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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS
REFRAMING THE
PERPETRATOR
IN CONTEMPORARY
COMICS
On the Importance of the Strange
Dragoș Manea
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels
Series Editor
Roger Sabin
University of the Arts London
London, UK
This series concerns Comics Studies—with a capital “c” and a capital “s.”
It feels good to write it that way. From emerging as a fringe interest within
Literature and Media/Cultural Studies departments, to becoming a minor
field, to maturing into the fastest growing field in the Humanities, to
becoming a nascent discipline , the journey has been a hard but spectacular
one. Those capital letters have been earned.
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels covers all aspects of the
comic strip, comic book, and graphic novel, explored through clear and
informative texts offering expansive coverage and theoretical sophistica-
tion. It is international in scope and provides a space in which scholars
from all backgrounds can present new thinking about politics, history,
aesthetics, production, distribution, and reception as well as the digital
realm. Books appear in one of two forms: traditional monographs of
60,000 to 90,000 words and shorter works (Palgrave Pivots) of 20,000 to
50,000 words. All are rigorously peer-reviewed. Palgrave Pivots include
new takes on theory, concise histories, and—not least—considered provo-
cations. After all, Comics Studies may have come a long way, but it can’t
progress without a little prodding.
Series Editor Roger Sabin is Professor of Popular Culture at the
University of the Arts London, UK. His books include Adult Comics: An
Introduction and Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels , and he is part of the
team that put together the Marie Duval Archive. He serves on the boards
of key academic journals in the field, reviews graphic novels for interna-
tional media, and consults on comics-related projects for the BBC,
Channel 4, Tate Gallery, The British Museum and The British Library.
The ‘Sabin Award’ is given annually at the International Graphic Novels
and Comics Conference.
Dragoș Manea
Reframing the
Perpetrator in
Contemporary Comics
On the Importance of the Strange
Dragoș Manea
English Department
University of Bucharest
Bucharest, Romania
ISSN 2634-6370 ISSN 2634-6389 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels
ISBN 978-3-031-03852-5 ISBN 978-3-031-03853-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03853-2
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To Mihaela and Eric,
may you always dazzle
Acknowledgments
This book owes a debt of gratitude to a group of fantastic people.

I would like to thank the coordinators of Comics Forum, the
International Graphic Novel & Comics Conference, the Comics & Society
Network, and the Perpetrator Studies Network. I’m grateful for the many
brilliant conferences and workshops they have organized, some of which I
have been fortunate enough to attend, and which have contributed
immensely to the direction of my own research. It was there that I pre-
sented papers that would form or inform the development of this book—
and there that I always received feedback that was knowledgeable, gracious,
and kind. The spirit of camaraderie and generosity they have always fos-
tered does a great service to the academic world.
To Roger Sabin, who invited me to submit a proposal that would later
develop into this book, I owe my thanks for his patience, encouragement,
and constant kindness. In 2016—in what is still one of the proudest
moments of my academic life—I received the Sabin Award for Comics
Scholarship for a paper that would later become the second chapter of this
book and go on to shape the direction of my research for the next six
years. I would also like to thank Camille Davies and Imogen Higgins at
Palgrave for shepherding this project with patience, generosity, and grace.
I also owe a debt of gratitude to my friends, students, and colleagues,
many of whom belong to the American Studies Program and the English
Department at the University of Bucharest. I’m particularly grateful to the
MA students that attended—and sometimes graciously bore with—my
seminar on Memory and Perpetration, and with whom I was fortunate
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
enough to explore many of the comics I analyze in this book. I’m thankful
to my friends George Birloiu, Dana Mihăilescu, and Andrei Nae for their
constant encouragement, advice, and support. I am especially grateful to
Alexandra Bacalu, who was always there with me through hard times and
helped me onward. Professor Mihaela Irimia and Professor Rodica
Mihăilă—my doctoral and postdoctoral advisors—greatly influenced my
development as a scholar and allowed for the genesis of this book. I owe
my frequent writing partner Mihaela Precup a special kind of gratitude for
the generosity with which she has helped shape this project—through
guidance and critique—across the years; no one has taught me more about
comics or the metamorphoses of life.
This book would not have been possible without you.
My work on this project was supported by grant PN-III-
P1-1.1-PD-2019-0460, no. 85/2020, The Representation of the Perpetrator
and the Ethics of Empathy in American Graphic Narratives, and PN-III-
P4-ID-PCE-2020-1631, no. 101/2021, Familiar Perpetrators: On the
Intimacy of Evil in Contemporary American Literature and Popular
Culture, offered by UEFISCDI.
An earlier version of Chapter 2 was published in Studies in Comics 8,
no. 2 (2017): 157–170.
Contents
1 Introduction:
Perpetration, Estrangement, and Historical
Debt 1
2 “Nothing
was spared”: Monstrosity and the Sympathetic
Perpetrator in Manifest Destiny (Chris Dingess and
Matthew Roberts, 2013–) 21
3 “Divine
the future, but beware of ghosts”: Romanticism,
Satire, and Perpetration in The New Adventures of Hitler
(Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell, 1989) 51
4 “May
they never get their hands on a monster like that”:
Perpetration and Moral Ambiguity in Kieron Gillen’s
Über (2013–) 79
5 Who
are you crying for?: Perpetration and Punishment in
Nina Bunjevac’s Bezimena (2019)109
6 “Unable
to protect anyone”: Terrorism, Salvation, and
Cultural Intelligibility in Gene Luen Yang’s
Boxers & Saints (2013)143
ix
x CONTENTS
7 Conclusion191
Index195
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Fezron leader wearing headdress in Manifest Destiny #15

(2015, n. pag.). (© Skybound, LLC) 25
Fig. 2.2 Dawhog is introduced in Manifest Destiny #15 (2015, n. pag.).
(© Skybound, LLC) 27
Fig. 2.3 The vameter grafting Private Jameson’s head onto itself in
Manifest Destiny #18 (2015, n. pag.). (© Skybound, LLC) 30
Fig. 2.4 Clark sees one of his Native American victims in the flame in
Manifest Destiny #7 (2014, n. pag.). (© Skybound, LLC) 32
Fig. 2.5 Dawhog confronts Collins in Manifest Destiny #18 (2015, n.
pag.). (© Skybound, LLC) 34
Fig. 2.6 The confrontation between Clark and York in Manifest Destiny
#45 (2021, n. pag.). (© Skybound, LLC) 39
Fig. 2.7 Lewis, Clark, and Collins juxtaposed during the slaughter of the
Vameter in Manifest Destiny #18 (2015, n. pag.). (©
Skybound, LLC) 42
Fig. 3.1 Alois and the visual language of Romanticism in The New
Adventures of Hitler (1990, n. pag.). (© Fleetway) 62
Fig. 3.2 Hitler and his vision in The New Adventures of Hitler (1990, n.
pag.). (© Fleetway) 63
Fig. 3.3 A different symbol for Nazism in The New Adventures of Hitler
(1990, n. pag.). (© Fleetway) 64
Fig. 3.4 A shift from internal to external focalization in The New
Adventures of Hitler (1990, n. pag.). (© Fleetway) 68
Fig. 3.5 Hitler’s rebirth on Christmas Day in The New Adventures of
Hitler (1990, n. pag.). (© Fleetway) 70
Fig. 3.6 The Holy Grail in The New Adventures of Hitler (1990, n.
pag.). (© Fleetway) 72
xi
xii LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 3.7 The future ghost of John Lennon in The New Adventures of
Hitler (1990, n. pag.). (© Fleetway) 74
Fig. 4.1 A depiction of the sexual violence practiced by the Red Army in
Über #0 (2013, n. pag.). (© Avatar Press) 90
Fig. 4.2 Double page spread depicting the mass murder of Soviet
prisoners of war in Über #1 (2013, n. pag.). (© Avatar Press) 94
Fig. 4.3 Superhuman violence in Über #0 (2013, n. pag.).
(© Avatar Press) 95
Fig. 4.4 The mass murder of Soviet prisoners of war from a different
angle in Über #1 (2013, n. pag.). (© Avatar Press) 96
Fig. 4.5 A contrast between the features of the rapist and the ethical
soldier in Über #0 (2013, n. pag.). (© Avatar Press) 99
Fig. 4.6 Churchill’s desecration in Über #11 (2014, n. pag.). (© Avatar
Press)105
Fig. 5.1 Stillness and abstraction in Bezimena (2019, n. pag.). (©
Fantagraphics)115
Fig. 5.2 Motion lines and the intrusion of sound in Bezimena (2019, n.
pag.). (© Fantagraphics) 116
Fig. 5.3 Superimposition suggesting conventional panels in Bezimena
(2019, n. pag.). (© Fantagraphics) 118
Fig. 5.4 An owl observing Benny in Bezimena (2019, n. pag.). (©
Fantagraphics)123
Fig. 5.5 A snake looking toward the reader in Bezimena (2019, n. pag.).
(© Fantagraphics) 124
Fig. 5.6 Becky’s sketchbook, mirroring the design of Bezimena (2019,
n. pag.). (© Fantagraphics) 134
Fig. 5.7 Bezimena’s central question (2019, n. pag.). (© Fantagraphics) 137
Fig. 6.1 Vibiana’s vision of Jesus Christ in Saints (2013, 158). (© Gene
Luen Yang) 149
Fig. 6.2 Lee Bao and Mei-wen’s dream of Guan Yin in Boxers (2013,
282). (© Gene Luen Yang) 152
Fig. 6.3 The depiction of the Gods of the Opera appropriates the
aesthetics of the superhero tradition in Boxers (2013, 128). (©
Gene Luen Yang) 166
Fig. 6.4 Saints largely appropriates the aesthetics of autobiographical
comics (2013, 55). (© Gene Luen Yang) 167
Fig. 6.5 Lee Bao’s last divine outfit in Boxers (2013, 128). (© Gene
Luen Yang) 180
Fig. 6.6 One of Lee Bao’s post-traumatic dreams in Boxers (2013, 191).
(© Gene Luen Yang) 183
Fig. 6.7 The employment of the YA love plot in Boxers, even after Lee
Bao has engaged in mass murder (2013, 267). (© Gene Luen
Yang)185
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Perpetration, Estrangement,

and Historical Debt
In his poem “The Problem Is How to Thank,” John Dolan asks three
questions that I have often struggled with: “How do you thank the dead
Ukrainian?”;1 “What would be the perfect gift for the old woman who
stepped directly in front of Descartes when the Mongol aimed at him?”;
“What can you write on the thank-you card with its picture of a kitten to
the Persian archer who delayed Subotai a second or two so that Voltaire
could perfect his dialogue?” (1995, n. pag.). By playfully bridging the vast
historical distance that exists between the thirteenth-century Mongol
invasion of Kievan Rus’ and two of the foundational figures of Western
modernity, Dolan invites us to consider the historical debt we owe to vic-
tims that are absent from Western cultural memory, groups, and individu-
als we neither memorialize nor mourn. Yet he also signals another question:
To what extent have the last few centuries of Western domination over the
1
When I started work on this chapter in early 2022, I did not expect Dolan’s question—
“How do you thank the dead Ukrainian?”—to have the profound contemporary significance
it has today (February 25, 2022), shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This book is
probably not the proper place to discuss my views on the conflict (and I am neither a histo-
rian nor a political scientist working on Eastern Europe). Suffice to say, I think it is a dreadful
war, grounded in geopolitical concerns and the nationalist fantasies I decry later in this chap-
ter. My only hope is that my discussion of the Ukrainian question, inflected as it is by the
current context, can do its little part in drawing attention to the larger, bloodier history of
the region and to the many innocent lives lost in the name of conquest and expansion.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
D. Manea, Reframing the Perpetrator in Contemporary Comics,
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03853-2_1
2 D. MANEA
rest of the world been predicated on the sacrifices of people from what
some used to call the “second world,” those on the peripheries—who
enjoyed fewer of the benefits—of the European West? How should the
beneficiaries of historical tragedies think of the debt they owe to the dead
that are not their own?
More so, what do we owe the Mongols themselves? Without their con-
quest and crippling of China and much of the Middle East, the West might
not have enjoyed centuries of imperialism and prosperity. A historical acci-
dent—the death of the Great Khan Ögedei—prematurely halted the
Mongol invasion of Europe. Had Ögedei lived, the Mongols might well
have inflicted similar damage—the estimates range at about 40 million,
often brutal, deaths—on the great kingdoms of Western Europe. While
some contemporary historians are often quick to highlight the benefits of
Mongol rule—such as the imposition of order on the Silk Road and the
subsequent expansion of globalization—they have a tendency to down-
play, as Dan Carlin argues, the incredible cruelty that lay at the foundation
of the Mongol Empire: the casual dehumanization of the people they con-
quered and the terrible violence they often inflicted upon them (2012).
What do we owe to—and to what extent is our historical privilege
grounded in—the deeds of evil men?2
Like the Romans and other conquering peoples, the Mongols
murdered and enslaved millions. Yet, as revisionist historian Marie
Favereau argues in her book The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the
World, they also enabled what she calls “the Mongol exchange” (a refer-
ence to the more familiar Columbian exchange): “a monumental shift that
facilitated the flourishing of art, the development of skilled crafts, and the
progress of research in various areas such as botany, medicine, astronomy,
2
My use of the word “evil” in this book is largely consonant with Hannah Arendt’s under-
standing of it: “evil is never ‘radical,’ that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither
depth nor any demonic dimension” (2007, 471). I employ it both because of its rhetorical
power and because I want to stress the importance of evil as a moral concept, one that allows
us to make a distinction between actions and inactions that are merely “very wrong” and
those that are qualitatively evil (Calder 2013). While I’m not trying to suggest any theologi-
cal or metaphysical dimensions—and I mostly follow Todd Calder’s argument that evil acts
can be distinguished by at least two components, significant harm and e-motivation—I am
aware that the vocabulary of evil and monstrosity potentially buttresses a popular under-
standing of evil that renders evildoers inhuman or beyond ordinary humanity, as well as “a
critical reluctance to fully surrender theological and occult figurations of these phenomena”
(Adams 2013, 3). My choice to employ this somewhat controversial term is grounded in a
belief that evil and monstrosity are not beyond human but inherently human.
1 INTRODUCTION: PERPETRATION, ESTRANGEMENT, AND HISTORICAL DEBT 3
measurement systems, and historiography” (2021, 3). While even a source

