Considering genres from a meta-perspective, this chapter elaborates on the mechanisms of comics genres, their specific codes, and their differences and similarities with genres in other media. It shows how genres are a practical tool for categorizing fiction and even more useful in highlighting the economic and cultural underpinnings of publishing contexts and media. As already suggested in Chapter 2, comics genres are particularly useful for understanding the relationships between comics and other media since they help delineate the parameters of the medium-specificity, or mediageny, of comics.

The chapter turns to the hybrid genre of the superhero and uses Fantastic Four as an example to examine the way genres evolve and are redefined by their users over time. It also elaborates on the long history of comics producing meaning for their readers by openly performing genres in addition to adhering to them. In showing how genre has become a less defining entity in contemporary comics production since it is often replaced by transmedial franchises or trademark styles and stories attached to successful authors and artists, the chapter also delineates the limits of generic analysis. For this, it turns to Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comics and the Mignolaverse in general.

This chapter looks at the ‘slippery figure’ of Boethius, whose religious and literary affiliations resist easy categorization, as a touchstone of discipline formation. It shows the ways in which Boethius repeatedly transgresses the generic boundaries imposed upon him by twentieth-century grand narratives of Latinity, focusing particularly on the narratives of E. R. Curtius, C. S. Lewis, and Northrop Frye. Boethius refuses to be corralled or co-opted in the service of either philology or theology: the effort required to construct and maintain a tradition can never fully conceal its own excesses or gaps. Finally, it looks at the way in which the myth of the western classic is dependent above all not on the text but on the codex, the material spine-hinged book.