International Journal of Comic Art blog

Although the full-scale war in which Russia has sought to conquer Ukraine has raged now for over four years, any Ukrainian will tell you that the conflict between their democratic nation and Putin’s authoritarian imperialist petro-state has actually been going on since 2014, when Russia illegally annexed Crimea and started supporting/taking part in a violent separatist movement in Ukraine’s Eastern Donbas region. But really, they would go on (rightly), Russian aggression against Ukraine has endured for generations, centuries. The only variant has been one of degree: the low simmer of cultural marginalization, mockery and dismissal, the full boil of genocide and war.

Explaining all of this in a brisk 100 pages of comics is the task set before scholar, activist and journalist Mariam Naiem and artists Yulia Vus and Ivan Kypibida (all Ukrainian), authors of A Brief History of a Long War. This version, from Ten Speed Graphic (a division of Random House), is a translation by Nata Hrytsenko and Naiem of an original 2025 French publication.

We may productively compare the book to the Italian artist Igort’s How War Begins: Dispatches from the Ukrainian Invasion (2022; English translation 2024) and The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks (2010/2011; translation 2016), as well as, to a lesser extent, Andrew S. Weiss and Brian “Box” Brown’s Accidental Czar: The Life and Lies of Vladimir Putin (2022)[1] and German author Nora Krug’s Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home (2018). All these works explore the individual’s entanglement with traumatic historical forces and their violent repercussions in the present day.

‘Empty Your Plate’

Subtitled “Ukraine’s Fight Against Russian Domination,” Naiem et al’s book pursues a largely didactic mission. As Naiem explains on her website:

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I have been trying to make the broad English-speaking community understand the cultural context of the Russian war in Ukraine. In particular, I aim to bring understanding of the colonial and racial aspects and practices of Russian culture with respect to Ukraine and other peoples colonized by Russia.

To that end, the authors of Brief History make a tremendous amount of historical material pertaining to the conflict accessible and relatable, through a deft use of cartooning, infographics and elaborate page designs.

Part of making the (often horrific) nonfiction elements relatable to a presumed non-Ukrainian reader involves the narrative device of Vika, an ordinary young woman who at the beginning of the book is startled awake by missiles exploding near her Kyiv flat in the middle of the night. Checking her phone, Vika moves from her bedroom to a mattress in a corridor. We learn, in a section titled “Living Through War for Dummies,” about “the rule of two walls”: when the bombs are going off, you should always have two barriers between yourself and the exterior; this usually means retreating to a hallway or bathroom.

It’s a clever hook for the reader: Vika’s experience shows the practical realities of living in a conflict zone, opening up all sorts of questions as to what brought us to this point. That query in turn leads her, while waiting for the all-clear, to google the phrase “What is genocide?” into her phone. And we’re off to the races.

It’s a long story that leads us all the way back to the origins of the nation, told mostly in page compositions which at times operate more as illustrations than comics – understandably, given the excess of information to convey. But Vus and Kypibida’s strong visual sense, clean line work, full bleeds throughout and use of color (with oranges, ochre and browns dominant) keep it all organized. Cartoony touches help, too: an hourglass with little hammers and sickles inside instead of sand delivers loud and clear the message that the USSR was living on borrowed time. If you’re going to approach long-form history in comics, this is definitely one way to do it.

In short, Brief History takes us all the way back to Kyivan Rus’, a Slav state founded in 882 CE, encompassing what we know today as Ukraine and much of Western Russia. Although Kyivan Rus’ lost its preeminent status in 1240 CE due to the Mongol Invasion and occupation (which lasted centuries), Russians came to regard the region as the origin of their civilization. (The very term “Kyivan Rus’” was not coined until the 19^th century – by Russian historians.) The authors utilize their visual/verbal “hooks” in clever ways to make this ancient history palatable: we start the section on Kyivan Rus’ through a graphic match by which we “enter” Vika’s bedroom calendar, which is illustrated with a portrait of Prince Volodymyr, who Christianized the people in 988 CE.[2]

Throughout these historical portions of the narrative, stretching from medieval times and with an emphasis on the last hundred years, the artists playfully mimic the styles of illustrated manuscripts, church iconography, Byzantine paintings, woodblock prints and Soviet graphics, among other fare. Despite the subtle parody, one theme crystallizes: for a very long time, the Russian state has sought to dominate, suppress and even wipe out the Ukrainians and their culture.

Among the most grisly examples we find the Holodomor. The word, meaning “death by starvation,” refers to Joseph Stalin’s explicit policy in the early 1930s to punish peasant resistance to the collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet republic of Ukraine by seizing harvests, creating an artificial famine. The Holodomor killed over three million people in Ukraine (other regions suffered terribly as well). Vus and Kypibida depict all this (potentially exploitative) death and destruction through a restrained palette that highlights evil-looking caricatures of Stalin henchmen Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich; dead bodies on Kyiv streets and by a railroad track, seen from a distance; and statistics over a map. Here and throughout, the artists take considerable pains to not sensationalize the human tragedies of genocide and war, overwhelming as they get.

As it happens – and as with the 1915 mass killings of Armenians by the Turks, the 1994 mass killings of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda, and other such events – the question of whether or not to classify the Holodomor as a genocide sparked considerable debate. The authors cover the “controversy” in a section titled “Was the 1932-1933 Famine in Ukraine a Genocide?” Only in 2006 did the Ukrainian parliament recognize the Holodomor as a genocide. And while many other nations did too, Russia never has.

Again, Vus and Kypibida masterfully deploy page composition to make plain the internalized, even banal, repercussions of historically distant events like the Holodomor, which after all happened almost 100 years ago. We see, against a black background, a loaf of bread with a candle, the years “1932-1933” emblazoned along the top. Three overlapping McGuiresque panels descend down the page, each showing families at a meal in different eras (1970, 1990, 2010), all punctuated by the mother figure admonishing the kids, “You must empty your plate.” The final panel shows Vika as a child, reacting to the phrase with a quizzical look. As a reminder that the aggressor’s persecution of Ukraine has never ended, orange flames and smoke lick and spark along the bottom of the composition. Brief History is replete with such displays of how comics, in the words of Hillary Chute, “can make the twisting lines of history readable through form” (199).

Through such compelling techniques, the authors present a centuries-long litany of Russian imperialist abuses against their country. Just to pick another: linguocide; one of many data points: the 19^th-century Valuev Circular, which outlawed Ukrainian in print, and whose eponymous drafter opined, “There was not, is not, and cannot be any separate Little Russian [derogatory Russian term for Ukrainians] language.” Fast forward to the 21^st century and Putin says exactly the same. And not just about language. This is in fact the whole rationale for the war: the Ukrainians are not really a separate culture or people; they’re just “Nazified” Russians in denial who need to be brought back into the fold. By force.

There really is no end to such sins, such inhumanity, the authors show. I especially responded to a haunting page made up of photographs of Ukraine’s “Executed Renaissance” generation: the cohort of authors and artists in the 1920s/1930s who spearheaded the development of a new national literature and culture in the hopeful period just after the Revolution. Their scores of portraits descend from red cords, as if they’re all hanged. The final, devastating text box reads: “The Communist government eliminated 80 percent of these artists and intellectuals. Only 36 of 259 Ukrainian writers survived.”

The War

As the world saw on February 24, 2022, the Russian military launched an invasion of its neighbor Ukraine. More than 8 million Ukrainians fled the country.

Naiem, Vus and Kypibida cover the highlights and go down some of the byways of what happened since: the repulsion of the invaders; the horrific discovery of tortured and executed civilians in places like Bucha (a suburb of Kyiv) in the wake of the Russian retreat; the devastating battles in the East; the heroic, doomed defenders of Mariupol; Russia’s shelling of non-military targets like apartment blocks, shopping centers and maternity hospitals; the frightfully rising death toll.

These stats and fast-accumulating tragedies can easily overwhelm; throw in the world’s spotty attention span, as well as the clamor of other global crises (like superpower chosen wars in the Middle East), and foreigners can easily forget about Ukraine’s ongoing struggle.

This again, I feel, is why Brief History’s authors resort to the device of the very relatable Vika. Whoever, wherever we are, we could totally see ourselves in her shoes, living in a city reeling from near-nightly missile attacks and explosions. What would we do?

After she’s spent some time lying in the corridor, Vika’s phone alerts her: “Attack drone threat. Please go to the nearest shelter.” Another “Living Through War for Dummies” section walks us through the basics: checking for supplies and keys to take along (you don’t know for how long), finding the right sort of shelter nearest you, notifying friends and family, hoping your building doesn’t get hit as you go down the stairs. Over two mostly wordless pages totaling ten panels, Vika does so, as a piercing orange graphic overhead signifies an air raid siren.

As far as bomb shelters go, Vika picks one of the cushier ones. There, she meets several strangers, forming a cross-section of Kyiv society. The encounters allow for exchanges that shed further light on the day-by-day actualities of wartime. But as elsewhere in the book, the past (which is never past) quickly rears its head.

Hence, when someone tells a child not to be scared because “You are going to be a future Cossack!” and the child replies, “Who?”, we fall into another historical rabbit hole. We get a multi-page verbal/visual portrait of the Cossacks, a self-governing, democratically-minded ethnic group, most of which resided in the Ukrainian lands and had a reputation for bravery in battle. Some say Ukrainians regard Cossacks the way US folks see cowboys or the Japanese view samurai: as the reified essence of their national spirit. “The word ‘Cossack’ became a symbol of freedom, courage, and military valor in Ukrainian culture,” a caption explains.

To their credit, the authors do not overly romanticize the Cossacks, whose masculinist warrior culture had its faults.[3] Nonetheless, their appeal is plain when invaders are pounding at the gate: “they remain a symbol of democratic values and resistance to oppression.”

