Super Bodies: Comic Book Illustration, Artistic Styles, and Narrative Impact by Jeffrey A. Brown (review)

Reviewed by: Super Bodies: Comic Book Illustration, Artistic Styles, and Narrative Impact by Jeffrey A. Brown Austin Kemp (bio) Jeffrey A. Brown. Super Bodies: Comic Book Illustration, Artistic Styles, and Narrative Impact. University of Texas Press, 2023. 240 pp, 55. 00. Jeffrey A. Brown's Super Bodies: Comic Book Illustration, Artistic Styles, and Narrative Impact presents a simple argument: comic book illustration needs more critical attention from Comics Studies. Reflecting on the robust scholarship and hard-won institutional footholds of previous decades, Brown identifies the field of Comics Studies as having been "primarily developed by researchers trained in literary research methods, " and thus it "typically has focused more on the 'book' side of the medium than on the 'comic' side, on the author as auteur" (14). This entrenchment in and privileging of literary approaches to the medium has resulted in a predominance of scholarship that favors literary analysis at the expense of critical approaches to the art itself. For its own part, Super Bodies views this artistic elision as at once a glaring gap in the current scholarly landscape and as a rich critical opportunity. To counter this emphasis on the literary, Brown proclaims the need for Comics Studies' recognition of dessinateurs, or visual artists, as co-creators of the narrative meaning in comics whose work should be critically intertwined with that of the writer. Super Bodies' object of study is the icon of the superheroic body, which Brown connects both to developments in the genre's visual conventions and to familiar events in comics history. The key draw to Brown's argument lies in its driving aim to expand End Page 84 the field rather than correct it. Brown never presumes prescription in his analysis; rather, he views his work as a probe into the critically unexplored depths of comic book art, a singular expedition that invites investigation, critique, and, most importantly, further exploratory endeavors. Rather than approaching the critical artistic gap as a problem needing a clear-cut solution, Super Bodies frames it as a launching pad that offers a variety of provocative trajectories born from problematizing Comics Studies' contemporary landscape. Super Bodies is an intricately explorative and innovative text, an insightful initiatory step into the "academic blind spot where comic book illustrations reside" (2). The beginning two chapters sketch out the theoretical framework for the text while the remaining chapters focus on detailed and thought-provoking analysis. Super Bodies' first chapter, "How to Draw Superheroes, " unpacks the iconic superhero as its focus of study, centering the "spectacle" of the superheroic body as "both the visual and the narrative focal point of the entire genre, " as well as the vessel for "symbolic interpretations of ideals, hopes, desires, and even fears" (5, 6). With this understanding, Brown invokes and extends Henry Jenkins' concept of "multiplicity" to include the variability of artistic style, constructing the superheroic body as a complex semi-otic system that is expressed as an iconographically malleable yet generically familiar figure that is intimately tied to collective ideas and values. The illustrated body of the superhero becomes to Brown a "site of aesthetic experimentation" where, with critical attention, scholars may "uncover how the different artistic styles reveal cultural beliefs regarding the correlation between aesthetics and dominant perceptions" (3, 18). Brown asserts that shifts in the superheroic body across varying artistic styles also equate to shifts in the very concepts housed within them. The second chapter, "The Superhero and the Dessinateur, " seeks to justify Super Bodies' specific attention to the superhero genre by historicizing the cultural and industrial factors involved in the critical devaluation of comic book illustration as an art form. The reasons behind this devaluation are framed by Barty Beaty's concept of "outmoded biases" (32). Beaty's concept helps Brown convey the persistence of biases against comics art. These biases are rooted in historical and cultural factors that designate comics art as "low" art. Brown's survey of comics historiography at the beginning of the chapter sets a stage of punched Hitlers and irate Frederic Werthams that may feel familiar to many comics scholars, but Brown complements this history with illustrative new facets transcribed from a parallel history of the comics dessinateur. The perceived "sameness. . .