I’m thrilled to share that my paper on warriors riddled with arrows found in medieval Muslim/Christian chronicles, comics, films, and television, can be read in the latest volume of This Year’s Work in Medievalism (open access).
This is my first publication in a peer-reviewed journal and it feels like I completed a dare by drawing random topics from a hat. But yes, the paper really does combine hedgehogs, Wolverine, the Crusades, and samurai films.
And that’s just the title!
When you read it, you can fill up your bingo cards with Deadpool, American Gods, The Song of Roland, the Cloisters Museum, Game of Thrones, St. Sebastian, Bud Light, the Super Bowl, Edmund the Martyr, Batman, and more.
Good luck!
Here’s the first paragraph to get you started:
For over four decades, comic book writers and filmmakers have found creative ways to torture Marvel Comics’ Wolverine. One method that has evolved since Frank Miller tackled the character in 1982 is filling his body with arrows. The mutant’s metallic skeleton coupled with his quick-healing superpower make him the ideal pincushion for these ancient projectiles in comic books and film. However, the image of a living human covered in arrows is medieval. Furthermore, the image of a living warrior covered in arrows is an image almost entirely relegated to Muslim and Christian chronicles of the Crusades, in which the writers typically associated the spectacle with a hedgehog. This paper examines medieval accounts of armored warriors likened to hedgehogs covered in arrows throughout the Crusades and how Wolverine has been the bridge for such a spectacle in popular culture, extracting it out of obscure medieval chronicles and proliferating it through comic books, film, television, and beer commercials.
Keep on reading (open access PDF).
There are many more examples that I didn’t include in the paper, so be on the lookout for those posts and tweets.
And here’s how you’d cite the paper in a bibliography using Chicago Manual of Style, as god intended:
Manning, Scott. “Warriors ‘Hedgehogged’ in Arrows: Crusaders, Samurai, and Wolverine in Medieval Chronicles and Popular Culture.” This Year’s Work in Medievalism 33 (2018): 62-77.