Studies in Comics - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2012

Fields of scholarship are segregated into discrete linguistic territories, and comics studies is no exception. Theory derived from European language sources predominate, both informing the latest advances in research and structuring areas of future enquiry. This results in a certain amount of intellectual stagnation. In this article, I will argue that scholars of popular culture should start looking east for renewed theoretical inspiration, to the writings of the so-called ‘otaku theorists’ Hiroki Azuma, Eiji Otsuka and Tamaki Saito-. Though they write about fans and consumption, they think neither in terms of, say, British cultural studies nor Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture. Instead, the three theorists, working in dialogue with each other, apply postmodern theory to obsessed consumers called ‘otaku’ and find new, and sometimes problematic, forms of cognition, sociality and relations of power. Recent translations into English from the University of Minnesota Press of their seminal books and essays have increased their visibility in the west. My aim for this article is fourfold: (1) to better understand what is at stake in cosmopolitanizing the discipline, (2) to review the western theoretical literature on comics and consumption, (3) to introduce the otaku theorists Azuma, Otsuka and Saito- and explicate their arguments and – most crucially – (4) by exploring the relationship between otaku theory and American superhero comics culture, to demonstrate how and why the otaku theorists make an important contribution to the study of comics outside Japan. Otaku theory, I conclude, provides a radically different, fruitful way of thinking critically about global popular culture.

A direct connection between comics and contemporary critical theory is to be found in the activity of the collective of artists who created Cannibale and Frigidaire, the two most innovative Italian comics magazines of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The work of Andrea Pazienza, Filippo Scòzzari, Stefano Tamburini, Tanino Liberatore and Massimo Mattioli should be regarded as an expression of the radical movements from which Marxist Autonomist thinkers such as Antonio Negri, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi and Paolo Virno also emerged in the same period. As a consequence, the writings of the latter can be used to analyse the narrative and visual style, the recurring themes, and the editorial characteristics of the comics of the former. Moreover, an interesting parallel can also be drawn between the work of the most influential of these artists, Andrea Pazienza, and the thought of another prominent Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, whose earliest books were published at that time too. The aim of this article is to show that the ideas of a number of the thinkers who have recently become internationally known as representatives of Radical Italian theory, are useful to understand the work of this group of comics authors. In the first section, I examine the direct links between Cannibale, Frigidaire and the Italian social movements of the 1970s. The artists discussed here were active participants in the cultural activities and political struggles promoted by the Autonomists. In the second section, a series of concepts central to (post-) Autonomist theory, such as post-Fordism, multitude, general intellect and virtuosity, are used to analyse the comics published in Cannibale and Frigidaire. Finally, I show how Agamben’s reflections on the ‘destruction of experience’ in modern society can help us to read Andrea Pazienza’s Le straordinarie avventure di Pentothal (1982), Zanardi (1983) and Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeo (1987).

Whiteness and blank spaces in sequential art are a key component of the form. Whereas the interstitial white of the page outside the panels – or even behind them – has been rigorously analysed by comics theorists (Groensteen et al.), the blank panel and the creeping whiteness it implies are often overlooked, references to them frequently made merely in passing. Contextualizing the blank panel within the field of visual culture studies, whose task – as W. J. T. Mitchell asserts – is to interrogate the manner in which ‘[v]ision itself is a cultural construction’, this article will look at a number of diverse sequential artworks, focusing on instances in which the image/text disintegrates into the very whiteness of the page, withholding all apparent visual stimuli. This article will propose a connection between loss and these telling instances in which sequential art – a strongly visual medium– purposefully ceases to represent or, even, represents through representational voids: white spaces and blank panels. The remit of this article, far from being to provide a definitive answer to the questions the very presence of the blank panel raises, is to humbly begin a much-postponed dialogue on this issue.

The 2011 publication of MetaMaus, which marks the 25th anniversary of Maus’ publication, continues Art Spiegelman’s long-standing preoccupation with creating an archive of his own fraught process of representation. While the difficulties of representing his father’s experiences during the Holocaust are foregrounded in the representational strategies of his acclaimed two-volume graphic novel Maus, they continued to haunt Spiegelman even after the books’ publication. In 1991 a museum exhibit, ‘The Road to Maus’, displayed the layers involved in Maus’ creation. In 1994, Spiegelman developed The Complete Maus CD-ROM, an interactive, digital archive of Maus. And in 2011, Spiegelman published MetaMaus, which combines reflection on and documentation of the process of representing Maus. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s and Giorgio Agamben’s theorizations of the archive, the article explores the different kinds of archival work that Maus and MetaMaus do. Both Derrida and Agamben call attention to the traditional archive’s exclusion of affective traces of the past. The article suggests that Maus and MetaMaus function as archives of the ‘after-effects’ of the Holocaust. As Maus so effectively demonstrates, the Holocaust did not end with the conclusion of World War II; its effects continue to be felt decades later by the survivors as well as by their children, who did not experience the events ‘first-hand’. Whereas traditional histories of the Holocaust narrate events that took place between 1933 and 1945, Maus depicts those events along with the difficulties of responding to and representing them. In documenting the process of representing Maus, MetaMaus invites a rethinking of what counts as history, and by extension what counts as an archive.

Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor belongs to a diverse body of comics that take as their subject real persons and actual historical events. This article proposes that the twin aspects of narrative and visual representation present a vital intersection between such comics and documentary. Yet, thinking about comics as documentary presents certain obstacles. Despite extensive and critical reflection on the relationship between image and referent, a broadly accepted assumption of documentary as tied to ‘the paradigm of recording’ has remained persistent among academics and the broader public alike. However, Jacques Rancière’s insistent emphasis on the intersection of aesthetics and politics; the capacity to make visible, speak about and thus reconfigure the world inherent to both, might instead be used to frame this enquiry. The article draws on Rancière’s conceptual frameworks to examine the construction and articulation of the real offered in American Splendor, proposing that American Splendor presents a radically graphic dislocation between representation and referent, consequently defamiliarizing the conventional conflation of documentary with camera-derived imagery. This intervention raises new sets of questions relating to the core concern of documentary; the real and its visual representation.

This article will consider the representation of the things that constitute our digital everyday in Danica Novgorodoff’s Refresh Refresh (2009), and comic strips commissioned by The Guardian for a series titled ‘A cartoonist’s view on the world we live in’ (2012). It will study the work of drawing the digital: how do we depict computers and networks in graphic narratives? And what specific decisions and discourses are brought to bear through the affordances of image-text narratives? Taking an understanding of ‘things’ from Bill Brown’s ‘Thing theory’, and Bruno Latour’s ‘From matters of fact to matters of concern’, this article will argue that computers are elusive cultural objects that will always resist straightforward narrative, and that in representation, thinking of computers as things might proffer an expansive frame of reference. Using this assertion as a theoretical base it will offer a critical approach to graphic texts that are considered in their representation of the digital; suggesting that graphic narratives offer a particular set of representational tools for depicting the digital in all its complex thingliness.

Critical posthumanism analyses tensions within traditional accounts of human ontology and epistemology. The modes by which we recognize humanity are often founded on hierarchical binaries of self and other. These binaries concomitantly inflect disciplinary boundaries of humanities scholarship. While recent advances in biotechnology have destabilized the boundaries of the human subject, the humanities appear ossified in their categories of human forms. How can work in the humanities reflect ‘the crisis in humanism’, while offering different optics for engaging the posthuman world? Comics provide an ideal media technology for posthuman knowledge production. The knowledge that each panel of a comic produces is contingent upon non-linear navigation between text and image and panel presentation. Panels and gutters operate as an assemblage, in networks of patterns, resonances and repetitions. Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth (2009–present) mobilizes hybrid modes of knowledge production around an additional hybridity: the hybrid human/non-human protagonist. In compelling the reader to identify with an inhuman subject, this work exploits the dynamic tension of the form and renders tensions within humanity itself graphically explicit.

This article examines the interrelated and mutually reinforcing condensation of subject/object in the fields of mass culture and nationalism. In an exploration of the essential use of affect to manage this project, I trace the primary utility of affective superhero bodies in the discourse of the dialectic and how these bodies are principle objects of exchange in the dialogue between producers and consumers in a national context. The dialogue between consumers and producers articulates the space between these dialectical forces. I examine the increasing turn in contemporary superhero comics towards reflexive mythology in such comic books as the Marvel series Bullet Points and The Ultimates and the DC series The New Frontier. As ‘alternative histories’, they ostensibly erase the preceding historical record in a utopian gesture of self-actualization. Yet, for all of its investment in erasure, this utopian gesture relies on remembrance, condensing personal memory and historical time. At the root of this is dialectical materialism, which is most productively understood in relation to the intersection of the competing utopian plans and impulses of American identity, mass culture and the superhero genre.

Lynda Barry: Girlhood through the Looking Glass, Susan E. Kirtley (2012) University Press of Mississippi, 217 pp., 9781617032356, Paperback, £25.99

No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics, Justin Hall (ed.), Fantagraphics Books, 328 pp., 9781606995068, Hardback, $35

Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First Century Storytelling, Jared Garner (2012) Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 240 pp., ISBN: 978-08-04771474, Paperback, $24.95

Comics Rock: A review of The Third International Comics Conference, Bournemouth, 28–29 June 2012

Comic Arts Conference, Comic-Con International, San Diego, CA, 13–17 July 2012