The Monstrous Hybrids of Guy Davis

What makes a monster? At their most basic level, monsters embody cultural fears. There are many ways to visualize this, but a comic where monsters are both threats and heroes requires especially frightful tensions. Long-time #BPRD artist Guy Davis is up to the challenge. 1/11

Citing Mary Douglas’ theory of purity, Noël Carroll argues that monsters “are un-natural relative to a culture’s conceptual scheme of nature. They do not fit the scheme; they violate it. Thus, monsters are not only physically threatening; they are cognitively threatening.” 2/11

Monsters typically localize evil so that it may be dispelled. In the words of literary scholar Jack Halberstam: “Monstrosity as the bodily manifestation of evil makes evil into a local effect, not generalizable across a society or culture.” IOW, monsters are scapegoats. 3/11

Yet Halberstam also describes monsters as “meaning machines,” while philosopher Rosi Braidotti argues, “Being situated at the crossroads of the supernatural with the earthly, the monstrous body is a textual body.” IOW, monstrous bodies are dense, unstable sites of meaning. 4/11

This dense meaning is typified by the 16th century Monster of Ravenna. Via literary scholar Leslie Fiedler: “It is not only a monstre par défaut, lacking one leg & foot, but also a monstre par excès, possessing an oddly displaced third eye, as well as a supernumerary horn…” 5/11

“And it is especially a monstre double, a multiple hybrid of bird & beast, beast & man, man and woman: a pictorial myth of the super-monster.” Through its hybridity, the Monster of Ravenna doesn’t incarnate a specific fear but rather becomes whatever anyone needs it to be. 6/11

Whereas the BPRD’s heroic monsters (Abe Sapien, Roger, Johann Kraus, etc.) maintain identifiable human features within monstrosity, Guy Davis’ non-heroic monsters are, like the Monster of Ravenna, dense sites of meaning, owing in part to their destabilizing hybridity. 7/11

The Jaguar spirit that inhabits Benjamin Daimio manifests with animal, insect & humanoid qualities, with elongated, strangely jointed limbs, fur, sharp teeth, and claw-like hands. It also straddles the living/dead binary, with protruding, carcass-like bones & exposed organs. 8/11

Arguably, Davis draws his densest, more existentially terrifying monster in “The Black Flame.” Variously tentacled, rock-like, insectoid, and amphibious, this enormous shapeshifting monster becomes what it needs to be, both in order to wreak havoc and to unsettle us. 9/11

This monster offers many physical threats. Sometimes, it threatens to trample or torpedo the city. Other times, it releases smoke or goo that both destroys and transforms. (This is part of an ongoing storyline involving frog-monsters who are actually mutated humans.) 10/11

This monster’s cognitive threat relates to its instability. It can be seen, yet its multitudinous hybridity ensures it cannot be fully understood. And thus, it cannot be fully destroyed—within the story or beyond it, where it promises to haunt the minds of readers. 11/11