Serialization, Solipsism, and Swarming: American Politics and the Graphic Novel in the 1970s

Abstract

Richard Howell’s Glamazon’s Burden, a graphic novel initially serialized between 1977 and 1979, makes a wry allusion to midcentury literary critic Leslie Fiedler in the shape of a book that never existed: Love and Death in the Comic Novel. Prompted by this subtle aside, which implies that the comic or graphic novel might be the vessel for anxious reflection on the state of American democracy, this article explores what the development of long-form comics in the 1970s meant for the articulation of political possibilities. This was the decade when American public commentators—not least President Carter—lamented the narcissism and self-interest of fellow citizens, and many of the era’s graphic novels depict rallies, fundraisers, and election campaigns, emphasizing a political system riddled with corruption and inertia. But if some graphic novels identified a democratic deficit in the American polity, Lee Marrs’s The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp (1973–1978) tacked in a different direction, offering a reinvigorated confidence in the ability to achieve progressive goals through political reform, a hope expressed through expansive formal strategies such as swarming panels.

“I am prompted by Howell’s wry suggestion of Love and Death in the Comic Novel to explore what the development of long-form comics meant for the articulation of democratic possibilities and dread in 1970s America.”