Studies in Comics - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2019

The graphic novels of Carol Swain frequently take rural Wales as their setting. Her most recent publication in 2014, Gast, continues her preoccupation with an isolated Welsh community. It explores aspects of liminality and fluidity, of blurred boundaries, both in terms of identity and of language. This article discusses the ways in which Swain represents and intertwines the landscape and language of Wales in order to demonstrate the child protagonist’s absorption into rural life. This article will consist of three parts. First, it introduces the work of Carol Swain and provides a brief summary of Gast that will help to contextualize some of my analysis. It will then discuss Swain’s mix of the Welsh and English language, and how language is used both to establish identities and confuse them. Gast is a graphic novel of intense silences, but when words are spoken they have an almost poetic weight to them, and this section will discuss the importance of conversations in the story. Finally, this article looks to the landscape of Gast to demonstrate how the isolation of the community is reflected in the sprawling countryside, but also how the protagonist comes to explore and understand the sparseness of her surroundings. By comparing Gast to the canon of Welsh writing in English, such as Brenda Chamberlain’s Tide-Race ([1962] 2007) and Cynan Jones’ The Long Dry in 2006, and to the recent S4C/BBC Wales drama, Hinterland (2013), this article aims to situate Swain’s text alongside the fiction that reflects a realistic image of the Welsh identity.

Ruth Hoberman suggests that ‘biography is the terrain on which each generation works out crucial questions about its relation to the past’, and perhaps the most crucial question of Spain’s recent history has been that of how to deal with the memory of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and General Franco’s dictatorship (1939–75). Drawing on existing scholarship that has described the repressed memories of Spain’s past as ghostly, this article will examine the conjuring power of memory to bring the ghosts of the traumatic past to the present in graphic biographies, taking as case study the Galician comic Bóveda (2012) by María Xesús Arias (writer) and Carlos Sardiña (artist), about the life of the politician Alexandre Bóveda (1903–36), executed by Francoist forces at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The analysis will also address the specificities of the comics medium to ‘bring back’ the bodies of the victims of the war compared to filmic representations of historical figures in biopics and documentaries. Because of the emblematic role that he has played in the imaginary of Galician nationalism, Alexandre Bóveda has become a national symbol of the traumatic suffering inflicted on Galicia by Francoism. Pramod K. Nayar suggests that graphic biographies provide ‘a new mode’ to address social systems of oppression. Following this assertion, the analysis of Bóveda will not only reflect on the representation of the life of an individual but also on how by invoking his memory, the whole national project embodied by this politician is also reclaimed. In this light, the graphic biography challenges the fallacy of Galician peaceful submission to Francoism while also highlighting the strength of the project of Galician autonomy before the war.

The Mediterranean island of Majorca has been a popular tourist resort since the late 1950s. While the model of mass tourism has been a subject of various unremitting sociopolitical controversies on the island, the swelling number of visiting tourists in recent years has increased anxieties about the sociocultural and environmental impact of touristification processes. Drawing upon studies of cultural trauma, this article argues that the comics Els darrers dies de l’Imperi Mallorquí (The Last Days of the Majorcan Empire) (2014) and its sequel, Un infern a Mallorca (La decadència de l’Imperi Mallorquí) (Hell in Majorca [The Decadence of the Majorcan Empire]) (2018), represent the advent of mass tourism on the island as the trigger of a sudden, comprehensive, unexpected and polarizing episode of social change that has profoundly transformed the sociocultural tissue of Majorcan society and the island’s landscape and territory. Both comics depict these socio-environmental crises as cultural crises and therefore suggest the possibility that the experience of cultural trauma has occurred in the island’s recent history. As the article shows, the comic form turns out to be highly qualified to portray the sense of cultural disorientation resulting from the traumatic experience, and to dialogue with the quasi-apocalyptic imagery circulated by emerging grassroots movements against mass tourism on the island. The article further suggests that such a highly critical portrayal of tourism-oriented dynamics should be read vis-à-vis the growing concerns about overtourism in Europe and beyond.

The aim of this article is to posit the productivity of examining the relationship between Brittany and comics, as a case study for developing not only the diversity of bande dessinée and comics scholarship, but also an intermedial understanding of minoritized stateless cultures. It focuses in particular on the role comics can play in political expressions in minoritized stateless cultures and nations. This is explored through the prism of two comics re-framings of the Breton Liberation Front (FLB), an underground independentist movement that was particularly active in the 1960s and 1970s. The article analyses Alain Goutal’s 1980 ‘Instantanés d’une sinistre farce’ as a piece of comics journalism that redraws the October 1980 FLB trial as a performance of Brittany–France relations, and Stéphane Heurteau’s 2013 Sant-Fieg as a postcolonial comic that explicitly addresses the status of Algeria as a key reference for the Breton militants that fought for ‘internal decolonization’. Through these two comics, the article maps out moments in ‘Breton bande dessinée’ and explores the question of how a comic can be ‘Breton’ when it is written in French, paying attention in particular to the absence/presence of the minoritized language in both ‘Instantanés’ and Sant-Fieg.

