Here's an experiment I proposed several years back. I've brought it up every four years or so, but I have yet to see anyone take this challenge up, so I thought I'd present it here again.

Is there anything in the original Star Wars trilogy that necessitates any given character being a certain race or gender? I can't think of anything. Obi-Wan and Yoda could have been female. Vader could have been Luke's mother. Even the Han/Leia romance could easily be portrayed by either two men or two women. Everything you think of as masculine or feminine in those movies is strictly a social construct, and it would be no problem at all to do color-blind casting since all ties to what we think of as racial identity are effectively null and void in a galaxy far, far away.

That got me thinking about how things are portrayed in comics. (Actually, everything pretty much gets me thinking about comics!) There are a lot of the same types of issues in mainstream comics. So what would happen if you took an existing comic book story -- particularly something really well-known -- and gender/race swapped characters randomly? Any number of fan artists have shown what famous characters might look like if they were gender/race swapped, but that doesn't carry the thought all the way to its natural conclusion.

There have been a number of stories where characters were gender-swapped already. The most famous example I can think of offhand is Archie #636 from several years ago. But, by and large, the writers here (and on the others) were quite conscious of the gender-swapping and specifically wrote the books to that effect. So readers are given a very consciously skewed version of the characters.

That's why I'd be more interested to see some existing stories swapped. Keep the dialogue and layouts and everything exactly as they were done originally, but simply swap the specifics of the illustrations themselves. The Galactus Trilogy, The Dark Phoenix Saga, The Killing Joke, The Death of Superman... what would these stories look like if everything were exactly the same, except characters' races and genders were assigned randomly? Again, exact same dialogue, exact same actions, exact same layouts; just swap out the visuals of the character designs.

I think this would be a fascinating and enlightening experiment. Rather than letting the writer consciously or subconsciously play to stereotypes, this approach would force readers to directly and honestly confront their notions of gender and racial identity. Why does Mrs. Fantastic sound like an utter bitch when Mr. Fantastic just came off as a bit gruff? Is Gene Grey's destruction of the D'Bari less heinous than when Jean Grey did it? Is Commissioner Jane Gordon excessively worried about her son's capture, given that he had already proven himself capable enough to fight alongside Batwoman? Does Superwoman's fight against Doomsday seem needlessly absurd now? (Well... even more needlessly absurd!)

In most race and gender swapping experiments, we're still stuck with preconceptions developed over years, if not decades, of social conditioning of what a person should/shouldn't act like based on their gender or race. Writers and artists, consciously or not, play to those stereotypes and present readers with (typically) one man's idea of what women would be like if they had masculine traits. By eliminating that aspect of the equation, and we pretend the original writer was simply writing from a gender/race neutral position, we can see how those stereotypes are often inadvertently catered to.

So here's my challenge. I would like to see someone go through some famous comic story, and randomly assign a gender and race to each character. Then recreate the story exactly as it was originally presented, but using the newly assigned race/gender for everybody. Yup, it would be a lot of work but it would spark one hell of a discussion, one that we haven't had yet!

Like many people, I am mostly familiar with Darryl Cunningham's work when it comes to non-fiction. Whether he was disproving absurd moon landing conspiracy theories or just relaying the life of a Russian dictator, he did a good job boiling down some complex elements into a fairly digestable narrative. But because I know him from that type of material, I was indeed curious to see what he might do with a straight-up science fiction story.

John of the Night is the story of the titular John, who discovers some "ripples" in space-time that seem to have originated some 3000 years earlier, in the 1960s, but could obliterate the universe. When he goes to inform his boss, though, he almost instantly finds himself at the wrong end of a several starships that blow his station into smithereens. While he and his daughter are able to escape the immediate execution, they have to race to keep ahead of John's boss's attempts to get rid of him. We learn of the war that was started by a group who believe the destruction of this universe will lead to the birth of a new and "perfect" one and that, when it comes to magic, belief is more important than reality. With the help of his daughter, John is able to thwart the universe's greatest assassin and ultimately save everything. Except perhaps himself.

I read the story before reading any background on it. I had no idea what Cunningham's intentions were or how he approached this compared to his non-fiction work. About a third of the way into it, I recall getting the strong sense that it reminded me of Jack Kirby's Fourth World. Obviously, there's little in the way of visual similarity, but the storytelling felt like Cunningham was relaying some of his core ideas about the fundamental nature of mankind, life, and even reality itself through an action-packed story much like Kirby had done in the Fourth World. It's not pontificating and there are in fact several fight scenes which just allow silent storytelling to take place with no monologuing or anything. I got the strong sense that, like Kirby, Cunningham was building up a story around ideas that he couldn't quite express directly. And sure enough, he expressly notes in the back matter that Kirby was a direct inspiration for some of his effort in the book.

