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- Volume 11, Issue 2, 2020
Studies in Comics - Volume 11, Issue 2, 2020
Volume 11, Issue 2, 2020
- Editorial
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- Articles
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Forging intragenerational and common memories: Revisiting Paracuellos’s graphic violence in times of confinement
More LessIn our times of confinement, cultural production has become as important as it is precarious. Reading habits were revamped during the most stringent moments of the early lockdown. Some would consume new products, some would revisit their favourite classics. In this article, I analyse Carlos Giménez’s pioneering graphic work, a(n) (auto)biographical series of comics surrounding children’s experiences in Francoist orphanages, or ‘Homes’ (Hogares de Auxilio). I argue that Paracuellos operates as an isotopic and confining device at formal, thematic, intragenerational and affecting levels. It displays an aesthetic of confinement and brings together a set of core themes that generate a continuum of isotopic semantics, catalysing the work’s capacity to affect and be affected. Graphic violence is as its core and serves as the main constant, be that presently exercised or absently loomed, in a context of pathos, loss and scarcity. This article further explores how the comics series pulls back the veil on the folds of early Francoism as well as the later transition to democracy, a period of ‘lockdown’ for cultural memory in general, and for the experienced confinement in the Francoist ‘Homes’ in particular. The piece suggests that in retrieving this collection of common memories of recurrent episodes of violence experienced individually, Giménez’s work ultimately nuances the monolithic concept of collective memory within cultural production.
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Jojo, Jimmy and Marie Chairne: What scribbled comics can (not) tell us
More LessWith two scribbled comics in hand, this article considers material uses and reading practices in Belgian comics culture. As doodles and marks left on battered copies, scribbles foreground complex questions for the comics historian, offering clues to understanding childhood reading practices that otherwise remain elusive.
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Queering the palate: The erotics and politics of food in Japanese gourmet manga
More LessAs demonstrated by a widely circulated Japanese proverb ‘men should never enter the kitchen’, kitchens, as well as food and the act of cooking, have been deeply suffused with heteronormative gender ideology. While domestic cooking has traditionally been associated with women and femininity in Japanese society and popular media, ‘gourmet manga’, emerging in shōnen manga in the 1970s, foregrounded male chefs as figures of authenticity and authority, and ever since, have successfully constructed the site of food and cooking as a professional, masculine domain. While shōnen manga tropes of battle, competition and victory have contributed to the construction of hegemonic masculinity in gourmet manga, some popular gourmet manga also employ female bodies to conflate food and sex, by repeatedly showcasing graphically explicit representations of orgasm in the scenes of women eating. These texts promulgate painstakingly prepared food as a catalyst not only for masculine maturity but also for ‘healthy’ heteronormative desire and, by extension, procreation. However, in more recent gourmet manga, non-competitive, pleasure-based cooking and eating have become salient, along with the gradual diversification of the representations of gender and sexuality. This article examines the queer interrelationship among food, gender and sexuality, in Yoshinaga Fumi’s Kinō Nani Tabeta? (What Did You Eat Yesterday?) and Hiiragi Yutaka’s Shinmai Shimai no Futari Gohan (‘Let’s have a meal together’). In these texts, the site of ‘gourmet’ is relocated from the public/professional to the private/domestic, wherein the pleasures of cooking and eating create new, non-heteronormative forms of intimacy and eroticism. Food is thus redefined as a catalyst for a queer kinship, which enables both the cooks and the eaters to create their own space and time outside the logics of domesticity and reproduction.
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Graphic panelling and the promotion of transnational affiliations in Thien Pham’s Sumo
By Monica ChiuIn Thien Pham’s comic Sumo, simple graphics, iconic figures and limited dialogue assist in efficiently conceptualizing the notion of the transitive, the ability to convey meaning, to allow images to translate concepts quickly, including that of transnationalism itself. Character Scott, a failed American football player, relocates to Japan to take up sumo. His physical transnational move and eventual accommodation to a new sport, new city and new friends are reflected in Pham’s loose OuBaPo form: sections of the comic occurring in Japan and those in the United States follow a fairly strict panel count, diminishing evenly as the narrative progresses, suggesting Scott’s amalgamation of and acceptance in the East from his arrival from the West. But neither is privileged in Pham’s use of nearly equal numbers of panels representing Scott’s past in the United States, present in Japan and future in a smooth amalgamation of football and sumo, East and West, strength and flexibility, failure and success. Sumo uses efficient visual approaches – the unique play inherent in OuBaPo as a drawing exercise in constraints, colour-coded panels and iconicity – to accommodate and unify race and national differences.
