Haptic visuality, embodiment and technology in superman’s pal, the new Jimmy Olsen and Arkham asylum: a serious house on serious earth

The materiality of drawn narratives and in particular the substances from which these drawings are made has been an overlooked factor in comics studies. Often, ‘the line’ is discussed as if its material composition were self evident. This could be explained by the predominance of methods of printing throughout the 20th Century which largely efface the traces of the original materials involved in drawing.
Since the 1980’s, photo-reprographic processes, digital practice and scanning technology have allowed materials to be mimetically translated in ways that remediate their tac le and indexical relationships to the body, inviting the reader into an imaginative embodied engagement with surface. This paper will argue that this form of engagement should be recognised as a distinct register in the narrative communication of a comic.
I will compare Kirby’s early 1970’s work on Superman’s Pal, The New Jimmy Olsen to Dave McKean’s artwork for the 1989 graphic novel Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. I will argue that while Kirby’s experiments with photocollage and development of the ‘Kirby Krackle’ amount to an iconic shorthand for imaginative embodied engagement, McKean’s adaptation of photographic technology remediates the indexical tactility of materials in a way that preserves their relationship to the body. This produces networks of sited embodied encounters which drive the dramatic trajectory of the narrative. I will show that these haptically active image networks can be better understood through an adaptation of Groensteen’s theory of iconic solidarity.