as inoffensive as Publishers Weekly notes that Favereau’s book “downplays
the bloodier aspects of Mongol power” (2021), there is no denying the
fact that the Mongols contributed immeasurably to the expansion of
human knowledge and wealth. Still, I think the 40 million people that
likely died due to the actions of the Mongol Empire might find little com-
fort in the fact that “the Mongols did not try to extract value from sub-
jects no matter the cost to the subjects—that is, the Mongols did not
enslave their subjects and work them to death, as much later colonial
regimes in the Atlantic world did” (Favereau 2021, 7). While I do not
want to detract from the evils of European colonialism—and I discuss
them at length in my second chapter—I think one should always remem-
ber the dead.
Like a lot of people over the years, I too have often been seduced by the
military and organizational prowess of the Mongol Empire. John Dolan—
in an article in which he describes them as “superhuman” and “alien”—
also highlights another dimension of the Mongols’ enduring appeal:
What the rest of us dream of is the Khan’s horde: the black arrow that swept
across Eurasia like a hundred-mile wide cropduster, leaving utter silence in
its wake. Every boy who came on the Mongols in the “M” volume of the
encyclopedia slobbered over those black arrows on the map, placed the flat
of his hand over them and moved it forward following the path of the
Horde, making little hissing noises as he imagined the progress of Death
incarnate. (2002, n. pag.)
Dolan’s employment of the languages of sexuality (“slobbered”) and ani-

mality (“hissed”) creates a sense of the Mongols’ almost satanic, snake-like
allure. It also gestures toward the larger tendency to fetishize perpetrators,
most frequently encountered in representations of the Nazis3 (in ’T Veld
2019, 85), which Susan Sontag has linked to sadomasochism: “Now there
3
The Mongols have rarely been aestheticized and sexualized to the same degree as the
Nazis in the West. Often, they haven’t even been portrayed as perpetrators at all. Most of the
films that focus on Genghis Khan, for instance, concentrate on his rise to power and often
feature his romantic relationship with Börte, his first wife. The tagline to one of the posters
for Dick Powell’s The Conqueror (1956)—which absurdly stars an aging John Wayne as the
future Great Khan—reads: “I am Temujin… Barbarian… I fight! I love! I conquer… like a
barbarian!” The tagline neatly juxtaposes orientalist cliches of barbarian seduction with John
Wayne’s conventional white masculinity. The Mongol conqueror is instrumentalized in order
to fulfill Western fantasies of power.
4 D. MANEA
is a master scenario available to everyone. The color is black, the material

is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is
ecstasy, the fantasy is death” (1981, 105). Renditions of death and domi-
nation, of power and the ability to exercise it without constraint, serve to
sexualize and aestheticize the figure of the perpetrator, potentially render-
ing us less sensitive to the historical tragedies they brought into being; less
able to properly remember the dead—victims and perpetrators alike.
The Mongol armies of Temüjin, Subutai, and Jebe, unlike most of the
perpetrators I discuss in this book, committed their massacres 700 years
ago. The victims of the Mongols do not have the privilege to be remem-
bered. Unlike the victims of more recent genocidal regimes, they have
been consigned to what Aleida Assmann has referred to as the “archive”
of cultural memory (2008, 99): a vast repository of human knowledge
that can be activated—but seldom is—in order to add new layers to human
remembrance. It is easy to forget about them in the West: no memorial
bears their names, nor were they even ever recorded, with the exception of
the privileged few—but they were murdered nonetheless. What debt do
we owe, then, to the murdered? Or even their murderers?
I am not arguing that ritualized, performative remembrance should
always be a moral imperative. I realize, of course, it would be somewhat
absurd for us to commemorate the victims of the Mongol invasions
700 years after the fact. Their deaths have little relevance for contempo-
rary politics: they can never be properly acknowledged and compensated;
truth and reconciliation commissions can never be assembled to render
them justice or peace. And it is perhaps a misuse of memory to focus too
much on them. Such commemorations could potentially amplify national-
ist fantasies of victimhood, “especially for peoples who, for a wide variety
of historical, religious, and cultural reasons, are highly prone or at least
vulnerable to self-mythologization” (Rieff 2016, n. pag.). Eastern
Europeans like myself certainly have enough simplistic narratives of vic-
timhood, resilience, and survival: of lives lost in order to protect European
civilization against the Ottoman Empire and of the debt that has never
been properly acknowledged or repaid by the West. I’d rather not turn the
Mongols into another nationalist bugbear; in fact, I’d rather have us con-
sider the debt they are owed.
The legacy of the nation-state has long conditioned us to think of debt
as something that we owe to people that have been construed as our direct
forebears—to foundational figures of memory that have been sanitized
and made to resemble ourselves. It is much more unsettling to think of
debt as something that we owe to perpetrators of genocide. Perhaps, as

Geoffrey Hill once put it, we ought “not look down so much upon the
damned” (2006, 25). By this, I am not suggesting that we should forget,
ignore, or justify their crimes, but merely that we should more frequently
ponder the ways in which we resemble them. Narratives of perpetration—
especially those that foreground the perspective of the perpetrator—can
allow us to understand our own capacity for evil. They may offer us a
glimpse into what James E. Waller has called “the ordinariness of extraor-
dinary evil” (2008, 145), our innate potential to commit unconscionable
acts, given the right circumstances and conditions. The Mongols of
Temüjin were people not fundamentally dissimilar to ourselves—despite
the terrible violence they inflicted upon their countless victims, they were
perfectly human. We owe them this recognition.
This book explores our ethical engagement with the figure of the per-
petrator—how we sympathize, empathize, and even identify with charac-
ters who have committed unconscionable acts—and the ethical space such
an engagement calls into being. I am interested particularly in the produc-
tive aspects of this space: its potential to make us more aware of our own
precarious ethical positions, our conventionality, our unearned privilege,
and our often-tacit complicity with larger structures of domination. The
comics I have selected for analysis all foreground the perspective of the
perpetrator—and meditate on the act of perpetration itself—but do so
from a position that often rejects realism and traditional notions of senti-
mentality in favor of the fantastic, the weird, and the deliberately estrang-
ing. They are works that do not merely portray perpetration but actively
defamiliarize it, allowing for an experience that circumvents our conven-
tional reactions to the figure of the perpetrator.
This book draws on concepts from the fields of perpetrator studies,
memory studies, comics studies, and moral philosophy in order to offer a
close reading of five graphic narratives I consider important for the con-
temporary depiction of perpetration: Bezimena (Nina Bunjevac 2019),
Über (Kieron Gillen 2013–), Boxers & Saints (Gene Luen Yang 2013),
Manifest Destiny (Chris Dingess and Matthew Roberts 2013–2022), and
The New Adventures of Hitler (Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell 1990).
This is by no means an exhaustive list of comics that portray perpetra-
tion—and I do offer a broader discussion of them below—but rather a
selection of works that share a number of characteristics: they are grounded
in history but often employ the logic of fantasy, they trigger profound
affective responses but also often function as puzzles, and they engender a
6 D. MANEA
sense of estrangement either at the level of form or through the events

they depict. It is this particular combination of features that I find produc-
tive when it comes to the framing of the perpetrator: these works encour-
age us not merely to feel but to deeply consider the processes of perpetration
in all of its—often elusive—historical dimension.
Implicatedness and the Ethics of Discomfort

In an editorial in which he discusses the tension between the familiar and
the unfamiliar—which grounds his comic book series Über—Kieron Gillen
recounts a strange idea: “as a guy living in a British democracy, I owe my
freedom to the Soviet dictatorship. No, I’m not at all comfortable with
that, but there’s little about writing Uber that makes me feel comfortable”
(2014, Über #9, n. pag.). His comment is prompted by a larger discussion
on the terrible casualties that the Soviet forces suffered on the Eastern
Front and Gillen’s skepticism that the democratic powers of Great Britain
and the United States would have been able to withstand such losses with-
out surrendering. While Gillen doesn’t offer an apologia for the Soviet
Union in Über—the series, to its credit, depicts the terrible sexual violence
that the Red Army vengefully inflicted on German civilians—his comment
does foreground the strange question of debt. What do we owe a geno-
cidal regime that often matched the Nazis in its ferocity?
It’s an uncomfortable question to face, as Gillen himself notes, but
perhaps a productive one (as I’ve already suggested, we owe perpetrators
at least the recognition of their humanity). Recent scholarship in memory
studies and perpetrator studies has focused on questions related to debt,
reparation, and our relationship with a past we are complicit with even if
we do not occupy the conventional positions of victim or perpetrator
(Barkan 2000; Rigney 2012; Sanyal 2015; Rothberg 2019). Michael
Rothberg, in a book which begins with an acknowledgment of the impor-
tance of “debts and responsibilities” to its thesis (2019, xv), posits the
category of the implicated subject. Neither victims nor perpetrators, impli-
cated subjects “occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without
being themselves direct agents of harm; they contribute to, inhabit,
inherit, or benefit from regimes of domination but do not originate or
control such regimes” (2019, 1). Largely unaware of and unburdened by
the historical fortuity that makes their current privilege possible—“how
do you thank the dead Ukrainian?” to briefly return to Dolan—implicated
subjects “help propagate the legacies of historical violence and prop up the
structures of inequality that mar the present” (Rothberg 2019, 1).
While I am somewhat skeptical of the political potential of the cate-
gory—of its ability to substantially foster solidarity and social change—in
a world in which the comforts of privilege for many of us in the Global
North far outweigh our insubstantial pangs of conscience, I do think it
present us with an interesting ethical problem: how should we, by inhabit-
ing the position of implicated subjects, interact with narratives of perpetra-
tion that have substantially shaped the conditions of our everyday lives?
Chris Dingess, the writer of the comic book series Manifest Destiny, which
I discuss at length in Chap. 2, draws a parallel between the ideas that
grounded American colonial expansionism in the nineteenth century and
those that still shadow our existence today. In a rare editorial at the end of
issue 25—in which he endeavors to attract both attention and funding to
the Dakota Access Pipeline protests—Dingess writes:
Our heroes are terrible white men “of their time,” marching through our
infant nation doing horrible things while expressing ugly thoughts and
views on sex, gender, and race. Hopefully, it makes the reader consider if
these ideas are truly dated, or how many people hold them to this day […]
“Manifest Destiny” is not a thing of the past. The Dakota Access Pipeline
and the danger it presents to the Standing Rock Reservation is happening
today. (2017, n. pag.)
Dingess’s editorial lays bare, I think, both the ethical benefits of asking
readers to assume the position of implicated subjects and its potential limi-
tations. Despite Dingess’s avowed desire to connect the Native American
genocide—to which his series frequently alludes—to contemporary injus-
tices faced by indigenous people in the United States, one reader, follow-
ing the editorial, wrote back to ask Dingess and his team to “drop the
white privilege bullshit” (2017, Manifest Destiny #27, n. pag.), threaten-
ing to stop purchasing the comic, while another one entreated them not
to “make this book political” (2017, Manifest Destiny #30, n. pag.). Even
a work that directly—if sometimes perhaps too subtly—positions its read-
ers to consider the consequences of genocide cannot force them to do so.
The editorial’s overtness asks readers to engage politically; the series’ sub-
tlety only allows them a space in which to ponder their debt to colonialism
and the genocide that it entailed—but only to the extent that they are
willing to do so.
8 D. MANEA
The comics I discuss in the following five chapters are grounded in his-
tory—even as they are inflected by the often-estranging presence of fan-
tasy—and foster a sense of implicatedness; they connect us to a now distant
past that most of us have only experienced “prosthetically,” through media
representations (Landsberg 2004), but which still structures our present:
1800s America, as colonialism expands; Liverpool shortly before the
beginning of the First World War and Berlin moments before its fall in the
Second; a mysterious interwar city, hinting at the darkness that would
engulf Yugoslavia before its descent into civil war; and fin de siècle China,
a country ravaged by the exploitative excesses of European colonialism,
starting to fight back. The works I analyze remediate histories of violence
and perpetration but they often do so in a subversive manner. Instead of
solidifying “cultural memory, creating and stabilizing certain narratives
and icons of the past” (Erll 2008, 393), they work to actively destabilize
remembrance, allowing readers to reconsider histories that have far too
often been framed heroically.
In doing so, they enable what Susanne C. Knittel calls an “ethics of
discomfort,” a term she takes over from Michel Foucault and describes as
“first and foremost a willingness to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty and
to question one’s own assumptions and the conceptual frameworks
according to which one apprehends the world” (2020, 380). For Knittel,
an ethics of discomfort also requires an acknowledgment of our implicat-
edness in contemporary “structures of inequality and political violence”
that are engendered in part by past instances of atrocity. Discomfort is
produced at the intersection between our nascent responsibility to critique
the structures that govern our social and political lives and our realization
that our individual power to foment change is profoundly limited. Knittel
argues that while this should not keep us from attempting to redress social
and political ills, an ethics of discomfort also implies “a form of modesty
regarding what one can achieve” (2020, 380). Manifest Destiny, for
instance, can suggest that the United States is built on a legacy of geno-
cide but it cannot persuade all of its readers. Despite this, the ethics of
discomfort that it produces has the potential to at least convince some of
its readers to consider the processes of perpetration that have given shape
to contemporary American society and to ponder the similarities that exist
between themselves and perpetrators of genocide.
The Marketable Perpetrator

