On bad art - play, puns, and the shortcomings of artificial intelligence

But when she parted hence, she left her groome
An yron man, which did on her attend
Alwayes, to execute her stedfast doome,
And willed him with Artegall to wend,
And doe what euer thing he did intend.
His name was Talus, made of yron mould,
Immoueable, resistlesse, without end.
Who in his hand an yron flale did hould,
With which he thresht out falshood, and did truth vnfould 

- Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (Book 5, Canto 1, Verse 12)

As the hype concerning generative artificial intelligence is rising and increasingly affecting various parts of society, I have found myself reflecting on the frustrating discussion about its use for the creation of images and novels. Several claims have been made regarding the possibility of using AI for writing novels, and most of these - as far as I know - fail to acknowledge that what is produced is assembled from stolen bits and pieces from existing novels, and require unethical amounts of energy to produce. Another significant point here is that images and texts assembled through generative AI are also bad - not only of a bad quality, but bad because they have no meaning to them. These products are bad art because the badness has no other element to it than badness.  

What I am writing here might at first seem both hermetic and obtuse, yet I do want to distinguish between between art that can be considered bad in terms of its quality, and art that is bad because it has no meaning. These thoughts have been offset by watching episodes of the animated TV series Batfink, a Batman parody that first aired in 1966-67, and my examples are taken from some of these episodes. My main point, however, is that no matter how one evaluates the series Batfink as art, it will always be better than anything produced through the use of generative AI. The reason for this is that the badness of Batfink - to be presented in more detail shortly - has a meaning to it, and that meaning is due to the series being created by human beings. 

 

 

Screenshot from Batfink, episode 77, The Trojan Horse Thief

Batfink was an animated series that parodied the Batman TV series that ran from 1966 to 1968, and might arguably have been intended to benefit from some of the popularity of the Batman franchise. The protagonist is an anthropomorphic bat (with features that also resemble both a cat and a mouse), who fights against various criminals together with his servant Karate, a human sidekick who follows a well-established trope of being both ethnically other and less intelligent (such as Mandrake the Magician's sidekick Lothar, for instance). The series ran for 100 episodes of around 5 minutes each, and is notable for its ludicrous plots, its pompous dialogue, its myriad of over-the-top supervillain antagonists. Moreover, the series relied heavily on recycled animation. Although this is common in a lot of animation, the Batfink series recycled its scenes with such frequency as to appear as a deliberate lampooning of the practice. When considering what animators were capable of producing in the 1960s, the Batfink series is definitely cheaply produced, and it might also be called bad due to its cheap production. 

However, even if we accept the label bad for the series, Batfink also reminds us that badness - here meaning low quality - is not without depth, and not without creativity. Because of this depth and because of this creativity, a series such as Batfink has a kind of cultural merit that can never be attained by anything produced by artificial intelligence. First of all, the dialogue, the plots, and, perhaps above all, the implausibly lucky escapes from deadly situations, are all part of a satirical tone that serves as a loadbearing beam for the series - it parodies and mocks the superhero genre, something that can only be done with intent, with deliberation. 

Secondly, the series contains a plethora of puns and references to various cultural products and to elements specific to its own period. These are deliberate details aimed at an audience expected to catch them, to understand them, and to appreciate them. While most episodes are full of these, a few examples will suffice here.  

One case in point is episode 77, The Trojan Horse Thief. Immediately, the title points to the central reference, namely the story of the wooden horse by which the city of Troy was captured, as recounted in the epic poem The Iliad, attributed to Homer. In the cartoon episode, the horse is a vehicle used by the recurring supervillain Hugo A-go-go to perform robberies. The animated horse is very different from its legendary reference point, in that it is not disguised as a sculpture, it is not given as a present, and it is not brought into a walled city in order to open its gates from the inside. Instead, the mechanical horse is used as a battering ram to break into bank vaults in broad daylight, and although it does contain a human being inside it, that human is its driver, not a contingent of soldiers. If human creativity had not deliberately parodied the legend of the Trojan horse, the appearance of a mechanical horse in an animated series would have no depth to it. Instead, there is a play on a very famous legendary episode.  