This article focuses on American folksinger Woody Guthrie’s unpublished and little-known response to anti-communist propaganda comic book Is This Tomorrow: America Under Communism (1947). Largely forgotten today, Is This Tomorrow was hugely successful, with millions of copies in circulation. Its tangled history reveals ideological conflicts with its publisher’s advocacy of comic book censorship. Is This Tomorrow also features early comics work by cartoonist Charles Schulz (years before beginning his comic strip, Peanuts). By happenstance, Guthrie’s only substantial comment on comic books is also his only (albeit unknowing) comment on fellow iconic popular artist Charles Schulz. The article discusses Guthrie’s career as a songwriter, political activist and cartoonist, and reads Is This Tomorrow (and Guthrie’s response) in the context of an emerging national discourse on comics as a political medium in an era rife with both anti-comic book and anti-Communist hysteria. Guthrie was a Communist sympathizer, careful reader, radical cultural worker and a creature of the media. His attacks on Is This Tomorrow never become a condemnation of comics as a whole, as was common at the time. He even reveals a respect for the comic book form. The intersection of Guthrie and Schulz’s worlds offers unique insight into the waning days of Woody Guthrie’s career and a window into the beginnings of comics censorship that culminated in 1954s repressive Comics Code Authority in the United States.

This article examines the ways in which Afro-Caribbean superheroes engage with questions of identity, movement and belonging as they embody diverse and culturally hybrid populations within the North American imaginary. First engaging with scholarship regarding the writing of race and marginalized cultures in US comics to situate the Santerians, Brother Voodoo/Doctor Voodoo and Groot within the larger comic book oeuvre, it turns to explore how these Marvel characters incorporate the myths and spiritual powers of Cuban/Puerto Rican Santería and Haitian Vodou into the metropolitan narratives in which they are depicted. As corporeal representations of these religions within the cultural landscapes of New York City and New Orleans, these transnational superheroes have each been physically and/or culturally displaced to the margins but see their hybrid identities valorized to greater or lesser degrees within the cultural framework of the metropolis. However, in spite of these characters having challenged stereotypical and hegemonic representations of racial and ethnic alterity, they are still subject to a clear hierarchy between the metropolis and the periphery. This is most clearly communicated through the restrictions and processes of othering that the Santerians and Brother Voodoo/Doctor Voodoo suffer, in comparison to the success and global mobility enjoyed by those more established characters alongside which they appear. As such, although the writing of these characters is both culturally sensitive and has permitted the development of new knowledges within the comic metropolis, at the same time these superheroes remain subordinate to their white, metropolitan counterparts and see themselves marginalized within very narrative that has sought to celebrate their transnational and hybrid identities.

Julia Kaye is a transgender cartoonist who recently published her first book Super Late Bloomer: My Early Days in Transition (Kaye 2018) with comics publisher Andrews McMeel. The book is a bound collection of select strips from her acclaimed web comic Up and Out. Though her web comic began as a run-of-the-mill gag strip, Up and Out transformed alongside Kaye herself into an autobiographical comic documenting her personal life as a transgender woman. Super Late Bloomer is comprised from a selection of these daily, autobiographical strips that document Kaye’s first months in hormone transition. The book was published in May 2019 and was acclaimed by reviewers. It presents a new format for the currently in vogue graphic memoir movement, a comics diary, an autobiographical collection comprised of quotidian, piecemeal installments from the artist’s daily experience. Kaye currently lives in Los Angeles where she works for Disney on the television show Big City Greens (2018–9) and continues to update her web comic Up and Out.

Arthur Ranson (b. 1939) is a British artist widely known for his work on Look-in (Danger Mouse, Sapphire & Steel) and 2000AD (Anderson: Psi-Division, Shamballa, Mazeworld, Button Man). This interview, undertaken throughout July–October 2018, explores his career as an illustrator and artist and explores a range of topics, including key points in his career; his approach to composition, colour and storytelling; comics and realism; whether comics are, as Jack Kirby once declared, journalism; artists he admires, including Mike Mignola, Neal Adams, Alex Ross, Jack Kirby and Allison Bechdel; the Bechdel test and representations of female characters in comics; reflections on Cassandra Anderson; the Judge Dredd films; John Wagner; Mazeworld; his collaborations with writer Alan Grant; and the single panel from his incredibly body of work in comics and illustration that he’s most proud of.

Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere, Hillary Chute (2017) New York: Harper, 464 pp., ISBN 978-0-06247-680-7, h/bk, US$40

EC Comics: Race, Shock and Social Protest, Qiana Whitted (2019) New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 181 pp., ISBN 978-0-81356-631-3, p/bk, £25.50