The Vault of Culture

Shawn Gilmore explores the complicated levels of reference in The Question #17 (1988), when The Question dreams of Rorschach, one of the main protagonists in Watchmen (1986-87), explicitly based on The Question himself.

Members of the U-C Comics Colloquium, a comics reading and discussion group based at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, provide some entry points to COVID Chronicles, a comics collection released in 2021.

Michael VanCalbergh argues that Tillie Walden’s On a Sunbeam uses backgrounds to develop the work’s themes and expand on the ideas present within the text. Instead of merely acting as a setting for meaning-making to happen, these backgrounds complicate those meanings actively with drafting, design, and narrative devices.

Zach Rondinelli argues that in Tom King’s “Knightmare” run on Batman, form and color combine to challenge readers’ expectations: as Batman struggles for his freedom, so too does the reader. Readers face the same challenges, confusion, disorientation, and uncertainty as the Dark Knight does, yet with each knightmare they also became witnesses to the complex formal communicative power that comics possess.

Shawn Gilmore returns with a long-form essay on the character portrait of Woody Brown, first published in Chris Ware’s ACME Novelty Library #19 (Fall/Winter 2008) and now collected in Rusty Brown (2019), finding it to be one of the most affecting pieces of characterization in the collection.

Shawn Gilmore gives an overview of Cole Pauls’ radical Dakwäkãda Warriors, which is designed for young readers to help them learn Southern Tutchone, while at the same time offering a compelling allegory of colonial oppression and resistance via a riff on sci-fi stories like Voltron.

Jillian Tamaki’s “SexCoven,” originally published in Youth in Decline’s Frontier #7 in 2015 (now appearing in her collection Boundless (2017) presents a complex narrative of nostalgia and loss over a shared cultural moment, for a time when an .mp3 with the potential to alter consciousness was passed around networks and social circles.

In book one of My Favortie Thing is Monsters (2017), Emil Ferris establishes a unique means of juxtaposing and interconnecting the worlds of comics and the fine arts to reconcile the problems her main character, Karen Reyes, faces.

Shawn Gilmore connects two works that seem to be from very different regimes of comics: Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’ Red: A Haida Manga (2009) and Alan Moore & JH Williams III’s Promethea #32 (2005), both of which have formal elements that extend beyond the traditional boundaries of the page or bound codex, requiring readers to imagine another, larger level of comics organization.

Shawn Gilmore examines Canadian comics artist and illustrator Fiona Smyth’s “Skin of Fate,” originally published in her magazine Nocturnal Emissions #3 (1991) and #4 (1992), using the surreal tale as an introduction to some of the shared stylistic and conceptual elements in her work.

A look at the Algonquin, an unfinished Montreal skyscraper at the center of the somewhat generic, if meditative, action thriller starring Dolph Lundgren, Silent Trigger (dir. Russell Mulcahy, 1996), portrayed in the film via combination of models, sets, and matte paintings.

An examination of the ominous “black tower” that is the focus of John Smith’s The Black Tower (1987), which seems to follow the short film’s unnamed narrator around London.

Ben Wheatley’s 2015 adaptation of JG Ballard’s High-Rise (1975) positions the novel’s titular building and protagonist, Robert Laing, as bound up together, drawing on Ballard’s language and selective aesthetic palette throughout as the film portrays a high-rise block that progressively descends into madness.

Now a central feature of London’s cityscape, The Shard, which opened in 2012, is also becoming a regular setting in film, television, and comics, serving a variety of fictional uses.

The amazingly-named sidequel Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (dir. David Leitch, 2019) features an early scene breaking a character out of a CIA black site located on an upper floor of a London skyscraper, revealed to be a version of 122 Leadenhall Street, known as “The Cheesegrater,” a 45-story, 738’ skyscraper completed in 2014.

