SOURCE: Rapatzikou, Tatiana. “Visualizations of Cyber-Gothic Bodies in William Gibson's Trilogy and the Art of the Graphic Novel.” Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction 83 (autumn 2001): 73-86.

[In the following essay, Rapatzikou examines William Gibson's representation of human identity in his trilogy of science fiction novels—Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive–and how Gibson's themes are both linked to and informed by the portrayal of the “inhuman” in comic books, particularly in the computer-generated graphic novels, Iron Man: Crash, by Mike Saenz and Batman: Digital Justice, by Pepe Moreno.]

The intrusion of the mass media and information technology in both the external and the physical world of the human subjects, gives way to myriad manifestations of selfhood and multiple versions of realities (“terminal identity”).¹ The electronically enhanced simulation of the human body re-introduces the issues of bodily intrusion and disorder that proliferated in the nineteenth-century gothic motif of the zombie.

Before being taken up by technology and science fiction, zombies could only be part of fairy tales, horror and fantasy stories. Throughout the history of the scientifically reconstructed human body (“automaton”, “android”, “robot”), due to the ever-changing perceptions of the organic and the inorganic (the human and the technologically non-human), the image of the zombie was gradually identified with everything mechanised and artificially constructed.² The mechanical automaton of Olympia in E. T. A. Hoffmann's story “The Sandman” and his images of “living death or inanimate life” puppets in “Automata”,³ constitute examples corresponding to the idea of the automaton as an intelligent imitation of man.⁴ Manuel Aguirre in his analysis of gothic fiction and symbolism characteristically writes: “The automaton is an imitation of man—but it has that repetitiveness and regularity which characterize the appearance of the ghost […] it may easily be granted numinous powers […] the individual will be haunted by something lost within his shadow, within his reflection, within his mechanical creation.”⁵ Imitating the exactness of the human form and replicating the precision of its performing ability, the automaton enters the evolutionary chain as a mechanised manifestation of humanness. Although it could be viewed as a manifestation of change and scientific progress, the automaton appears to be terrifying and uncanny due to its incompatibility with humanity's inner drive (instinct) to repeat/preserve the already existing (organic) state of being.⁶ The paradox arises from the inanimate (mechanical) nature of its form enveloped with animate qualities, making it a personification of both life and death. With the automaton (“inanimate life”), the image of the zombie (“living death”) is no longer a mere shadow. Departing from the worlds of myth and the imaginary, the image of the zombie becomes the new mechanical human construct. It complements the ability science has always had in breeding its own monsters (entities other than human), due to humanity's instinct for further perfection, as recorded in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: “God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance.”⁷ The scientific creation of human monsters, according to the analogy of the synthetic zombie entity, is actively engaging with the themes of dehumanisation and the confusion between human and non-human. The horror motif of the automaton gradually leads to the biologically engineered android or cyborg variety,⁸ where the regularity and repetitiveness of the machine mechanisms (the ability to recreate and reproduce other forms of organic/inorganic existence) are combined with the workings of the organic human matter.

In cyberpunk sf the cyborg becomes the new monster, symbolising the disillusionment of the contemporary human subject due to the fragmentation of its subjectivity and degradation of its personality value. Unlike Donna Haraway's utopian reading of the cyborg in her Cyborg Manifesto as a technologically higher form in the evolutionary chain due to the symbiosis of the human with the technological, in William Gibson's trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive)⁹ cyborgs are presented as humanity's electronically simulated nightmares.¹⁰ They live in the margins of society engaging in everything illegal (hackers, cyberspace cowboys) or in the periphery of their own bodies (clones, vats), depicting a world in crisis as the boundaries between the real and simulated reality have dissolved. The dissolution of its physiology traits (gender identity) and its tailored human selfhood make the cyborg the symbol of a human/non-human hybrid identity that can be manufactured and artificially assembled. Being not entirely human, the cyborg exists in the margins of human existence as something other than real. Being digitally constructed the cyborg exists as a simulation of reality, imitating the marginality of the zombie as the shadow and reflection of the real human self (the “abject”, according to Kristeva, that opposes the “I”).¹¹ While emphasis is placed on its synthetic existence, the cyborg develops into a metaphor and an icon for the deep-seated concerns of contemporary humanity over issues of self-awareness and identity in the same manner as the automaton/zombie existed as a metaphor for the mechanisation of human existence at the turn of the nineteenth century.¹²

The characters in Gibson's novels live in an age of electronically facilitated bodily transcendence. The materiality of their bodies is denounced, since it is the fluid and kinetic nature of cyberspace, as shown in Neuromancer, to be valued: “In the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes pouring in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information” (N [Neuromancer], p. 68: Ch. 3). The passage from a physically defined subjectivity to a new form of selfhood that can fuse and merge with the spatiotemporal reality of cyberspace enables human beings to view their specter and manipulate their image for the production/reproduction of electronically plausible multiple experiences. Being able to simulate real experiences, within cyberspace (or virtual reality), according to Scott Bukatman's analysis, “the disembodied consciousness leaps and dances with unparalleled freedom […] in which the mind is freed from bodily limitations.”¹³ The breach with the external and internal territory of the human subject, due to the negation of the flesh, has led to the technological colonisation not only of the outer, but also of the inner human space. The irrelevance of human flesh, due to terminal invasion and penetration, diminishes the value of bodily experience, leaving the human subject unguarded against the numinous “vampiristic” nature of the machine.

