Speculation

Speculation names the faculty through which we allow comics to defy the laws of nature and reveal the rules of reading. Comics share a queer kinship with speculative fiction—that is, the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror—but speculation means much more to comics than the tropes they have in common with other media. Totemic figures like Flash Gordon, Asterix, Little Orphan Annie, and Astro Boy emerged in comic strips, and their stories have fashioned the medium into a venue where the print and visual cultures of disparate societies entertain flights of fancy. Speculative fictions featuring time travel, magic, horror, mystery, and technological wonderment took up residence in the popular imagination alongside the romance, the Western, and the superhero adventure in the interwar period that gave rise to the critique of mass culture, and they have been a mainstay of the medium ever since. In “The Myth of Superman,” semiotician Umberto Eco (1972) surmised that the modern comic strip managed to overcome the risk of absurdity inherent in the way the superhero’s life accumulates spectacular moments on a weekly or monthly basis by exploiting the oneiric (or dreamlike) quality of the experience of reading. The sui generis temporality of narrative makes it utterly unnecessary to reconcile the representation of the passage of time within a story with the quantity of time elapsed in the act of deciphering a text. Particularly in serialized comics, readers can experience the suspense of following a plot to its conclusion over any number of installments, only to see a new story wash it away like the waters of Lethe until it reemerges, half-recognized, in flashbacks and allusions. From the surreal landscapes of Little Nemo in Slumberland, which embedded childlike wonder alongside racist caricature in a world of infinite depth, to Krazy Kat, a reverie with seemingly endless self-reinforcing permutations, to the ageless adventures of Wonder Woman, Batman, and Archie, the medium of comics eludes realism even when its themes are mundane and its visual style aspires to verisimilitude. Plausibility notwithstanding, images of places, persons, and events that might take years to traverse in reality coexist via juxtaposition in comics, just as they might appear fractions of a second apart on video or separated by as little as a punctuation mark on a printed page.