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Deviant and outsider communities are often rendered as outposts of sexual freedom, and are strongly associated with permissiveness and acceptance. However, behavior within subcultures and deviant communities is as heavily policed as behaviors in broader culture, or in communities held up as normative. While this is not a particularly new concept, witnessing it within the comic/sequential art community is particularly important, as comic books are themselves the representative interest of a deviant community. Just as it is important in other literatures to examine how deviancy is rendered by cultural outsiders, it is necessary to examine comics both for their popular culture properties (i.e. as cultural artifacts that encode specific norms in a variety of ways) and for their “view inside” (i.e. their link to the audience as a subculture). The way in which the gaze is staged can give us insight into not only the deviant community depicted in the work, but also into the comic community. In the Hellblazer—Highwater storyline, the main character John Constantine travels through a number of outsider communities, and while the story is largely focused on him, his actions, and his death, it also examines those communities in which he acts. The framework itself is interesting to break down: within a comic, itself a cultural artifact of a deviant community, we are asked as readers to move first through an ideologically conservative deviant community (the white supremacists), then through an outsiders’ cultural analysis if the American condition, and then simultaneously into two discreet but related scenes, one the locus of a sexually deviant community and the other a bastion of normative culture’s law and order—a police station. How we understand the sexually deviant community, and its codes and customs, is dependent upon this framework. The first community we enter is clearly one of discipline, but it is of a variety to which we are unaccustomed. A narration of a white supremacist interpretation of the Bible overlays Constantine’s initial interaction with a group of young Neo-Nazis and their older leader. An incident occurs in which the young thugs kill and display the mutilated corpse of an arms dealer for his praise of black women’s sexual prowess, creating a space in which the leader must react... Download this complete article with inline comic stills and analysis (341 KB PDF) |
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