Through the representational quality of cyberspace and the superficiality of the characters (due to the deprivation of their realistic existence),¹⁴ the preoccupation with the human/inhuman is central to Gibson's trilogy. Relying on the conjunction of text and image, Gibson resorts to his comic book background¹⁵ for the extraction of visual motifs functioning as metaphors for the contemporary human condition. According to Mark Oehlert's analysis “among the issues comic book cyborgs confront are violence, consciousness downloading, lost humanity, corporations as evil avatars.”¹⁶ Cutting into society's fears and desires, the cyborg comic book creatures (The Fantastic Four, The Hulk, Spider-Man, Daredevil, X-Men, Dr. Doom and Iron Man) could be “perceived as warnings as to what might happen if we pursue this line of technology.”¹⁷ Science (exposure to radiation, cyborg technology)¹⁸ has played a dominant role in creating both heroes and villains in the comic book industry (especially from 1961 to 1970, the “Marvel Age”). This influence will later feed in certain graphic novel titles following the publication of Gibson's trilogy where an attempt is made to visualise Gibson's proposed model of textual graphic representations of a dense and complex cyber-reality.¹⁹ Among the graphic novels influenced by the visual intensity of his texts, Mike Saenz's computer aided graphic design constitutes a good example. Saenz's “cyber” graphic novel Iron Man: Crash (1988)²⁰ relies upon the same aesthetics, as his intention is to “incise a kind of ‘digital aesthetic’ into the fabric of art and the story”,²¹ depicting technologically empowered body images whose human identity has been superseded by its electronically accessed or chemically programmed self.

In Gibson's texts and Saenz's graphic design the reader, besides the power cyberspace has over the human subject, is confronted with other, but not new, forms of technological control over individual consciousness. Drugs and stimulants reinforce the existence of a parallel to this world's temporal reality. Blurring the spatial and temporal boundaries, due to their subjection to a chemically programmed transformation, individuals live in a science-fictionalised reality. The exploitation of the workings of their inner mind by chemically advanced substances pushes their consciousness beyond the reality plane they presently occupy. Bodies and experiences no longer co-exist in Molly's experience as recorded in Neuromancer: “‘I wasn't conscious. It's like cyberspace, but blank. Silver. It smells like rain … you can see yourself orgasm, it's like a little nova right out on the rim of space’” (N, pp. 177-178: Ch. 11). The fragmentation of human subjectivity is underlined, according to Brian McHale, by the existence of “biologically-engineered alter ego[s]”.²² With the alter ego emergence, due to the alienation of the human subject from its external physical and spatial reality, every experience becomes other as if the character is acting out a scene in a role-play game. Oscillating between different levels of perception, Molly's alter ego simultaneously inhabits two parallel worlds due to the self-annihilating nature of her inactive/hyperactive consciousness. Molly's double consciousness reinforces the split between what she really is (human) and what possesses her now (chemical control). The paradox created could be attributed to a visual trick, to her visual ability to instantaneously perceive the herself that was and the herself that is now, which strengthens the equation that the writer draws between the drug and cyber mediated experience described in the text. Paul Virilio, in his study The Art of the Motor, writes that “it is the eyeball that now englobes man's entire body […] the fractional dimensions of cyberspace enable us to transfer the content of our sensations to an impalpable Double.”²³ The “impalpable Double” nature of cyberspace alludes to the gothic image of the zombie, also characterised as the shadowy Double of human existence. Cyberspace appears to be more self-haunting than that, depicted not as a human but as a technologically regulated experience. The influence technology exerts over the human senses and mainly over human vision manipulates the inner workings of the human mind due to the negation of the inner/outer dichotomy of human existence. Cyberspace is not a mere reflection, according to the zombie principle, but an extension of human subjectivity where the human and the technological fuse into an indistinguishable entity. The disintegration of the human subject is figuratively presented in Gibson's fiction through linguistic or visual metaphors. It is upon the ability postmodern/cyberpunk sf has to visualise these concepts that the link with graphic art lies.

