The Acme Novelty Library: Comic Books, Repetition, and the Return of the New

Abstract

While some critics have sought to explain the role of disasters in entertainment media by making recourse to the concept of fantasy, we suggest a different approach. Focusing on superhero comic books, we outline what we call a “logic of the anomalous.” We argue that comic books foreshadow disasters by allowing readers to explore the consequences of anomalies that emerge from differences in the scales of an industrialized society on the one hand, and the scales of embodied experience on the other. Comic books thus act as a database, or novelty library, of extreme or novel experiences, one that allows its users to explore the potentials inherent in the complexity of industrialized societies. This approach to comic books allows us to coordinate three research traditions—political economic analysis; a phenomenologically oriented tradition of media theory; and science and technology studies—to explain the constitutive role of novelty, repetition, and fantasy in contemporary society.

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