Studies in Comics - Family and Conflict in Graphic Narratives, Nov 2021

For decades the best-selling comics in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern half of Belgium, have without any doubt been the so-called familiestrips. In this article, I probe the Flemishness of this particular type of comics book (or ‘album’). Since there is a lot of confusion, I explain at length why ‘family comics’ would be a more suitable English translation for this term than the more obvious and more often encountered ‘family strip’ (which better suits the Dutch-type familiestrip). The article’s other objective is to explain why not only the Zeitgeist, but also the very format, of the Flemish familiestrip has made it difficult to broach the topic of serious inter-family conflicts such as marital problems among protagonists. I will demonstrate this by focusing on the stereotypical housewife characters of what could be considered Flanders’s two most ‘basic’ familiestrip series: Jommeke (for c. 7 to 10 years old) and De Kiekeboes (c. 10+). With the help of two thematically comparable albums about the mothers in the respective families, I will show how their creators have tried to deal with the tricky topic of marital problems – and, related to that, the emancipation of women – while still respecting the Flemish-type familiestrip format. Together with an elaboration on how Jommeke originated and how De Kiekeboes has changed its focus in the new millennium, the analysis of the albums shows what is possible within the rather strict but nevertheless evolving ‘rules’ of the Flemish familiestrip, and what is not possible with respect to inter-family conflicts in Flanders’s by-far most successful kind of comics.

In this article, Danielle Sutton examines the way in which the propensity towards narrative empathy in texts for children ultimately serves to rationalize abuse in two autobiographical comics for young people: Jarrett Krosoczka’s Hey, Kiddo and Shannon Hale’s Real Friends.

Influenced by Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco, Kashmiri artist Malik Sajad’s graphic narrative Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir calls the reader’s attention to the ongoing conflict in Kashmir, a South Asian region controlled by India, Pakistan and China since the 1940s. Using the hangul elk (an engendered species) to represent Kashmiris while portraying others as human characters, Sajad’s deliberate choice visually sets Kashmiris apart from the rest of the world. This article examines how the main character’s development from a boy with intermittent schooling to a cartoonist with political awareness is interlaced with the escalating violence in Kashmir from the early 1990s to the 2010s. In particular, it discusses how Sajad’s book presents massacres, curfews, crackdowns, mass graves and cover-ups as normalcy in Kashmiri daily life, how it experiments the conventions of comics, interrupts the temporal and spatial arrangements of the panels and creates gaps in the visual and verbal narratives often without foreshadowing or explanations and how it presents history as experiences lived instead of knowledge learned. Sajad’s graphic narrative does not provide a solution and ‘frustrates a reader looking for closure’. The closing panel visualizes Munnu disappearing into the all-encompassing darkness with only a flashlight guiding his way. Filling in the blanks of the ‘K-word’, the story comes to a stop without a sense of conclusion or a direction for the future, thus prompting the reader to contemplate the status of Kashmiris who have been left in a political limbo for decades and continue to be ‘endangered’.

Visionary British artist and designer Brendan McCarthy is internationally known for his singularly unique approach to art and craft. His comics debut, Sometime Stories, was published in 1977, and he went on to publish work with Vanguard Illustrated, Strange Days, 2000 AD, and Vertigo. He was part of the famous ‘British Invasion’ of the comics industry in the 1980s, which actually led to the creation of DC Vertigo and created new pathways for comics to gain wider influence within both Hollywood and the broader pop culture. With writer Peter Milligan, he co-created Freakwave, Strange Days, Paradax!, Rogan Gosh and Skin, and he painted covers for Milligan’s Shade the Changing Man DC Vertigo series. A pioneer in the field of computer animation, he created visuals for the 90s computer animated TV series ReBoot, which preceded Pixar and Dreamworks, and he contributed to a wide range of TV series, feature films, animation, and commercials during his more than two decades spent working in Hollywood. He co-wrote and was a designer on the feature film Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). His more recent comics work includes Dream Gang, published with Dark Horse, and The Zaucer of Zilk (with writer Al Ewing and colourist Len O’Grady) for 2000 AD. This interview explores key dimensions of his career in comics, British comics and the ‘British Invasion’ of the 1980s, Paradax!, and the influence and inspiration of David Bowie.

Review of: Drawing on Religion: Reading and the Moral Imagination in Comics and Graphic Novels, Ken Koltun-Fromm (2020)

University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press,

ISBN 978-0-271-08775-7, p/bk, £27.95