In terms of conceptualising and rendering techniques, Saenz focuses his attention on the page layout comprised of different shots, body language, and hardware depiction techniques. With the readers following the simple ordering of frames, it is the shots that render the visual events, set the scene and the mood. To emphasise the control of technology over the human subject, Saenz confronts the readers with the establishing shot of a “SHIELD craft”²⁴ (a technologically defined enclosed space).²⁵ Its accuracy of lines strengthens its aerodynamic presentation, while the overhead lighting of its hardware surfaces together with their finely blended shades of blue (use of airbrush) create a sinister deep shadowy effect, making this machine-defined space appear as something other than human.²⁶ Its numinous nature is further reinforced in the second frame where the eye centres around the medium-shot of the hero's (Tony Stark) organic figure (human) contrasted against the inorganic craft space (machine). Emphasis on the disintegration and fragmentation of the human self is achieved by intentionally omitting the full presentation of the hero's figure, focusing instead on his crouching body posture intensified by the slight blurring effect of his facial tonal density. The pictorial narrative suddenly changes focus when the artist is attempting to approach the subject of the chemically designed control substances. The artist, exploiting the visual immediacy between the readers and the depiction itself, chooses to be rough and raw to communicate the visual intensity of the action itself. The same feeling cannot be achieved in the written text where language substitutes for the immediacy of the eyeball. The power of vision in the written text emerges from the ability of language to record the unseen aspects of the event (alienation from external reality and the emergence of an alter ego). The graphic novel is not entirely deprived of language. The high impact of its visual motifs is further stimulated by the epigrammatic sentences incorporated in the image frame, verbalising the thematic idea (drug control) underlying the graphic representation: “When was my last Perpetuon injection? So much has been happening. It's long overdue. Dulls the emotions […] Isn't what I need? I don't know anymore.”²⁷ The economy and effectiveness of the pictorial discourse is achieved by simultaneously combining different visual effects, apart from the different shots used (ultra-closeup), leading to the incorporation of all senses when interpreting a visual motif. Adjusting the saturation levels (colour strength) to very plain but dull colours, tinting the hero's body with shades of ochre and “cold” blue in alternation with the dark brown colours of his face, the artist emphasises the hero's disintegration in an entity other than human due to his subjection to chemical control.²⁸ The use of a particular palette of colours reinforces the hero's biologically engineered transformation with his human form appearing to be passive (what Gibson in Neuromancer describes as “meat puppets”) and entirely subdued to the drug effect. The interchangeable arrangement of the images (in collage) depicting the hero's face alongside the designer drug, strengthen the assumption of the human/technology fusion. Resorting to different scales and theme colours, the artist projects the drug as a tool of technological domination as shown in the strong and firm lines the artist chooses for designing the arms and hands of the hero, revealing his determination in delivering the act (drug injection).

Apart from the chemically designed devices of body and mind control, the Cyber Age zombies are also subjected to biotechnological methods of surgically implanted biochips, enabling total submission of the human subject to technologically manipulated sources of power.²⁹ The emergence of a technologically enhanced human form, surpassing the traditional sf models of electronic surrogates (robots, AIs), functions as a central visual motif for both the writer and the graphic artist.

In Gibson's Count Zero, Angie Mitchell's transformation into technology's own instrument is communicated to the reader through the elaborate presentation of the technological practice Angie is subjected to. Resorting to a somehow unintelligible to the common reader scientific jargon, the writer overemphasises the overwhelming power of bio-technology as he is pushing the text beyond a common and rationally explained code of communication to a hybrid linguistic form: “[Mitchell] has perfected the hybridoma techniques […] he had produced the immortal hybrid cells that were basic production tools of the new technology, minute biochemical factories endlessly reproducing the engineered molecules that were linked and built up into biochips.”³⁰ The dissolution of her identity, due to the biochip implants control, into a hybrid (technologically generated) form, transgresses the barriers of her single mind, senses, and body, vampirising her inner being. Looking so human and the same time so other, Angie is nothing more than a synthetic zombie entity where the monstrosity of its being no longer lies in the periphery of her human existence but has already become an integral part of her being.³¹

Saenz is graphically approaching the subject of biological control by actually interpreting the metamorphosis of the human subject as an external rather than an internal process. Here again the artist relies on the ability of vision to capture an event in its external intensity, while language records the workings of the inner mind. Following the hero's external transformation (from human to humanoid) frame by frame, the artist mainly concentrates on the conceptualisation of the hero's “exo-suit” (externally worn armoured body case) enabling the audience visualise his gradual fusion with the machine, producing what in sf is called a cyborg. The artist is here moving beyond the traditional experience of the body as something organic to its association with an identifiable inorganic artificial form. Resorting to the lowest possible number of primary colours (red, yellow, magenta, cyan, black, and white), Saenz reduces the image to mere surface (“screen print”) making it resemble a collage of disparate pieces.³² With nothing else filling in the background of the identical square shaped frames on the graphic page, the hero's armoured body appears even more stylised and artificial. Emphasis on its humanoid form is further enhanced by the way the human body anatomy is manipulated for the depiction of something other than human. Experimenting with exaggerated body shapes, the artist chooses to depict his cybernetically transformed hero with muscles bulging in more directions than would usually happen in real life. The correctly planned posture and distribution of the hero's body masses make him look as something other than real, while the positioning of light so that the salient edges of the image to be picked out without direct illumination (edgelighting) add subtlety and forcefulness to the form that the hero has changed into (humanoid).

