Nancy and the Queer Adorable in the Serial Comics Form

• Jessica Q. Stark ^[1]
  1. [1] Duke University

     Duke University

     Township of Durham, Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: American literature: A journal of literary history, criticism and bibliography, ISSN 0002-9831, ISSN-e 1527-2117, Vol. 90, Nº 2, 2018, págs. 315-345
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This essay presents in dialogue two renditions of the Nancy comics by original creator Ernie Bushmiller and the later poet and visual artist Joe Brainard. Arguing for a generative consideration of these seemingly disparate versions on a continuum, this comparison addresses the ongoing seriality of Nancy as offering a complex queer adorability that destabilizes modes of identification in the Nancy comics and beyond. Both Brainard’s and Bushmiller’s Nancy texts draw on the controlled miniature and the unwieldy additive catalog, which are characteristic of the long-running serial comics form. As queer texts that oscillate between popular iconographies, these iterations of Nancy provide resistance to expectations for normativity, narrative closure, static character performance, and bound space in relation to twentieth-century American collective identities.