Shakespearean Families and Ideological Critique in Hill and Rodriguez's Locke & Key Authors

Joe Hill’s and Gabriel Rodriguez’s fantasy/horror comic book series Locke & Key (2008–2013) appropriates the classical psychoanalytic reading of Hamlet in combination with structural elements modeled on The Tempest to mount a critique of the role of families in perpetuating socioeconomic inequalities that strongly resembles the Althusserian critique of ideology, which also extrapolates a model of social subjugation from an Oedipal model of the family. When Hill belatedly attempts to incorporate race into this critique in the issues following Barack Obama’s election and the backlash of white rage, he flounders, largely replicating what Arthur Little identifies as the “white melancholia” that informs much reception of Shakespeare. Following Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s model of reparative reading, scholars of appropriation and adaptation can beneficially examine such moments of failure as signs of incomplete reparative work that might be continued by readers and through further adaptation and appropriation.