The stylisation of the hero's humanoid form can be attributed to the attention paid to the accurate and meticulous drawing of the armoured body hardware, resembling the detailed analysis of the biochip implantation technique in Gibson's text. The elaborate depictions are also accompanied by highly stylised fragmented sentences (“stereoscopic occlusion shutters”, “ocular solvent pipettes”), almost imitating the style of the technological jargon found in scientific manuals. This strips Saenz's hero from any human significance diminishing him into an automated object in display, a commodity that can become whatever you want it to be as in a video role game. This humanoid experience is even more emphasised when the meticulous graphic hardware presentation allows the audience to interface directly with the hero's electronic system. Allowing them to envision events through his machine vision as well as items of data scrolling rapidly on the screen with the focus shifting forwards and backwards, it is as if the graphic artist has placed the audience in the machine.³³

Gibson explores the simultaneous occupation of an electronically simulated and a humane body, when reference is made to simstim (simulated stimulation) technologies. In Neuromancer he describes it as “a flip flop switch, basically. Wire it into your Sendai here, you can access live or recorded simstim without having to jack out of the matrix” (N, p. 70: Ch. 3). Simstim is a multisensory experience creating in the written text the same effect as in the graphic design. Entering the optical spectrum of Saenz's cyborg image, the audience's vision is enlarged accessing the parallel to real life cybernetic vacuum. While the thorough description of all the electronic devices on the cyborg's armored body, enable the audience experience the multisensory enhancement achieved via the intervention of technology. In Neuromancer the simstim experience is presented as something powerful enough to substitute real experience with technology not simply copying but actually transferring the authentic feeling of external reality: “Then he [Case] keyed the new switch. The abrupt jolt into other flesh. Matrix gone, a wave of sound and color … She [Molly] was moving through a crowded street […] Smells of urine, free monomers, perfume […] For a few frightened seconds he fought helplessly to control her body. Then he willed himself into passivity, became the passenger behind her eyes” (N, pp. 71-72: Ch. 4). With Case becoming the “passenger behind her eyes”, in the same way as the audience becomes the passenger behind the cyborg's eyes in the graphic novel, the simstim experience effaces the boundaries existing between the natural and the artificial uniting them into one and the same entity. The technologically plausible union of Case's male and Molly's female body in cyberspace (matrix),³⁴ through the medium of vision, gives birth to a hybrid and uncanny form of androgynous being. Its uncanniness emerges from the power the eyeball has to fuse imagination with reality enveloping whatever is imaginary with realistic qualities.³⁵

The electronic transvestite body does not simply transgress the codes of gender-defined society, but suggests the possibility of imagining the world with bodies whose gender agenda can be electronically altered or even manufactured. Saenz's cyborg image, although complying with the superhero tradition (empowered male bodies), parodies the stereotypical gender roles that want male bodies to be physically powerful and robust. The exaggerated muscular body structure and the removable qualities of the armoured body efface socially imposed gender distinctions, revealing their superficiality and insignificance.

The issue of gender transgression and subversion is evident throughout Gibson's trilogy with Molly in Neuromancer perfectly exemplifying the idea of the androgynous being: “She held out her hands, palms up, […] and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails” (N, p. 37: Ch. 1). Her androgynous nature is presented here in its entire monstrosity, proving how dangerous the transgression of boundaries can be. Her organic/inorganic transformation resembles a teratogenesis with her flesh eaten away by a synthetic killing machine emerging through her organic body form.³⁶ What differentiates the disfigurement of her human body form from the graphic representation of Saenz's cyborg image is the nature of the transformation itself. In the first case the metamorphosis starts from within, while in the second the conversion is attributed to an external mechanism (“exo suit”).