The fellow shelterers, who span the generations, also share their memories of much more immediate historical events: the USSR’s collapse in 1991, the Orange Revolution of 2004, the 2013/2014 Euromaidan protests that ousted the corrupt pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. A series of four vertical panels progressively fill up with the crowds overflowing Independence Square (the text retains its Ukrainian name, Maidan Nezalezhnosti) to demand Yanukovych’s ouster: “[T]he number of people increased day after day.”

Putin, humiliated by the “loss” of Ukraine in the middle of his much-ballyhooed 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, could tolerate none of this; the theft of Crimea and the war in Donbas soon followed. Another composition expresses the stark divisions between Ukraine’s (mostly) Western-leaning, Ukrainian-speaking West and the (mostly) Russia-welcoming, Russian-speaking East through an ugly black rip along one side of a page, overlaid on a mass of separatists rallying under statues of Lenin. “Southwest Against Maidan,” “Yes to the Russian language” some signs say. At top right, a giant hand tugs on the wayward territory, dragging it further East towards Moscow.

For all the torment of a country being torn apart, though, Brief History reminds us that Russia’s recent military incursions “united Ukrainian society and increased the sense of responsibility for the fate of the country.” Vus and Kypibida capture that unity with an image of several people working together to hoist a giant trident or trizub, Ukraine’s national emblem.

The Downside

Brief History wants you to take it seriously as a weighty work of popular history that just happens to appear in comics format; among other sources, it references the highly-regarded Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy. It is, furthermore, understandably biased towards a Ukrainian perspective. If the first casualty of war is truth,[4] not far behind is nuance. This is not to argue that the Ukrainians are not on the right side of this war (they are) and the Russians are not on the wrong side (they are). It’s simply to remind us that a text like this one, elaborate and well-crafted as it is, has one primary objective: to, as mentioned, hold the world’s easily-wandering attention on this still-unfolding crime against a peace-loving nation, a peace-loving nation that by the way deserves entry into the EU and NATO. That doesn’t mean one can reduce it to mere propaganda – a position much easier to maintain with the daily pronouncements of Putin and his ilk.

All the same, I found what Brief History leaves out worth mentioning. Some of it has to do, I think, with the relatively low page count and the concomitant imperative to condense. For example, in the section on Mariupol, a panel shows a Russian bomber dropping munitions on a city block, clearly not a military target. One building has a word, in Cyrillic, written by it in large letters, so as to be seen from the air. You would not know (especially if you don’t read Russian) that the word is deti (children). The scene represents one of the most cruel atrocities of the war, when on March 16, 2022 the invaders bombed a theater in which hundreds of children were sheltering. The adults had written out the word in the square in front of the building as a plea for mercy, which the Russians ignored. The book’s authors are either counting on the reader to have foreknowledge of this event or could not spare the real estate in the panel (nor in the end notes) to explain.

Other choices by Naiem and her collaborators, though, point to a more deliberate strategy to, shall we say, downplay criticism of the Ukrainian war effort. We see no mention of documented problems such as the growing fatigue of the Ukrainian people; the attempts by some young men to illegally leave the country to avoid military service; soldiers abandoning the fight at the front; and reports of corruption in Zelensky’s administration.

A perhaps more egregious offense appears late in the book, when Vika and others speak to some broadcast journalists in the shelter. A Black woman with an Afro holds up a mic to Vika’s face and asks, “What do you want foreigners to know?” I understand that cartooning is an art that often resorts to visual typage (including, historically, of the ethnic and racialized sort) to make legible points to a reader; still I found it a bit lazy and off-putting to reflexively equate Blackness with “foreignness” – not only because there are native Black Ukrainians, but also because of my own awareness of long-standing racism among Eastern European whites. That context makes the Black figure overdetermined in a way that’s distracting to the book’s purposes, in my opinion. Maybe I’m just quibbling? I don’t think so.

In any case, such infelicities, minor as they are, do not overly detract from Brief History’s triumph as a sensitive, very humane work about people living through the worst of times. I especially appreciated how the authors often cut away from (reality-based) fictions like Vika to bring us back to actual individuals in the here and now. One page is comprised of their photorealist portraits: the soldiers Pavlo Kaliuk and Mykyta Zavilinskyi; Dora Chomiak, CEO of the charity Razom for Ukraine; the university lecturer and volunteer Olha Kryvitchenko, all testifying directly to the reader. At the very least a book like this should put faces before us, to help non-Ukrainian readers see the war as something more than a set of far-away abstractions. In this, Naiem, Vus and Kypibida succeed brilliantly.

Comics and Decolonization

“[E]ven when we win, it will not bring all of our people back. It will not give us back hours and hours in fear and doubt, wondering if we will survive. But we’d like to believe that justice will prevail.” So, in part, does Vika answer the Black journalist. It is an open-eyed but hopeful summation of what, as you read this, so many in Ukraine are living for. Soon after, she and the other shelterers receive the all-clear, and they scatter for home – the decidedly uncanny “home” of wartime.

I work in a Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures. Trained as a Slavist, for the past two decades I have taught and written on the cultural productions of Central/Eastern Europe, especially Russia and the Czech Republic. In the wake of the 2022 full-scale invasion, a decolonization movement has swept Slavic Studies. While Russian expansionism and imperialism are nothing new to those in my field, many of us are not only taking a more critical stance towards how we approach and teach these facts of history and culture; we’re also reassessing the foundations of our training itself.

The fact is that Russia has gotten the lion’s share of attention for so long first and foremost because Slavic Studies in the US emerged during the Cold War, with lots of federal support. It’s not the only game in town, just the biggest. The vast majority of us teach the Russian language and/or Russian material, as opposed to other Slavic languages like, say, Bulgarian or Slovak. Or Ukrainian. Ever since my undergrad days a very long time ago, it’s been more Pushkin, Tolstoy and Bulgakov than Shevchenko, Gombrowicz and Kundera. A lot more.

The war has cast a harsh light on these blind spots and, frankly, on our professional inertia. Can we ever get away from seeing and teaching the geopolitics of that part of the world primarily through Russian eyes, even when we don’t want to? Cue the hand-wringing.

In 2023 a major institution in my field, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), adopted “Decolonization” as the theme for that year’s conference. It released a statement that read, in part:

Engaging decolonization … involves re-examining our current research, teaching, and professional practices. How have power relationships and hierarchies within the region and beyond shaped what we study, how we study it, and who has a place at the table? What does it mean to de-center Russian studies, and how should we do so?

Since then, new and revised curricula and teaching resources have been drawn up with an emphasis on Russia’s former imperialist subject peoples (especially Ukraine). Books like Diversity and Decolonization in Teaching Russian Studies, edited by Thomas Jesús Garza & Rachel Stauffer (2025), are now seeing print (full disclosure: I blurbed it). We don’t send our students to Moscow and St. Petersburg for intensive language study anymore, but to places like Riga and Yerevan.[5] There have been shouting matches, ruffled feathers, intergenerational strife, you name it.[6] I know people who on the day of the full-scale invasion publicly pledged to give up speaking Russian (their mother tongue) and learn Ukrainian. We can’t really get away from the hard questions anymore. The realignment, if that’s what it is, continues.

And in this sense we are allies to folks like Naiem, who on her website describes her work as “decolonizing the discourse on Ukraine in order to center Ukrainian voices and de-center Russian and pro-Russian imperialist narratives.”

Here is where I think comics might play a useful role, not only nonfiction Ukrainian works like A Brief History of a Long War; the “Witnessing the War” comics section of the news platform War in Ukraine; and Zhenya Oliinyk’s work for the New York Times (and her Instagram), but also genre fare such as the steampunk alt-history series The Will (Volia, 2017) by Viacheslav Buhaiov et al. and the horror-inspired Franko (2022) by Heorhii Babanskyi and Anatolii Bielov, as well as grotesque black comedy like Maksym Palenko’s lacerating daily cartoons, all of which fruitfully tackle the war’s psychological, emotional and physical toll through allegory, exaggeration and the grotesque.[7]

Comics help in the decolonization project the way they always help: through spatio-temporal alchemy that visualizes how the Holodomor reverberates across generations; turns a group of people together raising a trident into a potent visual symbol of national renewal; taps photorealist portraits to put testifying names to faces, and in myriad other ways makes history grippingly “readable through form.”

Brief History has already prompted me to make some changes in my own teaching. For one thing, some of the book’s infographics are so good, I will likely use them in class.

Most years I teach one of my department’s required courses for Russian Studies majors, RUSS 323: Modern Russian Literature. Given some professional latitude in how to approach the task – and also faced with the ineluctable reality that this material is vast – I have mostly chosen to interpret the term “modern” to mean literature produced in Russia and/or in Russian[8] from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the present.

Sometime around Week 6, we discuss Stalin, the 1930s purges, and their impact on writers like Daniil Kharms, Mikhail Bulgakov and Isaak Babel.[9] In my unit on the forced collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine which produced the Holodomor, I use the word “kulak” – a Russian term – to refer to the middle-class peasants which the Soviets targeted as state enemies, for example in the propaganda slogan “Liquidate the Kulaks as a Class.”

Naiem, Vus and Kypibida’s A Brief History of a Long War reminded me that the Ukrainian equivalent for kulak is “kurkul.” The Holodomor was a tragedy brought down on Ukraine by its age-old oppressors, and it was Ukrainians who endured its agonies. It makes sense to me, then, to use “kurkul” and other such Ukrainian words in this class unit from now on.

Some of these changes might seem small, but they really aren’t. Decolonization can start with just such tiny shifts in terminology that lead to new perspectives, new ways of understanding – away from the point of view of the victimizers, towards that of those who bore their crimes.

And that makes everything else possible.

