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Scott Bukatman is a cultural theorist and Professor of Film and Media Studies at Stanford University. Bukatman's research examines how popular media (film, comics) and genres (science fiction, musicals, superhero narratives) "mediate between new technologies and human perceptual and bodily experience." [1]
In 1986, Bukatman published "Battle with Songs: The Soviet Historical Film as Historical Document" in the journal Persistence of Vision 3-4. In 1988, he curated a retrospective exhibit on the films and television shows of comedian Jerry Lewis at the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York City. In 1989, he published "The Cybernetic (City) State: Terminal Space becomes Phenomenal" in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 2. In 1992, Bukatman completed his Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University.
He has taught at NYU, Yale University, the School of Visual Arts in New York, the Free University of Berlin, and the University of New Mexico. Courses that Bukatman has developed include a range of interdisciplinary, intermedial offerings such as Cinema and the City, World's Fairs and Theme Parks, The Body in American Genre Film, and Cyborgs and Synthetic Humans.
In 1994, Bukatman co-organized "Cine City: Film and Perceptions of Urban Space 1895-1995" at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. In 1997, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Departments of Art and Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where he has developed the Film and Media Studies program in collaboration with Henry Breitrose and Art History professor Michael Marrinan.[ citation needed ]
Bukatman wrote Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Duke University Press) and a monograph on the seminal science fiction film Blade Runner for the British Film Institute. His articles have been published in Artforum International, Architecture New York, October and Camera Obscura. He has served as a consulting editor for Science Fiction Studies and is on the editorial boards of Art/Text and Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
In 2003, Bukatman published Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century (Duke University Press). According to a review in Guardian Unlimited, the fusing of the genres of superhero story and cyberpunk in films such as The Matrix are "...superbly analysed in Scott Bukatman's collection of essays." Bukatman addresses the "question of bodies in a technologised age", arguing that in modern science fiction "...the body may be 'simulated, morphed, modified, re-tooled, genetically engineered and even dissolved', but it is never entirely eliminated: the subject always retains a meat component." In addition, Bukatman analyzes the "scopic mastery" of special-effects shots in several seminal sci-fi movies, which provide an "omnipotent God's-eye view" vision and "panoramic displays," which he argues address "...the perceived loss of cognitive power experienced by the subject in an increasingly technologised world." [2]
In 2012, Bukatman published The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit (University of California Press). The book description reads: "In The Poetics of Slumberland, Scott Bukatman celebrates play, plasmatic possibility, and the life of images in cartoons, comics, and cinema. Bukatman begins with Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland to explore how and why the emerging media of comics and cartoons brilliantly captured a playful, rebellious energy characterized by hyperbolic emotion, physicality, and imagination. The book broadens to consider similar “animated” behaviors in seemingly disparate media—films about Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh; the musical My Fair Lady and the story of Frankenstein; the slapstick comedies of Jerry Lewis; and contemporary comic superheroes—drawing them all together as the purveyors of embodied utopias of disorder." Calling the book "Essential" in Choice, T. Lindvall of Virginia Wesleyan College wrote, "Slipping comfortably into Bukatman's book, one is dreamily transported to utopian worlds where merry madcap disorder rules. ...The lavishly illustrated book is delightfully Chestertonian, clapping its hands in glee over the unruly energy and plasmatic possibilities of the Pygmalion myth drawn into the imaginations of playful artists and their exhilaratingly disruptive arts. ... Bukatman shows the marvelous animated poetics of visual media." [3]
A book-length work of comics theory, centered around Mike Mignola's Hellboy comics, titled Hellboy's World: Comics and Monsters on the Margins was published in January 2016 by University of California Press. An essay, "Sculpture, Stasis, the Comics, and Hellboy" appeared in the special issue of Critical Inquiry devoted to "Comics and Media" (Spring 2014 Volume 40 Issue 3). The online abstract for the essay, read, in full: "Comics awesome. Read Hellboy." [4]
Blade Runner is a 1982 science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott from a screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples. Starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, and Edward James Olmos, it is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The film is set in a dystopian future Los Angeles of 2019, in which synthetic humans known as replicants are bio-engineered by the powerful Tyrell Corporation to work on space colonies. When a fugitive group of advanced replicants led by Roy Batty (Hauer) escapes back to Earth, burnt-out cop Rick Deckard (Ford) reluctantly agrees to hunt them down.
Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting that tends to focus on a "combination of lowlife and high tech", featuring futuristic technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cyberware, juxtaposed with societal collapse, dystopia or decay. Much of cyberpunk is rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when writers like Philip K. Dick, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner, J. G. Ballard, Philip José Farmer and Harlan Ellison examined the impact of drug culture, technology, and the sexual revolution while avoiding the utopian tendencies of earlier science fiction.
