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ABSTRACT
The present research aims at tracing the human-machine interaction and interpersonal relationship in the substantial realm of modern car culture with a focus on human beings’ dependency on cars as petro-products through Monster Motors (2015) by Brian Lynch and Nick Roche. With allusions to maestros of horror viz. Frankenstein and Dracula, this comic details the adventures of ace mechanic Vic Frankenstein and his android assistant IGOR against the vampire car Cadillacula which sucks gasoline out of other cars. In his triangular theory of love, proposes three components of love, viz. Intimacy, passion, and commitment. Modern car culture manifests in people’s love for cars. Thus, this research is an attempt to showcase people’s affinity with cars as an implication of their affinity with petroleum through Sternberg’s three components of love. Thus, the research establishes the aggressive consumption of petroleum used in cars as a derivative of Sternberg’s passion component and machine-intimacy of humans as a synonym of petro-intimacy based on intimacy component. Subsequently, the research investigates the decision/commitment component of Sternberg in relation to understanding humans’ determination for cars/petro-products. Here, it scrutinises that petro-horror- an attempt to represent oil’s increasing ubiquity (Tulsi 2020, 159–181) – is a conscious choice that humans make in promoting the car culture.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. The modern car was invented by Carl Benz in 1886.
2. After World War II, suburban communities were set up in America when soldiers returned to their native soil. With the creation of the interstate highway system of 1956 and the surge of the post-war economy, mass production and consumption of cars were evident during the 1950s.
3. In Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Citation2009), Cotton Seiler reflects on the American perception of identity construction around cars with a focus on the U.S. automotive industry from 1895 to 1961.
4. Petroculture/oil culture is the normative everyday culture which according to Ross Barnett and Daniel Worden (Citation2014), is the ‘broad field of cultural representations and symbolic forms that have taken shape around the fugacious material of oil in the 150 years since the inception of the US petroleum industry’ (269).
5. From 1938 to 1956, the publication of various types of comics viz. Superhero comics, detective comics, action comics, adventure comics, sci-fi comics etc. led to the increasing popularity of comics in America. Thus, this period is known as the golden age of comic books.
6. Mark Towle was an American car mechanic who used to sell replicas of cars used in the Batman series. After DC Comics filed a copyright infringement case against him, in 2015, the United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit applied a three-part test to protect the copyright of Batmobile. The three-part test is as follows:
A. The character must generally have physical as well as conceptual qualities.
B. The character must be sufficiently delineated to be recognisable as the same character whenever it appears. It must display consistent, identifiable character traits and attributes, although the character need not have a consistent appearance.
C. The character must be especially distinctive and contain some unique elements of expression. It cannot be a stock character like a magician in standard magician garb. (“U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit” Citation2015)
A. The character must generally have physical as well as conceptual qualities.
B. The character must be sufficiently delineated to be recognisable as the same character whenever it appears. It must display consistent, identifiable character traits and attributes, although the character need not have a consistent appearance.
C. The character must be especially distinctive and contain some unique elements of expression. It cannot be a stock character like a magician in standard magician garb. (DC Comics v. Mark Towle)
7. The character Victor Frankenstein is an allusion to the mad scientist who created a monster in Mary Shelley’s magnum opus Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus (1818/2017).
8. Lynch has chosen Transylvania as his setting as a reference to Count Dracula’s Transylvanian castle in Dracula.
9. The name ‘Holmwood’s Garage’ might be an allusion to the character of Arthur Holmwood from Dracula. Though there is no strong evidence of the same, the comic’s persistent references to different characters from Dracula call for such an assumption.
10. The name Cadillacula is a portmanteau of Cadillac and Dracula. Lynch’s vehicular vampire is inspired by the titular character of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula (2013). It also alludes to Cadillac, one of the first automotive brands famous for designing luxury vehicles.
11. Lynch’s R.M. Renfield is portrayed as a car fanatic who has glimpses of the legendary servant Renfield in Dracula’s castle.
12. Jekyll is a smart car that gets quite big and monstrous in dark alleys. The name ‘Mr. Hybrid’ is a reference to a mix of its capabilities. Additionally, this monstrous vehicle is an ode to the titular character of R. L. Stevenson’s 1886 gothic novel Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Citation2014).
13. Lynch describes the Invisible Sedan as a vile creature with a great ability to blend with the surroundings. It is characterised as a cheat and a liar with the only vulnerability of losing its armour to enter stealth mode. It is an allusion to H.G. Well’s The Invisible Man (Wells Citation1897).
14. Wheelwolf is a vehicular reference to the mythical werewolf.
15. Minivan Helsing, according to Lynch, is the monster car appearance of Abraham Van Helsing, the persistent chaser of Dracula, who helped in ending his reign in Dracula.
16. According to Lynch, April is the daughter of Abraham Van Helsing and the human partner of Minivan Helsing.
17. According to Statista research department (Citation2023), worldwide car sales grew to around 67.2 million in 2022, up from around 66.7 million units in 2021.
18. The character of Moreau might be a reference to the titular character of H.G. Well’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (Wells Citation1896). Well’s Moreau is an ill-famed physiologist known for his horrific experiments in vivisection. Lynch’s Moreau instigates Frankenstein ‘to build someone’ to assist him. Thus the allusion might be a possibility.
19. Asphalt is a mixture of gravel, rock and dirt bound by bitumen.
20. Gasoline is a mixture of flammable liquid hydrocarbons derived from petroleum.
21. Petrorealism is the idea of ‘the near omnipresence of oil in everyday life in an attempt to defamiliarize or to make strange our petrosubjectivity’ (Bellamy Citation2017,260).
22. People often perceive a subjectively constructed closeness in the social relationship for its smooth functioning. ‘Inclusion of the other in the Self’ (IOS) is a pictorial tool to measure the closeness between individuals developed by Aron, Aron and Smollan in a highly cited (Aron et al. Citation1992) paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
23. According to Shimp and Maden (Citation1988), Consumer Object Relation is the idea that ‘consumers form relations with consumption objects (products, brands, stores, etc.), which range from feelings of antipathy, to slight fondness, all the way up to what would, in person-person relations, amount to love’ (163).
24. The ‘Orang Minyak’, loosely translated as the ‘oily man’ in Malay, is a legendary supernatural creature who is infamous for kidnapping women at night in order to rape and kill them later. It is believed that the creature is covered in shiny black oil-probably crude oil- to hide his identity.
25. Automotive horror, mixing up of mechanics and myth to denote horror in the personification of automobiles, is a consistent motif in the novels of Stephen King, beginning with Night Shift (1978).
26. In logic and mathematics, the transitive law is ‘if aRb and bRc, then aRc’, where R is a particular relation, and a,b,c are variables/objects.