Bibliography

Alaniz, José. “Igor Baranko and National Precarity in Ukrainian Comics.” Comics of the New Europe: Reflections and Intersections. Ed. Alaniz & Martha Kuhlman. Leuven University Press, 2020: 215-238.

Chute, Hillary. “‘The Shadow of a Past Time’: History and Graphic Representation in Maus.” Twentieth-Century Literature. Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer 2006): 199-230.

The Guardian. “Who Coined the phrase, ‘The First Casualty of War is Truth’?”. 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-21510,00.html.

Naiem, Mariam. “About Me.” https://mariam.space/about/.

Zabuzhko, Oksana. “No Guilty People In The World? Reading Russian Literature After The Bucha Massacre.” Times Literary Supplement (April 22, 2022). https://www.the-tls.com/literature-by-region/european-literature/russian-literature-bucha-massacre-essay-oksana-zabuzhko.

[1] See my review here: https://www.russiamatters.org/analysis/accidental-czar-creative-take-putin-biography.

[2] In 2016 – two years after they stole Crimea at gunpoint – the Russians erected a 60-foot statue of Volodymyr just outside the Kremlin walls, along a major traffic artery (you can’t miss it). This was a declaration that he “belonged” to them, not the Ukrainians. The Russians call him by their version of the name, Vladimir, which of course just happens to also be the given name of the current despot – while Volodymyr is that of the current president of Ukraine! Very funny, fate. Incidentally, in folk etymology, the name means “ruler of the world.”

[3] See for example, Isaak Babel’s short story “My First Goose” (1926), set in Ukraine during the Polish-Soviet War era.

[4] The sentiment, widely attributed to the isolationist Senator Hiriam Johnson in 1918, apparently dates as far back as Samuel Johnson writing in The Idler in 1758: “Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages” (The Guardian, “Who Coined”).

[5] A lot of us are personally boycotting Russia too; I haven’t gone since 2017. That was a terrible trip.

[6] A 2022 essay by the Ukrainian novelist Oksana Zabuzhko, in which she accused Western Slavists of aiding and abetting Russian aggression by long giving Russian culture a pass, launched a thousand fights. She wrote, “[P]rior to February 24, I had only ever met one European Slavist who, in 2014, deeply disturbed by the Orwellian turn in Moscow, asked forgiveness from Ukrainians for having spent his life looking at Kyiv ‘through Russian spectacles’ as ‘the third city of the Russian Empire’, and for not properly seeing the capital [Kyiv] of a 1,000-year-old local culture, a culture towards which the Russian Empire has behaved much as the Russian Army has behaved in Bucha: what it could steal, it stole, and what it couldn’t, it destroyed. Such realizations may now become more common. Because the road for bombs and tanks has always been paved by books, and we are now first-hand witnesses to how the fate of millions can be decided by our reading choices. It is time to take a long, hard look at our bookshelves” (Zabuzhko).

[7] For a pre-2022 discussion of Ukrainian comics and national precarity, see Alaniz.

[8] Some of the works we cover are by émigré authors who left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution.

[9] As it happens, two of these writers have strong connections to Ukraine. Bulgakov grew up in Kyiv, Babel lived in Odesa.

Monday, September 21, 2026

Graphic Novel Review - Will Eisner: A Comics Biography by Stephen Weiner and Dan Mazur

Reviewed by Edward Whatley, Professor of Library Science, Russell Library, Georgia College & State University

Stephen Weiner and Dan Mazur. Will Eisner: A Comics Biography. NBM Graphic Novels, 2025. ISBN: 9781681123578. $29.99. https://nbmpub.com/products/will-eisner

The early life and career of the late Will Eisner have been chronicled extensively in biographies such as Will Eisner: A Spirited Life and Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics. Eisner himself discussed his formative years in numerous interviews and authored autobiographical graphic novels that portrayed his life and world during those times: specifically, The Dreamer (Princeton, Wisconsin: Kitchen Sink Press, 1986) and To the Heart of The Storm. The title under review here, Will Eisner: A Comics Biography by Stephen Weiner and Dan Mazur, is also told via Eisner’s chosen medium of the graphic novel. While Weiner and Mazur did not have the advantage of being present for the events they are portraying, their account of Eisner’s early life and career often seems more objective and honest than Eisner’s own idealized portrayal of himself and his times.

A brief prologue chronicles the early lives of Eisner’s immigrant parents Fannie and Sam, their marriage, and the births of their sons Will (1917) and Julian (1921). Chapter one begins in 1925 with the Eisners engaged in what was becoming a familiar routine: moving out of their apartment in the middle of the night to avoid the landlord. In their depiction of the Will’s nomadic childhood, Weiner and Mazur effectively establish how the conflicting worldviews of his parents shaped Will own psyche. Sam encouraged Will’s creative inclinations but was not an effective breadwinner. Fannie was constantly complaining that the family’s modest circumstances were the result of Sam’s lack of practicality. As a witness to this ongoing marital conflict, Will gradually internalized and reconciled these points of view, becoming both an accomplished creator and an astute businessman. Weiner and Mazur’s skillful and affectionate depiction of how this process played out in Will’s mind and in his actions and choices is what makes Will Eisner: A Comics Biography such an enjoyable story.

Weiner uses dialogue very efficiently to reveal much about a character in a few words while Mazur’s impressionistic drawing style also shows much about a character in a few lines. The characters all talk, move, and emote in ways that bring them to life on the page and would likely have impressed Eisner himself. The creators also provide informative history lessons on topics such as pulp magazines, Superman, and even how comics were printed in the 1930s. These interludes serve to give modern readers a better understanding of the early days of comics, an era that is now almost a full century in the past.

Longtime Eisner fans will already be familiar with many of the events in Will Eisner: A Comics Biography. As mentioned above, Eisner covered much of the same ground in his autobiographical graphic novels The Dreamer and To The Heart of the Storm. But while The Dreamer in particular suffered from a mawkish sentimentality, Weiner and Mazur are interested in providing a more honest portrayal of their subject and his world. This is perhaps most evident in their handling of the court case of DC vs. Victor Fox. Victor Fox was a publisher who wanted to cash in on the Superman craze by hiring the Eisner and Iger shop to create a similar character named Wonder Man. Eisner designed the character and produced the story to Fox’s specifications. DC Comics promptly sued Fox for copyright infringement. Fox instructed Eisner to claim under oath that Wonder Man was Eisner’s own idea. In Eisner’s portrayal in The Dreamer of the events that followed, he took the stand and told the truth, thus losing the case for Fox (fig. 1). In the years since the publication of The Dreamer, transcripts of the court case have become available to the public and they reveal that Eisner did in fact comply with Victor Fox’s instructions to claim that Wonder Man was Eisner’s own creation. Eisner even claimed to have never read Superman while working on Wonder Man (fig. 2). Eisner made this claim despite having received a submission for Superman from Siegel and Schuster before the character appeared in Action Comics. So at worst, Eisner’s telling of the story was untruthful. At best, he was misremembering events. But in either case, his account of the story was completely inaccurate. Weiner and Mazur, however, used the court transcripts as the basis for their version and readers therefore get a more accurate account of events.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

While Eisner’s portrayal of himself in The Dreamer is that of a rather guileless romantic, Will Eisner: A Comics Biography gives us a more believable (and probably more accurate) view of the young Eisner. To his credit, he was an enthusiastic advocate for the potential of comics as a valid medium for the telling of mature stories. But in Weiner and Mazur’s hands, Eisner also harbored a somewhat peevish resentment for the superhero genre. He displayed no reservations about working in other formulaic genres, reserving his disdain solely for costumed characters. As Weiner and Mazur infer, this may have been the result of his declining to publish Superman (and forfeiting the potential financial windfall) when he had the chance.

Eisner is also shown to sidestep his self-professed commitment to comics as a true literary form and instead embrace some of the more unfortunate pop culture tropes of the time, specifically in his early portrayal of the Spirit’s African American assistant/sidekick Ebony White. When confronted with complaints that Ebony was a caricature, Eisner’s response is simply, “Well of course he’s a caricature – it’s a comic strip. How else do they expect me to draw a Black sidekick?!” Though Eisner began to portray Ebony with more sensitivity in the post-war Spirit stories, the character’s basic design and speech patterns remained the same, ensuring a strip which was visionary in many respects would always appear dated in its portrayal of one of the principal characters.

None of this is to say this Will Eisner biography reads like a hit piece or that Eisner is presented as an unlikable person. Eisner was a tireless advocate for comics as a legitimate art form, a singularly innovative practitioner, and an ambitious but scrupulous businessman. All these qualities are present in Wiener and Mazor’s handling of their subject. The book covers Eisner’s post Spirit life and work in a breezy manner, giving the most attention to the events leading to his creation of A Contract with God and his struggle to find a publisher. Jeff smith provides an affectionate afterward that highlights how Eisner served as a source of encouragement and inspiration to younger creators.

Will Eisner A Comics Biography will be an enjoyable and informative reading experience for both longtime Eisner fans and those seeking an accessible introduction to the man and his work.

From Film to Panels: Tim Disney on The A.R.C., Comics, Satire, and the Politics of Truth

Interview by Fer García

Tim Disney's The A.R.C. begins with an unsettling premise: a pandemic in which lying itself becomes contagious. The resulting graphic novel combines political satire, speculative fiction, social commentary, and an extensive supplementary "compendium" that expands the book's concerns into questions of history, race, labor, climate change, power, and public discourse.

For Disney, however, the most interesting question may be the medium itself. Although he initially approached The A.R.C. through his experience in film and screenwriting, the process eventually forced him to rethink how a story is constructed for comics. In our conversation, he reflects on the differences between film and sequential art, the role of abstraction, the reader's participation in constructing meaning, and why comics may offer a particularly effective way of confronting difficult ideas.

