When graphic novels represent criminality as intrinsic to the urban Gothic, they provide a new way of visualizing the relationship between the criminal and the city. Frank Miller’s Sin City, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen all create an aesthetic of criminality that becomes apparent not only through their formal techniques in illustrating crime but also through their visual depictions of the city. With consideration of murder aesthetics through Thomas De Quincey’s 1827 essay, alongside recent criticism and theory on visual representation, this paper will explore crime as a visual art form that is made possible through a new kind of criminal-artist in a new kind of Gothic city. The aesthetics of crime is in part represented by urban decay and decrepitude, but another important aspect of this aesthetic is its dependence upon concealment through weather, darkness, bodies, and masks. Concealment allows the Gothic imagination to perpetuate fear and uncertainty in an urban environment. Uncertainty raises questions as to how the city is thinking about criminality, which may start to be answered through what is depicted and omitted in the panels. Darkness, in such examples, becomes simultaneously both visible and impenetrable. The darkness and obscurity of the Gothic city facilitates criminal behavior. To examine the aesthetics of urban criminality in Sin City, From Hell, and Watchmen, this paper will consider how form creates such an aesthetic and also how it depicts the relationship between the city and its homegrown criminals.
About the presenterErica McCrystal
Erica is a doctoral candidate at St. John’s University in Queens, NY. Her dissertation is on criminality in the urban Gothic, with specific focus on fin de siecle London and Batman’s Gotham City. She also teaches English at St. John’s University and Berkeley College.