Studies in Comics - Current Issue

This article is a feminist enquiry into the image of the grieving victim of sexual assault in the nation state of India; it is also a critical analysis of what it means to depict trauma, graphically, in this political climate where the rhetoric of women’s empowerment is constantly being strategically adapted within the Saffron camps of extremist Hindu forces. This article deals with the ideal victim of trauma in three Indian comics on rape and sexual assault through the lens of feminist discourses around justice, victimhood and feminist art history. The glorified, ideal victimhood is often placed within a narrative of Hindu iconography, which ironically, sometimes, manifests through a religio-political rhetoric of women’s empowerment. I read the image of this ‘ideal’ victimhood with reference to the comics series Priya’s Shakti, Pratheek Thomas’s graphic narrative Hush (2011) and my own comic Naming and Shaming (2018). I posit the reading of my own comics on the #MeToo movement and discuss my immense urge and severe unease while putting forth a visual representation of victimhood – and seeking that very act, as a point of departure – and a way of challenging the idea of an ideal victim.

Bianca Stone’s poetry comics often cast narrative and common panel transitions aside to centre the lyricism and playfulness of text and image, while retaining some ‘hallmarks’ of comics such as the speech bubble and pictorial sequence. Stone’s Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours is one of the few single-authored collections of poetry comics currently in print. In addition to her poetry comics, Stone has collaborated with poets to create illustrated texts. Notably, her collaboration with the poet and translator Anne Carson produced a new translation of Antigone (Antigonick), which moves beyond a strictly illustrated text without becoming a full-fledged graphic novel. Most recently, Stone ‘illustrated’ a Gertrude Stein poem to make a children’s book, A Little Called Pauline; she notes that this book would be challenging to read to children since images are a further abstraction of an already abstract text. Like much of Stone’s work, A Little Called Pauline defies a direct adaptation of the text. Despite all her work in the field, Stone’s comics remain largely unstudied. By examining three of her books, this article will illuminate Stone’s important, ongoing, role in the world of comics hybridity and rightfully place her in the rich history of dynamic creators who beg us to reimagine the comics medium and its definitions. To better understand her techniques, we consider her work using existing ideas about comics from a variety of creators and scholars. As we explored Stone’s work, we found that poetry comics is a rich genre, often opposing traditional definitions of comics, that could benefit from more study by comics scholars.

Readers of comics can easily call to mind images of musical notation they have seen on the page. It is a cliché of the medium that a speech balloon bearing a pair of quarter notes usually hovers near a singing bird, and it is no less common that floods of eighth, quarter, half and whole notes emanate from a turntable speaker or the bell of a saxophone drawn inside the panel borders. Yet the ways in which musical notation and musical expression take shape on the comics page are highly contextualized. For those comics that move beyond stereotypical depictions of musical sounds, how musical notes and emanations are depicted on the page are closely connected with the theme, critical aspirations and sociocultural context of a given work. Focusing on the representation of Black American jazz music in particular, and its transatlantic resonance in Europe (Germany, France and Spain) during the twentieth century, this article investigates three divergent manifestations of this phenomenon. By analysing innovative examples of musical representation from Berlin (Jason Lutes), Total Jazz (Blutch) and Montoliu Plays Tete (Gani Jakupi and Miquel Jurado), a basic typology is offered of mute, mutable and pedagogical representations of music in which comics form, audience reception and social context are interconnected.

The goal of this article is to analyse how graphic narratives creators can incorporate transmedial fictional characters such as celebrities, and what features these character types contribute to these narratives. Our target character is ‘Prince’, the celebrity alter-ego of Prince Roger Nelson. This character had an ambiguous and complex identity, an eclectic approach to art, a strong determination in achieving one’s goals, and a keen drive to be kind and realize the emancipation of his companions, especially women. These four traits pervade receptions of Prince as a fictional character across different graphic narratives, though they are interpreted in partial and often contrasting manners. We discuss the import of this intertextual and transmedial reception of Prince as a fictional character, and how this reception is mediated via these four key traits. We suggest these traits have inspired creators to develop characters that may refer to the ‘Princian purple thread’ to differing degrees, but constantly change across cultural, genre and thematic boundaries. For instance, most receptions of Prince interpret this fictional character as a kind, supportive individual with a fluid, non-binary identity, but express these aspects in culturally informed manners. We conclude by suggesting that our analysis informs theoretical views on graphic narratives in at least two aspects. First, the analysis sheds light on how characters can shape the creation of graphic narratives, modulo genre norms and constraints. Second, the analysis sheds light on what cultural and philosophical themes they can contribute to these narratives.

This article analyses the elements that contribute to the specific kind of humour central to the comic strip series Strange Planet, one that combines humorous components with everyday situations. We will examine the main strategies behind the comic disjunction that dominates the work of Nathan W. Pyle. On the one hand, the graphic representation of cuteness enhances the candid banality of its everyday themes. On the other hand, the verbal discourse approaches the everyday with cold neutrality of the enunciations, provoking an ironic effect. In order to understand how these concepts apply to narrative in comics the article employs theories of humour and academic work on cuteness. The article also looks at how the strip optimizes its distribution through the internet.

