Graphic Novels As Pastiche

GRAPHIC NOVELS AS PASTICHE

Jameson sees pastiche as a practice that arises from the "disappearance of the individual subject" and the "unavailability of the personal style". Postmodern practice can and does engage in a kind of pastiche or blank parody that occurs because of the rampant fragmentation where a collective, unified narrative no longer holds court. Pastiche is mimicry of style that lacks the cultural narrative of unified history - a normative view of the context - that would so inform parody.

DISSEMINATION

Graphic novels and narratives are often self-reflexive, highlighted in embedded visual references to books, other comics, and art in general cultural elements which hold significance for both author/artist and reader. As visual-verbal narratives, graphic novels are examples of metafictional texts therefore interpretation may be dependent upon the reader s ability to enter the text and to uncover multiple layers of narrative. Graphic novels can use postmodern literary pastiche as a structural device that contributes to the complexity of the visual-verbal medium.

The liberal borrowing and `mash-up` culture that exists in graphic novels through such embedded references is, perhaps, a sign that pastiche works to continue to remind the reader that they are engaged in a constructed reality, and that a reading of the one text may be informed by a multiplicity of other graphic novels and pieces of conventional literature.

The relationship of one graphic text to another is not necessarily evidence of pastiche, but it does suggest that there is mimicry being enacted upon the text. The mimicry itself is neutral: the oversized cell phones, the exaggerated costumes and the cigarette holders that are somewhat reminiscent of opium. But because it takes place in a metafictional text, it works to ultimately re-contextualize the narrative and becomes part of a discourse that is highly ideological, meant to show what `might have been.`

The presence of pastiche creates an environment in the graphic novel that is both eerily familiar and yet strangely alien, and its presence, when identified, provides a window on the kind of fragmentation that is at work in a postmodern text.