The legitimacy of technological violence against external body structure promoting aesthetically “ugly” (due to being unreal) synthetic human forms can be found throughout Gibson's trilogy. Neuromancer and Count Zero are diffused with obscure descriptions of youth troupes (“Gothic” and “Dracs”) where the extremity of their external appearance (human deformity) intensifies the peculiarity of the present human condition: “At least twenty Gothics postured in the main room […] like a composite creature, slime-mould with jigsaw surface of dark leather and stainless spikes. Most of them had nearly identical faces, features reworked to match ancient archetypes called from kino banks” (CZ [Count Zero], pp. 57-58: Ch. 6). The exaggerated but identical features make savagery part of the production line of the technological aesthetics of cyber culture relying on the promotion of hybrid (unoriginal) forms. All the zombie figures besides the main characters filling in the silences of the text are not featured as outsiders or persecuted minorities, but as members of a society whose individuals have chosen to lead a technologically enhanced existence. The writer choosing to name them as “Dracs” and “Gothics” alludes to the nineteenth-century zombie/vampire tradition but not without a reason. Their surgically modified human form and their distorted conventional feminine and masculine personas (“identical faces”, “features reworked”) mark a transition from a tradition employing superstition and supernaturalism as a device for social control (expulsion of everybody deviating from the socially accepted norms) to a cultural condition identifying otherness with the contemporary crisis of technological dehumanisation. Emphasis on the deformity of external traits, as shown in Neuromancer, intensifies the speculative power of technology, while the nouns used (“Dracs” and “Gothics”) to address the underground youth troupes function as empty signifiers underlining the superficiality (iconic hybridity) of cyber aesthetics: “His [Angelo] face was a simple graft grown on collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccharides, smooth and hideous. […] When Angelo smiled, revealing the razor-sharp canines of some large animal, Case was actually relieved. Toothbud transplants. He'd seen that before” (N, pp. 75-76: Ch. 4). The artificiality of the organic form leads to the demythologisation of the vampire motif. Using technical terms (cosmetic surgery jargon) to describe the machine-induced bestiality³⁷ (“shark-cartilage polysaccharides”, “razor-sharp canines of some large animal) of the character's facial structure, the writer parodies and trivialises (“Case was actually relieved”, “He'd seen that before”) the transformation. The monstrosity and hideousness of the external form could be interpreted as manipulation of the biological form for the satisfaction of the consumerist desire within the framework of postindustrial economy wanting everything to be manufactured and replaceable. With the narrative structured upon two parallel themes (cyberpunk's sf preoccupation with the inhuman and nineteenth-century vampire writing), the writer focuses on the ideological rupture existing between the borrowed literary motif of the vampire (a symbol of non-conformism and social differentiation) and the cultural icon it has become representing the hollowness, artificiality, and commodification of present-day existence.

With the grotesque and savage presented as an artificial rather than a supernatural entity, the dismantling of human identity goes beyond the opposition of good and evil entering the discourse of cultural performativity and iconic representation in the context of a speculative society. Gibson's cyberpunk androgynous models of cyborg consciousness could be compared to Pepe Moreno's graphic representations as part of his computer generated graphic design Batman: Digital Justice (1990). Aiming to transfer his audience from the mundane to the extraordinary (displacement) focusing on creatures that are certainly nonhuman (anthropomorphism), Moreno employs a variety of shots to give visual prompts as to the type of character to be portrayed (characterisation). In Gibson's text the visual prompts (“Gothics” and “Dracs”) used carry symbolic/figurative significance. The disfigurement and destructiveness of the human form is not attributed to mere biological factors, but to the dehumanised forces behind the machine making the body look completely other. In Gibson's text and Moreno's design, the monstrosity of the vampire is not decoded as something absent or unreal (according to imagery of nineteenth-century Gothic novels),³⁸ but represents the technologically generated choices humanity has to live as something else than human.

The image Moreno chooses for the graphic induction of the androgynous but bestial bodies theme heavily draws upon the myth of the female vampire being “the highest symbolic representation of eroticism”.³⁹ He graphically approaches the theme by confronting his audience with a sexually assertive seemingly female image (Gata=Cat=Beast) deliberately endowed with masculine physical traits (face and body structure).⁴⁰ Unlike nineteenth-century vampire fiction, the focus of emphasis shifts from depictions of vulnerable and sexually repressed female bodies (presented in gothic texts as female vampires)⁴¹ to caricatures of apparently eroticised female figures serving as surface markers of constructed sexuality.⁴² Choosing the “brachycephalic” shape for the depiction of the facial features (emphasis on breadth rather than length) of his androgynous image, the graphic artist gradually moves from a surface feminine marker onto an emergent masculine one. The artist effectively carries this out by concentrating on minor body details (flat face, not protruding nose) to delineate the hybrid (androgynous) nature of his image (male brutishness, female sensuality). The same logic applies to the graphic representation of the body visualised as a cross-gendered (“mesomorphic”) structure (square and fairly well muscled body with exaggerated female proportions). Resorting to visual cues instead of accurate realistic depictions when sketching the body posture of his image, the artist manages to produce a graphic representation of gender subversion by producing sexually neutralised modes of being.