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Panelling without walls: Narrating the border in Barrier
By Daniel PintiBrian K. Vaughan’s and Marcos Martin’s science fiction comics series, Barrier (2015–18), is a five-issue story set on the US-Mexican border and contributing to the continuing public discourse surrounding undocumented immigration in the United States. First appearing as a webcomic on Vaughan’s Panel Syndicate website and later published in comic book form by Image Comics, Barrier’s story of two characters, a Honduran refugee and a Texas rancher who struggle with and eventually come to rely on one another, depicts linguistic and cultural boundaries and borders, as well as the frustration and hostility they can generate. As comics, Barrier’s very medium works by means of crossing boundaries and borders: binaries (like word and image) are complicated if not subverted, and the borders of each panel remain closed yet open for sequential art to function as a medium for narrative. Moreover, as a bilingual webcomic crossing into print yet all but encouraging an ongoing virtual engagement through web searches and Google Translate, the series demands further creative energy from the reader in reimaging various barriers, borders and positions of liminality. Although stories that represent various kinds of borders (social, cultural and geopolitical) and various ways of establishing, challenging, crossing or deconstructing borders are frequently found in graphic narratives, Barrier demonstrates the south-west border to be one the medium of comics is especially suited to explore. Barrier is a work that takes as its very subject, to borrow a phrase from Ramzi Fawaz, ‘spatially drawn analogies’ in order to engage graphically matters of genuine political import. In doing so, Barrier not only reflects obliquely on its own form, but also engages creatively with one of the most politically and culturally contested spaces in contemporary US culture.
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Fire in the jungle: Genocide and colonization in Russell and Pugh’s The Flintstones
More LessMark Russell and Steve Pugh’s The Flintstones comic book (2016–17) addresses US colonialism much more directly than most popular media but focalizes its story through a white, settler American. Thus, it represents an unwillingness and/or inability to think outside of that narrow perspective, i.e. while it is anti-colonial, it is not postcolonial. The book was published through a licensing agreement between Hanna-Barbara and DC Comics in which several Hanna-Barbera cartoons were combined with contrasting genres to create grim and/or mature stories. DC’s The Flintstones, in particular, takes on a collection of social issues, including religion as cynical manipulation, military-industrial propaganda, exploitation of foreign/immigrant labour and media depictions of the environmental crisis. However, it consistently undermines its own messages, often through visual jokes that end up confirming the ideas the book satirizes but also through sincere pronouncements that prevent the satirical critique from reaching a concrete conclusion. The overarching narrative of the series is about the lingering trauma of colonization. It equates the colonization of the land presently held by United States with that country’s war in Vietnam. This equation results from depicting the literal colonization of an Indigenous space and land but using imagery that reflects US media depictions of their war in Vietnam: colonialist soldiers in green fatigues use fire (i.e. napalm) to exterminate racist caricatures of Southeast Asian guerrilla fighters in order to clear a forest and expose the literal bedrock from which the Flinstone’s city will be built. Fred Flintstone, who represents a settler American, states quite directly that he ‘participated in a genocide’ as a soldier in that invasion, thus confirming an anti-colonialist critique. However, the book never takes on the perspective of the colonized peoples, who by then have been wiped out, which is why it stops short of a postcolonialist critique.
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Photographic silence: Remediating the graphic to visualize migrant experience in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival
By Amrita SinghIn the absence of a verbal language, The Arrival’s mode of representation is derived from various visual storytelling practices in addition to the comic. This article proposes that Tan remediates the mode of comics storytelling by presenting the narrative as a photo album and drawing the panels as photographs, and in turn the photograph is also remediated in the text as a drawn object. Using transmedial techniques such as focalization, gaze, framing and page layout, in addition to deliberations on style and form, Tan constructs comics storytelling with a photographic vision. This photographic vision is used to represent the experience of migration in the narrative as well as connect past and contemporary histories of migration world over. The photograph emerged as an important medium through which memory came to be visualized in the twentieth century, and is an important historical artefact capable of telling the story of its times. Tan also expects the reader to employ an intermedial and intertextual critical literacy to engage with the narrative. The visual poetics of the text direct the reader’s affective and empathetic engagement with the situation being presented and with the character whose experience they encode. The article focuses on three kinds of photographic representation in the narrative: the iterations of the protagonist’s family photograph, the narrative itself shaped as a photo album and the immigrant’s identification photograph.