This book considers perpetrators to be fundamentally similar to our-
selves—as perfectly human, for better or worse, as ourselves. It draws on a
tradition established by Hannah Arendt’s work on the “banality of evil”
(1963), Stanley Milgram’s 1961 experiments at Yale University, in which
he explored the psychology of following genocidal orders, Primo Levi’s
work on “the gray zone,” the profound moral ambiguity that Auschwitz
produced among its prisoners, blurring the line between victim and perpe-
trator (1989), Christopher Browning’s historical inquiries into the moti-
vations of the seemingly ordinary German men who willingly perpetrated
the Holocaust (1992) and James Waller’s insights into the social psychol-
ogy of genocide perpetration (2002). By treating perpetrators as pro-
foundly human, I do not mean to suggest that we should justify or excuse
their genocidal actions but merely that we should strive to understand
them and consider how each of us—had we lived under the conditions and
structures that shaped them—could have potentially perpetrated similar
deeds. The comics I analyze in this book refuse to treat perpetrators as
inhuman or extraordinary—even as they employ fantastical, sometimes
monstrous conceits—and focus on the larger cultural processes that shape
and enable perpetration.
In this sense, they are part of what Mihaela Precup has described as “a
recent boom of productions” that evoke a strange sense of intimacy and
familiarity with figures of evil. As Precup notes, such works tend “to fol-
low the pattern of detective ‘whodunit’ fiction, but with an underlying
‘whydunit’ motivation,” as they attempt to solve the enticing, elusive rid-
dle that is central to the figure of the perpetrator: how is it “possible for
human beings to do often unrepresentable things to other human beings”?
By trying to answer this question, Precup argues, perpetrator stories create
an “aura of mystery” that plays an important part in the “creation and
circulation of a marketable figure of the perpetrator” (2021, n. pag.).
Contributing to this larger cultural trend, comics have also foregrounded
the figure of the perpetrator; for instance: Jean-Philippe Stassen’s
Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda (2006) traces the development of a Hutu
teenager as he engages in genocide; James Carr and Archana Kumar’s
Hipster Hitler (2012) turns the Nazi dictator into a cute, largely hapless
hipster; Nina Bunjevac’s Fatherland: A Family History (2014) explores
her father’s descent into terrorism; Kieron Gillen’s Three (2014) depicts
the brutal system of slavery that sustained the often lionized Spartan
10 D. MANEA
military machine; Ulli Lust and Marcel Beyer’s Voices in the Dark (2017)
looks at Joseph Goebbels’ family life in the closing days of the Second
World War; Nora Krug’s Heimat (2018) recuperates her own family’s
involvement with the Nazi regime; and Joe Sacco’s famous works of
graphic reportage explore the legacies of genocide in Gaza, Palestine,
Bosnia, and Canada.
Comics scholars, likewise, have done important work on the representa-
tion of violence (Prorokova and Tal 2018; Hague, Horton, and Mickwitz
2019; Mickwitz, Horton, and Hague 2019), war (Earle 2017; Viljoen
2020), genocide (Pettitt 2018; Stańczyk 2019; Frahm, Hahn, and Streb
2021), perpetration (Polak 2017; in ’t Veld 2020; Manea and Precup 2020;
Precup 2020; Barlow 2021), and the documentary potential of comics to
portray traumatic events (Mickwitz 2016; Chute 2016; Mihăilescu 2020;
Davies and Rifkind 2020). Laurike in ’t Veld, moreover, has done ground-
breaking work on the figure of the perpetrator. In her excellent chapter
“From Gruesome to Grey: The Moralisation of Perpetrators”—in which
she analyzes Rupert Bazambanza’s Smile Through the Tears (2007), Paolo
Cossi’s Medz Yeghern (2007), Jean-Philippe Stassen’s Deogratias (2006),
Eric Heuvel’s The Search (2009), and Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde (2000),
as well as earlier works such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986 and 1991)—in
‘t Veld reveals the moral and visual framing of the perpetrator in comics,
from figures of extraordinary evil to ordinary human beings whose actions
are motivated by social and historical forces (2019, 83).
While most of the comics discussed by in ‘t Veld—and most of the
examples I’ve offered above—are beholden to a logic of realism,4 factuality,
4
Jean-Philippe Stassen’s Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda, despite the fantastical conceit
implied on the book’s back cover—“Shattered with guilt, Deogratias became a dog”
(2018)—also follows a logic of realism (even on the back cover, a panel depicting Deogratias,
huddled and destitute but still very much human, assures us that we should not read the
description literally). In the 2018 edition of the book, the comic is moreover preceded by a
short introduction by Rwandan writer Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse, which serves to authenti-
cate the verisimilitude of the narrative. While the comic’s fantastical conceit—Deogratias’
PTSD triggers hallucinations that he is transforming into a dog—does offer a powerful visual
metaphor for the guilt he is experiencing, the comic book nevertheless strives to assure read-
ers that the sequences of the teenager’s metamorphoses are mere hallucinations. It is also
largely guilty of what Robert Eaglestone has called “the swerve,” the failure of perpetrator
narratives to come “to terms with evil,” even as they implicitly promise to do so (2017, 65).
Deogratias’ transformation into a perpetrator is briefly sketched out and his genocidal actions
are never depicted (only their aftermath is shown). Unlike Deogratias, the works I discuss in
the following five chapters do not renege on that promise by “swerving”: they confront evil
and largely render it human.
or reportage, the works I analyze in the following five chapters, with their
emphasis on fantasy and estrangement, reframe the larger conversation on
the graphic representation of perpetration, as they gesture toward a stance
that rejects the everyday and embraces the strange. Before I offer an outline
of the structure of this book, I’d like to briefly explore three comics that
also arguably belong to this tendency and which have yet to receive the
critical attention they perhaps deserve: Rasputin (2014–2015), Alex
Grecian and Riley Rossmo’s Russian-folklore inspired reimagining of the
life of the Russian political figure; The Goddamned (2015–), Jason Aaron
and R.M. Guéra’s dystopia of life before the flood; and Jonathan Hickman
and Nick Pitarra’s The Manhattan Projects (2012–2015), a dark and absurd
reimagining of the story behind the birth of the atomic age.
Rasputin and The Goddamned both portray globally famous perpetra-
tors in an often-heroic light. The former reimagines the life of the Russian
mystic and political figure by including elements from Slavic mythology—
such as Baba Yaga or Koschei the Deathless—that are to a certain extent
intelligible to Western audiences through other works that have tackled
the mythological tradition, such as Mike Mignola’s Hellboy (1994–) or
Catherynne M. Valente’s Deathless (2011). Rasputin—shorn of his pro-
found Christian faith—is transformed into a traditionally handsome young
man, who has the ability to heal people or even bring them back from the
dead. Rasputin is a man trapped between two overlapping worlds: that of
magic, where he is the descendent of a prince who stole the water of life,
echoing a popular Slavic mythological motif, and that of history, where he
is the peasant son of an abusive father, who beats Rasputin’s mother to
death in the very first issue (the series is frank about the kind of violence
women face in heavily patriarchal societies). His decision to bring his
mother back to life and not do the same for his father, who is later killed
by a bear (Rasputin decides to save the bear instead), marks him from the
beginning of the narrative as a man whose sense of ethics sufficiently mir-
rors our own.
The same is also true of Cain, the protagonist of The Goddamned’s first
story arc, which employs famous characters from Abrahamic mythology
and largely functions as a prehistoric dystopia. After the Fall of Enoch—
which Cain implies was the high point of technological progress—human-
ity has largely been reduced to tribes of hunter-gatherers who only appear
12 D. MANEA
to be interested in violence and mayhem. Cain is humanized in a manner

that is similar to Rasputin: reminded of the love his own mother had for
him—an emphasis on love as an ethical imperative that works to render
Cain more sympathetic—he decides to help a woman save her child (the
boy had been taken captive by Noah, who is reframed here as a cruel theo-
crat, interested only in saving himself and his children, the only people he
deems pure enough for the new post-flood world). Both series, as such,
blend history, mythology, and fantasy and depict famous perpetrators in
ways that significantly depart from the manner in which they are com-
monly remembered. While the ethics of offering Cain a redemption narra-
tive are untroublesome enough in the twenty-first century, the choice of
portraying Rasputin heroically—a man who was essentially a cult leader
and an alleged rapist (Smith 2016, 157)—is perhaps a bit beyond the pale.5
Another comic book series that places the figure of the perpetrator in a
fantastical frame is Jonathan Hickman6 and Nick Pitarra’s The Manhattan
Projects (2012–2015). The series—aptly subtitled Science Bad—interro-
gates the grand narrative of cultural and technological progress by reimag-
ining the allied research and development project as a site of significantly
more disturbing scientific experiments (including one that leads to the
annihilation of an entire sapient alien species). The Manhattan Projects is a
dark comedy of social and scientific amorality in the pursuit of progress,
5
In Grecian’s defense, the accusations of rape against Rasputin—although mentioned in
earlier biographies such as Edvard Radzinsky: The Rasputin File (2000) and Joseph
T. Fuhrmann’s Rasputin: The Untold Story (2012)—were possibly not as well-known before
the emergence of the #MeToo movement. Using the Wayback Machine to visit Rasputin’s
Wikipedia page, for instance, reveals no mention of rape in 2012–2014, unlike the current
version of his page, which dedicates an entire paragraph to it.
6
The Black Monday Murders (Jonathan Hickman and Tomm Coker 2016–) is another
comic book series by Hickman which deserves a mention. Reimagining financial elites—
especially those belonging to the great banks—as literal demon worshippers, the series inter-
rogates the excesses of late capitalism and our attraction to it as a mode of production. While
I am not altogether convinced that perpetration is the best critical angle by which to approach
it, the series does a very good job at depicting the allure of dominance and wealth—two fac-
tors that have been historically critical to the acceptance of perpetration. The Black Monday
Murders, moreover, involves real world banking institutions—such as Goldman Sachs or
J. P. Morgan—or the names of people associated with banking—such as the family name of
the Rothschilds—in its depiction of demonic conspiracy. Unlike The Manhattan Projects, the
series, as such, alludes to people who have long been identified as perpetrators of economic
violence—especially among the extreme right—even as it attempts to depict them in a some-
what positive light (Grigoria Rothschild, for instance, is secretly working against the interests
of the great banks).
which adopts a viciously parodic approach to the adaptation of history,

rendering famous historical figures in ways that are substantially different
to how they are usually remembered—Oppenheimer is a cannibal serial
killer, Einstein a pragmatic murderer—while alternating between parody,
farce, and, at times, genuine drama.
The first volume of The Manhattan Projects reveals, though, that two of
the characters are not the real J. Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein
but the former’s twin brother, Joseph—who has the magical power of
consuming his victims’ knowledge and personalities and who has mur-
dered and eaten Robert—and an alternate-world version of Einstein,
named Albrecht, who has secretly replaced the German physicist, strand-
ing him on a world where science is considered superstition and magic the
proper way of understanding the world. Albert and Robert do return,
though, later in the series, transformed in startling ways: Oppenheimer
wages a secret war inside his brother’s consciousness—including instances
of cannibalism and nuclear destruction—and finally manages to take over
his body before a returning Albert Einstein murders him, unaware that
this is not the same man that had betrayed the Manhattan Projects. Albert
has also been changed by his experience of inter-dimensional travel,
becoming a pragmatic “barbarian,” “super genius,” as the series defines
him, in a clear nod to the famous Conan the Barbarian character, and in
clear contrast to the real-life pacifist. Einstein and Oppenheimer—and the
rest of the personnel as well—are ultimately portrayed in ways that depart
markedly from their usual framing in cultural memory.
Like Rasputin and The Goddamned, The Manhattan Projects is particu-
larly interesting in terms of the ethics of adapting historical and mytho-
logical figures, especially as they are filtered through the frame of the
perpetrator. The tone of the series—as it alternates between vicious par-
ody, slapstick comedy, and genuine drama—creates a strange ethical space
for readers, always somewhat subverting our ability to sympathize with the
characters and their experiences but rarely outright denying the possibility
of sympathy or the extension of empathy. In doing so, The Manhattan
Projects allows for a more complex—and ethically demanding—engage-
ment with the figure of the perpetrator, one that eschews both the often-
melodramatic frame of the monstrous and the more realistic discourse of
the banality of evil in favor of a stance that is far more elusive and estrang-
ing. A few of the series’ characters might literally be monsters—and almost
all of them behave monstrously—but The Manhattan Projects still man-
ages to preserve a sense of their humanity in all of its profound ambiguity.
14 D. MANEA
Chapter Overview
Like Rasputin, The Goddamned, and The Manhattan Projects, the comics
I analyze in the following five chapters also engage with history, mythol-
ogy, and perpetration, but they do so in ways that are arguably more pro-
found, both formally and ethically. Moreover, they have also arguably not
received sufficient critical attention themselves, despite their novel contri-
butions to the larger discussion surrounding perpetration. In this book,
therefore, I offer detailed close-readings of the five works I have selected
in order to fully reckon with their specific—and innovative—approaches
to the representation of perpetration, while also exploring important ques-
tions that are adjacent to it, such as the ethics of justice, the poetics of
historical fantasy, weird fiction, and the romance, or the broader ethics of
adapting history.
Chapter 2, “‘Nothing was spared’: Monstrosity and the Sympathetic
Perpetrator in Manifest Destiny (Chris Dingess and Matthew Roberts
2013–),” considers the manner in which the series employs the conven-
tions of weird fiction and the frontier Gothic in its retelling of the
1804–1806 Lewis and Clark expedition. Alluding heavily to the Native
American genocide, Manifest Destiny reframes the Corps of Discovery as
perpetrators of mass murder on a secret mission to cleanse the frontier of
the fantastical—sometimes monstrous—creatures that inhabit it in the
name of colonial expansion. While the series refuses to justify their geno-
cidal actions, it does create a potentially productive space of ambiguity—
through the figure of the traumatized perpetrator and the sensation of
liminality often associated with the frontier—which might allow contem-
porary readers to ponder their position as beneficiaries of historical trag-
edy as well as the consequences—and continuities—of colonialism.
I continue the discussion of historical debt in Chap. 3, “‘Divine the
future, but beware of ghosts’: Romanticism, Satire, and Perpetration in
The New Adventures of Hitler (Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell 1989).”
Exploring the formative years of the German dictator, the controversial
comic strip draws our attention to the broader imperialist context that
shaped the emergence of Nazism. Drawing on the probably fictitious
memoirs of Hitler’s sister-in-law, The New Adventures of Hitler depicts the
future Nazi dictator traipsing around Liverpool in search of the Holy Grail
in 1912–1913, with the help of his imaginary mentor John Bull. Unlike
Manifest Destiny—which reframes historical figures usually not associated
with perpetration as mass murderers—The New Adventures of Hitler
explores young Adolf’s path toward perpetration, connecting it to earlier

