Presentation
Superhero Comics and the Seeing of Law: Masks, Icons and Legal Emblems
Dundee Law School Seminar Series (Dundee, United Kingdom, 13-Feb-2019)
Scottish Centre for Comics Studies
2019
Abstract
Superhero comics seem at once both the most and least obvious place to undertake a legal analysis. Most, because of their excessive concerns with criminality, legality, justice and the exception. Least because of their overdetermined plots, their incessant hybridity, and almost untrammelled commerciality which leave us wondering whether they can possibly say anything of critical value in regards to law beyond the current dominant ideology. This paper seeks to set out a project on comics, form and the superhero that analyses the way in which the visual (as well as narrative) tropes of superhero comics implicitly and explicitly draw on the visuality of law, whilst also inviting a form of critique of our modern legal visuality. Whether it be through the explicit reference to Justitia and blind justice by a superhero such as Daredevil, implicit adopting of the formal sovereign or legal office by Batman, or simply the figurings of iconic emblemata deployed by the superhero in the form of the mask, cape, costume and other trademarked and highly visible devices, superhero comics are saturated with visual legality. Yet, the very visuality of the comics form also asks us to consider the nature of what it means to see law. For the comics form itself, deployed as a representational medium both mimics and critiques the forms of law and asks us to re-think law as and through visual form. Through an analysis of comics as visual form, this paper therefore seeks to bring together and address two questions: what is that we ‘see’ when we see comics? And is it possible to ‘see’ law at all?
Details
- Title
- Superhero Comics and the Seeing of Law: Masks, Icons and Legal Emblems
- Authors
- Timothy Peters (Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Law and Society
- Event details
- Dundee Law School Seminar Series (Dundee, United Kingdom, 13-Feb-2019)
- Publisher
- Scottish Centre for Comics Studies
- Organisation Unit
- University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland; School of Law and Society
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 99630140602621
- Output Type
- Presentation
Metrics
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