Neil the Horse and suppressed comics memory : dolls, funny animals, and entertainment work
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 1980s are often described as a decade of maturity, marked by iconic works such as Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run and Neil Gaiman's Sandman, the multiplication of darker superheroes, and, of course, widely acclaimed personal works such as Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize winning Maus.The late 1970s and 1980s also saw the rise of creator-owned publishers bringing out independent or alternative comics, understood as "alternatives to mainstream comics" (Grace and Hoffman xii), that did not shy away from breaking, and mocking, the rules of conventional publications, which often relied heavily on formulaic seriality and generic codes.Canadian cartoonist Dave Sim's parodic (and ideologically problematic) Cerebus, first published by Sim and Denise Loubert's Aardvark-Vanaheim press, is in many ways the hallmark of 1980s independent publishing.Embracing black and white, targeting adults, and occupying a grand total of 6000 pages, the Cerebus stories initially started as floppies of twenty pages issued between 1977 to 2003 (Hoffman 129-30).These stories were eventually published as "phonebooks" which were thick paperbacks or protographic novels collecting all of the issues from one storyline.Cerebus inverts mainstream comics tropes, starting with the funny animal genre: the eponymous (anti-)hero of the series is a grumpy violent aardvark, reversing, and simultaneously commenting on, the mostly innocuous funny animals from earlier twentieth century comics and cartoons.He partakes in fantasy-laden, long-winded and largely ridiculous adventures loaded with satire.Such self-reflexive twists permeate many alternative and independent comics.In the case of Neil the Horse, this self-reflexivity takes the unusual form of remembering and celebrating comics for their whimsicality and "childishness" of style and storytelling.This essay will examine Neil the Horse in the light of three specific "media memories": the comics of largely ignored non-adult readers, specifically girl's comics; children's comics and funny animal comics; musical comedy; and the labor of comics-making.In using the term media memories (Ahmed), I emphasize how memories of media (musicals; newspaper strips) and genres (girl's comics; funny animal comics), as far as the two can be separated, layer the Neil the Horse stories.These media and genres are evoked through the incorporation and reworking of their distinctive forms and features as well as the associations and affective connotations they stimulate.Distinctive features discussed below include the anthropomorphic animals that are staples of funny animal comics or paper dolls that are frequently associated with girls' comics.These features have strong associations with childhood and can generate effects such as the bittersweet joy of nostalgic remembering.I propose the term media memories because, instead of being intertextual or intermedial references or instances of remediation (cf.Bolter and Grusin), the media and genres evoked in Neil the Horse buttress the narrative with layers of media history and connotations.The Lives of Neil the Horse Also published by Aadvark-Vanaheim and later by Loubert's Renegade Press, 1 Katherine Collins' Neil the Horse is one of many forgotten oddities: it recounts the idiosyncratic adventures of Neil, a Disney-like, banana-eating horse; an anti-funny animal, cigarsmoking cat called Soapy; and Mademoiselle Poupée who, true to her name, is a beautiful 1 Charlton Comics also published a Neil the Horse story (in color) in the "all new" Charlton Bullseye #2 (1981).
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
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".