Animal Comics: Multispecies Storyworlds in Graphic Narratives 9781350015319, 9781350015340, 9781350015326

Citation preview

i

ANIMAL COMICS

ii

Also published by Bloomsbury: Autobiographical Comics, Andrew J. Kunka The Power of Comics, Randy Duncan, Matthew J. Smith, and Paul Levitz Superhero Comics, Christopher Gavaler Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives, edited by Shane Denson, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein

iii

ANIMAL COMICS

Multispecies Storyworlds in Graphic Narratives

Edited by David Herman

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2019 © David Herman and Contributors, 2018 David Herman and the Contributors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © 1999, Fulcrum, Inc., Golden, CO, USA. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Herman, David, 1962– editor. Title: Animal comics: multispecies storyworlds in graphic narratives / edited by David Herman. Description: London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017025094 | ISBN 9781350015319 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350015333 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Comic books, strips, etc.–History and criticism. | Graphic novels–History and criticism. | Animals in literature. | Human- animal relationships in literature. Classification: LCC PN6714.A46 2018 | DDC 741.5/ 362– dc23 LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/ 2017025094 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-1531-9 PB: 978-1-3501-1695-5 ePDF: 978-1-3500-1532-6 ePub: 978-1-3500-1533-3 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

v

C ONTENTS List of Figures Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors

vii ix x

INTRODUCTION: MORE-THAN-HUMAN WORLDS IN GRAPHIC STORYTELLING David Herman

1

Part I ANIMAL AGENCY IN THE HISTORY AND THEORY OF COMICS Chapter 1 LIONS AND TIGERS AND FEARS: A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SEQUENTIAL ANIMAL Daniel F. Yezbick Chapter 2 THE ANIMALIZED CHARACTER AND STYLE Glenn Willmott

29

53

Part II SPECIES OF DIFFERENCE: FUNCTIONS OF ANIMAL ALTERITY IN GRAPHIC NARRATIVES Chapter 3 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF ALTERITY IN ADAM HINES’S DUNCAN THE WONDER DOG Alex Link Chapter 4 THE SAGA OF THE ANIMAL AS VISUAL METAPHOR FOR MIXED-RACE IDENTITY IN COMICS Michael A. Chaney

79

99

vi

vi

Contents

Chapter 5 CURLY TAILS AND FLYING DOGS: STRUCTURES OF AFFECT IN NICK ABADZIS’S LAIKA Carrie Rohman Chapter 6 INVASIVE SPECIES: MANGA’S INSECT-HUMAN WORLDS Mary A. Knighton

119

139

Part III CRITICAL FRAMEWORKS FOR MULTISPECIES COMICS Chapter 7 RESITUATING THE ANIMAL COMIC: ENVIRONMENTALIST AESTHETICS IN MATT DEMBICKI’S XOC: THE JOURNEY OF A GREAT WHITE Laura A. Pearson Chapter 8 INTERSPECIES RELATIONSHIPS IN GRAPHIC MICRONARRATIVES: FROM OLIVIER DEPREZ TO AVRIL-DEPREZ Jan Baetens Chapter 9 ANIMAL MINDS IN NONFICTION COMICS David Herman

161

183

201

Part IV GRAPHIC ANIMALITY IN THE CLASSROOM AND BEYOND Chapter 10 CAN WE BE PART OF THE PRIDE? READING ANIMALS THROUGH COMICS IN THE UNDERGRADUATE CLASSROOM Charles E. Baraw and Andrew Smyth Chapter 11 THIS IS HOME Artwork by Bridget Brewer Texts by Bridget Brewer and Thalia Field Index

227

245

257

vii

F IGURES 2.1 Reading the animalized character (AC). 2.2 From The Three Mouseketeers, no. 1, March–April 1956 (National Comics). By Sheldon Mayer. 2.3 From Ant Colony, n.p. Copyright Michael DeForge. Used with permission by Drawn & Quarterly. 3.1 Georgios and the Madonna in Sorrow. © Adam Hines, Duncan the Wonder Dog: Show One, p. 251. Reproduction Courtesy AdHouse Books. 5.1 From p. 51 of Laika, by Nick Abadzis. Reprinted by permision of Macmillan Publishers. 5.2 From p. 55 of Laika, by Nick Abadzis. Reprinted by permision of Macmillan Publishers. 6.1 TERRA FORMARS. © 2011 by Ken-ichi Tachibana, Yū Sasuga/ SHUEISHA Inc., Volume 4, pp. 94–5; English translation provided by Viz Media. 6.2 TERRA FORMARS. © 2011 by Ken-ichi Tachibana, Yū Sasuga/ SHUEISHA Inc., Volume 1, p. 42; English translation provided by Viz Media. 7.1 Cage divers, from Xoc: The Journey of a Great White, p. 22. © Matt Dembicki. Reproduction courtesy Oni Press. 7.2 Xoc, surfer, seal (part 1), from Xoc: The Journey of a Great White, p. 99. © Matt Dembicki. Reproduction courtesy Oni Press. 7.3 Xoc, surfer, seal (part 2), from Xoc: The Journey of a Great White, p. 100. © Matt Dembicki. Reproduction courtesy Oni Press. 7.4 Finning, from Xoc: The Journey of a Great White, pp. 72–3. © Matt Dembicki. Reproduction courtesy Oni Press. 8.1 Olivier Deprez, The Castle, p. 70. Used with kind permission of Frémok (FRMK). 8.2 Adolpho Avril and Olivier Deprez, Après la mort, après la vie, n.p. Used with kind permission of Frémok (FRMK). 9.1 From Joeming Dunn and Ben Dunn’s Laika: The 1st Dog in Space, p. 28. Reproduction courtesy ABDO Publishing Company. 9.2 From Cat Getting Out of a Bag and Other Observations, p. 79 by Jeffrey Brown, published in 2007 by Chronicle Books LLC. Copyright © 2007 by Jeffrey Brown. All Rights Reserved.

65 69 71

92 126 129

149

150 165 172 173 175 192 198 205

208

viii

viii

Figures

9.3 Reprinted with permission of the publisher from Sue Coe’s Cruel: Bearing Witness to Animal Exploitation, p. 176 by OR Books, 2012. 11.1–11.7 Cut-aways and close-ups from the mixed-media composition Fables, by Bridget Brewer.

209 245

ix

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS It has been a privilege to work on this volume with such a crack team of contributors, whom I thank not only for their multifaceted insights into animal comics but also for their hard work, attention to detail, and patient dedication to this project. At the press, I thank David Avital, Lucy Brown, and Mark Richardson for their gracious professionalism from the very start, and for commissioning reports from the three reviewers whose detailed, productive comments helped shape—and improve—the volume. I  am equally grateful to copyeditor Christina Taylor and designer Eleanor Rose for their expert assistance with the process of transforming a bare typescript into this finished book. I also thank Binx, Red Head, the manatees and dolphins in Coffeepot Bayou, the raucous inhabitants of Bird Island, the solitary roseate spoonbill, Max, Hawk, Beach, and Charlie, and the alligators of Sanibel for opening in recent months new pathways into multispecies storyworlds, which I have been so very fortunate to be able to explore alongside Susan Moss.

x

C ONTRIBUTORS Jan Baetens teaches literary and cultural studies at the University of Leuven in Belgium. His most recent book is The Graphic Novel: An Introduction, coauthored with Hugo Frey (2014). He coedited, with Éric Trudel, a special issue of the journal Littérature Histoire Theory (2016), devoted to the theme of “Crises de lisibilité.” Charles E. Baraw has taught Comics and the American Experience at Southern Connecticut State University since 2012 and has presented several papers on the subject. A specialist in nineteenth-century American literature, he is completing a book about the poetics of tourism and literary form in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Wells Brown, and others. His work has appeared in the Canadian Review of American Studies, Literary Imagination, and a recent collection, Transatlantic Literature and Author Love in the Nineteenth Century (2016). His article “William Wells Brown, Three Years in Europe, and Fugitive Tourism” won the 2012 Darwin T. Turner Award for the year’s best essay in the African American Review. Bridget Brewer is a writer, performer, illustrator, and teacher currently based out of Mexico City, Mexico. Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Sun Lit, Ink Brick, Cosmonauts Avenue, Real Poetik, Awst Press, Paragraphiti, and Caketrain, among others. She earned her MFA in Literary Arts at Brown University, and is at work on a novella about a Riot Grrrl apocalypse. Michael A. Chaney, who is associate professor of English and chair of the African and African American Studies program at Dartmouth College, has authored Fugitive Vision:  Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative (2008) and edited Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels (2011). His latest monograph, Reading Lessons in Seeing:  Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel, was published in 2017. His essays and articles on comics and the interrelation of literary and illustrative arts have appeared in such journals as Callaloo, College Literature, American Literature, MELUS, and the International Journal of Comic Art. Thalia Field is a professor of Literary Arts at Brown University. Her sixth book, Experimental Animals (A Reality Fiction), tells the lost story of animal activists, writers, and scientists who converged at the birth of the modern laboratory. Her previous book, Bird Lovers, Backyard, told other animal stories from the intermingled space of science and literature. Working at the intersection of

xi

Contributors

xi

innovative fiction/essay, Field’s books each explore narrations of self/character and history. . David Herman has taught at institutions that include North Carolina State University, Purdue University, and Ohio State University in the United States, and Durham University in the United Kingdom. His recent publications include a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on “Animal Worlds in Modern Fiction” (2014) and an edited volume titled Creatural Fictions: Human-Animal Relationships in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature (2016). His monograph Narratology beyond the Human will be published in 2018. Mary A. Knighton is professor in the Department of Literature at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, Japan, where she works in American and Japanese literatures and cultures. Her chapter for the present volume grows out of her book-in-progress, Insect Selves: Posthumanism in Japanese Literature and Culture, supported by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and an ACLS/SSRC/NEH International and Area Studies Fellowship (2013–14). Alex Link is an associate professor in and chair of the School of Critical and Creative Studies at the Alberta College of Art and Design, in Calgary, Canada. He has published a number of scholarly articles in journals such as Contemporary Literature, The Journal of Popular Culture, and European Comic Art, as well as in the collection Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels (2014). In addition, he is the cocreator, with Riley Rossmo, of the comics Rebel Blood (2012) and Drumhellar (2014). Laura A. Pearson recently completed her PhD research in the School of English at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom. Her doctoral project, funded by the School of English and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, combines aspects of zoocriticism—the study of animals, literature, and (trans)culture—and comics studies, focusing on mediations of multispecies and natureculture relationships in contemporary North American graphic fictions. Forthcoming publications include a chapter in the anthology entitled The Canadian Alternative (2017). Carrie Rohman is associate professor of English at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. She is author of Stalking the Subject:  Modernism and the Animal (2009), and has published essays in journals such as American Literature, Deleuze Studies, Criticism, and Modern Fiction Studies. Her book in progress, Choreographies of the Living: Bio-Aesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance, is currently under contract. Andrew Smyth is a professor of English at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, where he teaches Secondary English Education, Renaissance

xii

xii

Contributors

Literature, and a diverse range of literature and writing courses. He coedited Representing the Modern Animal in Culture (2014) and published “Impersonating Authority: Animals and the Anglo-Irish Social Order in Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui and Edmund Spenser’s Mother Hubberds Tale” in Animals in Irish Literature and Culture (2015). Glenn Willmott teaches at Queen’s University in Canada. His recent books develop economic approaches to literature that widen commodity critique to include nonmarket exchange and environmental economies: Modernist Goods: Primitivism, the Market, and the Gift (2008) and Modern Animalism: Habitats of Scarcity and Wealth in Comics and Literature (2012). His study of worldmaking in comics is forthcoming in Modernism and the Anthropocene, edited by Jon Hegglund and John McIntyre. He is currently working on a book titled Reading for Wonder: Empathy, Ecology, Ethics, Enchantment. Daniel F. Yezbick is professor of English and Media Studies at Wildwood College in St. Louis, Missouri, where he teaches writing, literature, and media-based courses. His essays have appeared in Icons of the American Comic-Book, Comics through Time, The Critical Survey of Graphic Novels: History, Theme, and Technique, and The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art. He is the author of Perfect Nonsense: The Chaotic Comics and Goofy Games of George Carlson, and he also contributes to Fantagraphics Books’ The Carl Barks Library.

1

I N T R O D U C T IO N : M O R E - T HA N - H UM A N W O R L D S   I N G R A P H IC S T O RY T E L L I N G David Herman

In his recent article “Animal Subjects of the Graphic Novel,” Michael A.  Chaney remarks that despite ample historical contextualization of the funny animal comics that have helped shape later traditions of graphic storytelling (e.g., Art Spiegelman’s Maus), there is as yet “very little scholarship . . . that casts the animal of the comics in the dawning theoretical light of concepts known variously as animality, becominganimal, or animetaphor” (130).1 Since Chaney’s article was published, several relevant studies have appeared, including two special issues of Antennae on “The Illustrated Animal” (2011) and “Literary Animals Look” (2013) that were edited by Lisa Brown and by Susan McHugh and Robert McKay, respectively, as well as a number of individual journal articles and book chapters centering on pertinent texts and topics (see, e.g., Chaney, “Animal Witness”; De Angelis; Herman, “Storyworld” and “Zoonarratology”; and, for a broader discussion of animal representations across a variety of media, chapters included in Almiron, Cole, and Freeman, and also in Molloy). However, although one of the contributors to the present volume, Glenn Willmott, has authored a monograph that considers the animals portrayed in twentieth- and twenty-first-century graphic narratives alongside those included in literary texts during the same period, to date there is no book-length treatment of graphic animal agents2 that draws on the cross-disciplinary conversations being conducted under the headings of critical animal studies (McCance), human-animal studies (Marvin and McHugh), and related rubrics.3 Nor does the term “animal” appear in the index of studies focused on the history and cultural ecology of graphic narratives more generally, such as Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey’s The Graphic Novel: An Introduction, Jared Gardner’s Projections, or Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics. Assembling eleven chapters by an international group of contributors that includes scholars based in Belgium, Canada, Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom the present volume aims to fill this lacuna, drawing together work in comics studies, scholarship on narrative, and cross-disciplinary research on animal worlds and human-animal relationships. Even as it uses ideas from these areas to shed new light on comics and graphic novels in which animal agents play a significant role, this book also suggests how the distinctive structures and affordances of graphic narratives foreground key questions about trans-species

2

2

David Herman

entanglements in a more-than-human world. The volume is targeted at a wide audience and should be of interest to nonspecialist readers and scholars across a variety of fields, including popular culture studies, history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and new hybrid areas of study such as anthrozoology. At the same time, it is appropriate for use as a classroom text in upper-level undergraduate and graduate-level, courses taught in areas such as Comics Studies, English Studies, Comparative Literature, Comparative Media Studies, Environmental Humanities, Literary Animal Studies, and others. With all of the chapters developing extended readings of focal texts, and thereby exemplifying how frameworks for understanding human-animal relationships afford a basis for interpreting particular graphic narratives, the volume is designed to provide instructors and students alike with models for critical practice in this emergent domain of inquiry. In the remainder of this introduction, before providing a brief outline of the book’s contents, I sketch in some of the larger context for the authors’ contributions. To this end, I focus on discussions and debates around the keywords that feature in the title of the volume.

Context for the volume In investigating how comics creators use styles of graphic storytelling to evoke more-than-human worlds—that is, how sequences of verbally and visually organized panels give rise to storyworlds populated by multiple species of animals, including, but extending beyond, humans—the contributors to this book synthesize ideas from comics studies and human-animal studies with work in a range of other fields. Relevant domains include gender theory, research on popular culture, anthropology, the environmental humanities, critical race studies, scholarship on narrative across media, the philosophy of mind, discussions of posthumanism, animal ethics, the scholarship of teaching, and other areas of inquiry. To provide an initial sense of how research from these domains enters into the contributors’ analyses of their example texts, I divide this section of my introduction into subsections centering on the three keywords included in the book’s title: multispecies storyworlds, graphic narratives, and animal comics. The first of these terms does not refer to any particular semiotic medium, given that narrative worlds can be projected by—and transferred among—any number of media (see Harvey, Fantastic Transmedia and “Taxonomy”; Herman, “Approaches to Narrative Worldmaking”; Kladstrup and Tosca). The descriptor “multispecies,” however, does restrict the scope of the storyworlds being considered. Thus the present study focuses on narratives in which intersections or interrelations between the experiential worlds of humans and of other kinds of animals structure, more or less explicitly and overtly, the unfolding of events.4 The other two terms, meanwhile, refer more or less inclusively to the medium of graphic narration, designating word-image combinations being used for any storytelling purpose, on the one hand, and the subset of verbal-visual narratives used to project worlds in which animals feature as focal participants, on the other hand.

3

Introduction

3

Two further preliminary points before I begin my discussion of the issues raised by these keywords: First, in part because of the importance of the textual category “animal comics,” both in this introduction and in the volume as a whole, it is important to clarify from the outset how the terms “animal,” “human,” and “nonhuman” function in this book. A working assumption informing all the chapters is that humans are animals too—that humans, as members of larger biotic communities, occupy one niche within the broader domain of creatural life. For the sake of simplicity, however, the other contributors and I sometimes use the terms “human” and “animal” as shorthand for “human animal” and “nonhuman animal.” Likewise, even though the term “nonhuman” encompasses inanimate objects and artifacts as well as living creatures, terms such as “nonhumans” and “nonhuman others” sometimes serve as abbreviations for “nonhuman animals.”5 Second, although Chute and DeKoven’s capacious definition of graphic narrative as “narrative work done in the medium of comics” (767, qtd. by Stein and Thon 4) sets a precedent for my own use of the terms “comics,” “graphic novel,” and “graphic narrative” (and “graphic storytelling”) as near-synonyms in this introduction, important definitional issues have been raised by Stein and Thon, and also by Baetens and Frey, in connection with stories told via sequences of word-image combinations. Arguing that the categories of comics and graphic narratives should be kept distinct, Stein and Thon point to differences between artifacts such as ancient cave paintings, the Bayeux tapestry, and stained-glass church windows, which can all be categorized as graphic narratives, versus the historically and culturally different artifacts resulting from the modes of comics storytelling pioneered by Rodolphe Töpffer in the 1830s and revolutionized again in the 1890s and 1900s by American newspaper cartoonists such as Richard Felton Outcault and others (5). Pointing also to formal dimensions specific to comics and to the Anglo-American heritage of the very term “comics,” Stein and Thon make a case for retaining “the historically resonant and culturally specific terms ‘comic strip’ and ‘graphic novel’ while also subscribing to the more general notion of ‘graphic narrative,’ signaling both the aim of developing a comics narratology . . . and an awareness of the transcultural and transnational varieties of graphic storytelling” (7).6 For their part, Baetens and Frey focus on the historical and conceptual relationships between the terms “comics” and “graphic novel.” Noting that authors such as Art Spiegelman and Alan Moore have raised legitimate concerns about how use of the category of graphic novel may in some contexts reflect an elitist dismissal of earlier comic book traditions, including those associated with the underground comix movement that took rise after the institution of the comics code authority in the United States in 1954, and being careful to make qualifications and register exceptions, the authors define the graphic novel as a medium marked by features that sit on a spectrum at whose opposite pole is the comic book. These features can be situated, in turn, at multiple interpretive levels (8–23). For example, at the level of form, argue Baetens and Frey, graphic novels foreground individual styles in a way that traditional comic books did not, and they also innovate by accenting the role of the narrator or sometimes even refusing to narrate. Likewise, when it

4

4

David Herman

comes to content, graphic novels unfold in a manner that is more or less distinct from the traditional comic-book mode, insofar as they “work on the borderlines of first-person narrative, history-from-below, and oral history,” while also interweaving fictional narratives with accounts of actual persons and events.7 It may therefore be instructive for readers of the present volume particularly interested in the historical and cultural contexts of graphic storytelling to track the contributors’ usage of the categories of comics, graphic novel, and graphic narrative in their discussion of the verbal-visual accounts of more-than-human worlds that they use as case studies.8 For their part, readers primarily concerned with changing ideas of the animal in visual-verbal narratives may ask: besides pointing to different kinds of texts, do the differences among these terms also suggest different ways of engaging with various forms of animal life? At this juncture, though, it is time to shift to the keywords that afford other terminological pathways into the core concerns of this book. Multispecies storyworlds It is perhaps best to break this term up into its constituent parts. “Storyworlds,” first of all, grows out of previous research that draws on the idea of narrative worldmaking as a central heuristic framework—a framework built, in part, on the pioneering insights of Nelson Goodman, Richard Gerrig, and other theorists (see Herman, “Approaches”; Basic Elements; Story Logic; and Storytelling for additional background). From this perspective, taking advantage of semiotic affordances to construct and imaginatively inhabit narrative worlds or storyworlds—whether they are the imagined, autonomous worlds of fiction or the worlds about which nonfictional accounts make claims that are subject to falsification—is a fundamental aspect of interpreting narratives.9 Worldmaking is likewise a way of describing how people use narratives as an interpretive resource in their own right as they work to construe what’s going on in wider environments for sense making. Building storyworlds, in short, stands as a hallmark of narrative experiences, a root function of stories and storytelling that should provide the starting point for narrative inquiry and the analytic tools developed in its service.10 Overall, then, a focus on narrative worldmaking studies how storytellers, employing many different kinds of symbol systems (including the word-image combinations of comics and graphic novels, but also written or spoken language, the static images of photographs and paintings, the moving images of cinema, and other vehicles for narrative meaning making), prompt interpreters to engage in the process of cocreating storyworlds.11 In previous work outlining a cross-media framework for studying how semiotic environments of various sorts enable narrative experiences, I  suggest that engaging with stories entails mapping written material, visual-verbal designs, or other intentionally arranged textual patterns onto the WHEN, WHAT, WHERE, WHO, HOW, and WHY dimensions of mentally configured worlds (see my contributions to Herman et al., Narrative Theory, as well as Herman, “Approaches” and Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind). By using textual affordances to specify or “fill out” these dimensions in more or less

5

Introduction

5

detail, interpreters can frame provisional answers to questions such as the following (to the extent required by their purposes in engaging with a given text): 1. How does the time frame of events in the storyworld relate to that of the narrational or world-creating act? 2. Where did/will/might narrated events happen relative to the place of narration, and relative to the interpreter’s current situation? 3. How exactly is the domain of narrated events spatially configured, and what sorts of changes take place in the configuration of that domain over time? 4. During a given moment of the unfolding action, what are the focal (foregrounded) constituents or inhabitants of the narrated domain, as opposed to the peripheral (backgrounded) constituents? 5. Whose vantage point on situations, objects, and events in the narrated world shapes the presentation of that world at a given moment? 6. In what domains of the storyworld do actions supervene on behaviors (or events), such that it becomes relevant to ask not just what cause produced what effect, but also who did (or tried to do) what, through what means, and for what reason? The interplay among the dimensions at issue—the specific pattern of responses created by the way an interpreter frames answers to these sorts of questions when engaging with a narrative—helps account for the structure as well as the functions and overall impact of the storyworld at issue. In other words, whereas the questions listed previously concern what kind of world is being evoked by the act of telling, these questions connect up, in turn, with further questions about how a given narrative is situated in its broader discourse environment—questions concerning why or with what purposes that act of telling is being performed at all.12 By way of illustrating the pertinence of these questions and the larger framework for inquiry in which they are embedded, consider the storyworlds projected by three of the comics that I  examine in Chapter  9 and that are excerpted in Figures 9.1–9.3. As discussed in more detail in the chapter, Figure 9.1 is taken from a narrative concerned with the life history of Laika, the dog rocketed into space in 1957 (without any provision for recovery) by the Soviet researchers who launched the Sputnik II satellite. Although it is presented as if it were being told posthumously by Laika herself, this account, conveyed in words and images by Joeming Dunn and Ben Dunn in Laika: The 1st Dog in Space, subsumes the dog’s life under the broader history of space exploration. Figure 9.1 thus reflects the authors’ overall approach; here the visual track elides Laika’s subjective experiences during the final moments of her life. In turn, the “dimensional” model of narrative worldmaking described previously provides means for comparing and contrasting this relatively human-centric storyworld with the more biocentric worlds evoked by Jeffrey Brown in the episode involving Misty the cat’s visit to the veterinary clinic in Cat Getting out of a Bag and Other Observations (Figure 9.2) and by Sue Coe in the sequence titled “dying calf at stockyard” included in the “Sketchbook” section of Cruel (Figure 9.3), a work coauthored by Judy Brody.

6

6

David Herman

For instance, Figures 9.1 and 9.2 are both taken from retrospective accounts, with the time of telling occurring after the told-about events. Dunn and Dunn’s storyworld, however, is brought to life by a canine narrator whose voice the human authors ventriloquize in a cross-species act of speaking-for that can be aligned with practices of “butting in” in communicative interactions involving humans.13 This nonhuman narrator, Laika, is also separated by decades—not to mention her own death—from the events encountered much earlier by the living, experiencing dog. By contrast, Brown’s text does not impute to a nonhuman teller the retrospective narration from which the storyworld emerges; and what is more, the act of telling that has produced this verbal-visual sequence can be inferred to be situated much closer in time to the narrated events than is the case in Dunn and Dunn’s text, which includes images of the space shuttle, the international space station, and other developments that long postdate the period of the US–Soviet space race. Brown refrains from using Misty as a mouthpiece for human projects and concerns, and thus departs from Dunn and Dunn’s decision to erase an animal character’s own vantage point on the events leading up to her death, in part by gapping out her experiences under conditions of duress.14 Yet Brown’s narrative does portray Misty as engaging in stress-induced vocalizations and behaviors, such as shivering in fear and attempting to burrow into the younger, experiencing Brown’s arms as an evasive strategy or flight response. Arising from and also helping to reinforce everyday understandings of animal minds, Brown’s storyworld can thus be read as modeling, in relatively fine-grained fashion, the cat’s perspective on and emotional response to events. The result is a text that engages in an act of crossspecies speaking-for that can be aligned with collaborative, non-face-threatening practices of “chipping in” in humans’ interactions with one another. Further, if in Dunn and Dunn’s account of her life history Laika paradoxically takes on the status of a backgrounded inhabitant of the narrated domain, in Brown’s narrative about Misty’s visit to the vet the cat and her experiences move into the foreground of the storyworld, as confirmed by the only partial (headless and faceless) images of the human characters who are also involved. More generally, whereas the net effect of Dunn and Dunn’s version of Laika’s story is to remove her experiences from what can be described as the register of actions—a register structured by talk about “projects, intentions, motives, reasons for acting, agents, and so forth”—and to situate the dog instead in the register of events structured by talk that centers on concepts such as “cause, law, fact, explanation,” Brown’s text profiles Misty’s behavior less as event-like than as action-like.15 Brown portrays the cat’s modes of comportment as ones for which it is appropriate to make mentalstate attributions—as part of the process of identifying an agential subject’s reasons for acting (again, see Chapter 9 in the present volume for further discussion). Figure  9.3, for its part, shrinks the temporal and spatial gap separating the telling from the told even more than does Brown’s narrative about Misty. Coe’s verbal-visual narration here assumes the form of an observational report based on her witnessing firsthand the calf ’s isolated and painful death in the stockyard; the sequence of micro-actions performed by the calf as she struggles to get back up onto her feet, recorded in the visual track, conspires with Coe’s use of

7

Introduction

7

present-tense narration in the verbal track to create the impression of a storyworld emerging from ethological field notes—notes taken in disturbing proximity to the suffering animal who is being observed during the final, agonizing moments of her life. But whereas Figure 9.2 at once draws on and contributes to established cultural models and forms of imagery bearing on the conduct of cats and on humanfeline interactions, Figure 9.3, as I discuss in more detail in Chapter 9, challenges the imagery—or rather the lack of imagery—that allows the experiences of farm animals to be bracketed off from those regularly attributed to humans’ animal companions. This sequence also highlights the role of stories in creating a space for mental-state ascriptions like those reported in and scaffolded by Brown’s text, suggesting that the absence of narratives about particular farm animals, like the dying calf, is part of what gives Coe’s sketches their anti-normative force. In other words, Coe’s sketchbook, like Cruel as a whole, recasts as experiencing subjects animals regularly treated as consumable property, profiling those animals’ behavior as action-like rather than event-like. In doing so, her account works to dislodge the objectifying norms of factory farming and to foster, in their place, the commitment to more-than-human relationality, the extension of the idea of selfhood beyond the species boundary, that both structures and arises from interactions between humans and companion animals such as Misty. Thus, beyond demonstrating the relevance of a “dimensional” approach to narrative worldmaking for a cross-comparison of Figures 9.1–9.3, the foregoing discussion suggests how, reciprocally, engaging with narratives of this sort requires refinements to the approach itself—in particular, finer-grained distinctions pertaining to the WHAT, WHO, and WHY dimensions of storyworlds. These further distinctions bear on questions of species identity and interspecies relationships not addressed in any detail in earlier research in this area. More precisely, the distinctions concern the degree to which animal inhabitants of storyworlds occupy a focal or peripheral position in the unfolding of events, the extent to which these inhabitants acquire the status of experiencing, agential subjects versus experienced, acted-upon objects, and, concomitantly, the degree to which their comportment takes shape via the register of action—involving talk about intentions, motives, and other reasons for acting—and not just the register of events—limited to talk about caused movements that have duration in time and direction in space. In broaching these issues, I  have also touched on questions that are of central importance to multispecies ethnography, trans-species anthropology, and other frameworks for studying how cross-species entanglements unfold in broader cultural settings—frameworks developed by analysts such as Donna Haraway, S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, Eduardo Kohn, Anna Tsing, and others. At stake here, in effect, is a dynamic inherent in the domain of inquiry that can be described as “postclassical narratology,” where theorists work to develop frameworks for research on stories that build on the ideas of classical, structuralist narratologists such as Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, Algirdas J. Greimas, and Tzvetan Todorov, while also supplementing those ideas with scholarship that was unavailable to earlier analysts. Inquiry into narrative worldmaking grows out of a strand of this postclassical research on stories—namely, a strand that concerns

8

8

David Herman

itself with the nexus of narrative and mind.16 This work draws on concepts and methods from fields such as social and cognitive psychology, discourse analysis, the philosophy of mind, and other areas pertaining to the study of human intelligence that were either ignored by or inaccessible to the classical narratologists. But as the present discussion confirms, a postclassical concern with how mentally projected worlds provide grounds for—or, conversely, are grounded in—narrative experiences requires further extension and elaboration when the worlds in question bring into view more-than-human environments. In these environments, attributes associated with intelligent beings, including the capacity to have a perspective on events, intentionality, agency, and others, extend beyond the species boundary. In such contexts, postclassical research on storyworlds, designed to overcome the structuralists’ failure to investigate issues of narrative referentiality and world-modeling, is itself due for innovation and transformation. By widening their remit and engaging with traditions of inquiry that center on humans’ interactions and relationships with larger biotic communities, approaches to narrative worldmaking can embrace the nature, scope, and cultural functions of multispecies storyworlds as newly focal concerns.17 One research tradition that is relevant in this connection stems from work conducted under the auspices of multispecies ethnography. Having emerged at the intersection of environmental studies, science and technology studies, and animal studies, this transhuman approach to ethnographic study, as S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich describe it, focuses not just on how human attitudes toward animals vary across cultures, but also on how how human groups recognize and participate in “contact zones where lines separating nature from culture have broken down, where encounters between Homo sapiens and other beings generate mutual ecologies and coproduced niches” (566; see also Kirksey, The Multispecies Salon). Similarly non-anthropocentric, or rather anti-anthropocentric, in emphasis and making an analogous attempt to reframe the relationship between the fields of biology and anthropology (see also Ingold), Eduardo Kohn’s trans-species anthropology (“Dogs”), or anthropology beyond the human (Forests), likewise seeks to capture not just human attitudes toward other kinds of life but also the webs of interaction that give rise to forms of intersubjectivity cutting across the humannonhuman boundary, creating what Kohn calls an “ecology of selves” (“How Dogs Dream” 4; How Forests Think 16–17). Kohn, too, seeks to develop an “analytical framework that goes beyond a focus on how humans represent animals to an appreciation for our everyday interactions with these creatures and the new spaces of possibility such interactions can create” (Forests 4; see also Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto and When Species Meet). Along the same lines, but in the domain of (auto)biography studies, Louis van den Hengel, drawing on the ideas of Giorgio Agamben, Bruno Latour, and others, proposes to establish as a new category of life writing what he terms zoegraphy, or “a mode of writing life that is not indexed on the traditional notion of bios—the discursive, social, and political life appropriate to human beings—but [rather] centers on the generative vitality of zoe, an inhuman, impersonal, and inorganic force which . . . is not specific to human lifeworlds, but cuts across humans, animals, technologies, and

9

Introduction

9

things” (2). As may already be apparent from my earlier remarks in this section, my own chapter (Chapter 9), which focuses on the storyworlds of nonfiction comics concerned with animals’ life histories, explores issues that fall within the scope of zoegraphy, thus defined. A partial list of other research developments relevant for the study of multispecies storyworlds—developments that resonate with the chapters featured in the present volume—would need to include at a minimum: ●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

work by Carol Adams, Josephine Donovan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Val Plumwood, and other ecofeminists who have pointed to interconnections between patriarchal institutions that foster the subordination of women and humans’ broader attempts to control nonhuman life forms (see Chapter 5); research on animal geographies that, in exploring “where, when, why, and how nonhuman animals intersect with human societies” (Urbanik 38), seeks to take into account how questions of location, landscape, and scale bear on humans’ interactions with the full range of animal species (see Chapters 1, 2, 6, and 7); work exploring the historical and conceptual links between attitudes toward animals and understandings of mental disabilities (among other forms of disability) in the realm of the human (see Chapter 8); literary scholarship on the role of animals and human-animal relationships in the storyworlds of science fiction, a genre distinctive for the way it exploits narrative’s power to (re)configure the world otherwise, and to also build entirely other worlds (see Chapters 4, 6, and 10); studies of how self-narratives, or the stories humans use to link together what they construe as self-relevant events over time, involve forms of relationality that extend beyond the species boundary, and provide a means for negotiating the self ’s position within and responsibility to larger biotic communities (see Chapters 4, 5, and 11); scholarship on humans’ interactions with companion animals and companion species more broadly, with a focus, again, on the mutually constitutive ways of relating that such transhuman modes of companionship require and entail in more or less localized domains that Haraway calls “naturecultures” (Haraway, Companion; see also Chapters 1, 5, and 9); work in philosophy, sociology, science studies, and other fields reexamining the concepts of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism, the way they become manifest in human institutions and practices, and their bearing on understandings of human-animal interactions and relationships (see Chapters 1, 2, 3, 9, and 10,); relatedly, the ongoing reassessment of value hierarchies premised on the centrality or exceptionality of the human by commentators working to develop concepts of posthumanism, contributors to the cross-disciplinary field of the environmental humanities, specialists in animal ethics, and researchers in the biological sciences concerned with forms of niche construction, behaviors passed down as a nongenetically encoded inheritance

10

10

●

●

David Herman

from generation to generation among nonhuman populations, and other indicators of animal cultures (see Chapters 3, 6, 8, and 11); research on the challenges of using narrative and other means to take the full measure of the biological, ecological, and ethical issues raised by the extinction of whole species (see Chapters 6 and 11); and analyses of the intertwined genealogies of (ideas about) race, ethnicity, and species, via the study of how associations between animals and disfavored human groups are established and maintained in narratives and other kinds of discourse circulating in a given culture or across cultures (see Chapters 3, 4, 6, and 10).18

The contributors to the present volume go a long way toward demonstrating how these and other, related frameworks for inquiry can be used to develop a more inclusive approach to narrative worldmaking–an approach capable of accommodating the complexity of the issues raised by multispecies storyworlds. That said, however, I have thus far described these issues in medium-neutral terms, without any consideration of whether the storyworlds in question are presented via cinema, television, dance, digital environments, opera, print texts, photographs, paintings, or comics and graphic novels, for example. Focusing on the other two keywords included in this volume’s title, my next subsection turns from multispecies storyworlds in general to the particular medial and generic categories with which the contributors engage, in their analyses of more-than-human worlds in contexts of graphic storytelling. Graphic narratives/animal comics In the previous subsection I  noted how approaches to narrative worldmaking have grown out of a strand of postclassical narratology concerned with the nexus between narrative and mind. Another strand of contemporary narrative studies, focusing on the affordances and constraints associated with different storytelling media, likewise contributes to a rethinking of classical, structuralist models of narrative—in this case, an insistence on recognizing that frameworks for studying narrative are necessarily based on specific corpora of stories, and that the stories included in a given corpus therefore shape analysts’ claims about the forms and functions of narrative itself.19 Considerations of the extent to which graphic storytelling might require a recontextualization and recalibration of existing approaches to the study of stories can thus be seen as part of the ongoing reflection on issues of methodology—in particular, the fit between corpus and theory—that constitutes a basic aspect of research in the field. Hence what Gardner and Herman (“Introduction”) term "graphic narrative theory" both recruits from and enriches earlier models of story by investigating how medium-specific properties of comics and graphic novels contribute to their structure, meaning, and overall effect. This project can be viewed as part of a wider attempt to come to terms with the narrative possibilities presented by various storytelling environments—and hence

11

Introduction

11

with the way frameworks for narrative inquiry bear the impress of the corpora for which they are designed to account.20 As the main title of the present volume indicates, however, this book’s main purpose is not to extend or refine graphic narrative theory per se, but rather to develop the new analytic tools that are needed for detailed engagement with a specific genre of graphic narratives: namely, the genre in which nonhuman animals feature as focal participants, such that intersections or interrelations between the experiential worlds of humans and of other kinds of animals structure, more or less explicitly and overtly, the unfolding of events.21 Granted, the chapters included in the volume start from the shared premise that, like other graphic narratives, stories that use words and images to present more-than-human environments and cross-species interactions can be situated in a larger class of multimodal narratives, or stories that exploit more than one semiotic channel to evoke a narrative world (Herman, Storytelling 107–112). But this premise is just that: an orienting assumption that leaves unsettled important questions about the issues that should be prioritized when it comes to studying animal comics in particular—and also about the best strategies to use when it comes to getting a handle on those issues. From the “funny animal” tradition that gave rise to such characters as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and others, and that was preceded by George Herriman’s influential, long-running strip Krazy Kat (see Rifas, and also Chapter 1 in this volume); to the use of animals for allegorical purposes in Spiegelman’s Maus; to texts, such as David Beauchard’s Epileptic and Jonathan Ames’s The Alcoholic, that use animal imagery to project onto animal others aspects of human selves that prove difficult to understand or accept (see Chaney, “Animal Subjects”); to texts that engage in an exploratory modeling of animals’ (hypothesized) perspectives and experiences, including nonhuman viewpoints on human institutions and practices, such as Sue Coe’s Pit’s Letter, Pierce Hargan’s “Butanding,” and a number of the case studies discussed in this volume by the contributors. Taken together, the chapters included in the present volume explore, with the help of the traditions of research outlined in the previous subsection, what accounts for the long-standing popularity, and self-renewing generativity, of graphic narratives that feature animals in these and other ways. Indeed, more-than-human storyworlds projected in words and images raise a number of issues that are centrally important both for scholarship on narrative across media and for human-animal studies—and hence for attempts to bring these areas of inquiry into dialogue with one another. In a given graphic narrative (or a segment of one), how are human and nonhuman actions parceled out between the image track and the verbal track, respectively, and how does this management of information bear on the process of building a multispecies storyworld? To put the same question another way, when it comes to comics and graphic novels concerned with animals, how exactly do readers use verbal-visual affordances as scaffolding for the construction of narrative worlds that extend beyond the human, and how do the worldmaking practices enabled by such graphic narratives relate to the practices associated with animal narratives presented in other media—and, for

12

12

David Herman

that matter, with graphic narratives that do not focus on animal agents? Assuming that earlier accounts of narrative structures and techniques (perspective taking, characterization, dialogue, consciousness representation, and so forth) will need to be adjusted to accommodate graphic storytelling, with the interplay between semiotic channels that it allows, what are the implications of such adjustments for the study of animal comics in particular? For that matter, do graphic narratives about animal agents afford different storytelling possibilities than other kinds of multimodal narratives that exploit alternative semiotic channels, such as the utterances and gestures used in face-to-face narration, or the moving images and the soundtrack used in cinematic narratives? Exploring these and other questions arising from the medium-specific qualities of graphic engagements with more-than-human worlds, the chapters in this book collectively suggest how addressing such questions can both inform and be informed by broader developments in the domain of human-animal studies, of the sort reviewed in my previous subsection. There I quoted Kirksey and Helmreich’s account of multispecies ethnography as a field concerned with “contact zones where lines separating nature from culture have broken down, where encounters between Homo sapiens and other beings generate mutual ecologies and coproduced niches” (566). Animal comics have functioned, in effect, as a narrative technology for modeling such niches, and for (re)imagining the dynamics of self-other relationships that cross the species boundary. Collectively the contributors to the present volume demonstrate how a range of analytic strategies will be required for a thoroughgoing investigation of the history, uses, and limits of this graphic modeling technology, which needs to be situated within the broader cultural formations and narrative traditions in which animals and human-animal relationships play a shaping role. To provide a preliminary sense of the scope and variety of the investigative methods that the contributors develop for this purpose, I turn now to an outline of the contents of this book.

Outline of the chapters The two chapters included in Part I, “Animal Agency in the History and Theory of Comics,” provide both historical and conceptual foundations for the volume as a whole. Daniel F. Yezbick develops an animal-studies framed approach to the history of multispecies comics, while Glenn Willmott explores, in complementary fashion, how the theory of the illustrated animal can be informed by—in addition to informing—considerations of comics history. In “Lions and Tigers and Fears: A Natural History of the Sequential Animal,” Yezbick outlines a genealogy of the sequential animal, from its origins in the medieval period through its contemporary incarnations. More specifically, he maps the habitats and tracks the behaviors of the graphic animal agent by tracing three intertwining relationships as they unfold in the history of creature comics. The first describes the pairing of human/animal characters as companions, coworkers,

13

Introduction

13

pets, and play-pals in interspecies relationships that focus on collaboration, teamwork, and mutually shared experience. The second involves nearly unspoiled anthropomorphic hybrid worlds where animal coats and cloaks are pulled across otherwise human forms, behaviors, and concerns, resulting in a theriomorphic charade that both amplifies and alleviates the trauma of our species' epistemological separation from true animal natures. The third centers on the critical and cautionary “fearful symmetries” built into zoomorphic parables where oppositional, mutated, or altered animals voice warnings or threats to our supposed anthroparchial dominance. By tracing the historical and conceptual interplay of these three narrative traditions, Yezbick works to create a springboard for the further examination of how comics mediate potent statements of “translated” animal experience. Although this history of the sequential animal is necessarily indicative rather than exhaustive, it underscores the pressing need for additional studies that explore how a focus on comics history can illuminate changing cultural understandings of animals—and vice versa. With Yezbick having demonstrated how ideas from human-animal studies afford an investigative lens for the history of comics, Willmott’s chapter on “The Animalized Character and Style” explores how, reciprocally, ongoing efforts to theorize multispecies comics can be bolstered via considerations of comics history. After discussing how funny animal figures may be read as character icons and placed in an art history tradition fundamental to comics, Willmott moves on to look at them as story characters from narratological perspectives, synthesizing concepts from contemporary narrative scholarship with Aristotelian ideas about mimesis, character, and audience response. In this way, Willmott probes the common semiotic genealogy of the funny animal, and the common field of questions opened up by graphic animal agents, without obscuring the creative differences, the individual preoccupations and meanings, which distinguish them. He argues that, rather than being an exceptional type of character, the creature of comics is the most direct expression of what lies at the heart of comics characters generally. The funny animal assimilates to readers’ fantasies of person and self a grotesquerie inseparable from signs of otherness; thus in creaturely comics, the human norm itself becomes estranged, or othered. Building on the historical and theoretical groundwork laid in Part I, Part II, titled “Species of Difference: Functions of Animal Alterity in Graphic Narratives,” includes four chapters: Alex Link’s “The Politics and Poetics of Alterity in Adam Hines’s Duncan the Wonder Dog,” Michael A. Chaney’s “The Saga of the Animal as Visual Metaphor for Mixed-Race Identity in Comics,” Carrie Rohman’s “Curly Tails and Flying Dogs:  Structures of Affect in Nick Abadzis’s Laika” and Mary A.  Knighton’s “Invasive Species:  Manga’s Insect-Human Worlds.” With Link’s chapter using Adam Hines's text to explore how portrayals of human-animal relationships in comics bear on the rhetoric of difference at work in political debates generally (and vice versa), Chaney, Rohman, and Knighton then examine specific case studies in zoopolitical rhetoric, to borrow Link’s term. Situated at the intersection of animal studies, comparative media studies, scholarship on popular culture, postcolonial studies, and race theory, Link’s chapter

14

14

David Herman

uses Hines’s innovative and challenging 2010 graphic novel Duncan the Wonder Dog to suggest how in animal comics ideas of species difference can refract, or be refracted through, concepts of cultural difference. Indeed, Duncan refigures animal alterity as a fundamentally (zoo)political question that both shapes and is shaped by more broadly understood political discourses of difference. The narrative explores how extending human language to animals only throws the barriers between human-animal understanding, now cast as cross-cultural understanding, into starker relief, particularly by interrogating the fiction of “the animal” as a catch-all term for diverse species. At the same time, the text identifies animal labor and commodification as a key tension in human-animal relations; at the heart of this tension is the way animals, in being objectified, are thereby rendered (as Donna Haraway puts it) “killable” (When 78). Duncan’s narrative addresses the killability of the animal by considering the possibility of animal individualism and alterity, on the one hand, and the interconnections between humans and animals, on the other; by mapping conflicts between animals onto human power relations, and vice versa; and by exploring how human-animal relations reproduce themselves on scales ranging from the individual to the global with different ends and effects. Meanwhile, centering on the commercially successful sci-fi comic book series Saga, by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan, Chaney’s chapter continues the exploration of animality and race initiated in Link’s chapter, and taken up again by Baraw and Smyth in Chapter 10. Animals are used throughout the series not only as a means of expressing cultural views about interactions among humans and non- or near-humans within the hypothetical ethics of the sci-fi universe, but also as thinly veiled stand-ins for real-world mixed-race relations. Thus, in reiterating an interstellar Romeo and Juliet story, Saga pictures a fantasy world with a speciesblending, miscegenative couple at its center; the series thereby stages an extended investigation of the larger historical and political forces that shape what people do with their bodies and what bodies come to mean. Yet Chaney goes beyond cataloguing parallels and similarities between the symbolic register of the animal and that of mixed-race identities in the series. By considering medium-specific affordances of graphic narratives, his chapter asks not only what the convergence of these symbols might mean, but also what it is that comics adds to them that would be lost, unintelligible, or impermissible in prose or film. Rohman’s chapter then shifts the focus from zoopolitical rhetoric surrounding issues of race to the zoopolitics of gender. The chapter centers on two cardinal images—that of the coil, and that of the flying dog—in Nick Abadzis’s 2007 graphic novel Laika, which tells the story of the dog that Soviet scientists launched into space on the one-way trip of the satellite Sputnik II in 1957. Laika’s curly tail functions as her signature, her mark of individuality in the text, while the coil, more generally, signals a specifically maternal or umbilical relation that she enjoys with a number of human and nonhuman females in the text. In turn, coils in this text operate as foils to rigid, linear (or projectile-like) acts of thinking and space exploration in the novel. Abadzis’s text thus offers what might be described as polarized image-tropes, visual patterns addressing shared cognition and empathy

15

Introduction

15

with animals in a particular gendered taxonomy. In her analysis, Rohman links the visual circularity used in the text with an “ethics of care” that is opposed to an “ethics of justice,” traditionally construed. Hence the narrative's spatial codes highlight how modes of empathetic engagement that cross species lines are themselves entangled with the cultural codes tied to gender. In the final chapter of Part II, Mary A. Knighton, in tracing the genealogy of the nonhuman in Japanese manga and exploring the relation of “story manga” to Western traditions of visual-verbal storytelling, continues and extends Link’s, Chaney’s, and Rohman’s investigations into the role of animal alterity in graphic narratives. In effect, Knighton situates the alterity of insects in the broader context of speciesism, or “the prejudicial discrimination against other beings based on their membership in (allegedly) inferior nonhuman species” (Warren: section 2.3; see also Gaard and Ryder). Speciesism, in this sense, undergirds zoopolitical discourses in which dichotomous understandings of human-animal relationships provide a means for expressing—or alternatively are expressed in terms of—differences centering on race, gender, class, and other identity categories. Highlighting graphic narratives’ potential for subverting speciesist discourse on animal otherness, Knighton’s chapter focuses on the way nonhuman animals, and in particular insects, have been interwoven with the aesthetics, thematics, and characterology of manga from Tezuka Osamu’s oeuvre onward—as exemplified by the insect-human worlds featured in Knighton’s primary’s case study, the manga series Terra Formars (2011–ongoing), a domestic and international sensation written by Sasuga Yū and illustrated by Tachibana Ken’ichi. All the episodes of this series revolve around questions of “invasive species,” questions that entail not only modes of species adaptation and forms of environmental colonization that disrupt other ecosystems but also the techno-biological internal invasion and colonization of bodies, insect and human, that impinge on sacred notions of what the “human” is, and ever was. Initially, a fantastic gory war between hybrid insect animals takes place on Mars after cockroaches, introduced on the planet to make it habitable for humans, evolve into giant insects, some of them descended from fighters from Earth who were surgically transformed into human-insect blends purpose-built for doing combat with the Martian roaches. Later in the series, the war moves to Earth in a reverse colonization effort led by the humanoid cockroaches from Mars. By thus blurring once-clear distinctions and categories such as human and animal, or citizen and pest, in a profoundly non- or rather anti-speciesist fashion, the text suggests how the radical alterity of insects paradoxically allows us to see ourselves for who and what we are—namely, the most invasive species in the era of the Anthropocene. Part III of the volume, “Critical Frameworks for Multispecies Comics,” continues and extends Part II’s exploration of how species differences make a difference in stories told via words and images. Here, however, the focus is not so much on the narrative functions of animal alterity as it is on developing a range of analytic tools that can be brought to bear on graphic engagements with (humans ways of orienting to) animal others. To this end, Laura A. Pearson draws on ideas from animal ethics and the environmental humanities to investigate a case study

16

16

David Herman

centering on forms of marine life; Jan Baetens integrates work in narrative studies, aesthetic theory, and other fields to explore the role of “micronarratives” in graphic storytelling concerned with interspecies relationships; and I myself leverage concepts and methods from anthropology, narratology, and the philosophy of mind to examine how nonfiction comics model animals’ subjective experiences, and with what overall effects. In “Resituating the Animal Comic:  Environmentalist Aesthetics in Matt Dembicki’s Xoc:  The Journey of a Great White,” Pearson investigates how this text creates a rich representational matrix of oceanic worlds that focuses on the unfolding drama of multispecies marine life. Using neorealist pictorials and a part fictional, part nonfictional blend of the animal epic-cum-beast fable, XOC disrupts stereotypes about sharks while engaging with environmentalist discourses and debates. At the same time, although XOC revolves around a series of tensions that initially rely on mainstream tropes such as the talking animal and the journey narrative, the text overturns default assumptions about the “animal comic” as reductive or simplistic in its treatment of nonhuman lives and human-animal interactions. Instead, Dembicki uses anthropomorphic as well as zoomorphic techniques to address the exploitative divisions underlying the environmentalist issues—real as well as metaphorical violence towards sharks, oceanic pollution, industrial shark finning—raised by the text. In the process, the XOC gives rise to a generative “planetary empathy,” or modes of fellow-feeling that cross the species boundary. For its part, Baetens’s chapter has links to the contributions in Part II as well as those in Part III. In his account of “Interspecies Relationships in Graphic Micronarratives:  From Olivier Deprez to Avril-Deprez,” Baetens focuses on the collaborative work of two woodcut artists, Adolpho Avril and Olivier Deprez, who are associated with the “S” workshop in Vielsalm, Belgium, a socio-economic laboratory whose basic principle is a systematic, equality-promoting collaboration among artists with and without disabilities. Like the texts of the authors whom Link, Chaney, Rohman, and Knighton examine in Part II, the collaborative works of Avril and Deprez draws on the resources of the medium to interrogate the cultural work performed by (speciesist) understandings of animal alterity—in this case by suggesting how traditional dichotomies such as disabled versus nondisabled and human versus animal have been mapped onto one another (see also Herman, “Trans-species Entanglements”). But beyond contextualizing in this way the authors’ engagement with ideas of animal (and human) alterity, Baetens outlines a framework for analyzing modes of narrative experimentation in multispecies comics. Integrating ideas from narrative theory, aesthetics, and historically as well as stylistically oriented research on artistic avant-gardes, Baetens highlights how Avril and Deprez explore different ways of telling suited to a rethinking of cross-species relationships and what they mean for understandings of humans as well as other animals. In particular, the chapter focuses on Avril and Deprez’s joint development of a micronarrative style, in which one or more parts of the basic architecture for storytelling—whether it is a beginning, a middle, or an end, or a meaningful and internally motivated transformation leading from beginning to

17

Introduction

17

end—is absent. Baetens examines how such micronarrative composition bears on the topic of interspecies relationships by comparing the narrative style used in Deprez’s 2003 single-authored adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Castle with the style used in Avril and Deprez’s 2014 collaboration Après la mort, après la vie (“After Death, after Life”). My own chapter on “Animal Minds in Nonfiction Comics” discusses how graphic narratives engage with forms of subjective experience across the species boundary, focusing in particular on attributions of mental states—or in some cases the lack of such attributions—to animal agents in nonfiction comics. I  argue that, rather than assuming a priori that only fictional narratives afford access to nonhuman minds, it is imperative to develop, inductively, techniques for documenting and analyzing the attested range of mind-ascribing practices in nonfictional as well as fictional narratives about both human and animal agents—across a variety of storytelling media. My analysis draws on a range of case studies, from graphic memoirs documenting the lives of animals conscripted into early space-exploration programs, to comics conveying observations of and informal theorizing about companion animals’ behavior, to narratives that combine words and images to engage with the lives of farm animals. Examining how these and other kinds of nonfiction comics profile the motivations, desires, intentions, and emotions of nonhuman characters, the chapter suggests how the creators of graphic narratives use the visual-verbal resources of the medium to engage in more or less detailed and far-ranging attributions of subjective experiences to animal agents in discourse that is presented as nonfictional, or subject to falsification. Finally, the contributions included in Part IV, “Graphic Animality in the Classroom and Beyond,” open up new pathways for critical, creative, and pedagogical engagement with animal stories that use both words and images. In “Can We Be Part of the Pride? Reading Animals through Comics in the Undergraduate Classroom,” Charles E. Baraw and Andrew Smyth model strategies for incorporating multispecies comics into two undergraduate courses at a four-year regional comprehensive university in the United States where students frequently face literacy challenges and motivational issues. Using questionnaire responses, online forum posts, and assigned essays to document participants’ reactions to several graphic narratives that evoke (and invite) increasingly more challenging engagements with human-animal relationships, the authors note how this progression raises key questions about teaching animal comics: How do we teach students to read in a way that raises their consciousness of other-than-human forms of subjectivity? Can we prepare students for a trans-species encounter through graphic texts? What are the challenges and opportunities these texts bring to the classroom? The authors ask their students to reconsider the meaning of the “Young Adult Literature” category in texts that blur species identities, to interrogate the American Experience from the mosaic of narrative perspectives afforded by multiple animal agents, and to rethink humans’ impulses to speak for, rather than listen to, animals and what they may need and desire. At the same time, they use animal comics as a resource for teaching visual-verbal modes of literacy in ways

18

18

David Herman

that may have an impact on understandings of human-animal relationships in the broader culture. The concluding chapter, “This is Home,” is a collaborative contribution by Bridget Brewer, a writer and visual artist, and Thalia Field, author of several experimental, genre-blending works about animal worlds and human-animal relationships. In dialogue with a visual-verbal narrative composed by Brewer, Field’s hybrid, critical-creative discussion reflects on the scope and limits of animal stories in graphic contexts, exploring ways in which animals become trapped in human visual designs—framed in innocent or nefarious fables, but framed and costumed nonetheless. Brewer and Field thus interweave images and text to articulate—to ask but also enact—key questions about animal narratives that recruit from more than one semiotic channel. How do graphic representations relate to modes of animal presence? How do humans’ frameworks for inquiry prescribe, or proscribe, ways of orienting to other kinds of creatural life? In engaging with issues of this sort, Brewer and Fielding's chapter opens expansive new horizons for the study of multispecies storyworlds in graphic narratives.

