MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture for the Medieval & Renaissance Area of the Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association Organized by Michael A. Torregrossa (Independent Scholar)

Monsters remain fascinating subjects, and intense discussion in recent years has focused on their representation in medieval texts. However, scholars have largely neglected the post-medieval afterlife of these horrors. Despite this disregard, the monsters found in such medievalisms have merit in our classrooms and research; we need to promote their exploits along with those of the creatures existing within medieval artifacts. This panel will highlight connections between medieval monstrosities and their post-medieval incarnations and successors to showcase both continuity and change in addressing how terrors rooted in the medieval have been portrayed and how their inheritors have been developedThe session revives the successful Comics Get Medieval series after a multi-year absence and seeks to foster communication between comics scholars, medievalists, medievalismists, and specialists in other aspects of popular culture studies through the study of “medieval comics”: any example of the comics medium (e.g. panel cartoons, comic strips, comics books, comics albums, band dessinée, graphic novels, manga, webcomics, comics to screen/screen to comics, and other related media) that feature medieval themes either in stories set during the Middle Ages or in stories presenting some element of the medieval in anachronistic settings (pre-medieval or post-medieval eras or medieval-inspired secondary worlds).