“Il sonno della coscienza genera mostri”: violenza e trauma della guerra in Monsters di Barry Windsor-Smith

Abstract

Since their beginning, in the years immediately preceding the Second World War, American superhero comics have intertwined their imaginative inventions with reflections (often superficial and stereotyped) about war and its effects. A perfect example of this are the adventures of Captain America by Simon and Kirby, an upright adversary of pseudo-Nazi organizations, or the fear of the atomic bomb evoked by Lee's Hulk. Both are models that constitute the main hypotexts of the impressive graphic novel Monsters (2021) by Barry Windsor-Smith. Precisely through the reworking and deconstruction of the most representative motifs and stylistic features of superhero comics, the English author carries out (in a work spanning over thirty years) a profound analysis of American society and how post-war trauma weighed (and continues to weigh) on it, with its consequences of suffering and violence. Starting from the examination of the elements attributable to this semantic sphere, this contribution intends to investigate the modalities of the fantastic that Windsor-Smith uses to give representation to the different forms that trauma can take, in relation to the specificity of the double register – verbal and iconic – of comic language.