  

Screenshot from Batfink, episode 77, The Trojan Horse Thief

A second example is from episode 9, Nuts of the Round Table, where the aforementioned Hugo A-go-go uses robot knights on horseback - living horses this time - to rob banks. Once again, the title indicates the cultural reference that has inspired the plot, namely the legend of King Arthur's knights of the round table. Moreover, the pun on nuts - as in nuts and bolts - is a nod to the robotic nature of these knights. The pun and the reference are both outcomes of human creativity, and they are made deliberately and easily recognisable. 

In addition, it is worth noting that there are two further elements that might also point to topoi from the literary repository to which the stories of King Arthur belong. First of all, the horse - as seen in the screenshot below - is white, a classical image ultimately drawn from Revelation 19:11-16, where the rider on the white horse is a Christlike figure. (Importantly, this is not one of the four horsemen mentioned in Revelation 6.) The white horse is a feature of numerous medieval legends, and has remained a symbol of chivalry in modern cultural parlance. Perhaps the white colour of the animated horse is a nod to this tradition? Moreover, the automaton knight also features in various old stories, be it Talos of Greek legend (mentioned, for instance, in Argonautica), or its early modern version Talus from book 5 of Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene, used in this blogpost's epigraph. I do not know whether the animators and script writers of Batfink were familiar with this topos, and I do not know whether the automaton knight is a nod to this literary element. Importantly, however, because the automaton knight was created by human creativity, there is a possibility that we are dealing with a cultural reference. Had this episode been produced by artificial intelligence, however, the question would have been moot, because artificial intelligence does not have intent and can therefore not make use of literary topoi beyond what it copies and cannibalises from other cultural products. 

Screenshot from Batfink, episode 09, Nuts of the Round Table

A final example to be mentioned here is period-specific references. These are elements that only make sense because the intended audiences are familiar with them from their own contemporary frame of reference. Once such case is found in episode 11, Fatman Strikes Again (another pun which points to the very franchise that Batfink lampoons). The plot concerns a man in a fat suit who robs the safes of fat men clubs. Such clubs were once a well-known, if perhaps not widely common, feature of American social life, where fatness could be connected to status and wealth. In the twenty-first century, this reference is antiquated as such clubs are no longer a prominent part of the contemporary discourse - I do not even know if any such clubs still exist. Such period-specific references only carry meaning because there is an intent in them, they are meant for the audiences to recognise. 

Screenshot from Batfink, episode 11, Fatman Strikes Again

These examples are not many, but hopefully enough to illustrate my main point, namely that even art that is mass-produced, cheaply made, and that has rather limited entertainment value has more depth than anything produced through generative artificial intelligence, simply because the human-made art in question has intent, is deliberately bad, and contains elements that are included on purpose, and not because the elements in question just happened to be part of the trove which was plundered for parts when assembling a product through generative artificial intellgience. TV series such as Batfink might be bad art, but the badness is playful, subversive, deliberate, parodic, and there is entertainment to be had in this. This intent is what makes the series art, however bad it might be deemed to be. If the series had been created through generative artificial intelligence, however, it would not be art, but a simulacrum of art, and it would be bad because of was just that, a simulacrum without any depth, meaning or intent whatsoever. 

Creative googling and its consequences - or, Adventures in medievalism, part 4

 

Friday, March 10, I gave a seminar on Vikings in medievalism, explaining how our current ideas about Vikings were shaped by the renewed interest in medieval history in nineteenth-century Scandinavia. The ideas that came into place in this period were formed by a very particular context which blended romanticism, nationalism and scholarship. In Norway, for instance, one of the driving forces behind this interest in medieval history was the desire to provide nineteenth-century Norwegians with a golden age that could serve as a reference point in moulding the Norwegian nation-state of the 1800s, a period when Norway the weaker part of a union with Sweden. In Denmark, the interest in medieval history was in part moved by the loss of Norway to Sweden in 1814, and later pressure from expansionist Prussia which in turn resulted in the loss of Schleswig-Holstein in 1864.

