Canonic Space
摘要
Canonic texts in comics and canonic simulacra include Disney castles, Camelot, and comic book adaptations of key texts such as Beowulf, or popular series which synthesize medievalisms, such as the Prince Valiant storyworld. It has been well established by medievalists who study popular culture and media, such as medievalist Richard Utz, that of what the public imagines about the surroundings of the Middle Ages are rather simulacra created through popular media adaptations, and this chapter looks at adaptations of medieval literature and the standard tropes created from illustrations in Victorian era to the present. This chapter argues for the dominance of simulacra in the visualization of medieval spaces, which is one pillar of the “ureal” nature of these historicized spaces, with the hyper-real seeming more historically accurate that the “real,” to draw on Umberto Eco’s foundational works on medievalism and popular culture, noting his particular interest in comics. This chapter exercises the theories and methods established in Chapter 1 on the most recognizable comics spaces of the corpus which represent fantasy or at least fictionalized environments related to famous, historic literature as mediated history.