atrocities committed by the British Empire. While the strip does allow
readers to commiserate with Hitler to a small extent—he is depicted as a
despondent schizophrenic, emplotting his own life as a romance—it
largely functions, I argue, as a satire of imperial romanticism and as a
reminder of the tragic legacies of empire.
In Chap. 4, “‘May they never get their hands on a monster like that’:
Perpetration and Moral Ambiguity in Kieron Gillen’s Über (2013–),” I con-
tinue to explore the legacy of Nazism and the benefits of ambiguity for the
representation of the perpetrator. By purposefully departing from the his-
torically accurate ending of the Second World War through the insertion
of fantasy elements—the imagined creation by Germany of the first suc-
cessful superpowered beings, a discovery that shifts the outcome of the
war and sees Germany recapturing Europe, defeating Great Britain, and
invading the United States—Über creates the premises for a reexamination
of the neat polarization between good and evil that usually dominates
historical accounts of the period. However, the series neither proposes a
pro-Nazi lens through which the said historical events can be read—
although my chapter also examines a possible sympathetic reading—nor
engages in a complete reversal of the binary; rather, the work creates a
basis for contemplating some of the under-examined but severe ethical
and political failings of the Allied side of the conflict.
After focusing primarily—although not exclusively—on the perpetra-
tion of genocide and mass murder, I turn my attention to sexual violence
in Chap. 5, “Who are you crying for?: Perpetration and Punishment in
Nina Bunjevac’s Bezimena (2019).” Drawing on her own experiences
with sexual violence in 1980s Serbia, Bunjevac uses shadows, silhouettes,
and symbolism to create a profoundly unsettling story of rape and retribu-
tion, as Bezimena the Old—a mystical god-like figure—transports an
ancient priestess to an interwar European city and forces her to live the life
of a deeply disturbed young man. Bezimena—with its sometimes-obscure
symbolism and references to classical mythology—is a work that requires
careful reading, positioning us to decipher rather than merely feel. It is a
work that—much like Bezimena the Old herself—refuses the call to empa-
thy and the language of sentiment. Deliberately estranging and provoca-
tive, Bezimena challenges us to confront perpetration, complicity, and the
ethics of punishment in a manner that is both profound and deeply
uncomfortable.
16 D. MANEA
Finally, Chap. 6, “‘Unable to protect anyone’: Terrorism, Salvation,

and Cultural Intelligibility in Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers & Saints (2013),”
tests several theoretical concepts of the transcultural turn in memory stud-
ies against Chinese-American author Gene Luen Yang’s two-volume his-
torical fantasy graphic novel Boxers & Saints (2013). The chapter explores
the strategies employed in the visual-verbal reimagining of the Boxer
Rebellion (1899–1901), a Chinese anti-imperialist uprising which was in
part triggered by anti-Christian sentiment and resulted in the massacre of
both Chinese converts and foreign missionaries, Boxers & Saints employs
the conventions of superhero fiction, as well as the contemporary image of
the terrorist, in order to make the comic book more intelligible to a global
readership. Thus, the first volume, Boxers, is centered on the figure of the
young Lee Bao, whose descent into terrorism is sparked by the oppression
of his family and fellow villagers by foreign missionaries and soldiers; on
the other hand, Saints, the second volume, zeroes in on a different per-
spective on the same historical events through the eyes of Vibiana, a
Chinese girl whose conversion to Catholicism eventually makes her a vic-
tim of an anti-Christian massacre led by Lee Bao. This two-pronged nar-
rative focus creates the premises for a rare perspective on historical events
from both the side of the victim and that of the perpetrator and offers an
important angle for the examination of the ethics of humanizing—and
even sympathizing with—perpetrators of genocide and mass murder.
What the five works I have selected thus have in common is that they
do not merely frame but consciously reframe the figure of the perpetrator:
the often mythologized Lewis and Clark are recast as mass murderers
(Manifest Destiny), Adolf Hitler is satirically depicted as a would-be
Romantic hero on a quest for the Holy Grail (The New Adventures of
Hitler), German soldiers are reimagined as self-instrumentalizing super-
powered beings in the employ of the Reich (Über), a priestess is trans-
ported to a world in which she inhabits the consciousness of a schizophrenic
sexual predator and murderer (Bezimena), and a young man transforms
himself into a superpowered terrorist, only to be ultimately saved by the
martyrdom of one of his victims (Boxers & Saints). The works I analyze
explore issues that are central to the depiction of perpetration—trauma,
empathy, intentionality, and punishment, among others—but they do so
in a manner that is deliberately estranging and provocative. Drawing on
some of the traditional conventions of the medium—funny animals, super-
powered beings, pulp horror tropes, or classic bondage imagery—the
comics I have selected reframe the figure of the perpetrator, rendering it
both familiar and strange. In doing so, they ultimately speak to the poten-
tial of comics—especially comics on the margins—to depict the act of per-
petration in ways that engender profound affective and cognitive responses
and cast new light on the figure of the perpetrator.
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CHAPTER 2
“Nothing was spared”: Monstrosity

and the Sympathetic Perpetrator in Manifest
Destiny (Chris Dingess and Matthew
Roberts, 2013–)
Manifest Destiny (2013–), a subversive reimagining of the 1804–1806

Lewis and Clark expedition, created and written by Chris Dingess, with
art by Matthew Roberts and Owen Gieni, finds the American explorers
battling various fantastical creatures—including giant frogs, sapient duck-
like creatures, and vampire-like beings—as they set out to chart and civi-
lize the Louisiana territory.1 Their encounters with such monsters—and
our experience of their adventures—create a variety of effects, from the
horrific to the humorous to the unsettling. My chapter is largely interested
in the last of these effects and examines Manifest Destiny as a work of
weird fiction, indebted to the earlier tradition of the frontier Gothic. In
1
Manifest Destiny incorporates numerous departures from the historical record. As Dingess
himself attests in the letter section at end of issue 6 (2014, n. pag.), history in Manifest
Destiny is used to frame the story and not to drive it (the one departure that the writer has
promised not to make has to do with the expedition’s route, which Dingess says that he
intends to follow). Lisa Macklem notes that this is a depiction of history that is eminently
presentist, as it questions received historical knowledge, and foregrounds a number of
important issues that are still relevant today: from environmentalism to social inequality
(2015). For a historical account of the Lewis and Clark expedition, please see David
Lavender’s The Way to the Western Sea: Lewis and Clark across the Continent (2001).
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

Switzerland AG 2022
D. Manea, Reframing the Perpetrator in Contemporary Comics,
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03853-2_2
22 D. MANEA
conversation with critics, such as Darja Malcolm-Clarke, Simon Spiegel,

and Matthew Wynn Sivils, I try to grapple with what I consider the most
daring and difficult event in the comic book series—the genocide commit-
ted by the Corps of Discovery against the Fezron people—by looking at
the ways in which the graphic narrative makes readers sympathize with
genocide perpetrators.
The series, then, deliberately foregrounds the darker aspects of US
colonialism, reframing the protagonists as genocide perpetrators on a mis-
sion to cleanse the frontier of undesirable, monstrous creatures. Although
aware of the problematic morality of their actions, the men of the expedi-
tion—on the orders of President Jefferson—systematically engage in the
extermination of sapient non-human creatures in a manner that is meant
to recall—and is overtly equated with—the Native American genocide. As
such, my chapter also explores the ways in which Manifest Destiny engages
with the earlier tradition of the frontier Gothic (Mogen, Sanders, and
Karpinski 1992) and its representation of the liminal space of the frontier.
I am particularly interested in the figure of the monster—and especially
the anthropomorphic monster—as it both displaces and replaces that of
the Native American in the logic of the frontier Gothic.
Drawing on an earlier article in which I discussed the genocide com-
mitted by the Corps of Discovery against the Fezron—a sapient, anthro-
pomorphic bird-like people—this chapter explores the framing of Lewis
and Clark as sympathetic, if morally flawed, perpetrators. To this end, I
read Manifest Destiny as a work whose employment of estrangement is
essential to its depiction of the monstrous and of perpetration. Yet unlike
the Vameter, for example—a headless, bat-like monster, which grafts its
victims’ heads to its own torso—the Fezron are not truly figures of disgust
nor do they engender any strange feeling of existentially profound other-
ness; rather, their representation is indebted to the funny-animals tradition
in comics and animation. This is a strategy that the series pursues deliber-
ately: from its emphasis on tropes frequently—and problematically—asso-
ciated with indigenous peoples such as ritual sacrifice and stereotypical
dress to its foregrounding of celebration and familial embrace, Manifest
Destiny goes to great lengths to naturalize and humanize the Fezron. At
the end of the third arc, Chiroptera and Carniformaves, estrangement is
not produced by the Fezron but by the actions of the Corps of Discovery,
as they systematically murder all of them, men, women, and children, fol-
lowing a feast in honor of the Corps.
While the series invokes tropes associated with the Holocaust in popu-
lar culture to make their actions more readily reprehensible—Lewis
2 “NOTHING WAS SPARED”: MONSTROSITY AND THE SYMPATHETIC… 23
suggests the men are merely following their orders; one soldier had earlier
described the Fezron as vermin—my primary interest here is with the par-
allel the series makes with the Native American genocide. In his narration,
Lewis notes that their actions could not have been unexpected or novel,
linking it with the time they had served “clearing the frontier of hostiles”
(Dingess and Roberts 2015, Manifest Destiny #18). In doing so, the series
seems to both recall—and subvert—the much earlier tradition of the fron-
tier Gothic and its representation of the Native American as a monstrous
figure. As Matthew Wynn Sivils notes:
The result of the literary marriage of Indian captivity narratives and European
Gothic was a distinctly American brand of Gothic literature, one that made
genuine use of inborn American anxieties about the perceived threat of a
dehumanizing wilderness, which served as both a site of and signifier for
violent reprisals at the hands of Native Americans. American Frontier Gothic
is perhaps best defined by its cultivation of often-unstable border zones, of
hazy demarcations between self-reliance and self-delusion, between the
humane and the monstrous. (2014, 93)
Many of the non-human creatures that the Corps of Discovery encounter,

