The visual images in William Blake’s illuminated books might correlate to the gothic sensibility of contemporary superheroes with their bulging muscles and gigantic stature, as Peter Ackroyd suggests in his biography of Blake.[3] There is also something deeper, however, a Broglioian-Blakean-Deleuzian mole tunneling beneath contemporary comic culture, driving creators to aesthetic innovation with visions of brimstone and apocalyptic nightmares contesting the bourgeois dream life of spandex-clad defenders of the status quo. One such tunnel flows through William Blake Everett, a distant descendant and namesake of William Blake, who created Namor the Sub-Mariner (figure 2), scourge of the deep. Namor is the son of a human and an Atlantean who sometimes saves the Marvel Universe and sometimes threatens it with leviathans seemingly pulled from Blake’s illuminated works.[4] Fixed between two worlds – at home in neither – Namor is, like Blake, a stranger in paradise. Everett occasionally used the name of his ancestor as a pseudonym, thrilling readers with tales of Hydroman, Namora, and the Fin. In a more general sense, Blake’s designs influence two generations of comic artists, from the acid-induced philosophical ramblings of Grant Morrison, to the wide-eyed fleshy perversions gracing the pages of work by R. Crumb, to the wistful fairytales conjured by J.M. DeMatteis and the more independent work of Keith Mayerson.[5] Each of these creators, in his own way, foregrounds the indisputable visual presence of transformation and metamorphosis in Blake’s work in their own.
Contents
Introduction, Roger Whitson
Minute Particulars and Quantum Atoms: The Invisible, the Indivisible, and the Visualizable in Blake and Bohr, Arkady Plotnitsky
Wordsworth Illustrates Blake (“All light is mute amid the gloom”), Nelson Hilton
William Blake and the Space of Revolution, Ron Broglio
Blake’s Lines: Seven Digressions Through Time and Space, Esther Leslie
Panelling Parallax: The Fearful Symmetry of Alan Moore and William Blake, Roger Whitson
Re-Visioning The Four Zoas, Donald Ault
William Blake: On the Infinite Plane, Matthew Ritchie
Engraving the Void and Sketching Parallel Worlds, Roger Whitson Interviews Bryan Talbot
Tygers of Wrath, John Coulthart
Mr. Blake’s Company, Joel Priddy