The mutability of the line and its tendency towards monstrosity: Otherness of and within comics

According to Theodor Adorno, contemporary art, having exhausted its possibilities and experimented to the extreme, “exists only in relation to its other” (Aesthetic Theory 1997, 3). For Adorno the being-for-other of art signaled the end of art and the domination of a commodifying culture industry. While one can only speculate about what Adorno would have thought about the current upsurge of comics/ graphic novels, his introduction of the concept of the Other within the very being of cultural products is a powerful image, especially when combined with the fragmentation central to the concept of the modern man, and transposed to the mixed medium of sequential art. With sequential art being based on splits and syncopation, it is also worthwhile considering the appropriateness of comics for capturing the fractured modern subjectivity, which in turn could explain the rise and success of auto- /biographical and reportage comics. Another material facet of sequential or graphic narration is the playfulness of the line and its scope in transmuting reality to varying degrees of abstract, evocative dimensions, which combined with the sequential setting, are hinged on difference and repetition, or in other words, mutation, which in turn has the potential to breed monstrosities usually enmeshed in a dialectical relationship with humanity. My paper will focus on the monstrosities manifested in graphic novels by exploring how far monstrosity as the implicit Other of humanity is thematized and works as metaphor for the medium itself. This will be done through discussing the works of two Finnish artists, Jyrki Heikkinen and Marko Turunen, not only for the sake of bringing up relatively unfamiliar material but also because the dialectic between monstrosity and humanity and its relationship to the traditional notion of the superhero has been intriguingingly problematized in Heikkinen’s Gallery of Wonders and Dr. Futuro as well as Marko Turunen’s Death Rode By Here