**You initially conceived The A.R.C. as a movie. Why choose comics for this message?**

The project actually began as a movie. I wrote it during the pandemic, and I had a producer who was interested in making it. He introduced me to someone who had worked extensively in graphic novels, and the suggestion was made to turn it into one.

I thought, "Oh, that will be fun," and then discovered that it was neither fast nor easy. I teamed up with my co-writer, J.C. Lys, who essentially became the producer and creative director, and he brought in the artist Vincent Dubour.

Because of my experience writing screenplays, I initially approached the book in screenplay format. Looking back, I wouldn't do it that way again. If I make another graphic novel, I would try to compose it directly in comic form—to think about the panels and the story natively in that format.

I tended to overwrite. There were too many words. Eventually I realized that I had to think differently. Comics are about economizing wherever you can, and once I understood that, we became much more efficient.

What can comics do particularly well when dealing with subjects such as misinformation and social criticism?

I'll be curious to hear what you think because you're much more of a student of this than I am.

There is something about graphic treatment that gets filtered through the human subconscious. There's a difference between an illustration and a photograph. Something happens as the image passes through us. The artist has an intention, but what comes out isn't entirely that intention. Something else happens too. It becomes humanized, in spite of ourselves.

Then there is the panel-to-panel experience and the way our eyes move over a page. It's different from reading a book. To me, it suggests something about the episodic way memory works and the way our brains organize information.

We see an image, or a series of images, or an action—a jump between one moment and the next—and we fill in everything else. There's a lot of background processing in our brains that fills in information. That's how I think memory works, and there's something powerful about that. Maybe that's part of why comics are such a successful format for memoirs.

You are describing something more than simply a visual version of a written story. Are you suggesting that the gaps between panels actually become part of the storytelling?

Yes. I think the way the reader fills in those gaps is important. Our brains are constantly economizing on energy. We don't process everything around us equally; we make assumptions about what is happening outside the center of our attention.

Comics seem to engage with that process. You give the reader certain pieces of information and the reader constructs what happens between them.

You have also worked in film, technology, business, and nonprofit leadership. What made comics the right tool at this particular moment in your career?

There wasn't really one particular reason. I have this tendency not to fully understand how difficult something is going to be before I start it. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't do many of these things.

I thought, "Oh, this will be fun," and then you get into it and think, "Oh my God, this is so hard. It takes so long. It's much more complicated than I thought."

But that's also how good things happen. You meet new people, you work with teams, and it becomes a great experience. If I had fully understood how involved it was going to be, I'm not sure I would have done it. But I'm very glad that I did.

At one point, the project changed significantly when you decided to include the compendium. What happened?

The compendium was where the project took a different turn.

For a while, we were focused primarily on the illustrated story pages. Then we realized that we had an opportunity to create something denser and different. That made me more comfortable being earnest and talking about things like climate change, labor relations, history, and race.

Those were subjects I wanted the book to address but didn't know how to incorporate into the story pages in a way that was palatable and didn't become too pedantic.

The compendium gave us a place to do that.

That raises an interesting question about the relationship between the narrative and the material surrounding it. Do you see the compendium as commentary on the story, or as part of the storytelling itself?

I think it became part of the world we were building.

There are layers and layers of assumptions in the world we live in, and the extensive footnotes and connections gave us a way to suggest how dense that world is—how much we assume, and how much we should question the things we think we know.

It allowed us to create connections between all these different subjects rather than simply presenting them as isolated arguments.

The book is deliberately satirical, but you decided to make a number of real public figures recognizable. Was that a difficult decision?

It was a scary decision.

We had originally gone most of the way through the project using analogues for real people. Near the end, we asked ourselves why we were doing that. So we went back and put the real people in.

Those people don't necessarily like being made fun of, and they have a lot of money. So yes, it's scary.

But we have strong free-speech protections in this country, at least theoretically, and there's a great tradition of making fun of public figures. I think that's an important corrective.

Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken are part of that tradition, and today many of the people willing to say uncomfortable things publicly are comedians—people like Stephen Colbert and John Oliver. People who have money at stake tend to keep their mouths shut.

One of the book's central concerns is the collapse of trust. What interests you about trust as a social force?

Some basic level of trust is required for anything to happen.

We made a real effort to be fair and even-handed in the satire. We tried to point out hypocrisies on the left, the right, and everywhere in between, because there's plenty to go around.

The idea isn't simply to tell people which side is right. It's to look at the ways in which we have become accustomed to accepting things that perhaps deserve more scrutiny.

Comics have often been dismissed as entertainment, yet they can address subjects that other forms struggle to approach. Why do you think comics are particularly powerful for difficult conversations?

I think it has something to do with abstraction from real life.

Even in a movie, if you're using actors and talking about deep subjects, it can become uncomfortable because you're looking at an actual person. If you create a layer of abstraction—talking animals, superheroes, or whatever metaphor you're using—I think it suppresses the fear response in us.

It allows us to take on ideas without immediately freaking out.

The reader has less resistance because it's "just a comic book." It's not a documentary. It's not a movie. It's not a conventional book.

You spent several years working in Disney's animation department. What did that experience teach you about storytelling?

What I experienced there was a culture of quality—the idea that you should make something as good as it can possibly be.

You can have a good idea and smart people and get something to 85 or 90 percent fairly quickly. Getting that final five or ten percent requires a great deal of additional time and energy. Disney had a culture built around making that effort.

It was also a very collaborative environment. I was in the story department. We worked with storyboards; I would write dialogue, artists would create panels, and we would present sequences to everybody. Everyone contributed ideas.

It was the opposite of the auteur idea that there is one genius who has all the ideas. Ultimately someone has to make decisions, but the best idea could come from anybody. That was a great experience.

You have spent significant parts of your life in artistic and entrepreneurial environments. Many people see those worlds as opposites. Why do you think that divide exists?

There's something strange about the way culture works. What we might call "high culture" is largely funded by philanthropic money. Museums and similar institutions are funded by wealthy people.

And where do those people get their money?

They get it from the corporate world.

These things are intertwined inextricably, but we create this false separation between them.

If an independent comics creator told you, "I want to make meaningful work without sacrificing sustainability," what would you tell them?

I suppose I'd say don't print paper copies.

But one of the beautiful things about this world is the physical book. When the first box of galleys arrived, there was something deeply satisfying about taking the book out and realizing: "Look, we made something. It's a thing. It's an actual thing."

I love that about graphic novels. Readers are very devoted to the physical books.

But obviously, physical production has consequences. Our book was printed in Malaysia and then has to be shipped around the world. Once you start pulling on that thread, it's difficult to know how to make value judgments about what resources are worth expending.

Looking back across film, technology, philanthropy, and now comics, what thread connects all those pursuits?

I'm not sure there is one.

I like trying new things. I like new challenges, complicated problems, and working with teams. That's what attracted me to this project.

And ultimately, I like the idea of trying to put something good into the world and hoping that it has some value that I can't necessarily articulate in advance.

The book is aggressively satirical and sometimes quite dark. What do you hope readers discover beneath that surface?

I think there is a real, earnest strain of hope and optimism in the book.

I hope people see that.

And I particularly encourage readers to go all the way through the supplementary material, because there are connections between all the different things in there. That's my favorite part.

Tim Disney is a filmmaker, entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. He has worked in film and animation, including a period in Disney's animation department, and has been involved in technology and media ventures. The A.R.C. is his first graphic novel.

Fernando García Cruz is a comics scholar, educator, and entrepreneur whose work focuses on comics, creative entrepreneurship, transmedia storytelling, and the relationship between comics and the creative economy.

Thursday, September 17, 2026

Naked between the Panels: Male Erotic Imagination and Closure in Bronze Age Superhero Comics

Naked between the Panels: Male Erotic Imagination and Closure in Bronze Age Superhero Comics

Hollis Cole Thompson

I once overheard a conversation between two older men about the evolution of cheerleader uniforms in professional sports. One was complaining about how revealing the current iterations were but not because of any moral objection. Rather, he bemoaned the fact that they “left nothing to the imagination,” in contrast to those the cheerleaders of his youth wore. He clearly enjoyed something being held back from his sight, something that inspired him to fill in gaps with his mind. Comic books, of course, have always been leaving things to the imagination. In the seminal Understanding Comics, comic theorist and practitioner Scott McCloud spends an entire chapter defining and demonstrating a function of the medium that he calls “closure.” This is his term for the dance between the comic creators and the reader that creates the story -- a nearly imperceptible connect-the-dots game wherein the artist provides the panels as a kind of outline of the action and the reader fills the blanks between them with their imagination. His term for these blanks is gutters. He explains, “comics [sic] panels fracture both time and space, offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality” (1994: 67). McCloud goes on to call closure the grammar of comics and argues that it is the most fundamental element of the medium: “in a very real sense, comics [sic] is closure” (67). McCloud catalogs many of the ways artists can use closure for various purposes. However, I have found that American superhero comics of the Bronze Age1 routinely use closure for a purpose he never discusses: eroticism. Although the Comics Code Authority forbade depictions of nudity and sexuality in comic books, artists discovered they could exploit closure in order to arouse their assumed heterosexual male readers without ever actually depicting a naked woman. In the present article, I will explain and categorize the two main methods these comics employ to eroticize female bodies without fully depicting them. Thus, the eroticization of female characters goes deeper than lingerie-like costumes and demeaning, irrational poses. It lies in the very heart of comics, oozing from the unseen space between the panels into the imaginations of the readers.

