The Literary Straitjacket. Comics and Literature in Chabon and Vaughan

The encounter of different media has traditionally been conceptualized as a struggle for dominance or value and has thus been expressed in terms of superiority and inferiority, of “high” and “low” arts. Yet some arts and artists exhibit a great affinity to other arts and seem to fuel and channel their own creativity through this form of fraught contact. Especially comic books with their inherent juxtaposition of speech and imagery have developed a rich repertoire for artistic self-definition, both by way of self-referentiality and reflections upon other media, especially literature. The article explores the strategies of intermedial referentiality connected with comic books in Michael Chabon's Novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" and Brian K. Vaughan's comic book series "Y: The Last Man". Both texts use the character development of their protagonists as a poetological metaphor, drawing a hypostatic parallel between the maturation of an individual as a person and an artist and the art-form of the comic book in general.