Narratives of city exposure: Incarnations of the street person in <i>Zanta: The Living Legend</i> and <i>The Dregs</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the rationale for definitions of the homeless in the public imagination and the kind of discourses used to create a physical, psychological, and moral distance between the domiciled and the destitute. In a society where the worthy individual is tied to an ideal of entrepreneurial, rational, homed, successful consumer, and where public space is solely destined for the unobstructed consumption of the privileged, street dwellers are naturally seen as a threat to the economic, social, and moral order as well as a visual blemish: an obstacle to safety and wellbeing. Drawing from a number of sociological, urban, and narrative studies on the survival tactics of homeless people, and especially from Nicholas Blomley’s (2010) insights about street mobility and Leon Anderson’s (2017) classifications of stigma management, this article describes how subjects defined as pathological, dangerous, or pitiful, negotiate street restrictions and create their own standing within a revanchist city. These individuals feature in two comic books published in Canada, Zanta: The Living Legend (2012) and The Dregs (2017), whose originality lies in the heroic role the street person assumes, a legitimate searcher for meaning that sees what most people overlook. In their different format as non-fiction comic and serialized fictional comic we find the expressive visual and narrative potential of the genre and become witnesses of the tribulations of two characters whom the world may consider as deranged but are, however, able to enhance their self-esteem, dismantle ideologies behind assumed notions of respectability, and actively contribute to the city as a place of encounter with difference.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".