ST202 Love, Sex, Bodies and the Nonhuman

Rite of Spring

How a comic represents an experience it cannot show: the tuber, the light, and the water.

About 150 minutes. Sample lesson, open to everyone.

Reading for this lesson

Introduction

"Rite of Spring" (March 1985) is the issue in which Abby and the creature become lovers[1]. He offers her a tuber grown from his own body; she eats it; and for the rest of the issue she perceives the world as it appears through the Green, as strands and fields of coloured light, connected, alive. The two of them are in the water. The comic does not draw sex. It draws what the experience is, from inside, in pages that abandon the grid, the panel border and, for stretches, the word.

The issue's reputation rests on that formal solution. A love scene between a woman and a plant could have been grotesque, coy or absurd. Moore, Bissette and Totleben made it a visionary sequence, and the vision is the sex. This lesson reads how, and then asks the questions the issue raises about consent, desire and the nonhuman that the module's title promised.

What you are studying

One issue as a formal and ethical achievement, and the vocabulary from ST104 at full stretch.

Learning objectives

  • Analyse the visionary sequence formally: layout, colour, line, the disappearance of the panel.
  • Discuss the ethics of the scene (consent, difference, the tuber as sacrament and as body) with precision.
  • Apply Alaimo's trans-corporeality to intimacy rather than threat.

Key concepts

Showing the unshowable

ST104 asked how comics represent the unrepresentable. Here the answer is to change the rules of the page. Describe what happens to layout after Abby eats the tuber: the shape of the panels, the colour, the line, the lettering. Then say what the change stands for.

Consent and difference

Abby chooses. The issue is careful about that, and the care answers #29, where she could not. Ask what the tuber does to the question: it is his body, eaten; it changes her perception; it makes the union possible. Is that a gift, a drug, a sacrament, all three? Alaimo would call it trans-corporeality made literal[2]: one body becoming part of another. Decide whether the issue is celebrating that or merely using it.

The nonhuman lover

Every monster in ST102 was a threat. Here the nonhuman is a partner. Ask what had to change, in the character and in the comic, for that to be possible, and whether the issue leaves anything of the horror behind.

Questions to think about while reading

  • Where is the last conventional panel before the vision, and where is the first after?
  • What colours dominate the vision pages, and how are they applied?
  • What does Abby say, before and after? What does the creature?

Things to notice

  • Water. The lovers are in it. Compare with every other water panel in the course.
  • The tuber. How it is drawn, how it is offered, how it is eaten.
  • The final page. Where the issue lands after the vision, and in what tone.

Reflection questions

  • Is this the most romantic sequence in comics, as some critics have said, or is it something odder and better than romantic?
  • What would the issue be if the roles were reversed and the creature ate something of Abby's?

Homework and tasks

Draft Assignment 1: a full close reading of "Rite of Spring", form first, then the ethics the form makes possible.

Next lesson

Last week: what the run has done to love, and the essay.

References

  1. Alan Moore (writer), Stephen Bissette and John Totleben (art). The Saga of the Swamp Thing #34: "Rite of Spring". The Saga of the Swamp Thing, #34. DC Comics, March 1985.
  2. Stacy Alaimo. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana University Press, 2010.