label “monstrous,” and usually kill occupy precisely this liminal position.
The still uncharted frontier that they explore is a space rife with creatures
whose nature questions the divide between the human and the non-
human, the ordinary and the monstrous. The buffalotaur, for instance—
the first such creature they encounter—has a buffalo carriage, a human
torso, and a hybrid buffalo-human head. During Lewis’s dissection of the
creature, his journal reads: “Though some of the flesh appears human, it
is actually tougher. Thicker. Like animal hide […] Species: ? (Human,
Buffalo)” (2013, Manifest Destiny #2, n. pag.). Lewis’s inability to catego-
rize the creature—the appellation buffalotaur itself is a misnomer, relying
on the familiar classical figures of the centaur and the minotaur—gestures
toward the identitary confusion that the frontier engenders. Earlier in
issue 1, as the members of expedition discover the slain buffalotaur, they
wonder from a distance if the figure is Shoshone, Sioux, or Blackfoot
before noticing its non-human features (2013, n. pag.). Covered in war
paint, the creature—much like the Fezron—recalls the earlier, somewhat
similar role Native Americans were given in the logic of the frontier Gothic.
Even before the Corps’ encounter with the Fezron, this is a parallel that
is hinted at. In issue 12, for instance, President Jefferson shows Lewis the
skull of a creature he calls a “cyclops,” trying to entice him to join the
24 D. MANEA
expedition. The skull is very large, with a single eye socket and a horn
protruding from its forehead. Despite its clearly non-human features,
Lewis dismisses Jefferson’s mythological interpretation of the skull, argu-
ing that it most likely belonged to “an Indian with a birth defect. Poor
bastard” (2014, n. pag.). Ironically, Lewis himself would employ the tradi-
tion of classical mythology in his attempt at categorizing the buffalotaur—
suggesting an inability to see the world beyond European conventions.
Yet Lewis’s misinterpretation also alludes to the series’ parallel between
the indigenous and the monstrous, a parallel that it will ultimately prob-
lematize throughout its run. By the latter issues of Manifest Destiny,
Lewis’s own love interest will come to describe him as a “monster” (2019,
Manifest Destiny #39, n. pag.), as the series will seek to question the con-
ventions that undergirded the frontier Gothic and the larger project of
European expansionism.
As such, perhaps the major question present in the comic book series is
whether it vindicates or discredits the genocidal doctrine of “Manifest
Destiny,” John O’Sullivan’s mid-nineteenth-century term for America’s
providential mission to expand westward (2001, 8). Needless to say, this is
a question that has divided critical opinion. In his CraveOnline review of
the first issue, Andy Hunsaker prophesized that “it may come to pass that
we begin rooting for the monsters to prevent the spread of Native
American genocide” (2013, n. pag.)—and the series may very well be on
the way to making his prophecy come true. Later plot developments in the
series reveal a narrative unafraid to challenge the various injustices perpe-
trated in the name of manifest destiny, and in doing so to question a pro-
gressive theory of history that would vindicate colonialism as, at worst, a
necessary evil. To summarize bluntly, in issue 18, the series’ heroes actively
and ruthlessly engage in genocide.
Manifest Destiny’s third arc, Chiroptera and Carniformaves, finds the
Corps of Discovery interacting with a strange tribe of highly intelligent
bird-like creatures, the Fezron. Their cognitive capacity and emotional
structure appear similar to those of a human being, as made evident by
their ability to speak—English or Fezron, as they refer to the language—to
reason and to care for their lovers and offspring.2 The Fezron themselves
2
In this, Manifest Destiny seems to privilege an understanding of the human—or human-
like—grounded in rationality and affect, which the more monstrous Vameter, which I
also discuss in this chapter, appears to lack.
are blue, short, and stocky and entirely covered in feathers, save for their
beaks, hands, and feet. The major threat they pose lies in their bite, which
infects victims with a highly dangerous poison, whose only known cure is
Fezron urine, as the Corps discover after capturing one member of their
species, Dawhog, following his attack. The Fezron later leads them to his
village, where they discover that his tribe has captured one of their men,
Charbonneau, and is preparing to cook him. To save the Frenchman, the
men, with Dawhog in tow, promise to kill the dreaded Vameter, a monster
that had been preying on the Fezron for generations and to whom they
had been sacrificing members of their tribe as a means of appeasement.
In many ways, the Fezron function as analogs for early nineteenth-
century Native Americans: they are tribal and largely non-literate, their
leader wears a headdress and staff that are reminiscent of South American
natives (Fig. 2.1), they engage in ritual sacrifice, and they appear to
Fig. 2.1 Fezron leader wearing headdress in Manifest Destiny #15 (2015, n.
pag.). (© Skybound, LLC)
26 D. MANEA
perform what Ian Dawe has identified as the trope of the “wisecracking
Native American,” as found in films such as Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man
(Dawe 2015, n. pag.).3 The Fezron genocide that follows should thus
arguably be read in light of this analogy and it should be placed in the
context of the series’ larger depiction of colonial-native interaction. Such
a reading, I think, reveals that Manifest Destiny has been actively engaging
with the legacy of Native American genocide, which it has yet to whitewash.
The Fezron, though, are not perfect analogs: they are after all a differ-
ent species altogether, with a much lower life span (the adult Dawhog was
only a child when he first tasted human meat, about three years earlier)
and a poisonous bite that can pose significant problems to human beings.
As such, the Fezron could be rationalized as monstrous, although we
should bear in mind that such rationalizations could be—and were—
applied to Native Americans, as well in the period (Kennedy 2016, 135).
The very nature of the Fezron interrogates the divide between human and
non-human and calls into question our ethical relationship to people we
understand as being fundamentally different from ourselves. The repre-
sentation of the Fezron, I argue in this chapter, is essential for this effect.
The representation of the Fezron is not grounded in a logic of defamil-
iarization, a feature essential to weird fiction, but rather one of naturaliza-
tion (“the process of normalizing the alien,” as Simon Spiegel defines it
(2008, 376)). In making this claim, I am employing the two terms, as
understood by Spiegel, and articulated as a critique of Darko Suvin’s con-
cept of cognitive estrangement. Spiegel makes a further worthwhile dis-
tinction between defamiliarization—as a formal effect, present at the level
of rhetoric—and diegetic estrangement, which he defines as “a collision
[…] between two systems of reality, whenever a marvelous element is
introduced into a seemingly realistic world” (2008, 375). What is impor-
tant here is that the marvelous element too is framed according to the
same realistic system of representation.
The distinction between defamiliarization and diegetic estrangement is
particularly relevant for the scene in which Dawhog is revealed to be a
3
As Dawe notes, the Fezron initially appear to be smarter—or more aware—than their US
counterparts. This is suggested to readers through seemingly innocent matter-of-fact state-
ments that nevertheless prove to be rather insightful (such as Dawhog’s comment on
American identity and the English language, which I mention later in this chapter), dismis-
sive barbs, or sarcastic banter. Dawe connects this to what he calls the trope of the “wise-
cracking Native American”—a character who possesses greater insight than their (often)
white counterparts, yet sometimes disguises it through humor.
Fig. 2.2 Dawhog is introduced in Manifest Destiny #15 (2015, n. pag.). (©

Skybound, LLC)
sapient creature (Fig. 2.2). As Lewis and Clark are shown quarreling—in
silhouette—a voice is heard from the box the Fezron was trapped in,
exclaiming “for the love of Glorgogg! Give it some rest! You two sounds
like an old nuptialed pairing.” The panel showing Lewis, Clark, and the
rest of the ship in silhouette gives way to a largely borderless frame—liter-
ally in the gutters of the page—depicting a befuddled Lewis and Clark.
The latter turns his head in confusion, half of his body trapped beneath
the previous panel, while the former points to the location of the cage, as
it had earlier been established. The sequence employs both diegetic
estrangement, in the sense that the strangeness of the creature’s exclama-
tion is marked by the inclusion of unfamiliar but understandable vocabu-
lary in a familiar turn of phrase (the replacement of “God” with “Glorgogg”
and “old nuptialed pairing” with “old married couple”) and formal defa-
miliarization, present in the way the narrative plays with silhouette and
panel positioning (2015, Manifest Destiny #15, n. pag.).
Through its use of the silhouette, the first panel creates an atmosphere
of the mundane—yet another discussion between Lewis and Clark about
their personal demons—which is interrupted by a marvelous and estrang-
ing exclamation (emphasized through the use of blue text in a jagged
word bubble). This appears to create a breakage in the very structure of
the narrative and the storyworld, as the protagonists are depicted in the
28 D. MANEA
gutter of the page, in front of a white background, momentarily unable to

make sense of what they are witnessing. The next panel, on the next page,
then depicts Dawhog, the source of the strange exclamation, explaining
his puzzlement as to why he would not be able to speak (and the rest of
the page, as well as the next one, are fairly conventional in terms of form).
Furthermore, it is likely that the silhouetted panel is from the perspective
of Dawhog, reflecting his lack of knowledge and interest in humanity. The
breakage I have earlier suggested would thus be the result of the conver-
gence of two different ways of making sense of the world.
Through its employment of diegetic estrangement and formal defamil-
iarization, Manifest Destiny creates a space of ontological ambiguity, which
is further strengthened in the two pages following the sequence I’ve dis-
cussed. In an attempt at understanding one another, Dawhog and the
Corps of Discovery have a mutually perplexing discussion about the lan-
guage they are employing, which readers manifestly recognize as English,
although Dawhog claims it to be Fezron. Dawhog then identifies the
explorers as English, based on the name of the language they claim to be
employing, which visibly angers members of the Corps, who in turn claim
to be American. Dawhog ponders this before ultimately concluding that
they are “stupids” (2015, Manifest Destiny #15, n. pag.). The scene,
therefore, hints at the identitary confusion present in the early American
Republic (Smith-Rosenberg 2010, 42) and serves to call into question the
nature of national and collective identity. Dawhog is thus introduced as a
defamiliarizing element in a narrative that had, until then, accepted a fairly
firm ontological delimitation between the human and the monstrous.
While human beings had previously been shown to behave monstrously
and had even been turned into monsters, the delimitation had yet to be
questioned overtly; Dawhog is the first creature to look like a monster but
act like a human being. Nevertheless, in the course of the third volume,
the sense of estrangement created by the introduction of Dawhog is tem-
pered, as the Fezron are naturalized as human-like via the parallels to
Native American culture that I have discussed above.
Yet this type of ontological ambiguity is essential to weird fiction,4 a
genre, mode, or even “sensation”—to quote Anne and Jeff VanderMeer
(2012, n. pag.)—that is itself inherently ambiguous and relies on estrang-
ing elements that call into question the conventions of our lived existence
4
For a discussion of the possible influence of H. P. Lovecraft—one of the original popular-
izers of the term weird fiction—on Manifest Destiny, please see Petrelli (2018).
and of the categories that we employ to make sense of the world. Darja
Malcolm-Clarke, drawing on the work of Geoffrey Galt Harpham, identi-
fies the grotesque as the mode most often used in weird fiction to depict
the body. She proposes a reading of the grotesque as “an unease that sug-
gests our way of classifying the world into knowable parts doesn’t get the
job done” (2008, 339). The physical representation of the Fezron is thus
not necessarily estranging—in fact, their bodies are in a sense already natu-
ralized or allow for easy naturalization (their anthropomorphic nature
makes them quite similar to other famous avian bipeds such as Donald
Duck or Daffy Duck). A much clearer instance of bodily estrangement
occurs in the encounter between the Corps of Discovery and the enemy of
the Fezron, the Vameter—a type of headless, bat-like creature, who steals
the heads of its victims and places them on its torso.
As a monster, the aesthetics of the Vameter defy easy categorization—
although it is likely influenced by the headless horseman and vampire
tropes—and this serves to create one of the series’ most powerful scenes of
body horror. Much like the Fezron, the Vameter also calls into question
the human/monster dichotomy by literally grafting the human onto itself,
but unlike the Fezron, it cannot be easily naturalized: its taking of Private
Jameson’s head is depicted as a transgressive violation (Fig. 2.3), and it
does not have the ability to speak or make itself understandable (it cannot
even control the head without using its small tentacle-like appendages,
which further suggests an inability to reach the rank of human). The kill-
ing of the Vameter can be read as a kind of communal catharsis, but the
way the series depicts the scene is a bit more nuanced and serves to inter-
rogate the ethical values of the Corps of Discovery. Right before Clark
cuts off the Vameter’s head using Jameson’s sword (his severed hand still
clutching it), a caption from Lewis’s journal reads, “And he made Jameson
useful one last time to boot.” In a sense, the human body is instrumental-
ized both by the Vameter and by Clark and this troubling parallel is made
even more palpable in the next panel (with Jameson’s head flying vertically
to his hand). The sequence in which the men chop up the Vameter is also
framed in a disturbing manner: first a panel depicting the corps in black
silhouette, over a gray-and-red background, and then three panels of
Clark, Lewis, and Collins depicted individually—no longer in silhouette,
but with red, black, and gray backgrounds—and describing their motiva-
tions. The darkness of the sequence arguably foreshadows the later Fezron
genocide (2015, Manifest Destiny #18, n. pag.).
30 D. MANEA
Fig. 2.3 The vameter grafting Private Jameson’s head onto itself in Manifest
Destiny #18 (2015, n. pag.). (© Skybound, LLC)
I will return to the scene of genocide later, but for now I would like to
suggest that what makes it particularly effective is that the series has made
readers sympathize with the perpetrators and that their act of genocide
also interrogates a long-standing white American identification with the
enactors and forerunners of the doctrine of manifest destiny (one founda-
tional narrative that still carries considerable mainstream cachet in the
United States). Characters with whom we have until then sympathized
skulk in the night and massacre each and every Fezron, adults as well as
children, in the name of obeying their orders and following their mission,
“to clear the way for peaceful settlement,” as President Jefferson puts it in
the briefing he issues the Corps (2013, Manifest Destiny #2, n. pag.).
To achieve identification, the series employs two major strategies. The
first is memorial—and this could even be called pre-identification, in the
sense that Lewis and Clark come to us as a known property: they are part
of American mythology, their journals are studied in schools and high
schools, and they are the subject of countless books, films, and documen-
taries. In this sense, they are part of American cultural memory, and they
do indeed function as figures of memory, to use Jan Assmann’s term
(1997, 11), both for the series core American audiences and for readers of
American history and mythology.5 Our familiarity with them, as well as
their privileged position in cultural memory, helps engender a sense of
identification.6
Furthermore, Lewis and Clark do largely perform their function as heroes
of American cultural memory, and this leads us to a second type of identifica-
tion, which is ethical in nature: the two men had, until the Fezron genocide,
generally acted according to twenty-first-century values. Both were generally
free of—or at least did not voice—any nineteenth-century prejudice against
women or (what readers would now consider) minorities (Lewis had engaged
the help of Magdalene Boniface, a widow they’d rescued, in his scientific
work, recognizing her as the better surgeon, while Clark had noted and
respected Sacagawea’s immense combat skill), both had never administered
unjust punishment or acted solely for personal gain; and both had repeatedly
risked their lives to save the men under their command. But I do employ here
terms such as “largely” and “generally” to imply that the series had neverthe-
less suggested a darkness at the heart of both men and that their actions at the
end of issue 18 should be read in light of it. One of the main areas this dark-
ness manifests itself is in their past interactions with Native Americans.
The series has long tackled the Native American genocide, rightfully
placing responsibility on the colonists and on American authorities. In
fact, images of genocide are usually connected in the series to Clark’s per-
petrator trauma.7 Three important narrative sequences deal with this
explicitly: after being swallowed by a plant monster, in issue 6, Lewis
dreams of an orgy, while Clark has a nightmare about the natives he has
killed and their revenge. When later questioned about his dream by Lewis,
Clark lies about it, ending the series’ first story arc with the curt “I don’t
dream” (2014, n. pag.). In issue 7, After Boniface discovers Lewis’s
5
For a more detailed discussion of Manifest Destiny’s adaptation of American history,
please see Fuchs and Rabitsch (2022).
6
For a critique of the concept of identification on both a political and a psychological level,
please see Barker (1989). Here I am only using the term as a shorthand for the cultural pro-
cesses through which we identify people long dead as sufficiently similar to ourselves within
the larger logic of the nation-state.
7
For more information on perpetrator trauma, please see Saira Mohamed’s “Of Monsters
and Men: Perpetrator Trauma and Mass Atrocity” (2015).
32 D. MANEA
Fig. 2.4 Clark sees one of his Native American victims in the flame in Manifest
Destiny #7 (2014, n. pag.). (© Skybound, LLC)
journals and secret orders, Clark suggests killing her, as she is guilty of
treason. When Lewis protests that they are not killers, Clark rhetorically
asks “we’re not?” looking into the lamplight and seeing a dying Native
American man (Fig. 2.4). And in issue 17, the issue right before the
Fezron genocide, Clark tells Lewis that a young soldier by the name of
Collins reminds him of Lewis, and we get a flashback to their fighting in
the Indian wars.8 In both panels, Clark looks proud of Lewis, while in the
lower corner we have a native woman crying over a murdered loved one.
With this last image, I think we have to bear in mind that perpetrator
trauma does not necessarily mean guilt or regret, but can manifest itself
simply as PTSD, with the traumatized subject regretting that he is suffer-
ing from the disorder itself and not his misdeeds.
The Corps of Discovery’s genocide against the Fezron should thus be
read in light of the series’ larger approach to the Native American Genocide.
8
This is a significant departure from the historical record, as the real Meriwether Lewis
never saw action, while he was stationed with Clark, nor fought in the Indian wars (Lavender
2001, 9).
The scenes of the slaughter itself are framed by excerpts from Lewis’s jour-
nal, which narrate their actions, as well as feelings. Lewis claims that all the
men had reservations, but that their mission is clear—they have to elimi-
nate all threats to colonial settlement—and that the Fezron had proven
themselves dangerous, despite their charm and occasional helpfulness, an
assertion that is juxtaposed with images of a cute, drunk, sleeping Fezron.
The scenes, therefore, also serve to draw our attention to the very much
real genocide of the Native Americans, who would in turn prove a problem
for white settlement. In this sense, I think it is important here that Lewis
claims that Fezron are murdered not for being monstrous but simply for
being a threat (2015, Manifest Destiny #18, n. pag.).
The perpetrator’s awareness of the moral ambiguity of his actions is evi-
dent. On the next page, as the Fezron leader sleeps peacefully alongside
several Fezron children, Lewis’s narration explains that he didn’t “feel
good about this” and that it was “a dirty bit of business” (the latter juxta-
posed to a panel where Lewis slits the throat of a frightened Fezron). Below
there are two contrasting panels, where one of the creatures—drawn in a
manner that places particular emphasis on its bird-like features—is shot in
the face, while Lewis’s narration mentions that the men have been pre-
pared for this moment by time spent clearing hostiles from frontier areas,
again connecting this particular slaughter to the larger Native American
genocide. Additionally, Collins is confronted by Dawhog, with whom he
had become friendly during the Vameter hunt and who was one of the first
people to pronounce his name correctly, thus signaling a greater affinity
than the one that he had felt with most humans. Collins hesitates to kill
Dawhog and is confronted with two external voices: Clark’s chastisement
and admonition to kill them all, and Dawhog’s call for him not to be “a
stupid” like the rest of them (Fig. 2.5). Dawhog looks particularly human-
like here9—his round, childlike eyes drawn larger for dramatic effect—and
his presence helps reinforce Collins’s understanding of the moral depravity
9
As Greg Garrard notes such representations of anthropomorphic animals evince a form of
Disnification (a term he takes over from Steve Baker): “Anthropomorphic animal narratives
are generally denigrated as ‘childish,’ thereby associating a dispassionate, even alienated per-
spective with maturity. The visual cue of disnification is ‘neoteny,’ or the set of characteristics
we instinctively associate with infant humans and animals: large eyes, a big head relative to
the body, short limbs and a generally rounded configuration” (Garrard 2004, 142). When it
comes to the representation of the Fezron, Manifest Destiny has a tendency to switch from
Disnification to other strategies that place more emphasis on their monstrosity in order to
guide reader affect.
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sought after, by the profession of the gospel, but a new heavenly life,
through the eternal Son of God, wrought in the fallen soul; there, the
spirit of satanic and worldly subtlety, will be church, and priest, and
supreme power, in all that is called religion.
But to return to the doctrine of continual inspiration. The natural

