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Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

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Matt Kish’s Inferno Illustrations (2020)

October 30, 2020 By Laura Chatellier, FSU '23

matt-kish-illustration-301-rom-73-fallen-angelsmatt-kish-illustration-028-attack-wrathful-attacking

“I have always been fascinated by the crude and vulgar spectacle of Inferno. Perhaps some of what follows is more personal than validated by scholarship, but despite his clear devotion to Christianity and deep and abiding belief in dogma, Dante seems to relish in his bizarre portrayal of the torments of Hell. I think I remember the poem was originally written in low, or street, Italian rather than formal language, because Dante wanted the tone to match the content and for the work to be something everyone could read. My experience growing up with comic books in particular was that they too were a kind of low, vulgar entertainment. Designed to titillate and provoke, but in no way were they deemed serious or valid art. There was a sort of dirty appeal to the comics I saw on the shelf in the grocery store, especially the pulpy black and white horror comic magazines like Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella. For my approach to Inferno, I wanted to borrow heavily from this lurid, brightly colored, sickly appealing visual style as well as the connotations of what comics seemed to be to my young mind. So this is mirrored in my painting style, which is very bright and graphic and employs linework over tone and value (essentially, I paint like one should draw, I don’t paint like one should paint) as well as in my collaging bits of text and image from comics into the illustrations.”    —Matt Kish (personal email communication, September 28, 2020)

You can check out the full series and Kish’s other works on his website.

Categories: Digital Media, Visual Art & Architecture
Tagged with: 2020, America, Art, Circles of Hell, Comics, Illustrations, Inferno

Cesare

October 15, 2020 By lsanchez

From Volume 2, Chapter 10, in Fuyumi Soryo’s 2005 manga series Cesare, which makes extensive reference to the Divine Comedy.

Learn more about Cesare here.

Categories: Visual Art & Architecture
Tagged with: 2005, Artists, Comics, Divine Comedy, Manga

“Parenting Hell” from Litterbox Comics

September 26, 2020 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

Posted October 27, 2019, on Litterbox Comics.

Categories: Digital Media, Visual Art & Architecture
Tagged with: 2019, Cats, Circles of Hell, Comics, Hell, Inferno, Parenting, Tenth Circle

Underworld – Saint Seiya

August 27, 2020 By lsanchez

“The Underworld (冥界, Meikai) or Inferno (地獄, Jigoku) is the realm of the dead where souls are placed after death. What area the souls reside in are determined by the Three Judges. It is the habitat of all Specters, including the god Hades (in classic myth, it is also the second residence of Hades’s wife, Persephone).

“The Meikai Underworld was created by Hades to forever punish humans for their crimes. No life is possible in the Underworld without the Eighth Sense (or special devices), as all things in the Underworld normally fall under the control of Hades. Specters are unaffected, and may enter and leave at the discretion of Hades because they wear Surplices.

“As depicted by Masami Kurumada, the Underworld is composed of eight prisons, with further subdivisions (the 7th prison is divided in three valleys, the 8th in ten pits, the 9th in four regions). All of the Prisons correspond to the nine Circles of Hell depicted in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, which itself borrows heavily from Greek myths. In addition, it also contains the passage to the Elysian Fields, where only those chosen by the gods can go.”    —Seiyapedia, September 12, 2018

Learn more about the Saint Seiya series here.

Categories: Visual Art & Architecture
Tagged with: 1986, Circles of Hell, Comics, Divine Comedy, Hell, Inferno, Japan, Japanese, Manga

The Sandman and Dante’s Inferno

August 26, 2020 By lsanchez

“The angelic appearance of Lucifer in Sandman #4 (April 1989), entitled ‘A Hope in Hell,’ features the Wood of Suicides from Dante’s Inferno (Canto XIII), the great expanse of which provokes comment from the titular character as he seemingly accidentally breaks a branch and allows the suicides, imprisoned in the form of barren trees, to speak. Despite this, the issue and The Sandman in general have more to do with previous DC comics than with Dante. Indeed, the issue features Etrigan, a colorful rhyming demon created by Jack Kirby for the inventively titled comic The Demon. At the issue’s conclusion, Lucifer swears Dream’s destruction, a move by writer Neil Gaiman to establish plot threads for subsequent issues.

[. . .]

Perhaps the inconsistency of Gaiman’s three versions of Lucifer should not surprise us. After all, Satan has always been a particularly malleable figure, changing even in his religious depictions over time. Huge gulfs exists between the serpent of Genesis, the prosecuting angel in Job, the Bible’s brief and vague references to a fallen angel, and the vaguely Manichean personification of evil in the New Testament, who were not even intended to be the same characters and were only united by exegetic interpretation. Equally, Dante’s bloated, immobile Satan is a world away from Milton’s deft, self-damned, self-hated rhetorical master.

In other words, Gaiman’s three Lucifers may not be consistent, but then, Lucifer never was.”    –Julian Darius, Sequart Organization, May 20, 2002

Categories: Visual Art & Architecture, Written Word
Tagged with: 1989, 2002, Comics, Inferno, John Milton, Lucifer, Satan, Suicide

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How to Cite

Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

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