With emphasis placed on an artificial human-like form simultaneously combining animal/machine elements, Moreno graphically produces a warrior image blending technology with savagery and primitivism. The artificial leopard-like claws, the satanic red and icy blue eyes, the sharp canines and the tight black leather uniform self-contradicts the mythologised warrior persona that the image evokes constituting instead its fake (demythologisation) artificially constructed copy. The ferociousness of the primitive warrior (due to the savagery of the armoured body) becomes obscure when viewed alongside the futuristic society s/he (denotes hybridity) emerges from. The forcefulness of the external appearance is dragged downwards into a feeling of its own superficiality in a society obsessed with icons. The initially mythologised savage body gradually dwindles to a demythologised puppet form entrapped within the role of the entertainer (the rock idol) enforced by contemporary society. The stylisation of the external appearance stripped from any spiritual and social function is only valued for its performative and iconic significance. Moreno's androgynous image (the savage warrior and the aesthetisised female rocker) due to its synthetisised form of existence (subversion of gender boundaries leading to the victimisation of the human subject) is metaphorically fighting against the dehumanising influence exerted by the machine.⁴³ The same effect is reinforced with the artist filling in the background with smaller in scale figures (juxtaposing the androgynous image against the diminutive representation of the surrounding crowd intensifies the centrality of the rocker icon) mainly emphasising the dull tones of their visage and “Mohawk” haircut in an attempt to communicate their ineffective raw power. Moreno's graphic design, overtly promoting a simplistic depiction of good (human elements) and evil (machine elements), is inertly parodying the extraordinariness of the visual icon whose exaggerating form pronounces its social hollowness.

The depthlessness of the image combined with the entertainer's icon (the rocker singer) that it wishes to project is an essential motif in Moreno's design and Gibson's text. With Moreno literally relying on the eye contact established between the audience and the graphic image reinforcing the influence of the spectacle, Gibson chooses to approach the issue of image simulation from the perspective of usurpation (sacrifice) of the human subject by the spectacle itself. In Mona Lisa Overdrive Angie Mitchell's (the simstim star) human substance is erased when her persona enters the production line of simulated experience. She no longer exists as a realistic entity but as a mere surface with her image degraded to a commodity (poster imprints, simstim decks): “There was a picture of Angie Mitchell taped up behind one of the tables” (MLO [Mona Lisa Overdrive], p. 69: Ch. 8), “stim those new Angies” (MLO, p. 100: Ch. 11). The surface structure of Angie's image is highlighted in the text as total absence. There is no direct eye contact established between the readers and the simstim's star image. Gibson chooses to be as economical as possible in his descriptions avoiding to offer his readers any exact or even elaborate details concerning Angie's appearance itself, concentrating only on the fake props filling in the poster's background: “the beauty of the poster, the luxury of the pictured room […] it was a kind of castle, probably it was where Angie lived […] you could see the walls were made of big rocks, and those mirrors had frames on them that were solid gold, carved with leaves and angels” (MLO, p. 69: Ch. 8). Moreno's fantasticated and animalistic representations are substituted in the text by the elaborate fakeness of Angie's surroundings enhancing the superficiality and hollowness of her iconic existence. In Moreno's graphic representation, being a rock idol symbolically identifies with the image of the outsider, the social non-conformist resisting social and technological control (hence the allusion to the vampire motif).⁴⁴ In Gibson's text Angie reverses the star system stereotypes (wanting rock idols to be wild), having entirely dissolved into a technologically generated cultural image caught up between a pseudo-super-naturalism (“it was a kind of castle”, “the walls were made of big rocks”) and a pseudo-mythologisation of her personal space (the castle and the baroque mirror imagery carry no cultural significance). Her total usurpation by the mass media strips her bare from any form of existence (individual and social absence) reducing her to a mere spectrum. The usurpation and complete degradation of the individual to a surface marker reaches its sacrificial moment when Angie's simstim persona is surgically taken over by Mona Lisa: “When she [Mona] was alone again, she rolled over and studied her face, Angie's face, in the mirrored wall. The bruising was almost gone. Gerald taped things like miniature trodes to her face and hooked them to the machine. Said they made it heal real fast” (MLO, p. 185: Ch. 23). The desire for manipulating and transfiguring human physicality (image usurpation) becomes the ultimate expression of human narcissism, also revealing the sickness and psychopathology of a society valuing monstrosity (technological non-human hybrids) as a manifestation of otherness.⁴⁵

Through the exploration of the non-human by shifting the focus of attention from the biology factor, the issue that remains is that human identity is in crisis. This anxiety metaphorically demonstrated in cyberpunk sf and graphic design in a range of identity ‘zombie’ constructions reveals the fear (the “abjection”)⁴⁶ of humanity turning into automated functional entities (i.e killing machines, cultural icons). Technology in Gibson's fictional world is presented as a “frighteningly intimate” force that transforms and disfigures the human form by producing multiple technologically simulated varieties. Human beings are confronted with their own myth of imbuing “the objects that they create with a sense of [their] own living spirit—to animate the inanimate and create a new form of “life” based on [their] own characteristics.”⁴⁷ Saenz's and Moreno's design graphically renders the hideousness of contemporary technology by depicting hybrid images of blended human and non-human forms. By inviting readers to take a speculative leap towards questioning the “unhuman, cold, and impersonal technological [force] that increasingly challenges the boundaries between the corporeal and the mechanical”,⁴⁸ both text and graphic design explore different ways the human subject is usurped pushing human vanity to its most grotesque and monstrous manifestations.

