LOCATION AS CHARACTER IN COMIC ART

CLICK for sampling of "Location as Character" comic art works: including Little Nemo, Doucet, Ware, Katchor, Sacco, and more, below.)

Some others, not represented in slideshow (or underrepresented):

• Krazy Kat (Coconino County)
• Little Nemo in Slumberland
• Lionel Feininger: Wee Willie Winkie's World
• Hicksville, by Dylan Horrocks (fictional world where comics are high culture)
• Chris Ware, The Building, in the New York Times
• Ben Katchor, Julius Knipl
• Pogo, by Walt Kelly (Okeefenokee Swamp)
• Moebius, various Arzach and other pieces
• Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi

Some examples from the news:

• Iraq/Baghdad
• North Korea
• New Orleans

Some examples from history:

• Hiroshima (Look at Barefoot Gen, or Grave of the Fireflies)
• Germany between the wars, Anne Frank's attic,   other WWII literature. - (see MAUS, Primo Levi - Survival in Auschwitz, etc)
• Little Big Horn, Waterloo, Civil War battlefields, Coal mining towns,   gold prospecting towns (the old American West, DEADWOOD on HBO)

Some examples from classic literature:

• Alice in Wonderland
• Lilliputia - Gulliver's Travels
• Romeo and Julliet's Verona
• Hell   as described by Dante in THE INFERNO (look at Dore's illustrations of it, or Gary Panter's version)
• William Faulkner , various other writers of the American South: Eudora Welty, Truman Copote's short stories, Zora Neale Hurston, Harry Crewes, Flannery O'Connor, etc)
• Whitman: Various poems about New York, Long Island, Manhattan, etc
• Henry David Thoreau- Walden ?
• Confederacy of Dunces- (New Orleans)
• James Joyce: Ulysses, Dubliners

Some examples from popular literature:

• Where the Wild Things Are - Maurice Sendak
• Salman Rushdie's Sea of Stories
• Narnia
• Middle Earth
• Oz

Some New York examples:

• Jonathan Lethem- Fortress of Solitude (Brooklyn)
• Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, and David Mazzuchelli's version. Literally inscribed on the city map.
• Luc Sante - Lowlife (New York)
• Call It Sleep - H Roth, about Lower East Side (see Jack Kirby's Street Code)

Some examples from mythology:

• Atlantis
• Troy, Ithaca
• Garden of Eden, other biblical places
• Shambhala
• Various cities of the gods, underworlds, etc

Go a little farther in some challenging classic and popular literature:

• Read Jorge Luis Borges (his famous library, for instance)
• Edwin Abbott's Flatland - the characters live in a 2 dimensional world
• IDEATH - Weird, dreamy world of Richard Brautigan - made of "Watermelon Sugar"
• The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco
• Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino - bizarre, abstract, descriptions of imaginary cities. read some samples at http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/00/pwillen1/lit/citysum.htm

• Various symphonic work, Debussy,
• Sibelius
• Maybe Turandot, (Puccini)
• Albums by Brian Eno, ambient music, other electronica,  etc

Film
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• Salaam Bombay
• Wings of Desire
• Aquirre, the Wrath of God, Herzog
• Blade Runner
• Alphaville, Goddard
• John Ford and other Westerns, The Searchers
• Paris, Texas
• Gerry (Gus Van Sant)
• TV: Deadwood
• Kurdish films by Bahman Ghobadi, Marrooned in Iraq, Turtles Can Fly
• Solaris
• 2001: Space Odyssey

• William Faulkner
• (Various other writers of the American South: Eudora Welty, Truman
  Copote's short stories, Zora Neale Hurston, Harry Crewes, Flannery
  O'Connor, etc)
• Dante: Inferno, etc.
• Whitman: Various poems about New York, Long Island, Manhattan, etc
• Shakespeare: Midsummer Night's Dream? The Tempest?
• Henry David Thoreau- Walden ?
• Call It Sleep - H Roth, about Lower East Side (see Jack Kirby's Street Code)
• Italo Calvino: Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities
• Confederacy of Dunces- (New Orleans)
• Joyce: Ulysses, Dubliners
• Jonathan Swift, various other travelogues from 18th, 19th century:
• Voltaire, Twain, Cervantes, etc
• Moby Dick
• Primo Levi - Survival in Auschwitz, etc
• Jonathan Lethem- Fortress of Solitude (Brooklyn)
• Luc Sante - Lowlife (New York)
• Some noir/pulp books- I don't know them, I'm afraid. The Big Sleep, Chandler?
• A River Runs Through it, Norman Maclean
• The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin
• Dune, Frank Herbert
• Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, and David Mazzuchelli's version.
  Literally inscribed on the city map.
• Under the Volcano, Malcolm Loury

Several sequence by Matt Brinkman fromTeratoid Heights

Introductory sequence from Jason Lute's Berlin