Two 2019 films set in Philadelphia both feature fictional towers—one a wholesale creation, the Osaka Tower in Glass (dir. M. Night Shyamalan, 2019), the other a transposition of a real-world tower, branded as the Sivana Tower in Shazam! (dir. David F. Sandberg, 2019).

The heart of the John Wick franchise (2014- ), The Continential is a mercurial hotel chain, catering to the world of hired killers that populate the series. Expanding and shifting with each film, New York City’s Continential is an intriguing example of tower-ing fiction.

A look at The Aerium, the mega-skyscraper that dominates the main plot of the first season of Altered Carbon (Netflix, 2018- ) and the visual style of the show, which borrows heavily from iconic science-fiction films.

Amazon’s recent series The Boys (2019), an adaptation of a comic-book series of the same name, features The Seven Tower (owned by Vought International), a digital creation built to blend in with the New York City skyline while also extending the show’s real-world filming location in Toronto.

The Glass Tower is the site of the titular inferno in The Towering Inferno (dir. John Guillerman, 1974) and serves as both the site of the film’s blockbuster narrative and as one of the foundational towers of cinema. Constructed as an elaborate nearly 100’ tall model, the Tower is integrated into the film itself, establishing disaster tropes and their visual representations.

The so-called “Monster Building,” a popular tourist attraction and recent filming location, is really five high-rise apartment buildings tightly packed together on the western side of Quarry Bay (鰂魚涌) in the Eastern District of Hong Kong, appearing in Western film and television as a metonymic singifier of the dense, chaotic East, while also providing a controlled visual space and shooting location.

Interestingly, LexCorp Tower and Wayne Financial are used to the retcon the logic of Man of Steel (dir. Zack Snyder, 2013) in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (dir. Zack Snyder, 2016), serving as the location for only a few scenes, but acting a bridge between the two films and providing a window into the narrative tension and the latter film’s ultimately the revisionist narrative.

The Pearl, the fictional skyscraper and world’s tallest building, is not just the setting of much of the action—and light drama—of the film Skyscraper (dir. Rawson Marshall Thurber, 2018). Importantly, it is a construction that directly relies on the film’s genre forebearers, a symbolic edifice, making architectural and visual the pastiche that is the film itself.

The second half of the heist thriller Entrapment (dir. Jon Amiel, 1999) uses what were at the time the tallest towers in the world, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, to stage its climax, a mash-up of and Mission: Impossible (dir. Brian De Palma, 1996) and The Thomas Crown Affair (dir. John McTiernan, 1999).

With its distinct glass exterior and accessible plaza, 101 Park Avenue has been featured in a number of films and television series, as outlined on its filming page. This is likely aided by its proximity to Grand Central Terminal (just a block away) and the Criysler Building a couple of blocks north-east.

The headquarters of SHIELD in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Triskelion, is the center-piece of Captain America: Winter Soldier (dirs. Russo Brothers, 2014).

The CNS Building) serves as the the symbolic conunterpoint to MI6 and the 00 program in 2015′s James Bond film Spectre (dir. Sam Mendes).

The Beverly Heights aparement building saves the day in the other volcano-themed disaster film of 1997, Volcano (dir. Mick Jackson).

In the final (for now) entry in his Digital Ghosts series, Ryan Sherwood argues that in the “Mechanic/Realtor” episode of Nathan for You, the chimera of infinite filmability meshes fruitfully with a bold performance style—a gelid numbness that suggests itself as the only suitable response to the apprehension of the otherworldly via digital technology.

Ryan Sherwood argues that Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000) and Steven Soderberg’s K Street (HBO, 2003) work in tandem, both obliquely associate celluloid’s acquiescence to video with some sort of filial betrayal, warranting visits from beyond the grave. 

In this first entry in his Digital Ghosts series, Ryan Sherwood examines the ways in which the slippery essence of the 21st-century still image—not technically “photographic” and only ever temporarily immune to some animating force—serves as the Twin Peaks: The Return’s foundational aesthetic principle.