Lynn Kutch (Kutztown University)
Gothic literature, art, and film have long trafficked in the uncanny, the monstrous, and the psychologically fractured—motifs that unsettle boundaries between self and other, life and death, reality and illusion. These elements find renewed resonance in the graphic novel, a form whose visual and often fragmented structure lends itself to the disjointed temporalities, haunting imagery, and corporeal distortions central to Gothic expression. As a hybrid medium that combines word and image, the graphic novel offers fertile ground for reimagining Gothic conventions in ways that are both formally and thematically transgressive. This panel seeks to explore the intersection of Gothic aesthetics and themes with the graphic novel form, examining how graphic narratives absorb, revise, or subvert Gothic tropes across historical and cultural contexts. The panel invites interdisciplinary proposals from scholars working in comics studies, as well as literature, visual culture, film and media studies.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
Adaptations of classic Gothic texts in graphic form
Visual and graphic representations of the haunted, abject, or monstrous body
Fragmentation, spatial horror, and temporal disjunction in Gothic comics
The uncanny and the visual narrative
Queer Gothic and graphic storytelling
Race, colonialism, and the Gothic in comics
Gender, sexuality, and Gothic archetypes in illustrated narratives
Horror aesthetics and panel composition
Global perspectives on the Gothic graphic novel