Studies in Comics - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2016

Running continually from 1905 to 1939, with albums appearing sporadically until the 1960s, Les Aventures de Bécassine (Caumery and J.P. Pinchon, 1905–1939) straddled the divide between old-style illustrés and bona fide bandes dessinées (BD). Its heroine, Breton servant Bécassine, was incredibly popular, spawning dolls, films and other merchandise. The character is particularly notable for being the first female star of modern BD. Response to Les Aventures de Bécassine has been mixed, due to the series’ problematic, stereotypical depiction of Brittany and Bretons: the country is backward, the inhabitants are credulous and unintelligent. Beyond this, however, is the presence of Bécassine as a rare female character in BD. She functions both as a figure of fun and as a role model for her readers, undertaking many exciting activities (pilot, tram inspector, intrepid traveller, etc). The series gives an insight into the upheaval French society underwent in the early years of the twentieth century, and is of particular use regarding the changing place of women. It demonstrates the tensions between the ‘old world’ of French nobility and the new modernity, offering an exploration of women’s new opportunities in a fast-changing world.

Although much has been written about the impact of Jewish culture and identity on comics and graphic novels, to date, no culturally specific hermeneutic has been used to expand our understanding of the relationship between Jewish comics and the cultural matrix in which they are formed. The relationship between Kabbballah and Literary criticism has been explored by Bloom, Handelman, Wolffson and others. However, once again, it has never been applied to comics, despite the deeply visual nature of Kabbalistic imagery and symbolism. I will utilize the celebrated Kabbalistic ‘travel’ narrative of the Four Sages who enter the Pardes, the Orchard, or Paradise, which will serve as a paradigm for analysing the work of four female autobiographical comics artists. In the Rabbinic tradition, PaRDeS became an acronym for four layers or levels of interpretation – Peshat, the literal meaning of a text, Remez, its symbolic structure, Drash, its relationship to other texts, and Sod, its mystical meaning. Each of the four sages represents a model of a particular approach, and the fate they meet acts as a critique of the potential reductiveness of that approach, if used exclusive of the others. I explore the work of four female artists who mediate between personal and collective quests for meaning in their work, focalized through their own experiences. All of these artists were featured in the touring exhibition Graphic Details, curated by Sarah Lightman and Michael Kaminer. Sarah Glidden and Miriam Libicki visit Israel as outsiders, and write from Diasporic perspectives; Glidden struggles with received ideology on a Zionist Birthright tour, while Libicki seeks to embed herself in the army, and pass as ‘fully Israeli’. Sztokman argues that ‘the “Israel” that Diaspora Jews prefer to usher into their identities remains a powerfully and singularly male construct’. In addition to deconstructing this masculine construct from a Diasporic perspective, the inclusion of work by Israeli artists Racheli Rottner, and Illana Zeffren, reflecting on their relationship to the Diasporic vision of faith and identity, provides more nuanced and alternative models of cultural critique and religious dialogue from Israeli perspectives. I seek to initiate a mutually enriching dialogue between Kabbalah and comics, interweaving a feminist interpretation of the Kabbalistic story with a Kabbalistic reading of these feminist comics, which celebrate the power of Jewish narrative, symbolism and hermeneutics in subtle and surprising ways.

Male–male sexuality is the central trope of Boys’ Love (BL) manga with stories tending to revolve around a central uke-seme (‘bottom’–‘top’) pair. Although focused on men, BL is produced and consumed primarily by women. This article presents, from an anglophone British perspective, analysis of age-stratified male–male romance – paederasty – as portrayed in BL. My corpus consists of 234 commercially-translated original Japanese BL manga stories, created by 100 different mangaka (author-artists), published commercially in English between 2003 and 2012. A total of 68 (30%) of these stories were identified as involving agestratified relationships, eight of which were selected for detailed analysis. Seven were selected for typicality: Waru (2007) by Yukari Hashida deemed the most typical. Fangs (2008) by Hiroki Kusumoto was also included in analysis as the most atypical age-stratified story in order to test the robustness of identified patterns. I argue that that, from an anglophone perspective, the characteristic themes of age-stratified BL map surprising well onto the eroticised intra-familial dynamics of Freud and the intra- and inter-familial economics of Lévi-Strauss. The patterns identified are evidenced and discussed under the following headings: the mother identified son, the doubly divested man, the castrated father, men on the market and the mother with the phallus. These themes help build and substantiate my argument that age-stratified BL might work, within an anglophone context at least, as a feminist critique of patriarchy through the mechanism of phallic divestiture.

This interview with Trina Robbins explores her roles as a comics creator, historian and activist. It discusses her championship of female creators and readers and her various publications within the fields of feminist and LGBT commix, superheroics, and self-publishing.

In this abridged and edited transcription of ‘“Arnie’s Air Conditioner” and other fond memories: Aline Crumb in conversation with Sarah Lightman’, held on 15 April 2016 at The House of Illustration, Kominsky Crumb talks through her role in the history of autobiographical comics, and discusses comics that reflect on her childhood experiences. She also describes how she deliberately approached parenting her daughter, Sophie, differently and how this is reflected in her works.

This is an interview with Reiko Momochi, a Japanese shojo manga artist best known for producing the Confidential Confessions (2003) series. The interview was carried out with the aim to gain an insight into the manga industry in Japan, with a particular focus on the matter of gender.

This article is about surviving life with help of comic books, with an abusive mother in the middle of a rural Denmark in the 1980s.

Women’s stories. For a decade, I created a series of graphic fables in which women protagonists from different cultures work with their communities to eliminate gender-based violence. McFarland anthologized that series, Feminist Fables for the Twenty-First Century, in 2015. In my current work, I am continuing to focus on women’s stories; specifically, I am developing autohistoriographic1 narratives, in which my own stories are intimately intertwined with the stories of my female ancestors and with cultural and historical themes. I created Pathways in the space between completing Feminist Fables and beginning this new work. Pathways shows movement towards a deeper understanding of my own stories and the creation of new lines of thought in connection with memories, ghosts, and with the more-than-human world. Drawing – a process of making lines that connect and intersect to create image-stories – is itself an act of finding or forging new pathways.

A visual review of Comix Creatrix: 100 Women Making Comics at House of Illustration, 2016.