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Understanding pictorial metaphor in comic book covers: A test of the contextual and structural frameworks
Authors: Christopher A. Crawford and Igor JuricevicConceptual metaphor theory proposes that metaphor is a mental function, rather than solely a literary device. As such, metaphors may be present in any by-product of human cognition, including pictorial art. Crawford and Juricevic previously proposed two heuristic frameworks for the identification and interpretation of metaphor in pictures, which have been shown to be capable of describing how pictorial metaphors are identified and interpreted in the comic book medium. The present study tested artists’ preference for combinations of contextual and structural pictorial information in comic book cover images. We analysed usages of exaggerated size in comic book cover art, as exaggerated size is a pictorial device, which may be used both literally and metaphorically. The goal was to assess how contextual and structural information is combined, and how literal and metaphorical information interacts, both when it is congruent and incongruent. This analysis of the use of exaggerated size in comic book art indicates that artists prefer to produce images that have congruent combinations of literal and metaphoric pictorial information, or the incongruent combination of metaphoric contextual information and literal structural information. Artists do not, however, prefer to produce images that have the incongruent combination of metaphorical structural information and literal contextual information. Taken together with the Corpus Analysis Relevance Theory (CART) argument, this pattern suggests that when processing information, our cognitive systems prefer metaphorical interpretations over literal interpretations and contextual information over structural information.
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‘She’s practically normal!’: Disability, gender and image in Doom Patrol
More LessThe portrayal of disability in superhero comics has often been problematic. Frequently, disabled characters in superhero comics, when not merely marginal, are portrayed as pitiable or villainous, or, if they are disabled heroes like Daredevil or Professor Xavier of the X-Men, as examples of the super-crip, that is, given powers as compensation for their disability. An arguable exception to this tendency is Drake and Premiani’s Doom Patrol of the 1960s, especially the character of Rita Farr a.k.a Elasti-Girl. Examining this character through gender and disability theories we can see a sophisticated portrayal of marginalization as it pertains to image, spectacle and social norms. Though Rita has sometimes been left out of later iterations of the Doom Patrol on the grounds of seeming too ‘normal’, the character can be read as an exploration of how disability operates as a category of power, in a medium that has often used that category too simply. Reading the character via such concepts as Davis’s dismodernism and Wendell’s feminist disability, seeing her both as a member of this team of outcasts and as one who is frequently lured into a life in the mainstream, we can see how in Drake and Premiani’s series the categories of disability and gender interact with each other, and reflect and respond to societal expectations of power.
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‘Who were you crying for?’: Empathy, fantasy and the framing of the perpetrator in Nina Bunjevac’s Bezimena
Authors: Dragoş Manea and Mihaela PrecupSerbian-Canadian cartoonist Nina Bunjevac’s third book, Bezimena (2019), embeds child sexual abuse and murder in an improbable geography where myth and fairy tale work together to create an otherworldly atmosphere, by turns mesmerizing and horrifying. Bunjevac’s previous work (Heartless [2012] and Fatherland [2014]) testifies to her continued commitment to exploring issues that are relevant to the feminist project, such as domestic violence, abortion, sexual assault and discrimination against female immigrant workers. In this article, we are particularly interested in exploring the manner in which Bezimena frames the figure of the perpetrator, as the context of the final question of the book – ‘who were you crying for?’ – repositions the entire ethical premise of the narrative by suggesting that responsibility for perpetration may lie both within and without the body and consciousness of the perpetrator himself. In conversation with scholars who attempt to expand the narrow category of ‘perpetrator’, such as Michael Rothberg or Scott Strauss, we explore how graphic narratives can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of perpetration, particularly in the case of sexual assault, and analyse Bezimena’s innovative approach to the representation of perpetration, as the book’s depiction of perpetrators and accomplices is mixed with elements of fantasy and mythology.