Throughout this article, I try to provide a wide enough variety of examples to not only illustrate these techniques but also expose how frequently they occur in the superhero genre. However, I intentionally avoid using any examples featuring She-Hulk or Starfire. Comics from the Bronze Age are notorious for excessively sexualizing these two characters, as other scholars (such as Mitchell and Cocca) have well documented. I also refrain from discussing any examples that were published outside of the normal comic book distribution system and, therefore, did not have CCA review or approval like Batman: The Killing Joke, limited series like the 1989 Catwoman, or Marvel’s black-and-white “magazines” like The Deadly Hands of Kung-Fu. These parameters avoid even the appearance of cherry-picking the most egregious instances of sexualization. My aim is to draw attention to the pervasiveness of these techniques; they are not limited to specific artists, characters, publishers, or series.

In order to fully understand this issue, we must reexamine McCloud’s ideas about closure and rethink some aspects of his understanding of the relationship between the panels and reader. He contends that the closure of comics is always voluntary on the part of the reader: “From the tossing of a baseball to the death of a planet, the reader’s deliberate, voluntary closure is comics’ primary means of simulating time and motion” (1994: 69). In his most famous example, McCloud presents the following two panels:

Fig. 1 Famous closure example from McCloud’s Understanding Comics. The first panel shows a maniac raising an ax to kill a man, followed by a depiction of the cityscape and a scream. The third panel features McCloud explaining, “All of you participated in the murder.” (McCloud, 1994:93). ©Scott McCloud.

Thus, it was the reader, not the ax-wielding maniac, who killed the man. McCloud sums this up in the conclusion of his discussion on closure by stating, “I can only point the way. I can’t take you anywhere you don’t want to go” (93). There is, however, room for doubt about this assertion, as his own example shows. Is it truly reasonable to think that anyone who has lived long enough to understand the danger of axes and madmen would fill in these two dots with anything but murder? Though he did not provide us with the fine details (location of the blow, et cetera), he cannot truly say that he left us with a space that our minds would not instantly fill with violent action. By McCloud’s own admission, most of the closure that occurs in our daily lives is the result of an unconscious (or, at least, subconscious) process of the mind. With such phenomena, one cannot be certain that the closure a reader’s mind performs while reading a comic like McCloud’s murder scene is truly voluntary. In fact, many readers probably get much more from the closure than they truly want -- gory images of ax wounds that they would rather not have entered their minds.

Another of McCloud’s examples further illustrates the power of the artist to control the meaning that arises from closure:

Fig. 2. Another example from Understanding Comics. The first panel shows a sad man asking, “what else could go wrong?”, the second a woman happy to not have heard from someone named Jerry, and the final one a phone ringing. (McCloud, 1994:71). ©Scott McCloud.

This is a brilliant illustration of the nature of comics as a medium. Each of the panels, in isolation, communicate a level of meaning: the first shows us a sad man having a bad day, the second a woman happy to not have heard from someone named Jerry and the final one a phone ringing. They function like individual phrases or sentences. When combined, the panels form a kind of paragraph where new meaning arises -- our characters’ day has gone from bad to worse. But McCloud has made the way in which it has gotten worse very clear. I have no doubt in my mind that Jerry is the one calling, even though I have no context for this story other than these three panels. This is because no rational reader, especially one who is familiar with the comic medium, would imagine that anyone other than the ominous Jerry is the one on the phone -- the relationship between the panels excludes any other meaning.

This fuzziness around the voluntary nature of closure is key to understanding how Bronze Age superhero comics exploit it for eroticism. As any aficionado of comic book history can explain, publishers changed the entire landscape of American comics in 1954 when, in the aftermath of Fredric Wertham’s controversial Seduction of the Innocent and the subsequent U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, they created the Comics Code Authority. This board censored all comics from participating publishers2 before publication, making them adhere to the CCA’s strict rules in an effort to make comics safe for children. Unsurprisingly, these regulations included prohibitions on depicting nudity and sexuality. The original version of the Code specifically states:

Nudity in any form is prohibited, as is indecent or undue exposure. . . Suggestive and salacious illustration or suggestive posture is unacceptable. . . All characters shall be depicted in dress reasonably acceptable to society. . . Passion or romantic interest shall never be treated in such a way as to stimulate the lower and baser emotions (n.pag).

However, the CCA later amended its policies in 1971 to read “Nudity in any form is prohibited. Suggestive and salacious illustration is unacceptable” (n.pag), removing the language forbidding “suggestive posture” and “indecent or undue exposure.” It also deleted the admonition to avoid stimulating the reader’s “baser emotions.” These edits, I contend, gave comic creators just enough leeway to begin introducing sensual elements -- not directly, but through a teasing use of closure.

This alteration of the code came very shortly before the beginning of the Bronze Age -- a time of massive upheaval in superhero comics. It began with a storyline in The Amazing Spider-Man #121-2 that saw Peter Parker’s longtime girlfriend Gwen Stacy murdered at the hands of the villain Green Goblin. The mature themes of violence, loss, and grief in this story reinvigorated the genre, which had become quite sanitized and juvenile in the Silver Age which preceded it. Comic creators across the entire industry realized that they, too, could tell stories primarily addressed to older teenagers and adults -- stories that presented and commented on the difficult realities of the ordinary world within the fantastic adventures of superheroes. Thus, the Bronze Age saw such celebrated works as Neil Adams and Denny O’Neil’s hard-hitting cultural fables in the Batman series, Chris Claremont’s revamped and diversified X-Men, and Frank Miller’s overtly political miniseries Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. This new era of stories often reinvented established heroes, adding a level of depth and complexity never before seen in the genre. It also saw the creation of many new characters, such as the Punisher, Wolverine, and Venom, who reflected the changing interests of the creators and readers.

Among these new characters was a veritable Cambrian explosion of female superheroes. The Silver Age had seen the first appearances of powerful women like Supergirl, the Invisible Woman, Batgirl, the Wasp, Marvel Girl, and Black Widow, but such heroines were an extreme minority. Comics took a great leap forward in female representation during the Bronze Age. She-Hulk, Storm, Ms. Marvel, Starfire, Dazzler, Power Girl, Spider-Woman, Kitty Pryde, Gamora, Huntress, and Mockingbird all premiered during this period. A tension exists within these heroines, however. They are part of the creators’ general trend toward diversifying their fictional universes and also an expression of their male fantasies. These characters are more psychologically complex and narratively engaging than any of the super-women from previous times, but they also often wear skin-tight or revealing costumes. The designs of these costumes show the artists employing more titillating than tactical logic.

This combination of character depth and visual sensuality was likely a part of the comic creators’ attempt to add more eroticism into the genre. Anna F. Peppard, perhaps the most thorough scholar of superhero sexuality, contends that the potential for such was present from the creation of superheroes: “the extant that superhero stories always center around fantastic bodies whose incarnated exaggerations and embellishments are explicitly designed to excite and inspire, their erotic potential is inherent and inescapable” (2020: 3). Insomuch as comics invite the reader to gaze on their superhuman protagonists, it is always possible for this looking to become sexual. This is especially true of female superheroes, who (by nature of the prevailing Western conflation of the female body with sexuality) are more often the subjects of such a gaze during the Bronze Age. At the same time, comic creators knew that they must still appease the demands of the CCA designed to prevent comics from becoming a super Playboy. Thus, a character like She-Hulk, who routinely wears a glorified bathing suit or outright rags, could avoid the label of “eye-candy” because she also had a complex and defined personality. In addition to being a superhero, she also was a lawyer, struggled with self-confidence, and navigated significant mental health issues. The fact that these characters were not just super bodies, ironically, made bringing attention to their bodies more palatable. This attention was almost always erotic in nature, despite the strength and authenticity of the heroines.

While discussing closure, interestingly, McCloud mentions in passing that cinema, another visual mass medium, has a particular kind of erotic potential: “Participation is a powerful force in any medium. Filmmakers long ago realized the importance of letting viewers use their imaginations” (1994: 67). He does not, however, discuss the ways comic book creators can use closure for an even more deeply erotic purpose than the classic Hollywood cut-aways. A prime example of this technique appears in the panels below from X-Men #125 (art by John Byrne).

Fig. 3 From X-Men #125. Phoenix works, fully costumed, in a laboratory, trying to better understand her new powers in the first two panels. The third panel features a close-up of her unclothed arm reaching for a robe. (Byrne, [1979] 2004:92). © Marvel Comics.

Fig. 4 X-Men #125 (cont.). Jean’s bare back as she puts on the robe. (Byrne, [1979] 2004:92). © Marvel Comics.

In this page, Phoenix (Jean Grey)3 works, fully costumed, in a laboratory to try to better understand her new powers. The art shows that gloves are a part of the costume, but the panel after she stops working with her powers focuses on her hand, showing it without gloves or sleeves. Because the comic had already established that Phoenix can create clothing out of energy, this panel makes it clear that Jean was using those powers in this instance and, having stopped using them, is now naked. The next panel confirms this by showing her putting on a robe from behind. Though the artist never actually shows Jean’s body in its entirety, the closure leads readers to automatically fill in a picture of her in their minds.

Note that this act of closure is the sole purpose of these panels. There is no logical necessity for the nudity within the narrative; just because Jean can create her own clothing is no reason for her to be without any covering besides that which she creates while in the lab. Neither do Jean nor the other character acknowledge or comment upon the fact that she is naked. They give no explanation for it. The only purpose that it serves is to create erotic pleasure from the reader’s filling in the intimate details of her body however his/her personal tastes dictate. It is purely “exhibitionist,” even though nothing is actually exhibited. In this way, Byrne gives a new expression to the phenomenon that Song of Songs scholar Tremper Longman III also observes in that ancient text: “The glimpse of physical beauty is more evocative than seeing the whole. The view of the part arouses the desire to see the whole” (143). Thus, in this kind of closure, an artist panels a woman’s nude body like a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces (namely, her breasts, buttocks, and genitals) in order to create erotic pleasure in the reader when he or she must supply those details.

