The Comic at the Crossroads: The Semiotics of ‘Voodoo Storytelling’ in The Hole: Consumer Culture Vol. 1

This article focuses on the use of religious semiology in the 2008 Black graphic novel The Hole: Consumer Culture Vol. 1 by Damian Duffy and John Jennings. Both creators use hidden signs taken from Haitian Vodou and other Afro-American literature tropes in order to give their story multiple meanings. To accomplish this, they utilize the Afro-American rhetorical figure Signifyin’ (or Signifyin(g)). This meta-speech plays with signs and their attached meaning in a way that could be summarized as ‘saying (or showing) one thing, but meaning something completely different.’ With this technique, the authors are able to mislead and exclude readers from the intentional meaning of the graphic novel by emphasizing ambivalent signs. By using cultural signs taken from Vodou, they are able to imply a spiritual reading experience in which the graphic novel becomes a ritual object and vehicle of the Vodou god Legba, lord of the crossroads and of interpretation. Modeled on Legba’s qualities, the story becomes an interactive system of reading paths that changes its reception depending on the reader’s interpretation of those ambiguous signs. This essay hence discusses the authors’ narrative strategy and how it changes the narrative. It thereby builds on the theory of Afro-American Signification presented in the book The Signifying Monkey by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and expands it.


Introduction
From the perspective of cultural anthropology, comics can be described as cultural objects (Kottas 2017: 166-168). As such, they are subject to perceptual patterns acquired socially. According to this approach, human perception is not solely a product of neurological processes but is similarly shaped by cultural experience (Prinz and Goebel 2015: 9-10). So, how a comic book is read is based on social conventions that must be learned and experienced (Kottas and Schwarzenbacher 2018: 158). Even though reading comics, or reading in general, is perceived as a secular, rational practice, it can also evoke a spiritual or magical experience (Baier 2011: 243-245). In that case, spirituality and magic are not essential 'substances;' they rather are a matter of signs and communication. Religious, spiritual, or magic experiences can be seen as semiotic constructs in which signs, symbols, and other figures are perceived as hiding a deeper meaning and potency (Willis 2006: 342). As a social practice, spiritual reading must be taught (Baier 2011: 245) in order to understand the hidden potential of narrations and symbols.
This essay aims to illustrate this 'spiritual' approach of reading comics by inquiring the Black graphic novel The Hole: Consumer Culture Vol. 1 (2008) (The Hole, in short) by Damian Duffy (writer) and John Jennings (artist). We focus on the Afro-American rhetorical technique Signifyin(g) as a narrative strategy that hides and alters the meaning of a story by using ambiguous linguistic key signs. Those keys refer to cultural experience and history, and can be understood only by those who share this knowledge. This also means that someone who does not notice this narrative strategy is deliberately misled by the authors' usage of ambivalent signs and gets, as a result, excluded from the intended meaning of their story. In The Hole, Duffy and Jennings use signs taken from Haitian Vodou religion to evoke a spiritual reading experience in which the graphic novel becomes a living being that talks to its audience and fools and misleads everyone who is 'spiritually illiterate.' For this attempt, we lean on an earlier German publication that similarly deals with ethnocentric constructions, and culture-specific identifications, of self-reflexivity in comic books by drawing on The Hole as a case example (see Kottas and Schwarzenbacher 2018). This paper however discusses the same graphic novel by introducing the approach of religious narratology that interprets Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s theory of The Signifying Monkey (1988) through the lens of Aesthetics of Religion.
Our aim is to develop a toolkit for studying the religious semiotics of comics and to support the research of narrative strategies in Black comics. To make our treatise more accessible, we briefly introduce our methodology in the first section of our this play with tropes and interpretations stems from oral narrative traditions in West Africa and from characteristics taken from a particular deity, Èshù-Elégbára (Eshu, in short), the god of interpretation. This figure appears under various names in West Africa and the New World, such as Papa Legba in Haiti or Papa La Bas in American Hoodoo traditions (Gates 1988: 5).
Eshu serves as the messaging link between the gods and men. As the guardian of the crossroads, he dwells between the world of the gods and the human world (Gates 1988: 6). He establishes and regulates communication between them during ritual sessions, as he is the only one who is able to open the gates and to translate the various languages (Gates 1988: 6-7). He is a 'principle of language ' (Gates 1988: 22), a god of semiotics, who gives a text its interpretation and attaches a particular predicate to a subject. His traditional stories mostly deal with 'the origin, nature, and the function of interpretation and language use "above" that of ordinary language' (Gates 1988: 6 (Wideman 1985: 66). The more familiar a certain key is among a group, the more subtle and smaller it becomes during a conversation (e.g. a mere wink). When a speaker uses Signifyin(g) in his or her speech act, s/he subtly introduces a key, signaling that the literal meaning of the following message is cancelled and should not be taken at face value. The understanding and visibility of this key is based on a resource of cultural signs commonly shared by the referent and the target audience. If the key is recognized among the recipients, it will be used to re-interpret the utterance metaphorically, or will otherwise exclude listeners from the root of the message. African-American novelists utilize Signifyin(g) to add layers to the meaning of their stories. A particular key can then be interpreted differently, even contradictorily, heavily depending on whether the reader is, for example, Black or White (Wideman 1985: 66).
Gates's theory of Afro-American Signification was initially inspired by the works of novelist Ishmael Reed (Gates 1988: 217-218). Like Eshu, Reed considers himself as a trickster linguist who secretly mocks and confuses his readers by using unclear signs in order to signify (that is, to trick) his audience (M'Baye 2016: 108). His writing style takes motifs, strategies, and semantics from West-African and Afro-Diaspora Black Kirby comic arts exhibition, when he states: Lines make societies feel like they know things; like there's an answer to all things. Our ancestors' collective bellies heave in laughter in the dark, beautiful after-space at this notion. Black Kirby hears that laughter, samples it, and turns it into synaesthetic, nuanced probes that pushes all the wrong buttons at the right times.
(Jennings 2013: 9; our emphasis) In summary, we define Esu-'tufunaalo as a writing style that uses key signs and concepts taken from African or Afro-Diaspora cultures and history in order to communicate a Black reading experience. The author functions, like Eshu in West-African mythology, as a linguistic gatekeeper to the text's interpretation. Through Signifyin(g), the trickster author is able to exclude those parts of his or her recipients from the root of the story's message who do not perceive or understand the cultural keys.
Despite the lack of grasping the narrative core, these recipients get access to another interpretation of the story which intentionally tricks them by taking the story too literally. However, those recipients who are able to read those cultural keys correctly experience, in The Hole's case, a semiotic ritual. Those two ways of reading a Black text will be illustrated and amplified below on the basis of The Hole's story.

