Apocatastasis: Redefining Tropes of the Apocalypse in Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Signal to Noise (original) (raw)

Apocalypse to Apocatastasis: Comics, Memory and Meaning in Signal to Noise

On a structural level comics are relatively easy to create and distribute, and yet, with their combination of words and images, they unite the ‘freedom of notation’ in literature with the ‘analogical’ immediacy of cinema. Their at once pictorial and textual nature means that the brain must process the information differently, and yet the comic book narrative necessarily takes place on the page, giving the reader all the time he could want or need to process said information. As its title would suggest, Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's "Signal to Noise" is constantly at play with the borders between signal and noise, meaning and meaninglessness.These two base elements of Signal to Noise, the narrative and the structural, notational and analogical, combine to produce a text which effectively uses a simple apocalyptic narrative and themes to discuss the relationship between signal, noise, and art in the Barthesian sense, creating a work charged with meaning and capable of being interpreted on a number of levels. In my essay, I analyse these two components, and the specific ways in which they work together to discuss the interplay between signal and noise in art, particularly in the comic book form.This combined form takes on new meaning, and turns every bit of noise into signal.

"Deep" Time in Times of Precarity: Comics and Anthropocene Poetics

Captures, 2020

This essay focuses on comics that show a sensitivity to “deep time” and the conception of our current epoch as the so-called “Anthropocene”. Through comics by Diniz Conefrey, Alberto Breccia and the WREK collective, this text explores how the bodily temporality of reading and drawing stands in productive counterpoint to some of the themes of these comics. These thematic layers are informed by the interpretive horizon of geological time and pose a politics of form to negotiate this contradiction. Cet article met l’accent sur des bandes dessinées de Diniz Conefrey, d’Alberto Breccia et du collectif WREK qui montrent une sensibilité au « temps profond » et à notre époque actuelle comme soi-disant « Anthropocène ». Il s’agit d’examiner comment la temporalité corporelle de la lecture et du dessin est en opposition productive avec certains thèmes, qui s’inspirent de l’horizon interprétatif du temps géologique, et posent une politique de la forme pour négocier cette contradiction.

Full page insight: the apocalyptic moment in comics written by Alan Moore

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2014

Alan Moore and his collaborating artists often manipulate time and space by drawing upon the formal elements of comics and making alternative constellations. This article looks at an element that is used frequently in comics of all kinds – the full page – and discusses how it helps shape spatio-temporal relations within the stories told, specifically in terms of full pages in connection with apocalypses. The spatio-temporal quality of the apocalypse is complex in that it concerns an event that is an ending and at the same time a continuation of time; and this double temporal quality is, it is argued here, something that it shares with the full page in comics. Through an analysis of several full pages from Moore titles like Swamp Thing, From Hell, Watchmen and Promethea, it is made clear why the full page provides an apt vehicle for an apocalypse in comics.

Apocalypse yesterday: posthumanism and comics in the Anthropocene

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2019

It is widely recognised that the growing awareness that we are living in the Anthropocene – an unstable geological epoch in which humans and their actions are catalysing catastrophic environmental change – is troubling humanity’s understanding and perception of temporality and the ways in which we come to terms with socio-ecological change. This article begins by arguing in favour of posthumanism as an approach to this problem, one in which the prefix ‘post’ does not come as an apocalyptic warning, but rather signals a new way of thinking, an encouragement to move beyond a humanist perspective, and to abandon a social discourse and a worldview fundamentally centred on the human. The article then explores how the impending environmental catastrophe can be productively reimagined through graphic narratives, arguing that popular culture in general, and comics in particular, emerge as productive sites for geographers to interrogate and develop posthuman methodologies and narratives. Developing our analysis around two comics in particular – Here (McGuire, 2014) and Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller et al., 2015) – we show how graphic narrative can help us to move beyond the nature-society divide that is rendered anachronistic by the Anthropocene.

Imagining the Apocalypse: Art and the End Times

London: Courtauld Books Online, 2022

What are the politics of picturing the end times? This online, open-access essay collection explores how art and visual culture has imagined Armageddon across the globe from the eighteenth century to the present. The book considers the ways in which apocalypticism has been contested by social conservatives and progressives, drawn on to perpetuate or challenge structures of power. Contributors discuss homophobia and queer utopias, climate change and nuclear anxieties, folk monsters and fears of revolt, imperial violence and anti-colonial imagination, the staging of conflict and disaster, popular culture and fascism, faith and denial in church congregations. Each reveal how a series of contradictions underpin the end times: beginnings and endings, annihilation and revelation.

