![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Critically reviewing these notions, this paper will show how nostalgia is involved in transformations of comics’ mediality: I will argue that the changing status of comics as a medium is affected by the past in ways that can neither be confined to identical repetition nor perpetual reflection. The perils of these politics, Svetlana Boym argues, can only be avoided once nostalgia is relegated to a ‘reflective’ role and acknowledges that what it longs for must remain perpetually irretrievable (Boym 2006). However, nostalgia itself is not devoid of agency its relevance to restorative agendas trying to reinstate an ideal lost home or past has repeatedly been discussed (Davis 1979 Hutcheon 2000). Such critiques resonate with oft-cited accounts of postmodern nostalgia and its alleged lack of ‘genuine historicity’, i.e., failure to identify the actual agents of historical change (Jameson 1991). In this view, phenomena like facsimile reprints, stylistic references or narratives focussing on obscure or lost works are all symptomatic of a nostalgic longing – which provides us with a commodified, selective view of the past, and thus defies a ‘true’ sense for the history of comics. The turn towards the medium’s past in contemporary comics and graphic novel production has been critically assessed as an instance of a broader ‘nostalgia’ or ‘retro culture’ (Baetens/Frey 2015). ![]()
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