Comics / Comics News

ComicBookBin Writer Zak Edwards Writes Master Thesis on Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles

By Hervé St-Louis
October 3, 2013 - 10:52

McMaster University English and Cultural Studies master’s student and long time ComicBookBin writer Zak Edwards successfully defended his master’s thesis on Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles. The thesis titled ‘Tools of the "En-Eh-Mee:" Grant Morrison's Utopia and the Means to End There’ was written as part of the completion requirements of Edwards’s master’s degree at McMaster University, in  Hamilton, Canada.

Ewards’s abstract describes the scope of his research as “analyzing the impact of the Dark Age of comics on Grant Morrison’s comic book series The Invisibles, specifically arguing that the traditional superhero figure enacts a certain narrative violence on the characters and text itself, both through direct violence and in the limiting of potential narratives. The first chapter establishes The Invisibles’ contemporary comic tropes, establishing Dark Age superheroes as an exceptionalist figures who use extreme violence to separate themselves from a perceived corrupt society. As such, this thesis moves from a psychoanalytic approach to heroism towards a schizoanalytic approach found in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, demonstrating how similar cycles of pathologization found in their critique of psychoanalysis also apply to The Invisibles’ attempt to innoculate itself against its own sensationalized violence. In doing so, the series eventually purges itself of the hero’s underlying ideological violences and attempts to actualize a Morrison’s own notions of utopia through the medium of comics, valuing multiplicities and the production of narratives to inform the experience of reality over a limitation of narratives based on violent conflict.”

With this thesis, Edwards has joined the select group of comic book academics and become another member of ComicBookBin’s staff to pursue graduate studies. On behalf of all my colleagues at ComicBookBin, I want to congratulate Zak Edwards on successfully defending his master’s thesis. Now that Zak is a “certified” comic book academic, we’ll look forward to reading his work here. No pressure intended ;)

Interested readers may  download Edwards’s master’ thesis at http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/opendissertations/8395

Source:
Edwards, Jordan Z., "Tools of the "En-Eh-Mee:" Grant Morrison's Utopia and the Means to End There" (2013). Open Access Dissertations and Theses. Paper 8395.

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12