Ashleigh Prosser

The Umbrella Academy (2008–2024) is an Eisner-award-winning science-fiction comic-book series created and written by Gerard Way, illustrated by Gabriel Bá, colored by Dave Stewart, and published by Dark Horse Comics. The story follows a dysfunctional family of seven uncanny superheroes who began their lives as the famous inexplicably superpowered children instantaneously born at the same time in random spontaneous pregnancies around the world. They were then adopted by wealthy scientist Sir Reginald Hargreeves to form The Umbrella Academy, spending their childhood fighting supervillains and training to save the world. Having disbanded after the death of one sibling and the disappearance of another when they were teenagers, their father’s mysterious death causes them to reunite as adults as they attempt to prevent the impending apocalypse. Executive-produced by Way and Bá, and created by showrunners Steve Blackman and Jeremy Slater, Netflix has released three ten-episode series and a fourth final six-episode series adaptation of The Umbrella Academy (in 2019, 2020, 2022, and 2024 respectively), to widespread popular critical acclaim. The first two series loosely adapt the first two collected volumes of the comics (Apocalypse Suite and Dallas), while the third series moved beyond the third collected volume of the comics (Hotel Oblivion) into new territory under the guidance of Way, seemingly drawing on the as-yet-unpublished fourth collection of the comics, The Sparrow Academy. The fourth and final six-episode series released on Netflix in 2024 likewise remained under Way’s production but has not been connected to any further comics as of yet. This chapter will explore The Umbrella Academy’s textually hybrid transmedial form through analysis of the re-imagining of the uncanny superhero family drama from its comic-book universe to that of Netflix’s digital media world. It will examine how cross-media textual play with the comic-book superheroes and their narrative arcs functions to subversively domesticate the story for adaptation to the home streaming small screen. For, in Lorna Piatti-Farnell’s words, “once superheroes are transported from comic books into another medium, they become autonomous figures, whose representations, actions, and meanings are constructed within the newly established platform that gave them renewed life” (2021, 5).

This chapter discusses the depiction of the vampire in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand’s literature, film, and popular culture. It examines the unique cultural and historical context that the Antipodean Gothic provides for the postcolonial development of the vampire tradition in these regions. The chapter offers an overview of some key examples of the vampire figure in contemporary texts by Australians and New Zealanders from the page to the screen. It pays particular attention to highlight works created by Māori and Aboriginal authors, screenwriters, and filmmakers, who use the vampire narrative as a medium through which the historical horrors and ongoing traumas of European colonization can be explored. The chapter begins with an introduction to the Antipodean Gothic context and the figure of the vampire, and is then geographically divided into two sections, Vampires in Australia and Vampires in Aotearoa New Zealand, that each provides an overview of the monster in recent literature, film, and television in their respective regions. The chapter is then brought to its end by way of some concluding remarks regarding the similarities between the two nations’ depictions of the immortal undead monster.

This chapter discusses the depiction of the vampire in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand’s literature, film, and popular culture. It examines the unique cultural and historical context that the Antipodean Gothic provides for the postcolonial development of the vampire tradition in these regions. The chapter offers an overview of some key examples of the vampire figure in contemporary texts by Australians and New Zealanders from the page to the screen. It pays particular attention to highlight works created by Māori and Aboriginal authors, screenwriters, and filmmakers, who use the vampire narrative as a medium through which the historical horrors and ongoing traumas of European colonization can be explored. The chapter begins with an introduction to the Antipodean Gothic context and the figure of the vampire, and is then geographically divided into two sections, Vampires in Australia and Vampires in Aotearoa New Zealand, that each provides an overview of the monster in recent literature, film, and television in their respective regions. The chapter is then brought to its end by way of some concluding remarks regarding the similarities between the two nations’ depictions of the immortal undead monster.

For over forty years contemporary English author, biographer and popular historian Peter Ackroyd, CBE FRSL, has produced a vast collection of writing that can be broadly classified as neo-historical because of his insistent return to the past and its texts within his own, but it is worth noting that many of his works are concerned with or clearly influenced by the nineteenth century in particular and often referenced in neo-Victorian scholarship. For instance, Dana Shiller employs Ackroyd’s Chatterton (1987) alongside A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) to exemplify one of the earliest definitions of the neo-Victorian as “texts that revise specific...

Robert Mighall has argued that the Gothic is a mode fundamentally concerned with history and geography (Mighall 2003, xiv). In this chapter, I will examine the ways in which the Gothic mode functions in Peter Ackroyd’s trilogy of London histories, London: The Biography; Thames: Sacred River; and London Under. To date, much of the scholarship concerning the Gothic in Ackroyd’s works has tended to focus on analyses of particular novels, while very little has been written with regard to its presence within his historical writing. Within these three companion volumes on London’s history, Ackroyd complicates the relationship between history and geography in the city by engaging with the language and tropes of the Gothic to explore what he believes to be ‘a Gothic genius loci of London fighting against the spirit of the classic’ (Ackroyd 2001, 580). By employing the discourses of monstrosity, spectrality, and the uncanny, Ackroyd anthropomorphically transforms the city into something akin to the abhuman monster of the Gothic mode. In these volumes, he argues that this abhuman London possesses an uncanny form of agency, a kind of spectral consciousness through which the city is able to influence its inhabitants. I will argue that this spectral consciousness is the key to understanding Ackroyd’s Gothic theory of the history of place, his historiography’s fusion of history and geography into a transhistorical palimpsest that is manifested through hauntings, traces, and uncanny returns.