Abstract

I'm writing this blog to collect and categorize appearances of the Latin language in comic books. I'm a Latinist and an avid comics reader, and I want to use this first post to give some background on who I am and why I'm writing.

Currently, at the start of this blog, I'm a graduate student writing my dissertation on the reception of Classical rules for Latin composition (rhetoric) during the Middle Ages. I teach Latin (both the Classical and Medieval varieties) at the university where I'm getting my PhD. Teaching Latin is what I've wanted to do ever since I first studied it in high school. I majored in Classical Latin and Medieval Latin in undergrad, and continued on to get a Master's in Medieval Studies. I then drove submarines for a few years for the U.S. Navy, who had payed for my undergrad degree. I didn't have much use for Latin as the Assistant Engineer of a nuclear reactor, except for occasionally advising my sailors who were planning to get a tattoo written in Latin--I would usually advise them first to simply not get a tattoo. I left the Navy to go back to grad school, and I've been having a blast ever since. Hopefully, I'll one day be able to make tenure as a professor of Classics, but, given the academic job market, that may take a while. Regardless, I really like reading and teaching Latin, and I get excited whenever I see or hear it in the wild, whether that be in paintings, inscriptions, mottoes, movies, television, or, as will be the focus of my posts here, comic books.

I first got into comics in the early 90's when I was twelve or thirteen years old. My favorite books were Nicieza/Liefeld's X-Force and Marz/Lim's Silver Surfer, both filled with the "extreme" 90's-ness I still totally enjoy. I eventually set aside comics when my interests shifted to music and girls and since my local comic store closed with the 90's Comic Bubble Collapse. I got back into comics in the early 2000's through the contemporary manga boom. A friend of mine had introduced me to anime after I expressed my interest in Cowboy Bebop which was then running on Cartoon Network. Anime led me to manga. I went to a few anime/manga fan conventions, and there I was reintroduced to American mainstream comics, starting with Neil Gaiman's Marvel 1602--a comic that really appealed to me as I was working on a Master's in Medieval Studies at the time. I then picked up the short-lived new Silver Surfer series (vol. 3), which I liked, since it was set in my hometown of New Orleans, but found overall disappointing. More importantly I came back to comics just in time for Ed Brubaker's Captain America run and Warren Ellis' Iron Man run. After that I was hooked. I now keep around 30 to 40 titles on my pull list for any given month--mostly Marvel comics, although I do get a few DCs and any Image/independent releases from specific writers I follow, e.g. Jonathan Hickman and Ed Brubaker-- and I have about ten thousand comics in long boxes and filing cabinets, cluttering up various corners of my house.

As I mentioned above, I get really excited whenever I find Latin outside of its normal, academic habitat of scholarly histories and editions. Latin gets used for all sorts of reasons in the modern world, and due to its increased absence from schools, the Latin we see or hear in popular culture is usually riddled with errors. Since I teach Latin, I can get really pedantic about correct grammar, and throughout this blog I won't shy away from noting and categorizing the types of errors I find in comic book Latin. But I also want to explore why Latin is used in comics. What role does Latin play in today's culture? What is expressed by the mere fact that someone--a character or a writer--speaks or writes in Latin? How does a dead language work differently from any other foreign language? There have been studies on these sorts of questions, but since I haven't bothered to read most of them yet, I figured I would just give it a go and try to sort things out for myself in blog form. My understanding of the subject is sure to develop over time, but that development won't happen unless I take the time to think it out.

I haven't the slightest clue how much interest a blog like this will attract from the vastness of the internet. I plan to post twice a month for at least the first year, just to get things running. I would love to post more often, but I have this other pressing commitment called a doctoral dissertation. Each post will focus on one specific comic book where Latin appears. I'm drawing from my personal comic book collection as a source for discussion, and I'll hopefully be able to wade through all my long boxes and find all the Latin contained therein. The majority of the posts will feature Marvel comics, since I'm using my own collection, and I mostly read Marvel. But I would truly appreciate it if readers sent me other instances of Latin they find in comic books. I could definitely use the help sorting the hundreds of titles published every month.