Myth in the heroic comic-book : a reading of archetypes from The number one game and its models

[摘要] This thesis considers the author's project submission, a comic-book entitled The Number OneGame, as production of a local heroic myth. The author will show how this project attempts toengage with mythic and archetypal material to produce an entertaining narrative that has relevanceto contemporary Cape Town. The narrative adapts previous incarnations of the hero, with referenceto theories of archetypes and mythic patterning devices that are derived from the concept of the'mono-myth. Joseph Campbell's conception of myth as expressing internal psychic processes willbe compared to Roland Barthes' reading of myth as a special inflection of speech that forms asemiotic 'metalanguage. The comic-book is a specific form of the language of comics, acombination of image and text that is highly structured and that can produce a rich graphic text.Using the Judge Dredd and Batman comic-books as models it will be shown how The Number OneGame adapts traditions of representation, such as in genre references, to local perspective to create anovel interplay of archetypes. It will be shown that this interplay in the author's project work andthe rich potential of the comic-book as a site for mythic speech makes the mythic a useful paradigmfor considering the expression of ideology in the heroic comic-book.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University