Notes 1 As noted by Baraw and Smyth as well as Yezbick in their contributions to the present volume, Lippit coined the term animetaphor for uses of language that gesture toward aspects of nonhuman experience that evade or escape linguistic expression. On animality and becoming-animal, see Lundblad, and Deleuze and Guattari, respectively. Finally, on the tradition of funny animals, see Rifas and also Yezbick’s contribution to this volume. 2 But see Paul Wells’s monograph The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons, and Culture for an extended account of the role of animals in animated films, including “cartoons, 3D stop-motion puppet and clay animation, computer-generated movies, and, more independent, fine art-based works” (2). (For examples in the present volume, see Mary A. Knighton’s analysis of the insects featured in Japanese anime as well as the discussion in Chapter 9 of human-animal relationships in the 2015 animated film Triolet for Laika, directed by Emory Allen.) Noting how “animal personae . . . have been used to sidestep the overt engagement with political, religious, and social taboos more usually explicit in any human-centered, realist mode of storytelling” (7), Wells identifies a “bestial ambivalence” in (some) animated animals, arguing that this ambivalence interrogates the animal/human and the nature/culture divides, along with related dichotomies (27–8). 3 For overviews of recent work on human-animal relationships across a number of disciplines, see, in addition to the next section of this introduction, the “ruminations” essays included on the H-Animal forum maintained by H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences online (https://networks.h-net.org/node/16560/pages/32222/ ruminations), Marvin and McHugh’s Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies, and Herman’s “Animal Worlds.” 4 In referring to humans’ and other animals’ experiential worlds, I am drawing on the Umwelt concept first proposed by the philosopher-biologist Jakob von Uexküll in the first decades of the twentieth century, and discussed in more detail in Chapter 9. For

19

Introduction

5 6

7

8

9

10 11

19

his part, Evan Thompson defines the term Umwelt as “the world as it presents itself to an animal given its specific organismic structure and corresponding sensorimotor capabilities” (59). For a wide-ranging discussion of the history, motivations, and stakes of philosophical treatments of the human-animal distinction itself, see Matthew Calarco’s Zoographies. Stein and Thon identify a number of formal differences between comics and graphic narratives, suggesting that “the following formal properties will be expected in works categorized as comics, but not in works that fall into the broader category of graphic narratives: sequential storytelling, gutters separating framed panels, direct speech represented in balloons, with additional conventions such as motion lines, thought bubbles, and much more” (5). The authors also adduce that the very term “ ‘comics’ is culturally specific, since its discursive origins are Anglo-American,” whereas “graphic narrative” is more inclusive, capable of accommodating different formats, genres, and storytelling traditions throughout the world (5). Baetens and Frey discuss two other interpretive levels: those of publication format, and production and distribution aspects (13–19). Regarding format, graphic novels, avoiding the serialization associated with comics, are typically “one-shot” creations that commonly assume the shape of the traditional novel. Regarding production and distribution aspects, thanks to the influence of the underground comix tradition, as well as the practices established by major publishers such as Pantheon, Penguin, and Faber & Faber, and then continued by independent presses like Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly, graphic novelists enjoy a degree of creative freedom unknown to many earlier comics artists. See also Chapter 6 for remarks about how Japanese traditions of story manga relate to the primarily Western categories discussed by Stein and Thon, as well as Baetens and Frey. In this context, I use the term referential in a broader sense than does Dorrit Cohn, for example. Discussing issues also explored by theorists such as Philippe Lejeune, Lubomír Doležel, and Marie-Laure Ryan, Cohn argues that fictional narratives are nonreferential because, in contrast with historiography, journalistic reports, biographies, autobiographies, and other narrative modes falling within the domain of nonfiction, fictional works are not subject to judgments of truth and falsity (15). By contrast, I link worldmaking to “the referential dimension of narrative” in a broader sense; my aim is to preserve the intuition that fictional as well as nonfictional narratives consist of sequences of referring expressions (see also Schiffrin, In Other Words), whose nature and scope will vary depending on the storytelling medium and genre involved. Narratives prompt interpreters to engage with a discourse model or model-world—that is, a storyworld—encompassing the situations, events, and entities indexed by world-evoking expressions or cues (for further discussion, see Herman, Story Logic 9–22, and Basic Elements 106–135). In this sense, narratives refer to model-worlds, whether they are the imagined, autonomous model-worlds of fiction or the model-worlds about which nonfictional accounts make testable assertions. For further arguments along these lines, see my contributions to Herman et al., Narrative Theory. Hence, as discussed in Herman’s Story Logic (9–22) the notion storyworld is consonant with a range of other concepts proposed by cognitive psychologists, discourse analysts, psycholinguists, philosophers of language, and others concerned with how people go about making sense of texts or discourses. Like storyworld, these

20

20

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

David Herman other notions—including deictic center, mental model, situation model, discourse model, contextual frame, and possible world—are designed to explain how interpreters rely on inferences triggered by textual cues to build up representations of the overall situation or world evoked but not fully explicitly described in the discourse. As argued in previous studies (Herman, “Approaches” and Storytelling), stories do not merely evoke a world, and thereby constitute a target of interpretation; what is more, they also afford resources for sense making in their own right, by intervening in a field of discourses, a range of representational strategies, a constellation of ways of seeing—and sometimes a set of competing narratives, as in a courtroom trial, a political campaign, or a family dispute (see also Abbott, 175–92). For a more detailed examination of the issues discussed in this paragraph, see Herman’s “Animal Autobiography,” which draws on Deborah Schiffrin’s distinction between “butting in” and “chipping in” to distinguish among more and less human-centric uses of animal narrators (see Schiffrin, “ ‘Speaking for Another’ in Sociolinguistic Interviews”). For a graphic memoir about Laika that does seek to take into account the dog’s final experiences before her death aboard Sputnik II, see Nick Abadzis’s Laika, discussed in Chapter 9 as well as Herman, “Storyworld/Umwelt.” See also Rohman’s detailed analysis of Abadzis’s text in Chapter 5. In distinguishing between the register of action and the register of events, I draw on formulations used by Paul Ricoeur (132–3), which complement those developed by Charles Taylor (54–62). For a fuller elaboration of these ideas, see Herman, “Hermeneutics” (11–22), as well as Chapter 9. For more on the project of postclassical narratology, see Herman, Narratologies, and Alber and Fludernik. For further details about research on narrative worldmaking vis-à-vis a postclassical focus on the interfaces between stories and the mind, see Herman’s “Approaches” and Storytelling. Along these same lines, see Erin James for work demonstrating how research on storyworlds can both enhance and be enhanced by work in the areas of ecocriticism and postcolonial studies. For an updating and recontextualization of ecofeminist ideas, see Gaard and Grusin. On animal geography, see, in addition to Urbanik, Lorimer and Srinivasan, Philo and Wilbert, and Wolch and Emel. On disability and animality, see Herman, “Transspecies Entanglements.” On animals and science fiction, see Vint. On self-narratives, see Gergen and Gergen, Herman, “Narratology,” and, to anticipate my next section’s focus on worldmaking via graphic narration in particular, Hilary Chute’s Graphic Women and “Comics.” On companion species, see Serpell; Haraway, Companion and When; McHugh, 65–112; and Tsing. On concepts of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism, see Crist, Fisher, and Plumwood (56–61). For examples of the (somewhat disparate) strands of research mentioned here as contributing to a questioning of the centrality or exceptionality of the human, see Avital and Jablonka, Braidotti, Calarco, Odling-Smee et al., Plumwood (168–95), and Wolfe. On issues of extinction see Heise, van Doren, and Field, Bird Lovers, Backyard (31–41). On race, ethnicity, and species, see Ahuja, Walther, and Chaney’s “Animal Witness”—along with Chapter 4 in the present volume. In this connection, as discussed in Herman’s “Transmedial,” it is a major historical irony that one of the foundational documents for structuralist narratology was Vladimir Propp’s investigation of folktales rooted in oral traditions. The early narratologists neglected to consider the limits of applicability of Propp’s ideas,

21

Introduction

21

trying to extend to all narratives, including complicated literary texts, analytic tools designed for a restricted corpus of Russian folktales. 20 The definitional issues surrounding the category of graphic narratives vis-à-vis the cognate categories of comics and graphic novels are especially pertinent for narratological considerations of this kind. 21 Here it is important to underscore that the generic label “animal comics,” as it is used over the course of this volume, is not limited to comics featuring an exclusively nonhuman cast of characters.

Works cited Abbott, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum, 1990. Adams, Carol J., and Josephine Donovan, eds. Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. Agamben, Giorgio. The Open. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004. Ahuja, Neel. “Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World.” Publications of the Modern Language Association 124.2 (2009): 556–63. Alber, Jan, and Monika Fludernik, eds. Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2010. Almiron, Núria, Matthew Cole, and Carrie P. Freeman, eds. Critical Animal and Media Studies. London: Routledge, 2016. Avital, Eytan, and Eva Jablonka. Animal Traditions: Behavioural Inheritance in Evolution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000. Baetens, Jan, and Hugo Frey. The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. London: Polity, 2013. Brown, Lisa, ed. “The Illustrated Animal.” Special issue of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 16 (2011): 1–99. Calarco, Matthew. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidigger to Derrida. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. Chaney, Michael A. “Animal Subjects of the Graphic Novel.” College Literature 38.3 (2011): 129–49. Chaney, Michael A. “The Animal Witness of the Rawandan Genocide.” Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. Ed. Michael A. Chaney. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2011. 93–100. Chute, Hilary. “Comics Form and Narrating Lives.” Profession (2011): 107–17. Chute, Hilary. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. Chute, Hilary, and Marianne DeKoven. “Introduction: Graphic Narrative.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 767–82. Coe, Sue. Pit’s Letter. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000. Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. Crist, Eileen. Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999.

22

22

David Herman

De Angelis, Richard. “Of Mice and Vermin: Animals as Absent Referent in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.” International Journal of Comic Art 7.1 (2005): 230–49. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Doležel, Lubomír. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. Field, Thalia. Bird Lovers, Backyard. New York: New Directions, 2010. Fisher, John Andrew. “The Myth of Anthropomorphism.” Readings in Animal Cognition. Ed. Marc Bekoff and Dale Jamieson. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1996. 3–16. Gaard, Greta. “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism.” Feminist Formations 23.2 (2011): 26–53. Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012. Gardner, Jared, and David Herman. “Graphic Narratives and Narrative Theory: Introduction.” SubStance 40.1 (2011): 3–13. Gerrig, Richard J. Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978. Grusin, Richard, ed. Anthropocene Feminism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2017. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2003. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. Hargan, Pierce. “Butanding.” Wild Ocean: Sharks, Whales, Rays, and Other Endangered Sea Creatures. Ed. Matt Dembicki. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2014. 30–39. Harvey, Colin B. Fantastic Transmedia: Narrative, Play and Memory Across Science Fiction and Fantasy Storyworlds. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Harvey, Colin B. “A Taxonomy of Transmedia Storytelling.” Ryan and Thon, Storyworlds across Media. 278–94. Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2005. Heise, Ursula. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2016. Herman, David. “Animal Autobiography; or, Narration beyond the Human.” Humanities 5.4 (2016). http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/4/82 Herman, David. “Animal Worlds in Modern Fiction: An Introduction.” Modern Fiction Studies 60.3 (2014): 421–43. Herman, David. “Approaches to Narrative Worldmaking.” Doing Narrative Research. 2nd edition. Ed. Molly Clark, Corinne Squire, and Maria Tamboukou. London: Sage, 2013. 176–95. Herman, David. Basic Elements of Narrative. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Herman, David. “Hermeneutics beyond the Species Boundary: Explanation and Understanding in Animal Narratives.” Storyworlds 8.1 (2016): 1–30. Herman, David, ed. Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1999. Herman, David. “Narratology beyond the Human.” DIEGESIS: Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Narrative Research 3.2 (2014): 131–43. Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2002.

23

Introduction

23

Herman, David. Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2013. Herman, David. “Storyworld/Umwelt: Nonhuman Experiences in Graphic Narratives.” SubStance 40.1 (2011): 156–81. Herman, David. “Toward a Transmedial Narratology.” Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004, 47–75. Herman, David. “Toward a Zoonarratology: Storytelling and Species Difference in Animal Comics.” Narrative, Interrupted: The Plotless, the Disturbing, and the Trivial in Literature. Ed. Markku Lehtimäki, Laura Karttunen, and Maria Mäkelä. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012. 93–119. Herman, David. “Trans-species Entanglements: Animal Assistants in Narratives about Autism.” Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities. Ed. Anne Whitehead, Angela Woods, Sarah Atkinson, Jane Macnaughton, and Jennifer Richards. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2016. 463–80. Herman, David, James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol. Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2012. Ingold, Tim. “An Anthropologist Looks at Biology.” Man (New Series) 25.2 (1990): 208–29. James, Erin. The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2015. Kirksey, Eben, ed. The Multispecies Salon. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2014. Kirksey, S. Eben, and Stefan Helmreich. “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 25.4 (2010): 545–76. Kladstrup, Liesbeth, and Susana Tosca. “Game of Thrones: Transmedial Worlds, Fandom, and Social Gaming.” Ryan and Thon, Storyworlds across Media. 295–314. Kohn, Eduardo. “How Dogs Dream: Amazonian Natures and the Politics of Transspecies Engagement.” American Ethnologist 34.1 (2007): 3–24. Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Berkeley : U of California P, 2013. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993. Le Guin, Ursula K. “Introduction.” Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences. 1987. New York: Roc, 1994. 9–13. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. Lorimer, Jamie, and Krithika Srinivasan. “Animal Geographies.” The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography. Ed. Nuala C. Johnson, Richard H. Schein, and Jamie Winders. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. 332–42. Lundblad, Michael. The Birth of a Jungle: Animality in Progressive-Era U.S. Literature and Culture. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2013. Marvin, Garry, and Susan McHugh, eds. Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies. London: Routledge, 2014. McCance, Dawn. Critical Animal Studies: An Introduction. Albany : State U of New York P, 2013. McHugh, Susan, and Robert McKay, eds. “Literary Animals Look.” Special issue of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 24 (2013): 1–136.

24

24

David Herman

Molloy, Claire. Popular Media and Animals. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Odling-Smee, F. John, Kevin N. Laland, and Marcus W. Feldman. Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. Philo, Chris, and Chris Wilbert. “Introduction.” Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relation. Ed. Philo and Wilbert. London: Routledge, 2000. 1–34. Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge, 2002. Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. 1928. 2nd edition. Trans. Laurence Scott; revised trans. Louis A. Wagner. Austin: U of Texas P, 1968. Ricoeur, Paul. “Explanation and Understanding.” From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1991. 125–43. Rifas, Leonard. “Funny Animal Comics.” Encyclopedia of Comics and Graphic Novels, Vol. 1: A–L. Ed. M. Keith Booker. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2010. 234–42. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. Ryan, Marie-Laure, and Jan-Noël Thon, eds. Storyworlds across Media: Toward a MediaConscious Narratology. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2014. Ryder, Richard D. Animal Revolution: Changing Attitudes towards Speciesism. London: Bloomsbury, 2000. Schiffrin, Deborah. In Other Words: Variation and Reference in Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Schiffrin, Deborah. “ ‘Speaking for Another’ in Sociolinguistic Interviews: Alignments, Identities, Frames.” Framing in Discourse. Ed. Deborah Tannen. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Serpell, James. In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Stein, Daniel, and Jan-Noël Thon. “Introduction.” From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative. Ed. Stein and Thon. 2nd edition. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015. 1–23. Taylor, Charles. The Explanation of Behaviour. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964. Thompson, Evan. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015. Urbanik, Julie. Placing Animals: An Introduction to the Geography of Human-Animal Relations. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012. Van den Hengel, Louis. “Zoegraphy: Per/forming Posthuman Lives.” Biography 35.1 (2012): 1–20. Van Dooren, Thom. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. New York: Columbia UP, 2014. Vint, Sherryl. Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2013. Walther, Sundhya. “Fables of the Tiger Economy: Species and Subalternity in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Modern Fiction Studies 60.3 (2014): 579–98. Warren, Karen J. “Feminist Environmental Philosophy.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2015). Ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/ entries/feminism-environmental/

25

Introduction Wells, Paul. The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons, and Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2009. Willmott, Glenn. Modern Animalism: Habitats of Scarcity and Abundance in Comics and Literature. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. Wolch, Jennifer, and Jody Emel. Animal Geographies: Place, Politics and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands. London: Verso, 1998. Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.

25

26

27

Part I A NIMAL A GENCY IN THE H ISTORY AND T HEORY OF C OMICS

28

29

Chapter 1 L IO N S   A N D T IG E R S   A N D F E A R S :   A N AT U R A L H I S T O RY   O F   T H E S E Q U E N T IA L A N I M A L Daniel F. Yezbick

The sequential animal is infinite and immortal Like many actual animals, the origins of sequentially rendered creatures are lost in a multidimensional haze of intertwining trends, fragmentary traces, and familiar traditions. Exploring these creaturely genealogies, however, is a project of central relevance to the burgeoning fields of Animal Studies and Comics Studies. Jared Gardner’s opening remarks at the “2016 Comics at the Crossroads Symposium” at The Ohio State University included the challenge, “Where on Earth are the scholarly histories of animal comics?” (Gardner). The present chapter takes up that challenge, investigating how comics creators have explored, in their many styles and storytelling strategies, implications of Jean Baudrillard's claim that “everything has happened to them [the animals] that has happened to us” (128). More specifically, the chapter begins to map the habitats and track the behaviors of creature comics by tracing three intersecting relationships.1 These three recurrent themes influence the bulk of animal comics. The first describes the pairing of human/animal characters as companions, coworkers, pets, and play-pals in interspecies relationships that focus on collaboration, teamwork, and mutually shared experience. These pairs can appear as pet-centric as Orphan Annie’s Sandy or Tintin’s Snowy; as ornery as Barney Google’s Sparkplug and Si Slocum’s Maude the Mule; as outlandish as Popeye’s Eugene the Jeep, Lil Abner’s Schmoos, and Calvin’s toy tiger, Hobbes; or as equally partnered as Angel and the Ape, Rueben Flagg and Raul, and Motor Girl and her gorilla. Next comes the conjuring of total or nearly unspoiled anthropomorphic hybrid worlds where animal coats and cloaks are pulled across otherwise human forms, behaviors, and concerns in what Steve Baker shrewdly describes as a theriomorphic charade that both amplifies and alleviates the trauma of our epistemological separation from true animal natures (Baker 108). From Captain Carrot and Marvel Bunny to Omaha and Blacksad, such texts are just as variable in how they completely subsume or inculcate human identity within personified animal fantasies, cultures, and communities. The urge to apply “external surface layers

30

30

Daniel F. Yezbick

of an animal carcass” over human anxieties and interests is deeply personal and inherently mythic, whether we consider a mainstream newspaper strip like Jim Toomey’s Sherman’s Lagoon, the animorphic correlatives of race and ethnicity in Gene Yeun Yang’s Monkey King pieces, or the alienating allegories of Michael DeForge’s Ant Colony (Swinney 225). Finally, there are the more adamantly critical and cautionary “fearful symmetries,” or harsh warnings, built into zoomorphic parables where oppositional, mutated, or altered animals provide what Derrida might classify as urgent, animaleseant warnings or threats to our supposed anthroparchial dominance (79). Glenn Willmott locates adamantly animal nodes of resistance to capitalist consumption in early works like Krazy Kat and Little Nemo, while more contemporary dystopic image-texts such as Cohen and Atkins’s Red Dog, Sattin and Koehler’s Legend, and Bennett and De Lelatorre’s Animosity explore how trans-species empathies resist, reverse, and indict human assumptions of superiority and control (Willmott 64). In what follows, I trace the historical and conceptual interplay of these three narrative traditions with a view toward creating a springboard for the further examination of how comics mediate potent statements of “translated” animal experience. Overall, my discussion suggests that animals in comics are not only “good to think with,” to adapt Claude Lévi-Strauss’s phrase, but also provide an exciting “invitation to a subversive pleasure” with a multitude of potential benefits and pitfalls (Baker 159). The history of the sequential animal that I sketch here is necessarily indicative rather than exhaustive, but it underscores the pressing need for additional studies that explore how a focus on comics history can illuminate changing cultural understandings of animals—and vice versa.

Early polygraphic beasts and where to find them The value of the animal has always been filtered or processed artistically through contrived human contexts, mediating narratives, or epistemological scaffolding. Within the foundational jointures, seams, and margins of such texts and contexts, we may begin to examine the first orchestrations of sequential animal presence in medieval manuscripts, instructional bestiaries, and allegorical emblem books. The role of the companion animal, working beast, and wild creature are, for the most part, all of a piece in early illustrations, pre-comics, and proto-sequential forms before 1800. “In the beginning,” most visualized animals orbited around what Cudworth codes as a “relational matrix” of anthroparchy (29). All animals—in life and in art—“were with man at the centre of his world. Such centrality was of course economic and productive, with humans depending “upon animals for food, work, transport, and clothing” (Berger 4). This hierarchal interdependency fostered a massive animal presence in the visual and rhetorical reflections of daily life in every possible form of rendered picture on paper, stone, iron, wood, glass, or cloth.

31

Lions and Tigers and Fears

31

Emerging out of these traditions, the first widespread evidence of illustrated creatures and printable beasts appears in the burgeoning serial print, broadside, and book market that developed with efficient printing techniques. Fabulously mythologized dragons, serpents, unicorns, and griffons were fairly ubiquitous in the almanacs, zodiacs, and alchemical charts of the period. These were accompanied by “garlands” of beast-centered ballads, anthologized chapbooks of animal myths, and “writing sheets” for both children and adults where familiar animal images were common. This interrelationship of animal imagery and children’s visual media probably began with such early bestiaries and primers; “printed on a single sheet protected by a thin sheet of transparent animal horn and mounted on tablet of wood with a handle,” these texts were called hornbooks or illustrated hornsheets (O’Connell 32). They were supplemented with collectible animal “lotteries,” cheaply produced “sheets of small images,” often with animal themes, that were then separated, saved, and “swapped . . . in the same way that later generations treated stamps and cigarette cards” (O’Connell 32–3). Children’s bestiaries also “used the qualities of an animal or plant to represent Christian allegories for moral and religious instruction” (Adams 22).2 In more commercial contexts, trade cards solicited domestic livestock and “exotic creatures ‘lately arrived’ ” from distant colonies (O’Connell 29). Such documents, deeply invested in the continuance of “the trade in exotic pets,” also assisted in the Western fascination with distant ecosystems and jungle scenarios—scenarios that were “like imperialism itself, . . . also inextricably bound up with slavery” (Tague 52). More scandalous animal imagery included “unnerving announcements of misshapen freaks of nature,” exaggerated nautical battles with gargantuan undersea creatures, and even one particularly shocking scenario, from the 1690s, documenting the “trew draught of the Whale as he was seen at Blackwall Dock” (O’Connell 102). The variety of such illustrations powerfully reveals how “animals and humans still shared the same world, and animals played a pivotal role in that world,” offering what artists and illustrators interpreted as forms of commentary on human habits (DeMello 308). Some of the earliest known sequential animal illustrations date as far back as the 1650s in pictorial amusements called Imagerie Populaire (Gifford, International 12). Other pre-1800 prints and trade papers sometimes featuring exaggerated animal bodies, as well as the occasionally personified animetaphor, to invoke Akira Mizuta Lippit’s term for uses of language that point to aspects of animal life that refuse linguistic codification. Among the most outlandish is the “gloriously misogynistic” iconography of “Fill Gut & Pinch Belly” in which two monstrous woman-devouring beasts, one obese and the other emaciated, are depicted as a “fat monster well fed on men who are bullied and cuckolded by their wives, but the other creature starves because she can eat only wives who are good” (O’Connell 48). The perennially popular “World Turned Upside Down” and “Cat’s Castle” scenarios provide even more damning visions. Rooted in medieval motifs of anarchy and apocalypse, both stories focused heavily on the maddening reversal of human and animal hierarchies, often to violent extremes. These reversals included rabbits

32

32

Daniel F. Yezbick

“roasting a man, the cart before the horse,” fish flying through the air while horses walk on water, and “hogs taking the man’s blood to make black pudding” (O’Connell 125). Enjoyed across Europe for their “ridiculous upturning of the natural order,” violently anthropomorphized scenarios of distress and disorder challenged conventional understandings of human/animal relationships. Cloaked in grotesque absurdity, such imagetic tales forced readers to brush perversely against a gnawing sense of animaleasance, reminding readers of the fragility of their own artificially sustained scaffolds of consciousness, communication, and control. Early modern graphic animals were also crucial to the heraldic iconography on crests, graves, and statuary, as well as the “unique but eclectic forms” of emblematica, or the emblem book (Raybould 250). Miscellanies of emblemata, or motto-driven collections of ethical and spiritual instruction, were built around sequences of outlandish allegories generally paired with a quotation, lesson, or poem. Animals were central to these iconotextual enigmas where lobsters, dogs, bears, and birds all play their parts in puzzling out the cryptographic secrets. Many such texts also operated according to closely prescribed sequences and established formats, whereby their more-than-human elements resonate even more fully with contemporary techniques for creating and interpreting sequential animals. These and other traditions would blend with rising trends in popular imagery and commercial narratives; these would have significant influence on the development of even more innovative and engaging sequential animals.

Learned pigs, transmuted tygers, and iconoclastic artists in eighteenthcentury print culture By the early Enlightenment era, animal-themed offerings of every sort filled shop windows, market stalls, and the pages of commercial compendia like “William and Cluer Dicey’s cheap print catalogue,” which offered both copperplate and woodcut engravings to consumers of all interests in 1754 (O’Connell 12).3 The Old World and the New were awash in new and intriguing animal images used for “advertisement, decoration, education, entertainment, information, religious or political propaganda, and titillation” (O’Connell 12). Prints, pictures, trade cards, ballads, and serialized periodicals “bound up with the spread of consumer society” appealed to all markets, in an environment marked by greater “knowledge about and interest in the natural world” (Tague 20). Indeed, the collectable print trade not only reflects a variety of animal-related issues and events, but also provides evidence of the shifting roles that pictorial or personified animals would play in serialized visual culture. For example, Sir Thomas Adams’s gift of a zebra to Queen Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in 1762 set off an animal fad throughout Europe that spawned zebra-centered paintings, prints, and caricatures, often used to parody Queen Sophia’s son, Prince George, as “the Queen’s Ass.” A number of bureaucrats also endured slanderous zebra-striped makeovers in prints and magazines (Plumb 20). Similar graphic fads and serial satires, involving animals such as apes and

33

Lions and Tigers and Fears

33

parrots trafficked via imperialist networks, took hold. The most infamous example, perhaps, consisted of the early visual representations of “the rhinoceros, or unicorn” which spawned a “veritable rhinomania of poems, coiffures á la rhinoceros, engravings, and fancy clocks with rhinoceros bases” (Enright 117). The sheer volume of rhino-lacra also exemplifies how quickly the popular fascination with animal ugliness, monstrosity, and otherness can devolve into dangerously inaccurate myths and misconceptions. Egregiously violent and erroneous descriptions of ferocious, carnivorous rhinos “killing for mere pleasure” circulated throughout print media, vilifying an otherwise placid herbivore placed egregriously out of context (Enright 112).4 Other animal fads “represented a direct challenge to normative categories, hierarchies, and definitions of ‘human’ and ‘animal,’ ” and their visual representations were even more resilient and outrageous (Mattfield 62). London’s infamous Learned Pig of 1785, for example, upended Drury Lane and Covent Garden with its “(super)human abilities in mathematics, literature, and mindreading” (Mattfield 58). Like Queen Sophia’s Ass, the pig “was frequently the talk of the town and quickly became a celebrity figure” whose visual caricature helped to introduce a new level of critical commentary on human-animal interactions within popular media (Mattfield 61). While fashionable animals influenced the era’s visual discourse, some artists were developing new forms of discursive animal narrative. Three particular innovators—Rodolphe Töpffer, William Blake, and William Hogarth— revolutionized animal tropes for the purposes of critiquing the flaws and failings of humanity, each altering and enhancing the sequential animal’s resonance. Each artist layers animal themes into what Thierry Smolderen identifies as an essentially sequential “polygraphic” narrative process (9). Blake’s organic melding of words, colors, and designs within his myth-soaked works of illuminated poetry anticipate the polychromatic address of later sequential spectacles like Vaughan and Henrichon’s Pride of Baghdad or Brremaud and Bertolucci’s Love series. Blake’s original plate designs for “The Tyger” from 1794’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, for instance, were purposely altered across successive editions to produce a multiplicity of potential readings of his luminous “Tyger of Wrath”—from ferocious carnivore to tame cat (Keynes 149). More generally, among the first iconotextual graphic narratives, Blake’s illuminated, sequenced poems expand the signifying potential of graphic and literary animetaphor. Töpffer, like Blake, was deeply engaged with Romantic traditions, but his inclinations led to outlandish experimentation with the satiric potential of caricaturedriven “graffiti,” episodic narratives, and interacting words and images. Töpffer’s sequential parody often turned on the use of hilariously exaggerated humananimal accidents; thus foreshortened animal creatures run rampant throughout his satires. In each case, their deftly “doodled” presence is suggested through strategically orchestrated cartoonish shorthand, which in turn comments smoothly on the human folly Töpffer loved to lampoon. Troublesome animals of all sorts figure in Töpffer’s many drolleries, including irritable watchdogs and feral cats in Monsieur Crepin (Töpffer 101), horses that explode from obesity in Monsieur Vieux Bois (176), and hordes of hunting hounds whose frenzy is sequentially extended to

34

34

Daniel F. Yezbick

outrageous extremes in the frantic hotel sequence from Historie de Monsieur Jabot (41). Töpffer’s sentimental farces not only foretell the slapstick antics of Opper’s Maud the Mule and Herriman’s Ignatz Mouse, they also reveal the changing state of animals in eighteenth-century narrative. For his part, English designer William Hogarth uses animal allegories throughout his serial progresses, compartmentalized “visual narratives composed of elaborate comic panels that sequentially related tales of social climbing and financial crisis” (Goggin 6). Animals are a familiar element in Hogarth’s satires, especially when their disparaging symmetries mock human follies. Marriage á la Mode, The Harlot’s Progress, and The Rake’s Progress each employ extensive animal symbols and counterpoints, including starving dogs, rambunctious kittens, and frightened monkeys; but Hogarth’s most unnerving statement on human-animal relations arrives in the first plate of the harrowing Stages of Cruelty series (1750), the last of his progresses. The “hero,” Nero the sadist, learns the terrible arts of torture by sodomizing stray dogs with arrows on the streets of St. Giles parish, where “abuse is presented as a form of entertainment for idle wastrels” (Tague 153). Hogarth’s grim vision of violent disorder includes horrors like “hanging cats, cockfighting, gouging out the eye of a small bird with a wire,” all part of a shocking condemnation of human depravity (Grier 142). Nero eventually moves on to murder and is executed himself, but the anxieties depicted in Hogarth’s unflinching polygraphic parade of violence are mirrored in nineteenth- and twentieth-century prints and trade cards depicting the “Cruel Boys” motif meant to instruct children—especially males— in the correct, compassionate treatment of pets, livestock, and wild animals. In some ways, these cruel male scenes deploy the same kinds of transgressive abuse that define the German romantic traditions of “bad boy” behavior—behavior that, as manifested in Der Struweelpeter or The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, would ultimately help to solidify the delinquint Katzenjammer shenanigans of Busch’s Max Und Mortiz and Dirks and Knerr’s Hans and Fritz. Like Blake and Hogarth, another social critic blended pictorial illustration with a “disturbing, prophetic dream” of strangely transmuted animal-human hybrids that haunted readers of all ages (Berger 8). Reminiscent of earlier inverted worlds and satiric symmetries, J. J. Grandville’s bizarre Public and Private Life of Animals, released between 1840 and 1842, turned the hierarchies of anthropocentrism back upon themselves. As John Berger observes, “These animals are not being ‘borrowed’ to explain people, nothing is being unmasked; on the contrary. These animals have become prisoners of a human/social situation into which they have been press-ganged” (19). Both fanciful and fearsome, Grandville’s scathing indictments of human social roles using animal figures are among the most ambivalent, aggressive, and exciting of any era. Berger interprets Grandville as the harbinger of the “banality of Disney,” but his perverse creatures—warped or stuck in uncomfortable frissions of anthro-sapien schizophrenia—also provide a tableau of resistance to the erasure or removal of animal rights and experiences. This theme is evident in Bryan Talbot’s ongoing zoomorphic graphic novel series, Grandville, set in a steampunked theriomorphic future rife with sociopolitical intrigues and speciesist plots that reflect the cultural fall-out of the September 11, 2001, bombings,

35

Lions and Tigers and Fears

35

international terrorism, religious extremism, and other unequivocally human conflicts. Some years after Grandville, a clever French illustrator quietly altered the animal agency of children’s picture books. Benjamin Rabier, now most famous for designing the beloved le vache qui rire or “Laughing Cow” cheese logo, was a master of anthropomorphic imagery who changed the interaction of text and image in a number of landmark publications, such as Les Fables de La Fontaine (1906), The Animals at Liberty (1923), and Comic Scenes of the Forest (1929). Unlike traditional illustrations that merely “follow” the written text, Rabier’s animals tended to create a separate “pictorial rhythm beyond the text itself ” (Kuo 25). His techniques pushed the syntactic continuity of the images toward a new mode of “comic illustration” that mirrors the format of newspaper strips and later comic books (Kuo 26). Rabier’s comic or laughing illustrations would also break from the prose continuity to “spot light small animal characters which never show up in the text,” frequently setting off their unexpected presence in “framed emblems” that could delight readers as a liberating, spontaneous eruption of the animetaphoric “fable world” and provide “a sophisticated theater for mocking humans and their expectations” (Kuo 33). As iconotextual antecedents or parallels to the comics proper, these texts merged traditions of animal representation with new forms and modalities of narrative. A broader trend had already emerged at this stage in the evolution of illustrative creatures, however. By the turn of the twentieth century, the sequential animal would find itself immersed in the spectacular visual circuses of the industrialized newspaper and the illustrated album.

Illustrative creatures and early anthropomorphs in albums, newspapers, and anthologies after 1900 Rabier’s experiments with the “fluctuating boundary” between interdependent text and image reveal the “rich possibilities” of personified animals in picture books and illustrated albums (Nikolajeva and Scott 93). More and more often in the late 1800s, illustrators, designers, and cartoonists expanded and explored how iconotextual animals could function in conjunction with prose text, and the results were wildly diverse. The subtle emphasis on dress and etiquette influenced Beatrix Potter’s watercolor animal vignettes, Gustav Doré’s engravings for The Bible (1866), Perrault’s Fairy Tales (1867) and Rabelais (1873), A. B. Frost’s remarkable anthropomorphic designs for Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories (1892), and especially W. W. Denslowe’s lush renderings for L. Frank Baum’s Father Goose, His Book (1899), as well as the “American Classic that has sold over ten million copies and has been translated into thirty languages,” The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Gangloff 12). Denslowe’s use of blended animals like ligers and tigons in Oz were particularly important for the development of a free-spirited, “floating” miseen-page based on the solid color blocking and flattened perspective of “Japanese prints.” As Deborah Gangloff notes, “there had never been a book like it before.

36

36

Daniel F. Yezbick

It was designed as a whole, interrelating all components: Illustration, type, color, covers, endpapers, and title page. Characters on one page reacted to events across the spread; figures bled out of the border” (12). A few years later, the explosion of happily anthropomorphized children’s series was truly remarkable. Notable installments include E.  H. Shepard’s pastoral sketches for Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), as well as A. A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young (1924) and Winnie the Pooh (1926); Harrison Cady’s fifty years’ worth of stylish designs for Thorton Burgess’ Old Mother Westwind stories featuring Reddy Fox and Buster Bear; the fantastic creatures (like the Hungry Howloon and the Snarleyboodle) of Johny Gruelle’s Raggedy Ann stories; Seymour Eatons’s Roosevelt Bears series; and Howard R. Garis’s hundreds of Uncle Wiggily Longears misadventures, whose earliest collections and comic strip excursions were illustrated by Lansing Campbell. Don Marquis and George Herriman’s outlandish Archy and Mehitabel stories (1916) would mine similar territory for older audiences. Each illustrator, in one way or another, invited readers to explore how pictorial animals of all types rambled across or evolved beyond the printed word, and in many cases, including Denslowe’s Oz, Caddy’s Peter Rabbit, Campbell’s Uncle Wiggily, and of course, Herriman’s Krazy Kat, they were also conversant with the thriving world of newspaper comics. From their earliest forms, magazine cartoons, newspaper comics, and sequential animals were creatively interdependent. In the traditions of Töpffer and Hogarth, acknowledged satirists including George Cruikshank, Honoré Daumier, Cham (Amédée Charles Henri de Noé), Nadar (Gaspard Félix Tournachon), Gustav Doré, George Du Maurier, and Leonce Petit filled their charivari, or cheap satiric periodicals, with animalesque mockeries, grotesques, and comments on human inanities (Kunzle, History 87). Thousands of animal parodies circulated regularly through all manner of political periodicals, including:  Punch, Judy, and Comic News in England; Le Journal de Rire, Le Figaro, Le Rire, Le Caricature, Le Charivari, and L’Assiette au Beurre (The Butter Dish) in France; Fliegende Blätter (Flying Leaves) and Kladderadastch in Germany; and Puck, Judge, Life, and Cartoons Magazine in the United States (Gifford, International 8). The Black Cat cartoons of T.  A. Steinlen in Le Chat Noir, Organe des Intérèts de Montmartre, rank among the best of these early animal comics. From 1884 to 1890, the hijinks of Steinlen’s Bohemian beast bordered on the phantasmic. His sly French feline found its caustic corollary in the animal antagonisms of Fliegende Blätter, where Wilhelm Busch snagged tails and brutalized hindparts of all species to emphasize the crudely comedic “link between animals and humans” (Kunzle, History 241). British penny comic sheets were also alive with the antics of ornery companion animals and precocious pets as early as 1835, but as Denis Gifford observes, “Humans were humans and animals were animals in the Victorian comic. The humanized animal, walking on his hind legs and dressed in neat Etons, would not evolve until the Edwardian Age” (Victorian 66). With a few exceptions, theriomorphic worlds featuring bipedal anamorphs began to populate the comics regularly just after 1900. Much of their whimsy and wonder was built on themes from previous storybook traditions, but the “polychromatic effulgence” of the

37

Lions and Tigers and Fears

37

early–twentieth-century newspapers remediated every form of visual, graphic, and narrative tradition (Gifford, International 22). Among the first and most imaginative talking animals were early efforts at what Gifford labels “the Nursery school of British comics,” relating to Jungle Jinks from The Playbox (1898) and J. Stafford Baker’s Mrs. Hippo’s Kindergarten (1904), which introduced one of the world’s “oldest cartoon heroes” in Tiger Tim (Gifford, International 46). These creations were quickly followed by an anthromorphic onslaught of animal comics across international news and “picture papers,” including Jimmy Swinnerton’s Mr. Jack, whose flair for mischief brought Grandville-esque depth to the first sustained sequential animal celebrity (Blackbeard 20). T. S. Sullivant’s zoomorphs also appeared in rich renderings and fluid motions that highlighted the incongruities between the natural world and industrial modernity. Grandville and Sullivant each inspired generations of artists and animators including Winsor McCay, Walt Disney, Walt Kelly, and Jim Woodring as well as lesser-known animalesceant texts like Lawson Wood’s simian satires, Herb Roth’s goofy menageries, and Vernon Grant’s whimsical holiday pals.5 At the same time, a fascination with jungle animals in the early 1900s led to exotically “anthropomorphized characters appearing in nearly every Sunday Supplement,” with as many as four or five artists collaborating to complete the zoomorphic spectacles (Maresca, Fantasy 54). Series like Dan Smith’s “Jungle Folk” and Winsor McCay’s just-so fables, “Tales of the Jungle Imps,” both dating to 1903, perpetuated exotic, jungle, and imperial/colonial animal worlds, providing a strangely ambivalent perspective not only on human-animal identity politics involving Darwin and Freud, but also on anxieties relating to spectacular, anthroparchial contexts such as zoos, circuses, and other sites of animal subjugation. In the same vein, fantastical works like McCay’s “Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend” and “Little Nemo in Slumberland,” Harry Grant Dart’s “The Explorigator,” and W.  O. Wilson’s “Madge the Magician’s Daughter” built dreamy fables of exploration, curiosity, and conquest around strange creatures and startlingly reimagined animals of all shapes and sizes (Maresca 126).6 Likewise, Lionel Feininger’s outlandish Kin-der-Kids toyed with multiple animal themes, especially bizarre creatures from strange lands. Richard Outcault not only shaped the evolution of the early comic strip, but also spoke powerfully to the plight of the urban creature in violently changing times through his use of strays, pets, and working animals. Mickey Dugan, the Yellow Kid, enjoyed a bestial entourage including consorts with a goat, a dog, a cat and a parrot,7 while Outcault’s later Pore L’il Mose keeps an equally kooky menagerie involving a dog, a cat, a bear, and monkey. Outcault’s most famous animal creation, though, remains Buster Brown’s “leathery talking bulldog,” Tige, who played a crucial role in the strip’s chaotic cycle of transgression and resolution (Waugh 9). By the 1920s and 1930s, the modern comic strip had congealed into a somewhat standardized format, and both zoomorphic worlds and companion comedies ran rampant through Hearst and Pulitzer papers. In this context, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat remains what many consider the quintessence of zoomorphic comic art; its celebration by critics, creators, and fans is richly deserved. Perhaps only Art Spiegelman’s Maus matches Krazy Kat for aesthetic gusto and interpretive

38

38

Daniel F. Yezbick

complexity. Authors as diverse as e. e. cummings, Spiegelman, Chris Ware, and Ishmael Reed have worked to unravel Herriman’s jazzy minstrelized banter, schizoid ethnic cues, fissioned gender performances, and inscrutably strange triangle of dog-cat-mouse love. Whether readers are concerned with Herriman’s complex statements of race and identity, his utterly unique use of poetry and dialect, his quasi-surreal landscapes and self-reflexive mise-en-page, or the madcap vaudeville of brick-bashing fun, the work shows how vibrantly we can overhaul our very human urges and needs in sequential animal forms.8 The “Golden Age” of the American newspaper strip included a number of more mainstream animal classics, including Clifford McBride’s Napoleon, Edwina Dumm’s Tippie, Arthur Poinier’s Jitter the Monkey, and Grace Drayton and Ruth Carroll’s Pussycat Princess.9 Over time, mid-century newspaper strips faced a period of transition to simply drawn, gag-a-day fare. More domestic comedies and pet scenarios arose to fill the gap, many of which featured remarkable animal companions. Among the most interesting was Brad Anderson’s outsized canine comedy, Marmaduke, beginning in 1954. Especially favored by dog lovers for its Sunday sidebar feature, “Dog Gone Funny,” Marmaduke encouraged readers to share their pets’ favorite oddball exploits. These and other companion strips perpetuated a consistent form of transpecial situational slapstick, but the mid-century’s most influential comic-strip comedian was unquestionably Snoopy, Charles Schulz’s endlessly charismatic beagle. Unlike Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, or Kermit the Frog, who have all suffered over-marketing and hyper-policing as valuable icons of family entertainment, Charles Schulz’s canine homage to the resilience of joy, hope, and make-believe arguably remains the single most important sequential animal of the twentieth century. Snoopy embodies the human need to dream, play, and connect across all boundaries; more than this, however, his first battle with the Red Baron on October 10, 1965, can be viewed as the apotheosis of animetaphoric evolution into something “other than a beagle” that is neither honestly or equitably animal, nor a mere theriomorphic reaction to unknowable animaleseance. Instead, he is the pet turned pretender turned provocateur. His actions, silly or selfish as they sometimes are, are almost always rooted in creative escape into some other identity, species, or purpose. He is never just a “stupid dog,” much to cynical Lucy van Pelt’s chagrin. He is a truly rare and encouraging sign of human-animal idealism and fearless symmetry. Beyond Blake’s tyger, Töpffer’s hounds, and Outcault’s animal gangs, Schulz’s uber-beagle may stand as the single most positive and compelling animetaphor in mainstream comics. Across the decades, Snoopy’s popularity inspired a host of parallel pets, imitations, and variations, including George Gatley’s Heathcliff and Jim Davis’s Garfield, Mike Peters’s Mother Goose and Grimm, and Darby Conley’s Bucky Katt from Get Fuzzy, among many others. Single panel animal cartoons like Kliban’s offbeat Cat series, Wright’s Kit’n’ Carlyle, Gary Larson’s The Far Side, Dan Pirraro’s Bizarro, Wiley Miller’s Non-Sequitur, and Hilary Price’s Rhymes with Orange likewise explored the animetaphoric anxieties that linger between human reason and bestial experience. Polemic political animals like Jeff MacNelly’s Shoe, Berkeley Breathed’s Opus the Penguin and Bill

39

Lions and Tigers and Fears

39

the Cat, Scott Adams’s Dogbert, and Bruce Tinsley’s Mallard Fillmore also continued the animal comic strip’s fabular and satiric traditions in more contemporary idioms. Two other late masterworks of sequential animal design also deserve mention. The first, Patrick McDowell’s Mutts, beginning in 1994, has evolved into the medium’s most imaginative visualization of pet culture. Rooted in the experimental vigor of the Underground, “Mutts” chronicles the daily lives of Earl the dog and his feline friend, Mooch, with unparalleled compassion and creativity. It is probably the most inventive sequential testament to the unique bonds of kept animals and their people. Second, Bill Waterson’s generation-defining Calvin and Hobbes remains the most beautiful comic strip work of the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. Running from 1985 to 1995, Waterson’s fantasy builds, like Schulz’s Snoopy, on a self-conscious fusion of the imagined anthropomorph and the bosom animal companion. With Hobbes, the toy tiger, coming to life in Calvin’s mind, each episode, steeped in dream and discovery, invites readers to ignore, resist, and overwhelm established boundaries of self and other, human and animal.

The fur flies! Zoomorphic humor in mid-century American comic books World War II and post-war atomic anxiety transformed every element of comics culture, especially patriotic superhero and funny animal themes.10 In fact, supercritters and atomic animals proliferated so much during and after the war that a complete list would run into hundreds of titles.11 By the early 1950s, the sequential animal reached its first great apotheosis in the mid-century comic-book market closely tied to marquee Hollywood and network television properties. The abundance of caped and comedic creatures that marched through newsprint and pulp pamphlet comics during the war years would reach unparalleled diversity in the following decades. As post-war America tired of super-patriotic heroes, they were swiftly replaced with slapstick animal comedy rooted in middlebrow baby-boom entertainment. Thus, in the fall of 1948, fans of the superhero stuffed Comic Cavalcade must have been shocked to discover that Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, and The Flash had been suddenly evicted and replaced by The Fox and the Crow, Dodo and the Frog, and Nutsy Squirrel. Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, the goofy “funny animal genre” overwhelmed the industry with family-friendly shenanigans built over previous fabular “moral lessons,” but deeply invested in the corporate media of the times (Duncan and Smith 208).12 American “funny animal” comics of the 1950s reached unprecedented peaks of commercial diversity, with many concepts aimed at “very young children, preadolescents of both sexes, and adolescents,” especially “young female readers” (Gabilliet 31). Among the most exciting and underscrutinized comic-book texts of any era, funny animal concepts like Otto Mesmer’s Felix the Cat, Lynn Carp and John Stanley’s Andy Panda, John Stanley and Dan Gormley’s Oswald the Rabbit, and Connie Rasinski and Art Bartsch’s Mighty Mouse were closely keyed to Hollywood studio continuities, but obscure auteurs found fertile ground to inject

40

40

Daniel F. Yezbick

their own animetaphoric insights (Barrier 135). For example, in titles like Funny Stuff, Movietown’s Animal Antics, and Hollywood Funny Folks, the still underappreciated Sheldon Mayer brought fast, farcical intensity and unparalleled visual wit to otherwise second-rate studio licenses like Nutsy Squirrel, Peter Porkchops, The Raccoon Kids, and The Three Mouseketeers. Though comic-book trends in violent crime, sadistic horror, and subversive satire have garnered the lion’s share of historical inquiry in this period, animal comics of the 1950s and 1960s were adamantly establishmentarian.13 One publisher stood at the very heart of this burgeoning business of anthroparchial amusement. For more than thirty years, George Delacourte’s Dell imprint produced every possible variety of mainstream funny animal, including the landmark title Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, and also, once the Hanna-Barbera license had been secured, dozens more titles meant to cross-market popular “small screen” animated properties. As Bradford W.  Wright notes, “Dell’s comic books remained steadfastly traditional in their cultural outlook and in their target audience of young children” (187). Hence the slogan “Parents can relax when kids read Dell comics." Many parents saw little harm in Dell’s supposedly benign animal pals, but several of these otherwise innocuous animal fantasies were conceived by adamantly antagonistic creators. Ironically, their works helped to initiate the scatological Underground comix and daring Alternative press experiments to come. Within the banal funny farms of 1950s and 1960s comic books, two auteurs quietly built a brace of politically potent animal scenarios. Carl Barks and Walt Kelly each cut their creative teeth as Disney animators, but quickly developed their own narrative mythologies in opposition to and, in Barks’s case, even under the vigilant surveillance of the gargantuan media conglomerates that distributed their work. Over the years, Carl Barks’s Donald Duck—and to some extent his multibillionaire miserly Uncle Scrooge McDuck—have come to represent the very core of human resilience in the face of failure and the acceptance of unexpected hardship. Barks’s Ducks—along with his lesser known work on Porky Pig, Barney the Bear, and Andy Panda—convey a “complex and ambivalent” anti-modernism that focuses on “revealing both the worth and limits of our Arcadias” (Andrae 21). In particular, Barks reveals the risks, wonders, and worries that arise when the tame, civilized, and anthropomorphized clashes with the adamantly other, wild, and unexpected in nature. From one-page strips to book-length adventures, Barks rarely lets an exterior frame go without including some persistent reminder of othered animal presence. In beach scenes, his seascapes are alive with gulls and terns. In mountain or desert settings, snakes and bears are ever-present, and in stories like “Vacation Time,” their ducks’ hapless human behaviors are crucial to the comedy that circulates around confounding interruptions of the Wild, the Animal, and the anti-anthropocentric (Shilling 64). Barks’s Disneyfied anthropomorphs perfectly embody what Chaney refers to as a “strategic and parodic veiling of the human” (130); but more than this, Barks’s antic emphasis on what Haraway describes as the Great Divide between the acculturated human and the ferociously animal is absolutely critical to his anthropomorphic vision (Haraway 78). Decades after Barks’s retirement, recovery, and global celebrity, the equally talented Don

41

Lions and Tigers and Fears

41

Rosa would reorient Barks’s Duckburg satires, transforming the original vision into a more continuous theriomorphic epic. Another politically charged use of the sequential animal arises in Walt Kelly’s Pogo. Its persistently multicultural, multimodal, mutually sustainable message of love, fun, and respect for the natural world ultimately did more to advertise the animal’s precarious position in twentieth-century life than any other comic of the time. The Pogo milieu remains unique in comics history for its success across comic books, newspaper strips, and the long-running paperback amalgamations that reprinted, revised, and added original material. This series might constitute the first major animal-centered graphic novel project in American culture. Kelly’s comedy turned on the familial intimacy of the Okefenokee, where most animals were “perfectly content being animals, but sometimes for their own amusement they’d undertake the enterprises of people, adopting the right jargon and costumes but not quite understanding the purpose behind the human endeavors they mimicked” (Harvey, “Pogo” 102). In the process, Pogo promoted free speech, democratic tolerance, and the birth of the Environmental Movement with its emphasis on Earth Day. Mid-century animal comics gave way to the return of the superhero, and the proliferation of teen, romance, and TV-based properties. Though mainstream theriomorphic comics never disappeared from the newspapers or spinner racks, familiar characters settled into a somewhat dreary period of conformity and calcification—until the blasphemy of late 1960s Underground comix once again transformed the representational politics of animal stories. The history of the “movement,” its creators, publishers, victims, and martyrs has been among the most well historicized in the medium, but the full influence of animal themes and traditions deserves more attention. Indeed, animal themes were essential to the Underground aesthetic. Among the most famous examples are Rick Griffin’s psychedelic creatures, R. Crumb’s Fritz the Cat, Gilbert Sheldon’s outrageously phallic super-macho Wonder-Warthog send-up, the orgiastic blasphemies of S. Clay Wilson, and the faux-sentimentality that sugar-coated the pitch black humor of Shary Flenniken’s Trots and Bonnie, a fabulously unnerving deconstruction of the charming pet tradition established by Briggs’ When A  Fella Needs a Friend, McBride’s Napoleon, Edwina’s Tippie, and Anderson’s Marmaduke. Some underground animals provided passive-aggressive appropriations of established classics. The mise-en-page of Bobby London’s Dirty Duck mirrored the idiosyncratic blend of love and violence that drove Herriman’s Krazy Kat (Estern 28). Jay Lynch’s bizarrely anthropomorphized buddy comics featuring Nard and Pat were equally steeped in revisions of slapstick, smart-alecky, pre-war gag comics. Robert Crumb’s fetishized ostrich women, fornicating cutesy creatures, and of course, the feline slacker-stoner-spy-celebrity-addict, Fritz the Cat, would more or less define the popular face of the Underground. Alongside Joe Beck’s “Mickey Mouse Today,” Bill Griffin’s Tales of Toad, and Trina Robbins’s Panthea, the Underground also provided rehearsal room for a young Art Spiegelman, who began to explore the theriomorphic and autobiographical Holocaust material that would eventually evolve into the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus.

