Autoclasm and aura – the graphic novel’s auto destructive structures of cultural legitimacy

This paper develops Christopher Pizzino’s notion of ‘autoclasm’ describing a tendency within comics practice, criticism and marketing to simultaneously assert and deny the legitimacy of comic’s cultural value in an auto-destructive gesture.

As Pizzino argues, the perennial discourse around the graphic novel as a form separate from comics which has ‘grown up’, elides the history of anti-comics campaigns and represents a marketing strategy advertising graphic novels as possessing legitimate literary artistic value. I will consider how autoclasm manifests itself through the visual register and argue that imaginative tactility represents an aesthetic effort to distinguish graphic novels from comic’s more transparent relationships to industrial mass-production.

I will discuss the role of materiality, embodied drawing and reproduction in this autoclastic aesthetic strategy and highlight it’s relationship to Walter Benjamin’s concept of the ‘aura’ of the work of art. Through examples including my own graphic novels, I will argue that attempts to produce comics that convey materiality in terms more usually associated with fine art represent a contradictory but none-the-less effective attempt at simulating aura in a mass-produced form.

I will argue that this autoclastic gesture often involves digitally confected fictive space where reproduction stands in for the original. In this space haptic elements assert themselves as material facts even as they reveal themselves as mimetic fiction. This fiction becomes increasingly precarious as modes of production, reproduction and dissemination in comics become ever more computational, multimodal and simultaneous, rendering attempts to impose auratic terms on the technologically reproduced image, ever more autoclastic.