This is a more sophisticated version of a semi-pornographic trend that goes back to “Good Girl Art” of the Golden Age of comic books. Comic historian Christopher J. Hayton defines this as art that “depicts, with a mildly erotic flavor, beautiful females scantily-clad or attired in shape-revealing clothes, while the suggestion exists that the character is innocently unaware of the sexuality that is apparent to the reader” (para. 7). As preeminent superhero scholar Richard Reynolds points out:

Good Girl art takes the signs of pornographic discourse (whips, chains, spiked heels, beautiful but blank faces) and integrates them into the context of non-pornographic story structures. In this way, the sign of pornography (never explicitly delivered) comes to stand in for an entire pornographic subtext, a series of blanks which readers remain free to fill in for themselves (1992: 34).

In other words, comics of the Golden Age used the set-dressing of porn as a way of prompting the reader’s erotic imagination, which could then create images and fantasies that no comic company of the time would have actually published. Decades later, Byrne’s art takes the same principle but uses closure instead of pornographic signs.

The X-Men extract is not the only instance of this kind of eroticism, and other artists combine closure with the trappings of porn to create comics which direct the reader’s imagination more specifically than anything in the Golden Age. Web of Spider-Man #42 (art by Alex Saviuk) contains such a use of closure in a more overtly sexual context:

Fig. 5 Alex Saviuk Web of Spider-Man #42. MJ walks onto a photo shoot wearing a robe, drops it to the floor, and poses for the camera man with only a thin bra strap appearing on her back. (Saviuk, 1988:15). © Marvel Comics.

Here, supermodel Mary Jane Watson Parker (the wife of Spider-Man) chooses to go all in on her first lingerie photoshoot (she does this after her husband blew her off when she tried to talk through the decision with him). The panel sequence portrays her walking in wearing a robe, dropping it to her feet, and posing for the camera man with her back to the reader (with only a thin bra strap on it). This sequence creates the same kind of closure striptease wherein the (presumably heterosexual male) reader fills in the undrawn details of MJ’s body. The comic intensifies this effect through the overtly pornographic context. Rather than depicting common pornographic signs, the characters are on a set creating erotic images. Additionally, the comic gives readers a proxy in the last panel -- the photographer. The panel features him looking at and photographing MJ while thinking, “I love this job” (15). This character can easily function as a stand-in for the reader because he actually looks at and creates a still image of the front of her body that the art does not show the reader. His looking at her exposed body, the knowledge that he is creating images of what he sees that are meant for consumption and the obvious pleasure that he is taking in looking at the unseen all push the reader to imagine the sight from his point of view. As we will see, comics frequently use this kind of in-story male observer to guide the reader toward erotically imagining nude female bodies.4 This occurs through the ease by which the reader can imagine this character’s perspective of the woman.

Paul Gulacy’s art for Batman #394 provides another example:

Fig. 6 Paul Gulacy Batman #394. The first panel shows Katia’s foot, and the second is a wider shot of Katia in a bathtub with her knee and the soapy water covering her body. The subsequent panels show her legs rising out of the tub and her bare back shadowed as she pulls a towel up. (Gulacy, 1986:npag.). © DC Comics.

This sequence of the Soviet agent Katia bathing functions like the other two examples. The first two panels establish a situation in which it is logical for her to be naked: they move from showing a small (but often fetishized) part of her body -- the foot -- to a wider shot of her in a bathtub with her knee and the soapy water covering her body. The subsequent panels intensify the eroticism through depicting her legs as she rises out of the tub and her bare back teasingly shadowed as she pulls a towel up. Once again, the panels cut up a female body and encourage the reader to reconstruct it. This scene lacks another character looking at her, unlike the previous examples, but the depiction of Katia bathing plays into a common male voyeuristic fantasy of getting to spy on a woman bathing. The fact that this scene lacks any crucial information for the narrative of the comic (even the inner dialogue of the character is minimal) further indicates that the sole purpose of this scene is to give a male reader a taste of what it would be like to be a peeping Tom.

One can see examples that function somewhat differently in the George Pérez’s Wonder Woman series. The following scene comes from the first issue and depicts the Amazon queen, Hippolyta, breaking herself out of prison:

Fig. 7 George Pérez Wonder Woman #1. The guard walks into a cell, surprised to see Hippolyta naked and inviting his attention. Then, she uses the chains of her imprisonment to attack him. (Pérez, 1986:19). © DC Comics.

As the guard walks in, the comic shows her from the back with her hair covering most of her but still revealing that she is naked. The shocked look on the guard’s face confirms this and, once again, provides the reader with a point-of-view proxy which is crucial to the scene’s erotic appeal. The next panel depicts what he sees: Hippolyta inviting his attention. The image fully shows the outline of her body and much skin with the shackles covering her chest and the guard’s shoulder covering her genitals -- leaving only the most intimate parts of her for the reader’s imagination. The very object that Pérez uses to cover her breasts ironically adds sexual charge to the scene through the connotation of shackles with male domination and control. The following close-up on the guard’s eyes portrays the haughty pleasure he takes in the sight, further tantalizing the reader to imagine it.

The key difference between this scene and the previous example of MJ’s lingerie shoot is the narrative context. Here, Hippolyta uses her body as a weapon -- she utilizes her beauty to lure the guard in, stupefy him, and destroy him. Thus, in the final panel, Hippolyta uses the chains of her imprisonment to attack him, with shadows and her own arm now covering her front from the reader. This is in keeping with the more female-empowering tone of Pérez’s Wonder Woman run. One could argue that this scene actually condemns the male gaze by portraying it as something that makes men vulnerable and even stupid. Nevertheless, it still offers the reader (not just the male character) erotic pleasure through closure even in the panel where she attacks him, which limits the scene’s usefulness as a condemnation of that visual pleasure. As feminist film theorists Laura Mulvey and Colin MacCabe point out, depicting “female nakedness carries associations of the exploitation of women that almost no degree of formal subversion can displace” (61). This is certainly applicable to a scene wherein the woman is bound in chains. Though Pérez clearly means to show both the chains and Hippolyta’s nakedness as signs of her oppression which she turns back on her enemies, his catering to that same oppressive male erotic imagination undermines that reversal. This sequence gives credence to Mulvey and MacCabe’s assessment that “the very image for the most visible exploitation that women endure in a sexist society cannot be used with impunity, cannot be used without a certain complicity” (52).

In #7 of this series, Wonder Woman receives healing from massive injuries through the intervention of supernatural oceanic forces:

Fig. 8 George Pérez Wonder Woman #7. A series of sequentially smaller panels shows Diana nude as she goes deeper into water. Narrow streams of bubbles cover her chest, crotch, and buttocks as the water rolls her over and over. (Pérez, 1987:6). © DC Comics.

Pérez depicts her nude as she goes down into the healing depths, with narrow streams of bubbles covering her chest, crotch, and buttocks but nothing else. He creates a sense of her plunge in the succession of panels through making the panels incrementally smaller, having the bubbles appear over different parts of her body (mimicking the way real streams of bubbles sporadically move through water) and showing Diana rolling into various positions. This also gives the reader the ability to mentally construct a three-hundred-sixty degree view of her body, since Pérez gives us a snapshot of it at every angle. The sequence does lack a character gazing at her, but (like the sequence from Batman) feeds into a male voyeuristic fantasy of having complete visual access to a woman’s body without her being aware. The fact that Wonder Woman is unconscious during this scene adds to its appeal as such.

This sequence illustrates the ways in which Bronze Age artists can turn what McCloud calls the “silent dance of seen and unseen” (1994: 92) into a tango. They tease and lead the reader with the seen, and the reader follows by stepping into the unseen gaps. And this is not a dance that the reader can easily opt out of. Contra McCloud, given these panels, readers cannot help but fill the gutters with mental pictures of these characters’ intimates. I am loath to argue that depicting a nude female body is inherently sexual; the problem is that this kind of closure functions like a striptease. On a fundamental level, it sensualizes female bodies by directing readers’ imaginations to focus on the breasts, buttocks, and genitals. Thus, these comics are an example of the various types of media depictions of women that encourage men to see them primarily for their ability to sexually arouse or fulfill them. Because a large portion of these readers were children and teenagers, this element of superhero comics could well have influenced how that generation of boys came to perceive the real women in their lives.

Additionally (as I have argued elsewhere5), closure can exist within a single panel when the art, through framing or mise en scène, leaves something of the scene for the reader’s mind to fill in. Once again, McCloud provides ingenious examples:

Fig. 9 McCloud Understanding Comics. Across three panels, McCloud looks down at his legs, which are outside of the frame. He says, “You can’t even see my legs, yet you assume that they’re there.” (McCloud, 1994:61). ©Scott McCloud.

The reader, knowing people have legs, fills in that part of McCloud’s body, even though he does not depict them.

Thus, a second method that artists of this time use for code-dodging eroticism is to depict a fully nude woman with some object or shadow conveniently covering the areas the CCA would object to depicting. This occurs even more often than the previous technique. Take, for example, this art by Pérez from The Avengers #162:

Fig. 10 Pérez The Avengers #162. Wasp strapped to a table that also holds a female robot. She is naked, and two restraints cover her breasts and crotch. (Pérez, 1977:n.pag.). © Marvel Comics.

Fig. 11 Pérez The Avengers #162 (Cont.). Ant Man and Ultron look at Wasp and the robot as energy glows around Wasp’s body. (Pérez 1977:n.pag.). © Marvel Comics.

Fig. 12 Pérez The Avengers #162 (Cont.). Wasp writhing in pain as the energy spreads to the robot. (Pérez 1977:n.pag.). © Marvel Comics.