Horror is a genre of fiction that is intended to disturb, frighten or scare. Horror is often divided into the sub-genres of psychological horror and supernatural horror, which are in the realm of speculative fiction. Literary historian J. A. Cuddon, in 1984, defined the horror story as "a piece of fiction in prose of variable length... which shocks, or even frightens the reader, or perhaps induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing". Horror intends to create an eerie and frightening atmosphere for the reader. Often the central menace of a work of horror fiction can be interpreted as a metaphor for larger fears of a society.
Little Nemo is a fictional character created by American cartoonist Winsor McCay. He originated in an early comic strip by McCay, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, before receiving his own spin-off series, Little Nemo in Slumberland. The full-page weekly strip depicted Nemo having fantastic dreams that were interrupted by his awakening in the final panel. The strip is considered McCay's masterpiece for its experiments with the form of the comics page, its use of color and perspective, its timing and pacing, the size and shape of its panels, and its architectural and other details.
A superhero film is a film that focuses on superheroes and their actions. Superheroes are individuals who usually possess superhuman abilities and are dedicated to protecting the public. These films typically feature action, adventure, fantasy, or science fiction elements. The first film about a particular character often focuses on the hero's origin story. It also frequently introduces the hero's nemesis.
Since the advent of the cyberpunk genre, a number of cyberpunk derivatives have become recognized in their own right as distinct subgenres in speculative fiction, especially in science fiction. Rather than necessarily sharing the digitally and mechanically focused setting of cyberpunk, these derivatives can display other futuristic, or even retrofuturistic, qualities that are drawn from or analogous to cyberpunk: a world built on one particular technology that is extrapolated to a highly sophisticated level, a gritty transreal urban style, or a particular approach to social themes.
Science fiction is an important genre of modern Japanese literature that has strongly influenced aspects of contemporary Japanese pop culture, including anime, manga, video games, tokusatsu, and cinema.
Denis Gifford was a British writer, broadcaster, journalist, comic artist and historian of film, comics, television and radio. In his lengthy career, he wrote and drew for British comics; wrote more than fifty books on the creators, performers, characters and history of popular media; devised, compiled and contributed to popular programmes for radio and television; and directed several short films. Gifford was also a major comics collector, owning what was perhaps the largest collection of British comics in the world.
Technoculture is a neologism that is not in standard dictionaries but that has some popularity in academia, popularized by editors Constance Penley and Andrew Ross in a book of essays bearing that title. It refers to the interactions between, and politics of, technology and culture.
Hellboy is a fictional character, created by writer-artist Mike Mignola.
Pérák, the Spring Man, was an urban legend originating from the Czechoslovak city of Prague during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in the midst of World War II. In the decades following the war, Pérák has also been portrayed as a Czech superhero.
Peter M. Coogan is an American comics scholar. He is the Communication Lab Coordinator and co-founder and co-chair of the Comics Arts Conference, which runs during the San Diego Comic-Con International and WonderCon.
Superhero fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction examining the adventures, personalities and ethics of costumed crime fighters known as superheroes, who often possess superhuman powers and battle similarly powered criminals known as supervillains. The genre primarily falls between hard fantasy and soft science fiction in the spectrum of scientific realism. It is most commonly associated with American comic books, though it has expanded into other media through adaptations and original works.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to science fiction:
Little Sammy Sneeze was a comic strip by American cartoonist Winsor McCay. In each episode the titular Sammy sneezed himself into an awkward or disastrous predicament. The strip ran from July 24, 1904 until at least May 26, 1907 in the New York Herald, where McCay was on the staff. It was McCay's first successful comic strip; he followed it with Dream of the Rarebit Fiend later in 1904, and his best-known strip Little Nemo in Slumberland in 1905.
Winsor McCay: The Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics, more commonly known as Little Nemo, is a 1911 silent animated short film by American cartoonist Winsor McCay. One of the earliest animated films, it was McCay's first, and featured characters from McCay's comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland. Its expressive character animation distinguished the film from the experiments of earlier animators.
Sequart Organization is an online magazine that focuses on the study of popular culture and the promotion of comic books as an art form. Sequart also publishes books and produces documentary films. It was founded in 1996 by Julian Darius. Sequart's editor-in-chief is Mike Phillips.
Ramzi Fawaz is an American associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he teaches courses in queer and feminist theory, American cultural studies, and LGBTQ literature. He is the author of The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics, published in January 2016 by NYU Press, which received the 2012–2013 Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Fellowship Award for Best First Book Manuscript in LGBT Studies, as well as Queer Forms, published in 2022 by NYU Press. His essays have been published in American Literature, GLQ, Feminist Studies, Callaloo, and ASAP/Journal.
Barry Keith Grant is a Canadian-American critic, educator, author and editor who best known for his work on science fiction film and literature, horror films, musicals and popular music and other genres of popular cinema.
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