While Swedish, Norwegian and Danish interests were moved by different impulses, these interests were nonetheless part of a wider phenomenon that appeared in many Western European countries. Consequently, despite the particulars of, say, Swedish medievalism, the Swedish ideas about the medieval past were part of a wider discourse and was therefore shaped by that discourse. This discourse also included input from Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Scandinavian diaspora in Canada and the United States.

The details concerning this historical developments are both interesting and numerous, and will hopefully be dealt with in a future blogpost, or perhaps several. However, in this present blogpost, my main aim is to share some of the reflections I made in the preparation for the seminar, and what I learned from the preparation process. It all started with some creative googling.

Even though the seminar was primarily focussed on nineteenth-century medievalism and how that medievalism shaped the modern ideas about the Viking, I thought this seminar would be a good opportunity to follow these ideas into the twenty-first century. I therefore decided to spend a couple of hours on the Internet, using very general search-terms that might yield some broader understanding of how pervasive and ubiquitous the figure of the Viking actually is in our day and age. One important foundational principle for this more or less aimless foray into cyberspace is the idea that the Viking is one of those reference points in a common register of what we might call ludic figures. These figures that are employed in cultural outputs because they are known by a very wide audience, and are therefore often used for play or gaming purposes. Examples of such ludic figures are pirates, ninjas, and cowboys, and such figures are often used in the same cultural expression, for instance if a film, a novel or a comic-book features pirates and cowboys in the same story, something which frequently happens. Because the Viking is a ludic figure, the Viking is often brought into play in cultural outputs, even when Vikings do not normally appear in the chronological or geographical setting in which that cultural output takes place. For instance, Rudyard Kipling’s story ‘The Knights of the Joyous Venture’ from his short-story collection Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) tells of Vikings reaching West Africa, thereby using the commonly-known figure of the Viking in a setting untypical of the Viking to create an entertaining story.

Knowing that Vikings are often fused with other such ludic elements popular in the common frame of reference, I decided to see what I could find, and how far afield I could follow the Vikings in the popular imagination. Since Vikings are not only used in entertainment and culture, but also for commercial purposes and in politics, I went on to cast a very wide net. My first port of call was Vikings and pizza. Remembering a pizzeria in York, UK, called Viking Pizza, I decided to dig a bit further, and learned that not only is this pizzeria still going – serving among other things its Viking pizza which is six toppings of your choice – but also that there is a nationwide chain called Vikings Pizza, whose website was blocked for Norwegian IP addresses, for some peculiar reason. This foray into modern food culture also brought to mind an advertisement campaign from my native Norway about twenty years ago, when a new brand of ham and tomato pizza made a claim that Vikings were the first to put tomato on their bread, on account of their contact with – the tomato-less – Vinland. Both these examples remind us that Vikings sell.

Moving on from culinary commercialism, I decided to try out various geographical connections. This yielded a throve of material. For instance, I found a picture of a reconstruction of a Viking ship in Sydney Harbour, taken in 2013, and learned of a collaboration between the Australian National Maritime Museum and the Swedish History Museum. Another antipodean find was a dart made in New Zealand called a ‘Viking hammer dart’, with decorations reminiscent of generic Norse knotwork patterns, and with an advertisement text that made a great effort in connecting the modern ideas about the Vikings – rampage and destruction – with this particular product.

Further geographically oriented searches produced a number of results pertaining to Vikings in space, including the 1963 novel Space Vikings by H. Beam Piper, and some short videos that dealt with the idea of Vikings in space. While I included Piper’s novel as a way to demonstrate how far removed from their chronological and geographical contexts Vikings could be used, it also served as a useful way to point out that this common imagination also yields real-life consequences, and in the mid-1970s the space probe programme called Viking was launched.

I also tried a few searches that connected Vikings with other ludic reference points, such as dinosaurs and robots, and the results were both varied and numerous, and provided good examples of just how ubiquitous the Viking is in the common imagination. Things did, however, take a weird turn, and not very long into my creative googling – I mean, my research. When searching for results in connections with Vikings at the centre of the earth – which was about halfway in my efforts – I got my first hit that pertained to literary pornography. The Internet being what it is, I guess it was inevitable that some of my searches should bring me into contact with pornography – thankfully, its literary kind – but the particular form was nonetheless unexpected. It was about this point that I became a bit despondent about my endeavours, and although I appreciate some forms of unbridled creativity, I had hoped to avoid certain of its incarnations.