What I also liked was Cunningham was able to casually throw in "corrections" to common storytelling problems when it comes to science. For example, at one point John leaves his daughter through a time portal and assumes she'll be able to build her own time machine to find him. And even though it takes her a month to do so, she shows up almost immediately. And that notion of time being, you know, relative remains consistent throughout the story, unlike many who play fast and loose with those kinds of ideas because their creators can't think of a decent way to generate tension otherwise. (I'm looking at you, Back to the Future.)

Despite the shade I'm throwing there, Cunningham does not do that. He doesn't call out any one story or franchise for being "wrong" about how any of that works. In fact, he's got any number of Easter eggs to other time travel/alternate reality stories from Star Trek to Red Dwarf, and from The Wizard of Oz to The Prisoner. There's a slew of background nods if you want to stop for a Where's Waldo style hunt.

On the whole, I thought it was a really interesting story despite the protagonist being kind of an asshole. We get a backstory explaining why eventually, but it's just an explanation, not an excuse. He's still an asshole, even to his own kid. (Which, interestingly, she recognizes and acknowledges, but continues to live with him anyway; but seemingly not in a toxic sort of way strangely.) But John ultimately does play the role of the hero, not only to the universe but also to his daughter and her mother. So as a reader, you still have good reason to cheer him on. And, seemingly as a bonus, Cunningham just so happens to include a lot of his ideas about the nature of reality in the process.

John of the Night should be in shops on September 2, 2026 but you can obviously pre-order it now. It retails for $19.99 US and is being published by Avery Hill. An advance review copy was provided to me by the publisher.

One of the things that's struck me about older comics is some of the cross-media attention they were given. I think many fans are at least nominally familiar with some of the serials that were produced using Superman, Captain Marvel, Captain America, and others, but less well-known are the radio programs that were popular around the same time.

The Adventures of Superman, of course, is one of the more well-known, largely by virtue of the titular character's popularity. He was, arguably, one of the first cross-media phenomenon. The old Fleischer cartoons are certainly well-known as are the serials and later TV show. So I think fans readily roll the notion of a radio show under that umbrella. "He was in all media, so of course he would have a radio show!"

But I don't know that fans today understand the importance and impact radio had back in the day. Unlike comics, radio programs could be listened to collectively and were a communal activity in a way that many other media -- certainly other media of the day -- couldn't be. So to have a character make the transition from comics to radio was a big deal, culturally on par with getting a blockbuster movie today.

Besides Superman, other comic characters that got their own radio programs included Batman, Blue Beetle, Flash Gordon, Blondie, Popeye, Blackstone, Archie, Dick Tracy, Gasoline Alley, Li'l Abner, Little Orphan Annie, Skippy, Terry and the Pirates, Mark Trail, Buster Brown, and the Gumps to name just a few! Perhaps surprisingly, considering how little is spoken of them in comic circles, they continued to be popular up through the 1950s!

What's striking to me is that any of them maintained any level of success at all! After all, comics are very much a visual medium and radio very much is not. Therefore you not only lose the visualizations provided in the strips, but the nature of the storytelling needs to be changed significantly. Think about that sequence from Action Comics #1 where Superman comes up to a locked room and the governor's assistant dares him to knock it down -- the subsequent panel shows Superman doing exactly that but without any dialogue or sound effects. While that sequence could be translated into a radio format, it would require some re-working for the non-visual medium.

I wouldn't mind seeing more writing analyzing how various comics were able to make the transition versus how many simply applied comic strip characters to what were essentially existing radio scripts.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: How I Make Comics Review
https://ift.tt/zi97tYg

Kleefeld on Comics: Some Rat Queens Thoughts
https://ift.tt/jkgNLfC

Kleefeld on Comics: Mitsumasa Anno
https://ift.tt/C4D1EGh

Kleefeld on Comics: Kill Six Billion Demons Paratexts
https://ift.tt/kcVQy9Y

Kleefeld on Comics: Juneteenth Comics
https://ift.tt/A9XpBFE

Juneteenth is a federal holiday here in the US, but you'd barely know it from reading the comics page. These are all the comics -- and two of them argueably aren't actually comics -- that I've found this morning mentioning the day...