Armageddon? Necessary! The Representation of Consumerist-Materialist "Chaos" in Terry Pratchett's and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens

Thesis, 2023

First of all, I would like to acknowledge and dedicate my work to my family: my Mom, my Dad and my Brother: it is thanks their unconditional, never ending support and encouragement that I am here at this point, finishing my Bachelor studies and writing my thesis. I am extremely grateful to and for them. Moreover, I would like to acknowledge and thank my Supervisor, Dr. Zsófia Orosz-Réti, who has not only showed me how to control the Chaos (both in my thesis and in myself at tough times) but who, through her classes, legendary personality and eternal patience, had a tremendous influence on me, and become a mentor-figure for me during the last two years of my studies. It was the greatest honor and experience for me to work with her. Last but not least, I would like to thank my friends and fellow university students for their encouragement and support, even on the toughest days of the writing process.

2012. The End of the World — Again: Why the Apocalypse Meme Replicates in Media, Science, and Culture

2012

Doomsday scenarios. They proliferate in our culture, from economics to ecology, theology to technology, biology to cosmology, James Bond to Slavoj Zizek, Plato's Atlantis to Lars von Trier's Melancholia. With creativity and critical insight, Barry Vacker shows why apocalyptic memes replicate and have built-in survival advantages. He also explains how the doomsdays reveal the deeper challenges facing human existence — the philosophical apocalypse effected by our lack of cosmic meaning in the vast universe. Have we really embraced our true existence on Spaceship Earth floating in the cosmos of the new millennium? Our calendars say we have passed the year 2000, but have we really entered the new millennium? The End of the World — Again offers an original, exciting, and (for some) terrifying critique of culture in 2012 and beyond. Available in high quality paperback via Amazon.

UNCOVERING THE APOCALYPSE Narratives of Collapse and Transformation in the 21st century Fin de Siècle

2012

This dissertation examines the idea of apocalypse through the lens of science fiction (sf) written during the current fin de siècle period. I have dated this epoch, known as the information era, as starting in 1980 with the advent of personal computing and ending in approximately 2020 when the functional limits of silicon-based digital manufacturing and production are expected to be reached. By surveying the field of contemporary sf, I identify certain trends and subgenres that relate to particular aspects of apocalyptic thought, namely, conceptions of the 'terror of history,' the sublimity of accelerated techno-scientific advance, the 'affective turn' in media-culture and posthuman philosophy. My principal method of inquiry into how the apocalypse is imagined or 'figured' in sf is the concept of hyperstition-a neologism (combining the words 'hyper' and 'superstition') coined by the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU). Hyperstition describes an aesthetic response whereby cultural fictions-principally, ideas relating to apocalypse-are imagined as transmuting into material realities. I begin by scrutinizing two posthumanist works of theory-fiction (theory written in the mode of sf) by the CCRU and 0rphan Drift which anticipate immanent human extinction and imagine the inception of a new evolutionary cycle of machine-augmented evolution This sensibility is premised on the sociallydestabilising cycles of exponential growth that characterise information-era technological developments, particularly in the digital industries, as well as the accelerated human impact on the natural environment. Central to my argument is the romantic materialist philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari and their concepts of accelerationism, schizoanalysis and Bodies without Organs (BwO's). Their ontology is constructed around the idea that exponential rates of development necessitate a new aesthetic paradigm that ventures beyond philosophies of human access. The narrative of apocalypse, approached from this perspective, can be interpreted in catastrophic or anastrophic terms; either as a permanent ending or as the beginning of something radically new. Using hyperstition, I also investigate the sf of

When the Life Giver Dies, All Around Is Laid Waste: Structural Trauma and the Splitting of Time in Signal to Noise, a Graphic Novel

Trauma critic Dominick LaCapra, in Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001), established a distinction between ‘historical’ and ‘structural’ traumas. In contrast to punctual events that lie at the core of historical traumas, a structural trauma refers to an anxiety-producing condition of humanity, namely mortality, which becomes the traumatic event in the mind of the subject. This essay aims to analyse Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s graphic novel, Signal to Noise (1989), as a representation of the mental unease of a subject affected by a structural trauma, which inextricably leads to an in-depth examination of the meaning of human existence. Within the scope of Trauma Studies, this article explores the splitting of the concept of time in the agonist protagonist’s mind, as this category is deconstructed into three different representations related to the philosophical ideas of Henri Bergson (la Durée réelle and la Durée interne), Martin Heidegger (Jeweiligkeit) and the theories of Trauma Studies (traumatic memories). Additionally, this graphic novel offers a possible means for working through structural trauma and healing from the anxiety of death.