At about the one-hour mark, I suspect, the overload of impressions and impulses had worn me out quite a bit, partly through the many encounters of Vikings in space and the various iterations of this theme, but especially due to the brief contact with erotic literature – erotic literature of a very weird kind. While at first I laughed heartily in my office when grasping what this result actually was, it was also something that hinted of a subtext and a subculture that employ these ludic figures in ways that are very far from my own comfort zone. My despondency grew even worse once I made some attempts to find useful material concerning the right-wing use of the Vikings, although that was an expected outcome since it always depresses me to do research on contemporary right-wing culture. 

On the whole, the two hours spent more or less aimlessly looking into various nooks and crannies of the Internet served me very well in the seminar, and it generally gave me a much broader understanding of the Viking in popular culture, and as a contemporary point of reference. My endeavour also fortified my conviction that having a broad familiarity with popular culture is crucial to our scholarly efforts, because this familiarity enables us to explain why a figure such as the Viking has had such a forceful impact, and also to evaluate what kind of impact the use of this figure might have in future iterations. In short, we understand better the after-history of our subject when we pay attention to its use in our own time.

The kind of magpie approach that I used, however, has both its benefits and its drawbacks. On the positive side, I now have a much broader understanding of Vikings in popular culture. On the negative side, the quick deep-immersion into such a vast trove as the Internet very quickly became both very weird and very much, and I felt as if my brain were melting after a while. Instead of doing this brief but intense foray into the subject, it would be better to have a small team dedicated to a concerted effort of gathering material. One day, this might be done and result in some very interesting books. 


+++ 

Similar blogposts: 

Adventures in medievalism, part 1 

Adventures in medievalism, part 2 

Adventures in medievalism, part 3  

To take the dragon by the nose - the iconography of dragonslaying by Paolo Uccello and Francisco Ibáñez

 
One of the great joys of being a medievalist is to explore how aspects from the Middle Ages - such as ideas, literary topoi or iconography - continues to work in culture long after the end of the medieval period (even by the most liberal estimate). This longevity of cultural aspect is of course unsurprising given the continuity in cultural transmission, or the occasional rediscovery which brings something back to the cultural consciousness after a period of oblivion. Moreover, this continuity is yet another example of how periodisations are fictions of practicality rather than natural entities, and continuity thus reminds us how cautious we should be in dividing time too neatly into compartments. 

Leaving aside the definition of the Middle Ages, and its problems as a scholarly construct, it is very clear that because there exists an idea of the medieval, that idea can be used aesthetically to connect with the period meant to be covered by that term. This connection can be serious or playful, or a mix of both, and it can serve a number of different purposes, all depending on the combination of author/sender/transmitter and audience.  

One medieval iconographical topos that has had a substantial impact on modern popular culture is that of the dragonslayer, which can be found in a range of media, from commercial fantasy to church art. I have touched on the development of this topos in earlier blogposts (here, here, and here), and I recently came across one scene that reminded me again how this ties into the cultural output of the medieval period. What the scene in question reminded me of was the famous depiction of Saint George and the dragon by Paolo Uccello, completed around 1470. In the contemporary imagination, this is perhaps one of the best known and most resonant renditions of the motif, and I was struck by the similarities between this and the scene by which I was reminded of Uccello's painting

Paolo Uccello, Saint George and the dragon (c.1470)
National Gallery, London, NG6294
Courtesy of Wikimedia

The scene in question is part of a dream sequence in the comic book El estropicio meteorológico (The meteorological fracas), which was serially published in 1987. The comic book is an instalment in the classical series Mortadelo y Filemón by Francisco Ibáñez, a series in which several famous works of art and literature have been parodied through the characters of this fictional universe. The similarities between the scene in the dream of Mortadelo and that of Uccello's dragonslaying are notable, especially the lance piercing the dragon's nose. Naturally, I cannot claim that it is Uccello who has provided Ibáñez with the model for the scene in El estropicio meteorológico - the scene might be inspired by any number of Saint George renditions, so we should be cautious in pinpointing influences too exactly. Even if the connection between the painting from c.1470 and the drawing from 1987 might be indirect at best, the scene with Mortadelo as the typical dragonslayer points to the impact of the medieval imagination on the modern, and we are reminded that so much of our modern cultural output is in some way part of a continuity that goes back centuries into the past.   