About a year and a half ago, I was contacted by Ronja Jokilampi, who was working on their Masters thesis and had some questions relative to my Webcomics book. I tried to answer them as best as I could -- although I have to admit I didn't have great answers then, and I still don't! But they've been working on their thesis since then and I learned last week that they indeed finished and have received their Master’s in Literary Studies! So first off, congrats to Ronja!

More to the point of my blog, though, the title of the thesis is Paratext in Paradox: Paratextual Elements and Functions in the Webcomic Kill Six Billion Demons. The academic study of webcomics is woefully lacking, generally speaking. One of the reviews of my own book noted, as one of his biggest complaints, that there weren't enough academic references in it... but then went on to add that there simply isn't much to reference in the first place! So it's worth noting when we get a thesis paper on webcomics in any capacity. More interesting, though, is that Ronja focuses in particular on the paratexts of Kill Six Billino Demons. The paratexts are basically all the stuff that's part of a webcomic, but not the comic itself! Everything from the ALT text on the images to the web site's FAQ to even the extra material over on an ancillary site like Patreon. I barely touched on paratexts in my book, doing barely more than citing that webcomics can have more options available that traditional comics. As far as I'm aware, Ronja's thesis is the first study looking expressly at webcomics' paratexts and how they're intergrated (or not) with the main comic.

Here's the paper's abstract...

The thesis analyses how Kill Six Billion Demons uses its paratext to expand the webcomic’s narrative toolkit beyond just the comic. The webcomic paratext is used for directing the comic’s interpretation, presenting both supplemental and primary narratives, creating aesthetic and comedic experiences, and breaking the borders between textual and paratextual spaces to create potent narrative effects. Building on the theoretical bases of Genette’s ‘Paratexts’ and Kleefeld’s ‘Webcomics’, Waites’ idea of paratextual narratives, and the categories of paratextual function introduced by Birke and Christ as well as Gross and Latham, the thesis is the first to create an extensive typology of a webcomic’s paratext. It is also the first piece of academic writing to focus on Kill Six Billion Demons, inviting further research on both the webcomic specifically and digital paratexts in general.

The paratext of Kill Six Billion Demons is shown to be unusually robust and influential to its text. While earlier research has claimed that paratexts function primarily to illustrate the author’s intent over the text’s interpretation to the reader, to assist in navigating the work, and to boost its sales, this analysis reveals further functions that challenge our understanding of the paratext as a solely pragmatic tool. The thesis gives examples of creative paratextual functions that demonstrate how the webcomic author can use the varied paratextual spaces that the webpage’s infinite canvas provides in ways that would be unfeasible in print comics. Paratextual space is used for textual functions and vice versa, creating a formal paradox that has the potential to both challenge and expand our contemporary understanding of the paratextual threshold.

The full thesis is available for download from the Helsinki University Library website under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. If you've got any interest in webcomics, it's well worth the read and gets into a LOT of material that I didn't have the space to touch in my book. (Full disclosure, though: my book is cited several times and Ronja gave me a special thanks at the very end.) I've been saying for literally decades now that we need more journalistic and academic discussions about webcomics, and I think we should all support anyone doing exactly that! Go check out Paratext in Paradox and, if you happen to be working on your own thesis, be sure to make some references to it, so we can continue to spread the good word!

The gent at the right is Mitsumasa Anno, a Japanese author and illustrator of children's book. From Wikipedia...

Anno was best known for wordless picture books featuring small, detailed figures. In the "Journey" books, a tiny character travels through a nation's landscape, densely populated with pictures referencing that country's art, literature, culture, and history. Anno's illustrations are often in pen and ink and watercolor, and occasionally incorporate collage and woodcuts. They are intricately detailed, showing a sense of humor as well as an interest in science, mathematics, and foreign cultures. They frequently incorporate subtle jokes and references.

My dad had several of Anno's books when I was a kid and they were truly impressive. I recall pouring over the fine linework and detail he would put into every page. Despite the stories being entirely wordless, they told very clear and concise tales and, in retrospect, very clear comic work told in an extraordinary manner.

I don't think I've ever seen Anno's name in association with comic book storytelling, and thought I ought to call some attention to his work for those who've never really made the connection between his work and the comic medium. My personal favorites were Anno's Italy, Anno's USA and Anno's Britain. Really masterful work, well worth seeking out.