Harmony Becker is a cartoonist and illustrator. She illustrated George Takei’s graphic novel They Called Us Enemy (Top Shelf, 2019), which won an Eisner Award in 2020. Her first solo graphic novel, Himawari House, was published in 2021 by First Second and received the Kirkus Prize in 2022. Becker is also the creator of the comics Love Potion and Anemone and Catharus. According to Top Shelf, she has spent time living in South Korea and Japan. This interview took place by Zoom in July 2022.

In this interview, Ritam Sarkar and Somdatta Bhattacharya talk to the French comics artist Simon Lamouret, to discuss his comics The Alcazar. Lamouret is a graphic novelist and illustrator based out of Toulouse, France. He has produced two graphic novels: Bangalore (part of the Angouleme International Comics Festival selection) and L’Alcazar (Winner of the debut award ADAGP/Quai des Bulles, France, 2021). L’Alcazar was published in India in 2022 as The Alcazar. In this conversation, Lamouret talks about his creative process, his experiences of living in Bangalore and the relationship comics share with cities. The interview was conducted on 3 July 2022 via Microsoft Teams. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Review of: Authorizing Superhero Comics: On the Evolution of a Popular Serial Genre, Daniel Stein (2021)

Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 315 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-81425-802-6, h/bk, $34.95

Review of: Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics, Sean Guynes and Martin Lund (eds) (2020)

Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 274 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-81421-418-3, h/bk, $99.95

ISBN 978-0-81425-563-6, p/bk, $29.95

ISBN 978-0-81427-750-8, e-book, $29.95

Review of: Immigrants and Comics: Graphic Spaces of Remembrance, Transaction, and Mimesis, Nhora Lucía Serrano (ed.) (2021)

New York: Routledge, 268 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-13818-615-6, h/bk, £130

Review of: Mise en scène, Acting, and Space in Comics, Geraint D’Arcy (2020)

Cham: Nature Switzerland AG, 136 pp.,

ISBN 978-3-03051-113-5, p/bk, $69.99

This piece was originally made for the anthology CBA #56&57: Uncomics, where the goal was abstraction in both art and narrative. Kimball’s writing has long been influenced by their experience with brain fog, searching for meaning but not necessarily finding it. Fragments of text, repeating with new conjugation and new connections but never finding a definite answer. The art is constructed out of photos and pencil lines and is focused thematically on exploring the nature of panels. Panels trying to contain, trying to hold, like trying to find the right words.

Pull quote was originally published in CBA #56&57: Uncomics, a collection of works guest-edited by Allen Haverholm meant to ‘unmake’ comics. This unusual prompt challenged me to almost entirely drop text, representational imagery, and narrative and embrace abstraction instead. My goal was to create a sequence of pages with echoes of comics structures like panels and gutters and that can still be ‘read’ even without a strict left-to-right and up-to-down format.

I began this comic by lightly tracing the underlying shapes in magazines called page architecture – pictures, headers, articles, ads, etc. – and used them as a foundation for coloured pencil and marker abstractions. This led to unexpected images that shook me out of my usual style. This interestingly abstract ‘readability’ allows readers to drift through Pull quote taking in the soft, melting forms on the pages in their own ways – maybe as physical spaces, tangible objects or simply flat colours.

The title comes from the term for short quotes that editors pluck from an article and feature as attention-grabbing headers or graphics. Print magazines have a certain visual architecture that is unique to the medium, and tailored to different genres and purposes and that language has been proliferated through ‘western’ graphic design in general. But all these design choices are usually invisible to the reader, existing to move us smoothly through an article from beginning to end (including the ads). Although I took these unseen shapes and let them take centre stage, my process does not result in neat, legible graphic design. Instead, it produces chaotic tangles of organic and angular forms that cannot be easily organized by the eye. Even if the reader does not know about the tracing process I used or the meaning of the title, I think it resulted in abstractions with a nagging sense of familiarity and that evoke some of the information overload of contemporary life.

In my black-and-white comic Undkomic 2, I combine the abstract elements of my art, different genres and ways of doing things. The transformation and repetition of the elements bring to the comic an atmosphere where the pictorial continuums intersect with each other. The division of traditional comics into squares is included in my comic as a background element and as an object of composition.

Soma is an abstract comic exploring the relationship between the creative act and mental health with an emphasis on embodiment. The title derives from the Greek term as used in Homer’s Iliad, where the word is used to refer not simply to the body, but to the dead body and also refers to the intoxicant used in Vedic ritual. As an abstract comic, the emphasis is not on narrative momentum or the development of an argument, but rather the cultivation of a tone or mood. In line with this, the comic’s visual approach partly takes its inspiration from black metal and other extreme forms of music, where the lyrics’ deliberate indecipherability recasts them as pure musical elements rather than conveyors of information. In a similar vein Soma’s use of words is intended as primarily rhythmical rather than information-bearing; rendered in such a way as to make them at times illegible, they become subsumed into the design. This strategy lies parallel to the aim of the comic as a whole: the reintegration of mind and body through the creative act here imagined as an act of self-cannibalization, recasting, in the terms of the title, the dead body as a ritual intoxicant.