man, educated in Pagan learning, and scholastic theology, seeing
the strength of his genius in the search after knowledge, how easy
and learnedly he can talk, and write, criticise and determine upon all
scripture words and facts, looks at all this, as a full proof of his own
religious wisdom, and calls immediate inspiration, enthusiasm; not
considering, that all the woes denounced by Christ against Scribes,
Pharisees, and Hypocrites, are so many woes, denounced against
every appearance and shew of religion, that the natural man can
practise.
And what is well to be noted, every one, however high in human

literature, is but this very natural man, and can only have the
goodness of a carnal religion, till as empty of all, as a new-born child,
the Spirit of God becomes the inspirer and doer of all that he wills,
does, and aims at, in his whole course of religion.
*But to all this, it must be added, that a religion of worldly glory

and prosperity carried on, under the gospel-state, has more of a
diabolical nature, than that of the Jewish Pharisees. It is the highest,
and last working of the mystery of iniquity, because it lives to Satan
and the world, in and by a daily profession of being crucified with
Christ, of being led by his Spirit, of being risen from the world, and
set with him in heavenly places.
I would ask all writers against continual, immediate divine
inspiration, how they could more effectually lead men, into an
habitual state of sinning against the Holy Ghost, than by such
doctrine? For how can we possibly avoid the sin of grieving, or
quenching the Spirit, but by continually reverencing his holy
presence in us; by continually waiting for, trusting, and attending to
that, which the Spirit of God, wills, works, and manifests within us?
To turn men from this continual dependance upon the Holy Spirit, is
turning them from all true knowledge of God. For without this, there
is no possibility of any edifying, saving knowledge of God. For tho’
we have ever so many mathematical demonstrations of his being,
we are without all real knowledge of him, till his own Spirit manifests
him, as a power of life, light, and goodness, vitally felt, and adored in
our souls. This is the one knowledge of God, which is eternal life;
this is that knowledge of which Christ saith, no one knoweth the
Father but the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son revealeth him.
And if none belong to God, but those who are led by the spirit of
God, if we are reprobates unless the Spirit of Christ be living in us,
who need be told, that all we have to trust to, as children of God, is
the continual, immediate guidance, unction, and teaching of his Holy
Spirit? Or how can we more profanely sin against this Spirit, or more
expressly call men from the power of God unto Satan, than by
ridiculing a faith and hope, that look wholly to his continual,
immediate operations, for all that can be holy and good in us?
This is the end of all scripture; for all that is there said, however
learnedly read, or studied by Hebrew or Greek skill, fails of its end,
till it brings us to feel all that the scriptures speak of God and man,
verified in our own souls. For all is within man, that can be either
good or evil to him: God within him, is his divine life; Satan within him
is his life of earthly wisdom, of diabolical falseness, wrath, pride, and
vanity of every kind. There is no middle-way, he that is not under the
power of the one, is under the power of the other; so far therefore as
man loses this life of God, so far he falls under the power of Satan
and worldly wisdom. When St. Peter, full of an human love to Christ,
advised him to avoid his sufferings, Christ rejected him with Get thee
behind me, Satan; and only gave this reason for it, thou savourest
not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men. A plain
proof that whatever is not from the Holy Spirit of God, however
plausible it may seem to men, is yet in itself, nothing else but the
power of Satan in us. *Christians, seeking any thing else, but to be
inspired by the Spirit of God, will bring forth a Christendom, that in
the sight of God will have no other name, than a spiritual Babylon, a
spiritual Egypt, a scarlet whore, a devouring beast, and red dragon.
For all these names belong to all men, however learned, and to all
churches, whether greater or less, in which the spirit of this world
hath any share of power. This was the fall of the whole church, soon
after the apostolic ages; and all human reformations, begun by
ecclesiastical learning, and supported by civil power, will signify little
or nothing, till all churches dying to their own will, wisdom, and own
advancement, seek for no reforming power, but from that Spirit of
God, which converted Sinners, Publicans, Harlots, Jews and
Heathens, into an holy, apostolical church, a church, which knew
they were of God, that they belonged to God, by that spirit which he
had given them, and which worked in them.
*Time, and the things of time, will soon have an end; and he that
trusts to any thing but the Spirit of God working in his heart, will be
but ill fitted to enter into eternity; God must be all in all in us here, or
we cannot be his hereafter. Time works only for eternity; and poverty
eternal must as certainly follow him, who dies only stuffed with
human learning, as he who dies only full of worldly riches. The folly
of thinking to have any divine learning, but that which the Holy Spirit
teaches, or to make ourselves rich in knowledge towards God, by
heaps of common place learning, will leave us, as dreadfully
cheated, as that rich builder of barns in the gospel, to whom it was
said, Thou fool, this night shall thy soul be required of thee; and
then, whose shall all these things be? Luke 12. So is every man that
treasures up a religious learning, that comes not wholly from the
Spirit of God.
Farther, what a blindness is it, to charge persons with the

enthusiasm of holding the necessity of continual, immediate
inspiration, and to attack them as enemies to the established church,
when every body’s eyes see, that collect after collect in the
established liturgy, teaches, and requires them to believe, and pray
for the continual inspiration of the Spirit, as that alone, by which they
can have the least good thought or desire? Thus, “O God, forasmuch
as without thee, we are not able to please thee; mercifully grant that
thy Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts.” Is it
possible for words more strongly to express the necessity of a
continual, divine inspiration? Or can inspiration be higher, or more
immediate in prophets and apostles, than that which directs, that
which rules our hearts, not now and then, but in all things? Or can
the absolute necessity of this be more fully declared, than by saying,
that if it is not in this degree both of height and continuance in our
hearts, nothing that is done by us, can be pleasing to God?
Now the matter is not at all about the different effects, proceeding
from inspiration, as whether by it, a man be made a saint in himself,
or sent by God with a prophetic message to others, this affects not
the nature and necessity of inspiration, which is just as necessary to
all true goodness, as to all true prophecy. All scripture is of divine
inspiration. But why so? Because holy men of old, spake as they
were moved by the Holy Ghost. Now the above collect, as well as
Christ and his apostles, oblige us in like manner to hold, that all
holiness is by divine inspiration, and that therefore there could have
been no holy men of old, or in any latter times, but solely for this
reason, because they LIVED, as they were moved by the Holy
Ghost. Again, the liturgy prays thus, “O God, from whom all good
things do come, grant that by thy holy inspiration, we may think
those things that be good, and by thy merciful guiding may perform
the same.” Now, if I have ever said any thing higher of the nature,
and necessity of continual, divine inspiration, than this church-prayer
does, I refuse no censure. But if I have, from all that we know of
God, shewn the utter impossibility of any goodness in us, but from
the divine nature in us, if I have shewn, that Christ and his apostles,
over and over say the same thing; and that our church liturgy is daily
praying according to it; what kinder thing can I say of those
churchmen, who accuse me of enthusiasm, than that which Christ
said of his blind crucifiers, Father, forgive them, for they know not
what they do!
It is to no purpose to object to all this, that these kingdoms are

