From streaming to stapling – small press re-presentations of cinema in the 21st century as drawing theory and as fan practice

Recent cinema feels dominated by big budget retellings of stories that originated in comics. This paper will approach the reverse phenomenon of the re-presentation of cinema in self-published alternative comics. I will argue that these comics represent an impulse to inscribe a subjective experience onto a shared cultural artifact and that the study of this can inform theorisations of drawing and fandom.
I argue that streaming services have facilitated a more personal, portable and adaptable relationship with the moving image. A film can now be used as a manipulable index of images which the drawing subject can sample and recompose.
I will introduce a variety of theorisations to frame this argument. Through a consideration of Walter Benjamin’s work on the relationship between film and the aura (Benjamin, 1999), alongside Gardner’s (Gardner, 2011) and Szép’s (Szép, 2020) theorisations of the trace of the body in comic’s mode of address, I will consider Ally Russell’s shot for shot redrawing of The Attack of the Killer Klowns from Outer Space and Matt Simmons’ Left Handed Akira.
I will discuss drawn film as intersubjective construct of a shared cultural artefact through Babak Ganjei’s Roadhouse, and Douglas Noble’s Horrible Folk. Through a consideration of redrawn cinematic content I will argue with reference to the work of Grennan (Grennan, 2017) and Crucifix (Crucifix, 2017) that practices of genre-splicing and ‘swiping’ particular to alternative comics represent established storytelling practices which facilitate these representations.