My monograph, On Comics and Legal Aesthetics, has just been published by Routledge, as part of the Discourses of Law series. Tackling the question of the implications of comics for law, it explores the epistemological dimensions of comics and the way this once-maligned medium can help think about—and reshape—the form of law. It argues that comics’ multimodality—its hybrid structure, which represents a meeting point of text, image, reason, and aesthetics (inter alia)—opens understanding of the limits of law’s rational texts by shifting between multiple frames and modes of presentation. Ultimately, the book explore how comics models knowledge as an infinity of nested frames haunted by the chaos of a universe without structure. In such a model, the multiple aspects of law become one region of a vast and bottomless cascade of perspectives—an infinite multiframe that extends far beyond the traditional confines of the comics page, rendering law boundless—and, of course, comics everywhere.
To mark the event of this publication, below is a copy of the volume’s Preface, reproduced with permission of the publisher.
Preface
Keith Aoki was a practitioner of ‘art during law school’, and produced numerous legal comics during his time as a student at Harvard.[1] Later, Aoki penned a journal article entitled ‘PIERRE and the Agents of REASON’ that engaged with the work of Pierre Schlag in comics form—complete with secret headquarters and metalevel debates between the journal’s editors over whether it was appropriate for a comics work to appear in a law review.[2] Aoki later went on to create, alongside James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins, the comics work Bound by Law? Tales from the Public Domain, a critical guide to navigating the complex realms of intellectual property.[3] Amidst other publications, he also produced his own comics law review article on the history of copyright[4] that outlined much of the premise for a further ‘tale from the public domain’ on the history of copyright in music.[5] This book is not about Keith Aoki, nor the substance of his immensely wide body of work of which I have not even scratched the surface.[6] Rather, it seeks an understanding of a question raised by the simple existence of his legal comics creations. Namely, what does it mean to put comics and law together? As one rather close-minded law review editor announces in Aoki’s piece on Schlag: ‘This piece infuriates me on the level of representation’.[7] But what is actually at stake in the representational and formal shift implied by the copresence of law and comics? What does it say about the typically rational and textual form of mainstream legal knowledge? What about the wider structures of human knowing? It is with this formal level of the meeting of law and comics and its epistemological ramifications that I engage in this book, seeking to elaborate the ways comics—as a hybrid or ‘multimodal’ form—can help us think about the limits of law’s rational texts.
In order to unpack the implications of comics’ and law’s coëxistence, perhaps the first step should be a lawyerly one: to seek a definition. Not of law,[8] but of comics.[9] And lest the thought of comics’ representational forms infuriate too many of this text’s more legally oriented readers, let us throw in some Latin for good measure. To wit: the term ‘comics’ derives from the Latin comicus, relating to comedy and humour.[10] Now, whilst there are many comics that do rely on humour (hence the term ‘funny pages’), the medium hosts such a wide variety of narratives and genres that ‘comedy’ can in no way be considered a defining feature. But despite attempts to shift the dominant definitional term to ‘graphic fiction’—arguably out of a desire to shake off some of the medium’s cultural baggage[11]—the label ‘comics’ persists. Indeed, it has become the accepted term in academic study,[12] going as far as defining the field that most closely examines the medium: ‘comics studies’. A juris comicus, then, would be a jurisprudence of humour, of comedy—my own previous use of the term ‘lex comica’ would also suffer from this same error.[13] As a term, ‘comicus’ is both too small and too broad for the purposes of understanding comics in general, or its relationships with law specifically: there are many comics that are not comedies, and many comedies that are not comics.
So much for the Latin stylings. Let us trace further: the root of comicus derives from the Greek komos,[14] a term linked not exclusively with comedy but with more general merriment, festival, and revelry.[15] The carnivalesque nature of the komos can be seen in its role in classical Greek drama, notably the way it has been seen to operate as a counterpoint to order and refinement. Time to cite some authority. As Morgan outlines, by using the komos:
the poet can emphasise his own story’s particularity and all the virtues that go with his professional persona, such as discipline in the choice of subject matter and stringent adherence to the rules of the genre.[16]
One can clearly see in its characteristics of merriment and mockery the seeds of what would develop into satire and modern notions of comicus and humour. In its lack of discipline, meanwhile, perhaps we also begin to glimpse the infuriating nature of comics for those committed to the neatly ordered texts of law—they just don’t look right. Against generic and formal order, the komos is full of ‘spontaneity and festivity’,[17] and in bringing ‘all its threat of undiscipline and rout’[18] it is clearly a force in tension with the legalistic order of precision, particularity, and generic adherence—that is, with the ordered, normative universe of law.