over-run with enthusiasts who are acting in the wildest manner,
under the pretence of being led by the Spirit. Be it so, or not so, the
doctrine I am upon is not in the least affected by it. For what an
argument would this be; enthusiasts make a bad use of the doctrine
of being led by the Spirit of God, ergo, he is enthusiastical who
preaches up the doctrine of being led by the Spirit of God. Now as
absurd as this is, was any of my accusers, as high in genius, as
bulky in learning, as Colossus was in stature, he would be at a loss
to bring a stronger argument than this, to prove me an enthusiast, or
an abettor of them.
Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye cannot
enter into the kingdom of God. Now as sure as this is necessary, so
sure is it, that no one can be thus converted, till natural reason, and
his own will, are equally denied.
Now whether this reason, broken off from God, contendeth about
the difference of scripture words and opinions, or reasoneth against
them, the same evil state of fallen nature, the same separation from
God, the same evil tempers of flesh and blood, will be equally
strengthened by the one, as by the other. Hence it is, that Papists
and Protestants are hating, fighting, and killing one another for the
sake of their different, excellent opinions, and yet, as to the lust of
the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, they are in the
highest union, and communion with one another. For if you expect a
zealous Protestant to be therefore alive to God, or a zealous Papist
to be therefore dead to all goodness, you may be said, to have lived
in the world without either eyes or ears.—And the reason why it must
be so, is because bad syllogisms for transubstantiation, and better
syllogisms against it, signify no more towards the casting Satan out
of our souls, than a bad, or better taste for painting.
Hence also it is, that Christendom, full of the nicest decisions

about faith, grace, works, merits, satisfaction, &c. is full of all those
evil tempers, which prevailed in the Heathen world, when none of
these things were thought of.
A scholar, pitying the blindness and folly of those who live to
themselves in the cares and pleasures of this vain life, thinks himself
to have escaped the pollutions of the world, because he is day after
day, dividing, dissecting, and mending church opinions, fixing
heresies here, schisms there; forgetting all the while, that carnal self-
will and natural reason have the doing of all that is done by this
learned zeal, and are as busy and active in him, as in the reasoning
infidel, or projecting worldling. For where this is wholly denied, there
nothing can be called heresy, or wickedness, but the want of loving
God with our whole heart, and our neighbour as ourselves: nor any
thing be called life or salvation, but the Spirit and power of Christ
manifesting itself in us. But where the natural man is become great
in religious learning, there the greater the scholar, the more firmly will
he be fixed in their religion, whose God is their belly.
*Hence may be seen, the great and like blindness both of Infidels
and Christians; the one in trusting to their own reason, dwelling in its
own logical conclusions; the other in trusting to their own reason,
dwelling in learned opinions about scripture words and phrases, and
doctrines built upon them. “For as soon as it is known, that God is all
in all, that in him we live and move and have our being; that we can
have nothing separately, or out of him, but every thing in him; that
we have no being, or degree of being but in him; that he can give us
nothing as our good, but himself, nor any degree of salvation from
our fallen nature, but in such degree, as he again communicates
something more of himself to us: as soon as this is known, then it is
known with the utmost evidence, that to put a religious trust in our
own reason, whether confined to itself, or working in doctrines about
scripture words, has the nature of that same idolatry, that puts a
religious trust in the sun, a departed saint, or a graven image.” And
as image-worship has often boasted of its divine power, because of
the wonders of zeal and devotion, that have been raised thereby in
thousands, and ten thousands of its followers; so it is no marvel, if
opinion-worship should often have, and boast of the same effects.
What poor divinity-knowledge comes from great scholars, and
great readers, may be sufficiently seen from the two following
quotations in a late dissertation on enthusiasm; the one is taken from
Dr. Warburton’s sermons, the other from a pastoral letter of Mr.
Stinstra, a preacher amongst the Mennonists of Friesland. That from
Dr. Warburton, stands thus: “By them (that is, by the writings of the
New Testament) the prophetic promise of our Saviour, that the
Comforter should abide for ever; was eminently fulfilled. For tho’ his
ordinary influence occasionally assists the faithful, yet his constant
abode and supreme illumination is in the sacred scriptures. ¹” Dr.
Warburton’s doctrine is this, that the inspired books of the New
Testament, is that Comforter, or Spirit of truth, which is meant by
Christ’s being always with his church.—Let us put the Doctor’s
doctrine into the letter of the text, which will best shew how true, or
false it is.
¹ Dissertation, page 10.
*Our Lord saith, it is expedient for you that I go away, or the

Comforter will not come: that is, it is expedient for you, that I leave
off teaching you in words, that sound only into your outward ears,
that you may have the same words in writing, for your outward eyes
to look upon; for if I do not depart from this vocal way of teaching
you, the Comforter will not come, that is, ye will not have the comfort
of my words written on paper. But if I go away, I will send written
books, which shall lead you into such a truth of words, as ye could
not have, whilst they were only spoken from my mouth; but being
written on paper, they will be my spiritual, heavenly, constant abode
with you.
Christ saith further; I have many things to say unto you, but ye
cannot bear them now: howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come,
he shall guide you into all truth; for he shall not speak of himself, for
he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you: that is, though
ye cannot be sufficiently instructed from my words at present, yet
when they shall hereafter come to you in written books, they will give
you a knowledge of all truth, for they shall not speak of themselves,
but shall receive words from me, and shew them unto you.
*Christ also saith, if any man love me, my Father will love him,
and we will come unto him and make our abode with him: that is,
according to the Doctor’s theology, certain books of scripture will
come to him, and make their abode with him; for he expressly
confineth the constant abode, and supreme illumination of God, to
the holy scriptures. Therefore (horrible to say) God’s inward
presence, his operating power of life and light in our souls, his
dwelling in us, and we in him, is something of a lower nature, that
only may occasionally happen, and has less of God in it, than the
dead letter of scripture, which alone is his constant abode and
supreme illumination—Miserable fruits of a paradoxical genius!
Rabbi, saith Nicodemus to Christ, we know that thou art a

teacher come from God: now this must be said of the scripture
likewise; it is a teacher from God, and therefore fully to be believed,
highly reverenced, and strictly followed. But as Christ’s teaching in
the flesh was only preparatory to his vital teaching by the Spirit; so
the teaching of scripture by words written with ink and paper, is only
preparatory to the teaching of God, by his Spirit within us. Every
other opinion of the holy scripture, but that of an outward teacher
and guide to God’s inward teaching, is but making an idol-god of it: I
say an idol-god; for to those who rest in it as the constant abode and
supreme illumination of God with them, it can be nothing else. For, if
nothing of divine faith, love, or goodness, can have place in us, but
by divine inspiration, they who think these virtues may be sufficiently
raised in us by the letter of scripture, do in truth make the letter of
scripture their inspiring God.
The apostles preached, and wrote to the people by divine
inspiration. But what do they say of their inspired doctrine, and
teachings? What virtue was there in them? Do they say that their
words, and teachings, was the very promised Comforter, the Spirit of
truth, the true abode, and supreme illumination of God in the souls of
men? So far from such a blasphemous thought, that they affirm the
direct contrary, and compare all their inspired teachings to the dead
works of bare planting and watering, and which must continue dead,
till life come into them from much higher power. I have planted, saith
St. Paul, Apollos hath watered, but God gave the increase. And then
further to shew, that this planting and watering, which was the
highest work that an inspired apostle could do, was yet, in itself, to
be considered, as a lifeless, powerless thing; he adds, So then,
neither is he that planteth any thing; nor he that watereth; but God
that giveth the increase.
But if this must be said of all that, which the inspired apostles
taught in outward words, that it was nothing in itself, was without
power, without life, and only such a preparation towards life, as is
that of planting and watering; must not the same be said of their
inspired teachings, when left behind them in writing? For what else
are the apostolical scriptures, but those very instructions put into
writing, which they affirmed to be bare planting and watering, quite
powerless in themselves, till the living Spirit of God worked with
them? Or will any one say, that what Paul, Peter, and John, spoke by
inspiration from their own mouths, was indeed but bare planting and
watering, in order to be capable of receiving life from God: but when
these apostolical instructions, were written on paper, they were
raised out of their first inability, got the nature of God himself,
became spirit and life, and might be called the great quickening
power of God, or, as the Doctor says, the constant abode, and
supreme illumination of his Spirit with us?
I exceedingly love and highly reverence the sacred writings of the
apostles and evangelists, and would gladly persuade every one to
pay as profound a regard to them, as they would to an Elijah, a John
Baptist, or a Paul, whom they knew to be immediately sent from
heaven with God’s message to them.—I reverence them, as fitted to
do all that good amongst Christians now, which the apostles did in
their day, and as of the same benefit to the church of every age, as
their planting and watering was to the first.
But if this is not thought that fullness of regard, that is due to the
holy messengers of God; if any one will still be so learnedly wise, as
to affirm, that though Paul’s preaching in his epistles, whilst he was
alive, was indeed only bare planting and watering, but the same
epistles being published after his death, got another nature, became
full of divine and living power; such a one hath no right to laugh (as
the Doctor doth) at the silly Mahometan, who believes the Alcoran to
be uncreated. For wherever there is divine efficacy, there must be an
uncreated power. And if, as the Doctor saith, the scriptures of the
New Testament are the only constant abode, and supreme
illumination of the Spirit of God with us, all that is said of the eternal
Spirit of God, of the uncreated light, ought to be said of them; that
they are the WORD that was God, was with God, and are our true
Immanuel, or God with us.
I shall now only add this friendly hint to the Doctor, that he has a
remedy at hand in his own sermon, how he may be delivered from
thus grossly mistaking the spirit of the gospel, as well as the law of
Moses. “St. Paul (saith the Doctor) had a quick and lively
imagination, and an extensive and intimate acquaintance with those
masters in moral painting, the classic writers; (N. B.) all which he
proudly sacrificed to the glory of the everlasting gospel.” ¹
¹ Sermon, Volume I. page 229.

Now if the Doctor did that (though it was only from humility) which
he says the apostle did proudly, such humility might be as great a
good to him, as that pride was to the apostle. And if the everlasting
gospel is now as glorious a thing as it was in St. Paul’s days; if the
highest classic knowledge is fit for nothing but to be all sacrificed to
the glory of the gospel; how wonderful is it that this should never
come into his head, from the beginning to the end of his three long
legation-volumes, or that he should come piping hot with fresh and
fresh beauties found out by himself in a Shakespeare, a Pope, &c. to
preach from the pulpit, the divine wisdom of a Paul, in renouncing all
his great classical attainments, as mere loss and dung, that by so
doing, he might win Christ, and be found in him!
Let the Doctor figure to himself the gaudy pageantry of a high

mass in a Romish cathedral; let him wonder at that flagrant, daring
contrariety, that it hath to the first gospel church of Christ. Would he
not still be fuller of wonder, if he should hear the pope declaring, that
all this Heathenish shew of invented fopperies, was his projected
defence of that first church of Christ? But if the Doctor would see a
Protestant wonder, full as great, he need only look at his own
theatrical parading show of Heathen mysteries, and Heathenish
learning, set forth in the highest pomp. To what end? Why to bring
forth what he calls, (as the pope above) his projected defence of
Christianity.
I come now to the quotation from the pastoral letter of Mr.

Stinstra. “A judicious writer, (says the dissertation) observes, that
sound understanding, and reason, are that on which, and by which,
God principally operates, (N. B.) when he finds it proper to assist
(N. B.) our weakness by his Spirit.” ¹
¹ Dissertation, page 73.
I cannot more illustrate the sense, or extol the judgment, both of

the author and quoter of this striking passage, than by the following
words.
A judicious naturalist observes, that sound and strong lungs, are
that, on which, and by which, the air or spirit of this world principally
operates, when (N. B.) he finds it proper to assist, (N. B.) the
weakness of our lungs, by his breathing into them.” Now if any man
should find his heart edified, his understanding enlightened, by the
above passage on divine inspiration, he will be pleased at my
assuring him, that the pastoral letter of Mr. Stinstra, and the
dissertation on enthusiasm, by Dr. Green, are from the beginning to
the end, full as good in every respect, as that is.
These two instances are proof enough, that as soon as any man
trusts to natural abilities, skill in languages, and common-place
learning, as the true means of entering into the kingdom of God, a
kingdom of God, which is nothing but righteousness, peace, and joy
in the Holy Ghost; he gives himself up to certain delusion, and can
escape no error that is popular, or that suits his state and situation in
the learned, religious world. He has sold his birthright in the gospel-
state of divine illumination, to make a figure and noise, with the
sounding brass and tinkling cimbals of the natural man.
Thus Doctor Green, wanting to write on divine inspiration, runs

from book to book, from country to country, to pick up reports
wherever he could find them, concerning divine inspiration, from this
and that judicious author, that so he might be sure of compiling a
judicious dissertation on the subject. All which he might have known
to be mere delusion, had he but remembered, or regarded any one
single saying either of Christ or his apostles concerning the Holy
Spirit, and his operations. For not a word is said by them, but fully
shews that all knowledge of the Spirit, is only that which the Spirit
manifests in man.
*But there is a degree of delusion still higher to be noted, in such
writers, as Dr. Green; for his collection of ingenious, eminent, rational
authors, of whom he asks counsel concerning the necessity, or
certainty of the immediate inspiration of the Spirit, are such as deny
it, and write against it. Therefore the proceeding is just as wise, as if
a man was to consult some ingenious, and eminent Atheists, about
the truth and certainty of God’s immediate, continual providence; or
ask a few select Deists, how, or what he was to believe of the nature
and power of gospel-faith. Now there are the Holy Spirit’s own
operations, and there are reports about them. The only true reports
are those that are made by inspired persons; and if there were no
such persons, there could be no true reports of the matter. And
therefore to consult uninspired persons, and such as deny, and
reproach the pretence to inspiration, to be rightly instructed about the
truth of immediate, continual divine inspiration, is a degree of
blindness, greater than can be charged upon the old Jewish Scribes
and Pharisees.
The reports, that are to be acknowledged as true, concerning the

