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Resource type: Web Article Language: en: English DOI: 10.20935/AL948 BibTeX citation key: Diak2021 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details |
Categories: General Keywords: "Vinegar Teeth", Bachtin. Michail M., Grotesque, Horror, Lovecraft. Howard Phillips, USA Creators: Diak Collection: Academia Letters |
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Attachments | URLs https://www.academ ... ries_Vinegar_Teeth |
Abstract |
Vinegar Teeth is a four-issue comic book series that mixes the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft with the comedy of a buddy cop film. The story sees Vinegar Teeth, a “giant scrotum”-looking tentacled alien becoming a cop and partnering with the drunk, down on his luck, Detective Buckle, as they thwart both criminals and an alien invasion. The world of Vinegar Teeth is grotesque and madcap: it juggles scenes of splatstick gore with the police procedural. It is a perfect example of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque. This essay will explore Vinegar Teeth’s flirtation with the carnivalesque and how it makes overt these elements found in the works of Lovecraft. First this essay will explain what Bakhtin’s carnivalesque is via Robert Stam’s Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film. Next it will leverage Timothy Jones’ The Gothic and the Carnivalesque in American Culture who appropriates Bakhtin’s carnivalesque as a reading mode to consume American Gothic horror literature. Finally this essay will detail how Vinegar Teeth manifests the carnivalesque elements found in Lovecraft as posited by Jones while bringing it back to the original Bakhtin definition.
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