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What do teachers think about the educational role of comic books?: A qualitative analysis
Authors: Paul A. Aleixo, Daniel Matkin and Laura KilbyAn exploratory, qualitative, study into the views of teachers on the use of comic books in education was carried out. Three secondary school teachers with varying experiences of comic books were interviewed using an open-ended format. Results of a thematic analysis indicated three clear areas of thinking around comic books: firstly, comic books are considered to be a medium of children’s entertainment, and not associated with educational practice; secondly, when the medium is employed in education, it should primarily be used with students that require extra support and thirdly, comic books represent a ‘missed opportunity in education’ and have not achieved their full potential due to a lack of comic book resources for use in the classroom. All three concepts are discussed in light of research evidence supporting the use of comics in educational contexts and concerns are highlighted that suggest these themes might represent a barrier to the future use of comics in these areas. Further qualitative and quantitative research to expand these initial findings is also suggested.
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- Interviews
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Interview with Argha Manna
Authors: Partha Bhattacharjee and Priyanka TripathiArgha Manna is a cancer-researcher-turned cartoonist. He worked as a research fellow at Bose Institute, India. After leaving academic research, he joined a media-house and started operating as an independent comics artist. He loves to tell stories from the history of science, social history and lab-based science through visual narratives. His blog, Drawing History of Science (https://drawinghistoryofscience.wordpress.com), has been featured by Nature India. Argha has been collaborating with various scientific institutes and science communicator groups from India and abroad. His collaborators are from National Centre for Biological Science (NCBS, Bangalore), Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB, Hyderabad), Jadavpur University (Kolkata), Heidelberg Center for Transcultural Studies (University of Heidelberg, Germany) and a few others. Last year, he received STEMPeers Fellowship for creating comics on the history of vaccination and other aspects of medical histories, published in Club SciWri, a digital publication wing of STEMPeers Group. Currently, Argha is collaborating in a project, ‘Famine Tales from India and Britain’ as a graphic artist. This is a UK-based project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, led by Dr Ayesha Mukherjee, University of Exeter. In this interview, Partha Bhattacharjee and Priyanka Tripathi speak with Indian ‘alternative’ cartoonist Argha Manna to trace his journey from a cancer researcher to a cartoonist. Manna is a storyteller of history of science, in visuals. Recently, his works reflect social problems under the light of historical and scientific theories. Bhattacharjee and Tripathi trace Manna’s shift from a science-storyteller in a visual medium to a medical-cartoonist who is working on issues related to a global pandemic, its impact on life and literature vis-à-vis social intervention. They also focus on Manna’s latest comics on COVID-19.
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Interview with Beano writer Andy Fanton
By John CaroAn interview with Andy Fanton, a current writer for the Beano UK children’s humour comic. Andy got his break writing and drawing for the sadly now-defunct Dandy weekly, and currently writes legacy characters such as Minnie the Minx and The Bash Street Kids. The interview covers Andy’s and DC Thomson’s working practices and methods, considers the role and relevance of Beano in the transmedia age, and defends Beano from accusations that the comic has lost its edge and is no longer as cheeky or rebellious as it once was.
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- Reviews
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Comic Books, Graphic Novels and the Holocaust: Beyond Maus, Ewa Stańczyk (ed.) (2019)
More LessReview of: Comic Books, Graphic Novels and the Holocaust: Beyond Maus, Ewa Stańczyk (ed.) (2019)
Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 142 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-13859-864-5, h/bk, £96.00, p/bk, £29.59
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Empirical Comics Research, Alexander Dunst, Jochen Laubrock and Janina Wildfeuer (eds) (2019)
More LessReview of: Empirical Comics Research, Alexander Dunst, Jochen Laubrock and Janina Wildfeuer (eds) (2019)
New York: Routledge, 366 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-138-73744-0, h/bk, £120.00
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Monstrous Women in Comics, Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody (eds) 2020
More LessReview of: Monstrous Women in Comics, Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody (eds) (2020)
Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 295 pp., 35 b&w illustrations
ISBN 978-1-49682-763-0, p/bk, $30
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- Comics
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