Holy Spirit, and his operations, are those that are recorded in
scripture; that is, the scriptures are an infallible history, or relation of
that which the Holy Spirit is, and does, and works in true believers;
and also an infallible direction how we are to seek, and wait, and
trust in his good power over us. But then the scriptures themselves,
though thus true, and infallible in these reports about the Holy Spirit,
yet can go no farther, than to be a true history; they cannot give the
reader the possession and enjoyment of that which they relate. This
is plain, not only from the nature of a written history, but from the
express words of our Lord, Except a man be born again, he cannot
see the kingdom of God. Therefore, the new birth, is that alone,
which gives true knowledge and perception of that which is the
kingdom of God. The history may relate truths about it; but the
kingdom of God, being nothing else, but the power and presence of
God, dwelling and ruling in our souls, this can only manifest itself in
man, by the new birth.
*Poor, miserable man! that strives with all the sophistry of human
wit, to be delivered from the immediate, continual operation and
government of the Spirit of God, not considering, that where God is
not, there is the devil, and where the Spirit rules not, there all is the
work of the flesh, tho’ nothing be talked of, but spiritual and Christian
matters. I say talked of; for the best ability of the natural man, can go
no farther than talk, and notions, and opinions about scripture words
and facts; in these, he may be a great critic, an acute logician, a
powerful orator, and know every thing of scripture, except the spirit
and the truth.
How much then is it to be lamented, that though all scripture

assures us, the things of the Spirit of God, must to the end of the
world, be foolishness to the natural man; yet from one end of learned
Christendom to the other, nothing is thought of, as the proper means
of attaining divine knowledge, but that which every natural, proud,
envious, false, vain-glorious, worldly man can do. Where is that
divinity-student, who thinks, or was ever taught to think, of partaking
of the light of the gospel any other way, than by doing with the
scriptures, that which he does with Pagan writers, whether poets,
orators, or comedians, viz. exercising his logic, rhetoric, and critical
skill, in discanting upon them? This done, he is thought by himself,
and others, to have a sufficiency of divine, apostolical knowledge.
What wonder therefore if it should sometimes happen, that the very
same vain, corrupt, puffing literature, that raises one man to be a
poet-laureat, should set another in a divinity chair?
How is it, that the logical, critical, learned deist comes by his
infidelity? Why by the same help of the same good powers of the
natural man, as many a learned Christian comes to know, and
contend for the gospel. For, drop divine inspiration, and all is dropt,
that can give the believer any godly difference from the infidel. The
Christian therefore that rejects and writes against the necessity of
immediate divine inspiration, pleads the whole cause of infidelity: he
confirms the ground on which it stands; and has nothing to prove the
goodness of his own Christianity, but that which equally proves to the
deist, the goodness of his infidelity. For without the new birth, or
which is the same thing, without immediate, continual divine
inspiration, the difference between the Christian, and the Infidel, is
lost; and whether the uninspired, unregenerate son of Adam, be in
the church, or out of the church, he is still that child of this world, that
mere natural man, to whom the things of the Spirit of God, are and
must be foolishness.—Nothing but the loss of the light and Spirit of
God, turned an order of angels into devils.—Nothing but the loss of
that same light and Spirit, took from Adam, his first crown of glory,
stript him more naked than the beasts, and left him a prey to devils,
and in the jaws of eternal death.—What therefore can have the least
power towards man’s redemption, but the light and Spirit of God? Or
what can begin, or bring forth the return of his first state, but this
eternal light and Spirit.—Hence it is, that the gospel-state is by our
Lord, affirmed to be a kingdom of heaven, because it has the nature
of no worldly thing, is to serve no worldly ends, can be helped by no
worldly power, receives nothing from man, but man’s full denial of
himself, stands upon nothing that is finite or transitory, has no
existence but in that power of God, that created and upholds heaven
and earth; and is a kingdom of God become man, and a kingdom of
men united to God, through a continual, immediate divine
illumination. What scripture of the New Testament can you read, that
does not prove this to be the gospel-state, a kingdom of God, into
which none can enter, but by being born of the Spirit, none can
continue, but by being led by the Spirit, and in which not a thought,
or desire, or action, can be allowed to have any part, but as it is a
fruit of the Spirit?
What now have parts, and literature, and the natural abilities of
man, that they can do here? Just as much as they can do at the
resurrection of the dead; for all that is to be done here, is nothing
else, but resurrection and life. Therefore, that which gave eyes to the
blind, cleansed the lepers, cast out devils, and raised the dead; that
alone can, and must do all that is to be done in this gospel kingdom
of God. For the smallest work of grace must be as solely done by
God, as the greatest miracle in nature: because every work of grace,
is the same overcoming of nature, as when the dead are raised to
life. Yet vain man would be thought to have great power in this
kingdom of grace, not because he happens to be born of noble
parents, but because he has happened to be made a scholar, has
run through all languages and histories, has been long exercised in
conjectures and criticisms, and has his head as full of all notions,
theological, poetical and philosophical, as a dictionary is full of
words.
Now let this simple question decide the matter: has this great
scholar any more power of saying to this mountain, be thou removed
hence, and cast into the sea, than the illiterate Christian? If not, he is
just as weak, as powerless, and little in the kingdom of God, as he is.
But if the illiterate man’s faith, should happen to be nearer to the bulk
of a grain of mustard-seed, than that of the prodigious scholar, the
illiterate Christian stands much above him in the kingdom of God.
Look now at the present state of Christendom, glorying in the

light of Greek and Roman learning, (lately broke forth) as a light that
has helped the gospel to shine with a lustre, that it scarce ever had
before. Look at this, and you will see the fall of the present church
from its first gospel state, to have much likeness to the fall of the first
divine man, from the glory of innocence, and heavenly purity, into an
earthly state of worldly craft and serpentine subtilty.
In the first gospel church, Heathen light had no other name, than
Heathen darkness; and the wisdom of words was no more sought
after, than that friendship of the world, which is enmity with God. In
that new-born church, the tree of life, which grew in the midst of
paradise, took root and grew up again. In the present church, the
tree of life is hissed at, as the visionary food of deluded enthusiasts;
and the tree of death, called the tree of knowledge of good and evil,
has the eyes and hearts of priest and people, and is thought to do as
much good to Christians, as it did evil to the first inhabitants of
paradise.――This tree, that brought death and corruption into
human nature, is now called a tree of light, and is, day and night,
well watered with every corrupt stream, however distant or muddy
with earth, that can be drawn to it.
But now, what follows from this new risen light? Why Aristotle’s
atheism, Cicero’s height of pride and depth of dissimulation, and
every refined or gross species of Greek and Roman vices, are as
glaring in this new enlightened Christian church, as ever they were in
old pagan Greece, or Rome. Would you find a gospel Christian, in all
this mid-day glory of learning, you may light a candle, as the
philosopher did in the mid-day sun, to find an honest man.
How poorly was the gospel at first preached, if the wisdom of

words, and if wit and imagination had been its genuine helps? But
alas they stand in the same contrariety to one another, as self-denial
and self-gratification. To know the truth of gospel-salvation, is to
know that man’s natural wisdom is to be equally sacrificed with his
natural folly: for they are but one and the same thing, only called
sometimes by one name, and sometimes by the other.
His intellectual faculties are, by the fall, in a much worse state
than his natural animal appetites, and want a much greater self-
denial. And when our own will, our own understanding and
imagination have their natural strength indulged, and are made rich
and honourable with the treasures acquired from a study of the
Belles Lettres, they will just as much help poor fallen men to be like-
minded with Christ, as the art of cookery, well and daily studied, will
help a professor of the gospel, to the spirit and practice of Christian
abstinence.
Who then can enough wonder at that bulk of libraries, which has
taken place of the short gospel? Or at that number of champion
disputants, who from age to age have been all in arms to support a
set of opinions and practices, all which may be most cordially
embraced without the least degree of self-denial, and most firmly
held without the least degree of humility.
What a grossness of ignorance, both of man and his Saviour, to

run to Greek and Roman schools, to learn how to put off Adam, and
to put on Christ? To drink at the fountains of Pagan poets and
orators, in order more divinely to drink of the cup that Christ drank
of?――What can come of all this, but that which is already too much
come, a Ciceronian gospeller, instead of a gospel penitent?
This will be more or less the case with all the doctrines of Christ,
whilst under classical acquisition, and administration. Those divine
truths, which are no farther good and redeeming, but as they are
spirit and life in us, will serve only to help classic painters (as Dr. W. ¹
calls them) to lavish out their colours on their own paper monuments
of lifeless virtues.
¹ As this address was wrote sometime ago, in which are

certain strictures upon Dr. Warburton’s writings, who has
lately been consecrated a Right Reverend Lord Bishop; I
thought it more candid not to alter my stile, than to take
the advantage of charging such gross errors, on a Bishop
of Glocester, which I only found in Mr. and Dr. Warburton.
The enemies to man’s rising out of the fall of Adam, through the
Spirit and power of Christ, are many. But the great enemy is SELF-
EXALTATION; when self-exaltation ceases, the last enemy is
destroyed, and all that came from the death of Adam, is swallowed
up in victory.
What, therefore, has every one so much to fear and abhor, as

self-exaltation, and every outward work that proceeds from it. But at
what things shall a man look, to see that which raises pride to its
strongest life, and most of all hinders the life of the humble Jesus in
his soul? Shall he call the pomps and vanities of the world, the
highest works of self-adoration? Shall he look at fops and beaux,
and painted ladies, to see the pride that has the most of Antichrist in
it? No, by no means. These are, indeed, marks shameful enough, of
the vain, foolish heart of man: but yet, comparatively speaking, they
are but the skin-deep follies of that pride, which the fall of man hath
brought forth in him. Would you see the deepest root, and iron-
strength of pride, you must enter into the dark chamber of man’s
soul, where the light of God (which alone gives humility) being
extinguished by the death which Adam died, self-exaltation, became
the strong man that kept possession of the house, till a stronger than
he should come. In this secret source a swelling kingdom of pomps
and vanities is set up in the heart of man, to which all outward
pomps and vanities are but childish, transitory play-things. The
inward strong man of pride, has his higher works within; and has
every power of the soul, offering continual incense to him. His
memory, his will, his understanding and imagination, are always at
work for him.—His memory is the faithful repository of all the fine
things he hath done. His will, though it has all the world before it, yet
goes after nothing but as this sends it. His understanding is ever
upon the stretch for new projects to enlarge the dominions of it; and
if this fails, imagination comes in, to make him a king, and mighty
lord of castles in the air.

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Reframing The Perpetrator In

Contemporary Comics: On The

The Importance of Forgiveness and the Futility of

On the Edge of the Panel Essays on Comics Criticism

Desegregating Comics Debating Blackness in the Golden

Wonder and Education On the Educational Importance of

Starting Out The c3 Sicilian 1st Edition John Emms

Armies of the Iran Iraq War 1980 88 1st Edition Chris

The Importance of Language Max Black (Editor)

The Importance of Wood and Timber in Sustainable

ISSN 2634-6370 ISSN 2634-6389 (electronic)

Cover illustration: CSA Images / Getty Images

This book owes a debt of gratitude to a group of fantastic people.

Fig. 2.1 Fezron leader wearing headdress in Manifest Destiny #15

Introduction: Perpetration, Estrangement,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

measurement systems, and historiography” (2021, 3). While even a source

Dolan’s employment of the languages of sexuality (“slobbered”) and ani-

is a master scenario available to everyone. The color is black, the material

debt as something that we owe to perpetrators of genocide. Perhaps, as

sense of estrangement either at the level of form or through the events

Implicatedness and the Ethics of Discomfort

The Marketable Perpetrator

to be interested in violence and mayhem. Cain is humanized in a manner

which adopts a viciously parodic approach to the adaptation of history,

explores young Adolf’s path toward perpetration, connecting it to earlier

Finally, Chap. 6, “‘Unable to protect anyone’: Terrorism, Salvation,

Viljoen, Jeanne-Marie. 2020. War Comics: A Postcolonial Perspective. New York:

“Nothing was spared”: Monstrosity

Manifest Destiny (2013–), a subversive reimagining of the 1804–1806

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

conversation with critics, such as Darja Malcolm-Clarke, Simon Spiegel,

Many of the non-human creatures that the Corps of Discovery encounter,

Fig. 2.2 Dawhog is introduced in Manifest Destiny #15 (2015, n. pag.). (©

gutter of the page, in front of a white background, momentarily unable to

But to return to the doctrine of continual inspiration. The natural

And what is well to be noted, every one, however high in human

*But to all this, it must be added, that a religion of worldly glory

Farther, what a blindness is it, to charge persons with the

It is to no purpose to object to all this, that these kingdoms are

Hence also it is, that Christendom, full of the nicest decisions

¹ Dissertation, page 10.

*Our Lord saith, it is expedient for you that I go away, or the

Rabbi, saith Nicodemus to Christ, we know that thou art a

¹ Sermon, Volume I. page 229.

Let the Doctor figure to himself the gaudy pageantry of a high

I come now to the quotation from the pastoral letter of Mr.

¹ Dissertation, page 73.

I cannot more illustrate the sense, or extol the judgment, both of

Thus Doctor Green, wanting to write on divine inspiration, runs

The reports, that are to be acknowledged as true, concerning the

How much then is it to be lamented, that though all scripture

Look now at the present state of Christendom, glorying in the

How poorly was the gospel at first preached, if the wisdom of

What a grossness of ignorance, both of man and his Saviour, to

¹ As this address was wrote sometime ago, in which are

What, therefore, has every one so much to fear and abhor, as

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