Francisco Ibáñez, Mortadelo y Filemón no. 17, El estropicio meteorológico (1987)

The ludic vision of America - or, Adventures in medievalism, part 2

 

About a month ago, I participated in an online conference on medievalism in twenty-first-century audiovisual media, which gave me an opportunity to delve into how modern culture has engaged with the historical contact between Norse seafarers and Indigenous people in what is modern-day Canada. The subject is immensely rich, as there have been comics, cartoons, films, TV-series and computer games that have dealt with this subject in various ways. Due to the richness of this material, my presentation on the subject served mainly as an inroad that opened up a wealth of questions and sources, and I will use this blog from time to time as a vehicle for thinking about and grappling with the material. The present blogpost is, therefore, the second instalment in a series called “Adventures in medievalism” (the first instalment can be found here).       

At the aforementioned conference, “Medievalisms on the screen”, I argued, among other things, that due to the cultural engagements with the topos of Norse contact with pre-Columbian America, the Norse have become part of the modern American vision of history. To put it in a different way, the Norse have become a staple of how Americans – and indeed many non-Americans – imagine and encounter American history. It is of little consequence that the Norse impact on the geography we now call America appears to have been rather limited (albeit more extensive than previously thought). What matters is that through the Norse landfalls at various points on the American landmass, there has been established a historical link between what has been thought of as the old world and the new. This means that to modern-day Americans of European heritage, the Norse contact has provided them with a kind of pre-history of USA and Canada that includes a European, and a Northern European, white, element. The details of this fascination are better fleshed out by E. R. Truitt in a 2016 article.            

Because the Norse element in the history of the American landmass has been blown out of proportions in cultural expressions dealing with American history, the Norse – or rather, the Vikings – have become a topos of the historical understanding of America. Such topoi are important marks of how non-experts in history receive, understand and misunderstand the past of a given area or a given culture. In the case of America, and particularly in the case of the US, there are several such topoi that have become so deeply-rooted in the modern cultural imagination that they become part of what I call the ludic vision of America. It is this concept I will try to flesh out in somewhat greater detail in the present blogpost. 

Prince Valiant in the New World by Hal Foster
Collected comic strips from 1956 
Courtesy of abebooks.com

By the term “ludic vision”, I mean the kind of vision of something – or someone, or somewhere – that is conjured up or that informs a playful, ludic, engagement with it. In terms of American history, there is a ludic vision of this which is shared by people within and without the US, and this vision is comprised of specific terrains, specific types of people or characters, and specific events. For instance, Western films, books and comics, and lately also games, employ landscapes and topoi that simply and easily invoke the historical period that is being enacted, or, rather, that is being ludically re-imagined. Such Western topoi can include cowboys, bounty hunters, trappers, Native Americans, American soldiers, and also landscapes like canyons, deserts, prairies, etc. These combine to make a ludic vision of America, and due to modern culture’s fascination with American history, this ludic vision comprised of the aforementioned topoi are disseminated widely, and consequently also shared, and developed further, by creators and consumers of culture from many different backgrounds. Moreover, because these topoi are so widely shared, there is also a more widely unified ludic vision of America, which means that fewer individual topoi are needed to invoke the full-scale vision. One Native American warrior, for instance, is sufficient to invoke the totality of post-Columbian American history because modern culture has made the Native American warrior a topos, or perhaps rather an avatar or an emblem, of that part of American history. (Similarly, of course, the Native American warrior represents the pre-Columbian history, but this period has gained less traction in modern culture, despite the fascination with the historical contact between the Norse and the Indigenous, and it is therefore likely that a Native American warrior is employed to signify the post-Columbian era in modern cultural expression.)          