At the Crossroads of Interpretations
The authors Duffy and Jennings organize their story by crossing dichotomies. The Hole tells the story of the young African American Curtis Cooper who accidently gains superpowers granted by the Vodou deity (loa) Papa Legba who is in a fight with White Peter, the spirit of capitalism. This evil spirit converts Black culture and spirituality into consumer goods for a White audience in order to gain power and wealth. Similarly to Papa Legba, Curtis, too, is at odds with several White characters.
When we first meet Curtis on his way to work, he is robbed by a White small-time criminal who, unknown to him, has also an affair with Curtis's mixed-race girlfriend Trina. After serving a sentence for drug possession, Curtis runs a tattoo studio in the back of his mother's hairdresser's shop co-owned by his White stepfather Charlie.
Curtis is displeased by their interracial relationship and refuses any of Charlie's advances -much to the latter's disappointment. Being too late to work after the robbery, Curtis enters his studio where Papa Legba is waiting for him. The moment he notices the loa Curtis's upper body gets exposed by the spirit, revealing a swastika scar on his belly. A flashback shows his time in prison, getting brutally beaten up by neo-Nazis. To escape this cycle of Nazi violence, Curtis scratches a swastika into his stomach with a razor blade, sneaked in by his mother. Papa Legba uses this scarred wound to create a black hole in Curtis's body. After reopening the wound, the loa To get back to the rhetoric of Esu-'tufunaalo and the qualities of the trickster linguist Eshu, one has to imagine the text's interpretation as standing on a cross-way.
In West-African Yoruba mythology, Eshu symbolizes the path to a text's interpretation (Gates 1988: 10) because he assigns the reader to one path or the other. Any interpretation of The Hole must be therefore read as a crossroads of meanings. The text must be read in motion, being constantly variable (Gates 1988: 25). Reading two discourses (Past and Present, Black and White, Good and Evil) as binaries creates ' a contradiction resolvable only by the unity of opposites' (Gates 1988: 37).
Understanding a Black text as a hermeneutical crossroads therefore means that the reader takes up a meta-level by noticing the text's Signifiyin(g).
Afro-American Signification functions as a meta-tool of communication; it is a 'trope of tropes' (Gates 1983: 686). It is, in some respects, a 'self-aware' rhetoric This ending sequence is essential, as it quite frankly parodies the story's plot and mocks its reader. Without any indication, the plot simply ends by Curtis and Trina expressing their intention to confront the villainous Carla Bonté in order to end her Hyper-Voodoo shenanigans. But, instead of a final confrontation between Good and Evil, the real villain, White Peter, enters the stage candidly mocking the story. He rhetorically spoofs its plot points and changes the whole story to his amusement. Thereby, Peter, being an allegory of capitalism itself, expresses his power over the graphic novel's plot: The story's hero is merely a fictional character of a comic book, of a capitalistic mass product. We argue that the authors silently reveal in said sequence that Peter is the story's meta-narrator. He leaves the diegesis right after his The Hole therefore is a story within a story within a story; each entangling itself with the others. To approach this subject more accessibly, we argue that each story is a narrative frame. The separation of those frames is, in accordance with the trickster writing style Esu-'tufunaalo, not obviously narrated. We also propose that those frames must be read from the inside out; this means, the narrative order is, for analytical purposes, not read according to the pattern of a classical framework story (frame 1 › frame 2 ‹ frame 1) but rather in the following way: frame 3 ‹ frame 2 ‹ frame 1 › frame 2 › frame 3 (Kottas and Schwarzenbacher 2018: 167).
Frame 1 marks the superhero parody told as the plot described above, while White Peter's sequence acts as Frame 1's meta-level. From his meta-arc, Peter tauntingly reflects on the graphic novel's plot. His polemics therefore serve as Frame