42

42

Daniel F. Yezbick

Other Underground satirists broke new ground using sequential animals to assault and decenter human/animal hierarchies involving factory farms, fast food, and corporatized entertainment. Gilbert Shelton’s shocking splash page in the premiere issue of Insect Fear depicts “Three giant chickens [who] catch Colonel Sanders in a dark Atlanta alleyway and proceed to ‘southern fry’ him piece by piece, starting with the balls” (Estern 147). Similarly, Justin Green toyed with themes of industrialized milk production by debasing the otherwise wholesome imagery of Newman and Fago’s outmoded Elsie the Cow comics in the “Moozak” sequence of his Illuminations project. More than any other institution, however, the Underground targeted Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse with perverse relish. Nearly every artist took their shots at Uncle Walt and his pantheon, including Robert Armstrong’s Mickey Rat series and Wally Wood’s Disneyland Memorial Orgy. No one went as far as Dan O’Neil and the Air Pirates cartoonists, who produced purposely derivative parodies of classic Mickey Mouse comics in Mickey Mouse Meets the Air Pirates Funnies and Dan O’Neil’s Comics and Stories. The extreme content in both titles led to a landmark lawsuit that set precedents for unauthorized satire on corporate icons.14 As the Underground collapsed into its own sophomoric excesses, several committed creators helped to found the more resilient Alternative Comics market where titles like Graphic Story Magazine and Star Reach could bridge the gap between 1960s euphoria and 1980s experiment. Some animal-themed concepts continued to thrive in the Alternative press like Matt Groening’s flat rabbit satire, Life in Hell, and Michael Friedrich’s anthology series, Quack!, which specialized in alt-oriented funny animal material. Though Quack! lasted only six issues, its template would quickly expand into a second wave of bold new species for the 1980s and 1990s.

Moore/Maus/Miller/Manga: Alternative animals and posthuman heroes By the mid-1970s, the sequential animal was an established theme in every major form and genre of comics, from high-profile franchises like Scooby-Doo and Godzilla, to obscure underground and alternative titles like Friedrich’s Quack! and Marshall Rogers’s Cap’n Quick and the Foozle. Yet the 1980s represent a time of revolutionary change in animal comics. Suddenly, the comic-book animal was angrier, more militant, and more eagerly co-opted than ever before. In many cases, these creatures were also more sophisticated. The gender themes of animal comics, for example, became more pronounced in works like Waller and Worley’s steamy melodrama Omaha the Cat Dancer and in edgy genre-blending titles like Dalgoda, Albedo, Critters, Captain Jack, Bucky O’Hare, Time Beavers, Penguin & Pencilguin, and Destroyer Duck. There were some mainstream moments of animetaphoric change, including Jack Kirby’s brief but vivid Devil Dinosaur concept; Steve Gerber and Val Mayerik’s assault on saccharine animal cuteness in their Howard the Duck material; the introduction of the now hyper-popular anthromorph space outlaw, Rocket Raccoon; and Roy Thomas and Scott Shaw’s fascinating superhero overhaul

43

Lions and Tigers and Fears

43

of DC’s screwball animal traditions surrounding Peter Porkchops and McSnurtle the Turtle in the still under-appreciated Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew.15 Yet the pivotal event in the recent history of sequential animals would begin within fairly obscure alternative contexts. The 1980s’ sea change in animal narratives is best introduced through two influential short stories by comics provocateur Alan Moore:  Moore and Don Simpson’s “Pictopia” (1986), from Fantagraphics’ Anything Goes anthology, and his collaboration with Bill Sienkiewicz on “Shadow Play: The Secret Team” (1989) from the Eclipse collection, Brought to Light. Each raises “a lament to the demise of comics themselves both as a social institution and as a valued industry,” especially in terms of their animal allegories (Kreiner 40). “Pictopia” reveals how frolicking 1950s pals are now left abject and forgotten in Reaganomic “funnies ghettoes” where dark knights and violent mutants rule. “Shadow Play” exposes a drunken debate with a “foul-mouthed, xenophobic, coke-snorting eagle” representing the hypocritical failures of human democracy (Baker 61). Both stories herald the hyper-politicization of theriomorphic narratives in which the sequential animal not only reached maturity, but also became co-opted and hyper-commercialized to shocking new extremes. Several major animal comics would arise out of the fairly obscure alternative comics market. The first, and most important, is Spiegelman’s anthropomorphic memoir, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, serialized as a pull-out pamphlet within the larger Raw magazine edited by Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly. Appearing from 1980 to 1991 in Raw, a complete collected edition received a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, leading to international controversy centered around the legitimacy of mediating Holocaust themes of war and genocide through sequential animal frameworks. Maus remains the most self-conscious of all animal comics, constantly exposing and deconstructing its own anthropomorphic metaphors and narrative codes. To date, no other theriomorphic comic has generated so much criticism of its examination of human truths through animal imagery. With Maus in the spotlight, another Raw artist produced powerful work related to animal rights. Sue Coe, an English feminist, illustrator, and animal rights activist ferociously expands the fearful symmetries of Grandville and Blake. Coe’s harrowing mixed media albums, prints, and comics stand among the most unnerving and uncompromising zoomorphic texts of any era. In works like Meat: Animals and Industry (1990), Dead Meat (1996), Pit’s Letter (2000), Sheep of Fools (2005; with Judy Brody), and most recently Cruel: Bearing Witness to Animal Exploitation (2012; also featuring material by Brody), Coe brings shocking visual energy to sequential narratives of factory farming, blood sport, and medical/industrial experimentation. Coe’s work exposes human hypocrisies of control and abuse through excruciating sequential testaments to the agony of the unspeaking animal. Spiegelman’s Maus animal metaphors make the inestimable horrors of the Holocaust more accessible, but Coe’s equally raw and violent animetaphors—or what Mel Y. Chen might call anxious animacies—work in the opposite direction, mediating painful traces of cruelty and slaughter as uncomfortable suggestions of unspeakable agony (Chen 104).

44

44

Daniel F. Yezbick

Two other influential works of anthropomorphic innovation arose out of the 1980s alternative milieu, one of which would enjoy unprecedented global success as a mass media franchise. Fan parody and participatory homage have always been important to comics cultures, and in early 1984 Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird gleefully developed the first of many militarized, martial arts concepts that would dominant the decade’s comics markets. Eastman and Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was originally a crudely witty, DIY send-up of Frank Miller’s noir-ish Daredevil and Wolverine titles. Laird’s lay-outs also exaggerated Miller’s appropriation of European science fiction and Japanese manga. Something about this new concept was immensely compelling to late–Cold War readers and the series initiated a second “angry animal boom” whose intensity closely mirrored the first wave of 1950s critter companions.16 The meteoric success of the ninja turtles across comics, TV series, action figures, live-action films, and computer games is well documented. Even at their most cloyingly commercial, nearly forty years of turtle-mania has brought issues of environmental abuse and animal experimentation into the parlance of children’s culture. The turtles’ apparently limitless popularity also exemplifies how globalized media for all ages continues to merge and blend traditions across cultures, languages, and pictorial traditions. As Shintoist themes of animism, simulacral technocultures, and cybernetic fantasies of biotechnological metamorphosis continue to influence manga and animé, critical work like that of Mary Knighton (see Chapter 6 in the present volume) becomes ever more important to our understanding of the international comics animal. Two further outré animal epics should be noted in this context. Like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dave Sim’s Cerebus the Aardvark began as a broad fan parody of Roy Thomas and Barry Winsor-Smith’s Marvel Conan series. Over the next twenty-six years (1977–2004), 6,000 pages, and 300 issues, no other work of selfconscious animal-enabled satire since Crumb’s Fritz the Cat has challenged the conventions of anthropomorphism so vehemently (Hoffman 1). As Sim’s Aardvark anti-hero progresses from opportunistic mercenary to Prime Minister to Pope and transcendental messiah on through a number of equally bizarre metamorphoses, the animal, the author, and the series itself defy categorization, often with open and problematic contempt for their critics and competitors. Though later episodes suffer from a strange, sour aesthetic, the majority of Sim’s Cerebus project brings powerful new depth to the storytelling potential of the sequential animal. Furthermore, its pioneering success as an independently published animal epic is probably unequaled in world comics. Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo, meanwhile, originated as a feature in the alternative anthologies Albedo and Critters in the mid-1980s, with Sakai’s action-packed fusion of Japanese chambara cinema and funny animal traditions growing in scope and maturity over the decades. His rabbit ronin’s adventures are now widely celebrated as a classic statement of transnational identity and hybridized media. Cleanly rendered, with powerful moments of drama, romance, and tragedy, its “family friendly” appearance disguises its innovative form —and its ethical complexity. Perhaps only Walt Kelly’s Pogo is as consistently exciting in its animal masking as Sakai’s now thirty-volume oeuvre.

45

Lions and Tigers and Fears

45

Zootopic visions and Umwelt anxieties: The sequential animal in the post-Maus era In the post-Maus network of graphic novels, web comics, mini-comics, and Comics Studies courses, the sequential animal enjoys more fertile habitats and thorough conservation than ever. Nearly every motif in animal comics has found new validity in some facet of comics culture. In the tradition of Rueben Flagg’s sidekick feline, Raul, Brian K. Vaughan has developed Old Lace the Deinonychus for Runaways, Ampersand the monkey for Y, the Last Man, and Lying Cat in the popular Saga series. Vaughan’s own interest in animal ethics is at the narrative heart of his harrowing Pride of Baghdad, developed with Niko Henrichon. Such stories of fearful symmetry where animal agents comment on the circumstances forced on them by human anthroparchy remain common, with notable examples including Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s tragic allegory of animal weaponization, We3 (2004); Nick Abadzis’s Laika (2007), a memoir about the experiences of the dog launched into space on board Sputnik II in 1957; Garth Ennis and Michael Dispascale’s apocalyptic dog story Red Rover Charlie (2014), profitably read alongside Adam Hines’s sumptuous Duncan the Wonder Dog (2010); Gerry Alanguilan’s nuanced examination of Filipino identity and human-animal rights in Elmer (2010); and Cohen, Ewington, and Atkins’s shocking new cybernetic parable, Red Dog (2016). Among the most surprisingly complex of these critical animal works stands Evan Dworkin and Jill Thompson’s lavishly orchestrated Beasts of Burden series. Developed around the pets, strays, and wild animals of Burden Hill, these anthropomorphized comrades in arms stand quiet guard against supernatural threats to the human world; but as the series subtly interrogates their precarious status as pets and allies in combat, it also delivers harsh criticism of human abuse, endangerment, and general disregard for animal welfare. Other companion animal narratives that strive to articulate the intimacy of human and nonhuman interactions include Junji Ito’s Cat Diary: Yon & Mu (1987), Takashi Murakami’s elegiac Star Gazing Dog (2011), Carol Swain’s haunting Gast (2014), the winsome animaldriven mini-comics of Isabella Rotman’s Good Kitty!/Bad Dog!! (2015), and Mike Freiheit’s charming Monkey Chef (2016). Recent notable developments include the rise of animal liberation comics, such as Critical Hit (2013) and Liberator (2014), conceived by an actual animal rescuer, Matt Miner, and the insect worlds of cartoonist-biologists like Carly Tribull and Jay Hosler, especially Hosler’s thrilling Clan Apis and Last of the Sandwalkers stories. At the same time, while purposely abstracted works such as Chris Ware’s Quimby the Mouse (2004), Andy Hartzel’s Fox Bunny Funny (2007), and Michael DeForge’s Ant Colony (2014) push the very concept of animal narrative into confounding new directions, funny animal traditions also thrive in unexpected ways in post-millennial comics. For example, Chris Onstad’s Achewood, Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics, and Reza Rarazmand’s Poorly Drawn Lines web series keep the traditions of Swinnerton and Sullivant alive in new digital idioms. Among the most endearing of all animal comics, recent manga titles like Kanata Konami’s

46

46

Daniel F. Yezbick

Chi’s Sweet Home and Makoto Raiku’s Animal Land epic are just a two of the many series continuing the animetaphoric traditions of Miyazachi’s Nausicaa and Masashi Tanaka’s Gon. Classic Disney icons are also undergoing a massive upgrade with stylish new material involving Barks’s Duckburg cast and surprisingly emotive rebootings of Mickey Mouse, including those conceived by Lewis Trondheim and Nicolas Keramidas in Mickey’s Craziest Adventures and by Bernard Cosey in Mickey Mouse: Mysterious Melody or How Mickey Met Minnie, both published in 2017. Even animal-driven fantasies have become more self-conscious of how anthropocentric metaphors inform their narratives, as manifested in superheroesque concepts like Robert Kirkman’s Science Dog and Astounding Wolf-Man, as well as Erica Henderson’s femi-fun Squirrel Girl and Noelle Stevenson’s eco-savvy Lumberjanes. Completely zoomorphic worlds like David Stevensen’s Mouse Guard, Maczko and Witter’s Squarriors, and Brian J. L. Glass’s Mice Templar have developed layered microcosms of community and tense intrigue built around animalconscious themes. Perhaps the most stylishly profound animalacral concept of all is Juan Diaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido’s stunning Blacksad series, which appropriates traditions ranging from slick Disney animation to hard-boiled noir in its powerful, animal-enabled indictment of human evil. More family-friendly and whimsical series also persist, including Roger Landridge’s charming Snarked remix of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland books, Puttjamer and Schultz’s exciting Hero Cats adventures, Andy Renton’s Owly, Tracy J. Butler’s outstanding Lackadaisy web series, and Sara Varon’s many, playful, “all ages” animal comics and picture books. Further, several postmodern auteurs have expanded Spiegelman’s experiments with autobiographical animetaphor with results that “breed horrors and wonders in equal measure” (Hatfield 58). Among the most intriguing are Jim Woodring’s surreal Frank stories, which pit “a bucktoothed anthropomorph of uncertain species” against an “oneiric playscape of wavy lines and fluid, sensuous shapes”; the equally complex, ambivalent worlds of France’s Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar; and work by Norway’s Jason (John Arne Sæterøy) (Hatfield 58). Trondheim’s The Spiffy Adventures of McConey (1993–2004) and Dungeon (1998–2014), developed with fellow French cartoonist Joann Sfar, pose complex questions of identity and desire according to how their animal characters negotiate their own confusion and alienation (Wivel 45). Similarly, Jason’s offbeat blending of history, fantasy, and satire in The Left Bank Gang (2006) and Isle of 100,000 Graves (2011) emphasize the cryptic elements of personified animal art. Equally sublime realms of detachment and distress have informed the animal elements of more recent works like Mike Brinkman’s faux treatise on the ecological complexity of Teratoid Heights (2000), the phantasmic works of Brecht Evans including Night Animals (2011) and Panther (2016), and the uncanny visions of Renee French’s H Day (2010), along with her avian creepfest, Baby Bjornstrand (2014).17 Also, counterbalancing the rampaging animal concepts of Ryan Ottley’s Grizzly Shark and Dan Schaffer’s White, there is a clear contemporary urge toward ecoconscious, animal-rights-driven celebrations of the inherent dignity and subjective

47

Lions and Tigers and Fears

47

experiences of nonhuman agents. Thus, in an effort to develop sequential animal allegories that might realign anthropatriachal perspectives on the Wild, comics creators have explored the possible experiences of extinct species, as in Ricardo Delgado’s prehistoric Age of Reptiles, while also bringing powerful philosophical rigor to the problem of instinct and the question of differentiated animal selves, as in Adam Sacks’s Salmon Doubts (2004). Among the most ambitious of these animetaphoric narratives is Frédéric Brremaud and Federico Bertolucci’s wordless multispecies Love series, featuring barely anthropomorphized animal heroes struggling against a variety of natural catastrophes. Like Dembecki and Keeling’s paradigm-challenging Xoc:  Journey of a Great White (2012), examined in this volume by Laura Pearson in Chapter 7, these zoomorphic stories work to revise human misconceptions of animal life. Thus, in an effort to build on Lévi-Strauss’s famous claim that “animals are good to think with”—more specifically, in an attempt to suggest why this might be so— the present chapter has outlined an approach that combines work in comics history with cross-disciplinary perspectives on cultural understandings of animals. In investigating three intertwining modes of animal representation in comics— those involving the animal companion, the anthropomorphized world, and the mutated oppositional animal—I suggest how all of these traditions, separately and in hybrid forms, have contributed to the complexity, diversity, and resonance of the sequential animal, not only historically but also rhetorically and ethically. As pets, parables, and prophetic warnings, our animal others prowl endlessly across multiframes of culture, commerce, and creativity, their ever-evolving forms pleasing and provoking the human mind.

Notes 1 Scholarly histories of comic books and comic strips, such as Michael Barrier’s, JeanPaul Gabilliet’s, and R. C. Harvey’s, include brief references to the general popularity and creative importance of key animal characters like Uncle Scrooge or Snoopy, major historical trends like the post–World War II funny animal boom or the alternative animal of the 1980s, and a few canonical pioneers and auteurs like Frost, Swinnerton, Barks, Kelly, Spiegelman, and Woodring. None focuses on the ways that such concepts or creators speak to larger concerns of human-animal interrelationships, or the larger role that animals continue to play in human art, literature, leisure, and imagination. Conversely, animal historians and theorists such as Donna Haraway, Nathan Stephens Griffin, and Margo DeMello are fond of deploying animal-centered advertisements, trade cards, prints, and cartoons as illustrative examples, but rarely concern themselves with the specific creative contexts relating to these materials. 2 Animal designs and drawings were also common in other forms of children’s sequential ephemera, including early paper toys, playing cards, and popular acculturating amusements such as the graphically elaborate Game of the Goose, which was often used to introduce youngsters into the complex realities of adult life

48

48

3 4

5

6

7

8 9 10

11

12

Daniel F. Yezbick (O’Connell 124). During winter holidays, families also exchanged a variety of animalbased prints, books, and broadsheets. See Kunzle, The Early Comic Strip, and Goggin for concise examinations of the consumer contexts of such prints and publications. The same mass delusions would later compromise the ecological health of trendy species and celebrity animals, including “Dalmations, Bonzo, Lassie, Bambi, and a host of other commodified animal characters as well as other trends in dolphin, meerkat, and big-cat” commercialization (Molloy 13). See the anthologies of Baker and Brentano, Blackbeard and Williams, and Maresca’s Forgotten Fantasy and Society Is Nix for further details about the early theriomorphic newspaper strip. Animal themes in the many dream, fantasy, and proto-surrealist comics of early newspapers require serious critical attention, as do the many humanoid fairies, elves, brownies, and allegorical creature-people like Arch Dale’s Doodads, Cousin Ken’s Gloops, Gelett Burgess’s Goops, Herbert Crawley’s Wiggle Much, and Al Capp’s schmoos, bald iggles, and kigmies. Outcault and George Luks use animal themes such as farcical circuses, dog-catching raids, horse shows, and duck chases to stage violent cultural upheavals and clashes in their variations on The Yellow Kid. Forthcoming scholarship by Christina Meyer promises to expand critical awareness of these themes. Michael Tisserand’s biography of Herriman provides the definitive study of this cartoonist’s animal themes. For more in-depth surveys of newspaper animal comics, see the entries for “Funny Animals,” “Children’s Comics,” and “Satire” in Booker. The animal’s complex role in superhero culture requires special attention, especially considering the therianthropic themes of bat, spider, and cat heroes and the prevalence of theriomorphic protagonists like Animal Man, Changling/Beast Boy, Swamp Thing, and Frog Thor (Baker 108). Similarly, the use of animals as antagonists in early superhero stories, companions like Mr. Tawky Tawny, Streaky the Super-Cat, and Ace the Bathound, and anamorphic extensions of super-myths as in DeFalco and Armstrong’s Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham and Baltazar’s Super Pets series, all provide important expansions of the super-animal sub-genre. Characters like Squirrel Girl, Hawkeye’s Pizza Dog, Montclare and Reeder’s multicultural reboot of Moon-Girl and Devil Dinosaur, and Skottie Young’s narrative experiments with Rocket Raccoon continue to expand the boundaries of what super-sequential animals can mean. The animal comics in military and men’s magazines, like Sansone’s salacious The Wolf, also deserve further critical scrutiny beyond Christina Knopf ’s excellent scholarship in The Comic Art of War. A complete catalog of the first funny animal boom of the 1940s–1960s would comprise hundreds of titles and potentially thousands of animal characters; see the online appendix to this chapter, “Funny Animal Charts” (at https://sites.google.com/ view/lionstigersfearsdyezbick), for a partial catalog of major titles and characters. The sampling to be discussed here should provide some idea of the unprecedented deluge that more or less confirms John Berger’s claim that the rampant simulations of happy, cute, and stylish animals throughout corporate capitalism and consumer culture emptied the actual animal of “experience and secrets” in favor of an invented nostalgic “innocence” (Berger 12).

49

Lions and Tigers and Fears

49

13 Limitations on space require only an abbreviated gloss of sequential animals’ impact on infamous EC and Harvey horror comics of the 1950s, but early beast books like Charlton’s Gorgo and Reptilicus and Marvel’s Tales to Astonish can be viewed as essential to the resurgence of the superhero genre with hits like Spider-Man, the Hulk, the Thing, Ant-Man, and the Wasp. War, western, and jungle titles also merit serious review for their themes of animal vengeance, monstrous menace, and atavistic dinosaur fury. The heady gender, race, and environmental politics of jungle-themed comics deserve especially close scrutiny in light of new critical avenues in Animal Studies. 14 For the best extant treatment of the O’Neil trials, see Levin’s The Pirates and the Mouse. 15 Howard the Duck and Rocket Raccoon were introduced to both mainstream all-ages color comics and more adult black-and-white magazine markets at nearly the same time, suggesting their potential cross-over appeal as both anthropocentric fantasies and angry satires of human superiority. 16 For a more comprehensive history of the “new model animal” theme in alternative comics, see Yezbick, “Funny Animals.” 17 It is also important to document the strange world of animal-driven pornography, including works like Terry Moore’s Genus or the plethora of queer web series involving “furry” eroticized hybrid human-animal bodies. As Mel Y. Chen observes, the “overwhelmingly cute, indeed aestheticized vigor of this subculture” seems not only to seek sexual pleasure in transgressive pornographic fantasies involving straight, bi, queer, and even incestuous desires, but also to solicit a strangely comforting “multi-animalist” utopian vision of bodily identity rooted in ecstatic masturbatory theriomorphism (Chen 105).

Works cited Andrae, Thomas. Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2006. Baker, Nicholson, and Margaret Brentano. The World on Sunday: Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer’s Newspaper (1898–1911). New York: Bulfinch, 2005. Baker, Steve. Picturing the Beast. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 1993. Barrier, Michael. Funnybooks: The Improbable Glories of the Best American Comic Books. Oakland: U of California P, 2015. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses.” Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. 129–41. Berger, John. “Why Look at Animals?” About Looking. New York: Vintage, 1992. 3–28. Blackbeard, Bill, and Martin Williams. The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute P, 1977. Booker, M. Keith. Comics Through Time. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2014. Chaney, Michael A. “Animal Subjects Of The Graphic Novel.” College Literature 38.3 (2011): 129–49. Chen, Mel Y. Animacies. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2012. Cudworth, Erika. “Beyond Speciesism: Intersectionality, Critical Sociology, and the Human Domination of Other Animals.” The Rise of Critical Animal Studies. Ed. Nik Taylor and Richard Twine. New York: Routledge, 19–35. DeMello, Margo. Animals and Society. New York: Columbia UP, 2012.

50

50

Daniel F. Yezbick

Derrida, Jacques. The Animal that Therefore I Am. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. Trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham UP, 2008. Duncan, Randy, and Matthew J. Smith. Icons of the American Comic Book. Denver, CO: Greenwood, 2013. Enright, Kelly. “Why the Rhinoceros Doesn’t Talk.” Beastly Natures. Ed. Dorothee Brantz. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2010. 108–26. Estern, Mark Hames. A History of Underground Comics. Berkeley, CA: Ronin Publishing, 1993. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Of Comics and Men. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2005. Gangloff, Deborah. The Artist, the Book, and the Child. Springfield: Illinois State Museum, 1988. Gardner, Jared. “Notes from Canon Makers (& Breakers).” Canon Fodder 2016 CXC Scholarly Symposium. Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, Ohio State University. October 13, 2016. Gifford, Denis. The International Book of Comics. New York: Crescent, 1984. Gifford, Denis. Victorian Comics. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976. Goggin, Joyce. “Of Gutters and Guttersnipes: Hogarth’s Legacy.” The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature. Ed. Joyce Goggin and Dan Hassler-Forest. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. 5–24. Griffin, Nathan Stephens. “Doing Critical Animal Studies Differently: Reflexivity and Intersectionality in Practice.” The Rise of Critical Animal Studies. Ed. Nik Taylor and Richard Twine. New York: Routledge, 2014. 111–36. Grier, Katherine C. Pets in America: A History. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2006. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. Harvey, R. C. The Art of the Comic Book. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996. Harvey, R. C. “Pogo 1949–1973 Walt Kelly.” The Comics Journal 210 (February 1999): 102–3. Hatfield, Charles. “The ‘Frank’ Stories: Jim Woodring 1992–Present.” The Comics Journal 210 (February 1999): 58. Hoffman, Eric. “Preface.” Cerebus the Barbarian Messiah. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012. 1–4. Keynes, Geoffrey. “The Commentary.” Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake. 2nd edition. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. New York: Oxford UP, 1967. 131–55. Knopf, Christina M. The Comic Art of War. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015. Kreiner, Rich. “No. 92 ‘Pictopia’ 1986.” The Comics Journal 210 (February 1999): 40. Kunzle, David. The Early Comic Strip. Berkeley : U of California P, 1973. Kunzle, David. The History of the Comic Strip: The Nineteenth Century. Berkeley : U of California P, 1990. Kuo, Shu H. “The Art of Making Animals Laugh: Benjamin Rabier’s Comic-Illustration of Les Fables de La Fontaine.” Neophilologus 97.1 (2013): 21–33. Levin, Bob. The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney’s War Against the Counterculture. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, 2003. Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. Maresca, Peter. Forgotten Fantasy: Sunday Comics 1900–1915. Palo Alto, CA: Sunday P, 2011. Maresca, Peter. Society Is Nix. Palo Alto, CA: Sunday P, 2013.

51

Lions and Tigers and Fears

51

Mattfield, Monica. “ ‘Genus Porcus Sophisticus’: The Learned Pig and the Theatrics of National Identity in Late Eighteenth-Century London.” Performing Animality. Ed. Lourdes Orozco and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 57–77. Meyer, Christina. Modern Mass Entertainment: The Serial Unfolding of the Yellow Kid. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2018. Forthcoming. Molloy, Claire. Popular Media and Animals. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Nikolajeva, Maria, and Carole Scott. How Picturebooks Work. London: Routledge, 2001. O’Connell, Sheila. The Popular Print in England. London: The British Museum P, 1999. Plumb, Christopher. “ ‘The Queen’s Ass’: The Cultural Life of Queen Charlotte’s Zebra in Georgian Britain.” The Afterlives of Animals. Ed. Samuel J. M. M. Alberti. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2011. 17–36. Raybould, Robin. “Emblem and Device.” Camrax.com. Trafford Publishing. September 28, 2016. http://www.camrax.com/symbol/bookpdfs/9.%20Emblem%20and%20Device. pdf. 249–96. Shilling, Jr., Peter. Carl Barks’ Duck: Average American. Minneapolis, MN: Uncivilized Books, 2014. Smolderen, Thierry. The Origins of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: U Press of Mississippi, 2014. Swinney, Geoffrey N. “An Afterword on Afterlife.” The Afterlives of Animals. Ed. Samuel J. M. M. Alberti. Chartlottesville: U of Virginia Press, 2011, 219–34. Tague, Ingrid H. Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Britain. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2015. Tisserand, Michael. Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White. New York: HarperCollins, 2016. Töpffer, Rodolphe. Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips. Ed. and trans. David Kunzle. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2007. Waugh, Colton. The Comics. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1991. Willmott, Glenn. Modern Animalism: Habitats of Scarcity and Wealth in Comics and Literature. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. Wivel, Matthais. The Lewis Trondheim Interview. The Comics Journal 283 (2007): 44–71. Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. Yezbick, Daniel F. “Funny Animals.” Critical Survey of Graphic Novels: History Theme and Technqiue. Ed. Bart H. Beaty and Stephen Weiner. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2012. 181–5.

52

53

Chapter 2 T H E A N I M A L I Z E D C HA R AC T E R   A N D   S T Y L E Glenn Willmott

We need a new word for a new kind of sign that is everywhere, for which comics are largely to blame. Rather than invent one, I will extend the meaning of the term “funny animal,” which has indicated a particular genre in comics, beyond these generic boundaries to include all animalized comics figures. The funny animal is, I hope to show, a good name for any character in a story told in comics form that is animalized—that is, any character recognized as embodying nonhuman animal types and qualities. Such figures originally flourished in humor strips, and still do, so their character type is marked as funny. Yet that bare historical truth hardly touches the aesthetic and biological mysteries of these rampant figures, or the complexity of feelings that may be prompted by them—their touch of the bizarre, and our pleasure in being thrown slightly off balance by the outré. Indeed, if we call them animals, as scholars commonly do, it can only be a matter of convenience. They usually bear little visual or behavioral resemblance to actual nonhuman animals. We might even suspect they are nothing more than human characters in superficially animalized form, but we would be wrong, because that form is also significant: as the irrepressible expression of what Michael Chaney calls an “animal identity crisis endemic to the comics form,” their nonhumanity matters.1 In the first sections of this chapter, I  will discuss how funny animal figures may be read as character icons and place them in an art historical tradition fundamental to comics; in subsequent sections I move on to look at them as story characters from narratological perspectives. While I will draw on contemporary scholarship for these purposes, my approach is rooted in some key Aristotelian ideas: that every art is a kind of mimesis (representation); that poesis (making; in Aristotle’s usage, literary craft, referring to any sort of creative writing) may be multimedia, as in the performance of songs or staging of drama; and that poetic character is an object of mimesis that one grasps both immediately and sensually as an iconic form, and also temporally and intellectually through focalization and action. Aristotle felt that identification with mimetic characters was straightforward because he only distinguished characters as figures that imitate familiarly human, moral qualities.2 Funny animals, I  hope to show, trouble mimesis, doing funny things to identification and to our ethical response to them. Bringing

54

54

Glenn Willmott

pictorial and storytelling aspects of comics together under the lens of animalized mimesis, I aim to cast light on how strange and unique this funny animal type of character is, one that is intrinsic to comics yet flourishes far beyond, with a compelling modern significance.

Animalized icons as stylized persons It is one of Scott McCloud’s enduring insights that all comics forms, including panels, are iconic, where an icon is broadly understood to refer to “any image used to represent a person, place, thing or idea” (27).3 This insight is usefully refined by the comics formalist Hannah Miodrag, who provides classifications of comics icons and their differing modes of readability (173–7).4 Such work brings comics into conversation with art historical concepts of iconology as pictorial meaning and iconography as pictorial style.5 When we look at the funny animal as an icon, what sorts of meaning does it convey? The funny animal is obviously an icon of a person, but it is not so obvious what nature of person, nor whether it might additionally evoke places, things, or ideas. This icon is a weird fusion of human traits, animal traits, graphic conventions, and expressive or abstract style. The funny animal may be regarded as something of a biomorphic question mark, which elsewhere I have called a “problem creature,” inspired by what H. G. Wells has the biological sculptor Doctor Moreau call his fabricated, humanoid animals (Willmott 52). One problem, which should plague us as much as it did visitors to Moreau’s island, is how we recognize such a fabricated thing as a person. The problem of how readers discern elements of stories as representations of persons as opposed to mere objects reaches beyond comics to narrative studies at large, and has been explored by scholars drawing from cognitive studies. A starting point is offered by David Herman, who begins with a theory of mind axiom that for us to recognize an object as a person in the most basic sense, we must recognize the ascription to it of both mental and material predicates without one being reducible to the other, so as to infer an embodied mind. In texts, Herman argues, persons are subsets of objects. Authors present sets of mental and material predicates that are in one sense always just part of the carefully cluttered landscape of its storyworld—an important point for comics to which I will return. But we also (normally effortlessly) assemble these objects as “model persons” particular to their stories. In doing so we are informed by more general, cultural scripts of “models of persons” in circulation outside the story. Immersed in the concerns and doings of such model persons, readers may be prompted to affirm, challenge, or revise their models of persons (Herman 74, 193–4). The variability of the distinction between person and mere object, and the storytelling power to change the way we think about persons, suggests that animalized characters may have peculiar effect. The long history, established by Aristotle and exemplified by Descartes, of viewing nonhuman animals as mechanical objects with behavioral instincts and drives rather than thoughtful or emotional minds (so reducing mental to corporeal qualities), persists with much debate into modernity and troubles the heart of

55

The Animalized Character and Style

55

the person-nonperson distinction. Yet our encounters with animalized characters may seem to evade this disturbance. For example, when we begin to read a Mickey Mouse comic, most of us will immediately recognize Mickey as a person, even if we are unsure what kind. A clearly bounded outline frames a humanoid form that seems to express a familiarly thinking and feeling mind, one both irreducible to and bound up with its body. Sweat beads and other conventional signs of emotion point to a thinking and feeling person-like being beyond the surface we can see. Likewise, Mickey’s words, issuing from within him, indicate more or less complicated understandings of social relationships, memories, hypothetical projections into the future, and self-display embodied in voice. Such person recognition is not merely a cultural construction, but, according to research in psychology, a transcultural process in human ontogenetic development. Another literary scholar working from cognitive science, Lisa Zunshine, describes how human cognition automatically discriminates things into categories of living kinds (persons, animals, or plants) and nonliving kinds (artifacts or substances) (63–5). This data processing of things into exclusive ontological domains is natural and inevitable for us; what is culturally inflected is the lumpy array of knowledge, beliefs, and experiences we bring to learning what goes where. I  say inflected rather than determined because even “what goes where” may be determined by developmental, somatic experience rather than cultural, discursive learning. Animalized comics characters will evoke reader empathy, Suzanne Keen argues, not only due to cultural scripts that code particular animals and animal nature in general, but also due to neural system responses to expressive face, posture, and gesture (137). When we so readily infer that Mickey is a model person of some kind, it is in our primal cognitive development, as well as in our particular cultural scripts, to do so. As an animalized character, though, he is like other conceptual hybrids that, according to Zunshine and her cognitive science sources, resist stable ascription to any ontological category, and so “retain our interest, and stay in our memory, and remain perennially open to new interpretations” (66). Thus animalized characters in comics solicit our minds and our very bodies to recognize them as persons from a strange concatenation of mental and material predicates, in units of image and word. Their very strangeness as icons is normalized by modern mass media culture: to be sure, they can never line up precisely with any model of person ascribed to actual life, but we likely classify them easily enough not in the category of person, but in the cognitive category of artifact, sub-category mimesis (cultural production), here of fantasy creatures. Thierry Groensteen calls attention to this artifactual being in the pioneering reflections that anticipate so many of the themes of animal studies in comics when he insists that we identify these creatures as “little graphic machines” (12). The category of artifact ascription is important because it engages generic expectations and institutions of representation; it silently permeates the immersive experience of cognitive decisions about persons and objects in stories. Reading the animalized character as a coherent artifact goes some way toward understanding how the animalized character is read as person and object, which might otherwise halt at the impasse of the contradictory or strange. In comics, the funny animal will typically have a

56

56

Glenn Willmott

humanoid face, meaning a facial pattern abstracted from the human, often nothing more than two dots above a line with perhaps a squiggle in between. (Even this convention is not required: in one of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat strips, a palm tree is personified with the use of expressive sweat beads.6) But beyond this icon of a face, and a typically upright posture with two legs and two arms, the funny animal is often aggressively nonhuman in appearance, and according to any other anthropomorphic criterion, rather monstrous. Mickey Mouse may seem cute to me on the page, but he or his ilk would be horrific to me if they walked into my room.7 On the page, I recognize the artifactual tradition to which they belong as icons, and I enjoy their artifactual style as abstraction rather than mimesis. It is a paradoxical thing to say of abstraction, but I misread Mickey if I fail to apprehend his style.

Grotesque natures In pursuing this idea, I  will return to Mickey a bit later. First, it helps to look outward a little at the history of the comics “character” as a pictorial form with a history. It is a commonplace that comics drawings of persons grow out of an iconographic tradition of caricature that reaches at least as far back as what Roger Sabin has called the “satire industry,” cartoons and strips of the eighteenth century, a tradition that produced its own professional niche in the institution of nineteenth-century periodicals (12).8 The newspaper editorial cartoon remains the most prominent genre of this satirical art. While modern comics has diverse precedents in graphic narrative and cartoons throughout history, the mass media humorous caricature was what pioneering comics artists actually saw every day. Certainly, early comics cartoonists were both influenced by the aesthetics of, and practically enabled by, this widely disseminated genre, whose distortive drawing styles they assimilated and increasingly abstracted, and whose commercially valued invasion of the printed page led the way for their own creations. Yet caricature also thrived outside the institution of the printed page. For example, the comics pioneer Winsor McCay began his career as a caricature busker on the street, a practice that was more ludic than satirical. The historical roots of caricature drawing as a ludic artistic practice have been traced back to antiquity. As such, caricature is merely one subset of generic practices in a larger artistic tradition that is itself foundational to the styles and spirit of modern comics, and I believe more germane to our understanding of funny animals: the grotesque.9 The grotesque emerged as the name for a tradition in the early modern period, referring to artwork in murals, painting, architectural ornament, and book illustration from the early Roman Empire through the Middle Ages. It takes that name from the style of murals discovered in Roman excavations (thus from the grotto) in 1500, a style distinguished by fanciful, unrealistic, playful, and ornamental configurations of human, animal, vegetal, and architectural figures (see Thomson 12–13). These plastic, distorted, or combinative creatures, populating a space in which anything might appear, are the ludic source of caricature and

57

The Animalized Character and Style

57

comics styles alike, the basis of styles of representing things/persons with biomorphic freedom from conventional notions of species and nature. Such freedom may have a subtle edge. The grotesque, like comics, was not generally considered a valuable or serious art, and when not overlooked as mere superficial fluff, was even deplored as ignoble or unnatural. The style did find some polemical rethinking among Romantic writers who felt that it offered an existential aesthetic of the comic, the conflicted, and the horrible to counterbalance, in artists’ and writers’ portrayals of the world, a regnant classical idealism of beauty and harmony. This interpretation has been influentially adapted to modernist currents by the German scholar Wolfgang Kayser, who made a virtue of the overt anti-realism and apparent meaninglessness of the grotesque by claiming for it an absurdist agenda and defamiliarization technique:  “the familiar world is seen from a perspective that suddenly renders it strange,” a perspective which plays “with the deep absurdities of existence” (Thomson 18).10 Wolfgang Kayser’s description of the grotesque, as “a world in which the realm of inanimate things is no longer separated from those of plants, animals, and human beings, and where the laws of statics, symmetry, and proportion are no longer valid” (qtd. in Edwards and Graulund 37), offers a good description of the iconographic foundation of modern comics. I  do not mean here that all comics depict chimera, but that as a genre, both creators and readers understand that the fictional and perceptual conditions of possibility for what happens in comics are grounded in that biomorphic range, in an “anything is possible” that may transgress nature and convention alike. For example, in a single gag page of Walt Kelly’s Uncle Wiggily, a rabbit in red formalwear waters a lily, the lily shoots the water back at him, and an anthropomorphic beetle is revealed to have blown the water through the stem before marching off, playing music from the trumpetshaped blossom (see Spiegelman and Mouly 86). We have come to accept stories populated by familiar-looking humans as easily as we do those by clothed rabbits, musical plants, and talking mice. And in the comics world, even what we accept as “familiar looking” in human form admits of much more stylization, conventional iconography, and distortion than we are accustomed to think about. The grotesque as a stylistic tradition of biomorphic play, whether humorous or horrifying or, perhaps inescapably, a mixture of both, has meaningful implications for the funny animal. The grotesque body, write contemporary literary scholars Justin D. Edwards and Rune Grauland, “that is incomplete or deformed forces us to question what it means to be human: these queries sometimes arise out of the literal combination of human and animal traits or, at other times, through the conceptual questions about what it means to deviate from the norm,” and will lead us “to embrace uncertainty over certainty” (3).11 Such is the playful threat, whether gentle or more insistent, of so many and various funny animals in comics history.12 In an age of mass animal slaughter (for food resources) and of imperialist and genocidal racisms grounded in human-animal hierarchies (for labor, territorial, and natural resources), funny animals lure us into accepting animalized creatures as persons who are partly yet sympathetically mysterious to us: we accept the fictional pact of entering into their interests and lives as if we too belonged among them, yet we reserve our difference; we know they look and may behave in ways

58

58

Glenn Willmott

unexpected by us or impossible to us. Funny animals have their own physical and moral universe, in classic humor strips ranging from Jimmy Swinnerton’s Little Bears (1895) to George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (1913–44), Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse (from 1930), Walt Kelly’s Pogo (1943–75), Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes (1985–95), and Melissa DeJesus and Ed Powers’s My Cage (2007–10), as well as more somber graphic fictions like Adam Hines’s Duncan the Wonder Dog (2010) and Michael DeForge’s Ant Colony (2014). In Mickey Mouse comics, touched on previously, we do not look for satirical winks in the distorted, stylized garb and anatomy of the musoid hero. He escapes easy social or political classifications: his black body and white face cancel out each other’s racialized associations, his diminutive size and shorts may suggest a child in age, but his speech, actions, and species association with mice suggest he is a fully grown person (this is more evident in other appearances, as in his first two animated films in which he is an airplane pilot and a cowboy). None of his features is satirical or parodic of conventional human (or mouse) qualities. Confronted by his curious form, we do not look, even, for humor—some element of delight or pleasure, perhaps, but nothing laughable. An adult man or woman in the same shorts, or with huge feet, would be funny because of the contrast in expectations. But we expect Mickey to be nothing but Mickey. He is a stylistic unity of aggregate stuff, an appealing grotesque. This is true even of a human figure like E. C. Segar’s Popeye, who retains a residual social typage of the uneducated sailor. This typage motivated how Popeye first appeared as an incidental character in Thimble Theatre in 1929, but it is not what made Popeye great in subsequent years. A lumpy, protean figure of impossible ingenuity and chivalric perfection, cast in a chaotic universe with an adopted baby, Popeye himself declares his unique, un-pin-downable but resilient nature:  “No matter what ya calls me—I am what I  am an’ tha’s all I yam!”13 Might we not feel the same could be said by many of these weird new creatures of modern storytelling? That the appeal of animalized characters is their resistance to both models of persons and models of animals at large, in the chance to be strange insistences of what they are? This does not mean that funny animals are sublime or illegible icons. Charles Schulz’s Snoopy is, for example, like the children who are his peers, a caricature of big-headedness. Thus his flourishing inwardness, and the psychological preoccupations of the strip generally, are represented formally. Nor does he require a mirror world of other personified animals to justify his presence. Snoopy leads the way in liberating the funny animal figure from its Golden Age fantasy genre habitats, to become a free-floating character-type able to appear in comics of very diverse kinds. They may not even be funny any more, the ludic quality of the grotesque modulating into a mood more earnestly or darkly weird, as with the irascible aardvark of Dave Sim’s Cerebus or the abused domestic animals of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s We3. In the historical adaptation of caricature to comics, the particular iconological institution of political satire largely falls away as content from mainstream caricature’s stylistic shell. Later on, even the comical of comics and the “funny” of funny animals become mere possibilities among possibilities within the fictional

59

The Animalized Character and Style

59

worlds open to comics as a modern artifactual tradition. What remains genetic to the funny animal and endures, however, is the plastic inhumanity or animalism of the grotesque—now removed from the blank wall, cornice, or page of ornamental arts and placed in a narrative of characters, plots, and the imagined social worlds that sustain them. What remains of the generic meaning of caricature, therefore, is no longer the societal and political typage corresponding to nineteenth-century realism in which exaggeration selects and signifies conventional social meanings, but the empty shell of grotesque stylization as it remains quizzically indicative of social identity, a social identity that may no longer be grasped by any conventional iconology, and is felt rather as a pleasurable or disturbing mystery in the unbounded abstraction of style itself. When we read comics, we recognize their figures immediately as artifactual traditions whose material is style. Mickey Mouse does not look like a hybrid mixture of human and mouse, nor does he act like one: he is his own, unified shape and has his own gestural and behavioral identity. He is a fantasy animal that is at once both human and nonhuman, and enjoys a plastic unity of style that is pleasing to us, inviting our identification with this paradoxically anthropomorphic escape from the human. Why would we be drawn to identify with or take pleasure in a subjectivity that is such an estranged, alternative kind of humanity? The grotesque caricature no longer offers pleasure in signifying satirically what we are, but, with more open-ended humor, the possibility and sometimes the question of what we are or might be.

Artifacts of possible animals Dovetailing with this tradition of the visual grotesque in comics is one that renders more thematically explicit its biomorphic play with conceptions of the human: all those animal fables, trickster tales, and shapeshifter lore in popular traditions of storytelling. These stories with not-properly-animal, but not-properly-human personages, with didactic messages or covert warnings, but also thrills and fun, are ubiquitous across cultures and deep into time. Prior to the twentieth century, these stories were for the most part confined to a cultural world distinct from the institutions of art and literature, in myth, folk and fairy tales, and stories for children. Talking animals appear in high-art storytelling only sporadically in rare forms of adult allegory, as in Chaucer or Swift, and later in Orwell.14 The werewolves and vampires, the hares and tortoises, the bear mothers and crow fathers of animalized narrative all belong to cross-generational storytelling practices with an educational and sometimes social-structural purpose; yet in comics their pedagogic and social roles are loosened, cut adrift from any obligatory connection with conventional iconological meanings, and they become more ambiguous kinds of actors in their worlds. The didactic animal fable character, especially as conveyed in children’s literature, remains the basis of classic funny animals such as Donald Duck or Krazy Kat, as well as animalized superheroes from Batman to Wolverine, and even, I will later suggest, of resolutely human characters like Tintin who cohabit with fantasy

60

60

Glenn Willmott

creatures like Milou/Snowy.15 But what they allegorize or mean, if anything, is left indeterminate or imagined anew by their comics creators.16 In this way, the funny animal stories born with the modern comic strip assimilated the previous century’s animal fable for children, but as sensual storyworld and style became more important, they were free to reinvent the way its character figures balanced the possibilities of pleasurable mistakes, mischief, or transgression against moral restitution. In particular, in these earlier tales, the animal mask or body allowed for the defamiliarization of human traits—selfish violence perceived in wolves, innocence in songbirds, curiosity in cats—and for the staging of moral dramas of idealized forms of appetite, vanity, nurture, charity, etc., while in turn naturalizing these simplifications. In comics history, the ludic and biomorphic freedom of the genre quickly ventures beyond such conventional mappings of idealized human traits onto allegorical animal bodies. Donald Duck and Krazy Kat have no moral cognates in conventional virtues; they are their own ethical individuals or species. The defamiliarization effect of personified animals is still there, and so is the sense in which whatever they mean is naturalized in nature at large, yet with a crucial difference. Nature, as now inferred by the comics reader, is no longer taxonomically stable or biologically recognizable; its normal classifications prove volatile. As a result, in modern comics, the defamiliarizationnaturalization strategy of the animal fable genre henceforth defamiliarizes both human and animal under the alluringly stylized sign, however hermetic, of an inaccessible or uncertain nature at large. Indeed, such an implied nature, like a hidden Moreau’s laboratory island from which style’s creatures are born, ceases to appear to us as a timeless and originary source of character qualities or values, and instead shares the volatility and feedback loops of human history. Disney’s Donald Duck, just like Alex Raymond’s Lion Man or Jim Davis’s Garfield, is not regulated by a simply conventional animal nature, but by some more heteronomous, uncanny representation of nature in every way as historical and fragile as our own. Thus the immediate generic raw materials of caricature and animal fable, and the deeper tradition of grotesquerie and animal education myths and legends, in modern comics produce a new kind of “character” icon that expresses these uncertainties about natural and cultural traits. The funny animal reflects the authors’ and readers’ sense of a precarious or disintegrated social identity radically resolved by style, and of an ethical subjectivity torn dizzyingly—hence the tendency to absurd humor—from any grounding in a fixed natural order. When considering both the funny animal in comics and the personified animal in stories and iconologies of modernity at large, the funny animal can be seen not merely as a subgenre figure in comics art, but moreover as the archetype of a nearly ubiquitous, wholly unique, and deceptively profound modern character that is categorically neither human nor nonhuman, is made coherent not by mimetic traits but by the unity of an artist’s style, and is made recognizable as a possible person/animal by the familiarity of style itself as the marker of an artifactual object tradition. Produced by the fluidity of the plastic line and color field rather than the staccato of the written word, the funny animal of comics is the progenitor of

61

The Animalized Character and Style

61

those swarms of personified animals that now surround us in advertising, games, toys, film, television, and web design. As a character who must be grasped as a particular kind of stylistic artifact in order to make sense and be recognized as a coherent person, the comics character is hardly recognizable in the same way we understand conventional literary characters. Mickey is a loopy, curvy thing of balls and tubes drawn in exactly the same way as everything in his storyworld:  easy, swooping lines of round, blunt, soft, smooth, airy shapes, nothing too big or too small. Everything is fully lit, unshaded, visible. Overly complex things like floors and buildings trail off languorously into empty spaces of it-doesn’t-matter-what. Style works both functionally, to unify cognitive incoherence in a purely aesthetic way, and semiotically, to express (in this case) a world in which character is holistically embedded, in which things including persons are clear, open, and distinct without gradation or ambiguity. Herman observes that stories typically involve storyworlds built from middle-sized objects, neither dwarfing nor eluding characters, able to engage them in meaningful action (Storytelling 75). Mickey Mouse is a typically middle-sized object in this sense, but placed in a highly stylized world of reductively middle-sized objects in which anything a bit too detailed, like a shoe style, vanishes into cartoon simplification while anything just a bit too large, like a room, bleeds into empty space. The result is a myopic fantasy world of characters enjoying a homogeneous identity with nature, easy perception, and ready grasp of their situation. So far I have focused on iconography and iconology: the analyses respectively of form and meaning in figural signs. These modes of analysis are basic to understanding comics art. Yet in speaking also of the unifying function of style and the cognition of character as artifact, I have also departed from figural signs to refer to nonfigural or abstract forms. Jan Baetens has argued that abstraction is intrinsic to comics and works against both its figural and narrative modes. While I am persuaded that this tension may be inevitable, I suggest that abstraction also enables such reading processes in comics. The historical institutions of abstraction as a practice—here ranging across the modernist style expectations of comics, both generic and individualistic—shape the way readers infer the sensual and ecological nature of characters in storyworlds.17 The abstraction of style both (1)  makes possible the recognition of cognitively incoherent model persons as artifactually stabilized characters (Mickey is a familiarly generic anthropomorphic animal icon, or “funny animal”), and (2) filters the inferential comprehension of characters, objects, and holistic storyworlds themselves through expressive artifactual qualities (Mickey is an uncomplicated, soft-lined thing—just like his shoes or the stones on which he stands). Style aggregates word and image into the unity of character, and also affects how we feel about a character independently from its mimesis of a thoughtful mind and practical body. In sum, then, considered as an icon, the animalized character (1) is inferentially recognized (a)  in its storytelling situation as a stylistic artifact, proper to models normalized by modern comics for possible persons and objects, and (b) in its storyworld, as both a person and an object; (2) in person and object registers, affords both figural and abstract comprehension; and (3) in the latter, engages both

62

62

Glenn Willmott

symbolic (culturally scripted) and empathetic (human developmental) reading processes.

