From Stanford’s news service yesterday, “Comics like Hellboy produce a heightened adventure of reading, Stanford scholar says: Using the Hellboy series as a touchstone, Professor Scott Bukatman has discovered new ways to talk about comics while offering a heightened “adventure of reading.”” by Leah Stark, beginning:
The Hellboy comics – about a demon who tries to resist his predestined role to destroy our world – provide a powerful vantage point from which to view the extraordinary and unique powers of the comic book medium, a Stanford scholar suggests.
That is the viewpoint of Scott Bukatman, a Stanford professor of film and media studies. He researched the Hellboy series by creator Mike Mignola and found that the pleasures of reading a comic book can reveal something about contemporary visual culture and even the act of reading itself.
… Bukatman … details his findings in a new book, Hellboy’s World: Comics and Monsters on the Margins [Univ. of California Press, 2016].
Many different genres are juggled in the Hellboy comics and, as a result, the stories themselves have different tonalities, Bukatman said.
“Some are really funny, some are melancholy. Some are cosmic in scope, others are local and small. There’s a lot of variety within this strange story world that Mignola has come up with,” he said.
Extended discussion in the piece
