Narratives of city exposure: Incarnations of the street person in Zanta: The Living Legend and The Dregs

Abstract

This article examines the rationale for definitions of the homeless in the public imagination and the kind of discourses used to create a physical, psychological, and moral distance between the domiciled and the destitute. In a society where the worthy individual is tied to an ideal of entrepreneurial, rational, homed, successful consumer, and where public space is solely destined for the unobstructed consumption of the privileged, street dwellers are naturally seen as a threat to the economic, social, and moral order as well as a visual blemish: an obstacle to safety and wellbeing. Drawing from a number of sociological, urban, and narrative studies on the survival tactics of homeless people, and especially from Nicholas Blomley’s (2010) insights about street mobility and Leon Anderson’s (2017) classifications of stigma management, this article describes how subjects defined as pathological, dangerous, or pitiful, negotiate street restrictions and create their own standing within a revanchist city. These individuals feature in two comic books published in Canada, Zanta: The Living Legend (2012) and The Dregs (2017), whose originality lies in the heroic role the street person assumes, a legitimate searcher for meaning that sees what most people overlook. In their different format as non-fiction comic and serialized fictional comic we find the expressive visual and narrative potential of the genre and become witnesses of the tribulations of two characters whom the world may consider as deranged but are, however, able to enhance their self-esteem, dismantle ideologies behind assumed notions of respectability, and actively contribute to the city as a place of encounter with difference.