While the various topoi of the Western genre of cultural expressions comprise the perhaps most significant aspect of our contemporary ludic vision of American history, there are also others such topoi. For instance, the typical pirate employed in modern culture is, in terms of geography, an American pirate, set in the Caribbean and operating within a wider American geographical remit. This is so despite the fact that piracy has been a part of maritime history all across the inhabited globe, and it is a consequence of the widespread dissemination and popularity of the cultural imagination centred on the American pirates. Other such topoi are, for instance, conquistadors and, thanks to Arthur Conan Doyle, dinosaurs.   

Similarly, the Norse, or the Vikings, have also become part of the ludic vision of America. One of the perhaps most influential examples of this is Hal Foster’s comic strip Prince Valiant. The topos of Vikings in America has also been picked up by comic book creators from the US (such as Donald Duck stories by Carl Barks and Don Rosa), Spain (Capitán Trueno by Victor Mora), and Belgium (Jean van Hamme). In addition, this topos is also employed in films (such as Pathfinder), TV series (Vikings), and computer games (such as Age of Empires and Dead in Vinland). In other words, Vikings have become a very important part of how we playfully imagine America. 

Cover from "Ombre del passato" from 1981 by G. L. Bonelli and Guglielmo Letteri

Adapted for a collected volume in Norwegian translation, Egmont, 2016 

One important aspect of the ludic vision of America is the employment of achronology. This is a topic to which I aim to return in later blogpost, but the main point of is that by removing chronological boundaries and merging all historical periods into an atemporal here-and-now, topoi from across the chronological spectrum can be brought into play. Achronology can be employed in various ways, and very often it takes the form of relict societies – peoples who have continued their lives in the form of a particular historical period all the way to the present day. In some cases, this is how Vikings are introduced into a particular enactment of the ludic vision of America. In the Tex Willer story “Shadows from the past” by G. L. Bonetti and Guglielmo Letteri from 1981, for instance, the protagonists encounter a Viking society on a forbidding and secluded island on the north-western coast of Hudson Bay. Here we see an example of how Italian comic book creators also share in the same ludic vision of America as seen in the cases from the US, Spain and Belgium mentioned above.      

Another example of how the trope of relict societies facilitate the employment of Vikings is the original DuckTales series. In episode 61 of season 1, “Maid of the myth”, a gang of Vikings raid Duckburg and return to a secluded island somewhere in the Arctic – an island surrounded by solid ice but warmed by hot springs that allow for the growing of palm trees. Here, too, we see that the Vikings are part of a ludic vision of America – and that they are even turned into Americans, as two of these Vikings become fond of root beer in the course of the Viking raid. 

Root beer-drinking Vikings
Screenshots from DuckTales S01E61, "Maid of the Myth"

The ludic vision of America is complex, and can be further divided into several categories. Moreover, while the general ludic vision is shared by people from many different backgrounds – as exemplified above – the ways in which the ludic vision is enacted can vary significantly, and the ludic vision is of course also constantly developing. But despite changes and variations, it is important, I believe, to recognise that there is such a shared vision of America and American history that furnishes, facilitates and influences how we engage with American history in modern culture. The reason why this is important is that modern culture influences our understanding, or, perhaps more often, our misunderstanding. In order to understand how we understand or misunderstand, we must know how this ludic vision functions, and which elements it is comprised of. In this blogpost, I have tried to sketch the general outlines and pinpoint some of its characteristic, defining features, but I will need to develop the idea further.