Here, the evil robot Ultron and his hostage, Ant Man, look over the captured Wasp (a member of the Avengers and wife of Ant Man). The villain is planning on transferring her consciousness into a robotic body to create a “bride” for himself. Note that Wasp is unconscious and nude with only two well-placed restraints obscuring her breasts and crotch from the reader’s view. It is clear that Wasp’s nakedness is gratuitous, rather than an essential element to the plot, since it is her consciousness that the villain wants. The fact that the scene depicts a male villain’s triumphant perspective of a woman he has captured, stripped, and reduced to a specimen in an experiment further establishes this moment as one of male domination and female objectification, encouraging the assumed male readers to join Ultron in this gaze. Ultron also posits her body as his property -- a kind of trophy he can show off -- by revealing her to another male. The panel portraying Wasp writhing in pain as the procedure begins adds a touch of sadism. All of this enhances the art’s ability to give the voyeuristic male reader a sense of power over her.

One of the most exhibitionist examples of this comes from Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man #90. Here, Spider-Man’s villain-turned-girlfriend the Black Cat remembers the trauma she went through in obtaining her super-powers. This involved going to the Kingpin of crime for help and subjecting herself to various experimental procedures. This process included having to appear naked for an “examination.”6

Fig. 13 Al Milgrom from Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man #90. Black Cat appears naked, aside from her mask, for an examination by three male scientists. (Milgrom, 1984:3). © Marvel Comics.

Artist Al Milgrom not only depicts a nude woman but presents her as an object of the male gaze. Once again, the panel contains people looking at her -- in this case, a group of exclusively male scientists. Milgrom’s depicting the Black Cat in a straight standing posture with a neutral (drugged?) expression on her face confirms that she is a passive entity fully available to their observation and waiting for them to act upon her. Pointedly, the mask is the only shred of cloth on her; her true identity that it conceals is of no importance to the scientists. Her only value to them lies in what is below the face. Thus, the art invites readers to join the men in “examining” her body and consider her an object.

This technique can also eroticize more mundane actions. The following panel from World’s Finest #245 depicts the Black Canary changing her clothes:

Fig. 14 Michael Netzer World’s Finest #245. A sequence showing Black Canary undressing, including a panel where she arches her back and sticks out her chest, a close up of her face with a finger going to her mouth, and mid-action shot of her topless and peeling off her skin-tight suit. The thought bubbles feature Canary’s complaints about male chauvinism. (Netzer, 1977:4). © DC Comics.

In the first panel, artist Michael Netzer takes an everyday action for the character -- removing her blond wig -- into a sexually charged image by drawing her arching her back and sticking out her chest. This pose makes her breasts the center of attention. Netzer intensifies this fixation by making the outlines of her nipples just barely visible through the fabric. The next panel subtly alludes to oral sex through the close up on her face with eyes closed and a finger moving toward her mouth. Finally, the panel that depicts Canary topless is also overtly sexualized because it shows her in mid-action removing her clothes and poses her like a stripper -- chest forward and arms to her sides, peeling off her skin-tight suit with attitude. This is not a realistic depiction of how a typical woman changes clothes but a quite obvious attempt on the part of the artist at catering to the male gaze. Reynolds argues that, unlike the usually instantaneous or offstage quick changes wherein male heroes don their costumes, a superheroine changing into her costume “can (at least potentially) be viewed as the performance of an uncompleted striptease” (1992: 37). Netzer pushes this idea as far as the Code would possibly allow; he turns Black Canary changing out of her costume into a strip show by charging the art with sexual imagery. This show is also a completed one, despite the absence of explicit nudity -- the completion happens in the reader’s mind. The fact that the thought bubbles feature Canary’s complaints about male chauvinism creates a bizarre dichotomy within the sequence. It’s almost as if the creators are attempting to escape that very label by having Canary employ it against others -- a half-hearted salute to feminists within a decidedly non-feminist scene.

These two techniques are by no means mutually exclusive. The Incredible Hulk #168 contains an extended sequence by Herb Trimpe that uses both. Betty Ross (the love interest and future wife of Bruce Banner, the titular hero) becomes a pawn in the battle between Hulk and a villain -- the vile M.O.D.O.K. uses his mind control powers to make her come to his secret lab hidden in the woods and remove all her clothes as she does:

Fig. 15 Herb Trimpe The Incredible Hulk #168. Betty walks naked through a forest. In one panel, she covers her chest by crossing her arms. (Trimpe, 1973:8). © Marvel Comics.

Fig. 16 Herb Trimpe The Incredible Hulk #168 (cont.). M.O.D.O.K. explains to Betty how he is controlling her mind. Shadows cover her chest in an otherwise completely lit room. (Trimpe, 1973:12). © Marvel Comics.

Again, the scene features a male villain kidnapping Betty and reducing her to an object through taking away her will and clothing. The first sequence employs both techniques. Trimpe draws different angles of her body among separate panels, allowing for reader-reconstruction. He also uses (in a rather contrived way) convenient shadows, her arms and foliage to hide her chest and other inmates, especially in the second panel. Next, M.O.D.O.K.’s dominating gaze functions as proxy for the presumed male reader who shares in his dominance by gazing at her. This comic contains an even more extreme version of female subjugation, however. Not only does it show the man having power to control and expose the woman’s body, but it also portrays him transforming it.

Fig. 17 Herb Trimpe The Incredible Hulk #168. Betty follows M.O.D.O.K.’s order to lie down on the center of a device. A shadow from a radio-tower-like device covers only her chest and crotch. (Trimpe, 1973:13). © Marvel Comics.

The final panel gives the reader the most access to Betty’s body precisely when she is lying down to be experimented upon. This will result in Betty transforming into a green human-bird hybrid called the Harpy. By turning Betty into Harpy, M.O.D.O.K. completes one of the most sickening misogynist fantasies -- wielding such power over a woman that he can change her into anything he wants, even something hideous.7

It is imperative to understand that the issue is not simply that these comics portray nude women in ways that avoid breaking the code; my contention is that these artists exploit the medium of comics to eroticize and objectify the female body (thus affirming the “woman=sex” equation). This is perhaps more readily observable by contrast. In Pérez’s first issue of Wonder Woman, he depicts nude Amazons at other times, but those panels lack a male observer and usually do not depict the body cut up like a puzzle over different panels:

Figure 18 Perez Wonder Woman #1. Multiple Amazons burst to life out of water, naked and joyful. (Perez, 1986:9). © DC Comics.

Figure 19 Perez Wonder Woman #1 (cont.). Nude Amazons interacting with each other and their paradisal environment. This includes a panel with Menalippe in a flower patch which hides her lower abdomen, inspecting a single flower which covers her chest. (Perez, 1986:10). © DC Comics.

These panels show the Amazons all nude and interacting with each other and their environment in a paradisiacal state without any one of them displaying herself or gazing at another. Even the manner that Pérez uses objects to conceal their breasts and genitals from the reader differs from earlier examples. Those artists encourage erotic closure by employing objects that are obviously obtrusive to the logic of the environment or situation -- medical/scientific equipment, shadows, or bubbles obscure our view of their bodies in ways that would not be possible in reality. They, thus, slightly break the scene’s internal logic. Any such break calls attention to itself;8 these direct our attention to body parts they so obnoxiously cover. The objects in this sequence, however, serve a clear purpose within the scene apart from covering body parts. The flowers that obscure Menalippe, for example, are important for their own sake. By portraying the character's intense delight in the flower in her hand, Perez focuses our attention on the flower rather than her breasts. The bloom in Menalippe's hand and those at her crotch also symbolize what the narration states is her defining personality trait -- her love of nature. The flowers, thus, are a logical part of the scene, rather than a disruption to it. The cumulative result is that Pérez’s art does not code these female bodies as sexual; he simply shows the characters existing as women.

John Buscema and Tom Palmer provide a similar example in The Avengers #266 with the character Volcana:

Figure 20 Buscema and Palmer The Avengers #266. Volcana battles the Avengers and Fantastic Four in three panels. The panels include a head-to-toe view of Volcana and one that shows Captain America and Wasp looking at her, obviously concerned. (Buscema and Palmer, 1986:n.pag.). © Marvel Comics.

Volcana’s nudity makes narrative sense, in this instance; her powers enable her to shield herself with fire, which would certainly melt away clothing. The artists fully display her curves and figure but do not bring undue attention to her chest or crotch. They refrain from using strategically placed limbs or flames over her nipples or genitals to tease the reader and encourage imagination. She is also depicted in natural, non-sexual poses. The head-to-toe view of Volcana in the first panel ensures that closure will not invite eroticism, since there are no body parts left unseen. Additionally, the four characters looking at her include men and women, precluding a proxy gazer. No pleasure is visible in the facial expression of Captain America (the only male face we see in the sequence); rather, he is concerned about the danger she presents. Thus, the art emphasizes Volcana as a threat, not an inspiration for fantasy. Her nudity has a purpose in the sequence but is not the focus.

Finally, consider the following scene from David Larson’s The Emmaus Road Series: Creation and the Fall:

Figure 21 Larson Creation and the Fall. Adam and Eve meeting for the first time and joining hands. The framing only shows the characters from the waist-up, and the woman’s hair covers her breasts. (Larson, 2018:35). © David Larson.

