La creación como camino a la felicidad. Una lectura de la novela gráfica "La broma asesina" de Alan Moore y Brian Bolland a través de pautas narrativas horacianas y el estoicismo

Abstract

In this article we study different notions of happiness that can be deduced from the attitudes that Batman and Joker expose in The Killing Joke. Published in 1988, this graphic novel was written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Brian Bolland, both of them being famous British artists. Although these two comic book characters’ behaviours oppose to a large extent the possibility of being happy, we as readers can extract valuable lessons from their respective performances and build a space for our own happiness through a compre-hensive reading of their misadventures. In this sense, we adopt a classic perspective based on Horace’s Ars Poetica and Stoicism in order to read the aforementioned misadventures with full awareness. Therefore, we think both the Horatian and the Stoic guidelines gene-rate narrative resources and conceptions that, respectively, can be extrapolated to various artistic genres (from theatre and poetry to cinema and comics). Finally, we propose the compound felicreatividad to explain how creativity is one of the major keys that brings human beings closer to the doors of happiness, which we understand to be an expression free of its two extremes: euphoria and conformism.