Down the rabbit hole - or, Adventures in medievalism

 

Oh, historical, so was there a dragon?   
- Nick Miller, New Girl, S05E16

The Vikings probably went to the moon
- David Mitchell, QI, S17E14


Although most of my research is spent on primary sources from the Middle Ages, I have increasingly ventured into various labyrinthine passages of the field of medievalism - the study of the reception of the Middle Ages in the modern period. This topic is one that is close to my heart, as I suspect that it was precisely such playful engagements with modern ideas about the medieval, conveyed through Playmobil, Lego, comic books and cartoons, that subtly prepared the ground for my current work on medieval history. Such a link between the childhood encounters and the very serious grown-up fascination with medieval minutiae are not unique to my trajectory, and I am always delighted when friends and colleagues share the various factors that moved them towards acquiring an expertise in the history of the Middle Ages. It is precisely this awareness of a quietly influencing fascination that works in mysterious ways that makes me interested in medievalism as a field of serious study. In part, it might be explained as a kind of homage to my younger self, a kind of acknowledgement of the hours spent engaging with those cultural expressions that prepared the ground for future decisions that have since brought me such immense intellectual pleasure. In part, it might also be explained as a way of acquiring a better comprehension of why this fascination was allowed to grow, and what nerves and what chords of my historical understanding - indeed, our collective historical understanding - that were touched by the images of knights and princesses, castles, swords and other staples of our Platonic idea of the medieval. In seeking such a comprehension, there is an awareness that the medieval fascinates other than myself, that understanding how we interpret, play with, represent and misrepresent the past actually matters for events that unfold in the present. Just as my future has been shaped by my exposure to the medieval in popular culture, so have other events likewise been shaped by representations of the Middle Ages, and people have been moved to things good or bad by this fascination. Engaging scholarly, critically and seriously with the knowledge of such an impact on real events and the contemporary world is one of the cornerstones of medievalist research. 

Research

Because ideas about the Middle Ages have flourished in so many different ways, and within a vast range of cultural frameworks, it is impossible to gain a complete overview of the phenomenon. Modern polities have their own cultural traditions in which visions of the medieval are conveyed through various forms of art, and these traditions require that the scholar engaging with them is familiar with the culture in question, and familiar with the language. By learning a new language, therefore, a new culture opens up, and a new trove of medievalism can be examined. Such troves easily become veritable rabbit holes from which it is difficult to emerge. 

Recently, as my Spanish has improved sufficiently for me to explore cultural expressions that are less well known outside the Spanish-speaking world, I have encountered a few such expressions that engage with the Middle Ages, and I am looking forward to spending years familiarising myself with this subject and, in doing so, enjoying the fruits of the labour of the numerous scholars already working on it. At the present stage, however, my forays are few, short and amateurish, and they are limited to specific topics that I have worked on within other cultural frameworks. One such topic is the modern fascination with the historical contact between the Norse and the Native Americans. This is a topic that has resulted in a number of cultural expressions, and as I am now preparing a talk on this subject for a conference in April, I am taking a deep dive into its manifold manifestations. 

It was in the course of this research that I remembered one of the Spanish cultural products that engage with the medieval, namely the comic book hero El Capitán Trueno, Captain Thunder, a twelfth-century knight created by writer Victor Mora Pujadas in 1956, and predominantly illustrated by Miguel Ambrosio Zaragoza. I only learned of this comic book series a few years ago, and although I wrote about its engagement with the topos of Atlantis in four blogposts (here, here, here, and here), I can still not claim to be an expert on the subject, far from it. However, since I remembered that Capitán Trueno is a wide-wandered gentleman, I decided to see if he had also travelled to the American landmass. It turned out that he had, and that the results drew me further and further down the rabbit hole. 

I came across a website presenting the covers of the first three hundred bi-weekly comic books, and when scrolling through these I realised that Capitán Trueno had met several Native American cultures, from the Inuit to what appears to be the predecessors of the Aztecs, and even battled dinosaurs - thus connecting the trope of medieval contact with America with the trope of the relict dinosaur inspired by The Lost World. I spent longer than I care to admit, getting a first impression of these stories, solely based on their cover art and their title, and it made me realise that this is something I will eventually have to spend even more time on, and getting further down the rabbit hole for the sake of science. It is thrilling realisation, and it is a good reminder that scholarly research opens up far more passages than can easily be envisioned at the beginning of one's career.     

Capitán Trueno, Acosados, vol. 56, 1957 

(courtesy of rafaelcastillejo.com/trueno.htm)

Capitán Trueno, La voz de Zankú, vol. 86, 1958 

(courtesy of rafaelcastillejo.com/trueno.htm)