Reading for animalized experience Beyond both figuration and abstraction, to be recognized fully as characters rather than as mere conceptual or emotive icons, to live and breathe for us as beings we can identify with or against, animalized characters need to have functions in stories. In addition to evoking thoughts and feelings for us, they must have thoughts and feelings of their own entangled in a storyworld, and to act thereupon. This leads us more deeply into the realm of fiction and narratology. Here, I will look at ideas about how we discern and understand the meaning of animalized characters in comics storyworlds. First, I will return to the person-object distinction in the context of narrative action and focalization. This is a real-life cognitive processing distinction that is shaped by both psychological and cultural learning, and I find it useful to bring in categories of what Herman calls “models of persons” developed by the philosopher Amélie Oksenberg Rorty in the context of meaningful action. Rorty’s categories, while being finer tuned than the raw person-object dichotomy, are also transcultural permutations on ontological possibilities rather than arbitrary cultural scripts. In this connection I find narratologist Mieke Bal’s view of focalization particularly illuminating as a bridge between theory of mind and the narratology of action, and one that leads to a second, aesthetic axis of possibility that intersects the first. For focalization is a useful way to measure degrees of anthropomorphic versus zoomorphic representation of liminal characters in action, whether they are more person or more object. Understanding the different kinds of action possible for animalized characters is an Aristotelian key to understanding their ethical horizons and implications for readers. What does one have to be, or show, in order to be considered a person? Returning to this question, Rorty’s answer anticipates that of current narratologists: it depends on the situation in which we encounter an object, and what we thereby apprehend of its ethical qualities. In practice we go through life employing different and incompatible ideas of personhood. We resort to an array of possible notions of what constitutes a person, and Rorty shows that this range is expressed in literary history. The representation of persons may be constituted, for example, by acts belonging to a genealogy or destiny (Heracles), as a set of traits and dispositions (Shakespeare’s Falstaff ), as a transcendent center of choice (Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus), or as focalization, an expression of conscious perception or perspective (Beckett’s Malone); these are only a few of the ten categories identified by Rorty. Her notion of a heterogeneous range is important for present purposes because it means there is no one or certain way that we recognize funny animals as people, hence no one way to identify with them in stories. Rorty’s most provocative distinction is between what she calls the “character” and the “person”: the character is constituted by a bundle of traits and dispositions, whereas the person is a “unified center of choice and action” at the presumed core

63

The Animalized Character and Style

63

of traits and dispositions. Either of these may be “persons” in Herman’s sense, in which mind is fused with but irreducible to embodiment—though Rorty’s “person” meets Herman’s expectation that a person’s action will be mindful, rather than merely psychologically mechanical or behavioral (Storytelling 195). Thus Herman points to the broadest polarities of inference in the person-object range, yet these break down further into the developmental ontological classifications proposed by Zunshine, and, within the range of the person alone, the permutations offered by Rorty (and beyond these, of course, into culturally scripted types). The traditional funny animal, like Mickey Mouse, may be individualized yet still be a loosely articulated character rather than a person in Rorty’s sense: he or she does not choose who to be or become, does not struggle with his or her own individual identity. There is no ego or pour-soi anterior to traits and dispositions, or to their embodiment. This suspension of problems of identity in action is not necessarily simplistic or primitive, and Rorty sees “character”—to avoid confusion and locate her category in the person-object range, I will henceforth refer to this category as a “wysiwyg [what you see is what you get] person”—as a valuable way of thinking about self and ethics differently than in terms of unified ideals of persons: it allows us “to inquire into the ways various traits support different conceptions of responsibility,” and thus to “move away from the agonies of self-definition, of strong personal identification, and turn to thinking about the sorts of traits of imagination and sociability that might be socially and politically beneficial” (Rorty 96–7). In this view, a funny animal character may not seem like a realistic model for us as individuals, but may embody sets of traits and embodied constraints, hence patterns of action tuned to the nature of its world, that invite imaginative translation into our own lives. Rorty sees the wysiwyg person as unified by embodiment rather than by abstract mind; mind and body are not separable, and permeate the self. Is Mickey intrinsically good, or does he choose to be good? Deciding whether mental predicates of the wysiwyg person are reducible to body or not may be impossible: modes of thought and feeling may seem indeterminately self-conscious or behavioral, so that character is liminally personal, straddling a borderline touching both (acting) person and (behavioral) object, whether human or nonhuman. This has suggestive implications for the traditional funny animal, in which ethical and political thinking would be linked with unfamiliar bodies—and so with the partial unfamiliarity or unknown of nature itself—as a challenging if risky ecological and biopolitical horizon for identifying our capacities and responsibilities (Rorty 95–6; see also 81, 86). While the funny animal may be deployed by comics artists in a variety of ways (and we shall consider them to be Rorty’s “persons” in Ant Colony), as animalized icons they may never lose the layering of this wysiwyg form, which in most cases gently, but sometimes violently, loosens our sense of what a human person is and can or cannot be, or can and cannot decide. When we see a funny animal in comics, we are prepared (by artifactual experience) for a package of traits and dispositions that will slice obliquely through familiar nature, both human and nonhuman. We recognize a kind of person that will stir up or find themselves in trouble of some sort, who cannot help but do so, such is their obscure or indeterminate

64

64

Glenn Willmott

classification, hence inferred ethical orientations, in nature. Looking at Mickey Mouse, this profile of the funny animal may make us laugh, but only with the sobering thought that humans are just that kind of animal too. For funny animals to be meaningful to us as characters, they will have either to be significant actors in their stories or focalizers of these stories for us. Character as an expression of action is an Aristotelian ideal. Aristotle says that all literature is a making (poesis) that is an imitation of something (mimesis), even if that something is imaginary. An effective story is going to imitate a meaningful sequence of events. A meaningful sequence refers to the plot as a series of intelligibly linked actions—actions that matter in relation to other actions. The agency for such actions is character. It was very important to Aristotle that character be understood as the signifier of action, that is, of ethical and cognitive processes expressed in praxis, rather than as a static assemblage of historical fates, traits, or capacities. Hence he evaluated the significance of character according to its representation of agency, not as a mere icon (Aristotle 23–4). To be an authentic representation of the hero, Heracles on stage has to act on the plot as would Heracles, not merely wear his costume and show his strength. What brings comics icons to life as characters is the representation of thinking, feeling personifications that impinge meaningfully on their world. What is a meaningful action for a funny animal? Unfortunately, Aristotle did not linger in the Poetics to unpick the problem of what constitutes or how one recognizes characters apart from other figures; this was largely obvious in tragedy, where he pursued familiar human actors and their choices.18 From the perspective of the comics form, however, in which nearly anything might be animated, this process of recognition is more ambiguous, and the boundary lines between what we recognize as human agency and nonhuman action are more blurry. Aristotle says stories work best when we can identify with characters and so with their agency. But how can this identification simply and smoothly apply to worlds in which nature, including any ground rules for the nonhuman nature of characters and their distinction from nature at large, is abstract and fabricated? For the animalized character we confront an aesthetic problem alongside a cognitive one: the meaning of action depends not only, in the cognitive domain, on the indeterminacy of an action-behavior distinction in the ascription of person versus object categories; but also, in the aesthetic domain, on the ambivalence of zoomorphic mimesis of sensual agency and experience of (human or nonhuman) nature, which I will refer to as zoomorphic focalization. The latter displays itself in the mimesis of patterns of coming to grips with imaginary lived environments, patterns that are by degrees either more or less recognizably human. Hence animalized character action is open to a double estrangement: it is both liminally behavioral, tending to inanimate nonmeaning, and ambiguously alien, evoking unfamiliar or alternative meanings. The one belongs to a cognitive characterization axis in reading, the other to a narrative focalization axis that I  draw from Herman, moving from animal allegory through anthropomorphic projection, zoomorphic projection, and Umwelt exploration.19 The two axes may be mapped, along with elements I have already discussed for the reading of animalized characters in comics, as shown in Figure  2.1. Note that a text’s model

65

CHARACTER RECOGNITION

ARTIFACT RECOGNITION

AC Focalization Continuum Anthroponorphic

AC Characterization Continuum

Model substances

Model artifacts

Symbolic Representations Empathetic Representations

Model persons Figural AC Abstract

Object

Model animals

Model plants

AC Icon

The Animalized Character and Style

Person

Zoomorphic

AC among objects in storyworld

Figure 2.1 Reading the animalized character (AC).

65

66

66

Glenn Willmott

objects, if in any way active, may be recognized almost anywhere on either axes (the personification of a substance may seem implausible, but the Spider-Man villain, Sandman, a personified substance without intrinsic form, offers an example); hence their arbitrary locations in the storyworld.20 Mieke Bal insists on a concept of character as a relationship between focalization and action that is instructive for the funny animal. Focalization is the narratological term she deploys to describe, more accurately than perspective or point of view, the way that perceptual agency mediates access to story content. She finds that the iconic assemblage of character comes alive in focalization, which she describes as a glue holding model persons to storyworlds (119, 142). In accepting the focalization of funny animal characters, we suspend our disbelief and enter the subjective realities offered by comics and the peculiar ethical twist that an animalized character—an alternative humanity—can offer. In doing so, we momentarily accept that we ourselves as humans may be more exotic, more obscure, more vulnerable, more dangerous, more protean, and yes, perhaps more grotesque or ludicrous than we think.21 In the remainder of this chapter, I will look more closely at three examples of funny animal characters in action. After returning to Mickey Mouse, I compare him with another classic funny animal character, Mousketeer Minus from a 1956 comic book, before turning to an alternative funny animal, a singularly “proactive” ant in DeForge’s 2014 graphic novel, Ant Colony.

Characters in ecologies of scale How we read Mickey Mouse as a particular model of an animalized character will depend on our prior experience with both Disney’s cartoon worlds and of comics as a genre. Total inexperience and complete knowledge define the limits of this spectrum. An unfamiliar reader will see in Mickey a personified (speaking, interacting) character often half the size of others around it, in morphology upright with two arms and two legs and frontal binocular vision, and in this sense humanoid. The body is bulbous with flexible stick limbs and tail, and bulbous arms, feet, and head. The head features a grotesquely prognathic jaw tipped by a bulbous nose, a toothless mouth, vertically ovoid eyes that vary from one-quarter to onehalf the size of his head, and large, circular ears that, defying dimensional space, appear in the same aspect no matter what the perspective. His coloration is black and white. The white segments of his hand, feet, and pelvis may be recognized as clothing, but could plausibly be anatomical; recognition as clothing depends either on inductive inference from other creatures more evidently wearing clothing of similar style or, more likely, from familiarity with cartoon styles generic to comics. Yet even the clothing is ambiguous, an indeterminate and possibly vaudevillian or clownish mixture of formal gloves, child short pants, and workaday shoes. An imaginary first contact with Mickey is decidedly grotesque in biological form and manner:  an exuberant, sweat-spraying, wiry but bulbous, pot-bellied creature of uncertain age that mixes natural and artificial forms in a ludicrous style. Is it more or less disturbing that such a creature’s kinship with humanity is evoked

67

The Animalized Character and Style

67

by his standard English speech, his almost humanoid form, and his conventional hand gestures? The benevolence of his character reassures us that monstrosity may be benign, pleasurable, and even—where the story shapes possibilities for focalization through Mickey as its protagonist—pleasurable to identify with. Overall, Mickey’s portrayal expresses the hidden message of all funny animals to us: the wish to be inhuman enough to escape humanity, yet to be human enough to perfect humanity. This grotesquerie makes the world (whose world?) a better place. In one daily strip of 1933, with the help of his horse friend Horace, Mickey hypnotizes a team of ape scientists with their own ray gun in order to save the world from their mischief, telling them to “work for humanity” and maybe “invent something that’ll make the whole world better!”22 Funny animals are our fantasy of being better than ourselves, indeed better than human, without ceasing to recognize who we are. If we set that pleasure, with great difficulty, aside, the funny animal looms more disturbingly as the grotesque it really is, and the risky absurdity, the humanist iconoclasm it represents, however liberating. What prevents the reader, familiar or unfamiliar, from feeling anxiety or downright horror is the modernist unity of style: Mickey is stylistically one with his non-species others and with the handdrawn beauty of his world, an aesthetic whole. This style, pulling every figure in the composition toward pure abstraction, is unassuming yet imbued with grace. A reader familiar with Disney’s cartoon worlds will hardly notice grotesque or abstract effects, and will instead readily identify the iconic “mouse” we know as Mickey. We do not confuse him with other species—nor with other “mice” like Minnie—in other episodes. As a character species, Disney mice are typically benign but humble actors in their world. They are notably shorter than other Disney species, and associated with working class or rural backgrounds. Thus they retain the allegorical traces of animal fable, reflecting in their vulnerable size and non-predatory nature an image of what Mickey’s era idealized as “the common man”:  people of good will but modest means, little individual power, and limited station in social life. The tradition of the mouse as a thief or trickster is not retained, except in Mickey’s own loopy ingenuity in getting out of trouble. This DIY ingenuity, along with modesty and altruism, help to define Mickey within his species as an individual character, and a more powerful one. He is an animal trickster merged with social typology, yet he is also uniquely himself: a nonhuman that can focalize human desires from outside human identification. Thus he can hypnotize us into thinking like a “mouse” coming to the aid of our human selves, just as easily as he hypnotizes “apes” in aid of a “humanity” to which they, the mouse, and the horse all insistently if obliquely belong. The comic typically uses not only dialogue but also facial expressions and visual gaze between characters to underscore this fantasy of cross-species agency and reciprocity, playing out a kind of mimicry of focalization among them, each a lucid mirror of another, suggesting a homogenous Umwelt. This style covertly reinforces a strongly anthropocentric message, despite an apparent animal diversity, as Michael Chaney has argued regarding funny animals more widely (131–2). In Disney strips, this ultimate message is often predominant, yet even there we may notice a zoomorphic fraying at the seams. Mickey Mouse self-reflexively returns us to Aristotle’s notion

68

68

Glenn Willmott

of character as mimesis of form and action, but in a bizarre conditional tense shot through with animalized focalizations: “If everybody was like you,” Horace tells Mickey, comparing him to the ape scientists and implicitly to us, “th’ world wouldn’t need t’ be no better.” That is, only if we give up rigid ideas about the difference between humans and animals may we identify with and unlock the full implications of Mickey’s moral action. What hypnotic focalization must draw us in, and what animalized shapeshifting must take place to do so? The funny animal always asks us, more or less explicitly, what the nature of “human” action is, and what kind of “humanity” or “whole world” it works its acts upon. These are liberating questions whose profound risks to values and identity are here veiled in the cognitive unification and sensual reassurance of the styles used to present Mickey, among other funny animals. The human must remain a kind of inference principally from the action and focalization (speech, gaze, perception, gesture, posture, activity) of wysiwyg characters that are themselves liminal model persons, vulnerable to reinterpretation. This is why the intrusion of an explicitly human figure in a classic funny animal comic like Mickey Mouse (like the word “humanity” identified with “everybody”) tears through rather than strengthens the normatively anthropocentric message:  it violates the shift, in animalized characters, of the human concept from a reified and transcendental to a manipulable and wysiwyg basis of recognition. When conventionally iconic humans themselves appear with funny animals, they rarely support a normative human sovereignty: they are either transgressive types lured into the animalized world (Disney’s film animation career began with the Alice comedy series from 1923–7, which featured a live-action girl drawn into a cartoon-land of talking animals), or, more typically, they are mildly satirical types of orthodoxy, authority, and boredom. Thus, to continue with the mouse theme, in the inaugural issue of National Comics’ The Three Mouseketeers (March–April 1956), the mice are similar to Mickey in grotesque iconography and animalizing iconology, but are more mischievous in a world in which the imagination-bereft human is their foil (see selected panels, Figure 2.2).23 In this sequence, the female human adult and child are represented only by their lower legs, as if to emphasize their lack of iconic or character interest. It is not that they are mysterious, but that you don’t need to see any more to grasp their significance; their heedlessness, their banal appendages and clothing—even their indifferent vacuum cleaner—are synecdoches for the death-like boredom or hollowness of a supposedly proper, mature human life. The woman sees a cherry pit, which is to her sight merely waste and must be abolished. We focalize via the “mouse,” Minus, as the gaze of the humans is left at some unrepresented distance. Minus sees not a cherry pit but a valuable baseball, as this object has been imaginatively recycled into a different identity. As a “person,” Minus is equivalent to Mickey on a scale of characterization. On a scale of focalization, however, he is much more animalized—an anthropomorphic projection into animal experience deeper than Disney attempts. In Figure 2.2, the animalized focalization foregrounds the spatial contrast between human scale and mouse scale, and their respective differences in experiencing the same world.

69

The Animalized Character and Style

69

Figure 2.2 From The Three Mouseketeers, no. 1, March–April 1956 (National Comics). By Sheldon Mayer.

From Minus’s focalization, the human world is a macro-world beyond the middlesize realm of objects he can adequately perceive and control. Fragments of bodies, fragments of furniture, even weird fragments of action: the speech balloons reach beyond the frame, while the vacuum cleaning is first felt and heard as an unexplained “Whirrr-rrrrrr” and an impossible flight of objects before the fragment of its apparatus appears, yet without human connection, in the next two panels. The human Umwelt has its own experience severed from that of the mouse, for whom it is something like what Timothy Morton has called a hyperobject—a thing that is too large in time and space to be directly apprehended as such, having no fixed location, yet also inescapable and impacting our life, like global warming or plastic. Here, of course, the estranged focalization that allows human life itself to be grasped as a vast hyperobject, source of both raw materials for mouse life and risks

70

70

Glenn Willmott

to its security, is ironic for the human reader. We are far from the homogeneously middle-size, anthropotropic world of Mickey. Hence Minus is characterized by different causes of and conditions for action. When Minus gets sucked up by the machine, the girl screams, and he makes fun of her confused recognition of his identity as a measure of agency—is he a harmless mouse, or a fearsome lion? Indeed, what is he? Unlike with Mickey, his human clothing requires an explanation: it is stolen doll clothing, again a creatively repurposed object. The girl is reprimanded (unfairly) for eating cherries and dirtying the floor with pits—requiring she conform to rules of restraint of desires and of things in proper places. In the panel immediately following those reproduced here, she is then reprimanded for claiming to have seen a mouse dressed in her doll’s clothing: “Oh, you and your imagination! Turn off the vacuum cleaner and wash up for lunch!” Interestingly, this last panel shows only the machine, and the household cat lost in its own thoughts: the speech balloons enter from out of frame, and neither mice nor humans are visible. The insistence upon imagination is coincident with the severing of sightlines and character focalization. We identify with the hypothetical creature, a subjectivity now left to our imagination to visualize, that is open to imagining animals in clothes and cherry pits as baseballs. The child is represented iconologically as a liminal creature, not (yet) properly human—a thing with imagination that fails to perform correct identifications in her world. The importance of the child figure and focalizations to those of the funny animal, often revealed in the explicit pairing or doubling of the child and animalized characters, as in Disney’s inaugural cartoons: this compositional mode is not merely an accident of market niche, but grows inevitably out of the indeterminate meaning, pleasure, and power of the funny animal itself as an alternative “possible humanity.” The modern animalized child is a sign not of primitivism, but of the futureoriented generation gap that would define itself politically later in the century. While the funny animal flourished as playful grotesquerie in the institution of humor comics in the first half of the twentieth century, these personified creatures very likely influenced the darker iconology of animalized superheroes from Batman (1939) onward, and they have certainly taken many more various shapes and shades of feeling since then. Sometimes the humor in these creatures has modulated into other feelings, as in the meditative illuminations of Lynda Barry’s What It Is (2008), or it has been evacuated altogether, as in the disturbing violence of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s We3 (2004). In order to indicate the funny animal’s historical liberation to that open play of feeling, I will end this exploration by asking what we make of the identity and actions of those characters called “ants” in the grimly comedic yet melancholic phantasmagoria of DeForge’s graphic novel, Ant Colony (see selected panels, Figure 2.3). As a character species, DeForge’s “ants” are unapologetically abstract. The main characters are about as minimally anthropomorphic as you can get: they have faces like human masks, sparely composed of simple dots and lines, and they use two stick arms on an up-tilted portion of their body as humans would do. They talk with a sophisticated range of jarringly human concepts and idioms; as in the other comics considered here, their verbal language does not imitate in any way actual

71

The Animalized Character and Style

71

Figure 2.3 From Ant Colony, n.p. Copyright Michael DeForge. Used with permission by Drawn & Quarterly.

animal communication, though they do read each others’ scents. They are multibulbous black things with what appear to be multi-colored, x-ray-visible digestive tracts and organs, standing on seven stick legs. In short, they are only formicoid enough and humanoid enough to allow the animalized abstractions to signify as “ant” characters. What does this mean? In DeForge’s world, this means they think, feel, and talk like conventional human characters; but because we can see inside their bodies, their nature and needs as objects are more intrinsic to their identities and possibilities, and because their tiny size is evoked both in words and focalized with reference to objects around them, this physical nature is a vulnerable one. Since the ants’ sexual differentiation and reproductive process are quite different from humans, the way their sexuality and social lives are gendered is quite different as well; males and females are rigidly separated in domestic lives and social roles, yet their sexual preferences are unrestricted. The grotesque physicality and the bizarre size of the ants are crucial to the plot, which is about the wanderings of these creatures in a natural landscape produced mainly by giant forces around them—swarms of similar-sized creatures, titanic spiders and bees, and god-like humans—which must be negotiated. The ants are searching for a new home in an unpredictable, often catastrophic world of human and animal making that they can only minimally control. There is not much of middle size to get a narrative grip on. Their species characterization prompts the reader to identify with being subject to a sublimely scaled, human/animal nature, a manufactured landscape in which pleasure, sorrow, violence, and value are always tinged with an ecology that is grotesque and tending to the ludicrous. To imitate the experience of such a world, DeForge chooses a surreal Umwelt of jarring colors and forms, and non-Euclidean, cubist perspectives. The environmental rocks in Figure  2.3, which might be middle size, turn out to be of a substance toxic to ants—artificial sweetener left behind by humans. In the story, the ant with the tiny spade has just told his companions that he is tired of looking for a colony to take them in, and is “building a new colony” from scratch. The disparity between the ant’s digging action and the grandeur of his aim is poignantly ridiculous. The other ants show no inclination to help, and are indifferent to his later plea: “We can design it how we want. We can make things different! We can make things better than before.

72

72

Glenn Willmott

. . . I’ve spent my whole life just—just moving tiny bullshit around some other tiny bullshit, you know what I  mean?” The theme of Ant Colony is experimentation with nature—with the nature of one’s own identity, capacities, and possibilities of transformation, and with those of an ecologically bounded, but also ecologically unknown, communal life. DeForge uses the funny animal to reveal personal and ecological nature as a kind of indeterminate, playful but dangerous grotesquerie, and to explore what meaningful identity, action, and kinship can be in such a world. It would not work to do this with mimetic representations of ants, nor of humans, nor of ant-human hybrids lacking the stylized unity and imaginative surplus of DeForge’s “ants.” We must see these “ants,” and see with them, to wonder at the bewildering, biological uncertainty of what we can and cannot be or do. To be seduced, and actually scared, into seeing our fragility in the world, and the responsibility this demands, from the perspective of a possible, but unclassifiable, humanity. This is an ecologically oriented version of what all funny animals implicitly ask of us, as attractive icons of stylistically unified values and traits, as ambiguously human perceivers and victims of their world, and as grotesque wysiwygs that act according to their natures. What must humanity do? How might it demur? The meaning of the funny animal is always, then, an aestheticized question. It is an exceptional artifact we let tunnel under our fences dividing animals from humans, and humans from themselves. How it does so, with what values or ideas at stake, and to what conservative or subversive ends, are questions specific to individual genres, strips, and characters. I have aimed to show the common semiotic genealogy of the funny animal and the common field of questions opened up by them without obscuring the creative differences, the individual preoccupations and meanings, which distinguish them. As a final gesture, I would like to return to my reference to Popeye as a grotesque figure. What is the purely human Popeye doing in theory of the funny animal? Popeye and other human comics characters belong to the same genealogy in the grotesque, but without roots in animal fable. Yet this genetic bond in the grotesque leads to strong convergences between animalized and conventional human characters. The iconic character represented in comics, because it is an abstractly stylized, plastic figure, is on a continuum with the monstrously more-than-human or nonhuman, and in this sense always opens to the animal. In comics, style is more powerful than anatomy, actual or conventional. Neither Popeye nor Charlie Brown have to look very human, or even look like Flash Gordon, Ernie Pook, or other distinctly human comics characters, to be recognized as human. When we recognize any of them, we are already wandering on the borderlines of orthodox humanity, lured by the pleasure of style, the hypnosis of focalization. In this sense, the funny animal is not an exceptional type of character, but the most direct expression of what lies at the heart of comics characters universally. In reading the funny animal, which comics has made a conventional practice, we assimilate to our fantasies of person and self a grotesquerie inseparable from signs of otherness. This is not the stereotypical xenophobic allegory in which exceptions to the norm are animalized or monstrous. On the contrary, funny animals solicit our delight and assimilation to a heterodox fantasy

73

The Animalized Character and Style

73

of the norm, rather than fear and exceptionality to it. Whether through the eyes of “mice” or “ants,” what we accept as the human norm is estranged, othered. The rest is up to “us.”

Notes 1 See Chaney 130. Chaney offers a salutary critique of the funny animal as a potentially subversive but often ultimately conservative character through which normative models of persons and anthropocentric sovereignty may be affirmed. Chaney provides both intrinsic arguments, reading characters in comics stories, and historicist ones, observing how comics are shaped by their publishing context. The present chapter indicates a range of political implications for the funny animal intrinsic to comics (for example, in the contrast I draw between the animalized characters of Disney and DeForge). A materialist reading of the political significance of comics, situating their reading in particular media, institutions, and economies, is an important envelope for the more formalist interpretation I pursue here. 2 On mimesis and poesis, see Aristotle 17–18, 20; and, on characters as objects distinguished by superiority or inferiority of virtue, the ethical base of action, Aristotle 18–19, 35–6 (Aristotle allows for but does not discuss characters not distinguished as such, 24–25). Aristotle is open to nonhuman or hybrid figures as characters, such as Cyclopses (19), but assimilates them to human models as narrative agents. N. B., I will use the term “mimesis” in Aristotle’s very capacious sense, rather than in the narrower usage, inspired by Erich Auerbach, that links it with realist style. The latter sense is relevant, however, to Scott McCloud’s proposition regarding subjective identification with comics characters on a realist-abstract continuum; see my next note. 3 According to McCloud, character icons will fall in pictorial style somewhere on a continuum between abstraction and mimesis (28). For example, the panther and wolves in Walt Disney’s cartoon movie The Jungle Book (1967) are closer to the mimetic end of this continuum than is Donald Duck; toward the more abstract end, where style increasingly overpowers mimesis, one may find such heavily stylized figures as SpongeBob SquarePants, or invented creatures like Tove Jansson’s Moomins and Jeff Smith’s Bonevillians. I am unable to pursue this proposition here, except to say that the notion of comics form offering a “masking” experience of reading is to me a compelling one, though the role of realist as opposed to other styles, in the context of variable notions of person and character developed in the present chapter, must remain an open question. 4 Miodrag demonstrates how style may be deployed in comics as a non-mimetic “metaphor icon” (177) which associates motivated (expressive) meanings with a semantics particular to the syntax and mimetic icons of a comics story. I would argue further that style always signifies (is always either expressive or associative in some way) and will always evoke this effect, whether implicitly and homogenously (the fractured, volatile world of Krazy Kat) or more explicitly and differentially (the world of Asterios Polyp studied by Miodrag). The comics character is always a sign with style. As an image icon, Snoopy connotes both domestic dog qualities and human qualities; the loose, very simple, flowing, and curvy style functions as a metaphor icon both to fuse these qualities into the sign of a seamless unity (we do not read him

74

74

5

6 7

8

9

10

11

12 13 14

15

16

17

18

Glenn Willmott as a chimera), and to connote a friendly, accessible nature (we would think of him more ambivalently were he rectilinear; angularity in character style has always had a strong effect in comics and is used judiciously, for example to differentiate Reggie from Archie). Erwin Panofsky provides an early foundation for this methodology where he distinguishes iconology, the historical study of the meaning of visual signs, from iconography, the historical study of style. This Herriman strip is reproduced in Willmott, plate 6. It would be intriguing, but beyond my scope, to trace the genealogy of the monstrous-cute figure in comics and modern visual culture from the first cute funny animals and Kewpies to My Little Pony and Pikachu, as a subgenre in the traditions I discuss herein. Kunzle has explored the roots of comics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century caricature traditions in depth. Other leading comics historians have affirmed this genealogy; see, for example, Walker (9–10) and Hatfield (para. 2). A nineteenth-century study of caricature by Thomas Wright, an antiquarian and scholar of medieval history and literature, roots this satirical genre in a tradition of the grotesque characterized by the comical in art more generally from antiquity onward. The defamiliarization effect of the grotesque is anticipated by John Ruskin, for whom it enables us, according to Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund, “to see humanity in a new light, revealing ourselves in unique guises, and linked to other forms of life” (17). Another literary scholar, Rémi Astruc, extends this argument to suggest that the grotesque unsettles readers’ ideas of the symbolic and hence cultural stability and normativity of their whole worlds (Astruc 253–5). This is Steve Baker’s claim in Picturing the Beast (125–39). This instance of Popeye’s oft-repeated declaration is from Thimble Theatre, King Features Syndicate, 4 January 1931; reproduced in E. C. Segar (175). An interesting exception is the new, realist personified animal stories, influenced by post-Darwinian science, which emerged coevally with comics, and were pioneered and popularized by Canadian writers E. T. Seton and C. D. G. in Wild Animals I Have Known (1896) and The Kindred of the Wild (1902), among many other story collections. In modern times, these folk animals flourish across myriad media and especially in children’s and young people’s cultures, finding homes in literature—Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit (1901) or A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)—and elsewhere; hence animated Alvin and the Chipmunks in film, puppetry Muppets on television, printed Pokémon on game cards, and the fad for knitted animal tuques. I here affirm and extend Joseph Witek’s observation that “the ‘funny animal’ genre takes these allegorical meanings [from the animal fable tradition] as a starting point but then proceeds to ignore, qualify, or reverse them” (110). In a way that intersects with the concerns of the present essay, I pursue the worldmaking background to character and plot in comics, and its implications for ecological ideas, in “Comics: Worldmaking in the Anthropocene.” That Aristotle in principle considered nonhuman agencies as consequential to plot is evident in his affirmation of the judicious representation of gods (35, 51) and even, in the action of Mitys’s statue (29), perhaps the mysterious animation of inorganic objects.

75

The Animalized Character and Style

75

19 I am importing here David Herman’s scale of “coarse” to “fine” grained representation of nonhuman experience (“Storyworld” 166), and I am adapting this scale to my understanding that such experience is rendered via character or narrator focalization. In Mickey Mouse comics, there is normally no attempt to render a (typically omniscient narrator) focalization that is not familiarly anthropomorphic. In Adam Hines’s Duncan the Wonder Dog, however, we encounter a range of diversely zoomorphic focalizations, from conventional funny animal characters assimilated to human social life yet who think and speak about their species difference in a human-dominated world, to more realistic images of animals in the wild rendered with speech bubbles either containing conventional speech or left blank (suggesting untranslatability?), to animal images without speech bubbles yet active and embedded in detailed environments. Zoomorphic focalization, the more it is animalized, tends toward character focalization, which is to say, more or less strictly tied to the assumed or inferred perceptual capacities of nonhuman focalizers. The less this is so, the more powerful are the anthropocentric frames of reference of a narrator focalizer—which the deliberately incommensurate focalization strategies of Duncan the Wonder Dog, for example, disrupt. 20 In the Animal Character location, for example, Mickey would be in the mid-upper right, Minus in the mid-upper middle, the protagonists of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s We3 to the upper left, and the eponymous dog of Nick Abadzis’s Laika in the lower far left. Characters in the lower, more nonperson range, unless they are supporting types (like Betty Boop’s slapstick cat, Bimbo), are less common. Some curious examples include the cartoon Pokémon creatures in animated cartoons and comics, which conflate data-defined traits and dispositions in species types with individuals significant to the plot, and the cat, Waldo, in Kim Dietch’s The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, which is a projected hallucination of another character’s repressed dispositions. 21 By “momentarily accept” I mean the kind of knowing immersion in artifactual possible worlds that Michael Saler has called an “ironic imagination.” 22 Reproduced in Walker (271). 23 This The Three Mouseketeers story is reproduced in Speigelman and Mouly (115–20).

Works cited Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Anthony Kenny. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2013. Astruc, Rémi. Le Renouveau du grotesque dans le roman du XXe siècle: Essai d’anthropologie littéraire. Paris: Editions Classiques Garnier, 2010. Baetens, Jan. “Abstraction in Comics.” SubStance 40.1 (2011): 94–113. Baker, Steve. Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation. 2nd edition. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 2001. Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 2nd edition. Trans. Christine van Boheemen. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997. Chaney, Michael A. “Animal Subjects of the Graphic Novel.” College Literature 38.3 (2011): 129–49. DeForge, Michael. Ant Colony. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2014. Edwards, Justin D., and Rune Graulund. Grotesque. New York: Routledge, 2013.

76

76

Glenn Willmott

Groensteen, Thierry. “Le Plus Grand Zoo du Monde.” In Animaux en Cases: Une Histoire Critique de la Bande Dessinée Animalière. Ed. Thierry Groensteen. Paris: Futuropolis, 1987. 8–13. Hatfield, Charles. “Introduction: Comics and Childhood.” ImageText 3.3 (2006). http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v3_3/introduction.shtml Herman, David. Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2013. Herman, David. “Storyworld/Umwelt: Nonhuman Experiences in Graphic Narratives.” SubStance 40.1 (2011): 156–81. Hines, Adam. Duncan the Wonder Dog. Richmond, VA: AdHouse, 2010. Kayser, Wolfgang. The Grotesque in Art and Literature. 1957. Trans. Ulrich Weisstein. New York: Columbia UP, 1981. Keen, Suzanne. “Fast Tracks to Narrative Empathy: Anthropomorphism and Dehumanization in Graphic Narratives.” SubStance 40.1 (2011): 135–55. Kunzle, David. The History of the Comic Strip. 2 volumes. Berkeley : U of California P, 1973, 1990. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. 1993. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Miodrag, Hannah. Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2013. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2013. Panofsky, Erwin. “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art.” In Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955. 26–54. Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg. Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind. Boston: Beacon P, 1988. Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art. London: Phaidon, 1996. Saler, Michael. As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Segar, E. C. Popeye Volume 1: “I Yam What I Yam.” Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2006. Spiegelman, Art, and Françoise Mouly, eds. The Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics. New York: Abrams, 2009. Thomson, Philip. The Grotesque. London: Methuen, 1972. Walker, Brian. The Comics Before 1945. New York: Abrams, 2004. Willmott, Glenn. “Comics: Worldmaking in the Anthropocene.” Modernism and the Anthropocene. Ed. Jon Hegglund and John McIntyre (forthcoming). Willmott, Glenn. Modern Animalism: Habitats of Scarcity and Wealth in Comics and Literature. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. Witek, Joseph. Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Speigelman, and Harvey Pekar. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1989. Wright, Thomas. A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art. 1865. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1968. Zunshine, Lisa. Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2008.

77

Part II S PECIES OF D IFFERENCE: F UNCTIONS OF A NIMAL A LTERITY IN G RAPHIC N ARRATIVES

78

79

Chapter 3 T H E P O L I T IC S A N D P O E T IC S O F A LT E R I T Y I N A DA M H I N E S’ S D U N C A N T H E W ON DE R   D O G Alex Link

Described by the New York Times as “ ‘Dr. Doolittle’ meets the Baader-Meinhof gang” (Kois), Adam Hines’s Duncan the Wonder Dog (2010) has received little critical attention to date, despite having been awarded a Los Angeles Times Book Prize (2010), a Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize (2011), and a Xeric Grant (2009).1 Yet Duncan contributes significantly to the growing body of early-twenty-first-century comics engaged in an interrogation of human-animal relationships, including, in addition to Hines’s text, We3 (2004–5), Sheep of Fools (2005), Pride of Baghdad (2006), Elmer (2010), and the Beast Wagon series (2015–7). Consistent with the general thrust of human-animal studies, a field of inquiry now taking shape across a range of disciplines, these comics urge a “rethinking of the stakes of anthropomorphic styles of animal representation” and challenge “assumptions about the distinctiveness of humans” vis-à-vis other animals (Herman 162–3). Indeed, animals—funny or otherwise—have been a major element of comics for over a century. Considering graphic narratives within an animal-studies framework can thus be particularly productive, opening new paths of inquiry at the intersection of comparative media studies, scholarship on popular culture, postcolonial studies, and race theory, while affording further insights into the history and theory of comics. Like the characters in traditional animal comics, Duncan’s animals can talk. Overall, however, the animality of Hines’s nonhuman characters takes priority over their anthropomorphic qualities. Duncan explores the social and political consequences of a world not of furry people, but of talking animals. By drawing parallels between tensions at work in both human and animal worlds—more specifically, by refracting ideas of species difference through concepts of cultural difference, and vice versa—Duncan creates a dialectical interplay between anthropomorphizing the nonhuman and zoomorphizing the human. In this sense, the text refigures animal alterity as a fundamentally (zoo)political question that both shapes and is shaped by more broadly understood political discourses of difference. To this end, Duncan explores how extending human language to animals only throws the barriers between human-animal understanding, now cast as

80

80

Alex Link

cross-cultural understanding, into starker relief, particularly by interrogating the fiction of “the animal” as a catch-all term for diverse species. Echoing work by Jacques Derrida and, especially, Donna Haraway, the narrative also identifies animal labor and commodification as a key tension in human-animal relations, particularly in how animals can be objectified and thereby rendered, as Haraway puts it, “killable” (78). Duncan’s narrative addresses the killability of the animal by considering the possibility of animal individualism and alterity, on the one hand, and the interconnections between humans and animals, on the other; by mapping conflicts between animals onto human power relations, and vice versa; and by exploring how human-animal relations reproduce themselves on scales ranging from the individual to the global to different ends and effects.

Can the talking animal speak? Hines’s nearly 400-page narrative, on which he worked from 2003 to 2009 (Hines “Talking Comics”), gives us a world in which animals can communicate clearly with humans and can assert their rights. But the text also raises questions about how cognizant humans are (or have been) about these animal abilities. Duncan is the first of a proposed fourteen volumes, and we do not actually meet a Duncan in it, though there is a “wonder dog”: the much-anticipated Antaeus, a possibly Messianic being with a dog’s body and human limbs. The narrative’s main thread concerns tensions among four principal agents in this world of animal selfadvocacy. Aaron Vollman is a human with presidential ambitions (59) about to become the Director of the Office of National Animal Control Policy (286). His sharpest critic is a mandrill named Voltaire, the representative of a large corporation run by a philanthropist supportive of animal welfare, Daniel Muir (141). Their argument runs parallel with the battle between Pompeii, a macaque terrorist, and Jack Hammond, the FBI agent charged with tracking her down. The narrative ends with Voltaire and Aaron in their entrenched positions, Pompeii captured as a consequence of her own recklessness, and Antaeus discovered at last by a marten named Herodotus somewhere in South Africa. Duncan is not as unified as this summary suggests, however; its episodic structure is rich with vignettes of varying length whose connection to the central plot is purely thematic. Even without the promise of future volumes, one gets the sense that every tale in Duncan, no matter how fleeting, is part of its own, much larger story. Taken as a whole, the text’s mosaic of stories raises far-reaching questions about human-animal relationships; it also reexamines assumptions concerning the very nature of the nonhuman—and thus of the human as well. When considered through the lens of animal studies, “the animal” is best understood as a negative value in that it lumps together diverse species into a group of organisms that have, in common, the understanding that they are not “human,” itself a slippery notion. Hence the very concept of the animal is an act of “unconscious dominance” (Hines “Talking with Adam Hines”), what Derrida calls a “corral” for “a large number of living beings within a single concept.” The real purpose of this category or corral is

81

The Politics and Poetics of Alterity

81

to “confirm . . . complicit, continued, and organized involvement in a veritable war of the species” (Derrida 31–2), when it is deeply doubtful “whether what calls itself human has the right rigorously to attribute to man . . . what he refuses the animal” (135). Kimberly Benston, for his part, likens anthropomorphism to animal sacrifice in that it effaces the animal just as readily as killing it (551): both are discourses of domination (Haraway 77)  that put the animal, once again, in the service of shoring up the distinction of the human. Duncan resists such corraling and sacrificing, refusing to engage in a mode of storytelling in which “the ‘animalness’ of the characters . . . drops away entirely” (Witek 110) to leave us with an “anthropomorphic taming” entirely “for and in man” (Derrida 37). Instead, the narrative tries to answer Rosi Braidotti’s demand that we respond to the narrated animal as individual (and individualized) animal, which is to say “neoliterally” (528). Hines has insisted that Duncan calls for just such a response, and that it was never intended to allegorize human (e.g., postcolonial) institutions and relationships (“Math”; “Creating”). However, he also recognizes Duncan’s openness to interpretation, particularly since comics, with their “[m]any disparate, even contradictory disciplines in one setting,” are especially tailored to produce variable interpretations among readers (“Talking Comics”). Certainly it is difficult not to read the text’s treatment of animals as conceptually affiliated with (critiques of) postcolonial discourse, given the frequency with which “capitalist colonial logics” have “historically conflated” “discourses of race and species” (Ahuja 557; see also Haraway 18). Duncan’s success at capturing the animal purely as animal is therefore inevitably partial. Indeed, the narrative seems to insist, perhaps in spite of itself, on parallels between human-animal relations and the history of American slavery. Pompeii (or “Pompey”) was a common slave name in antebellum America, and Pompeii bombs a university named for confederate colonel Elijah Gates (Hines 110). Furthermore, she paraphrases New Testament verse that has been taken as supportive of slavery (163).2 Likewise, when a sheep farmer seeks to discourage “future would-be heroes of the animal kingdom” (51) by displaying a stuffed weasel she killed when the weasel tried to free penned-in sheep, the farmer’s conduct recalls the American spectacle of lynching. Arguably, however, Duncan challenges its readers to consider animals in the context of slavery, rather than read the narrative as an allegory in which the history of human slavery is represented through animals. In this respect, in suggesting parallels between humans’ enslavement of one another and their treatment of animals, the text broaches larger questions about what would be required for—and entailed by—the recognition of animal agents as subjects in their own right. One would think that clearer communication between humans and animals would enable humans to take “full accountability for the science and technology we have collectively invented” in the name of “realism and sanity . . . as the premise for a morally relevant position” (Braidotti 529). That is, one would think that the attribution of language, which has often historically been touted as “a human species-specific feature” (Matinelli 81), would transform animals into quasi-human subjects included in discourses of rights, and thus in a position to challenge the history of animal slavery. However, Duncan gives us a world that is

82

82

Alex Link

not very different from our own. Zoos still exist (210). Slaughterhouses are simply a poorly kept secret in the bovine community (73), and are now even more evocative of Nazi death camps. Hines himself states that “even though, in this world, we can talk to each other in the same languages, genuine communication might still be impossible” (“Talking Comics”). Thus, however articulate, Hines’s animals remain “disposable bodies traded in a global market of posthuman exploitation” (Braidotti 529), and the only noticeable change in that market is its bureaucratic unwieldiness. If anything, there is simply more effort put into dissimulating “cruelty . . . in order to organize on a global scale the forgetting or misunderstanding of [interspecies] violence” (Derrida 26). That an animal can speak changes very little about its capacity to communicate, nor is the capacity for speech shown to impact the animal’s killability in the end. This last point is, perhaps, ultimately unsurprising. History is filled, after all, with slaves who speak but who are not heard. It is for this reason that Duncan returns over and again to questions not only of language but of its authoritative deployment in scenes ranging from muskrats debating the respectfulness of nicknames (334– 7) to frogs rejecting language that habitually ascribes docility to them (271). The most consistent investigation of language comes through Pompeii, not only in her frustration with the human penchant for naming but also in her eventual doubt that Georgios, her gorilla accomplice, can mean anything with words (368), as she reduces language to a sequence of nonsensical noises by repeating the phrase “whale watch” over and over (365). The structure of Hines’s storyworld thus seems to put the lie to the narrative’s earlier claim, drawn from William Gass (“Talking with Adam Hines”), that a system’s “[w]rongness is self-evident” when one can show that it “tolerates moral absurdities” (83). Such self-evident wrongness changes little, if anything. In parallel with Derrida’s discussion in The Animal that Therefore I  Am, Duncan levels human and animal worlds in a manner that does not create common ground between them after all, but instead emphasizes how any putative point of contact between them rests on shaky assumptions. The leveling, in other words, is formal, in giving humans and animals a shared language and a shared medium that, in black and white, only “deaden[s] the difference” between them a little (Hines “Creating”). Rather than imply that human speech elevates the animal through anthropomorphism, Duncan’s shared speech and strategies of muted representation make homo sapiens one species among others, with no clear criteria for the establishment of species superiority. In short, despite the presence of talking animals, the narrative avoids the illusion of seamless communication between animals and humans, resisting “the two fallacies of too inclusive an anthropomorphism and too constant an anthropodenial” (Vint 13; see also Haraway 67). It insists on foregrounding the limits as well as the possibilities of human-animal communication in this world of articulate animals, undercutting the temptation to see Duncan’s animals as what Rebekah Fox calls “furry ‘little humans’ ” (529). Duncan gestures, in other words, toward Wittgenstein’s remark that “if a lion could speak, we could not understand him,” and Nagel’s famous argument concerning the impossibility of knowing what it

83

The Politics and Poetics of Alterity

83

might be like to be a bat (Hines “An Interview”). Along the same lines, Hines resists talk of “rights” as too anthropomorphizing a concept (“Talking with Adam Hines”). Rather than try to convey “ ‘what it is like’ for nonhuman others” directly, as some comics might (Herman 159), many of the narrative’s vignettes are opaque, or oblique at best, seeming to “pay respect to [animal] otherness” with “verse or abstraction” that keeps readers at a distance (“Math”). Duncan builds “analogical bridges” while “acknowledging the absolute alterity and opacity of the other voice” (Gordon 44). For example, some birds speak in blank speech balloons (48), while others sing, mysteriously, “RUINED TIME persisted / in the SILVER (More than river swept instincts yet is slept)” (182); other creatures are depicted alongside similarly cryptic verse (91). Perhaps the clearest example of this communicative gulf is the vignette in which Anaximenes the monkey tells a man named Dakarai about two raptor birds, a red kite and a black kite that, despite being different species and separated by vast distances, die at the same time. For Anaximenes, the story is a kind of parable about human habits of binary thinking—that a rationale must be either metaphysical or material, for example, or an organism either human or animal—and Dakarai’s simplistic response only drives the point home. He just wants to know if Anaximenes sympathizes with humans at all, assuming that, as a monkey, he sides with Pompeii (147).3 This episode, like the other aspects of the text highlighting difficulties of communication despite a shared language, evoke a multitude of “lived phenomenal worlds . . . of creatures whose organismic structure differs from our own,” or what animal studies pioneer Jakob von Uexküll terms Umwelten (Herman 159). In this way, Duncan not only rejects a Great Chain of Being or Aristotelian Scale of Nature that hierarchizes relations between human and animal, but also underscores differences among animal species. But what is more, we meet individual rather than representative animals (Gordon 40), making it impossible for us to assume Umwelten break down precisely along species lines. The differences among Duncan’s animals are deeper and subtler than the political differences that obtain between Voltaire the reformer and Pompeii the revolutionary, extending to fundamental differences of Umwelten, or lived, experienced worlds, such as those between a dog and a snake, for example (153). Animals also tend to differ in shifting, complex ways when it comes to arguments about the relative importance of the material and the metaphysical, as Anaximenes’ parable illustrates. Consider, for example, the disagreement between Polybius, an unspecified creature who seems to be a lizard or perhaps a rodent, and Herodotus the marten. Polybius describes Herodotus obscurely as “impatient with this philosophy, I guess” (98) and does not believe Antaeus exists (94), yet we discover their disagreement is a matter of emphasis rather than a sharp division. Herodotus has gone in search of the Messianic Antaeus, and his metaphysical quest produces material results: Antaeus exists after all. Polybius, for his part, seems so deeply anchored in the material sciences that his skill resembles magic. He can predict the exact moment a shooting star will appear (97), draw on the properties of cyclic numbers (Hahne) to predict where and when a first raindrop will fall (99–100), and recommend an optimal “rice seed variation” for a given season (95). His successful weather prediction

84

84

Alex Link

via mathematics also contrasts with Voltaire’s failed weather forecast using what Vollman’s press secretary Nathan teasingly calls a “mystical, old world Nigerian sense thing” (56). At the same time, Herodotus argues in a scholarly treatise that animals with extensive human contact are more inclined to individualism (73), further particularizing animals from species to individual and making them historical subjects. This observation, that contact between species changes those species, underscores the degree to which identities in Duncan are best understood in relational terms, rather than as discrete and essentialized profiles or sets of qualities. It also rejects the notion that, if there is such a thing as species-specific Umwelten, they are somehow timelessly fixed and impervious to changes brought about by cross-species interactions. That is, Duncan’s animal identities expand upon Donna Haraway’s argument that for “companion species” “coconstituti[on] and coevolution are the rule, not the exception” (220), troubling Joan Gordon’s claim that Duncan opposes pet-keeping because human involvement keeps Polly and Bundle, the Johnson family cat and puppy, respectively, from “flourishing” (36–7). Animal traits and animal worlds are dynamic and historically situated, as are the human-animal relationships in which so many creatural lives are caught up. Likewise, Gordon’s claim that Roy, the “workman is emotionally stunted” by bringing cows to slaughter (38), requires further nuance. Roy can be characterized, rather, as refusing to relate to a cow as a co-constitutive subject because he lives in a world that discourages emotional attachments to animals other than pets. Roy is similar to Vollman in this way. Aaron Vollman has no interest in bridging interspecies worlds. As he puts it, “[w]e are not means, we are the end, and you take everything that comes with it” (288). He reduces animals—and, it seems, “the archaic people who worship them”—to a quaint “one-sidedness” that, along the lines of stories about “the stork bringing babies,” denies animals subjectivity and dismisses indigenous ways of knowing (285). This stance also denies the possibility of human-animal co-constitution. Vollman refuses the very idea, reserving for himself the “complexity” (285) that, from his imperalist or rather speciesist perspective, constitutes a defining human trait. In this respect, Pompeii is no different from Vollman, further preventing the absolute commitment to species self-interest from becoming, ironically, a defining human trait. Insofar as Pompeii and Vollman are both villains, in the manner of mirror opposites, the narrative squarely establishes species self-interest and the objectification of others as the root cause of violence in Duncan’s world. If Vollman is not “for anything [but] just against” animals (58), for Pompeii it is humans and not animals who are “merely killable” (Haraway 78). A  key challenge that has crystallized within animal studies, and that Duncan likewise addresses, is how to approach animals as not merely killable while recognizing, as Hines does, the inescapable reality that humans do in fact kill them (Haraway 89; Hines “Talking with Adam Hines”). The issue is how to “respond practically” to this challenge “in the face of the permanent complexity not resolved by taxonomic hierarchies and with no humanist philosophical or religious guarantees” (Haraway 75). Or,

85

The Politics and Poetics of Alterity

85

to quote from Jill Johnson’s diary: “[I]t’s sweet to want everything to work out for everybody. Even if it’s impossible” (307). Vollman and Pompeii prefer the simple solution of violence to “permanent complexity.” Vollman even constructs his “absolute” stance toward animals as a sign that he is “not a plain man,” confusing ruthlessness with complexity and taking sentiment for weakness (285). Voltaire, however, takes up the challenge of responding practically to a world shared by many species, humans among them. In his case, the practical response to multispecies coexistence is a diplomatic one, expressed visually in his choice to go clothed. Here, in a way that extends beyond general questions of anthropomorphism, comics history and animal studies intersect in their concern with the clothed animal as an absurdity or, following Derrida, an impossibility, in that animals are “naked without knowing it” (5). Nakedness is only possible for the human, and it is only underscored by the wearing of clothes. Voltaire is the only nonhuman animal in the whole of the narrative to appear clothed by choice, in contrast with the compulsorily dressed circus animals (19, 32) and the dogs who are similarly compelled to wear collars (e.g., 225, 315). For Voltaire, nakedness is thus at least plausible. His decision to go clothed—which is never discussed—is perhaps as politically charged as his choice of a human lover, Tiv. It is difficult not to see Voltaire’s state of dress as a marker of the degree to which he is willing to compromise in the name of negotiated reform. He seems to go about clothed by choice, remaining dressed even when home alone. The anthropomorphized animal is thus recontextualized, in this realist narrative, as a political expression of partial cultural assimilation. Arguably, Voltaire becomes animal, or comes closest to appearing conventionally animal, at the moment he perches on a fireplace mantel. This position accentuates his small size in a space designed for human proportions, and his use of the space in a manner unintended by its designers (113); it also visually anticipates the more defiant, last gesture of Pompeii before her capture, as she sits on a convenience store shelf and declares, “We don’t have to do anything they say. Or want” (373). In other words, Voltaire’s clothing and bearing push him, in visual register of the text, in the direction of the recognizably human, but it is unclear whether that sense of the human persists in the face of his other-than-human conduct. His decision to perch on the mantel, or even his awkward grip on a fork (58), would seem to illustrate Heidegger’s explanation that animals are “poor in world” because they are unable to relate to, say, a staircase as such (Derrida 158). Yet the text suggests that Voltaire exercises a choice when he acts in these ways, just as the silent animals in Duncan cannot be called dumb, for there is no question that they have made the choice not to speak. Thus a dog can respond to the bombing at Elijah Gates University (138), or not (110). Voltaire’s body, simian in its movements yet clothed, suggests that Heidegger’s argument that the animal is “poor in world” is perhaps best understood as an attempt to point to the alterity of species difference. Through Voltaire’s characterization, Hines constructs species difference as both like and unlike cultural difference, the way, perhaps, one might struggle to find a word that points to all that the word “primitive” implies, but that is neither pejorative nor euphemistic. In short, Duncan renders the Umwelt properly cultural

86

86

Alex Link

and, thus, political. In doing so, it problematizes the objectification of the animal and, hence, subverts its categorization as merely killable.

