Walking Corpses & Conscious Plants: Possibilist Ecologies in ...

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Bingham 114 of how. As the quintessential embodiment of the desensitized, prideful capitalist, Sunderland has a vested interest in discovering an answer though. Since Linda was killed shortly after her husband's disappearance, the lab exhumed her remains to see if a similar change had occurred. They were baffled to discover it had not, and thus ruled out exposure to the formula as the single determining factor for prompting such a happening. Understandably, the mystery surrounding this case extends past the scientific realm and into the level of metaphysics regarding death as a finite marker for existence. The title of this issue, “The Anatomy Lesson,” plays with the expectations of comics as a medium for juvenile readers while simultaneously expressing information about the content of the publication. Anyone picking up the piece for the first time could easily assume it will have a biological focus. Though the work is not an instructional or factual pamphlet, it is educationally valuable. It's a visceral exercise in engaging imagination and generating questions about the ethic of bodies as enforced by communities and the accepted correctness of justified killing. All in all, body ethic deals with the prevention of harm. This ethic addresses a spectrum of harm ranging from the relatively innocuous, where self-image might be damaged or minor injury sustained, to the extreme, where acts of brutal violence, rape, and torture would fall. An establishment of body ethic and collective agreement upon its adherence seems like a difficult task to accomplish since there is so much variation from one person to the next. However, this doesn't mean that an attempt at consensus should not be made. The desire to vocalize concerns for violations of body ethic comes in some ways from fear of the inevitability of death. Supporting this assumption and further particularizing the scope of the work is the image on which the title is overlaid. “The Anatomy Lesson” is written on the torso of a
Bingham 115 dismembered body which is laid out across the bottom of the page, occupying almost its entire width. (Saga pg. 13). The cadaver's placement below the panels buries the title under content. This move foreshadows a narrative arc illustrating Sunderland's death and closes the action of the opening panels which will structure the remainder of the text. The story's setting is split into two locations within the nation's capital: Woodrue's apartment and workplace. Jumping back and forth between these locations, the story also switches perspectives from one of present reflection to flashback and even briefly describes an unverifiable hypothetical imagination of transpiring events. Interestingly enough, Washington, D.C., was also the site where Woodrue's predecessor, the Plant Master, made his attempt at world domination in Atom Comics #1. Yet the expansive elaboration upon the work of past creators performed within this issue does not end with this detail. According to Moore, “the first story in Swamp Thing is based on a Goya engraving, 'The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters'” (Intv. with Lawley & Whitaker, pg. 40). The forty-third of eighty aquatints printed in Goya's 1799 Los Caprichos, this piece works along with the others to critique dangerous political conditions relevant to Spain's population and society in general. Only a few years before its display to the nation's northwest, France was in the midst of violent revolution including a period of widespread public executions and secret government sanctioned killing known as the Reign of Terror. In this piece which Moore claims as an inspiration for “The Anatomy Lesson,” an artist sleeps on his desk while scary creatures like bats and owls hover above him and a catlike, sinister creature stares out toward the viewer suggesting an unsettling threat to safety (Figure 1). The work and its title argue for an articulation and preservation of body ethic as metaphorically, these harmful creatures
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Walking Corpses & Conscious Plants:
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Bingham 3 I owe an extreme debt of
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Bingham 5 Introduction My project e
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Bingham 7 personal growth through t
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Bingham 9 beliefs. Seeing a possibl
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Bingham 11 zombie exceeds death as
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Bingham 13 the validity of singular
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Bingham 15 Chapter I: The History o
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Bingham 17 Swamp Thing. According t
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Bingham 19 instructional profession
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Bingham 21 Another artist who worke
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Bingham 23 action into panels (Cohn
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Bingham 25 sponsorship. He designed
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Bingham 27 Charles Moulton. Marston
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Bingham 29 Frederick Wertham prompt
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Bingham 31 “graphic novel” was
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Bingham 33 what is or isn't a graph
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Bingham 35 Works Cited Benton, Mike
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Bingham 37 Chapter II: Transfusion
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Bingham 39 conflict or war. This ex
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Bingham 41 and dismember other bodi
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Bingham 43 bodies to pieces. (Cavar
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Bingham 45 thus creating an affecti
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Bingham 47 margins. Unlike the four
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Bingham 49 implicates the role of o
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Bingham 51 demonstrates that he is
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Bingham 53 Amy (Figure 10 & 11). Th
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Bingham 55 being who has done nothi
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Bingham 57 transgressions, this ima
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Bingham 59 Returning to the full pa
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Bingham 61 order” (200). The prem
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