2019 Foreword to RAVAGE – An Infernal Hannibal Anthology
RAVAGE – An Infernal Hannibal Anthology
Romina Nicolić (ed.) RAVAGE: A fanart & fanfiction anthology based on Bryan Fuller's TV-show "Hannibal" & Dante Alighieri's "Inferno". 757 backers pledged €48,865 to help bring this project to life. — 2019
A Foreword by Mark Benecke
[More articles by MB] [All Prefaces / Forewords by MB]
“Most people are reluctant and obnoxius”, says Bryan Fuller, brain behind the Hannibal series that you quite non-obnoxius fans love so much, in an interview with ‘Suicide Girls’ that was conducted a few years before the Hannibal series started.
When I see the art and deep love that you – artist and readers – commit towards the topic of serial killing and cannibalism, I wonder what I got wrong in my professional career. Which tender softness or which beauty, apart from the obvious visual drop height between a super fancy dinner in penumbral shadows and the human tissue that is used to prepare it, could lie in such topics? What draws you into a world of deceit and violence, no matter how aesthetically it might be depicted?
Even though I was chosen to officially (re)present the Hannibal Blu-Ray edition in Berlin when it was released, and even though I cut the blood-stained cake in the basement of posh Soho House, and even though I thought I had understood the topic on the criminalistic level, your art opened a gate for me.
What I had not understood, not even during my public talks and congress speeches con- cerning serial killing, and initially also not whilst talking to serial killers, was the deep wish for all creatures, probably even the most psychopathic ones, to have a good and save bond to another person.
In Hannibal’s case, that wish and that bond was – eternally in your almost religious approach to the topic – bent and shattered when the killer of his sister made him eat part of her flesh.
This sentence alone would provide anybody with safe access to ten years of high-quality psychotherapy, and I do not even dare to ponder on the sexual and emotional fuckups that an event like this (the murder and meal I mean, not the therapy) might bring upon a person.
So yeah: Hannibal, fragile Will and Alana, who, for some reason, does not raise your inter- est too much, are in a co-dependent jumble that neither can escape – at least not emotionally.
Many of you artists and readers of the recent as well as the preceding volume of Hannibal fan art may have similar experiences, and maybe that is why you can relate to the plot so much.
Enjoy the wild ride through the emotional and sexual depths, variations and extensions of the Hannibal universe that I missed until you showed it to me. I had seen a lot of very strange things in my life which is my job, err, job that is my life, I mean. I guess. But you wonderful people here really put your time and energy into something frightening and beautiful that most can and will never see. Or feel. Or wish for.
For that I like and I thank you very much. Be good.
Mark
Mark Benecke, M. Sc., Ph.D., is an FBI-trained, certified and sworn in forensic biologist, working in international forensic research and consulting. Among many other things, he is known as an author, public speaker, politician, frequent guest commenter on “Medical Detectives”, president of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula, and fan of Hannibal :)
Suggested readings
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