Madness as Narrative Possibility in the Comics of Nate Powell

The cultural myth of the ‘mad genius’ has associated madness with creativity, from the Romantic period to at least twentieth-century antipsychiatry (Laing 1965; Deleuze and Guattari 1972). Rather than treating madness as a springboard for literary achievement, a clinical category, or an identity (Beresford 2020), this paper will argue that madness and schizophrenia—including hallucinations and obsessions—function in the comics of Nate Powell as a formal catalyst that expands narrative possibility. More specifically, I will focus on visual metaphors, animal imagery, and fragmented page layouts as means of externalizing mental distress or trauma in three of Powell’s comics—Swallow Me Whole (2008), Any Empire (2011), and Come Again (2018). Building on insights from comics studies and cognitive narratology—particularly Charles Hatfield’s concept of the “art of tensions” (2009) and embodied approaches to narrative experience (Caracciolo and Kukkonen 2021)—this paper will examine how madness intensifies formal tensions between word and image, sequence and page design, and narrative coherence and fragmentation. Instead of treating hallucinations or altered realities as merely thematic content, I will show that Powell deploys them as structuring devices that influence readers’ interpretive and experiential engagement with the narrative. Ultimately, my intermedial and narratological analysis will show that madness allows Powell to transform subjective mental states into visual narrative spaces. In doing so, Powell reframes madness not as a pathology or romantic exceptionalism, but as a creative framework that enables narrative and artistic experimentation.