From forest to factory Duncan returns repeatedly to the ways in which capital has transformed the natural landscape and, with it, animal killability, making it impossible for “everything to work out for everybody.” In this respect, the narrative reflects Haraway’s suggestion that, in place of talk of rights, “[t]aking animals seriously as workers without the comforts of humanist frameworks . . . might help stem the killing machines” (73). Fredric Jameson may have declared famously that there is no position for humans “outside the massive Being of capital, from which to assault this last” (48), but the same is true for Duncan’s animals. In one of Duncan’s most jarring images, the California landscape that Pompeii and Georgios drive through is transformed by the insertion of giant human body parts into it (365–9). Given that Pompeii’s journey is from a claustrophobic house, where the air is saturated with the smells of “[a]mmonia, benzene, SOAP from our fat choking our lungs” (168), to a convenience store where the fluorescent light makes her “fur itch” and “skin burn” (373), these landscapes concretize Pompeii’s experience of the world, in which the house and store are not islands of human influence in a natural world so much as concentrations of that “Being of capital,” which saturates her environment as a whole. Within this Being, animals exist only as a “means for man: livestock, tool, meat, body, or experimental life form” (Derrida 102), as commodity or labor. Insofar as animals are rendered means, the Being of capital effectively “disanimalizes” the animal (80, Derrida’s emphasis). Animal labor, in particular, has been the focus of several comics that consider animals as military surrogates (We3), lucrative spectacles (Beast Wagon), and producers of goods such as wool and eggs (Sheep of Fools, Elmer). Duncan returns repeatedly to animal labor, animal laborers, and commodified animals. We open, for example, with a sequence of stories in which domesticated animals are made into instruments for the colonization of wild spaces: Euclid the monkey tells the story of an Italian bridge-builder tricking Satan into accepting a dog’s life in lieu of a human one—in other words, as a form of currency, the animal’s life being sufficiently similar to the human’s to fool the devil, but different enough for it not to matter in the human scheme of things. The mason thus passes off the life of the dog like a counterfeit bill (24–5). Euclid’s tale can itself be read as the symptom of or metaphor for a text that is about the technologically enabled collapse of space—a bridging of distances that can bring animals from around the world into a single space, as in the American circus where Euclid tells his story to Mercodonius the tiger and Amarante the zebra. Hines’s narrative teems with shifts of scope and perspective, reaching down to the movement of insects in the grass and up to the moon. We also repeatedly encounter media that collapse distances, from radio broadcasts of the boxing match (11), to news of the bombing spreading throughout America and around

87

The Politics and Poetics of Alterity

87

the world (112), to Jack’s suspicion of Maggie Pritchard based on a mailing list (199). This collapse of space is at once a colonization of wild spaces and curiously akin to animal migration, as is the immigration story about Daniel Muir with which Duncan begins. Space, here, is fluid, exposing as impossible the ideas of wild spaces untouched by capital, or, for that matter, the notion of “natural” spaces beyond artificially constructed “preserves” (51) that was bound up with the colonization of North America. Paradoxically, Hines’s representation of space also problematizes the very notion of invasive species, by making movement the norm. Euclid’s story can be read in other ways as well. It may be a testimony to a bridge-builder’s cleverness, or a tale of animal sacrifice. Euclid’s inability to fix the story’s moral (25) is understandable, particularly since he may not discern a difference in value between the life of a man and that of a dog. Hines visualizes Euclid’s ambivalence via his ambiguous appearance floating above farmland. Below him, we see barely discernible images of technological approximations of animals in the “iron horse” of a train, and the literal harnessing of animals in a horse-drawn plow to transform the landscape (28). Euclid’s story then repeats itself on a larger scale, with the famed Laika appearing above definitions of the words “sacrifice” and “icon” (35) before being launched into outer space and sailing over built landscapes in the night. The scene concludes with another bridge (44), as Hines himself points out (“Talking with Adam Hines”), suggesting that the narratives are parallel despite their different spatial amplitudes. The human-animal connection is there, but whether it takes the form of a bridge, a sacrificial exchange, or a conscription into labor toward human ends depends upon how these stories are seen, and by whom. Duncan continually draws attention to power differentials like the ones in Euclid’s story, not only between humans and animals, but also among humans in the context of labor. Vollman, for example, humiliates his underlings (53) just as readily as he reminds Voltaire of his animality and, implicitly, his lower station at every opportunity. In fact, he equates animals and employees by remarking, upon discovering that his press agent is friends with Voltaire, “monkey see, monkey do, I presume” (60). At the slaughterhouse, an unseen Jerry instructs Sandra who commands Roy who, in turn, manages the injured cow and the dog that wants to eat it (71). In a similar vein when the manager of the circus employees compels them to get back to work, they, in turn, manage Euclid and the other circus animals. Likewise Miranda, Jack’s FBI superior, pulls rank at the bomb site (131). These hierarchical relationships, in which we repeatedly see superiors commanding underlings, culminate in Jack’s recollection of his meeting with Hadrian, an older, one-armed ape and, it seems, one of Pompeii’s mentors. Hadrian declares to Jack, as “one caste to another,” “we are a disturbed disparity.” He quotes the nineteenth-century novel Patricia Kemball, in which appears a line claiming that peasants “ ‘enjoy the poetry of their self-abasement in the belief that their superiors are indeed their betters.’ ” If, historically, human class difference has been essentialized in a manner akin to species difference, Hadrian is right to wonder what the novelist and her readers must “think of cats” (350–1), or in other cases where actual species differences enter the scene of representation. Hadrian is one

88

88

Alex Link

model of the truly articulate animal. He not only speaks, but has the discursive authority by which he might be heard. Among humans, bosses have that authority. For Hadrian, what follows is simply the most brutal literalization of such authority: a gun to Jack’s head. Unlike Pompeii, whose genocidal dream is to go back in time and prevent the birth of James Watt (377) or to flood Olduvai Gorge (165), Hadrian desires a world in which “everyone will be indistinct in our common service” (351). Georgios, for one, is convinced Hadrian would have had nothing to do with Pompeii’s wild killing spree (375). Whereas Pompeii comes more and more to resemble Vollman, whom Voltaire describes as being like Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a British political philosopher influential in the development of ideas of Aryan supremacy (57), Hadrian’s is something of a workers’ revolution. He seems to recognize the power differentials also at play in the human world, and although he employs violence he is nevertheless comparable to Voltaire in his desire to bring about change in a world he recognizes as complex. Rather than bombing a university campus, Hadrian kidnaps the daughter of a senator, demanding legislative reform by way of ransom, particularly in the name of experimental animals —which is to say animal labor (341). It is unclear whether Hadrian lets Jack live and returns the baby to him in order to humiliate him or to plant the seed of an idea that they may in fact be class allies in a barely nascent interspecies workers’ revolution—or both.

The personal is the zoopolitical In both its verbal and its visual registers, then, Hines’s narrative insists upon the complexity of relations, interspecies and otherwise, as well as the ripple effects of lives and actions, as a tonic against animal killability. For example, Duncan takes the life of a quintessentially commodified animal, a cow, and individualizes it before tracing the consequences of its death. The unnamed cow stands out from the numberless others that are slaughtered daily, simply by virtue of the attention the narrative devotes to it. It is depicted in isolation rather than in a herd, and it realizes that it is being led to slaughter. The cow resists, ultimately breaking its leg; its death is anomalous in the world of the slaughterhouse. This exceptional event, in turn, contrasts with and thus throws into relief standard practices of factory farming, which are premised on the cow’s objectification and deindividualization. Hence the magnified image of a measuring tape overlaying another of hanging sides of beef (65) that introduces the episode, the illustrations in the page margins depicting meat preparation and nutrition pyramids (72), and the reference to the dying cow as “good meat” (69). Further, like other anomalies in other kinds of institutional systems, the accidentally injured cow is not allowed to die without red tape: the animal languishes until shot by a bureaucrat who, pictured as a disembodied hand holding a gun, cites “regulations” (75). This moment illustrates the process by which bureaucratic regulations maintain the anonymity of the creature and its killers, containing and distancing its violence, by treating this problematic life as an error in an impersonal, or disanimalized, system. The bureaucratization

89

The Politics and Poetics of Alterity

89

of this anomalous violence is, structurally, no different from the bureaucracy that manages and contains the anomalous violence of the Elijah Gates bomb site. The epiosode featuring the cow is complex for several reasons. First, the narrative is careful to qualify the cruelty with which it depicts the cow’s death, making it clear that the cow’s objectifying “killability” is the target of its critique, and not simply eating meat. The vignette is framed by animals that eat meat: a dog that mistakes the cow for dead and wants to eat it (69), and an owl hunting mice on the page immediately following the cow’s execution (76), not to mention the narrative’s frequent depictions of predators on the hunt (e.g., 80, 116, 149) and humans, in death, also becoming good meat for a cat and dog (173). These acts of predation are entirely unlike Pompeii’s acts of murder; they also contrast with the murder committed by Clementine the collie, whose proximity in the narrative highlights the extent to which it differs from the cow’s slaughter. After asking where beef stew comes from, ostensibly stew made from this specific dead cow, Clementine is given a tour of “Dave’s slaughterhouse” (80–1). She responds by murdering Carol, the family baby (82). By virtue of this scene’s placement, the narrative implies that Clementine’s act of smothering Carol is a direct consequence of this specific cow’s death. Yet it also raises the question of whether Clementine killed the individual Carol, specifically, or simply a human baby, in an ironic inversion of the death of the unnamed but suddenly individualized cow. In any case, Clementine’s actions put into perspective Pompeii’s deindividualizing demand that, after he has murdered John’s family, John simply says, “move on chill out you’ll date again have another kid” (165). The scene’s conclusion, depicting a cow and calf together, challenges readers to see the image as a depiction of individual, rather than generic, creatures (84). Indeed, the difficulty of deciding where to draw the line between the individual and the generic is with us virtually from the opening page; this difficulty manifests itself, at the outset, in landscapes in which nearly invisible individuals speak in icons that suggest generic conversations. Thus a speech balloon containing a flag emanates from a person near the Statue of Liberty, forcing readers to infer content based on generic type—in parallel with other unconnected but similarly generic conversations that dot the scene and that suggest how, at a larger scale, the many localized vignettes in Duncan nevertheless form a whole picture (6). The cow scene is one such vignette, and is itself imbricated with several other narratives, including the discovery of Herodotus’s marginalia in Keynes’s Treatise on Probability by a man named Sebond, as well as Herodotus’s own treatise on the relationship between animals and art. This imbrication, in turn, is reflected in a general narrative structure that is fragmented in myriad ways. Hines’s text layers stories, folding them into one another, just as the cow’s death ripples out into other lives such as Clementine’s; characters appear and disappear with minimal context or explanation. Duncan begins and rebegins, with a table of contents appearing well into the story, with its own secondary table of contents and preceding a Chapter Zero (47); it frequently depicts pages taken from other books (e.g., 15, 160), sometimes with Hines’s own text inserted into them (276); and its marginal images often suggest that Duncan itself is a series of nested and cobbled-together

90

90

Alex Link

books (e.g., 36, 116, 132). Finally, the narrative features elements of collage that include diary entries, newspaper clippings, ticket stubs, maps, photographs, film stills, appliance instructions, embroidery, diagrams, dictionary pages, and images that appear taped to the page and/or with ragged edges, suggesting they have been torn from other contexts (e.g., 183). Despite the fragmented initial appearance of this collage, Duncan can be read as projecting a “full . . . world” of interrelated parts (Hines “Creating”), expressing in its storytelling methods the principle with which we began in Euclid’s perusal of the Metaphysics: that “objects” are “derived from numbers . . . Because the qualities of numbers exist in harmony” (11). That is, Euclid considers through the mathematics of Aristotle’s Metaphysics what Mercodonius the tiger expresses through the metaphysical concept of “dharma,” which, in Buddhistic thinking, “holds everything together” (27). Like Anaximenes’s story about the mysteriously linked kites, and like the difference of opinion between Polybius and Herodotus, Euclid and Mercodonius express, in their own ways, a sense of the deep interconnectedness and interdependence of so many seemingly separate narratives—including their own. Insofar as they are separable in Duncan, both the material and the metaphysical expression of interdependence or, to borrow from Haraway, coevolution and co-constitution understood on a global scale, resonate with Heidegger’s idea of “syndosis,” which is a wholeness that is not a synthesis of disparate parts so much as an intuition of totality (93). Structurally, Duncan demands syndosis as a grounding assumption upon which to build an ethics of animal welfare. As Duncan suggests in both its form and its themes, when it comes to human-animal relations, syndosis provides a productive point of entry—more specifically, a way of thinking about not a global ecology but rather an ecological globalism. The interconnections that spread throughout the narrative like spiderwebs span time and space, generating a sense of complexity, on the one hand, and selfsimilarity, on the other. Similar feelings, tensions, and attitudes can thus appear in a single conversation between bullfrogs or in an extended national dialogue. Such self-similarity is perhaps clearest in Vollman’s conversation with Southand Lodders, a starling who lands on his balcony. Vollman is incredulous that Lodders does not recognize him as the director of National Animal Control Policy; ironically, however, Vollman’s “control” is quite limited here, since he cannot get the bird to leave or stop talking (284). To Lodders, Vollman is merely “every man I have ever seen on this roof tonight” (289)—at once general and specific, like a bird in a flock. This conflation of scales resonates through Lodders’s remark that he “was here before you” and is “waiting for you to leave” (284). That “you” might be read as singular, in which case the starling is waiting for Vollman to leave so that he might build his nest, or it is plural, in which case he is waiting for every human to leave or to become extinct like the multiple bird species mentioned in passing during Lodders’s and Vollman’s conversation (286, 288). Hines sometimes uses the visual register of the text to figure these interconnections, repetitions, and conflations of the individual and the generic, of the garden plot and the globe, as fractals. The reproducibility of tensions at multiple scales implied by self-similar geometric shapes occurs at two key moments in Duncan.

91

The Politics and Poetics of Alterity

91

The first is the repeated appearance, over five pages, of a Sierpinski triangle overlaid atop Pompeii as she browses John Johnson’s bookshelf. In its several layers— triangle atop Pompeii, atop details of engravings—this sequence problematizes the relationship between this moment in the Johnson home and history. Here a superimposition of images carries traces of past events like the stains, bleeds, and transfers we often see on Duncan’s pages; this superimposition evokes, in turn, a range of comparable structures, including the linear passage of time conveyed by the orderly sequence of narrative panels in a comic, the iterative histories in the self-similarity of a fractal, and the weight of history as details of past acts of representation—engravings, paintings, and statues—mark the pages of this scene. Duncan’s central tension might be reduced to the tension between the images that conclude this section; these images constitute the second of the two key moments foregrounding questions of scale, vis-à-vis human-animal relationships. In the center of the section’s last page, a pair of frames situate John—hooded, prone, a tire pinning his arms to his sides, and probably already dead—next to a detail of a similarly yoked ox from a nineteenth-century engraving of monks plowing (“Monks Ploughing”). Appearing here as it does, one might argue that John’s immobilized body stands in for the sight of yoked oxen through animal eyes. Additionally, Hines’s panels evoke, yet again, the uneasy relationship between the material and the metaphysical. The scenes in the engraving and in the Johnson home depict material labor and material suffering, respectively. However, the engraving also depicts oxen in the service of a religious institution, even as, in the Johnson home, Pompeii considers the religious foundations of anthropocentrism in an animal-centered exegesis of Cain and Abel. As if insisting on the double-sidedness of the problem, the way human-animal relationships raise questions about commodification as well as identity, labor as well as ethics, the bottom third of the page is taken up by Georgios seated in profile, as seemingly out of place as Voltaire on a mantel, next to Baroque painter Sassoferrato’s Madonna in Sorrow (251). The image of the two side by side is just as jarring as the juxtaposition of John with the yoked oxen—and just as deflationary when it comes to anthropocentric models in all of their many guises:  practical, philosophical, religious, and other. In a home that doubles, with its books and artifacts, as an expression of Western history writ large, Pompeii considers the story of Cain and Abel through animal eyes. To her, the fact that biologists call the tendency of African black eaglets to kill their siblings “Cainism” is proof of “how far gone you people are” (249–50). Although she does not explain her remark, it does serve as proof of distance between the human and the animal in several ways. First, it continues the tradition of regarding animals as objects of knowledge rather than subjects in their own right—a tradition with its own roots in Genesis. Both biologists and the biblical Adam reserve the right to name the natural world, and it is Pompeii’s frustration with the human attitude that something “doesn’t exist if it doesn’t have a name” (247) that triggers her comments about Cainism. Furthermore, the use of this term to describe animal behavior further underscores the way anthropocentricism undergirds all human institutions, scientific as well as religious.

92

92

Alex Link

Figure 3.1. Georgios and the Madonna in Sorrow. © Adam Hines, Duncan the Wonder Dog: Show One, p. 251. Reproduction Courtesy AdHouse Books.

If one considers the story of Cain and Abel more closely, subjecting it to a putative animal gaze—in parallel to the the way Pompeii critiques the story of an African black eagle eyrie as distorted by an anthropocentric gaze—something like an origin story for anthropocentrism emerges. To take up Pompeii’s point, the eagle chicks compete because there is only enough food for one, while Cain’s is an act of murder conventionally attributed to jealousy, a needless act. In the larger context of Hines’s narrative, Abel is to Cain as the lamb may have been to Abel: killable. Its death was unnecessary. By extension, this biblical narrative, as part of the constellation of stories that makes up Duncan, draws another clear line between human and animal, between what might be murdered as opposed to merely killed, and thus the moment at which humanity formally takes up the right to kill animals as an expression of its sovereignty over the material objects of nature. Indeed, Pompeii sees a redoubled irony in God’s praise of Abel, as if either of the brothers “did anything” when it is the lamb that died (249). The story looks different through animal eyes, as Euclid’s story of the mason does or the fairy tale about three magic hounds that a dog recalls differently from the human storyteller (225). In this case, however, the biblical text marks the ground zero of the humananimal divide.

Uncomfortably numb Visually, this discussion of naming, culture, and family dynamics anticipates the contents of Jill Johnson’s diary, which Hines calls Duncan’s “heart” (“Creating”; see also “Math”). Every character in the diary has a visual, abstract motif. Bundle the puppy is comprised of rectilinear oblongs, while Jill’s daughter, Julia, consists of a kind of mosaic that softens as she matures (301–2), and Jill herself appears atop three long parallel vertical lines. Jill’s emotional closeness to Bundle is signified by the interplay of their abstract representatives (312–13, 319). Bundle’s shape

93

The Politics and Poetics of Alterity

93

turns black in the center of a two-page spread when Polly the cat chides Jill for not valuing Bundle’s life enough to prioritize it over her charity work, inverts at his death (318), and simplifies afterward as more time passes (321). The self-similar shape, like the Sierpinski triangle, asks readers to consider the degree to which Jill’s experience, and the experiences of other members of her household vis-à-vis companion species, might be extrapolated to general human-animal relations. The key element of these experiences is arguably the need to balance empathy with respect for alterity as separate lives in the household, like the separate narratives of Duncan nevertheless form a whole. Both the scales of the individual and the global present us with obstacles to finding this balance, or to responding to the animal as other-than-killable. Each scale has its strategies for maintaining animal objectification, from the personal effort put into avoiding uncomfortable truths to collective strategies of distancing and impersonal bureaucratic mechanisms. In the storyworld of Duncan, affect is carefully managed on both the individual and collective levels to institute what seems to be a general numbness, a dampening of empathy designed to minimize the discomforts of a violent world. The concealment and displacement of animal violence is the most obvious of these mechanisms of disavowal, signified most succinctly in “regulations” against delivering meat or removing waste through a restaurant front door (81). Violence has its alibis in this widespread violation “not only of animal life but even and also [the] sentiment of compassion” (Derrida 29). For example, the circus provides the visual appearance of happy and graceful animals while readers, behind the scenes, see them caged and struggling not to despair (19). At the same time, Hines shows advocates for animals being routinely mocked as sentimental, as when Tiv faces the accusation that she is “on some holy crusade to turn the world into Dr. Doolittle’s Land of—of Happy God-knows-what” (113). Compassion’s barbs trouble Pompeii, too. She reduces the human to the killable only to face, when she reads Jill’s diary, inconvenient evidence of the possibility of human-animal understanding. The diary individualizes Jill for Pompeii in the way that Duncan indvidualizes animals for readers. Jill and her dying puppy Bundle gaze out at the ocean together, and while Jill at first thinks Bundle is unable to see it clearly, she gradually realizes, unlike Dakarai in his exchange with Anaximenes, that they are not seeing things in the same way at all, nor can they (317). This, perhaps, is also the moment at which Jill comes to see Bundle as a responding subject in his own right, a moment of recognition perhaps made easier because in America, as well as other societies, “cats and dogs” already occupy a “special category on the boundaries between humans and animals” (Fox 533). What is more, whereas earlier she condescendingly regarded her husband’s childhood guilt about hunting animals as “cute” (307), in her encounter with a grieving duck, long after Bundle has died (326), Jill is able to bring to bear a new understanding, a fuller appreciation, of alterity. Jill’s transformation seems to make it difficult for Pompeii to keep thinking of her as killable, if one regards Pompeii’s hesitant but final destruction of Jill’s diary as an act of doing away with evidence that threatens to trouble her objectification of humans. One might speculate that Jill’s diary spurs Pompeii’s seemingly

94

94

Alex Link

unconscious, and otherwise inexplicable, desire to be captured. After burning the diary, Pompeii becomes reckless, choosing to make her escape in a convertible with the top down rather than a car with tinted windows (367), and to linger in a convenience store after killing the clerk, purely on impulse, until she and Georgios are caught (366–79). Meanwhile, to illustrate broader, cultural acts of disavowal with regard to calls for empathy, both within and across species lines, Duncan opens with the famous boxing match between Rocky Marciano and the only boxer to last fifteen rounds with him, Ezzard Charles. At issue here is a spectacle of violence, a “superficial brutality” that distracts from the “very real brutality” experienced by animals and people every day (“Talking with Adam Hines”). The text visually parallels the boxing match with a bullfight (10) as comparable spectacles of disavowal, and in turn it is difficult not to compare the species difference in the bullfight with the racial difference in the boxing match. Hines demonstrates particular interest in the fight’s inconclusiveness (“Creating”), just as the question of human-animal relationships remains interminably unresolved in Duncan. The fight anticipates Duncan’s last vignette before we meet Antaeus, in which an ape teaches a lesson on the virtues of struggle for its own sake: “They say nothing can matter if everything will end . . . They are wrong” (386). That story, in turn, resonates with Duncan’s final image, which considers the brevity of the life of the mayfly (389–90). These parallels and resonances take on special importance in a text suggesting that, in the long view, animals need only last the anthropocene’s fifteen rounds. Perhaps it is no accident that Jack’s supervisor, Miranda, refers to the university bombing investigation by using the locution “the circus is in town” (131), linking the circus and the investigation conceptually both as spaces of labor and as practices with a stake in the careful management of collective guilt and anxiety. As is the case with the treatment of circus animals, there is a general lack of affect in the wake of the university bombing, at least as it is recounted in interviews with humans and a dog who are asked about the impact of the event (138). At the bomb site itself, only six hours after the attack, the investigators display a noticeable lack of urgency, placing great emphasis on bureaucratic procedures for processing the scene. In fact, Jack’s main task seems to be simply to create the impression that the case is “moving forward,” regardless of whether it actually is (197), and he is visually inert as he manages detail after trivial detail (137). Later, a man ignores the news broadcast of Pompeii’s capture, more interested in the traffic report, even though his hamster’s rebellious impulse might have been inspired by Pompeii (379). Together, the event’s mediation and bureaucratization represent not so much callousness as a prophylactic against inconvenient empathy. Bureaucracy, on an institutional scale, brings about the same numbness that Jack invokes personally when he sees a dead girl’s arm in the bomb site rubble (133), and that Pompeii exemplifies when she destroys Jill’s diary. Jack tries to avoid empathizing by thinking of mundane things until he is “once again as useless as a newborn baby” (135). Like the stereotypical bureaucracy, he tries unsuccessfully (179) to distract himself with pointless minutiae. These two strategies of denial—concealment and

95

The Politics and Poetics of Alterity

95

displacement—come together in Jack’s attempt to bury his feelings about the girl’s arm as he tries to imagine, in a manner that reprises and adapts the MarcianoCharles fight to the plotline of Duncan, a fight between a werewolf and a minotaur—only to have his feelings return with the distraction of “the pebbles and debris underfoot” (134), this phrase encapsulating the literal definition of the word “scruples.” Jack’s inability to prevent himself from feeling pain for or with the victims of the bombing, like Tiv’s ambivalence about whether to feel guilty over nearly having killed a spider by accident (277), may be read as flattering to him, as evidence of his capacity for empathy. Then again, Remus, a seemingly imaginary creature visible only to an inebriated Jack and to the reader, who might at first be taken for Antaeus given his half-human half-canine appearance, insists that “[i]t’s not about you caring” (357). That is, there is something suspicious about viewing empathy, which is perhaps impossible without an attendant anthropomorphism, as a prerequisite for ethical action. Remus introduces this section as a meditation on “vanity” (356), not in the sense that the search for Pompeii is pointless, but rather in the sense that focusing on the necessity of empathy is itself an act of vanity, in this case a kind of human narcissism (356–7). However, if the text has succeeded in producing an affective response in the reader, it is difficult not to think about the role of narrative vis-à-vis empathetic responses across species lines.4 One might imagine that Remus’s words are addressed to the reader, too, warning against any self-congratulatory feelings about an empathetic response to Duncan as a sufficient end in itself. Indeed, when one considers the plenitude of stories at work in Duncan, one cannot help but wonder if reading the text has been framed as an ambivalent political act by virtue of the opening dialogue between Mercodonius and Euclid. Mercodonius is explicit in his preference for storytelling over open acts of rebellion, since violent resistance will simply “cut you down to a tired nihilism” (23). Storytelling, however, “fills the time”; that is, fills the time until the day when “the circus”—and, figuratively, humans’ attempts to dominate other animals—“won’t be here anymore” (23), when the man on the balcony will leave. While “it’s a shallow renunciation,” as Mercodonius admits, one is left with “[s]tories from your friends,” stories that can bring animals that might never have met—a zebra, a tiger, and a monkey, for example—together into a unique relation. That relation can deepen and strengthen with time until the day when they, like rebel songs, might “rise again, escaping from the battlefield of defeat, lifting up a voice that will bring to life, elsewhere, other movements” (Certeau 17). Perhaps the reader is that elsewhere. Or one of them. There is no shortage of stories. Duncan ascribes to the richness of possible Umwelten what theorists and practitioners of postmodern fiction have often attributed to the infinite possibilities built into narrative itself. Yet Hines’s point is not that we need an infinite number of proverbial monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters to realize the more-than-human potential of stories and storytelling. His point, rather, is that the monkeys—among other companion species—embody storyworlds still to be recognized, untold alterities.

96

96

Alex Link

Notes 1 This dearth of criticism is likely attributable, in part, to the book’s small original print run. Fortunately, Hines has recently made the whole of Duncan available online at www.geneva-street.com, where he recommends a charitable donation to one of several web-linked animal welfare causes in lieu of payment. 2 Ephesians 6:5: “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ.” This verse reappears, with slight variations, in 1 Peter 2:18 and Colossians 3:22. In Pompeii’s words: “Slaves be submissive to their masters.” 3 Anaximenes tells his story in response to Dakarai’s question, “[w]hat do you think about that stuff,” implying that, as a monkey, he must have a clear and deeply felt position on Pompeii’s terrorism. The question interpellates Anaximenes in a manner reminiscent of contemporary Muslim-American experience in the wake of 9/11. 4 See Link for a discussion of this issue in relation to Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s We3.

Works cited Ahuja, Neel. “Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World.” PMLA 124.2 (2009): 556–63. Benston, Kimberly W. “Experimenting at the Threshold: Sacrifice, Anthropomorphism, and the Aims of (Critical) Animal Studies.” PMLA 124.2 (2009): 548–55. Braidotti, Rosi. “Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others.” PMLA 124.2 (2009): 526–32. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1984. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal that Therefore I Am. Ed. Marie Louise Mallet. Trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham UP, 2008. Fox, Rebekah. “Animal Behaviours, Post-human Lives: Everyday Negotiations of the Animal-Human Divide in Pet-keeping.” Social & Cultural Geography 7.4 (2006): 525–37. Gordon, Joan. “Animal Viewpoints in the Contact Zone of Adam Hines’s Duncan the Wonder Dog.” Humanimalia 5.2 (2014): 26–46. Hahne, Seth T. “Study Guide for Duncan the Wonder Dog.” Good OK Bad (n.d.). http:// goodokbad.com/index.php/reviews/guide/duncan_the_wonder_dog_study_guide Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. Herman, David. “Storyworld/Umwelt: Nonhuman Experiences in Graphic Narratives.” SubStance 40.1 (2011): 156–81. Heidegger, Martin. Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997. Hines, Adam. “Adam Hines on Creating ‘Duncan the Wonder Dog.’ ” Interview by Calvin Reid. Publishers Weekly (November 9, 2010). https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/ by-topic/industry-news/comics/article/45103-adam-hines-on-creating-duncan-thewonder-dog.html Hines, Adam. Duncan the Wonder Dog. Richmond, VA: AdHouse, 2010. Hines, Adam. “ ‘Duncan the Wonder Dog’: Math, Mystery, and Rhythms of the Animal Mind.” Interview by Noelene Clark. Hero Complex: Pop Culture

97

The Politics and Poetics of Alterity

97

Unmasked. LA Times (April 22, 2011). http://herocomplex.latimes.com/comics/ duncan-the-wonder-dog-math-mystery-and-the-rhythms-of-the-animal-mind/ Hines, Adam. “An Interview with Adam Hines, Author of ‘Duncan the Wonder Dog.’ ” Interview by Marco Apostoli Cappello. Fumetto Logica (September 18, 2014). http:// www.fumettologica.it/2014/09/adam-hines-intervista-ducan/2/ Hines, Adam. “Talking Comics with Tim: Adam Hines.” Interview by Tim O’Shea. CBR. com (August 30, 2010). http://www.cbr.com/talking-comics-with-tim-adam-hines/ Hines, Adam. “Talking with Adam Hines, Creator of ‘Duncan the Wonder Dog’ (and a 33-Page Preview!).’ ” Interview by Laura Hudson. Comics Alliance (December 30, 2010). http://comicsalliance.com/adam-hines-interview-duncan-wonder-dog-preview/ Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991. Kois, Dan. “Holiday Books: Graphic Novels.” New York Times Sunday Book Review (December 3, 2010). http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/books/review/Kois-t.html Link, Alex. “Funny? Animals? The Problem of We3.” Comics Forum (May 30, 2015). https://comicsforum.org/2015/05/30/funny-animals-the-problem-of-we3-by-alex-link/ Matinelli, Dario. “Anthropocentrism as a Social Phenomenon: Semiotic and Ethical Implications.” Social Semiotics 18.1 (2008): 79–99. “Monks Ploughing the Land with Oxen.” 1872. Getty Images. http://www.gettyimages. ca/detail/news-photo/monks-ploughing-the-land-with-oxen-germany-engravingnews-photo/152190053?#monks-ploughing-the-land-with-oxen-germany-engravingpicture-id152190053 Vint, Sherryl. Animal Alterity. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool UP, 2010. Witek, Joseph. Comic Books as History. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1989.

98

99

Chapter 4 T H E S AG A O F T H E A N I M A L A S V I SUA L M E TA P HO R F O R M I X E D - R AC E I D E N T I T Y I N   C OM IC S Michael A. Chaney

The animal configures a shorthand for reader-viewers of the comics symbolizing the mental, emotional, and ontological Other to the human. At the same time, the animal of philosophy activates a relational potential in the human—as final boundary of difference and as the grounds for exceeding relational limits. In Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’s Saga, the animal does not overtly play other to the human, but when it does it is as a mute excess. The animal is already a visual and therefore presumptively genetic part of most of Saga’s main characters. It deepens what is an essentially complexional intensity in Saga’s humanoid characters and even some of its monsters. When bestial, the animal is ravenous to look upon, though it recedes to the background in proportion to its ferocity. In keeping with the boundary policing that both the animal and the figure of the mixed-race individual instigate, Saga’s animal metaphors envision the human at its limits, instantiating miscellany as virtues and making humor and monstrosity reading priorities. To those familiar with the medieval bestiary, such priorities are nothing new. Organizationally, the bestiary enshrines sensational rarity and miscellany, a structure readers of Saga understand only too well. The comic epic bursts at the narrative seams with a capricious mix of cultural allusions, types, and characters, all formed in the fissile interstice of fantasy and allegory, where fabliau and soap opera blur. At its center is a star-crossed story of lovers worthy of being the latest in a proud line of precursors from West Side Story to The Walking Dead and Beauty and the Beast. Reiterating an interstellar Romeo and Juliet story, Saga replays anxieties of transgression as well. It pictures a fantasy world, to be sure, but one with a miscegenative couple at its center, and so the narrative remains sensitive to those larger historical and political forces that shape what people do with their bodies and what bodies come to mean. Interestingly, bodies in Saga also come to configure embodied acts, such as spoken language, across thresholds not just of difference but of possibility. Take, for example, the decision by Saga’s team of creators, artist Fiona Staples and writer Brian K.  Vaughan, to make Esperanto the language of the Wreath

100

100

Michael A. Chaney

race, the Moon people to which the story’s Romeo, Marko, belongs. Esperanto is a constructed language once intended for international communication. Its very existence as a language presumes a world of linguistic variety (not to mention socio-historical and ethno-racial heterogeneity). One could miss the exact reference to it, noticing on a first read only something vaguely Latinate, or Portuguese maybe? It is then still apropos for the Moon people, this colonial language that is as uncanny to recognize as its speakers’ visual claims to humanity: their visages familiar to comic renditions of the human, albeit with estranging, animalizing horns. More generally, Saga upholds a narrative order that prioritizes the miscellaneous. The cast gathers a weird medley of allusive, fusion-driven characters—the talking cat; alien sex workers; multi-limbed mercenaries; cyclops authors; alligator maids; winged-, horned-, and TV-headed people. This mob is itself an organizational animality and its apotheosis may be found in the bestiary, the zoo, or the circus—wherever the society of animals and humans is allowed. Indeed, the text stages how animality functions as another way of seeing the socius—call it the demos, the masses, people in a state of subjective wilderness. The animal brings into propinquity the human destitute of life; people but not persons; life amidst political, historical, and social scarcity. The same condition of worldlessness accounts for Giorgio Agamben’s comment that the “animal remains enclosed in the circle of its environment and can never open itself into a world” (90). A capacity for the self-conscious self-seeing (which Saga shows itself capable of with its self-reflexive storylines of authors and reading) is also crucial to the distinction Agamben goes on to draw between humans and animals: “The passage from the environment to the world is not, in relation, simply the passage from a closure to an opening. The animal in fact not only does not see the open, beings in their unveiled being, but nor does it perceive its own non-openness, its being captured and stunned in its own disinhibitors” (90). Although contemporary ethological research suggests that nonhuman animals do have the capacity for self-awareness,1 Agamben’s remarks help explain why Saga’s chief characters incessantly break through the fourth wall in search of the author at the source of their internal fears and daydreams, their erotic fascinations and beloved fictions. With Agamben, the authors of Saga align the human with self-consciousness, reality, and being, weaving together a very human graphic story as a result, one that periodically shows itself to be conscious of itself as a visual object to be looked at (there are sketches at the endings of volumes, and internal covers and title pages with characters in positions of direct visual address). Ultimately, the animals in Saga are legislative. They create occasions for drawing and redrawing boundaries of difference and ontology while imagining those who might embody exceptional differences, monstrous creations. While Saga’s animal-like characters situate the human as the epicenter of evolution, the text relegates the animal to stasis and unchanging ahistoricity, doing so with heightened emotionality.

101

The Saga of the Animal as Visual Metaphor

101

The form of animal metaphor: From the medieval bestiary to the Syrian refugee crisis The facility to instruct emotionally is a trait associated with animals in Western literature going as far back as the medieval bestiary. As Richard Jones claims in The Medieval Natural World, the primary aim of the bestiary is “didactic” and that is why, according to one medieval prefacer, pictures of animals are used in them: these texts rely upon “a picture to instruct the minds of simple folk, so that what [the intellect] could scarcely comprehend with the mind’s eye, it might at least discern with the physical eye” (Jones 77). In A Medieval Book of Beasts, Willene Clark distinguishes the bestiary from the encyclopedia in terms of organization, the bestiary essentially being “a compilation, consisting of numerous borrowings,” “an ensemble” (23). But how does the animal with its centuries-old drive toward compilation organize our thinking about society? A  fear of social miscellany underwrites recent essays on the Syrian refugee crisis facing Europe and the West. Readers of Saga could hardly find a more apt political backdrop. Against it they might interpret the comics’ figurations and figures as visual metaphors with cultural implications. Refugees in this discourse are manifestly ahistorical as individuals, and as a mass they signal no chronology other than an invariant now, the temporality any crisis must produce. Protestors and rioters occupy similar temporalities of immediacy. But as a social problem or as objects of utterance, refugees are thoroughly historical. Mention of them always requires a brief history of world wars, for instance: “With millions of people displaced as a result of the Holocaust, the World War II era is marked by notable failures in the world’s ability to respond in a timely and adequate way to the plight of refugees fleeing persecution and destruction” (Sovcik). The masses in these formulations are an animal-other not simply because they behave inexorably as a mass, but because they transgress borders thought to be inviolable by the historical actors who fear them: “over 65.3 million people forcibly displaced from their homes, 21.3 million of whom are refugees, having crossed an international border” (Sovcik). As objects of forced displacement, the refugee is reactive, measuring the superior forces that police and manage borders the refugee leaves porous in the cultural imaginary if not in political reality. The refugee is an embodiment of crisis, precipitating an emergency of scale that must be reflected in the nation’s response, which, according to some commentators, suggests an implicit connection between the refugee and the allegedly backward regimes they flee. In accordance with a principle of “essential protection,” some analysts recommend educational measures as preemptive assimilation—the only future-oriented solution to the problem of the refugee’s otherness. This principle assumes an isomorphic relation between the private citizen and the refugee Other, which repeats the difference between civic privilege and civic privation symbolized by literary animals and animal-others. The refugee functions in relation to the citizen as the animal functions in relation to the human. That education is one

102

102

Michael A. Chaney

of the strategies offered to assuage the social upheaval brought about by the crisis shows how many respondents continue to invest in a model of assimilation perhaps in nostalgic affirmation of a Civil Rights–era brand of political utopianism. Even in supposedly liberal rhetoric, an ontological compatibility arises between the animal and the refugee. As UN Secretary-General António Guterres reminds us in an April 2015 op-ed in Time, “We can’t deter people fleeing for their lives. They will come. The choice we have is how well we manage their arrival, and how humanely . . . It’s time for Europeans to abandon the delusion that we can isolate ourselves from this crisis.” The refugee is thus a fait accompli, an immanence. To be human is to rescind one’s choice and agency in the face of a mob thought to behave without choice, its movement more of a migration best captured with statistics and maps, easily made grotesque when imagined as a swarm or an ungovernable herd or flock. In this discourse, the refugees’ deterministic, nonvolitional groupings of uninvited but inevitable bodies contrast sharply against the volitional collective of European or American individuals, each one coming together according to his or her own moral accord to respond to the refugee crisis. A similar hydraulics of rhetorical interchange feeds the binaric differences of identity that comprise Saga and its universe, in which masses coded as animals help to individuate through opposition those with choices, will, desire, neuroses, a story—or, as philosopher Emmanuel Levinas would have it, those ethical animals we call humans, who have faces.

Saga’s entry into the animal as Other, and the future idealized in the mixed-race narrator Ontological relations of opposition and familiarity between the human and its various others are represented throughout Saga. The narrator, whose birth initiates Volume 1, is the mixed-race infant of Marko, who descends from a horned, lunar people, and Alana, one of the winged planetary inhabitants who are constantly at war with Marko’s kind. The winged people are tinged green, as opposed to the beige tones associated with the Moonies. While the winged people are in league politically with the Royals, a dominant cyborg species with TV-like monitors for heads, the Moonies align more with Saga’s sordid caste of animal-like characters at the narrative margins—such as the simian-tailed grease monkey who rats out the location of the birthing couple in a service station, or the nameless alligator butler who answers the door for the screen-faced aristocrats. When attempting to comprehend either symbolic register embodied by the characters in Saga, whether that of the animal or that of mixed-race identities, cataloging parallels and similarities is only the first step. Careful interpreters do well to ask not only what the convergence of these symbols might mean, but also what it is that comics add to them that would be lost, unintelligible, or impermissible in prose or film. To risk a Deleuzean metaphor, if it is not the animals of the story, per se, but their becoming animal that matters, then what unique opportunities for “becoming animal” do comics make possible? And how are these impacted when

103

The Saga of the Animal as Visual Metaphor

103

race is revealed to be part of the mix? As we shall see, race functions in Saga as a paradigm of difference, in practical terms, demarcating subsets within an otherwise undifferentiated human standard, which lingers at the vanishing edges of the fantasy’s relentless play with socio-political realism. In Saga, as in any comic, entry into the domain of the animal blurs these and other boundaries since the animal is caught up in a formative binary of its own, signifying in strict, definitive relation the human, not animal, which is thereby unveiled, to use Heidegger’s phrase. Entry into the animal happens on the first page of chapter 1, Volume 1 (chapter numbering is continuous across volumes). There, we see a close-up of Alana in profile. Her teeth are clenched, and she is sweating. Her first words—“Am I shitting? It feels like I’m shitting”—jab the audience out of passive viewing. We apprehend her in recognition of the claim that she is now more than a corporeal collection of surfaces. She has depths, in other words, and refers to them in language. Despite scatological hints to the contrary, she is not in the process of any digestive action. Within a few panels, we soon realize the misdirection. Such feints are one of the text’s signature moves, in fact. Along with its unexpected jokes and jarring medleys, its mixed metaphors, kooky allusions, and metareflexive signifiers, Saga is also designed with ironic page turns that dramatically play up or play down what has come before. Our entry into the animal thus coincides with our introduction to the humor of Saga. The comic opens by confusing defecation with reproduction, a co-emergence of birth and evacuation. The first page is therefore animal in its reference and in the work it performs, conjoining obscenity with the birth of a concept—or, as the narrator puts it: “This is how an idea becomes real” (1).2 That voice belongs to Hazel, the mixed-race infant, and it is embodied in a lettering style unenclosed by the panels it writes over. This voice incarnates both a new idea as well as a mode of survival. The idea introduces something different into the status quo. It affirms Deleuze and Guattari’s attention to the power of voice when becoming something else (what they call becoming animal) in A Thousand Plateaus: “What if one became animal or plant through literature, which certainly does not mean literarily? Is it not first through the voice that one becomes animal?” (4). As narrator, Hazel does not allow readers to experience the animal vicariously. Neither is she the mixed-race figure who suggests animal-human hybridity. She is rather the opposite:  an embodiment of that abiding fantasy of the miscegenated future and its dream for the perfectibility of the human. “That’s why people create with someone else,” says the narratorial voice, juxtaposing its coordinate image of its mother Alana, her legs outspread from having recently given birth, saying:  “[R]ight, because nothing is more lovely than a fat woman spread eagle in the back of an old body shop. It’s like something out of a fairytale or . . .” (3). Alana’s speech gives the lie to the voice of narration as omniscient. Perhaps Alana’s unwholesome situation is not why people create with someone else. At the very least, we are goaded to look beyond Alana’s words to see her in the same generous way Marko does. From his intimate angle of view, she is so close that spindles can be seen at that juncture where her green wings taper off into paler segments.

104

104

Michael A. Chaney

A transfer of gazing attention flows from mother to child—as we must inspect the parents with whom we seamlessly merge as they review an infant not shown to us. Whatever it is that embodies that voice from the future remains at a distance in this scene as the parents marvel at the unusual characteristics of the infant body. “Look she’s going to have your horns,” says the mother. “And your wings,” replies the father (5). After a page turn, we learn the infant has hazel eyes: “[N]ot quite your shade of brown either. They kinda change depending how you . . .” (6; panel 1). The ellipses perform the same operation here as they do in an earlier passage: they indicate the opening up of a space of semantic interactivity. Our game of phrase completion is interrupted by Marko’s comedic gestures of biting the umbilical cord: “Wasn’t expecting this much gristle” (6, panel 4). We see him in quarter profile eating the umbilical cord as his ram-like horns curl around his ears, resembling the ears of a fawn. Such animalizing close-ups help to contextualize the way the winged soldiers denigrate Marko when they see him or hear him speak: “Is that moony speaking Language?” asks one white soldier with mouth agape (10, panel 3, emphasis in original). In the same panel a darker-skinned soldier similarly stunned by Marko’s speech adds, “We should cut its fuckin’ tongue out.” Such rhetorical dehumanizations are ubiquitous in Saga. Later, when Prince IV learns about the mésalliance between Alana and Marko, he finds her interracial desire incomprehensible: “You’re saying she willingly laid down with one of those monsters Why?” (23, panel 4). The prince’s exclamation is another instance of the same trope elevated to the level of langue more than parole: routinized rhetorical dehumanization seems to be more of a general rule of play rather than any particular move in the game. Our suspicions are confirmed in panels depicting sex between Prince IV and another screen-headed Royal, the princess. After his screen in a three-panel sequence shows a bloody horn and he fails to perform, his consort says in a panel that shows her face as a blank screen but which renders her two naked breasts prominently: “Things will be better once we’re away from this godforsaken flock” (20, panel 2). Prince IV drives the point home that they are surrounded by masses of animal enemies: “You think there’s something good about what those animals did to my friends?” (20, panel 4). Any approach to understanding the reference to the animal in these panels must take into account the nakedness of the robotheaded couple and the white-gloved alligator who finalizes the page—eyes closed, the alligator interposes to announce “a gentleman caller” (20, panel 5). Facially reptilian and thus aggressively inassimilable, the alligator merges with the grease monkey from the opening—which is also literally a monkey, by the way—to designate contrapuntal human actors and agents through visual opposition. These bestial characters are foils to the mixed-race couple at the center of the narrative, having too much animal and not enough anthropos in their faces. As in Levinas’s philosophy, the face is where one’s ethical faculties are to be practiced and where all ethical relations are to be brokered. The monkey and alligator encode the animal at the margin, the faceless threshold where this world locates the parameters of its fantasy. As with the Syrian refugee of rhetoric, they are purveyors of impossible conglomerations, as if Alana were to have her child with someone who

105

The Saga of the Animal as Visual Metaphor

105

looks less like Marko and more like one of these alligators, monkeys, or mice. The animal at the margins is like the refugee at the border in that both exacerbate anxieties of definition and limit, suggesting impossible combinations and social monstrosity. Like the frozen undead warriors marching to invade the world of Game of Thrones, or the zombies that wander the wilderness in The Walking Dead, the animals on the fringes of Saga represent a similar threshold of humanity.

Quasi-animals, “humane” cyborgs, and ultra animal Others: Lying Cat, Prince Robot, and the wild boars One such creature at the margin separating the animal and the human is Saga’s elusive pet. At one curious moment, as Marko and Alana scour the tunnels while consulting their map to the uncanny bridge, Marko mentions having been shot with a heartbreaker pistol: “and it hurt like the day my dog died . . .” (25, panel 4). And though we might scour earlier pages for any other animal referenced as a mere domestic pet, no more than two page-turns elapse before we encounter the mercenary known as the Will with an alien cat. But this is no pet. A horned woman, whom Lying Cat catches in a lie, asks, “I’m sorry did your animal just call me a liar?” To which the Will replies: “She’s not an animal. She’s a Lying Cat” (35, panel 1). What is it, exactly, that exempts this figure from the category of the animal other than the Will’s insistence that it be so? Is this not the very animal conjured by Marko’s supposed joke? Is this not the beloved pet restored, resurrected to a level of dignity that enables it to escape its own classification, becoming not just an animal but animalism itself? While the human lingers in the domain of the reader, other characters in Saga do cross the species divide, or at least call it into question. In Volume 1, the only other entity that is as ontologically elastic as Lying Cat is the narrator, the product of an improbable union who handwrites over past time itself. In these early scenes, it is the parents who instantiate the animal, gruff Alana with her clipped wings and the pacific but potentially berserk Marko with his horns. Of course, they signify the animal only on the level of appearances, which counts for much in a pictorial medium. Nevertheless, they have choices and a balanced characterology, (more like Simba than the hyenas in The Lion King, in other words); their portrayal elevates them to the rank of human actors with agency, offering moral and emotional identification to readers presumed to possess the same. Even more agency symbolically rests with the narrator, Saga’s mixed-race voice par excellence. Relevant here is An Yountae and Peter Anthony Mena’s account of the significance of the animal in Gloria Anzaldúa’s theories of hybridity and borderland decolonization. Remarking that “the animal, as Anzaldúa presents it, opens the possibility for the multiplicity and ambiguity of hybrid identities” (162), Yountae and Mena go on to argue that “the animal might signal a tactics of survival, toward what Anzaldúa calls the mestiza consciousness. Our reading might even suggest that Anzaldúa’s animal is the ‘new consciousness’ she calls for—a consciousness, or an animal, imbued with the potential for awareness of the self,

106

106

Michael A. Chaney

of the divine, and of decolonial freedom” (162). It would not be difficult to read Hazel as an extension of (or at least a fantasy of) the “new consciousness” called for by Anzaldúa. But the narrator is not the only character who achieves superanimal status. Even though he is a machine-organism hybrid, and even though the situations he is put into are tinged with deflation, the royal prince likewise escapes demotion. No mere cyborg, the prince is determined by all-too-human characteristics, including raging violence, ambitions for political domination, and psycho-sexual trauma. In chapter 3, Prince Robot interrogates a bull-faced prisoner. After confronting the prisoner with a Harlequin-style interracial romance novel, A Night Time Smoke, static appears on the prince’s screen. His anger is caused by the defiant amusement of the bull-faced prisoner, who laughs upon recalling the Battle of the Threshold, and how “much of you assheads we bury that day” (8, panel 8). By having the bull-faced prisoner question the humanity of the vengeful prince, who is in part a machine, the comic leaves the pure, unvarnished human to pass as the unseen ideal at the bedrock of its irony. At issue is the human understood neither in terms of particular persons nor as a bundle of passions or relations, but rather the human whose intellectual uniqueness calls the inevitability of death into question. The animal enters the visual field both to conjure and to oppose this promulgation of the human as that which ought not to die. It does so in two distinct ways at this point in the story. First, the animal is visually cued to the top-left profile of the horned prisoner, looking rather more like a man with horns than a bull (chapter  3, p.  10, panel 1). His mouth is bloody, yet he is able to say the word “Humane” with the quotation marks visible in the original. Thus, the animal, or its closest visual analog, utters its alleged opposite in a scene that renders ironic the machineheaded prince’s understandable anger. And it is important that it be understandable, or communicable, so as to forward the human as a definitional nexus for the anticipated emotional, characterological, and motivational points of intercept with readers. Thus, the prince’s sympathetic anger over the mortality of his fellows erupts in vengeful force against the only one with the power to both name and revoke his claim to humanity:  the bull. In varying morphological sites of collision with the human, the animal takes up the visual space of this naming and rescinding function. This is the same function given to the animal of philosophy. Thus, according to Christopher Peterson, “[W]hat names itself human does so precisely by suppressing the animality that conditions its emergence” (2). The animal is negational, defining what the human is not. Like the slave in the master-slave dialectic, the animal haunts not the hinterlands of human belonging but the very foundations of it. As Martha Nussbaum has shown, xenophobia relies upon a logic of projective disgust and group subordination: “So powerful is the desire to cordon ourselves off from our animality that we often don’t stop at feces, cockroaches, and slimy animals. We need a group of humans to bound ourselves against, who will come to exemplify the boundary line between the truly human and the basely animal” (107). If the fantasy work of Saga imagines a world reorienting the human to recenter itself on the animal-human divide, then those

107

The Saga of the Animal as Visual Metaphor

107

others that are more facially animal would come to occupy the abject terrain of Nussbaum’s cordon sanitaire of embodiment. Second, the animal enters the visual field during the interrogation scene in the prince’s enactment of the scare quotes placed around the word “Humane.” The prince mimes the semiotics of doubleness and contingency inherent to the scare quotes when his victim, the animal man, utters the very term he no longer illustrates. After a strange turn of events, the machine-man becomes the unwilling object of the animal-man. The prince is an object of parody and insult for being less than he pretends to be, a visual approximation of the human. However, the human the robot aspires to be physically—and thus ontologically—proves unstable. Not only is Prince Robot’s head a TV, now his right arm and hand transform into a metal gun barrel. The prince looks less like a man with a TV for a head than a TV with a body at this moment of machinic transformation. Another significant animal representation occurs soon after the interrogation scene when wild boars are seen chasing the arachnoid Stalk (chapter 3, p. 14, panel 2). It happens as she is making a cell phone call to her ex, the Will. While they bicker, boars loom in the background, their tusks at the ready. These are animals wearing their most conventional aspect. They emit no sound in contrast to the Stalk’s chatty tele-presence. Despite her profusion of monstrous limbs and eyes, the Stalk’s all-too countable pair of breasts (as with the Princess Robot earlier) remands her to that object-realm reserved for those sexualized into mere body parts. The adjoining panel reminds us just how corny the humor can get in Saga. We see the Will next to Lying Cat eating a breakfast of sugary alien cereal in a big bowl of milk. Listening to the Stalk’s message, he confesses, “I’m never picking up for that bitch again,” to which the cat replies: “lying” (15, panel 3). In the arthrology of the open page, Lying Cat is next to the face of the Stalk as she makes the call across the fold (14, panel 3). The Cat and the Stalk exist in panels tinted with the same color, copper antiquated to puce. They are also symbolic objects of affection and affectation vis-à-vis the shirtless man pictured in the panel—halted in the act of devouring his sugary cereal (15, panel 2). Whatever else Lying Cat and the Stalk represent, they do so in negative relation to him and the advantages of his embodied personhood. Moreover, these feminized super-animals signify animality in the visual field despite having communication skills superior to those soundless boars. It is important that they be soundless, for the new frontier of the boundary drawn within the zone of animality in Saga has to do with the capacity for speech in Lying Cat. No mere parrot act, the cat voices a response to the utterances of others that is able to override whatever the other has said, on some occasions, by branding it fiction. Just such a scene occurs when Lying Cat is banished from Sextillion back to the ship with the rest of the Will’s contraband gear. The cat gives the lie to the Will’s consoling remark: “Don’t be like that! You woulda had a lousy time anyway!” (chapter 4, p. 3, panel 5). When Lying Cat responds with “lying,” the animal exchanges the role of the familiar for that of language-user, another of Saga’s many visual and conceptual experiments with mutants, mixed characters, and conglomerations.

108

108

Michael A. Chaney

The animal as a comics visualization of the monstrous and the scatalogical The animal is at its most dramatic in Volume 1 when it crosses over with the monstrous, as is the case with the rectangular-headed pimp who offers the Will a six-year-old child (chapter 4, p. 16, full-page panel). The pimp’s face is demonic, bestial. And although the Will performs a seemingly righteous mutilation of it, the narration identifies him as the monster, casting doubt on his heroism and rescue mission. Thus, as Saga pictures animals everywhere as the background of the human and makes them the preferred miscegenative Other to the human, it also entertains an inquiry into the monster. The Will is just such a monstrous being, the narrator reassures us; yet the fact that there is a new type of monster insinuated here posits a new rule in the organization of the animal thus far. At this moment, it is revealed that there is no such thing as the monstrous within the diegetic logics that govern this fantasy world and its symbolic boundaries. Nor is there a singular monster of which all others are copies. Rather, we are to understand by this ironic interplay of monsters (which paradoxically encompasses both the slaver-pimp and the murderous hero) that there is a family of monsters, a gamut of them, each with their particular manifestation of the genetic substrate of monstrosity, perhaps classifiable by degrees. And yet, it is strange to think of the monster in this way, as a unique exponent of a larger, more heterogeneous collective. Thinking so is antithetical to the monster’s cultural function as arbiter of the permissible limits of the human. Is this monster with its family not so different from the human? Are not both to be understood within racializing logics? Both invoke the notion of appreciable differences within a species no matter how spurious such an appreciation may be. The monster is to be comprehended in relation to its more hopeful visage, as with Hazel the narrator, who represents the oft-ignored other side of abjection. Like the rhetorical force that gathers around the concept of education in the Syrian refugee crisis, a discourse of assimilative and hopeful futurity nourishes the fantasy of mixed-race identity in Saga. Volume 2 opens with a flashback of the young Marko as a youth on his home moon, which expands the fantasy of a mixed-race future to include the animalhumanoid bond. Marko is shown next to the dog whose death he may have lamented earlier. Both the young Marko and the animal are shown to have horns (chapter 7, p. 1, full page). This opening accomplishes at least three things for the book’s animal metaphors: (1) It reinforces a connection between animals and sites of memory that concretize, in this case, nationalist and martial affect; (2) it works retroactively as a trigger for readers to remember disparate parts of the narrative, to ascribe belated validity to the anecdote told in an ostensibly off-hand manner; and (3) it establishes the horn as a cross-species physiognomic token unifying not just the lunar people, but also their domestic familiars—in martial contradistinction to their winged enemies. The horn thus normalizes the domestic animal, rendering familial the intimate other as it pictures that creature in the image-idiom of its master. These images circulate in this text as if to ensure connections between

109

The Saga of the Animal as Visual Metaphor

109

family relation and physiognomic resemblance, which offspring within a family are expected to display at the level of their bodies. Hybrids, by contrast, fail to ensure these expectations. The second volume also glimpses forms of scatological embodiment at the juncture of the animal and the monstrous. Continuing with its parodic jibes at familial respectability, Saga brings Marko and his mother together on a mission to save the ghostly babysitter his father unwittingly exiles. Upon landing in the magical dimension, Marko attempts to shield his mother from looking at an unseen giant attacking them from above. Reader-viewers may only access this creature after the page turn (chapter 7, p. 16, full page). If we throw off the spectatorial protection or censure associated with the figure of the mother, we may rue the decision to look unreservedly at a monster built to disgust—a naked cyclops with a bone for a weapon, its enlarged and tumescent scrotum hanging only a few feet above the supine mother and Marko. Dwarfed by the monster taking up much of the fullpage panel, Marko and his mother are scarcely present in the scene. They are the same size as the speech bubble beside them:  “Mother, please” (chapter  7, p.  16, full page). If readers seek resolution in return for their investment in the forward progress of the narrative, they might notice how the top right of the next narrative panel figuratively extends the work of the cyclopean image, with its scatological focus on the monster’s diseased genitalia. This next panel puts that eruption of obscenity within a larger context. “We are small, but the universe is not” (17, panel 1), says the narrator in handwriting we come to recognize as hers. The image beside this writing in the first of three panels shows a star. The faint galaxy comes into focus as another hybrid passes by, the rocketship tree with Alana and the infant narrator on board in the second panel. This blending of the organic and the mechanical in the plant that is also a machine is yet another specimen in Saga’s project on mixtures carried out to extremes—its thematic array of fusions, of humanity and inhumanity, sexuality and violence, humor with animality and obscenity.