The komos is valuable in understanding the formal order of law. For without the komos—as Greek poets knew of their own artistry—the wonderfully ordered classifications of law have no meaning, no context within the disorder of life.
The komos was a swarming band of drunken men who engaged in dancing, laughter, obscenity, and mocking language, and who generally dispensed with social conventions and inhibitions. The komos represented a more accessible and less severe form of Dionysian self-abandonment … and a more public ‘dismemberment’ of human norms and hierarchies.[19]
The link with the Dionysian is important. It solidifies the tensions between komos and wider social and communal structures, placing the komos in a mediating position between the public and social order of the nomos and the complete abandonment of that order signalled by the Dionysian. The komos is thus the revelry on the boundary of the regulated order of society, the carnival at the limit of the rule; it is the chaos subdued by the nomos. It enables a public engagement with disorder, without losing grip of the ordered world. It mediates between the nomos and the unstructured universe.
So, do comics retain this quality of the komos? My argument in this book sits firmly in the positive, and it is by thinking a comics-as-komos that the profound implications of comics for law can be elaborated. It is the broad hypothesis of this book not only that the expansive multimodal nature of comics means it retains the mediating quality of the komos, but that comics can thereby help us think about the limits of legal knowledge against the chaos of an unstructured universe. And to encounter comics-as-komos, we need to look in detail at the mechanics and operation of the comics form, as well as its thematic resonances, in relation to the regulated order of law. As will be seen across the following chapters, the comics form exists at a meeting point between different orders of knowing and fluidly engages its multiple formal aspects—text, image, logical rules, layout, materiality, aesthetic affect, sequence, inter alia—in navigating its epistemological positioning. And this multimodal complexity, like the komos, avails insight into the constructed and fluctuating nature of the present conditions of the world, and thereby ‘dissolves a fixation on forms’, opening up to a vast sea of alternatives.[20] In short, comics augur the reformation of law.
Notes
[1] For an overview, see Kennedy (2012).
[2] Aoki (2003).
[3] Aoki et al (2008).
[4] Aoki (2010).
[5] Boyle and Jenkins (2017). This project was only recently published, as Theft! A History of Music. Due to his untimely death in 2011, Keith Aoki was unable to see the completion of this project.
[6] On Keith’s legacy more generally, see the special issue on ‘Super Aoki’ that forms volume 45, issue 5, of the UC Davis Law Review from June 2012.
[7] Aoki (2003), p 10.
[8] A can of worms, indeed!
[9] Another can of worms, as we’ll see in Chapter 1.
[10] Chambers Etymological Dictionary.
[11] On comics’ history of censorship and cultural denigration, see Barker (1984); Nyberg (1998). And, for a concise summary of the ‘naming’ issues in comics, see Sousanis (2015), p 60.
[12] In comics studies the term ‘comics’ is generally used when referring to the medium, and is treated as a singular object: ‘As for any medium, such as film, it is now standard to treat comics as singular’: Chute and DeKoven (2012), p 175. For clarity: comics is a medium; comics are examples of that medium.
[13] See Giddens (2015c). Note also the twitter handle of the Graphic Justice Research Alliance, a research network that explores intersections of comics, law, and justice: @LexComica.
[14] Chambers Etymological Dictionary.
[15] Chambers Etymological Dictionary.
[16] Morgan (1993), p 5.
[17] Morgan (1993), p 5.
[18] Morgan (1993), p 12.
[19] Hatab (2005), p 157.
[20] Hatab (2005), p 157.
References
Keith Aoki (2003) ‘PIERE and the Agents of REASON’ 27 University of Miami Law Review 1.
Keith Aoki (2010) ‘Pictures within Pictures’ 36 Ohio North University Law Review 1.
Keith Aoki et al (2008) Bound by Law? Tales from the Public Domain, Duke University Press.
Martin Barker (1984) A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign, Pluto.
James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins (2017) Theft! A History of Music, Duke University Press.
Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven (2012) ‘Comic Books and Graphic Novels’ in D Glover and S McCracken (eds) The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction, Cambridge University Press.
Thomas Giddens (2015c) ‘Lex Comica: On Comics and Legal Theory’ in T Giddens (ed) Graphic Justice: Intersections of Comics and Law, Routledge.
Lawrence J Hatab (2005) Nietzsche’s Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence, Routledge.
Duncan Kennedy (2012) ‘Remembering Keith Aoki’s Casual Legal Studies: Art During Law School’ 45 UC Davis Law Review 1817.
Kathryn A Morgan (1993) ‘Pindar the Professional and the Rhetoric of the Κωμοσ’ 88 Classical Philology 1.
Amy Nyberg (1998) Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code, University Press of Mississippi.
Nick Sousanis (2015) Unflattening, Harvard University Press.