Notes

1. Scott Bukatman defines terminal identity as “an unmistakably doubled articulation in which we find both the end of the subject and a new subjectivity constructed at the computer station or television screen.” Reference to terminal identity, according to Bukatman, can be found in William Burroughs's novel Nova Express (1964): “The entire planet is being is being developed into terminal identity and complete surrender.” See Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-Modern Science Fiction (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 9.

2. “In the 18th century, Vaucanson unveiled a mechanised excreting duck and a pump-operated flautist with mechanical fingers. The human body was a fabulously intricate mechanism, but it could be mimicked and perhaps even replicated.” See Scott Bukatman, Blade Runner (London: British Film Institute, 1997), p. 64.

3. E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Best Tales of Hoffmann, edited by E. F. Bleiler (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1967).

4. Representation of mechanical automata can also be found in Villiers de L'Isle Adam, The Eve of the Future (1886).

5. Manuel Aguirre, The Closed Space: Horror Literature and Western Symbolism (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 130-131.

6. “It seems, then, that an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces […] This view of instincts strikes us as strange because we have become used to see in them a factor impelling towards change and development, whereas we are now asked to recognize in them the precise contrary—an expression of the conservative nature of living substance.” See Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, translated and newly edited by James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press & The Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1961), p. 30.

7. Peter Fairclough, ed., Three Gothic Novels (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 397.

8. “The neologism ‘cyborg’ […] was proposed by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline in 1960 to describe ‘self-regulating man-machine systems’ and in particular and exogenously extended organisational complex functioning as integrated homeostatic system.” See David Tomas, “Feedback and cybernetics: Reimagining the Body in the Age of the Cyborg”, in Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, eds., Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, (London: Sage Publications, 1995), pp. 21-43, at p. 35.

9. The editions of the primary texts I will be referring to in this article are as follows: William Gibson, Neuromancer (London: Voyager, 1995); Count Zero (London: Voyager, 1995); Mona Lisa Overdrive (London: Voyager, 1995). References to these texts in the main body of the essay will be indicated in parenthesis and take the form of an abbreviation (N for Neuromancer, CZ for Count Zero, MLO for Mona Lisa Overdrive) followed by a page number. Chapter numbers will also be given to aid readers with different editions.

10. Donna Haraway argues that “by the later twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics.” See Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (London: Free Association Books, 1991), p. 150.

11. “What is abject is not my correlative, which, providing me with someone or something else as support, would allow me to be more or less detached and autonomous. The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I.” See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 1.

12. Some texts to be considered among others as examples of the cultural ambivalence of the times towards science are: Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), H. G. Wells's Island of Dr Moreau (1896), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1987).

13. Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-Modern Science Fiction, pp. 208-209.

14. “I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border […] nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver.” See Kristeva, op. cit., p. 3.

15. “Gibson has admitted that a primary influence on his conception of cyberspace was the comic book visualizations of Heavy Metal.” See Bukatman, op. cit., p. 152.

16. Mark Oehlert, “From Captain America to Wolverine”, in Chris Hables Gray, ed., The Cyborg Handbook (New York & London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 219-232, at p. 226.

17. Oehlert, op. cit., p. 226.

18. Stan Lee's X-Men epic tales of tragedy and triumph, among others, serve as prime examples of the newer cyborgs populating current comics. See Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, The Essential Uncanny X-Men (August 1999); Stan Lee, The Ultimate X-Men (USA: Boulevard, 1996); Stan Lee, The Uncanny X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga (USA: Marvel Books, 1990).

19. Some titles to be considered are: Scott Rockwell and Darryl Banks, Cyberpunk (Wheeling, W. V.: Innovative Corporation, 1989), Pepe Moreno, Batman: Digital Justice (New York: DC Comics Inc., 1990), and Tom DeHaven and Bruce Jensen, Neuromancer: The Graphic Novel (New York: Epic Comics, 1989).

20. According to Les Daniels's history of Marvel, Iron Man was probably the most popular graphic novel of cyborg culture to debut in Marvel in 1963. It also constituted the model upon which Mike Saenz based his graphic creation. See Les Daniels, Marvel (New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1991).

21. Mike Saenz, Iron Man: Crash (New York: Marvel Entertainment Group, 1988), p. 67.

22. Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 255.

23. Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor, translated by Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 148.

24. “SHIELD is now, of course, the official world police organization, dedicating to protecting all nations from extra-governmental threats.” Saenz, op. cit., p. 5.

25. See Saenz, op. cit., p. 36.

26. Manuel Aguirre in his analysis of enclosed gothic spaces describes the machine-defined spaces as “no longer a human space; it does not happen to be sheltering a numinous presence, it is the numinous presence, an otherworldly living space […] It is another perfect parasite, another cell in the body of mankind.” (See Aguirre, op. cit., p. 192). His argument reinforces the cyber-gothic dialectic this paper is attempting to present focusing on a continuation of practices and symbol usage.