From screens and faces to miscegenation anxiety Volume 2 constitutes readers as passive voyeurs and sometimes as empowered agents, reading beyond social norms through fantasy. Indeed, we are given evidence of the power of reading when the authors show the prince reading the interspecies romance that sparked Marko and Alana’s interracial relationship (chapter 12, p. 7, panel 2). Similar scenes feature flashbacks of Alana reading the same novel prior to her decision to free Marko, who uses a crude version of her language to speak to her: “I and you. Not as alone . . . as we feel” (chapter 8, p. 5, panel 4). This ability of the enemy to speak a “native” language becomes a litmus test for compatibility. Despite being a realm of lurid projections, fiction, in Saga, thus accrues political relevance as a medium inspiring access to barred, non-native languages.

110

110

Michael A. Chaney

The same could be said for the screen that operates as the face of the Royals. That, too, is a projection area with political effects, as when the screen shows a blue bauble with a yellow ribbon tied to it the instant the prince finds himself in violent circumstances. Confronting the Stalk, he hears the mistaken accusation that “she’s reaching for something!” (chapter  5, p.  21, panel 3). The prince shoots a beam through her torso as a toy flashes across his screen. The mismatch between “reality” and the screen’s display occurs again as the prince lies wounded in a battlefield at the beginning of chapter 12. Images of gay fellatio appear upon his screen as he is aided by a medic in the form of an anthropomorphic mouse. The surreal imagery gives way to the mouse’s earnest confession that it is only helping in the Landfall fight in order to get its degree—just before discovering it was not issued a protective gasmask as poison gas fills the panels. The mouse explodes horrifically, before the narrative wriggles free from the consequences of its abrupt turn to porn and gore by revealing all to have been the prince’s dream. The prince robot awakes to the news that his ship is getting closer to the novelist he seeks, Mr. Heist, author of the proselytizing romance novel. Representations of animality in many of the panels in Saga require similar interpretive moves, situating species difference in the context of the oneiric and the grotesque, surrealism and fantasy, and other deflections—or brute rejections—of the real. In both of the scenes just discussed, the prince reaffirms Levinas’s notion of the human. He is revealed (or veiled) in his relation to himself and to the world via his face. Then again, where one expects a face, the prince wields facial machinery, an apparatus of projection and display, whether conscious or not. Thus, the Royals’ screens signify as ethical faces, both demanding and subverting the primacy Levinas ascribes to the vicissitudes of human consciousness. In Saga, Royal screenshots parallel the romance novel. Both expose sexual taboos, in part, via sensational images, as does Saga as a pictorial medium. Saga concretizes it boundary crossings, freezing the narrative to suspend characters in portraits reminiscent of romance novel covers. Such moments suspend the plot to reimagine characters as image merely, reduced, in other words, to material signifiers. For example, in one full-page image, Alana in her role as prison guard knocks blood from the face of Marko, her horned prisoner, with the butt of her rifle; the ironic caption reads: “In romantic comedies, this is called the ‘meetcute’ ” (chapter 8, p. 6, full page). In another, a semi-nude Marko takes an improbable break from the chain gang to implore the implied romance reader, “Please, keep reading” (chapter 10, p. 1, full page). In yet another full page that visually rhymes with the image repertoire of the romance novel, we see Alana and Marko in coital embrace, their bodies illuminated by the amber glow of a lamp just as Alana grabs Marko by the horns and moans. Her enunciation appears in a speech balloon, the only signifier to distinguish this image as a comic. Onomatopoeic, the speech balloon contains the nonword: “HNNNG” (chapter 11, p. 1, full page). Taken together, these full-page posters for reading allude parodically to a romance genre that Saga both mocks and mirrors. The internal novel which doubles as Saga’s narrative twin, A Night Time Smoke, valorizes attachments across difference, especially across lines of difference

111

The Saga of the Animal as Visual Metaphor

111

normally maintained for purposes of war and colonization. Moreover, these ambivalent scenes force reader-viewers to renegotiate the terms of their reading contract, redetermining the degree to which the text betrays self-consciousness of itself as a text—perhaps the very one Alana is shown to be reading at the start of chapter 8: enrapt in her novel, she is blowing a bubble with her gum while perched athwart what appears to be a propeller (chapter 8, title page). The banality of the material page she holds in her hands falls far short of the literary worship characters in Saga express for it, containing such exchanges as: “Hey did you tape Cake Haters?” “Shit,” she yelled from the kitchen. “Sorry, I spaced.” (Chapter 8, p. 1, full page) A Night Time Smoke seconds as Saga, a story of improbable combinations, proposing such amalgamations as remedial to the aporetic, the fantastical, or the whimsical. Even the dual gendered authorship behind the book’s construction undoes all attempts to fix its aesthetic according to monolithic, finite, linear, or binaric ways of thinking. Authorship itself remains a site of the unexpected because of mixed production in Saga, a monstrosity at the helm. Indeed, Saga’s monsters are especially articulate. The visual obscenity of Fard, the testicular Cyclops, is matched by his speech, which prefers crude travesty and curses. “Fard will eat your souls and piss them out Fard’s anus,” he exclaims in one memorable panel (chapter 8, p. 18, panel 2). Fard’s speech, his name, and his repellant appearance are ludic rejoinders to propriety. What regularizes our disdain for Fard and his monstrous corpulence are the reproachful oaths we witness from Marko’s mother, who must be shielded from Fard’s excesses. She reserves her most monstrous verbal imaginings for her racial enemy Other: “Unlike that overgrown house-fly of a wife you decided to bed down w—” (chapter 8, p. 12, panel 2). Racism functions in this world in the same way it does in ours, normalizing a range of subsidiary exclusions according to a nationalist agenda of Us versus Them. As Eddie Glaude has claimed, “fear of ‘amalgamation’ ” helped to establish “national identities through difference and, if necessary, violence” (108). Interestingly, the other cyclops who appears at the end of this volume is the cult-hero author of Saga’s vehicle for animal erotics, the romance novel that induces transgressions both political and sexual-cultural. Like Homer’s cyclops, Mr. Heist challenges the hero—in this case, supplying a sort of reconciliation for the postmodern self-inquisition that Prince Robot requests of the author. As an alibi for narrative self-consciousness, the animal, like the mixed-race individual, foments boundary crossing. Both symbolically perforate the supposed verisimilitude of the real or, in Saga, of the fantasy. We are hard-pressed not to plug Saga or its authors into the conversation that ensues between the novelist and the Royal about selling out to commercialism, as well as the author’s indifference to the reader’s discovery of profundity in the text: “Kiddo, I hate disabusing anyone of the notion I’m a genius, but I swear to you, that story was about one thing and one thing only: A quick fucking paycheck” (chapter 12, p. 12, panel 5). Within this

112

112

Michael A. Chaney

storyworld, the reader no longer has the means to a counter-reading. Only a predictable, accounted-for position enclosed by the text remains.

Animal of fantasy as narrative jouissance and metareflexivity And yet, on the other side of its political allegory, the animal opens onto exhilaration—a pure physicality unencumbered by mentality or emotion. In Volume 2, the animal adjoins to childhood wishes and a nostalgic desire for them. Animality is therefore a fitting catalyst for the final voyage to the center of the mystery caused by the novel at the lighthouse home of the novelist. Before finally revoking, at the end of the volume, innocent assumptions regarding intentional authorship and its erroneously assumed control of textual effects, Saga treats viewer-readers to the visual exhilaration of young Marko taking to the skies astride a cricket (chapter 11, p. 18, panel 1). But here is where words are belied by the visual. Viewers cannot determine whether the cricket young Marko rides is really a cricket, though many times larger than an ordinary one, or whether it is unreal, a fantasy or imagination. Perhaps the apparent cricket is really a vehicle used by the inhabits of this world and fashioned in the cricket’s likeness. A white star has been painted along its flank, and a pink blanket has been placed on its back for the rider to sit upon. Nevertheless, these features characterize its domestication, not its organicity, or the qualities that inhere in it by virtue of the kind of being it is. The portrayed features tie the cricket object to its real animality—its giving over of itself, as with a technology, to become the organic object of another’s will or use. Such an explanation makes the cricket’s simulacral nature irrelevant. The cricket never moves, aside from the act of jumping, or utters a sound. That it is unmoving and unspeaking leaves it free to roam Saga’s wilderness of boars—un-hybridizable animals that haunt the Stalk and the backgrounds of Volume 1. They envision a base level of animality where predators red in tooth and claw coalesce with loyal pets and steeds, bray animals and beasts of burden, those that are remembered as well as those experienced as types, in fiction or merely in the abstract. As Saga repeatedly teaches us, the animal is always somewhat illusory. Near the beginning of Volume 3, the Will aids Gwendolyn in swordplay using floating sharks as targets. When she guts one in front of him (chapter 14, p. 8, panel 3), the animal’s sacrificial life to be used at the discretion of others is only magnified by its status as hologram. This animal hologram prefigures a battle waged between the man Gwendolyn sees and the one he is prodded to become by his unseen partner, the Stalk (chapter 14, p. 11, panel 4). The result is a combinatory creature, a monster not unlike that of Saga’s authorship—a gender fusion that, in this case, authors a risible and doomed sexual “play” for Gwendolyn that nearly ends in violence. Afterward, the Stalk only stresses Gwendolyn’s qualifier, “Without asking”— evidence that she is still overreading Gwendolyn’s receptivity to the Will’s erotic advances. Even though it results in a stolen kiss, the subplot creates more images of interracial faciality, which Saga is fond of presenting in its panels (chapter 14,

113

The Saga of the Animal as Visual Metaphor

113

p. 13, panel 5). In a later panel, Gwendolyn’s face takes up a third of the page as she confesses to the Will, who calls her closed-minded, that while she does not like him, she has been a romantic partner to other races: “I’ll have you know I’ve been with other races, even races like yours . . . I just have no interest in being with you” (chapter 14, p. 20, panel 3). On the facing page, an anthropomorphic cat makes a call to the Will, passing on information about “some high-and-mighty type, real sweet duds” (21, panel 4) who “is flying that dragon skull ship” (21, panel 3). A page-turn reveals Prince Robot refueling his ship as if it were a car at a gas station, with the informant, from this angle, looking far more like a rodent on the phone (22, full page). In fact, the character shown in the background at the end of chapter 14, where the prince refuels, is so hunched forward as to have a different skull structure and what appears to be an altogether different anatomy than the more cat-like figure from the previous page. Could it be that this page reflects the perceptions of a different focalizer, one who sees the animal informant as more of a rat than its prouder animal kin, the cat, if only to increase the humor, the visual punning—of the moment Prince IV is ratted out, as it were? Another of Saga’s more recognizable representations of the animal signals animality in more ways than one. It happens in the embedded tale that the cyclopean novelist, Mr. Heist, reads to Hazel. The visual style of Saga’s primary narrative momentarily takes on the black-and-white visual style of the horrific embedded story, that of Weeber the bee who crosses the road only to behold the terrible Odendron—a giant skull-faced chicken (chapter  16, p.  6, panel 1). On the one hand, the endearing animal protagonist stimulates sympathy across differences for being so defenseless, child-like. The first panel even shows the bee from a superior angle as the illustration captures its doe-like eyes as it shouts: “Show yourself !” It moreover wears its bee body more like a sweater than an exoskeleton. The yellow-and-black stripes seem to bunch up at the sleeves (6, panel 1). When the bee is plucked into the chicken’s beak, the embedded black-and-white imagery gives way to a discussion over the appropriateness of darker subjects in children’s literature. Mr. Heist, the author, reader, and defender of the story, refers to the tiny figure as a “creature”—a figure central to “all good children’s stories,” which according to him involve a “young creature [who] breaks rules, has incredible adventure, then returns home with the knowledge that aforementioned rules are there for a reason. Of course, the actual message to the careful reader is: break rules as often as you can, because who the hell doesn’t want to have an adventure?” (chapter  16, p. 7, panel 3). There is more to cast doubt on the novelist’s wisdom at this moment than Alana’s incrimination of his hypocrisy for having never written a children’s book, since the “young creature” who breaks the law in his road-crossing universe (a fitting metaphor for Saga’s narrative unconscious, to which all such fantasies, dream sequences, and illustrations contribute) dies in the maw of a giant chicken and never experiences anything remotely legible as “adventure.” Here again, the animal merges with messages about rule-breaking (a

114

114

Michael A. Chaney

particular anxiety of genre fiction) in order both to invite and to manage interpretation. Epistemological models of reading are as much at stake here as ontological ones. Saga resonates in this respect with Vanessa Lemm’s reading of Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, Lemm argues, the concept of “animal forgetfulness reveals that memory is an artistic force (Kunsttrieb). As a consequence, historiography mush be understood as artwork (Kunstwerk) rather than as science (Wissenshaft), concerned with interpretation rather than with a factual representation of the past” (87). In line with its tendency toward humor, Saga’s debate about children’s literature ends with a punch line, this one self-reflexive. Mr. Heist claims that children’s literature “requires collaborating with an artist. And artists . . . frighten me” (chapter 16, p. 7, panel 4). Thus, children’s literature and its frightening collaborations are linked to the very comic we read. As has been true of the previous two volumes, the animal heralds readerly instability vis-à-vis Saga’s narrative worlds. Its play with fantasy’s unstable border shifts as the story reflects upon its own construction. It thus creates an inside joke for readers to enjoy even while witnessing the imperial momentum of diegesis to seize even the site of interpretation as its own. After all, a need for interpretation lures the prince to Mr. Heist in order to have the author account for the sexual dreams he had been having after reading the novel: “Every last man and woman I’d ever fought alongside of, we were all mixed together in . . .” (chapter 17, p. 16, panel 1). The word the prince arrives at is “orgy,” but animality and mixed masses are also possibilities, as this chapter has attempted to show. The answer to the question of what it all means may take us elsewhere than the realization the prince is shown to have at the end of this volume: that it is fucking he longs for, a form of intercourse which is the opposite of war. Yet that realization does little to stabilize the images that appear on the prince’s screen, such as the close-up of a flower that appears at that moment (chapter 17, p. 16, panel 6). The epiphany is complemented by the presence of the prince robot’s speech bubble, which reads:  “is fucking.” Just then, Marko’s mother intervenes making threats. Proof of her speech prompts in the prince a reaction we have seen before—shock that someone from the Moon can speak: “A moony? Speaking language?” (chapter 17, p. 17, panel 3). The tilt of his TV head mimics the surprise conveyed in his words. Both signifiers remind reader-viewers of Saga’s general attitude toward species difference, a rhetoric that becomes fantasy’s alibi for exploring real-world racism and class prejudice. While the very end of this volume hinges on the interchangeability of its main characters, as human-like and yet  also something else, whether machine or animal, the first three volumes promote a visual practice of marginalization equating animality to absurdity. The perfect image of this practice can be found in the scene of the two alligator maids, costumed in aprons and bonnets, shown managing the princess’s dress as she complains of “the small army [that] is trying to stuff me into a second gown for this bloody interminable V.A. ball” (chapter 16, p. 21, panel 2). The animals’ nonattendance at such a ball goes without saying, notwithstanding

115

The Saga of the Animal as Visual Metaphor

115

its customary expenditures of physical service or fleshly sacrifice which maintain humanizing or “humane” events.

Conclusion: The animal that is (not) Lying Cat Although they may possess human traits, animals sketch out horizons of species otherness, to which the main characters allude but which they never embody. As this chapter has tried to show, the parameters of that animal horizon, or horizon of animality, necessarily encompass contemporary politics. In this way, Saga exercises a temporal license afforded to all fantasy—to retain narrative relevance in exchange for referential ambiguity. Saga makes use of the animal as a trope as well as a theme, enacting an animal logic with its hodge-podge character structure. Of course, such heterogeneity seems to have given rise to xenophobic tensions within the Saga universe, and tensions of that sort have historically (and do currently) make wide rhetorical use of the animal to press home dangerously basic points about difference. Commenting on Derrida’s lack of curiosity when he wonders if animals suffer, Donna Haraway scolds the philosopher for ignoring other possible responses to meeting his cat’s gaze: “The question of suffering led Derrida to the virtue of pity, and that is not a small thing. But how much more promise is in the questions, Can animals play? Or work? And even, can I learn to play with this cat?” (22). Haraway refuses the generalizable situations forever posited by the philosopher in favor of the situational ethics of particular private moments of interspecies interaction and exchange. In a related vein, the first three volumes of Saga show us what the animal might look like when untethered conceptually from realism. No longer a threat to the definitional boundary of the human, the animal in Saga is already domesticated, in genetic league with the human, and in process of further miscegenation via the sublime body of the narrator, Hazel. More than its animal-like characters, Saga entertains an animal aesthetic. It does so through a vast repertoire of sight gags, jokes, visual turnabouts, scatological signs, grotesque ironies, and meta-reflexive signifiers, which point to established orders of expectation (of genetic resemblance, for example, or of species uniformity or trans-species difference) only to violate them. Let us return, in conclusion, to the character of Lying Cat, who models one of Derrida’s pivotal concerns with Levinas’s hesitation when asked whether or not the snake has a face. As Derek Ryan summarizes it: “Derrida seeks an ethical response to animals that doesn’t depend upon language or recognition. He deconstructs Levinas’ anthropocentric ethics of the ‘face’, where the animal is ‘outside of the ethical circuit’ ”(134). Lying Cat not only exists within the ethical circuit but is central to its legitimacy. Primarily adjudicatory, Lying Cat’s utterances create the possibility for an ethics of truth-telling in the Saga universe, and are thus in keeping with Levinas’s notion of the face, reprioritizing a simplistic, human-centered, face-centric world of recognizable symbolic exchanges. Her

116

116

Michael A. Chaney

utterances of “lying” take on a material force beyond the speech bubble’s border style. They imagine animal speech as divine intervention, oracular, supernatural. But is this speech for her? Is it her speech? To imagine her depths, we might turn to Lying Cat’s image of herself as the spurned runt of the litter when the ghost babysitter chastises her for not playing by the rules, which all lying cats are supposed to do. Without her attendant human agent, it would seem, the animal prop that is (not) Lying Cat scampers off to Saga’s nether regions, where that which places her outside of human solipsism collars her with a subaltern status that simultaneously mutes her once and for all.

Notes 1 See Parker et al. and Riess and Marino for studies indicating that nonhuman primates and dolphins, respectively, share with humans the capacity for self-awareness. 2 The graphic novel volumes of Saga are not paginated; therefore, I shall assign page numbers according to my own counting within chapters. Chapters from which quotations are taken are designated first in the parenthetical reference, followed by page and panel numbers. The pagination restarts with each new chapter.

Works cited Agamben, Giorgio. The Use of Bodies. Trans. Adam Kotsko. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2016. Clark, Willene B. A Medieval Book of Beasts: The Second-Family Bestiary. Woodbridge, MA: Boydell, 2006. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Athlone P, 1980. Glaude, Eddie S. Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Jones, Richard. The Medieval Natural World. New York: Routledge, 2014. Lemm, Vanessa. Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics, and the Animality of the Human Being. New York: Fordham UP, 2009. Nussbaum, Martha Craven. Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2004. Parker, Sue Taylor, Robert W. Mitchell, and Maria L. Boccia, eds. Self-Awareness in Animals and Humans: Developmental Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Peterson, Christopher. Bestial Traces: Race, Sexuality, Animality. New York: Fordham UP, 2013. Riess, Diana, and Lori Marino. “Mirror Self-recognition in the Bottlenose Dolphin: A Case of Cognitive Convergence.” Proceedings of the Academy of the National Academy of Sciences 98.10 (2001): 5937–42. Ryan, Derek. Animal Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Sovcik, Annie. “Responding to Today’s Global Refugee Crisis: How Will History Judge Us?” WorldPost September 20, 2016. http://www.cvt.org/blog/healing-and-humanrights/responding-today%E2%80%99s-global-refugee-crisis-how-will-history-judge-us.

117

The Saga of the Animal as Visual Metaphor

117

Vaughan, Brian K. and Fiona Staples. Saga Vols. 1–3. New York: Image Comics, 2012–2014. Yountae, An and Peter Anthony Mena. “Anzaldúa’s Animal Abyss: Mestizaje and the Late Ancient Imagination.” Divinanimality: Animal Theory, Creaturely Theology. Ed. Stephen D. Moore. New York: Fordham UP, 2014. 161–81.

118

119

Chapter 5 C U R LY T A I L S A N D F LY I N G D O G S :   S T RU C T U R E S O F A F F E C T I N N IC K A BA D Z I S’ S   L A I K A Carrie Rohman

Questions about cognition, affect, empathy, and gender are central to the plot and visual workings of Nick Abadzis’s graphic novel, Laika, which tells the story of the dog that Soviet scientists launched into space on the one-way trip of Sputnik II in 1957. In a 2011 interview, Abadzis discusses the creation of Yelena Dubrovsky, the female dog trainer in the novel, who was not a historical figure: “I did imagine what I might have felt like if she [Laika] happened to have been my dog, which is where a lot of Yelena’s love for her came from . . . Creating Yelena allowed me to have a more human response to the fate of Laika at the center of the story” (Brown 13). That “human” response facilitated by a female character importantly includes inter-species cognitive and affective experiences. Yelena, in other words, enables Abadzis to dramatize what Lori Gruen would call a case of “entangled empathy,” where we recognize that we are already in relationship with animals and where we are called upon to act because of another’s needs. Thus, although Abadzis’s invention of a female dog trainer is interesting for many reasons, it is particularly compelling that he felt his own imaginative instantiation of a companionate relationship with this famous dog could not be fully realized through a male character. There was, after all, no shortage of male historical players through whom Abadzis could have examined the species dynamics that played out in the Soviet space program. This chapter examines representations of Yelena’s and other female characters’ cognitive and empathic entanglements in the text, exploring a number of visual tropes associated with these entanglements. I focus, in particular, on two of Adadzis’s cardinal images in the text: the coil and the flying dog. Laika’s curly tail functions as her signature, her mark of individuality in the text, while the coil, more generally, signals a specifically maternal or umbilical relation that she enjoys with a number of human and nonhuman females in the text. At the same time, the coil is repeatedly linked to visual images in which canine and human dreams, memories, or other forms of cognition connect the hopes or desires of both species. In turn, coils seem to operate as foils to rigid, linear (or projectile-like) acts of thinking and space exploration in the novel. Even the borders of Abadzis’s panels,

120

120

Carrie Rohman

or frames, become wave-like rather than straight, during particularly intense passages of species “intimacy” in the text. Moreover, in the early visual semantics of this novel, the dog’s flying indicates a shared world of imaginative relationality and safeguarding, even as the historical flight itself is figured as a betrayal of trust and fidelity at the end of the story. Thus Abadzis’s text offers what we might consider polarized image-tropes that address shared cognition and empathy with animals in a particular gendered taxonomy. I am intentionally refusing a sharp distinction between cognition and affect in this chapter, a refusal motivated not only by theoretical work on affect,1 but also by Gruen’s resistance to this division in her recent study of empathy. Gruen defines entangled empathy in the following way: “[A] type of caring perception focused on attending to another’s experience of wellbeing. An experiential process involving a blend of emotion and cognition in which we recognize we are in relationships with others and are called upon to be responsive and responsible in these relationships by attending to another’s needs, interests, desires, vulnerabilities, hopes, and sensitivities” (3). Such entanglements are a key subject of the dialogue and thoughts of Abadzis’s characters, but they are also part of the visual lexicon that he marshals in Laika. In what follows, building on Gruen’s model, I link the visual circularity used in the text with an “ethics of care,” as opposed to an “ethics of justice,” traditionally construed.2 I also track the tropes of the curl and the circle, in Abadzis’s narrative, to explore the literal implications of entanglement. If we think in the most fundamental spatial ways about a coil, we recognize that basic relationality takes the “shape” of a coil: enfolding, embracing, revisiting, dwelling, and interacting. The “blast” of a rocket, on the other hand, or the hard edge of a straight line, tends to evoke separation, distance, escape, and singularity. Abadzis makes productive use of these spatial codes throughout the novel in ways that highlight how modes of empathetic engagement that cross species lines are themselves entangled with the cultural codes linked to gender.3

Shapes of attachment Abadzis establishes a powerful representational presence for circularity from the opening pages of Laika, long before the famous dog appears as a character in this graphic text. As Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, who will subsequently be known as Chief Designer in the Sputnik project, walks away alone from the Kolyma gulags where he had been held, a round moon accompanies his meditation on death and destiny, with Korolev repeating the phrase, “I am a man of destiny,” and “I will not die” over and over (Abadzis 6–15). Abadzis first shows Korolev underneath a full, round moon (10). The first panel depicting a moon shows Korolev looking rather diminutive underneath this large celestial body. Korolev then addresses the moon as “my friend,” specifically suggesting that it peers down on him, or perhaps mocks him. As Korolev claims that the moon appears to be close enough to touch (11), Abadzis depicts the man’s arm reaching upward in an attempt to make

121

Curly Tails and Flying Dogs

121

contact with the moon. The following panel includes only the round moon, right in its center, surrounded by circular shading that emphasizes this shape and a few surrounding stars. The panel itself is a classic rectangle, and underscores the text’s early contrast between circularity and linearity. At this early juncture, the narrative associates the moon and the circular with hope, protection, tactile intimacy, and a kind of “radiance” indicated by the author’s use of shading. After the panel showing only the moon, Korolev muses, “Or you’re helping me? A guardian angel, perhaps? . . . Lighting my way . . . through this frozen and silent world . . .” (11). Korolev’s remarks here anticipate speculations that might be attributed to Laika at the end of her life, in a frozen and silent world in outer space. Immediately afterward, Abadzis uses an asterisk-like shape within a typical speech balloon to indicate that Korolev hears the bark of a dog, the moon also being present as he remarks: “Not silent . . .” (11). When Korolev decides to follow the sound of the bark to safety and warmth, it is not just that the moon in these pages represents a feminine force, a classic association in many literatures and cultures; what is more, the text establishes, from the start, the connection between circularity, protection, a dog’s presence, and the feminine. These early, extreme conditions in which a lone male vacillates between thoughts of destiny or greatness and comfort or relationality are striking in the way they point up the contrast between traditional ethics, oriented around questions of justice, and an ethics of care. As Gruen notes, traditional ethics often posits that we are “in the world as thinkers and actors without having come to learn how to think and act with the assistance of a community of thinkers and actors,” with the result that traditional “theories tend to ignore or downplay not just the meaning of the relationships we are in, but the way those relationships shape who we are” (Gruen 14). Care ethics, in contrast, tends to insist upon the social engagements that undergird all people’s lives and paths to “independence.” Thus, from the perspective of an ethics of care, Korolev’s self-construal as a “man of destiny” can be interpreted as a form of self-delusion. His autonomy as an actor in the world is belied by his private dependence upon nurturing forces. In turn, the contrast between these individual-first and community-first approaches to ethics at once shapes and is crystallized in the spatial vocabulary that remains a constant in Abadzis’s text, despite the changes to Korolev and his circumstances shown in the unfolding narrative. Thus eighteen years after the gulag scene, when the first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, is launched into space by a Russian team in October 1957, Korolev first celebrates with his male comrades, but then quietly moves outdoors to raise a glass to his feminized moon. The dynamic here suggests a classic heteronormative model in which the breadwinning, progressive man of action secretly depends upon a feminine force or presence that is behind the scenes, usually in a domesticated, private setting. At the same time, Korolev’s comments on this occasion reinforce a tension between circular and linear modes of thinking:  “Today, the people of the world will stop thinking of themselves as a two-dimensional civilization wrapped around a ball . . . Now they will begin to look upward . . . and outward” (Abadzis 18; my emphasis). The first panel of this sequence depicts Korolev adopting a stance in which he holds a sort

122

122

Carrie Rohman

of invisible beach ball representing the earth, suggesting an insular or inferior view of the planet, and, by extension, of human civilization itself. The second panel then shows him making an expansive gesture with his upper body, looking outward as if to suggest a more mature, superior understanding of reality. It is worth repeating here that in the scene discussed previously, Korolev felt indebted to the feminine, round moon for saving him, and to the bark of a dog that kept him from perishing. Abadzis emphasizes another central theme early in the novel that underscores questions about cognition, affect, and empathy: dreaming. When confronted with Khruschev’s demand that his team launch a second Sputnik within a month— one that carries a “biological organism” (Korolev’s idea)—Korolev’s colleagues are incredulous and skeptical. But Korolev insists that they can and must achieve this seemingly impossible goal. In his attempts to encourage those colleagues, he claims, “This is only the first step to realizing our dream — putting Russians on the Moon!” (24). In general, however, dreaming is a contentious, polyvalent site in the text that calls into question intentionality and progress. It also specifically challenges human exceptionalism by suggesting forms of species intimacy and shared “dream work.” As a form of consciousness representation that Abadzis portrays as extending beyond the human, dreaming becomes one of the chief tropes of species entanglement in the text. That is, dreaming becomes one of the “images [Abadzis uses] in a bid to capture the distinctive texture and ecology of nonhuman experiences” (Herman 158), vis-à-vis those of humans. The first visual introduction of the dog who will eventually become known as Laika is instructive. Part of a litter of seven puppies, she is represented as somehow special throughout the text. This singling out partly echoes Korolev’s claim to be a man of destiny, but it also insists upon the distinctive personalities, preferences, and points of view that individual animals possess. As previously noted, Laika’s curly tail functions as her signature, as a sign of her particular “destiny,” marking her as set apart or different from the very outset. Tatiana, one of the first maternal figures in the text, names the dog for her tail: “Look at this! . . . Little Curly! Kudryavka!” (27). After a few panels showing small images of the tiny Kudryavka, she appears at the bottom of a page in a borderless panel (27); here Kudryavka is surrounded by concentric shaded circles—with Abadzis using the same form and style of circularity that he used for the moon a few pages earlier, when Korolev walked away from the gulag. This scene also emphasizes a female empathy that is specifically tied to the bodily strain associated with birthing. Comforting Kudryavka’s mother as she nurses her young, Tatiana says, “There, there . . . . Had a difficult time, didn’t you, girl?” (27). In this sense, the reader’s introduction to Kudryaka4 is filtered through a maternal form of empathy. The novel also registers, early on, cultural understandings of empathy as a childish, or feminine, trait or capacity. After Tatiana’s daughter, Liliana, asks to keep Laika, the mother feels torn. The family already has a cat and a dog, and Tatiana begins searching for proper homes for the various puppies she has rescued from an estate where she appears to be a domestic servant. After asking a local couple who run a stand in the market if they would take a puppy, the stall woman refers to Tatiana as a “[b]leeding-heart madwoman” (28). A few pages later, the

123

Curly Tails and Flying Dogs

123

father of Mikhail, a boy who abuses Laika for a short time and then throws her in a river in an attempt to kill her, calls Tatiana a “silly soft-hearted cow” when his wife (Tatiana’s cousin) relays Tatiana’s idea that raising the puppy might teach their son some responsibility (31). In these scenes, and also in the contrast between Yelena’s and her male colleagues’ attitudes toward the dogs used in the space program, the narrative resonates with Gruen’s discussion of how empathy is something we are taught to “get over” or “grow out of ”— and also with her remarks about how “empathy is sometimes thought of as a feminine emotion” (82). It is important to note that there is not a unilateral or final juxtaposition of male and female attitudes in the text, however. For instance, Oleg Gazenko, who supervises the training of the dogs for the space program, is deeply distressed at a number of junctures in the novel, and is eventually aligned with Yelena vis-à-vis Laika. Another male scientist has intervened on behalf of a different training dog. That said, however, Abadzis deliberately creates a female character to embody and enact most of the emotional labor in the novel. Hence, although the text seems to critique limiting associations based on gender stereotypes or ideals, at the same time it engages in what might be called gender excess, in which the visual rendering of female bodies, for instance, raises questions about a subtle over-morphologizing of feminine care—questions that I return to later on in this chapter. By the same token, Mikhail and Laika’s interactions also instantiate and reinforce the text’s crossing of spatial and gender codes vis-à-vis human-animal relationships—or rather its exploration of how this crossing plays out in a variety of more-than-human settings. By virtue of this crossing of codes, the novel casts animal and female cognitive and affective experiences and intimacies as rounded or coiled, while linking masculinist—and also anthropocentric—views or associations to linear shapes and trajectories. The boy Mikhail is abused by his hyper-masculine father, and replicates the same abusive behavior in his dealings with Laika. He keeps her locked in a closet most of the time, and neglects her basic needs for food, water, exercise, and interaction. When he initially throws her in the closet, Abadzis uses a small coil and a womb-like image to depict Laika being dumped into the closet, potentially signaling the end of Tatiana and Liliana’s commitment to building a community of care, and the beginning of a period in which Mikhail imposes a regime of the (putatively) isolated and independent self. Then, in the last three panels on the page showing Laika’s imprisonment in the closet (31), Abadzis alternates between the circular and the linear. He registers Laika’s abandonment by the boy using stark, straight lines of light as the closet door is being shut; the bar of light falls straight across Laika’s trunk and face in the first of the these panels. In the second, smaller panel, we see only a black rectangle divided in half vertically by a small line of light, likely representing Laika’s perspective from within the closet as the door is being closed. This simple angular image also reinforces the boy’s unwillingness to engage at all with Laika, and thus denotes a rigid barrier between human and nonhuman. Finally, in a moving end to this sequence, Abadzis draws Laika in total darkness, with a cloud-like thought balloon that includes only Mikhail’s face. That face is neutralized of its vicious, angry, and frustrated emotions, almost appearing

124

124

Carrie Rohman

vulnerable in Abadzis’s rendering: eyes and mouth are closed as simple lines, and eyebrows are relaxed high above the eyes. Despite the rigid, linear shapes used to portray Mikhail’s rejection of the dog, Laika’s thoughts about the boy are soft and rounded; indeed, her thought balloon—the first moment in which Abadzis presents Laika’s conscious experience—contains the only compassionate view of the abused and abusive child in the text. Following David Herman, we may ask what this instance reveals about the “texture and ecology” of Laika’s mental experience? Arguably, it reveals an empathic view of her abusive temporary owner. More strongly, Abadzis here signals that empathy—its nature and scope in a more-than-human world—is a major, if not the major, philosophical question raised by the narrative. This moment also marks the first time in the text that Abadzis explicitly links animal and human imagination or dreaming. In the first panel on the page that follows the three-panel sequence just discussed (Abadzis 32), the reader immediately sees a dark rectangle with two very small, narrowed eyes. Placed immediately after a page on which Laika thinks about Mikhail, and which concerns what Mikhail’s face “means” or “contains,” the reader may automatically assume that the eyes depicted belong to Laika. The next panel looks smudged and shows two larger, startled eyes. Here the eyes may strike readers as more human, but it is still impossible to determine the identity or even the species of the character in question. The next panel reveals Korolev shouting out while still in the midst of a traumatic dream about being imprisoned in the gulag. The larger, startled eyes in the second panel on this page are likely Korolev’s, as he jolts awake from the dream—probably. But the reader cannot be sure. Abadzis thus uses the principle of juxtaposition to suggest an overlap between human and animal thinking and dreaming, one that is directly linked to forms of trauma and abandonment that connect the two segments. Along the same lines, after Laika rescues herself from the river into which Mikhail has thrown her, Abadzis provides the first image of Laika dreaming. Having struggled to find food, Laika eventually catches a rat to eat and settles down to sleep in what appears to be an abandoned building (44). Abadzis uses a yellow, halo-like circle above the sleeping Laika to project the contents of her dream, in which a smiling Tatiana looks out at the reader from what appears to be a portrait with blurred, sketchy edges—that is, with shaded edges of the sort Abadzis has also used for images of the moon throughout the novel. In the next panel, a color change and the reaching out of two hands indicate that Laika dreams of being held, cared for, and nurtured by her first “human” maternal figure. Significantly, Abadzis chooses to portray Laika as dreaming about Tatiana rather than her actual mother, who is of course a dog. Then, in another case of deliberate juxtaposition and simultaneous, interspecies intuition and dreaming, one page later Abadzis shifts the storyline back to Tatiana and Liliana in their home. This choice suggests that Laika’s dreaming somehow corresponds with or even triggers Tatiana and Liliana’s own dreaming and thinking. The scene is explicitly domestic: Tatiana cleans the dishes, while Liliana stands at a window looking out. Tatiana realizes that her daughter is thinking about Laika

125

Curly Tails and Flying Dogs

125

and notes silently to herself, “My daughter still worries about you, Kudryavka . . . Still, after all this time, she thinks of you” (46). The scene that Abadzis attaches to this thought process will become an iconic one in the text. It is a rather simple image of Tatiana cradling the infant Laika in her arms, just as a mother would cradle her own child. In the image, Tatiana wears a head kerchief and looks down at the dog with affection. The evocation of the Madonna and child, an image that has suffused Christian iconography for centuries, is undeniably present here. The use of the headscarf in these images contributes to a “haloed” effect, even though there is not always a literal halo around Tatiana’s head in the panels at issue. Moreover, Abadzis draws this thought balloon using puffy, wavy lines that appear almost like a cloud or flower. The curvature of the balloon’s frame matches the empathic concern expressed by both mother and daughter in this section—a concern that the text, again overlaying or crossing spatial and gender codes in a scene of interspecies encounter, thereby constructs as feminine. Most of Abadzis’s depictions of memory or imagination have borders that are wavy and “broken” in the book, as in the juxtaposed scenes of Laika and Korolev dreaming (31, 32). To some degree, then, wavy borders represent all acts of memory, cognition, dreaming, or imagining, human as well as nonhuman. But the intensity of the wavy and curl-like borders around Laika’s dreams seem especially exaggerated, as are the curvy lines that surround moments of imagined species intimacy. Thus the visual register of the text, drawing on resources unavailable to narratives limited to the verbal register alone, crosses spatial and gender codes to suggest that memory, cognition, dreaming, and imagination in general are themselves feminine, coil-like, nurturing. Given that, as discussed previously, the official dream of the Soviet state is to land on the moon, the use of differently shaped and shaded borders allows Abadzis to draw a contrast between dreams of care, protection, interaction, relationship, and dreams of techno-bureaucratic conquest—and also to associate these two broad classes of dreams with different kinds of gender identities.

Dream weaving Figure 5.1 is taken from the beginning of what are easily the most visually arresting and engaging pages of Abadzis’s narrative; this segment again links the cognition, dreaming, and memories of human and dog. At the start of this section, Laika gazes up at the moon before she and Gertruda settle in to sleep. Gertruda, the larger dog, lies behind Laika, and creates a curved space of safety for the smaller dog. Once Abadzis has established with a small panel that Laika is asleep, he draws an image of what Laika dreams about—another “beatific” image of Tatiana holding Laika. The dreamer is now a full-sized dog, indicating the present time. Further, the borders of this panel are perhaps the least solid and straight of any in the novel. They are, in fact, a series of curvy lines and strokes that often do not touch and that seem relaxed, intimate, and “soft” in their visual presentation. Tatiana is also somewhat over-sized in this segment’s drawings, her

126

126

Carrie Rohman

Figure 5.1 From p. 51 of Laika, by Nick Abadzis. Reprinted by permision of Macmillan Publishers.

ample figure raising questions about a female morphological plenitude to which I will return later in the discussion. The panels that follow are exuberant depictions of Laika’s dream: first, Tatiana cradles her in love and safety, and then, seated with Laika on her lap and overlooking the city, says to her, “Look Kudryavka . . . you can see the whole world from up here! . . . Isn’t it beautiful? . . . We’re up so high, we could be flying!” (51). Near the middle of the page, Laika is pictured flying ecstatically right off Tatiana’s lap. The remaining panels on this page feature wavy borders and show Laika flying over the city, escaping the dog catcher’s net, and generally thrilling in the freedom of flight. The form of flying associated with Tatiana’s care, then, indicates freedom from captivity, a joyous independence. But again, this independence has been cultivated through prior, tender care. The sequence thus resonates with claims around

127

Curly Tails and Flying Dogs

127

“attachment parenting,” or the idea that intimate bonding with a child in early infancy can result in confidence and independence later.5 The following page is a splash page depicting Laika in her dream state; it shows the dog high above the earth, flying over a large round moon that is attached to surrounding wisps of atmosphere, consisting of clouds, smoke from smokestacks, and flames—with those flames perhaps anticipating the fiery reentry of Sputnik II into the Earth’s atmosphere. There are essentially no straight lines in this image—even the buildings below are curved and bent as Laika joyously soars above it all. The image thus literalizes the dream of flying that will become a contentious, polyvalent axis for questions of human and nonhuman aspiration, ethics, and surrogacy in the remainder of the story. Abadzis also includes small, borderless images of Laika in her dream state on the previous page (51); in some of these images, she lies on her back, as if tossing in her sleep while she dreams of flying. The borders that Abadzis does include in this section are so wavy and twisting that they sometimes fold into the image itself, to create swooping lines that accentuate Laika’s flying. In one panel, the wavy lines of the border even transform into Laika’s own hind legs, which have no termination point but are simply shaded from light blue to white as they become her limbs in the drawing. Even the tails of the thought balloons (also sometimes called pointers) on this page are exceptionally curly, like Laika’s tail. This somewhat uncanny overlap between the curly tail of thought balloons and the dog’s own curly tail visually suggests that Laika herself may be construed as a sort of cognitive force or claim. That is, Laika’s body resembles a thought balloon and her tail a pointer, the text’s visual register thereby making an implicit statement about the richness of animal cognition. In the last panel on this same page, the curvy border itself is permeated by tentacle-like segments of the black background that Abadzis uses throughout the page. In addition to curvature, then, the image accentuates a sense of porous boundaries. More specifically, the iconography of the text suggests that dreaming and the unconscious are spaces where interspecies empathy is especially prominent, where the boundaries of species-specific modes of cognition become wavy and blurred, not rigid and clear. This idea of interspecies connection is borne out in the rest of the episode (51–5). After the splash page discussed previously, Laika dreams that she sees Mikhail, flies down toward him, and then flies in a precise coil shape around him. While the dream-figure Mikhail appears astonished and eventually runs off, Laika is drawn with a smile throughout. The coil trajectory translates as her attempt to offer protection and care even to the child who tried to destroy her, and who cannot seem to accept her offer of compassion. Subsequently, Laika dreams that she sees Liliana walking down the street (53). She flies up to the girl, and once Liliana recognizes the dog the two gleefully embrace. In the very next panel at the top of the following page (54), Liliana is shown startling awake in her own bedroom. She calls to Tatiana and then reveals that she has just had a “strange dream” in which “Kudryavka was flying, and she came to see me” (54). Here the unconscious dreamwork, to use the terms of Freudian psychoanalysis, allows for a deep coincidence of human and animal

128

128

Carrie Rohman

wish-fulfillment—and the wish is for reunification and affection between human and dog.6 The text suggests that the dog and the girl literally have the same dream, at the same moment. Such overlaps, made especially salient in this sequence, strongly resonate with Herman’s observation that “narrative affords a bridge between human and nonhuman . . . not merely by allegorizing human concerns via nonhuman animals or engaging in anthropomorphic projections, but also by figuring the lived, phenomenal worlds,” the Umwelten, of creatures who are other than human (159). From this perspective, dreaming functions as a particularly charged interspecies “bridge” in Laika. Indeed, the suggestion that dreaming is an activity that crosses species boundaries and links human with nonhuman cuts against the grain of human exceptionalism. The imaginative, and hence the “creative,” are often still assumed to be exclusively human capacities, despite Darwin’s early insistence in The Descent of Man that dogs and other animals have vivid dreams. In the same vein, in a moment highlighting gendered implications of this uncanny coincidence of cognitive and affective connection between Liliana and the dog, later in the novel several of Yelena’s male Russian colleagues in the space program argue about whether dogs dream, and Yelena has a moment of crisis in which she wonders if she is “crazy” for thinking that they do (174). The final page of this episode concerned with dreaming, flying, and interspecies cognition ends as Tatiana helps her daughter go back to sleep, and then thinks to herself as she walks out of Liliana’s room, “A flying dog . . . ! . . . That child” (54). A remarkable sequence follows on the next page (55): additional images from Liliana’s dream of Laika in flight appear at the top of the page, one of them in a cloud-shaped panel, and from the right side of that cloud seven more images of a flying Laika sweep downward in a yellow, narrowing S-curve that at once contains umbilical motifs and is itself strongly suggestive of female anatomy—specifically, as I propose below, the structure of the fallopian tube (see Figure 5.2). In this visual corridor, Laika’s tail is often shaped into a kind of umbilical cord that is attached to or approaching the previous image of her. Moreover, the yellow path itself sometimes tapers to become Laika’s tail. It appears we are back in Laika’s own dream at this juncture, as she flies directly onto Tatiana’s lap. Abadzis repeats the same Tatiana figure as on the previous pages; again she wears a headscarf as she cradles the dog. The curving S-shape of flying Laikas is strikingly reminiscent of the shape of the female reproductive system, in which ovaries are attached to fallopian tubes. This association, coupled with the umbilical appearance of the coils within each of the flying Laika images, makes the sequence exceedingly—almost excessively— “feminine” in terms of its visual composition. In keeping with this excess, Laika appears to implant herself in Tatiana’s lap and embracing arms at the conclusion of the flight. Tatiana is depicted in a receptive manner, offering womb-like comfort and reassurance. Moreover, of the three panels showing Tatiana, the final one makes her figure larger and more curvilinear than the first two. There is a tendency in Abadzis’s visual work to exaggerate the bodily plenitude of his female figures, particularly in moments where they represent the kind of care ethics that I have

129

Curly Tails and Flying Dogs

129

Figure 5.2 From p. 55 of Laika, by Nick Abadzis. Reprinted by permision of Macmillan Publishers.

been discussing. This tendency applies to various representations of Yelena further on in the text, as I discuss later. Here, the final image of Tatiana cradling Laika also seems to show a mercurial or ethereal dog figure looking down from the upper right corner, as if we are seeing Laika’s consciousness viewing or monitoring her own dream content. This may be understood as a moment of metacognition, in which Laika registers or indexes her affective attachment to, experience of, and investment in Tatiana’s care. I would also suggest that it serves to punctuate what will be further iterated as her memory of that care, which becomes transferable or transmittable, to some degree, once Yelena enters her life.

Processing empathy Starting with chapter  3 of the novel, Abadzis’s imaginary female dog trainer in the space program, Yelena Dubrovsky, becomes the narrative center of the human drama surrounding Laika’s flight. During Yelena’s first introduction to the small

130

130

Carrie Rohman

dog, she notes the “curliest tail” she has ever seen, and repeats Tatiana’s naming ritual from earlier in the text, settling on “Kudryavka.” This second naming by a woman, a naming that values the curliness of the tail, functions as a kind of double recognition of the importance of a maternal coil or curl. It is made all the more emphatic and reiterative when Yelena, having announced to her male colleagues that dogs talk to her, then cradles Laika in precisely the same manner as Tatiana has done (72). This naming sequence and the introduction of Yelena in the text also returns us to the question of female corporeal excess and whether the text represents the female body in problematic ways, perhaps in an effort to exaggerate a visually embodied female compassion. Again, while I  find the text largely critiques stereotypically gendered behavior, there are some images of Yelena that could be read as excessive, or perhaps even unnecessarily, sexualized. While I do not want to accuse the text of being sexist, I  think some images warrant scrutiny along these lines. For instance, when Yelena meets Laika, she mistakenly asks what “his” name is. Dr. Yazdovsky corrects her, and explains, “All our dogs are female” (71). In the next panel, Yelena is drawn bent over the table that holds Laika’s carrier as Yazdovsky uncomfortably discusses the program’s gendered reasoning about waste disposal. Yelena is not only pictured bent over, with her perhaps overly rounded buttocks prominently displayed, but she has her forearms down on the table and her head elevated. This is a polyvalent image, to be sure. Yelena might be said to adopt a dog’s play position, signaling a friendly invitation to Laika, who is depicted looking out from her carrier. On the other hand, the sexually suggestive nature of the position cannot be overlooked. Perhaps Abadzis intentionally plays on the perceived sexual availability of women in this moment, especially since Yazdovsky and Gazenko later have an awkward miscommunication about Yelena’s versus Laika’s “beauty” (73). Yet the representation of Yelena’s body still may be read as exceeding the conscious critique of gender roles that Abadzis elsewhere seems to leverage. Other images similarly raise questions along these lines—for instance, on the page featuring both a gargantuan drawing of Yelena’s left breast and a very small image of her in which the raised buttocks and arched back of availability seem to reappear (79).7 Likewise, the tiny image of a nude Yelena showering on page 151 gives me pause. Yelena “covers” herself in a staged act of modesty that insists upon the viewer’s voyeurism, but given the options open to Abadzis here (for instance, drawing her from the neck up in a shower), I find the satirically titillating composition of the image strange. How does the reader’s “peep” at the nude Yelena serve the larger narrative, and why does Abadzis choose to render it? Thus, although it can be argued that Abadzis sometimes makes Yelena’s body excessive in an attempt to emphasize her nurturing qualities, those renderings may also reinforce problematic views of the female body. The issue of caricature and the exaggerated style sometimes used in cartoons, comics, and other forms of visual satire is also germane to this set of questions. Returning to Yelena’s introduction and naming sequence, I want to note how Abadzis juxtaposes her actions and her image to those of Korolev, who in his role

131

Curly Tails and Flying Dogs

131

as Chief Designer later gives the dog her new name of Laika, which means “barker” (127). The primary irony in this scene is that the normally calm dog seems to have an instinctive dislike of the Chief Designer during the meeting, and Korolev marks this agitation by singling her out as the chief dog for the Sputnik project. When he takes Laika from Yelena, his actions are the precise opposite of hers and Tatiana’s. He thrusts Laika up into the air forcefully, away from him, and the penultimate panel on this page depicts this movement as violent. The Designer’s arms, drawn as powerful black forces composed of straight black lines, no longer seem like appendages. The arms instead resemble forces from turbo engines, visually connecting the Designer to his larger plans for Laika. In parallel with Abadzis’s images of Yelena’s body, these drawings raise questions about the gender dynamics of the text—more specifically, about whether these images appeal to a reductive or problematic visual register of male power. The rather phallic “outward and upward” of Korolev’s earlier sentiments is visually salient here, with Laika being the sacrificial object of those impulses. It is useful to recall that Korolev initially experiences a dog’s bark in the text as a saving force. While on the surface his naming practice values an aggressive kind of speech or self-marking, Korolev carries with him a secret association of the barking dog with protection and care. Abadzis provides an interesting contrast between how Korolev and Yelena respond to Laika’s barking. In the early interactions between Yelena and Laika, Yelena enacts a basic form of empathy as the dog growls repeatedly when it is time to be put in her kennel. Yelena simply observes, “Don’t like being locked up, eh?” (75). Later in the novel, Yelena will elaborate such empathy-based hypotheses in various ways, and she will come to believe (rightly) that Laika has been through some form of trauma, a possibility that seems utterly lost on Korolev. After Yelena’s initial empathic recognition of Laika’s dislike of cages, she speaks two of the novel’s cardinal phrases to Laika: “Good dog. You can trust me” (75). In two of the large panels in the bottom half of this page, Abadzis depicts Laika as if she were ruminating on these two phrases. Abadzis uses red lettering for the phrases, and three of the four final panels on this page are drawn as if from within Laika’s kennel. Here the narrative’s representation of Laika’s perspective resonates with Yelena’s ability to empathize with the dog. Even in this early segment, Yelena seems to exhibit what Gruen calls “cognitive empathy” in which “the empathizer is not mirroring or projecting onto the emotions of the one being empathized with, but is engaged in a reflective act of imagination that puts her into the object’s situation and/or frame of mind, and allows her to take the perspective of the other” (48). Also important here is the way that this entangled empathy, grounded in the relationship between Yelena and Laika, is the prime building block of an interspecies trust that will ultimately be violated with such heartrending drama by the end of the story. Yelena’s reactions upon learning the truth about the experimental scientific program she works in underscore what Carol Gilligan would call an “ethics of care” in contrast to an “ethics of justice.” Gilligan’s ideas about ethics focus on how connection and relationships constitute situated moral contexts, as opposed to the often abstract ideas about justice and right action of more traditional ethical

132

132

Carrie Rohman

models (64–105). When Dr. Gazenko reveals the purpose of the training—to send animals on dangerous test flights into space—Yelena reacts in horror, silently (80). In the second panel on this page, Abadzis draws her with her jaw dropped in dismay, and, crucially, holding Laika in the cradling position, emphasizing her relationship of care. It is a particularly interesting panel because Yelena seems “frozen” in this position of nurturing as she registers the reality of her role in the Soviet scientific complex. The obvious ethical problems of the Soviet agenda are implied by the panel: the use/abuse of animals who will be put through intensive physical strain and harm (and frequently will die) in order to function as surrogates for human pilots in what amounts to an exaggerated pissing contest between geopolitical territories that take on the profile of hyper-masculinist nation-states. Laika’s lack of understanding and, implicitly, her inability to give consent to this agenda, are emphasized on the next page as she is strapped into a centrifuge machine (81). The final two panels on this page evoke Laika’s experiences. In the first, six human hands are depicted securing her straps, and Laika looks to her left as a thought balloon shows a simple question mark. In the final panel, as the door of the centrifuge shuts, Abadzis repeats the use of shadow to show a single line of light traversing Laika’s head, just as when Mikhail was locking Laika in a closet for reasons she could not “sniff out.” It is telling that Abadzis does not depict that centrifuge from above, which would result in a circular image. Instead, he chooses to show the centrifuge from the side in long horizontal panels that appear very linear (82–3). Because of its complicity with the space program, arguably, the circularity of the centrifuge is thus morphed or redirected by Abadzis into what is ultimately a linear visual register. This is a noteworthy choice, as the centrifuge would typically be one of the most obvious occasions for visual circularity in the text.8 Yelena’s capacities for nurturing also come into view during the conversations she has with the dogs, and these moments do much of the cognitive and affective work around questions of entangled empathy in the novel. The first extended conversation occurs when Yelena asks Albina and Kozyavka (two dogs who have already been sent on a preliminary flight) what it is like to have “touched the edge of space” (86). The question itself is an indicator of empathy, as Yelena seems genuinely engaged in trying to imagine the dogs’ experiences. We don’t see any of the male characters explicitly engaged in this kind of imaginative exercise.9 Indeed, the very idea of process is key to Gruen’s discussion of entangled empathy, and Gruen pointedly stresses that such processes are not linear: I think of empathy as a process. Although the process may not be linear, we can think of the various parts of the process as going something like this: The wellbeing of another grabs the empathizer’s attention; then the empathizer reflectively imagines himself in the position of the other; and then he makes a judgment about how the conditions that the other finds herself in contribute to her state of mind or wellbeing. The empathizer will then carefully assess the situation and figure out what information is pertinent to empathize effectively with the being in question. (51).

