Abstract
The extremely successful, ongoing comic series Saga (Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, 2012–) is a fantasy graphic narrative written for an adult audience. Saga boasts a majority of tough female characters whose representation reworks the “bad girl” paradigm by showing that it can function as a productive and desirable version of femininity that can successfully replace more traditional models. In Saga, the bad girl is someone who can see beyond the conventions of patriarchy (including the cult of war heroism) and heteronormative sexuality, and who rarely and only briefly becomes part of a community. Furthermore, through its use of genres such as the romance, the soap opera, and the superhero story, Saga unveils the subversive potential of popular culture that can hide behind its escapist dimension to promote non-mainstream values.
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The authors of this chapter, Mihaela Precup and Dragoş Manea, along with the co-editors of this volume, Julie A. Chappell and Mallory Young, would like to express sincere gratitude to Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, author and illustrator of the serialized graphic narrative Saga, for the use of images in support of the scholarly analysis herein. We hope this volume will bring further recognition and new readers to their brilliant work.
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Precup, M., Manea, D. (2017). Bad Girls in Outer Space: Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ Saga and the Graphic Representation of Subversive Femininity. In: Chappell, J., Young, M. (eds) Bad Girls and Transgressive Women in Popular Television, Fiction, and Film. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47259-1_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47259-1_13
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-47258-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-47259-1
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