27. Saenz, op. cit., p. 36.

28. “Humans are little more than adjuncts to machines […] rebuilt in accordance with technological needs and capacities, leaving nature and humanity supplemented to the point of extinction.” See Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 163.

29. “At the moment I'm involved with the ‘Nature of Freedom’ drill you know, wondering if any action of mine is truly my own, or if always do only what They want me to do … regardless of what I believe you see … I've been given the old Radio-Control-Implanted-In-The-Head-At-Birth problem to mull over-as kind of koon, I suppose, It's driving me really, chemically insane.” See Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (London: Picador, 1973), pp. 541-542.

30. William Gibson, Count Zero, first published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz Ltd. 1986 (London: Voyager, 1995), p. 127 (Chapter 14).

31. Judith Halberstam in her definition of the “postmodern monster” writes: “The postmodern monster is no longer the hideous other storming the gates of the human citadel, […] makes the peripheral and the marginal part of the centre. Monsters within postmodernism are already inside—[…] the body, the head.” See Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 167.

32. See Saenz, op. cit., p. 8.

33. See Saenz, op. cit., p. 9 (Top) and p. 38 (Bottom).

34. As Lance Olsen says, “the world matrix derives from the Latin for womb, which in turn derives from the Latin for mother. So while it is true that only males have access [jack in] to cyberspace, it is equally true that what they have access to is a female region.” See Lance Olsen, “The Shadow of the Spirit in William Gibson's Matrix Trilogy”, Extrapolation, Vol. 32, No. 3, (1991), pp. 279-289, at p. 283.

35. “This is that an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolises and so on.” See Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), reprinted in Albert Dickson, ed., Art and Literature, translated from the German by James Strachey, Vol. 14 (London: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 367.

36. The emergence of a killing-machine personality can be found in the cyberpunk texts of Walter John's Hardwired (London and Sydney: Futura, 1986) as well as in Michael Swanwick and William Gibson's short story “Dogfight” incorporated in Gibson's short story collection Burning Chrome and Other Stories. It can also be seen in James Cameron's film productions of Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2 (1991), in Paul Verhoeven's Robocop (1987), as well as in Shinya Tsukamoto's Japanese production of Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1991) where the imagery derives from Japanese manga.

37. The emergence of a cyber-induced bestiality not only opposes but also parodies nineteenth-century Darwinian scepticism (Origin of Species, 1859) relying on biological justification about the animal stage humanity has emerged from and was about to return to. Rosemary Jackson argues that “[r]eduction to a primal state of inorganicism, of the pre-human, is equally horrific to Machen [The Great God Pan (1894)] and to H. G. Wells [The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and The Invisible Man (1897)], whose fantasies shrink from all that is not human.” See Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, first published by Methuen & Co. Ltd in 1981 (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 116.

38. “Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) […] dissolves the life/death boundary, returning from an otherworld to prey upon the living. He occupies a paraxial realm, neither wholly dead nor wholly alive. He is a present absence, an unreal substance.” See Jackson, op. cit., p. 118.

39. Jackson, op. cit., p. 120.

40. See Pepe Moreno, “Part 4”, Batman: Digital Justice (New York: DC Comics Inc., 1990).

41. “The vampire myth is perhaps the highest symbolic representation of eroticism. Its return in Victorian England […] points to it as a myth born out of extreme repression. It is during his period of engagement to Lucy that Harker enters the world of Dracula and vampirism […] The fantasy of vampirism is generated at the moment of maximum social repression on the eve of marriage […] It introduces all that is ‘kept in the dark’: the vampires are active at night, when light/vision/the power of the look are suspended.” See Jackson, op. cit., p. 120.

42. “The figures were caricatures in light, lifesize cartoons […] Molly's breasts were too large, visible through tight black mesh beneath a heavy leather jacket.” See Gibson, Neuromancer, p. 249.

43. “The punks' bizarre and creative use of other forms of modern technology to suggest savagery is an indication of the extent to which these warriors will go to prove that they are unafraid of technology's dehumanising, mechanizing effects.” See Ronald Schmitt, “Mythology and Technology: The Novels of William Gibson”, Extrapolation, 34.1, (Spring 1993), pp. 64-78, at p. 66.

44. Poppy Z. Brite in her gothic/horror novel Lost Souls (1993) explores the psychology of the outsider, recounting the story of three vampires (Zillah, Molochai, Twig) members of the Lost Souls? rock band. The vampire motif as a metaphor for the outsider is also examined in Anne Rice's novels Interview with the Vampire (1994) and The Vampire Lestat (1986) with Lestat embodying a rock star. In these novels the vampires are the pleasure-seekers (erotic desire), always in search of another form of community.

45. “Medical technology can be used to miraculously restore life, perpetuate state or compliment human vanity to the point of the grotesque.” See Schmitt, op. cit., p. 77.

46. “On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safe-guards. The primers of my culture.” See Kristeva, op. cit., p. 2.

47. Schmitt, op. cit., p. 76.

48. Schmitt, op. cit., p. 76.