133

Curly Tails and Flying Dogs

133

Analogously, Yelena begins her conversations with the dogs by asking, “What would you say if you could talk?” (87). When, in Yelena’s mind, Albina answers back, she imagines the dog saying, “Let me out”; “Let me go”; “[Being shot into space is] noisy, frightening, and very dangerous”; “Let me go” (87). Here Yelena imaginatively transposes herself into the dog’s position and speculates not only about what the experience is like for her, but also about a course of action that would be ethically sound, given what the dog can be imagined to have gone through. Moreover, Yelena clearly recognizes her own distinct position and point of view during this exchange when she says “I can’t [let you go]”; “That would be a desertion of duty” (87). Gruen insists that the capacity to articulate one’s own position as distinct from the other is critical to an empathy that avoids routine problems such as overestimation or overidentification, and other theorists have also noted how empathy requires moving between our own and others’ perspectives.10 The text will continue to stress both the differences as well as the similarities between Yelena’s and the dogs’ perspectives. In particular, Abadzis attributes specific and intense emotions to Yelena and the dogs, often in overlapping ways, across the full arc of the story. Following Yelena and Laika’s initial interchange, and after another brief dream sequence in which Yelena and Tatiana appear in contiguous oval shapes, cradling Laika with their eyes closed and with peaceful, meditative visages, Abadzis revisits images of Laika flying (88), suggesting again a kind of unrestrained consciousness that is born from the women’s nurturing, protective care. This image of joyous “free” flying reappears at times of confusion for Laika, such as when she is subjected to a parabolic training flight in which the plane makes full 360-degree loops while Laika is enclosed in a padded and pressurized cabin. Yelena remarks upon Laika’s patience and loyalty before the flight, and Dr. Gazenko notes with perhaps a wry clarity:  “Indeed. ‘Man’s best friend’ ” (90). Such scenes highlight how her handlers take advantage of Laika’s species and personality in the name of human “progress.” During the flight, Laika is shown experiencing feelings of confusion, surprise, fear, and perhaps betrayal, yet one small panel depicts dreamlike flying, indicating the possibility that she has a moment of joy associated with her earlier dreams of flying. Immediately after, however, she is smashed against the side of the cabin (93), so the anomalous panel may also function as an ironic interpolation, pointing out the disparity between Laika’s earlier dreams and her present experience of distress. Despite being knocked semi-conscious during the flight, she nonetheless runs in circles of happiness around Yelena when they are reunited—suggesting Yelena’s centrality to Laika’s affective world. Indeed, Yelena is clearly the figure who does most of the “emotional labor” in the novel, as Abadzis’s interview responses would seem to confirm (it is clear from the interview that Abadzis created her expressly for this purpose). Yelena claims, for instance, a privileged kind of knowledge of the dogs’ inner experiences:  “I can usually tell what’s bothering them,” she notes (95). Yelena is also a kind of Jane Goodall figure, who, even in a scientific setting, insists upon animals’ capacities to feel, and who gains a certain amount of credibility for her sensitivity to animal worlds. On the prior page, Yelena and Gazenko have begun a discussion

134

134

Carrie Rohman

about reviews of Laika’s responses during the parabolic flight. When Yelena is able to make sense of Laika’s relief during moments of zero gravity during the test, Gazenko suggests that Yelena is becoming a “behavioral expert,” yet remains skeptical of the dog’s, or any dog’s, cognitive and affective capacities. “What can I tell you?” Yelena replies, “Dogs have emotions. Besides, she’s a special dog” (95). This reply insists on the similarity between animals’ and humans’ experiential capacities, but hints that Laika’s abilities may be somehow enhanced vis-à-vis those of other dogs. The effect of her claim that Laika is special is both to undercut assumptions of a general commonality between human and nonhuman emotions, yet at the same time to highlight Laika’s singularity—undoing any blanket statement about limitations when it comes to other species’ affective and cognitive capacities. The danger of developing empathy toward animals in a scientific setting is another motif that runs throughout the story. Yelena is repeatedly warned by her male superiors to not get too attached, emotionally, to the dogs in her care.11 After the parabolic flight sequence, Gazenko finally explains to Yelena that one of their superiors, Blagonravov, “broke the golden rule” of detachment and took a dog home with him so that animal would never have to fly again (97). In the context of this revelation, Yelena tells Gazenko, “It’s impossible not to care about them,” and begins to provide a character-sketch of each animal in her program. Her sketches begin with the animal’s name, and she then describes each animal’s personality, preferences, habits, temperament, and so on. For instance, Yelena begins the sketches with the following description:  “Albina—the matriarch and space veteran, fussy, but protective of the others . . . ” (97). When she gets to Laika, her description is striking for its gendered connotations: “sweet-natured and empathic Kudryavka, so good at adapting her own moods to suit yours . . . She wants to please and to be loved. But she’s very patient and determined, which is what gets her through the training” (98). This description has more than a few overtones of the classic accommodating feminine ideal, including the quality of being empathic. At the same time, however, the novel seems to imply that this traditionally feminine stance is ultimately more just, in the final analysis. The scene also highlights the use of all-female dogs in the Soviet program, which is earlier explained away as a decision made out of convenience (for ease of waste disposal) but which surely had ideological underpinnings as well. In another interaction between Yelena and the dogs, just after she learns of Blagonravov’s secret rescue of an individual dog, Yelena feels that her dogs are also asking her to rescue them. She imagines them claiming that they overheard the discussion about Blagonravov, and suggesting that she take them home. Yelena also hears a guilty accusation coming from the dogs—namely, that Yelena favors Laika over the rest of them. After several panels depicting her anxiety, Yelena admits, “It’s me who gives you voice” (100). These moments in the narrative articulate the cognitive and affective processing in which Yelena engages in relation to the lives of the dogs in her care, in an extended or slowed-down time-frame. They also highlight Yelena’s awareness of her own significant, vexed role in the dogs’ lives. Korolev’s one-on-one exchanges with Laika, after he has singled her out to be the animal used for the fatal flight, provide several interesting points of contrast

135

Curly Tails and Flying Dogs

135

with Yelena’s conversations. That is, while Korolev is aware of Laika’s sacrificial status, he frames the situation through abstractions in order to rationalize her death. In the scenes where the Chief Designer apologies for what he “must do” (131), Abadzis at first uses a series of repetitive, horizontally stretched out panels (130–1). Korolev suggests that the Sputnik event will make him “free” and oddly implies that it would do the same for Laika—despite knowing that the flight will kill her. He appeals to abstract concepts like destiny and history as justifying the mission, and notes of Laika: “You will fly further and longer and higher than any living being from this Earth ever has” (132). In the panel where Korolev makes this statement, Abadzis uses a vertical frame that reaches from top to bottom of the page. Korolev’s face occupies the apex of the panel; Laika’s, the bottom. There is thus a huge gulf or negative space between them, which, in parallel with Gruen’s account of traditional ethics as a process of reasoning from abstract principles (33), visually suggests Korolev’s detachment, abstraction, and lack of any sense of entanglement with the dog. At the same time, though, Abadzis continues to use a number of striking curved or circular images, often in juxtaposition to linear ones, in the final segments of the text. In one moving panel, when Laika returns from a “humane” overnight stay with a superior’s family, just before preparations for the launch, Laika runs to be reunited with Yelena. She leaps into Yelena’s arms, and in the panel depicting that embrace, Yelena almost seems to be underwater, given Abadzis’s extensive use of curves in the sketch (145). Laika’s leash cascades away from the tableau, like a gymnast’s undulating ribbon, and in a fascinating departure from his other sketches, Abadzis draws Yelena barefooted, right in the middle of their clinical workspace. There is, moreover, no delineation of a floor or ground of any kind in this panel, and this absence adds to the reader’s sense of movement or floating. The use of barefootedness is particularly noteworthy as it seems to signal Yelena’s embodied, earthy, and “animal” propensities, alongside her ability to more fully acknowledge emotional and cognitive forms of vulnerability, exposure, and interspecies intimacy. Yelena’s capacity for intimate interactions with the dogs comes to the fore in the scenes involving the maximum-security site of the launch, where the human workers and the dogs have been flown. Yelena is staying in a heated but sparse barracks, and she requests that Laika and her back-up dog, Albina, be allowed to stay with her so they can be warm. On the second night, after a comrade has angrily complained to Yelena that everyone has “gone soft” (152) over Laika, Yelena confronts what she interprets as the dogs’ query to her, “What are we doing here?” (154). The resulting interchange involves the dogs’ emphasis on their use of smell as a primary form of knowledge production, as they repeatedly suggest that the plane they flew on and the room smell of what the previous occupant must have felt. Abadzis cleverly connects the olfactory and the affective here, evoking how dogs read others’ emotional states through smell. Yelena goes through another searching set of questions about animal perceptions and communication. “I wonder,” she muses, “ . . . how much do you really understand? Anything at all . . . ? Is it just the tone of my voice that you respond to . . . ? How do you seem to know?”

136

136

Carrie Rohman

(155). At the end of the scene, Yelena laments what “this place” is: “Where we don’t let dogs be dogs . . . or even people be people. . . . This place . . . is a monument to man’s ambitions” (155). The monumental is part of the logic of the line that undergirds much of the spatial lexicon of the narrative, and which is most forcefully represented in the last thirty pages of the text where images of the launch of Sputnik II are prominent. At the moment of Laika’s death, Abadzis again uses repetitive straight, horizontal panels, this time of different lengths (186). Several of these are blank or nearly blank, but a few contain images of Laika in a flying position—one showing her stretched out in the cabin amid the grim reality of the stress and overheating that caused her death. Yelena is featured in the bottom left corner panel on page 186, looking up as tears stream down her face. The overall composition of the page confirms that the masculinist form of flying—associated with what Korolev refers to as destiny and history—has supplanted the coiling affections that Abadzis made so central through curvilinear shapes, and through his creation of a female character in the novel. Taken as a whole, then, Abadzis’s text certainly levels a critique of detached, masculinist positions that value idealized and anthropocentric aspirations and perspectives; instead, the text privileges forms of interspecies entanglement and ethical postures of care. The visual lexicon of rigid and curved is central to this framework, and raises questions about the degree to which it is aware of—or merely traffics in—gendered stereotypes. In this connection, moments of potential visual excess in his drawings of the novel’s female figures may be especially salient; such moments perhaps suggest an attempt to relegate affective interspecies work, primarily, if not exclusively, to the feminine. Read along these lines, Abadzis’s portrayal of Yelena enables a transference to her of the compassion or empathy that certain male figures in the novel are understood to experience, but that they do not (or cannot) fully process or voice.

Notes 1 The relation between the cognitive and affective remains highly contested in affect theory. See for instance Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, and Ruth Leys’s responses to Massumi in Critical Inquiry (2012). Also, for details about work in neuroscience suggesting the interconnectedness of cognition and emotion, see António Damasio’s Descartes’ Error. 2 Gruen usefully reprises the emergence of an ethics of care, situating that work as a reaction to the writings of Lawrence Kohlberg in particular, who in the early 1970s identified stages of moral development through his study of boys. Kohlberg’s work focused on boys’ responses to social standards and rules. Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings began studying moral development at this time, with a focus on people’s embeddedness in social relationships (Gruen 30–2). 3 For another discussion of cross-species empathy in graphic texts, see Suzanne Keen’s essay, “Fast Tracks to Narrative Empathy,” where Keen theorizes what she calls an “ambassadorial strategic empathy” (135) that is produced by word-image

137

Curly Tails and Flying Dogs

4

5 6

7

8

9

137

combinations that sometimes address animal suffering. My own argument is focused on the ways that gender is inflected in graphic representations of interspecies empathy. Although I am emphasizing the curly tail of the book’s namesake, for ease of reading I will henceforth refer to Kudryavka as Laika. That said, however, the reader should note that it is Korolev who eventually gives the dog the name Laika, as I discuss later. Ideas about attachment and child development are complex and wide-ranging, but for a useful overview see Jean Mercer’s Understanding Attachment. For a detailed discussion of dreams and wish-fulfillment, see the third chapter of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1913), titled “The Dream Is the Fulfillment of a Wish.” Along these same lines, see the work of sculptor and performance artist Heidi Wiren Bartlett (heidiwiren.com). Especially in the pieces “White Monarch” and “Our Feet,” Bartlett troubles the way in which women’s fashion colludes with ideas about sexual availability, specifically the way that high heels result in the raising of a woman’s buttocks and arching of her back to suggest she is constantly “ready.” Bartlett directly links these objectifying views of women to similar notions of the availability of animal bodies. Abadzis’s choice not to represent the centrifuge as circular again raises broader questions about how tightly the visual register of the text links linear and circular shapes to masculine and feminine gender roles, and whether the linkages at issue are consistently conscious and critical of dominant gender ideologies, or rather unconscious and aligned with such ideologies. Ultimately, I see Laika as exemplifying a “mixed” textual economy, in which some elements of the narrative may work to trouble gender stereotypes, whereas others seem almost troublingly conventional. Again, Dr. Gazenko’s affective experience is hinted at throughout the text, and it finds expression in the quotation from the historical Gazenko that Abadzis inserts as the text’s postscript: Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog. Oleg Gerogivitch Gazenko, 1998 (Abadzis 201)

The inclusion of this quotation raises the question of whether Abadzis created Yelena in part as a kind of proxy or receptacle for the empathy that Gazenko and perhaps the other male figures involved were barred from acknowledging, to themselves or others, given their historically gendered positions in the 1950s. 10 See Gruen’s discussion of Diana Meyers’s work (66). 11 Goodall’s work has helped make this question, along with the question of anthropomorphism, prominent in discussions around the use or observation of animals in science. For a detailed consideration of these and related issues, see Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman’s Thinking with Animals.

Works cited Abadzis, Nick. Laika. New York: First Second, 2007. Brown, Lisa. “Animals in Space” (includes interview with Nick Abadzis). Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. Issue 16 (Spring 2011): 8–28.

138

138

Carrie Rohman

Damasio, António. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam, 1994. Daston, Lorraine, and Gregg Mitman. Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982. Gruen, Lori. Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals. New York: Lantern, 2015. Herman, David. “Storyworld/Umwelt: Nonhuman Experiences in Graphic Narratives.” SubStance #124, 40.1 (2011): 156–81. Keen, Suzanne. “Fast Tracks to Narrative Empathy: Anthropomorphism and Dehumanization in Graphic Narratives.” SubStance #124, 40.1 (2011): 135–55. Kohlberg, Lawrence. The Philosophy of Moral Development: Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice. New York: Harper and Row, 1981. Leys, Ruth. “The Turn to Affect: A Critique.” Critical Inquiry 37.3 (Spring 2011): 434–72. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002. Mercer, Jean. Understanding Attachment: Parenting, Child Care, and Emotional Development. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006. Meyers, Diana. “A Modest Feminist Sentimentalism: Empathy and Moral Understanding.” Ethical Sentimentalism. Ed. Remy Debes and Karsten Stueber. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, forthcoming. Noddings, Nel. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Oakland: U of California P, 1986.

139

Chapter 6 I N VA SI V E S P E C I E S :   M A N G A’ S I N SE C T- H UM A N   W O R L D S Mary A. Knighton

Since the 1980s, such terms as swarms, distributed intelligence, and insect models of organization have infiltrated both the design of digital technologies and cultural theoretical analysis of such media systems. Yet, as researchers commented, “The most talented roboticist in the world is not going to come close to what a cockroach can do.” (Jussi Parikka, Insect Media, xi)1

Attributed to renowned nineteenth-century ukiyo-e artist, Katsushika Hokusai, the word “manga” (漫画) in Japanese derives from Chinese characters (kanji) that denote whimsical scribbles and random drawings.2 Manga thus shares with comics similar associations ranging over time from silly or satirical caricatures and children’s entertainment to contemporary graphic narratives for adults.3 Despite idealized and simplistic claims by Roland Barthes in Empire of Signs (1983) about Japan’s linguistic escape from a strict law of letters to wider and bluer semiotic skies thanks to kanji logography, few scholars today would disagree that manga is strongly rooted in Japan’s writing system and technologies of print culture. Words in the form of, and accompanying, pictures read right to left have fascinated readers in this part of the world ever since The Tale of Genji (emakimono) scrolls and Buddhist-inspired human and animal caricatures in chōjū jinbutsu giga, both dating from the twelfth to thirteenth centuries. Later, Edo-era (1603– 1868) woodblock printers created books (kibyōshi) that combined text and images for increasingly literate readers to procure via itinerant book peddlars and lending shops (kashihonya).4 However, the term “story manga,” central to worldmaking in manga, is a post-WWII, twentieth-century phenomenon, inseparable from a man who dominated the form at that time, the so-called “God of Manga”: Tezuka Osamu (1928–89). In this chapter, I  introduce modern manga and explore the degree to which nonhuman animals—in particular, insects—inform diverse storyworlds arising from Tezuka’s pioneering contributions to the form. I  conclude this overview by describing the beautifully rendered manga, Mushishi, in order to contrast its

140

140

Mary A. Knighton

nostalgia for human-nature harmony with the violent disruptions of that worldview in my primary case study, Terra Formars (2011–ongoing). A domestic and international manga (and anime) sensation written by Sasuga Yū and illustrated by Tachibana Ken’ichi, Terra Formars redraws the lines of insect-human relationships in a posthuman portrayal of species war.

On the order of insects in Japan’s “story manga” Tezuka expanded earlier single-frame formats displayed in public performances as kamishibai paper theatre and four-frame (yonkoma) manga published in newspapers and manga magazines for boys and girls in the prewar period, and soon gained a name for himself with cheaply printed manga books (akabon) in the late 1940s and 1950s.5 His “story manga” became longer, continuous, intertextual narratives relying on a stable “star system” of characters. Furthermore, as might be expected from the artist who would dominate the early stages of the postwar anime scene on television and become known abroad, Tezuka innovated a style that shook up the strictly sequential frame (koma) format, and experimented with saying less with words and more with cinematic aesthetics.6 He innovated intraframe and interframe relationships in ways that produced dynamic effects of speed and movement while also dramatizing, and helping to codify, characters’ interpersonal and psychological communication (Steinberg 37–85). Indeed, broadly speaking, the most striking difference between Western comics and manga may well be the greater weight placed on the narrative, even cinematic, function of the image in manga. We can see this in the utter elimination of any words at all for sometimes pages at a time, or in the increasingly common double-page wordless layout. The radical rethinking of frame shapes also allows for fine-tuning of a story’s balance of exterior action (movement across the page) and interior drama (close-up freeze-frames), besides guiding the reader’s eye to relay visually and dynamically the details of character relationships, minute changes in psychological or physical landscapes, and complex time shifts. Manga is especially strong at creating an experience of simultaneity and not just one of sequential unfolding.7 Just as Etienne-Jules Marey innovated developments in cinema with artificial insects and then real ones in flight, and like Eadweard Muybridge’s similar work with horses, modern manga since Tezuka creates its human and nonhuman animals with an eye to animation film. But even Tezuka, as a child in school, studied and collected insects. He documented them in detailed realistic drawings associated with natural history, as was common for male enthusiasts (konchū shōnen, or “insect boys”). His pastime, coupled with his given name “Osamu,” reminded his friends of the common ground beetle, the osamushi, leading to a nickname that Tezuka would ratify by silently adding the kanji character for bug, mushi (虫), to his first name; later, when he created his own manga and anime company, he would call it Mushi Productions.8 Although he had trained to become a doctor, Tezuka gave up that career and turned to manga art and storytelling, making use of his knowledge of science, medicine, zoology, and natural history to

141

Invasive Species

141

create multispecies storyworlds. Influenced by (and at times influencing) Disney’s global production of rounded, cutesy animal and human forms in story manga and then in animation, Tezuka aimed his work at children initially.9 In these early works, the robot boy Mighty Atom (Tetsuwan Atomu, known overseas as Astro Boy) and Princess Knight (Ribon no kishi), respectively, come to life in tales of high adventure and conflict that compel character change and growth. Appropriate as Bildungsromane, such manga also address incipient adult issues of war, loss, love, and sexuality. Indeed, particular to Japanese postwar manga and anime are stories of children who stand in, and even replace, adults to become heroic saviors who fight for the future. Arguably, this sort of storyline stems from disillusionment with past “fathers,” including military leaders and the emperor himself, who misled the country into its modern imperialistic “fifteen-year war.” Japanese manga today is full of mecha transformers and mobile suits piloted by tiny humans (adolescent boys and girls) lodged inside giant carapaces, part of highly technological and robotized storyworlds that find their origins in Atom and the transformer morphology of insects.10 Such high-tech storyworlds are rarely far from animals, be they simply inspiration for primitive or “alien” Others, analogies to innocent but inchoate children, or self-conscious references to early cinema derived from animal motion studies. As manga scholar Frederick Schodt reminds us, Disney’s Mickey Mouse quite literally shaped the robot boy Atom’s form, and Paul Terry’s Mighty Mouse, “fathered” by Superman, is intertwined and encoded, like visual DNA, in the manga rodent’s signature gestures (“Designing” 236). Animals frequently function to shore up conventional sex roles, as if gender were based in “nature,” but at times they afford a more radical rethinking of gender alignments in hybrid terms. For instance, it is almost impossible to understand Princess Knight’s story manga without considering how her white steed Opal reinforces her disguised identity as a male knight, or without recognizing just how thoroughly the Takarazuka Theatre shaped Tezuka’s dramas of cross-dressing and gender-role reversals. Sapphire, the “beribboned knight” of this tale, is equipped quite literally with two hearts–a blue boy’s and a pink girl’s heart–inside her body, and she defies whatever limitations her female anatomy might normally create by hiding her transgressive biology behind masculine masks and an openly androgynous beauty. As a boy, Tezuka’s hometown was near the city of Takarazuka where all-female musical and dance troupes developed from 1913 as a modern counterpart to traditional Kabuki’s reliance solely on male actors. Creating quasipermanent male roles (otokoyaku) for select female actresses who tended to live those same roles off- and onstage, Takarazuka captured Tezuka’s imagination for its stylized and flamboyant musicals, costumes, settings, and adaptations of works from the exotic West. In this way, theatre and increasingly film and animations not only profoundly impacted the gendered plots and aesthetics of storytelling that Tezuka would forge in the decades ahead, but also challenged genre categories for manga explicitly marketed according to specific sex and age demographics. Human hybrids of various kinds, such as the mixed-gender Princess Knight, would develop out of Tezuka’s fascination with forms of animal life–including those that resist being assigned to the binarized categories of male versus female.

142

142

Mary A. Knighton

Tezuka’s fascination with hermaphroditic insects, for instance, reinforced his sense that gendered and sexed bodies were more complicated than the usual binary model gives them credit for; this, of course, resonates with anatomically rearranged, bi-gendered characters such as Princess Knight. Early insect comics by Tezuka evolve in gendered social and biological complexity, as when praying mantises feast on lovers after sex or I.L.’s eponymous character transforms into a poison moth fatale to get revenge on her cheating husband.11 This trajectory culminates in Tezuka’s dramatic gekiga manga for adults in the 1970s, The Book of Human Insects (Ningen Konchūki). This story critiques Japan’s rise to success in the postwar period through a tale of serial metamorphoses by a female insect who mimics, then replaces, her rivals in order to survive on the domestic and international stage.12 Perhaps in reaction to complex story manga, a de-emphasis on telling in favor of showing is taken to a radical post-Tezuka level in the completely wordless Gon series (1991–2002). Its 1998 Eisner Award–winning author, Tanaka Masashi, depicts slapstick and sarcastic humor through realistically drawn, highly detailed natural settings and animals. It focuses on the daily encounters of Gon, a disproportionately shaped, perpetually disgruntled little dinosaur with an oversized head whose name connotes via onomatopoeia the sound of a dull thud, or simply the emotional state of being dumbfounded. The often inept, chronically antagonized Gon has, against all odds, outlived all the other members of his species. His muteness, whatever the situation, acts as a cynical retort; at other times, it functions simply to stress that any word at all is one too many.13 Gon suggests that manga’s posthuman animal turn is one aimed at detouring the reader away from the textual primacy of stories about human animals toward “seeing” what nonhuman animals have to say. It also asks what it might mean for such stories to be universal in wordless translation, which is no small point; that is, contemporary manga for consumption as a global cultural product derives from Japanese, a language not so widely known or spoken outside of Japan, so Japan’s global manga aesthetics and production are shaped by the demands of visual codification and translation in ways that comics in English and other more common, global languages do not have to be. When much is lost in mere linguistic translation, diverse avatars in supernatural creatures and deities (yōkai)—often in the form of animals, including insects—serve manga stories well as mediums for global communication. A substantial body of insect story manga exists in Japan, inseparable from the rise of the modern manga industry and the most influential practitioner of the art form, Tezuka. In its wider cultural context, though, Tezuka’s insect-inspired manga itself emerged from within a narrative tradition already known as “insect literature” (konchū bungaku), wherein insect and human worlds have long crossreferenced each other in Japan’s folklore, as well as a variety of artistic productions, both high and low. In classical and premodern poetry collections of waka and haiku, for instance, insects function as conventional and necessary seasonal and regional code words. In the domain of religion, the empty shell of a cicada symbolizes the transient form of human life in a Buddhist-conceived world (utsusemi). Shinto shrines dedicated to silkworm deities can be found all over the country, and

143

Invasive Species

143

in society at large insects continue to be collected, kept as pets, or eaten for protein. Recall too that the global phenomenon of Pokémon has its origins in Nintendo’s Tajiri Satoshi, who created a taxonomic and trading-card-driven game modeled after the insect collecting he had enjoyed as a boy. He saw it as a way to get isolated urban youth off of sofas and into imagined natural spaces to socialize with others. Insect-oriented narratives and practices in Japan constitute, then, a deep cultural stratum out of which has emerged more recent insect-human storyworlds, including Sasuga and Tachibana’s Terra Formars.

Transformative power in insect manga, from Mushishi to Terra Formars On “Adult Swim,” the all-night cable TV alternative and adult network from Cartoon Network on the Turner Broadcasting System, viewers in North and South America as well as in Europe and the UK can see Japanese anime that originally began as manga. Available dubbed and with subtitles, these anime continue to introduce to a global audience a variety of Japanese-authored storyworlds that they can subsequently access as manga at bookstores, via iBooks, or via fan and media sites such as Crunchyroll. These worlds feature invertebrate animal characters ranging from insect-fighting avatars in such blockbuster manga stories as Bleach to major insect villains like Onigumo in InuYasha, who sells his soul to insect yōkai (supernatural and mythical creatures, gods, and demons) to become the half-demon Naraku who wields poison insects.14 Another striking insect character is Aburame Shino from one of the most successful and long-running of global media franchises, Naruto. Aburame is a regular member of Naruto’s circle of shinobi ninja fighters, and his unique background and training include the mushi (bugs) called kaikichū (parasitic beetles) that circulate around within and outside his body under Shino’s capacious, loose-fitting clothes. As with Naraku, Aburame and other insect characters sacrifice their bodily flesh to become one with their insects; rather than designating them as hosts, we might more accurately describe these characters as hosted by their insects to form a new hybrid human-insect species. As episodes provide more background to Aburame Shino’s life and show how invaluable he can be to Naruto’s inner circle, readers learn that insects can be terrifying: initially innocuous as tiny individual organisms, they arouse irrational fears and serve as lethal weapons when maddened into swarms that take down much larger opponents. Shino himself is somewhat formidable and creepy given his silent and rather antisocial ways; his perpetual sunglasses even raise suspicions of an insect’s compound vision. His character and his biology mutually shape and reinforce each other. Sasuga and Tachibana’s Terra Formars shares much with these insect manga worlds, developing insects as both intelligent swarms and individually powerful characters with will and intent. Telling a disturbing story of international cooperation and conflict as humans strive to colonize Mars by using insects to make a new planet habitable for human life, Terra Formars not only blurs the taxonomies of insect and human but, more significantly, interrogates what it means to be an

144

144

Mary A. Knighton

invasive species in the context of animal-human relations. Terra Formars’s insect inspiration leads to creative and dramatic avatars with the unique fighting and defensive capabilities associated with the biology of various insects. It also ratchets up readers’ fear and repulsion by forcing close-up views on cockroaches in particular, an insect widely despised for its association with filthy infestations. The modern dystopian violence and planetary crisis of Terra Formars are all the more striking when contrasted with a tale conveying at its heart a more traditional and localized Japanese worldview and environmental ethos: Urushibara Yuki’s manga Mushishi (literally, The Bug Doctor, 1999–2008).15 Mushishi tells a weirdly timeless tale of an itinerant scholar named Ginko who studies medicine and possesses an inner vision that allows him to see “bugs”— from the healthy to the parasitic, the visible to the invisible, the natural to the supernatural and ghostly.16 Episodic in structure, Mushishi nonetheless builds in an overarching narrative. This larger storyworld concerns Ginko’s fleeting encounters with watari mushishi like himself, mysterious and ghostly sages perpetually wandering, learning about mushi, and following the kōmyaku, or vein of light. They distill strange alcoholic elixirs from the kōmyaku to sustain not only their own powers as mushishi, but also Ginko’s powers. When the kōmyaku appears in the mountains or valleys, it is as an elusive, somewhat misty river of shimmering iridescence, as if the source of life itself took the forms of both light and water. By the end of the manga series, it appears that the mushi make up the kōmyaku as surely as they constitute life at every level everywhere in water and on land. Mushi help to provide a balance in a vulnerable island environment like Japan’s, which is threatened by typhoons, volcanic eruptions, and floods. The manga also briefly depicts a deity of the mountains as a catfish, reminding readers of the legendary animal that represents the islands of Japan: while usually sleepy in the mud, once disturbed the catfish that is Japan thrashes wildly, causing earthquakes and tsunami (see Bates). The artwork of Urushibara’s Mushishi revitalizes a lost and ethereal past, and its stories of mushi occasionally animate even the kanji of words on the page as wriggling, visible kotodama (the animistic spirit or incantatory power that resides in words), evoking thereby the specificity of Japan’s visual and textual culture. In this manga, diverse and mysterious mushi, good and bad, operate at the boundaries of life and death, and permeate all life as revealed in the manga’s stories, which incorporate ancient beliefs and superstitions of folklore, Shinto practices, and indigenous categories pertaining to natural history and to medicine. The reader trails after Ginko on his journey, witnessing a mushishi compelled by his curse and his gift to endless wandering as he seeks to understand the proper balance between the visual and invisible worlds of mushi. The idyllic if ceaseless balancing act between the human and mushi natural worlds in Mushishi gives way in Terra Formars to violent upheavals and interplanetary species wars. Terra Formars imagines wars for survival at the edge of the Anthropocene—the term Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer coined to refer to our current epoch, one marked by human domination and destruction of all of Earth’s resources and habitats, expanding even to the planetary ecosystem. What

145

Invasive Species

145

these manga worlds share, however, is increased attention to, and interpenetration of, human and mushi bodies: the former via folklore, medicine, and religion, and the latter via the dramatization of biopolitics in a posthuman frame.

Insect subjects: Terra forming at the Anthropocene’s edge Created by the young team of writer Sasuga Yū, a college student, and illustrator Tachibana Ken’ichi, Terra Formars first appeared in 2011 in the serial magazine Miracle Jump before moving to Young Jump.17 In 2013, it won first place in the “Top 20 Manga for Male Readers” (a fan poll award publicized in a guidebook put out each year by Takarajimasha, Inc.), and translations of the manga into English are proceeding apace with Viz Media. Its first thirteen volumes were remediated for television in Japan (2014) and then released as anime with subtitles in Malay, Chinese, and English. Sasuga and Tachibana continue to churn out volumes, and a rather unheralded live-action film of the same name by well-known director Miike Takashi came out in 2016. Yet despite its various media franchises and remediations, the ongoing Terra Formars interweaves its proliferating and diverse nonhuman and human animals into plot lines that make up a consistent narrative. This narrative grows out of the following foundational story:  Early in the twenty-first century, in a time not so distant from our present day, scientists on Earth collaborate to figure out a way to make Mars habitable for human life now that our own planet shows the ravages of overpopulation, pollution, and environmental destruction. An international team of scientists develops a long-term project of seeding Mars with cockroaches (gokiburi) and algae-like moss (koke) to proliferate life on the planet. The cockroaches, both alive and cycling into corpses fed on by the remaining cockroaches, would enrich the soil and moss, gradually warming the planet and melting the frozen water so plentiful there in order to purify the air. Five hundred years later, in 2577, when six elite crew members on the BUGS I mission are sent to Mars to see how the project is faring, they never return. Before all goes dark, a transmission reaches Earth to let scientists know about a mysterious problem on Mars—giant cockroaches. As the first volume of the manga begins, a second mission, BUGS II, is being sent out twenty-two years later, in 2599, with a fifteen-member international motley crew now ready with pesticides to exterminate whatever bugs remain on Mars. In anticipation of what the crew might encounter, scientists with U-NASA, a United Nations aeronautical space agency, have surgically modified the crew members with a “Bugs Procedure” designed to enable them to fight more strategically and effectively against any adversaries. Upon landing, the crew discovers an almost Edenic green and lovely planet where they can breathe as on Earth, but without Earth’s devastation. The serpent in the garden, however, soon appears:  Mars is now dominated by giant humanoid cockroaches. The crew of BUGS II thought that they were simply supposed to exterminate unusually large and excessive pests; instead, they learn that they are meant to fight to the death cockroaches larger and more powerful than humans themselves.

146

146

Mary A. Knighton

Unlike the crew of BUGS I, consisting of elite astronauts and scientists who were all murdered by the cockroaches, the crew of BUGS II is made up of “disposable” human beings: men and women recruited from all over the world who are poor, criminal, in debt, or otherwise cornered by difficult lives in human society. They have been bribed and strong-armed into agreeing to take on the mission after first getting a surgical enhancement, or “Bugs Procedure,” which has a survival rate of less than 40%. And they agree to it—to avoid prison, to help their families or loved ones, or to settle their debts, financial or otherwise. In other words, they are themselves the lowest of the low, the mere “bugs” of the human species, hardly worth squashing beneath one’s shoe but perfect for fighting as guinea pigs on a mission to save humankind on Earth. Their surgical enhancements? Each individual crew member’s bug-like superpower is literalized in specific insects, explicitly designed using insect morphology and biology as inspiration and then adapted for the human body with DNA technology. Injecting a syringe of serum soon results in the character’s metamorphosis into one of various hybrid human-animal forms. The humanoid cockroaches now face insectoid humans. Needing to colonize other planets after destroying their own Earth, humans begin with Mars, forcibly migrating cockroaches and moss to a foreign ecosystem to invade and “terraform” the formerly Red Planet and thereby make it habitable for humans. What the humans did not count on, however, was that the cockroaches would have to evolve at a much faster pace to survive not only the new harsh environment of Mars but also new conditions of multispecies invasion in the Anthropocene era. In short, Terra Formars dramatizes questions about the very meaning of “invasive species,” especially as this term encompasses not only modes of species adaptation and forms of environmental colonization that disrupt other ecosystems, but also the techno-biological internal invasion and colonization of bodies, insect and human, that transgress sacred notions of what the “human” is and ever was. The fantastic gory war between hybrid insect animals that first takes place on Mars, and that later in the series moves to Earth in a reverse colonization effort led by the humanoid cockroaches, thematizes this key issue: which forms of life have value, by being “human enough,” and which are mere parasites to be exterminated or allowed to die off ? When only two members survive the BUGS II mission to return home, Hiruma Ichiro and Komachi Shokichi, the narrative distinctly suggests that their lives and those of their abandoned dead comrades are valued less than those of the roaches they bring back for the scientists. A third spaceship, Annex I, is sent to Mars in 2620 with a simple mission: in effect, “do not get killed by cockroaches as you gather samples of roach body parts or capture live cockroaches to bring back to Earth.” These samples are meant to help combat a mysterious new virus designated the Alien Engine (A.E.) virus, that appears to have come from Mars on one of the previous cockroach specimens that made it back to Earth for U-NASA. In order to find a cure and cultivate antibodies to the spread of this 100%-fatal “bug,” more samples are needed. The Annex I’s massive 100-member crew is led by Komachi and some children of the earlier BUGS II mission, adding now a motive of revenge for the deaths of their previous comrades to the financial and other dire motivations of the crew.

147

Invasive Species

147

Moreover, the surgeries the new crewmembers are compelled to undergo have changed. With the former Bugs Procedure now considered to be inadequate to the task, U-NASA scientists have synthesized a new serum to accompany an even more risky surgical procedure known as the Mosaic Organ (M.O.) procedure. Catalyzed by the injection of a serum or by a dose of other medication, each new metamorphosis results in various hybrid human-animal forms that begin to extend beyond Arthropods and the Order of Insects proper and to encompass other animal species, including birds, reptiles, fishes, and even plants. Even so, the children of parents who have already had either the Bugs Procedure or the M.O. operation, such as Hizamaru Akari and Michelle K. Davis, tend to be more powerful than other members of the crew, and have a virtually 100% success rate with further M.O. operations. This is because they had been born with a Mosaic Organ of some sort and with DNA already receptive to the procedure. Their deeper backstory, good looks, and phenomenal insect metamorphoses and superpowers—Hizamaru is a Bagworm Moth and Michelle a Blast Ant—justify keeping them around for a while in the story, as readers and fans revel in their insect superpowers and dynamic storylines.18 After all, a notable characteristic of this manga compared to other fighting manga such as Bleach, where well-developed characters have fantastic avatars and incessantly “fight to the death” but never really die, is that just as we witness a truly fantastic “animal” with human character traits emerge in metamorphosis, it is immediately killed off—his or her head ripped off faster than we can see the image on the page and take in what has just happened. These images thus confirm what the characters themselves understand from BUGS II onward; namely, they are disposable lives for the elites on Earth who own them body and soul. Viciously decapitated or ripped in half, the insectoid humans are, in the eyes of the Terra Formar humanoid cockroaches, as repulsive as cockroaches are to humans—mere filthy bugs to instinctively swat or crush. Fan blogs make clear that some readers are turned off by these deaths as gratuitous gory violence, not to mention by racism, sexism, and ethnocentrist nationalism in the manga. Such fans do not find it accidental that among the international crews of the various missions the Chinese become traitors, while the Japanese join the Americans as heroes. And why, other readers bemoan, do the female characters’ trading card statistics include their breast size? Defenders counter that the manga’s crew is multicultural with diverse ethnicities, and that its juvenile humor and sexism appeal to the adolescent male fans to whom, after all, Shueisha markets the series via its host publication. Because publishing, franchising, and fan consumption regularly demand ever more shocking developments in new plot lines, the violent story with constantly changing characters is also in the service to potential gaming and spin-off products in a medium designed to be interactive with and responsive to its dedicated fans. In the Japanese context, the insect language of Terra Formars may even act as an inside joke about manga’s own followers as otaku, or obsessive fans. Otaku are stereotyped as society’s mushi to be looked down upon and ridiculed as embarrassing misfits or immature perverts in the proper social order. Indeed, as the epigraph for this chapter suggests, insects in contemporary cultures at times index modes of

148

148

Mary A. Knighton

technology and their specific consumers while also self-reflexively standing in for content proliferation, the social buzz about it, and the media mix. Azuma Hiroki’s term, “database animals,” emphasizes the animality of otaku fans who are obsessed by but also voraciously consume and help shape the media they consume in their participatory dialogues with the affect-rich moe “parts” of the manga and anime storyworld database that they most obsessively follow.19 The radical alterity of insects in Terra Formars easily appeals to today’s “database animals” who not only embrace but also insist on assembling their own otaku identity. What is more, insect characters, with their replaceable and transformable “parts,” enable fantasies that play with racial and ethnic difference, sometimes with disturbing effects. For one thing, the cockroaches in Terra Formars are musclebound, dark-brown humanoids without genitalia or sexual differentiation but ears and close-cropped kinky hair, with facial features more ape-like than like the face of a mandible-heavy cockroach. As the story progresses, some of the Terra Formars show themselves to be far too close to humans in their capacities and qualities for readers to see them simply as bugs. A recurrent trope of the narrative is that the cockroaches feel no pain, something that sets them off from their insectoid human foes; yet this assertion appears primarily to justify the pleasure taken in killing them so violently. The Terra Formars’s morphology and skin color have led to protests by some online fans: a darker race of humans is being equated with cockroaches, and then systematically killed off.20 Yet, the common cockroach is brown-black in color so when it is anthropomorphized and rendered to be as muscular as its insectoid human opponents, this inevitably leads readers to make racial associations. (In this context, consider whether Beetle in the US stopmotion animation film Kubo and the Two Strings (2016), inspired by a Japanese folktale, should be all brown-black armor aside from his white face.) However adolescent or disturbing at times, Terra Formars’ racial, national, and sexual fantasies fail to undermine creative complications in its art and story, including detailed allusions to entomology, animal biology, science, and international cultures. Terra Formar cockroaches sport wiggling antennae and vestigial cerci, and manga artist Tachibana takes pains to brush their bodies with computer graphic tools that give a hard glossy finish to the cockroach carapace, distinguishing them from human animals who are soft on the outside. The Mosaic Operation itself hints at mosaic evolution, a term from evolutionary biology that theorizes that some organs adapt or mutate at different rates; this may explain much about the cockroaches’ unusual rate and quality of adaptation. Similarly, cockroach biology lessons (for instance, an informative detour through their nerve center in the subesophageal ganglion) allows readers to compare roach brains and biology with those of the insectoid humans before and after their insect metamorphoses. It is worth repeating that insects are the founding metaphor for disempowered, poor human animals from the start of Terra Formars, besides noting that cockroaches are not universally reviled. Cristopher Hollingsworth, for instance, details their positive associations throughout Mexico’s folklore and culture. So even as US antiimmigration rhetoric at times conflates ethnicity and cockroaches in racist ways, Hollingsworth points to the deep irony in depicting Mexicans as invading swarms

149

Invasive Species

149

when, for Mexicans, cockroaches are “associated with survival and successful opposition to oppression” (272–4). As the manga continues, the Terra Formars differentiate into classes with higher-level leaders capable of controlling the others, and it is hinted that evolution alone cannot explain the speed with which the cockroaches change or the degree of differentiation among them. Their hair comes to resemble the wigs of Pharoah-like ancient Egyptians, while the elite Terra Formars are seen donning white loincloths, suggesting a biological or cultural legacy of primitive humans— or perhaps the influence of a mysterious early Rahab civilization on Mars, be it through inherited DNA, life from another planet, or some other means yet to be revealed (see Figure 6.1). BUGS II crewmembers were taken aback at the sight of built structures on Mars remarkably like Egyptian pyramids. As the story develops, then, what readers may initially find offensive as racist stereotyping soon becomes a query about disposable human-insects, and leads to scenes where the insect evolution of the Terra Formars is contrasted explicitly with the evolution of humans from apes, generating complex storylines about crossed animal and racial lines of heritage. Likewise, in using the Greek glyph for “female” and “Venus” to refer to the A.E. virus, the manga portends a lurking backstory that doubles as a future storyline—one that broadens beyond the male and martial Mars narrative recounted thus far.21

Figure 6.1 TERRA FORMARS. © 2011 by Ken-ichi Tachibana, Yū Sasuga/SHUEISHA Inc., Volume 4, pp. 94–5; English translation provided by Viz Media.

150

150

Mary A. Knighton

So while the Terra Formars are metaphorically “mere bugs,” as were the human crewmembers of BUGS II, they are also quite intelligent as individuals and in swarms; they use tools and weapons, adapt quickly to new information, and occasionally communicate using combinations of the sounds “joji.” Most significantly, the Terra Formars have learned surgical procedures such as M.O., using the bodies of abandoned dead crewmembers from BUGS I  and II to bioengineer their humanoid cockroach selves into new hybri insect and animal bodies. In this way, they ratchet up an already intense competition with insectoid humans for survival in a context of colonization, or cross-species invasion. Finally, then, the disturbing social Darwinist elements in this manga, coupled with its emphasis on contemporary biopower technologies and their capacity to accelerate and (re)shape evolutionary processes, provoke and challenge readers to think more deeply about humans’ invasive conduct toward other species, and more generally about the complex, intertwined relationships between animal and human lives (see Figure 6.2). Doing so can bring us one step closer, perhaps, to recognizing our shared animal origins and the inevitability of a future marked by human-animal interdependence. Significantly, the term “invasive species” first gained wide currency with the publication of Charles Elton’s The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants

Figure 6.2 TERRA FORMARS. © 2011 by Ken-ichi Tachibana, Yū Sasuga/SHUEISHA Inc., Volume 1, p. 42; English translation provided by Viz Media.

151

Invasive Species

151

(1958), which problematically opposed “natural” and “foreign” to describe the destruction of ecosystems and habitats. Long before Elton, though, the rhetoric of foreign species was used for creatures who piggybacked into non-native countries by means of shipping containers and global transportation; consequently, exogenous species were not only associated with the foreign countries they came from, but provided nativists with pejorative labels and stereotypes for immigrants and agricultural laborers (see Shinozuka). Rhetoric of this sort leads scientists today to adopt alternative terminology and a more global perspective on “native” ecosystems. Indeed, the crisis of our planet in the Anthropocene makes manifest that the greatest invasive species on Earth is the human animal; in its manga storyworld, Terra Formars merely reinforces this reality in a radically new way. The connotations of “invasive species” particularly connect the United States and Japan, not to mention human and insect animals, in one of the earliest panics in North America that occurred in 1916: Japanese beetles (Popillia japonica) were discovered to have proliferated since arriving some years before in iris bulb shipments to New Jersey. Decades earlier, however, waves of Japanese immigrants who came to labor in Hawai’i or California had already been stigmatized as invading insects. By the 1920s, then, well before Elton’s study, biosemantic associations between the Japanese and invasive species were confirmed as a kind of scientific truth, as exogenous insect life and invasive human populations cross-referenced each other.22 Sasuga and Tachibana’s text continues this layered biosemantics. After their initial forced migration to Mars, the cockroaches continue to adapt and evolve into hybrid humanoid insects (Terra Formars) that harvest various insect powers, including those of Japanese beetles, from the “human insects” brought to Mars on the “shipping container” of bioengineered crewmembers on BUGS II. The biosemantic and biological lines between human and insect animals have already been crossed by the time this posthuman manga begins. Terra Formars provokes surprising ethical questions about wars over scarce natural resources and the biopolitics of invasive species at the edge of the Anthropocene—even when those questions can be hard to hear over the tumult of graphically violent battle scenes and the disturbing spectacle of species war.

Beyond “bare life”: Rethinking insect-human relationships in the Anthropocene The story of Terra Formars began serialization in January of 2011 but on March 11 of that year, in a land already prone to natural disaster, Japan’s greatest environmental and human disaster occurred: the Tohoku and East Japan earthquake, the resulting tsunami, and the Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown. As explosions at the power plants released dangerous radioactive isotopes into the air and attempts to cool off the overheated fuel spent rods in storage tanks led to what now number more than a thousand 1,000-ton tanks of radioactive water with nowhere to go, suddenly the concerns of a rural agricultural and fishing region

152

152

Mary A. Knighton

north of Tokyo became the problem of Tokyo and all of Japan—and very quickly, the problems of a small island country became those of the world. As the crisis deepened over coming weeks and months, people all over Japan had much to wrestle with: Tezuka’s Atom long remediated as incipient public relations mascot for power plants; news stories of postwar “Atoms for Peace” campaigns that now appear deceptive in having distinguished between the dangers of nuclear weapons and nuclear power; and “experts” giving scientific assurances of safe nuclear power while individuals daily monitored confusing and conflicting bequerels and sieverts calculations for levels of radiation in water, food, and the local parks where children play. It did not help to learn weekly of new lies, misdirection, and coverups by governmental and corporate entities, all with strong international interests in nuclear power. The scale of human displacement and sudden loss of life caused by the natural disasters, compounded by the human errors that led to a Chernobyllike no-man’s land around Fukushima’s meltdown, define the ongoing disaster of “3.11.” More than 100,000 people were initially displaced, with many also grieving 15,000 dead or lost to the natural disasters; today, more than five years after the crisis, some 59,000 people continue to live in temporary shelters. Public confidence in Japan’s leadership and in technological progress was shaken immediately in the wake of 3.11, and when the usual lines of communication, distribution, and transportation were disrupted, publishers like Terra Formars’s Shueisha briefly made some of their manga content freely available. Manga by artists such as Shiriagari Kotobuki, Hagio Moto, and Yamagishi Ryoko attempted to deal with what was “unspeakable” about the environmental disaster in their artwork, and a new serious appraisal of manga’s power contributed to an explosion of “3.11 manga.” On Terra Formars’s publisher’s homepage (as on many businesses’ websites now), visitors can read supportive messages about the Tohoku disaster or find links to donate money. In the immediate aftermath, though, as concerned Japanese half joked about how far away from Tohoku was safe enough, and panicky foreign residents or visitors wondered whether to heed embassy recommendations concerning flights out of the country, a 2011 story premised on the limited escape options for everyday people on an environmentally toxic and damaged planet controlled by a few elite scientists and politicians in self-interest proved to be, at the very least, provocatively timed—some might even say prescient. Five years later, as biological mutations in Tohoku’s insects and other fauna and flora are being closely monitored (see Crumpton), it is worth underscoring that in manga, anime, and film, Japan’s popular nuclear imagination often centers on animals as barometers of environmental contamination and mutation. Hence the iconic status of Godzilla (derived from “gorilla” and “kujira,” or whale), the creature whose origins can be traced back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki but whose most proximate cause was the U.S. hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll that irradiated Japanese fishermen on the Lucky Dragon No. 5 in 1954. Similarly, Terra Formars began its manga life in a world-shaking year for Japan. Its expanding global base of fans and readers interacts with a storyworld populated by humans-as-insects and

153

Invasive Species

153

insects-as-humans. Even now it continues to unfold as an ongoing tale of environmental destruction and precarious human existence in corrupt advanced industrialized societies and resource-exploited poorer countries alike. Terra Formars has emerged at a time when readers understand the text as more than just an entertaining expression of (some) humans’ aversion to cockroaches, and rather as a subversive treatment of social organization and how (some) human lives can become both repugnant and disposable. Woodblock artist Kazama Sachiko uses the term kimin (棄民) to refer to the nation-state’s strategic use of some populations as “throwaways,” and its creation of such categories not simply to deal with limited resources during massive crises but, more insidiously, to shore up distinctions between those whose lives do and do not count.23 In Homer Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben uses the term “bare life” to describe the biopolitics that kimin already implies. Thus, when Ewa Plonowska Ziarek elucidates aspects of Agamben’s concept of “bare life,” she offers useful ways to think about the disposable human and animal life represented by the Martian war between humaninsect hybrids in Terra Formars. As Ziarek notes, Agamben traces a genealogy of the concept of bare life back to Aristotle’s and Hannah Arendt’s distinctions between biological existence (zoe) and the political life of speech and action (bios), between mere life and a good life . . . Stripped from political significance and exposed to murderous violence, bare life is both the counterpart of the sovereign decision on the state of exception and the target of sovereign violence . . . [But] bare life, wounded, expendable, and endangered, is not the same as biological zoe, but rather the remainder of the destroyed political bios. As Agamben puts it in his critique of Hobbes’ state of nature, mere life “is not simply natural reproductive life, the zoe of the Greeks, nor bios” but rather “a zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast” (1998, 109). More emphatically, the conclusion of Homo Sacer stresses the fact that “[e]very attempt to rethink the political space of the West must begin with the clear awareness that we no longer know anything of the classical distinction between zoe and bios” (187).

At its worst, Terra Formars risks using animals as a mere metaphor for humans while repeating age-old stereotypes and prejudices about national character, race, and gender; at its best, though, it narrates a storyworld of ceaseless negotiation between mutually invasive species, one where “bare life,” in the form of “a zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast,” takes shape. As readers, we struggle to distinguish between protagonists and antagonists, endogenous and exogenous, invaders and invaded; but, increasingly, we see there is no real demarcation between the cockroach Terra Formars and the insectoid humans who come to exterminate them but find themselves exterminated instead. As the biology of all these animals interacts with new technologies, the narrative blurs the once-clear lines between natural and foreign, between citizen and pest, until we are not clear just which species is the invasive one, or exactly which sorts

154

154

Mary A. Knighton

of beings deserve to be the target of sovereign violence. Yet the blurring of those once-clear distinctions and categories is perhaps less something to be mourned than a starting point for a new politics—namely, a posthuman politics for what Donna Haraway has tentatively renamed the Chthulucene era, wherein interdependent human and nonhuman lives offer up a horizon for modes of social organization newly recognized as biosocial in origin and scope.24 Almost despite itself, Terra Formars’s storyworld and art challenge us to recognize the chthonic and radical alterity of insects—the most foreign of the animals and the animal furthest from the human—and occasionally catch sight of the chaotic and violent edges where the Anthropocene and the Chthulucene might meet: there, where so many animals (human and nonhuman) continue to be victimized or romanticized through quaint anthropomorphic blinders. Through these blinders, we glimpse the bare life of mushi Others, swarming just beyond the ken of our Anthropocene frame, fighting and adapting—with or without us—to manifest whatever the posthuman future has in store.