The Talking Comic Book
The third frame transforms the graphic novel into a Talking Book by reference to ritual semiotics. For this final part, we would like to remind the reader that in religious narratology the content of religions acts as a resource for semiotic keys in a text. In The Hole, for instance, the myth of the Signifying Monkey provides inspiration for its metaplot. In the following, we examine Papa Legba's key role for Frame 3, in which the comic book becomes a sentient being from the perspective of Aesthetics of Religion.
To recap, Papa Legba is the Haitian Vodou 'version' of Eshu, the West-African guardian of the crossroads and god of interpretation. He also serves as the manager of the cosmic life-force, ashé. Legba determines whether the flow of ashé manifests in the real world. No ritual is possible without his permission at its very beginning, and no one is allowed to enter a ritual site without his clearance (Kment 2005: 160).
Speaking all languages in existence, Legba is the universal translator as well and embodies language and communication itself (Gates 1988: 6-9). By using his ritual meaning in The Hole, Duffy and Jennings turn the comic book into Legba himself, as we illustrate below.
For a better understanding of the graphic novel's ritual semiotics, we point to our introductory thesis: Comics are cultural objects. As such, an item consists of material as well as immaterial elements (Hahn 2014: 9-10). To illustrate this thesis, a bocio is a West-African material object that stores the spiritual, immaterial, powers of the gods. This device is not magic per se, though; it first needs ritual activation (Hoedl 2009). In order to read The Hole as a ritual item, we must understand the comic book's materiality as part of its story. It is a cultural material text; this means, its physical form as well as its narrative content are both parts of one single cultural text.
It is important to read both parts together, as they form one single semiotic system.
While the graphic novel as a material object consists of binding, paper, and ink, it stores the immaterial powers of Legba as well. To become a ritual vessel of Legba, the comic must first be ritually activated by Signifyin ( In Vodou, the identity of individual loas is fluid, resulting in various manifestations When we begin to define our own image the stereotypes […] that our oppressor has developed will begin in the white community and end there. (Ture and Hamilton 1992: 37)

Conclusion
The Hole's storytelling abstracts ideas from West-African philosophies of religion and mythology. The authors Duffy and Jennings model their writing on the trickster linguist and god of crossroads, Eshu-Elegbara. They use the Afro-American metacommunication Signifyin(g) that derived from Eshu's attributes. This meta-speech identifies plot elements as meaningless story mechanics and semiotic figures. On a meta-level, a story is just nothing but a system of bare signs. As tricksters, the authors play with their readers' expectations by rendering The Hole a superhero story. As 'Eshuian' creators on the crossroads of storytelling, they create a path system that 'updates' the story's interpretation interactively (Kottas 2017: 93-96), depending on the reader's sign comprehension. The story is intentionally open-ended in order to challenge their readership. Arriving at the dead end, one path leaves the reader signified by racist and capitalist rhetoric. Another path may lead to the reader's conclusion that The Hole promotes Black and White dualism and 'reversed racism.' The Hole's Vodou semiotics however hides the opening to a third space beyond singularity and dualism (M'Baye 2016: 121). In that way, the comic book literally teaches its readers the breakdown of the semiology of marketing consumerism by metaphorically talking to them.

Editorial Note
This article is part of the Creating Comics, Creative Comics Special Collection, edited by Brian Fagence (University of South Wales), Geraint D'Arcy (University of South Wales) and Ernesto Priego (City, University of London). Any third-party images have been fully attributed and have been included in this article as scholarly references for educational purposes under Educational Fair Use/Dealing only.