Mythologies transcend all aspects of life from the most realistic to the most abstract. It is with a critical approach that I consider the apocalypse, and American culture’s recent obsession with the end of the world. In this paper I intend to look at how the apocalypse, as a mythology, or a fairy tale as others may call it, is reconfigured in the 2014 comic series Hinterkind by writer Ian Edgington and artist Francesco Trifogli. Through the application of Barthes’ definition of what myth is, how it works, and what is does within culture, I hope to uncover how the myth of the apocalypse has transformed over time, but more importantly how this transformation is laid out for the reader within the panels and gutters of the Hinterkind series. As this comics series is still so new, I hope to further develop my research on this topic each month as more issues come out to possibly hypothesize the trajectory of the apocalypse myth. One of the most interesting aspects of Edgington’s and Trifogli’s comic is the juxtaposition of the apocalypse alongside the fantastical. Through the incorporation of fairy tale beings rather than the undead or incomprehensible loneliness, Hinterkind saturates its pages with a literary genre that has a long history in all cultural aspects of American lives. It is in this reconfiguration and juxtaposition of such opposing genres that I hope to answer the following questions: Is the apocalypse, like all other myths and fairy tales, doomed to fade into history? Is the cultural work/reconfiguration being done by the Hinterkind series a step in the direction of realization that the apocalypse, like so many other things, is nothing more than a fantasy in the American consciousness to make us feel better about how terrible things are today?
About the presenterSarah Elizabeth Camp
I am a Master’s degree seeking student at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. I enjoy working with comics and graphic novels while taking a cultural studies approach. I am currently working on my thesis project where I am looking at the ways in which LAF and apocalyptic comics influence, reflect, and critique American constructions of identity and American consciousness. In my thesis I examine, specifically, the currently running monthly serials Fables by Bill Willingham and Hinterkind by Ian Edginton, as well as the completed, 10 volume series Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan.