Abstract - Jesse Astwood

This paper attempts to explain the prevalence of apocalyptic imagery and the evolving doomsday narrative in graphic novels, comic books and film, thereby elucidating the legacy of Christian apocalyptic archetypes in contemporary popular media. More specifically, it shows how the Bible’s book of Revelation provides a powerful model (and sometimes a script) for the depiction of end times in contemporary popular culture. The paper’s primary sources, such as “Cloverfield,” The Watchmen, Maus and “Shaun of the Dead,” are representative of the infusion of the Armageddon myth into modern entertainment. These examples offer a window on the evolution of representations of Apocalypse and demonstrate how it is adapted for different media. The modern day doomsday, whether it is the undead narrative [in “Example,”] or Batman’s struggle for the soul of Gotham, is firmly grounded in earlier Judeo-Christian texts. The paper is divided into three sections: “The Apocalypse by Proxy,” which investigates the use of imagery from Revelation as a device to depict reality; “The Super Apocalypse,” which analyzes superheroes as religious archetypes and examines how they deviate from end time ideology; and “Surviving Apocalypse,” which is an examination of personal accounts of the end, with a focus on the human experience of great tragedy and destruction, as opposed to the more mythical constructions of the previous sections. This last section takes the Apocalypse out of the realm of proxies and ideals and into the muddier arena of the everyday.

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