Larson created this comic for a conservative Christian audience and, thus, has ample motivation not to sexualize female characters. Nonetheless, his depiction of the woman in this scene employs some of the techniques we have seen in Bronze Age superhero comics. Larson depicts the characters only from the waist-up, leaving the lower body to the reader’s imagination. The woman’s hair rather unnaturally covers her breasts, just as the World’s Finest comic depicted the topless Black Canary. Adam serves as the male point-of-view proxy, which Larson makes clear by portraying Adam with an astonished facial expression in the first panel and intensifying it with a close-up in the second panel, like Pérez did with the guard in Wonder Woman #1. However, there are also some clear distinctions between this scene and those. Though Adam is indeed a male observer of a naked woman, his look is nothing like the others. He stares into her eyes, not at her body. His focus is glued to her face -- directing the reader’s attention there, as well. Additionally, Larson does not cut up the female body over multiple panels, which means the comic does not encourage the reader to fill in the missing intimate details of her body. The fact that the male character here is also naked works against that kind of eroticism by putting him and the woman on a more equal footing than superhero comics typically feature.9 For these reasons, Larson’s art portrays nudity (and male-observed female nudity, at that) without eroticization through closure, either in or out of panel.

Examining the use of these techniques ultimately reveals a deep irony in comic book history. As Peppard notes, “Superhero sexuality is flagrantly present even when it is officially absent” (3). The CCA reviewed and approved every single one of the superhero comics we have examined. Technically, they do not contain any depictions of nudity. They do, however, “stimulate the lower and baser emotions” -- the prohibition that the CCA removed from its 1971 update. Probably unbeknownst to the editors, this deletion left enough of a crack to open up a floodgate. Thus, in this time of censorship, comic book creators used the very medium of the comic itself to obey the letter of the code while completely disregarding its spirit. The technique they created is perhaps the purest expression of “the always-evolving but ever-present play of sexual presence and absence . . . [that] is vital to” the appeal of superhero comics (Peppard, 2020: 17). In it, history, art, regulation, and sexuality collide, producing a sophisticated solution to the “problem” of readers’ restricted access to the nude bodies of their favorite female characters.

Erotic closure also reveals something about the sexuality of the male creators and readers. Like the two old men I began this discussion with, they enjoy using their imagination. These comics revel in showing enough to arouse and prompting the mind to supply the missing parts. This tango has proven very popular, as artists continue to use these techniques even after the death of the CCA. Why should comic creators still employ them, now that they can depict full nudity and whatever else they want? The answer lies in the fact that, at least for some people, “leaving things to the imagination” is more erotic than full exhibition.

In the case of these comics, this pleasure comes at the cost of dehumanizing female characters. This is because, firstly, the sensual closure trains/re-enforces readers to obsess over breasts, crotches, and buttocks. Because these are the only body parts the comics consistently do not show, the closure pushes them into the reader’s imagination, just like the action of murder in McCloud’s famous example. This continues the cultural obsession with seeing the female body as primarily an object of sexual pleasure. Feminist writer-activist Andrea Dworkin once said that “The photograph makes the woman dead; she’s two-dimensional, there’s nothing human left of her” (1989: 03:28-35). If so, these sequences mutilate the corpse by chopping her up like the Benjaminite’s concubine from the Book of Judges, leaving only a masturbatory shell of the famed complex characters.

However, there is another byproduct of these techniques that is perhaps more profoundly objectifying. It transforms the bodies of these characters into semi-blank canvases wherein readers can project their sexual preferences. The artists provide the CCA-approved parts, and the reader’s mind can insert the intimate details of breast size, body hair, etc. according to their inclination or preference. This is a high feat of erotic fantasy, allowing these comics to have broad appeal for those attracted to women, but it is a dangerous fantasy because of its self-centered nature. Whenever an art form caters to heterosexual male tastes in this way, it risks fostering an egotistical, opportunistic, consumption model for sexuality. These comics make the body of any female character into a Galatea that readers can mold to their liking and consume. Because we often learn patterns of interaction from fiction, such readers could learn to see the real women in their lives similarly, potentially leading them to use real life closure to mentally mold actual people into objects of fantasy.10 These comics, therefore, may eternally stunt the ability of Pygmalions to understand that real people do not magically conform to their preferences.11 For these reasons, those wanting to heal our sexually broken society must remain attentive to and critical of even populist mediums like comics when they ask us to leave things to our imaginations.

Endnotes

1 The dawn and setting of any of the comic book ages is, to some degree, fungible. No dates for the Bronze Age will satisfy all scholars. In this article, I consider the Bronze Age to begin in 1973, the year “The Night Gwen Stacey Died” was published, and continue until 1989, before the coming of the massive shifts in style, writing, and distribution that characterize the 90s.

2 Not every publisher submitted to the CCA. Companies like Dell who primarily published comics that were unambiguously written solely for children and based on cartoon characters never felt the need. Underground comics that were produced outside the corporate publishing world saw the CCA as the antithesis of everything they celebrated.

3 It is important to note that Jean is one of the most complex characters in the X-Men mythos. She was a member of the original team lineup and the only character aside from the leader, Cyclops, who remained a part of the X-Men after its revamp. At this point in the series, she had become Phoenix when a cosmic entity called “the Phoenix force” joined with her while she was sacrificing her life to save her teammates. This made her one of most powerful beings in the Marvel universe, at the time. All this is to say that Jean was not simply eye-candy in the series; she was a well-written, essential character in the stories.

4 I am indebted to Andrew Markus for pointing out that the X-Men example I previously used also features such an observer in its last panel.

5 This is in the article “Shadows Who Have Shadows: The Use of Color in Batman: The Long Halloween.”

6 It is worth noting that (like Jean) Black Cat is, by this point in comic history, an established heroine who has held her own against the likes of Spider-Man and many members of his rouges gallery. Therefore, another function of this art could be to neutralize the threat of a powerful woman by reducing her to an object of conquering male gaze. The idea that seeing a woman naked against her will gives one some kind of power over her is common in adolescent boys and men who act like them.

7 One can see other examples of this in things like Tattoo (1981) and other body horror films.

8 As, for example, in instances of breaking the fourth wall where the text directly acknowledges its artificial nature.

9 With the exception of depictions of outright sexual intercourse, where men are also depicted nude.

10 The explosion of non-consensual AI-generated porn featuring real women is a more extreme version of this way of seeing and imagining.

11 Likewise, they also contribute to the impossibly high standards of appearance that patriarchy forces on women.

References

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Buscema, John, Tom Palmer, and Roger Stern. 1986. “. . . And the War’s Desolation.” The Avengers 1(266). New York: Marvel Comics.

Byrne, John and Chris Claremont. 1979. “There’s Something Awful on Muir Island.” The Uncanny X-Men 1(125). New York: Marvel Comics. In Marvel Masterworks Presents the Uncanny X-Men. Edited by Roger Stern, pp. 90-107. New York: Marvel Comics.

Comics Code Authority (CCA). (1954). “The Comics Code of 1954.” CBLDF. (https://cbldf.org/the-comics-code-of-1954/). Accessed July 25, 2024.

Comics Code Authority (CCA). (1971). Comics Code Revision of 1971. CBLDF. (https://cbldf.org/comics-code-revision-of-1971/#:~:text=Scenes%20of%20excessive%20violence%20shall,could%20not%20possible%20be%20duplicated). Accessed July 25, 2024.

Cocca, Carolyn. 2014. “The ‘Broke Back Test’: A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of Portrayals of Women in Mainstream Superhero Comics, 1993–2013.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. 5(4): pp. 411-428.

Dworkin, Andrea. 1989. “Why Men Like Pornography and Prostitution So Much.” Keynote address presented at the International Trafficking Conference. (https://andreadworkin.com/audio/TraffickingConference1989_P1_M.mp3). Accessed September 18, 2025.

Gulacy, Paul and Doug Moench. 1986. “At the Heart of Stone.” Batman. 1(394). New York: DC Comics.

Hayton, Christopher J. 2021. “Evolving Sub-texts in the Visual Exploitation of the Female Form: Good Girl and Bad Girl Comic Art Pre- and Post-Second Wave Feminism.” Image Text. 7(4): (https://imagetextjournal.com/evolving-sub-texts-in-the-visual-exploitation-of-the-female-form-good-girl-and-bad-girl-comic-art-pre-and-post-second-wave-feminism/). Accessed Sept. 6, 2025.

Larson, David. 2018. The Emmaus Road Series: Creation and the Fall. Sparta: McPherson.

Longman III, Tremper. 2001. Song of Songs. Grand Rapids and Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

McCloud, Scott. 1994. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: William Morrow.

Milgrom, Al. 1984. “Where, Oh Where Has My Spider-Man Gone?” Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man. 1(90). New York: Marvel Comics.

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Mulvey, Laura and Colin MacCabe. 1989. “Images of Women, Images of Sexuality: Some Films by J. L. Godard.” In Visual and Other Pleasures, pp. 49-62. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Netzer, Michael and Gerry Conway. 1977. “Hospital of Fear.” World’s Finest 1(245). New York: DC.

Peppard, Anna F. 2020. “Presence and Absence in Theory and Practice: Locating Supersex.” In Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero. Edited by Anna F. Peppard, pp. 1-30. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Pérez, George and Shooter, Jim (1977), “The Bride of Ultron,” The Avengers #162, New York: Marvel Comics.

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Reynolds, Richard. 1992. Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.

Saviuk, Alex and Peter David. 1988. “Pressure.” Web of Spider-Man 1(4). New York: Marvel Comics.

Thompson, Hollis Cole. 2016. “Shadows Who Have Shadows: The Use of Color in Batman: The Long Halloween.” Aquila Review. 9: pp. 97-100.

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Hollis Cole Thompson is the artistic director of the Biblical Drama Institute in the Texarkana area, an English faculty member at the University of Arkansas at Hope and Texarkana, and the host of the Sunday Morning Superheroes and Comicstory podcasts. His main interests include Biblical literature, drama, and superheroes. His academic writing has appeared in Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal. He is also the author of the vampire novella Vivienne.

Editor's note - this essay was accepted for IJOCA 27-2, and edited by John A. Lent (JAL) and Mu Lin.

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