Notes 1 Parikka quotes here from “Sci/Tech Cockroaches: World Champion Side-Steppers,” from BBC News, February 17, 1999, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/281512.stm. 2 As is customary, Japanese names here and throughout this chapter are indicated by family name first, given name second. 3 “Manga” may be written in kanji characters or in one of the two syllabaries, katakana or hiragana (マンガ andまんが respectively). Scholars argue about inflections of meaning associated with each “spelling”; however, when used in English overseas, the term manga simply means comics produced in Japan. 4 See Kern on early forms of kibyōshi, and how techniques such as mitate-e shaped visual as well as textual literacy in cultural codes. Mitate-e is a form of comparative reading enabled by a woodblock print artist’s visual substitutions or allusions that create a doubling of meaning in ironic or humorous ways; it allows artists to compare past and present, or cast a new light on a well-known subject. 5 On kamishibai, see Nash and Schodt, “Designing.” The Osaka area where Tezuka was based proved to be the engine for manga growth in the postwar period, with its “rental manga” and akabon, or manga printed in red ink. 6 Satō Tadao, renowned film critic, considers the relationship between film and Tezuka’s manga in a 1964 essay cited in Steinberg. As Tadao discusses, unlike prewar manga that at best was like primitive cinema working from a fixed camera position, Tezuka develops an aesthetics that functions like a “montage of close-ups and long-shots, strongly incorporates a feeling of movement and speed into the image, and gives the spectator a sense of movement by following the frames alone” (27–8). Miryam Sas also notes the cinematic qualities of manga: “Shirato Sanpei’s gekiga, like all gekiga of this time, is already cinematic. The structure of its framing follows and is inspired by the kind of editing done in cinema; as in Tezuka Osamu’s work, this is a crucial part of the form that allows the creators to open out and spin long stories for volumes upon volumes. In this sense, gekiga is already an ‘intermedial’ medium” (271–2).

155

Invasive Species

155

7 Critics who disagree with Scott McCloud’s definition of comics as “sequential art” will often refer to this type of formal breakdown or temporal simultaneity in frame ordering. 8 “Insect” as a more scientific term associated with Linnean and Asian natural history categories is usually denoted as konchū. By contrast, mushi covers the more capacious meanings of “bug,” from microscopic organisms to arthropods. 9 See Schodt, Dreamland, on the controversy surrounding Disney’s unattributed “borrowing” of Tezuka’s Kimba the White Lion for The Lion King, and also on Tezuka’s worship of Disney (268–74). 10 Representative of this genre would be Anno Hideaki’s anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion, now a cult classic and world-famous favorite, as well as the manga and anime versions of Oshii Mamoru’s Ghost in the Shell. 11 See Knighton, “ ‘Becoming Insect Woman’ ” and “Diary of an Insect Shōjo’s Vagabond Life,” for discussion and images from I.L. and Tezuka’s earliest short, highly gendered, and hermaphroditic mushi manga. Godzilla’s female insect adversary, Mothra, in the monster film genre, is part of this larger socio-cultural context as well. 12 See Knighton, “ ‘Becoming Insect Woman’ ” for further discussion of this text. Gekiga literally means “dramatic pictures,” and its coining is usually attributed to Tatsumi Yoshihiro, a fan of Tezuka’s work in the field who nonetheless went on to create more controversial adult gekiga with dark social and political themes from the turbulent 1950s and 1960s in Japan. 13 How unfortunate—and misguided—that the animated version of Gon gives him a voice! 14 Note that InuYasha himself is part-dog, part-human in this anime written and illustrated by Takahashi Rumiko. 15 Tezuka often included environmental concerns in his manga and anime, sometimes indirectly—as with the kusunoki tree at the center of Ants and Giants (Ari to kyojin, 1979)—and sometimes directly—in themes of deforestation and the destruction of nature in his short Disney-ish animation film, Legend of the Forest (1987). One might wonder, too, if his celebrated experimental film Jumping (1984) derived from Tezuka’s insect imagination. See Tezuka Osamu’s experimental films at www.youtube.com/pla ylist?list=PLDYWZUcGbh49GvyRQ6VWen XPZMkfKKs5m. 16 Ostensibly, the time period is roughly Edo (1603–1868) into early Meiji-era (1868–1912) but Ginko’s clothes and various settings and encounters also suggest timelessness if not time travel. See Jackson’s illuminating discussion of this story. While focusing on the extraordinary 2005 anime version by Nagahama Hiroshi, Jackson conveys the complex ways in which Urushibara’s manga world of mushi, humans, and yōkai supernatural creatures intersect and interact to tell environmental stories of mental and physical health. 17 The first thirteen volumes of Terra Formars, which deal most explicitly with insects and also shape the animation series, are the focus of my discussion in this chapter. 18 Later, Hizamaru and Davis will be targeted for capture by warring nations, and distinguished by what turns out to be Hizamaru’s artificial creation by a rogue scientist “father,” as opposed to Davis’s natural birth with the M.O. as the daughter of BUGS II leader, Donatello K. Davis. Hizamaru’s existence leads to war among the nations on Earth seeking the technology to mass-produce disposable populations for war and for interplanetary colonization efforts.

156

156

Mary A. Knighton

19 See the valuable “Introduction” by translators Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono to Azuma’s book, Otaku (xv–xxix). Azuma argues that grand narratives in the service of universal humanism are dead, and that they have been replaced by a radical democratic and diverse underground subculture of otaku consumers whom he calls “database animals.” The slang term moe refers to savvy and passionate investments by otaku fans less to overall narratives, per se, than to the details of a story’s and/or character’s constituent parts that can be assembled, disassembled, and reassembled in new avatars. In this context, it is significant to recall that the word “insect” itself comes from the morphology of the insect, in particular its divisibility into modular “sections,” or parts. 20 See Hollingsworth on the implications of racialized rhetoric in the language used about insects. 21 These symbols were adapted from the Greek by Carl Linneas, who used them as graphical symbols to denote female and male characteristics in plants and animals. 22 See Clausen, King, and Teranishi, as well as the two Introductions by Brett Walker and Gregory Pflugfelder to their edited collection, JAPANimals. 23 Kazama’s art appears in director Linda Hoaglund’s film ANPO: Art x War (2010), and also in Hoaglund’s online article, “ANPO: Art x War—In Havoc’s Wake.” 24 Intended to displace an apocalyptic and despairing Anthropocene, Haraway’s notion of the Chthulucene insists on hope and responsibility on a shared planet. For Haraway, humans may not be dominant but rather subject to violent rejection by chthonic forces and ever-adaptable life determined to survive, with or without human animals. Haraway’s inspiration for this term comes from the Pimoa cthulhu, a mere spider.

Works cited Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1998. Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. 2001. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009. Bates, Alex. “Catfish, Super Frog, and the End of the World: Earthquakes (and Natural Disaster) in the Japanese Cultural Imagination.” Education About Asia 12.2 (2007): 13–19. Brown, Eric C. “Introduction: Reading the Insect.” Insect Poetics. Ed. Eric C. Brown. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006. ix–xxiii. Clausen, Curtis P., Joseph L. King, and Cho Teranishi. 1927. “The Parasites of Popillia japonica in Japan and Korea and Their Introduction into the United States.” USDA, Dept. Bull. 1429. 56 pp. archive.org/details/parasitesofpopil1429clau. Accessed December 6, 2016. Crumpton, Nick. “ ‘Severe Abnormalities’ Found in Fukushima Butterflies.” BBC News (August 13, 2012). www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-19245818. Accessed December 6, 2016. Crutzen, Paul J., and Eugene F. Stoermer. “The ‘Anthropocene.’ ” The International Geosphere– Biosphere Programme Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18. Elton, Charles. The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants. London: Methuen, 1958.

157

Invasive Species

157

Haraway, Donna. “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene” e-flux #75 (September 2016). 1–17. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67125/tentacularthinking-anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/. Accessed 29 December 2016. Hoaglund, Linda. “ANPO: Art X War—In Havoc’s Wake.” The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol. 9, Issue 41.5 (October 10, 2011). apjjf.org/2011/9/41/Linda-Hoaglund/3616/article.html. Accessed December 6, 2016. Hollingsworth, Cristopher. “The Force of the Entomological Other: Insects as Instruments of Intolerant Thought and Oppressive Action.” Insect Poetics. Ed. Eric C. Brown. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006. 262–80. Jackson, Paul. “ The Space between Worlds: Mushishi and Japanese Folklore.” Mechademia 5: Fanthropologies. Ed. Frenchy Lunning. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. 341–3. Kern, Adam. Manga from the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and the Kibyōshi of Edo Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U Asia Center, 2006. Knighton, Mary A. “ ‘Becoming Insect Woman’: Tezuka’s Feminist Species.” Mechademia 8: Tezuka’s Manga Life. Ed. Frenchy Lunning. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2013. 3–33. Knighton, Mary A. “Diary of an Insect Shōjo’s Vagabond Life.” [Tezuka, Osamu. Konchū shōjo no hōrōki [(1955)]. Mechademia 8: Tezuka’s Manga Life. Ed. Frenchy Lunning. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2013. 25–32. Kobayashi, Junji, ed. Tezuka Osamu: Konchū zukan (Tezuka Osamu’s illustrated guide to insects). 1992. Tokyo: Kodanasha Plus-Alpha Bunko, 1997. Kobayashi, Junji, ed. Tezuka Osamu no konchū hakurankai (Tezuka Osamu’s insect exhibition). Tokyo: Isoppusha, 1998. Lippit, Akira. Electric Animal: A Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Nash, Eric P. Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theatre. New York: Abrams Comicarts, 2009. Parikka, Jussi. Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. Plfugfelder, Gregory, and Brett L. Walker, eds. JAPANimals: History and Culture in Japan’s Animal Life. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2005. Sas, Miryam. “Moving the Horizon: Violence and Cinematic Revolution in Oshima Nagisa’s Ninja bugeichō” Mechademia: Lines of Sight 7. Ed. Frenchy Lunning. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012. 264–81. Sasuga, Yū, and Tachibana Ken’ichi. Terra Formars. Vols. 1–19 (ongoing series). Tokyo: Shueisha, 2011–present. (English translations: Terra Formars. San Francisco, CA: Viz Media, 2014–present) Schodt, Frederik L. “Designing a World.” Mechademia 8: Tezuka’s Manga Life. Ed. Frenchy Lunning. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2013. 228–42. Schodt, Frederik L. Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge P, 1996. Shinozuka, Jeannie N. “Deadly Perils: Japanese Beetles and the Pestilential Immigrant, 1920s–1930s.” American Quarterly 65.4 (December 2013): 831–52. Steinberg, Marc. Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012. Tanaka Masashi. Gon. Vols. 1–7. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1991–2002.

158

158

Mary A. Knighton

Tezuka, Osamu. The Book of Human Insects (Ningen Konchūki, 1970–1). New York: Vertical, 2011. Urushibara, Yuki. Mushishi (The Bug Doctor). Vols. 1–10. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1999–2008. Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska. “Bare Life.” Impasses of the Post-Global: Theory in the Era of Climate Change. Vol 2. Ed. Henry Sussman. Minneapolis, MN: Open Humanities P, 2012. quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/10803281.0001.001/1:11/–impasses-of-the-postglobal-theory-in-the-era-of-climate?rgn=div1;view=fulltext. Accessed December 6, 2016.

159

Part III C RITICAL F RAMEWORKS FOR M ULTISPECIES  C OMICS

160

161

Chapter 7 R E SI T UAT I N G T H E A N I M A L C OM IC :   E N V I R O N M E N TA L I ST A E S T H E T IC S I N M AT T D E M B IC K I’ S X O C :   T H E J OU R N EY OF A G R E AT   W H I T E Laura A. Pearson

Sometimes, as in traditional animal comics and beast fables, anthropomorphism (humanlike metaphors for nonhuman agents or entities) and zoomorphism (portrayals of humans or other kinds of entities as animals) work to educate humans about certain codes of moral behavior; however, they tend to do so in such a way as to reinstate traditional Cartesian divisions—animal versus human, mind versus body—and little if anything is said about actual animals or about multispecies relations themselves. The animal as animal is rendered invisible, and multispecies epistemologies and planetary agencies are foreclosed. By contrast, Matt Dembicki’s 2012 graphic novel XOC: The Journey of a Great White,1 targeted at audiences of all ages, creates a rich representational matrix of oceanic worlds that focuses on the unfolding drama of multispecies marine life. Using neo-realist pictorials and a part-fictional, part-nonfictional blend of the animal epic-cum-beast fable, XOC disrupts stereotypes about sharks and delivers a hard-hitting environmentalist text. XOC is a non-paginated shark’s tale that follows the eponymous Xoc as she journeys through the perilous northeastern Pacific waters.2 The main plot is straightforward. As Xoc embarks on an energetic trek through the ocean depths and open water zones of the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaiʻi, we learn that both she and the loggerhead turtle she meets are on their way to their birthing grounds near the Hawaiian coast. “The purposes of our journeys align!” says the jubilant turtle, also a female (95). But neither shark nor turtle completes the round-trip. In a way that is foreshadowed by several “creaturely”3 encounters earlier in the narrative, in the end zoomorphized watercraft, or “creatures with twirling teeth” (74), decide the fates of the two protagonists. A fishing net snatches the turtle as she is about to “complete her quest after swimming some 2,000 miles” (104), and Xoc is lured to her own death by a shark-finning vessel’s “ready smorgasbord” (121). As the Author’s Note tells us, Xoc is but one of the estimated “73 million—million—sharks [that] are killed this way each year” (124).4

162

162

Laura A. Pearson

It is therefore safe to conclude that the other sharks in the book—including the hammerheads (78–81)—might end up this way as well. The present chapter argues that, although XOC revolves around a series of tensions that initially rely on mainstream tropes such as the talking animal and the journey narrative, Dembicki’s use of these familiar devices creates what emerges as a generative “planetary empathy,” or modes of fellow-feeling that cross the species boundary. Dembicki’s narrative methods are thus in keeping with the so-called turn to ethics in animal studies, which has refocused the notion of anthropomorphism, now “regarded not only as a problem but also as a potentially productive critical tool that has similarities to empathy within recent historical research” (Weil 15). By drawing on some of the different histories and practices that surround the figure of the shark, Dembicki highlights how (some) cultures construct forms of creatural life as more or less inferior to and dominated by humans. At the same time, at odds with more radical strands of constructivism, and critiquing a full-fledged privileging of human “cognitive sovereignty” (Crist 5), the text renders its quasi-realistic subjects “allomorphically,” that is, through metaphors of otherness that associate kinds of incommensurability—or problematic notions of “superiority”—with the domain of the nonhuman (Garrard 155). Throughout, Dembicki uses a variety of visual and framing techniques as hermeneutic devices, interpreting multispecies relationships in a manner that gives rise to what I call an “enchanting uncontainability.” By evoking such uncontainability, which suggests vertiginous interpretations of (unknowable) experience and subjectivity, XOC overturns default assumptions about the “animal comic” as reductive or simplistic in its treatment of nonhuman lives and human-animal interactions. Instead, Dembicki uses anthropomorphic, as well as zoomorphic, techniques to address the exploitative divisions underlying the environmentalist issues—real and also metaphorical violence toward sharks, oceanic pollution, industrial shark finning5—raised by the text.

Troubling the talking animal Thinking with sharks disorients notions of the superior human. Belonging to the category of cartilaginous fishes, or chondrichthyans, sharks have lived in the Earth’s oceans for over 400 million years (Pikitch et al. 3). Some 200 million years ago, they evolved into top predators and “by the time of the dinosaurs [they] were ‘morphologically similar’ to modern sharks. Today, more than 440 known shark species ‘are found throughout the world’s oceans—from coastal waters to the open ocean, from the surface to depths of 3000 meters’ ” (Jefferies 125). These mindboggling numbers call on us to consider today’s depleted contexts of “[o]verfishing and habitat degradation, [which] have profoundly altered populations of marine animals . . . especially sharks and rays” (Dulvy et al. 2). In comparison with other oceanic mammals, great whites are “one of the least understood animals in the ocean,” yet they are also “preeminent participants in a complicated food web” (Philpott 447–8). In the summer of 2012, the conservation group WildEarth

163

Resituating the Animal Comic

163

Guardians, with the joint collaboration of Oceana, the Center for Biological Diversity, and Shark Stewards, registered two petitions to list the already vulnerable northeastern Pacific population of the great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) as either endangered or threatened under the US Endangered Species Act. At about the same time, the independent US comics publisher Oni Press released Dembicki’s XOC, a text that, in drawing on this activist context, not only redefines the animal comic but also uses the graphic narrative medium as a means to promote the worldwide conservation of sharks. The all-too-real presence of the great white tends to inspire a predictable response in humans. As might be expected, Dembicki’s iconic cover image homes in on the shark’s gaping jaws, recalling Will Eisner’s claim that “the stereotype is a fact of life in the comic medium” (12). The cover image immediately invites analogies with the blockbuster film Jaws (1975) and the “crude anthropomorphism” associated with caricatured and “Disneyfied” representations of sharks (Garrard 155; Baker 174). But though Dembicki’s text features the ubiquitous shark “bite shot,” in which Xoc’s cavernous mouth appears front and center, simultaneously shark-like and ominous, her blunted teeth and roly-poly features assuage visceral feelings of panic, while other accompanying images—an injured turtle, toxic waste drums—suggest mitigating contexts that counteract these polarized and speciesist tropes. Although Xoc “talks” with her companion sea turtle throughout the text, the text is far from a typical talking animal comic. Xoc’s oceanic journey might rather be read as a multifaceted satire on the traditional talking animal comic, the artificial form and language of which is self-consciously pitted against biological facts. According to Mark Richardson of the Shark Trust, a UK-based international shark advocacy organization, “the paradigm shift is clear in XOC”: moving away from the “hopelessly inaccurate—and damaging—imagery which Great Whites and other large shark species acquired post-Jaws,” “[XOC’s] narrative and images, and the science behind them (that is, what little marine biologists actually know about the Great White) comes through loud and clear” (n.p). Indeed, while Dembicki truncates Xoc’s journey for the sake of dramatic unity, it mimics an abbreviated portion of what scientists call natal philopatric migration (Domeier and Nasby-Lucas 1). As marine biologists Michael L. Domeier and Nicole Nasby-Lucas report, mature female great whites usually complete two-year migration cycles (6). In this sense, the journey motif in XOC takes on an ambiguous or at least multilayered meaning, suggesting perhaps “that the representational structures people work with are derived from the world within which the human species evolved” (Crist 9). From this perspective, Dembicki might be seen as engaged in a non-anthropocentric rethinking of the ubiquitous trope of the journey, especially as it has proliferated in North American cultural discourses over the past thirty years (Friedman n.p.). Certain liberties are taken, of course, with the unnamed narrator pointing out that “[n]either the fish nor the turtle typically swim at such fathoms” (43). Thus, while the text’s companion pairing raises the story’s empathetic stakes by imagining an unlikely multispecies relationship, it also reminds us that such a relationship is an imaginative anomaly, given that here a top predator associates with a

164

164

Laura A. Pearson

turtle sidekick.6 Yet Dembicki embellishes this narrative trope by portraying the turtle as injured. Specifically, a zoomorphized, propeller-driven boat, cast as a “surface dweller . . . one with great speed and mass, and sharp, twirling teeth,” has “shredded [her] flipper” (41). The turtle’s injury thus provides both a critique of radically constructivist approaches to the human-animal distinction while at the same time reinforcing humans’ and other animals’ shared creaturely vulnerability. Further, in referring to humans and human-created artifacts as “creatures,” the narrator, reversing the conventional denotation of the term, emerges as nonhuman as well. Even though the narrator sounds human—almost David Attenborough– like in places—the text repeatedly undercuts the inference that he or she possesses the sort of sagacity that has, for millennia, informed assumptions about human exceptionalism. For instance, during an encounter with an orca, the narrator recounts Xoc’s actions in a manner that reflects uncertainty: “Whether it is a desperate move to flee or simply because she lost her bearings, Xoc swims for the surface” (37). He/she also uses the word “creature” to refer to cage divers (22–3), a submarine (65), shark-finning boats (75, 120), and an “unnatural” “beacon” (a shark tag for the purposes of human research) (108). The “creature” that humans would categorize as a shark-finning boat apparently causes Xoc’s demise on the concluding page of the narrative. Indeed, the word “human” never appears in the text, with the narrator thereby disallowing or at least discouraging obtrusiveness, however well meant, on the part of the reader. Curiosity rather than omniscience is the watchword of this text, which thereby implicitly disavows the ideas of human superiority and assumptions about direct access to nonhuman experiences that tend to structure contemporary infotainment media such as the nature documentary (DeMello 153; see also Rothfels x). Instead, the zoomorphic imagination works to reverse or invert readers’ perceptions of the events being presented by the text. In Scott McCloud’s terms, a “masking effect” (43) is at work in the text’s verbal and visual language; instead of using anthropomorphic metaphors to describe animals in humanlike terms, Dembicki strategically inspires readers to think from a “creaturely” perspective. In the early sequence reproduced as Figure 7.1, Xoc encounters two cage divers (21–5). The scene sketches out a human-animal contact zone, which in turn raises a number of different tensions. The picture included in Dembicki’s biography at the end of the text mirrors the appearance of the diver in the top left panel, suggesting that this sequence is based on the author’s own experience (131). Autobiographical moments such as these challenge what Bart Beaty has described as a preconception about a “dominant comics aesthetic of escapist fantasy” (232). But while the text grounds itself in such real-world moments of encounter—moments that are vital to the environmentalist message of the text—the narrative also draws attention to its own “constructedness.” As we see here and throughout, Dembicki’s framing techniques are dynamic in the extreme. Near-photographic images encased within various frames—black and white, filled and unfilled—appear in an assembled montage over a white background. The cumulative visual effect is to suggest

165

Resituating the Animal Comic

165

Figure 7.1 Cage divers, from Xoc: The Journey of a Great White, p. 22. © Matt Dembicki. Reproduction courtesy Oni Press.

166

166

Laura A. Pearson

a bond between realism and non-realism in the text—one which is crucial to its attempts to think with but not entirely as the shark. The combined visual-verbal registers reveal the complications of this endeavor. Across the top panel, Dembicki invites readers to imagine Xoc’s gaze as she looks at the divers. The narrator speaks for Xoc here: “She gazes coldly into the eyes of the strange-looking creatures” (22). In being invited to see through the eyes of Xoc (mediated in the verbal track by the narrator, and in the visual by the photorealist depiction), we become aware that this is probably not how Xoc would see the divers. The following panels draw out further tensions that derive from sharkhuman incompatibility. Thus, in the two central panels, the stretching human arm has a similar shape to that of the shark, but these two entities are clearly at different depths. Similarly, the diver seems close to touching Xoc in the bottom panel, but he is actually still far away, unable to grasp the other as Xoc’s body swims off the page. As Steve Baker suggests, comics have the potential to enact “the reversal of the empowered gaze” and render the human “other,” “dismantling their secure sense of a superior identity” (158). It is this sort of dismantling that Dembicki is attempting, indicated further by Xoc’s “cold” indifference to the humans. On the page immediately following the one from which Figure 7.1 is taken, readers see Xoc nibbling on the cage, appearing much larger in an allomorphic depiction that suggests her superiority to the tiny divers contained within it; another allomorphic scene visualizes Xoc’s electromagnetic senses (88). Never once do readers hear (or see) a human character speak within the main text; when humans do appear, they are voiceless. This reversal is in keeping with the text’s realism about life underwater, where divers in scuba gear cannot speak, but it also parallels the narrator’s pointed refusal to engage with the human perspective. This disruption of the “empowered gaze” is both visually and verbally apparent, as when the narrator zoomorphizes the divers:  “With their flippers and sleek skin, they almost look like seals, but not quite” (22). Their otherness is paradoxically rendered animal-like, with Xoc being somewhat “curious” yet also apathetic about them (21, 25). From an ethological perspective, Xoc’s response to these divers accords with recent shark research which indicates that great white sharks can be curious about but “generally don’t like to eat people” (Hile n.p.; see also Philpott 448). Admittedly, for all Dembicki’s efforts to undermine the anthropomorphic perspective, the text’s language remains inexorably caught up in the web of human conventions, practices, and values. Yet by bringing together the quasi-real “journey” and the quasi-imagined “talking animal” realms, XOC manages cleverly to underscore how awareness of the inescapability of human-animal entanglement forms the basis for planetary—or transhuman—empathy. Furthermore, by casting anthropogenic threats as cumulative antagonisms throughout the text, Dembicki succeeds in reining in the cruder kinds of anthropomorphism that might allow its animal protagonists to be mapped transparently onto a human milieu. He inverts the human perspective yet still keeps it in play, inviting readers to think about “humanimal” and multispecies relations in the mode of “the proximate other.”

167

Resituating the Animal Comic

167

In hovering uneasily somewhere between fact and fiction, caricatured and “real” animals (and humans), XOC enunciates the ontological and epistemological problematics of the species boundary. In one sense, the text appears to undermine the animal-human divide in its non-species-specific portrayal of the “creaturely.” In another, however, it firmly reestablishes the species boundary. Thus, even as XOC critiques human dominance through zoomorphic reversal, the text inadvertently suggests that nonhuman animals are unable to think like humans—that, in Heidegger’s suspiciously speciesist language, they remain intrinsically “poor in world” (qtd. in Wolfe 65). It is worth pointing out, however, that this second suggestion comes through primarily in the text’s verbal register, not in its equally (if not more) important visual register. The images foreground, rather, the relational aspects of definitions of “the animal”—the way that the category of the human derives its meaning from being placed in opposition to the category of the nonhuman, and vice versa (Derrida). In short, although talking animals in comics often summon the charge of anthropomorphism, not all anthropomorphisms are the same; nor is anthropomorphism a stable category. As Timothy Clark points out, “To describe a specific representation as ‘anthropomorphic’ necessarily makes certain assumptions about what human nature itself is in the first place: for example, that certain qualities are definitively human, whether also then attributed to other creatures or not” (194). While Dembicki certainly deploys the trope of the anthropomorphized talking animal, the text’s verbal techniques also invite readerly skepticism: for example, through the frequently jarring exclamations that mark the turtle’s dialogue, as well as the repetitive ellipses that appear in Xoc’s. These strategies suggest imposition and artifice. They are also reminiscent of what Clark describes as the “modernist technique of juxtaposition and cutting (‘parataxis’ and ‘ellipsis’)” (140).7 Visually, the text boxes remain at surface level, operating much like cutouts, belying XOC’s restless movement between oceanic surface and oceanic depth. Unlike the fluid imagery of the diegesis, the text’s scripted words, fonts, and enclosures are geometrical. This verbal content admittedly provides a hermeneutic frame for the unfolding events, but the boundedness of the content marks that frame as one that readers are invited to remove or challenge. A notable exception is the type-scripted report Dembicki provides on the title page. Here, a description of the etymology of “Xoc” free-floats, unframed within the oceanic background and thereby opening up larger questions of agency and representation. Extending my engagement with this last issue, the next section explores how XOC both invokes and upsets embedded histories of human domination— histories that are inextricable from those of language, comics, and cultural production as a whole.

Recontextualizing the shark: Etymology, etiology, and biopolitics Dembicki’s environmentalist project in XOC makes explicit use of scientific and other nomenclatures. Aware that identificatory naming can be read as an attempt

168

168

Laura A. Pearson

to classify and control, XOC notably avoids using any single shark term, employing instead a wide range of shark expressions. This strategy suggests Dembicki’s aim to diversify the vocabulary of the shark while critically assessing the reasons behind its negative associations. Terms such as “broadtooth behemoth” (13), “the beast” (13), “white death” (14), “Carcharodon carcharias” (18), “meat eaters” (20), and “the great fish” (55) all provoke reflection on the general process of shark branding while shedding light on specific human technologies of language. They also function to dispel the myth of an essential identity: any one tried-and-trusted version of the shark. Instead, Dembicki historicizes this myth, linking it to linguistic morphology. Consider the etymological account of “Xoc” as it appears in the position of the title page: XOC (pronounced “shock”) is an ancient Mayan word for demon fish (though there are other translations) and likely the origin of the English word shark. The story behind how it entered the English language is rather interesting. Capt. John Hawkins was said to have brought a carcass of a beast that killed some of his crew while they were pirating off the coast of Mexico. He heard some of the local people call it “xoc” and he apparently brought that term back to the Old World with him. The specimen was exhibited in London in 1569 right outside a shop . . . [A] broadsheet post about the fish read: “There is no proper name for it that I knowe but that sertayne men of Captain Haukinses doth call it a sharke. And it is to bee seene in London, at the Red Lyon, in Fletestreete.” (1)

In foregrounding the text in a non-Western as well as Western history of encounter and classification8 that conducts the audience back in time to a “pre-Jaws” era, Dembicki’s etymological account gives us an early version of “man-eater” mythology that traces the exploitative phenomenon of the “shark spectacle” back to the colonial past. As Tom Jones points out, the colonial expeditions of William and John Hawkins carried “English goods south,” “obtained slaves from the African coast, crossed the Atlantic, and entered the Caribbean to sell their cargoes to the colonists of the islands and the Spanish Main” (212). In his research on the importation of the word “xoc” from Mayan culture and the glyph that purportedly represented this word, Jones’s work—which Dembicki’s text explicitly builds upon9—reveals “xoc” to be a coevolutionary, as well as transcultural, term. This term is inseparably bound up with both Mayan histories and the history of Western colonization, deeply engaged with a series of sometimes violent and materially entangled human-animal relations, and more recently entangled with part of the prehistory of comics and graphic narratives—specifically glyphs, which McCloud points to as an important example of a prehistoric visual-verbal meaning system (10–11).10 It is significant that Dembicki draws on these historical and etymological roots, especially when his text is compared with the blurb included on the back cover of the text, which tellingly refers to “Xoc” via the impersonal pronoun “it.” The blurb reads:

169

Resituating the Animal Comic

169

XOC explores the ocean’s wonders through the eyes of a great white as it treks from the Farallon Islands off the coast of California to the warm waters of Hawaii some 2,300 miles away. Along its journey, the 17-foot shark encounters natural prey and predators—from skittish seals to brazen orcas—as well as man-made impediments that threaten not only the giant fish, but the balance of the ocean’s ecology. (1)

From this objectifying perspective, what more can we say about an animal that has in effect already been fetishized? Consider, too, Jacques Derrida’s critique of what he describes as “the general singular that is the animal.” For Derrida, “the general singular of an animal [is one] whose sexuality is as a matter of principle left undifferentiated—or neutralized, not to say castrated” (408, original emphasis). This point, aptly illustrated by the noncongruence of references to Xoc as “it” on the back cover and Xoc as “she” inside the text, calls attention to the misuse of the “neutralized” impersonal pronoun for animals while highlighting the importance of nuancing objectified shark narratives of both the present and the past. Dembicki’s female animals also invite us to consider what Bruno Latour has called the trope of “the Male Western Subject [who] dominated the wild and savage world of nature through His courageous, violent, sometimes hubristic dream of control” (Latour 5). Dembicki’s decision to feature female protagonists not only raises the story’s stakes—both of the main characters are carrying offspring—but also gives rise to questions about the text’s critical anthropomorphism. Gendered representations of this kind can work both to offset stereotypes of masculine aggression and to reconsolidate the feminization of nature. Arguably, however, nonhuman animals are not readily containable in the same categories of gender, nation, and culture that are applied to the overdetermined human. This caveat may be especially salient in a maritime environment that reconfigures “materials across and beyond national and linguistic borders” (Mentz 998). Yet it remains standard practice, in popular culture and elsewhere, to hyperextend such identity categories into the domain of the nonhuman: consider Jaws, which Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller and Noenoe K. Silva characterize as a shark-hunt movie that only partly camouflages its theme of “Western fear of women’s illimitable sexuality” (433). Indeed, as Christopher Neff and Robert Hueter argue, the roots of the “maneater” discourse surrounding the great white go back at least as far as Carl Linnaeus: The scientific system of species classification and description originated by Carl Linneaus [sic] (1758)—the same system that identifies humans as Homo sapiens—was the genesis for the label of “man-eater” for the white shark, Carcharodon carcharias. . . . Linnaeus’ historic volumes redefined the scientific and social world, and white sharks were singled out for their motivation as a man-eater. (66)

XOC counteracts this kind of human-shark engagement, critiquing what Clark calls “the cultural imperialism of scientific classifications (e.g., how the Linnaean system of scientific names or species discredits the authority of local names)”

170

170

Laura A. Pearson

(149). Arguing that scholarship needs to be informed by indigenous knowledges without relegating these to nostalgic, “precontact forms,” Goldberg-Hiller and Silva contend that “there is a powerful yet still unappreciated meaning associated with the human/animal distinction in settler colonies such as Hawaiʻi that can help us think creatively about decolonization” (432). Dembicki suggests as much in his use of the word “Xoc,” showing a clear link between language, power, and belief systems, and providing a vivid example of intertwined histories in which supposed knowledge, fabricated language, and “abstract constructions” go hand in hand (Jones 212). Such intertwined histories inform the larger biopolitical context in which human-shark interactions have evolved—and continue to unfold. Thus Nigel Rothfels describes “the phenomenon of Jaws as a window into our human expectations of our relationships with animals” (vii). This narrative, he argues, “is revealing because it demonstrates the deep connections between our imagining of animals and our cultural environment” (vii). Rothfels goes on to discuss the twenty-fifth anniversary of the opening of Jaws (1975), based on Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel of the same name, and the subsequent anniversary release of a National Geographic article and film in which Benchley discusses his changed attitudes toward sharks and great whites in particular. According to Benchley, “society has changed, [and] the perceptions of animals have changed, and to write a book today in which an animal is a conscious villain is not acceptable anymore. I don’t mean acceptable from the political correctness point of view, I mean acceptable morally and ethically and every other way” (qtd. in Rothfels viii). Forty years after Jaws, however, media representations still continue to sensationalize sharks, raising questions about what Rothfels calls “creature-fromhell vocabulary” (ix). The trope of shark-as-villain continues to circulate widely, showing up across multiple storyworlds, media representations, and mythological accounts. To cite just one example: attributes like razorblade teeth and indiscriminate stealing typify the DC Universe comic book super-villain and infamous Batman enemy, Great White. By the same token, in English, various idioms that pertain to what Garrard calls “denigrating mechanomorphism” (155)—terms such as “loan shark,” “card shark,” and “sharking”—all feed in turn into a vilifying shark imaginary. Neff and Hueter likewise point to the “criminalizing” discourse on sharks “attacking” humans, isolating three labels that stand out in the historical, scientific, and public treatment of shark bites on people:  “the concept of the ‘man-eater’ shark, ‘rogue’ shark, and the term ‘shark attack,’ all of which originate from scientific studies” (65)—even though scientists regularly denounce anthropomorphism as unscientific (Daston and Mitman 3; see also Garrard 164–5). This same shark discourse is ubiquitous in North American popular culture, especially in the spectacular register of film, from Jaws right up to the newly released Sharknado 5 (2017), the viral B-movie sensation that began in the summer of 2013. Such iterations of “maneater” and “shark attack” discourse perversely demonize all sharks, potentially

171

Resituating the Animal Comic

171

lending support to “government overreactions to shark bites” and condoning indiscriminate “shark hunts” (Neff and Hueter 65–8). In a similar vein, Goldberg-Hiller and Silva tell the gripping story of fifteenyear-old Billy Weaver, who, while surfing off the shores of O‘ahu in 1959, sustained a massive tiger shark bite that eventually led to his death. The subsequent Billy Weaver Shark Control Program resulted in the killing of “595 sharks, including 71 tiger sharks, around O‘ahu reefs before the end of 1959. The corpses of sharks were hoisted on scaffolds near the piers and driven through the streets of Honolulu, where they were photographed as records of vengeance” (430). This “shark control” program, however, needs to be brought into relation with native Hawaiian cultural beliefs about sharks, and also issues of neocolonial Hawaiian sovereignty. Sharks, Goldberg-Hiller and Silva note, are particularly important to many Hawaiian families that recognize aumākua or what might translate as “deified ancestors” (431). Accordingly, when situated against the background of the Hawaiian kingdom’s “actually never ‘ceded’ lands” and precarious state government trust, “spectacular displays of sovereign state power” like that involved in the shark hunt raise key biopolitical questions about human-animal boundary itself (430–2). As Goldberg-Hiller and Silva put it, “The visceral fear of being dismembered by a shark is as much a human terror as it is the horrifying anathema of the sovereign state” (433). Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s influential concept of the “anthropological machine,”11 they argue that “states do things with animals” (434).12 The state may be absent, as such, in XOC; but the narrative’s setting between the Farallon Islands and Hawaiʻi invokes this particular geo- and biopolitical context, as when hungry Xoc, in a location that clearly approximates Hawaiʻi, spies a surfer who looks like a seal (figures 7.2 and  7.3). In this sequence, which unfolds across two pages separated by a page turn, the narrative invites readers to interrogate the nature of the boundary between the shark, the human, and the seal. Although it is unlikely that an “all-ages” text would portray a shark seizing a human, the scene evokes this possibility and raises a number of issues in the process. What if the shark were seen making a mistake, calling the supposed sovereignty of the human into question in what, after all, is the shark’s oceanic domain? Does this way of thinking require a suspension of anthropocentric frames of reference, tapping into readers’ capacity for empathy across the species boundary? And does the text at the same time prompt readers to assume the naturalness of Xoc’s seal hunt? The scene is clearly open to different interpretations, each of which splits off into different shark-human perspectives. Whatever their chosen interpretation, readers are encouraged to recognize how the scene captures the complexity of (frames for understanding) human-animal relationships. The following two sections, on Dembicki’s portrayal of shark finning and of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, reveal other ways in which XOC engages with such trans-species relationships—in a manner that runs counter to hierarchic understandings of humans as sovereign or autonomous vis-à-vis the larger biotic communities of which we are members.

172

172

Laura A. Pearson

Figure 7.2 Xoc, surfer, seal (part 1), from Xoc: The Journey of a Great White, p. 99 © Matt Dembicki. Reproduction courtesy Oni Press.

173

Resituating the Animal Comic

Figure 7.3 Xoc, surfer, seal (part 2), from Xoc: The Journey of a Great White, p. 100 © Matt Dembicki. Reproduction courtesy Oni Press.

173

174

174

Laura A. Pearson

Shark finning “Finning” refers to the practice of slicing off a shark’s fins while the shark is still alive, then tossing the body back into the water where the shark inevitably drowns or bleeds to death (Jefferies 126; Dell’Apa et  al. 151; WildAid). According to Cameron S.  G. Jefferies, “Shark finning is one of the most controversial hunting or fishing activities in the world due to the cruel nature of the practice and also because fins are used for shark fin soup,” which is often considered a gourmet dish rather than a dietary staple (126–7). Although it is now prohibited in many countries, the international shark fin trade continues in places where shark fins are used in traditional culinary practices.13 Because of this demand, poaching and overfishing are exacerbated in unpatrolled waters, as fins sell for exorbitant prices on the international black market (Dell’Apa et al. 151). As Philpott points out, from a fisherman’s perspective shark finning is an “economically efficient operation” because “throw[ing] [sharks] overboard” means only using storage space “for the valuable fins” (452). Sometimes sold for up to US$10,000 (Philpott 452),14 shark fins are not only a highly valued commodity but also an indicator of “shark exploitation levels and species pressures worldwide” (Clarke 1116). XOC portrays shark finning practices on more than one occasion. Inviting readers to imagine the act as it may be encountered underwater, Dembicki shows bloodstained scenes of drowning sharks, like the one Xoc finds as she follows the “scent of blood” (72). This sequence also foreshadows the last scene of XOC, and Xoc’s own death. Dembicki reinforces the “graphicness” of this violent scene in part by making use of the visual rule of thirds for effect. Again we see the technique of inset frames, with overlaid grids set against black (72) and white (73). In this composition, through motion lines and open mouths, the images convey a sense of visceral astonishment. For example, the top panels work in a held-framing sequence against the encasing grid, functioning through a moment-to-moment dialectic of embodiment and disembodiment. That Xoc’s body is fragmented in some panels and silhouetted in one of them vividly suggests the commodification process that this nefarious practice inflicts upon sharks. Further, several of the panels highlight the protrusions of Xoc’s fins, while other panels evoke aspects of “sharkness,” modeling Xoc’s experiences through sensory details that are amenable to human understanding: for instance, smell, sight, and hunger. A close-up of Xoc’s eye elicits the question:  are we looking at her or is she looking at us? “Thinking itself,” Derrida says, “begins in such moments when we see an animal look at us, see ourselves placed in the context of another world, where living, speaking, dying, being mean otherwise” (qtd. in Weil “A Report” 17). Thus a sense of the bodily and the cerebral coalesce in this sequence, with Dembicki highlighting depth perception in both literal and figurative ways. The number of open-mouthed sharks in this scene seems to multiply. Blood—repeated as a word and overpowering the visual register—explicitly brings out the violence and trauma involved in the practice of finning. Xoc is “shocked,” but the pun is

Resituating the Animal Comic

Figure 7.4 Finning, from Xoc: The Journey of a Great White, pp. 72–3 © Matt Dembicki. Reproduction courtesy Oni Press.

175

175

176

176

Laura A. Pearson

decidedly unfunny. Are readers imagining here what it might feel like to be a drowning shark? Or are they focusing on the words—the last word of the page in particular—that send us straight back into the purview of ethical imperatives that cross species lines: “But something is wrong” (73)? The shark-finning scenes in XOC display a kind of human-created violence that probably could not be depicted in any other manner or medium and still prove acceptable for an “all-ages” audience, raising another key question:  Are certain kinds of animal bloodshed somehow more tolerable or acceptable than others? What if these scenes had depicted, for example, human dismemberment or extreme violence against cats or dogs? Violence has long been a contentious topic for North American comics, with “violence” and “unsuited to age group” being two of the most cited reasons for “banned” and “challenged” comics.15 In XOC, the issue is quite literally brought to the surface, with the profusion of blood and the making visible of invisible (oceanic) violence directly challenging the civilization/savagery binary that structures more or less dominant understandings of human-shark relationships. Dembicki’s use of the animal comic to portray violence also raises the tricky issue of victimization. As Joe Chernov points out, one of the ironies surrounding sharks is that “the shark is arguably the most feared animal on the planet, yet whereas they killed 12 people last year [2011] (a peak year), we kill that many every four seconds” (n.p.). To help visualize the unfathomable number of 100 million— the estimated number of sharks killed per year—Chernov has created an infographic (ripetungi.com/shark-attack/). This “shark attack” graphic, in reversing dominant tropes involving sharks versus humans, may be the nearest equivalent to Dembicki’s text. Here, as elsewhere in the narrative, then, the idea of the “shark victim” is turned on its head. What the text underscores is not that the idea of the shark as victim is new, but rather that the idea has taken shape within a historical confluence of ideas about animals as victims. To build on Susan McHugh’s argument that species extinctions and cultural extinctions are inextricably connected (“When Species Meet” n.p.), Xoc’s translinguistic Mayan-English name comes once again, in a further entanglement of shark and human, to embody death, or a vanished way of life.

Imagining the Great Pacific Garbage Patch The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (also known as the Pacific trash vortex) is a massive gyre of plastic waste and marine debris (Dautel 181; see also De Wolff ). Reportedly, over eighty percent of this vast floating mass of refuse, stretching between California and Hawaiʻi (the Eastern Patch) and between Hawaiʻi and Japan (the Western Patch), consists of plastic. Sharks, turtles, albatrosses, fish, and other sorts of marine life come into regular contact with this garbage, from both above and below. Estimated to be doubling in density every decade, this is only one patch out of five centered in the five main oceanic gyres, where human and toxic wastes gather in a ghastly swirl of sludge (Dautel 181–4). In Kim De Wolff ’s

177

Resituating the Animal Comic

177

description, “For some, the garbage patch becomes a solid ‘trash island’ twice the size of Texas in need of cleanup; for others, a whole new realm of inseparable associations between synthetics and life called the plastisphere” (xiv). Xoc and the turtle encounter this patch in the middle of their journey. The two-page poster layout depicts the animal characters as dwarfs next to the mass of floating garbage. Key words like “poison,” “trap,” “snares,” and “sick” verbally capture what the visuals also depict in the ten-page sequence that follows— the longest sequence in the book. Contrasting with Dembicki’s detailed framing techniques throughout most of the text, the double splash page holistically conveys the enormity of the patch; it also depicts a common problem for those engaged in oceanic conservation, for although the patch “contains an estimated 100 million tons of garbage, the debris is hard to see because it bobs just below the surface to depths of 100 feet or more” (Dautel 183). De Wolff points out that much of the debris evades “attempts to measure, know, cleanup and otherwise control it, challenging the cultural and political foundations of science and ecology” (xiv). She further argues that “caring for the ocean requires responding to plastic in all its natural-cultural relationships, as it transforms humans and environments alike” (xiv). As the sequence proceeds, the turtle almost eats a plastic bag because it looks like a jellyfish. Another turtle then swims by, entrapped in a six-pack plastic ring, its head already turning a sickly grey. Many of the text’s images in this section suspend the need for verbal explanation or elaboration; rather, the “non-oceanic” images speak for themselves. Such “ordinary human objects”—along with the radiation barrels that Xoc almost nibbles on—punctuate Dembicki’s narrative, creating a forceful sense of the “vitality of matter” (Jane Bennett, qtd. in Alaimo, “States” 487–8) and nuancing the text’s environmentalist concerns. Dembicki’s garbage patch graphics also address the “potential rift between imagination and empirical veracity” (Slovic 1), provoking readers to ponder the fluid connections between nature and culture, ocean and land, but also animal and human and—not least—death and life. These false dichotomies, as the text makes clear, extend to the existence of the patch itself. When Xoc says, “It smells of death,” the turtle responds: “[T]here is life here. It’s teeming with plants and animals!” (58). In this way, XOC manages to capture some of the contradictions of oceanic garbage patches, in which materials and animals leech together, and in which attempts simply to dispose of the plastic “fail to account for the marine life that has adapted to flourish with [it], or the way [the plastic material] continues to escape and travel despite attempts to regulate its movements” (De Wolff 8). XOC dramatizes these symbiotic relations between human waste and marine life, asking readers to question their tendency to gloss over the agency of matter in our everyday lives. Similarly, the divers Xoc encountered earlier in the text foreground the relevance of Stacy Alaimo’s concept of multispecies “trans-corporeality,” which calls for imagining “all creatures [as] existing within their own corporeal crossroads of body and place” (“Thinking” 20). By drawing readers’ attention to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Dembicki invites this sort of multispecies and planetary

178

178

Laura A. Pearson

empathy, encouraging readers to “expand and challenge the research” that went into his book—to engage in a larger project of rethinking that “begins with education and advocacy” (“Author’s note” 124–5).

Conclusion: Thinking with sharks and oceans Mixing the animal epic, the “talking animal” comic, and the environmentalist fable, Dembicki reworks all of these genres and more, forcing us to “re-think the ways in which the animal, and by extension the animalistic, is presented to us,” and to imagine how “different approaches [to human-animal relationships] enable us to live with and act out of quite contradictory views” (Huggan and Tiffin 152). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a fable in the most prominent sense is a “story devised to convey some useful lesson; especially one in which animals or inanimate things are the speakers or actors” (OED, definition 2a). While XOC uses talking animals in order to convey its author’s views, XOC also confounds the traditional fable in at least two of its other conventional senses. For one thing, the tale is not purely, also as the OED delineates, “a fictitious narrative or statement; a story not founded on fact” (OED, definition 1a). Nor is it a “classic narrative” in which animal subjects are relegated “to the background of human activity” as “moreor-less transparent allegories of ourselves” (Huggan and Tiffin 173). Instead, XOC gives readers several different imaginative points of departure for coming to understand the world in a significantly different, non-anthropocentric manner. As Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin write in their introduction to Postcolonial Ecocriticism, “in assuming a natural prioritisation of humans and human interests over those of other species on earth, we are both generating and repeating the racist ideologies of imperialism on a planetary scale” (6). They also suggest an interrogation of those subordinate constructions in which humans are positioned in a hierarchical “natural order” that has underwritten countless forms of “exploitation from the time of imperial conquest to the present day” (6). While XOC reaches out to nonscientific, cross-generational audiences, it is a text that attempts to place readers within rather than against “nature.” In inviting a reevaluation of our culturally informed beliefs about both oceans and sharks, Dembicki uses the unique “ability of graphic narratives to figure . . . differences of experience [across species lines], and to prompt a re-thinking of the value hierarchies in which they have been embedded” (Herman, “Storyworld” 158). As I  have shown in this chapter, the material-semiotic discourses surrounding the great white shark are complex, and Dembicki encourages readers to consider Western and non-Western, human and more-than-human reference points. Imaginative literature has an important role to play here. As Erica Fudge aptly puts it, “Animal tales can reinforce the status quo or they can change it. Imaginative fictions—the products of culture—have, therefore, an important role to play in the ways in which we live with and think with the non-human” (209). XOC subverts shark stereotypes, challenges the traditional categories of the animal comic, and provokes reflection on different elements of ocean conservation as well as on

179

Resituating the Animal Comic

179

the incommensurable aspects of “sharkness” itself. Alaimo asserts that, “In the midst of the 6th great extinction, where a million species are expected to be rendered extinct by 2050, the threats to biodiversity are not something to overlook” (“Thinking” 18). XOC picks up on this theme, reconfiguring the journey motif and the construct of the talking animal, and incorporating these tropes into an ethically charged narrative that is energetically brought to bear on urgent contemporary environmental themes. At the end of the text, the characters that readers have been “thinking with” are about to lose their lives. However, this tragic ending only encourages us to think—and act—in ways that extend beyond the world of the text. Such a resituating of the animal comic leads us back to the “humanimals” that we are, and in the process renders perceptions of our fragile and fluidly connected existences all the more acute.

Notes 1 Hereafter I refer to the text as XOC and the main character as Xoc. An earlier version of this chapter was presented at “Reading Animals” (conference) held at the University of Sheffield in 2014. I am grateful for the feedback I received there and to Graham Huggan, David Herman, and Mathias Gustafsson for comments. Acknowledgments are also due to research funding provided by the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, and the School of English, University of Leeds. 2 To facilitate referencing, I have paginated the text myself. 3 For Anat Pick, the concept of the creaturely, as developed by Eric Santner and others, points to the shared bodily vulnerability of humans and other animals. In this chapter, I use Dembicki’s text to outline an approach to human-animal (specifically, human-shark) relationships that takes the creaturely into account. For more on this term, see also Herman, “Introduction.” 4 The actual numbers are under dispute: “Estimates of trade auction records from Hong Kong suggest that between 26 and 73 millions of sharks were traded for their fins annually worldwide in the year 2000. More recent estimates suggest a total mortality (including finning) between 97 and 267 millions of sharks in the year 2010” (Dell’Apa et al. 151). See also Jefferies and Dulvy et al., who claim that “[t]rue total catch . . . is likely to be 3–4 times greater than reported” (3). 5 According to Dell’Appa et al., “Shark finning in the Galápagos Island started on a large-industrial scale in the early 1950s, due to the demand from the Asian market” (157). Jeffries writes, “Shark finning can be described as ‘global-scale industrial fishing’ since it is currently [as of 2012] practiced by more than 125 nations” (130). 6 Great white sharks do, in fact, sometimes eat sea turtles. See, for example, Fergusson et al. 7 Clark claims that this technique “serves some strictly ecological points, as in the jumps between Paleolithic and modern realities, or between a human perspective and those of various mythical or religious agencies expressive of the deeper natural systems in which all life unfolds” (140). 8 See Tom Jones, especially pages 220–2, for a historical recreation of this account. 9 Jones’s article appears in Dembicki’s bibliography (128). 10 “Xoc” has been associated more specifically with the reading of a “fish head glyph,” and the name appears among studies of Maya personal names (Josserand 297).

180

180

Laura A. Pearson

11 See Agamben, The Open, in which he claims that “[t]he anthropological machine of humanism is an ironic apparatus that verifies the absence of a nature proper to Homo” (29). 12 Working to subvert (Western) romantic notions that connect native peoples to nature, Goldberg-Hiller and Silva also show how “Hawaiian culture has always possessed a ready response to Agamben’s posthumanist concerns and to the violent dynamics of contemporary state sovereignty in which native land and culture dissolve in zones of indifference” (435). 13 The shark finning that Dembicki’s text depicts is now illegal in the United States: “In August 2000, the State of Hawaii banned the landing of shark fins without the accompanying carcass. This was followed by a US federal shark finning ban implemented in February 2002” (Dalzell et al. 272). 14 Philpott further points out that “[i]nternational collectors have paid as much as US$50,000 for the jaw of a Great White. Small jaws may yield US$15,000, and individual teeth US$600 . . . Unfortunately, as with fins, the value of trophies will only increase as Great Whites become more scarce” (453). 15 See “Infographic Reveals the Reasons Comics Are Challenged” by the Comics Book Legal Defense Fund at http://cbldf.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/cbldf-leong4.jpg.

Works cited Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2004. Alaimo, Stacy. “States of Suspension: Trans-corporeality at Sea.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.3 (2012): 476–93. Alaimo, Stacy. “Thinking as the Stuff of the World.” O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies 1 (2014): 13–21. Baker, Steve. Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity and Representation. 1993. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 2001. Beaty, Bart. “Autobiography as Authenticity.” A Comics Studies Reader. Ed. Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2012. 226–35. Camhi, Merry D., Ellen K. Pikitch, and Elizabeth A. Babcock, eds. Sharks of the Open Ocean: Biology, Fisheries and Conservation. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Chernov, Joe. “Man Bites Shark.” Helicopter to Work Weblog, March 27, 2013. jchernov. com/post/46445834470/man-bites-shark. Accessed March 30, 2014. Clark, Timothy. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Clarke, Shelley C. et al. “Global Estimates of Shark Catches Using Trade Records from Commercial Markets.” Ecology Letters 9 (2006): 1115–26. DOI: 10.1111/ j.1461-0248.2006.00968.x. Crist, Eileen. “Against the Social Construction of Nature and Wilderness.” Environmental Ethics 26.1 (2004): 5–24. Dalzell, Paul J., R. Michael Laurs, and Wayne R. Haight. “Case Study: Catch and Management of Pelagic Sharks in Hawaii and the US Western Pacific Region.” Camhi, Pikitch, and Babcock. 268–73. Daston, Lorraine, and Gregg Mitman. “Introduction: The How and Why of Thinking with Animals.” Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. Ed. Daston and Mitman. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. 1–14.

181

Resituating the Animal Comic

181

Dautel, Susan L. “Transoceanic Trash: International and United States Strategies for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” Golden Gate University Environmental Law Journal 3.1 (2009): 181–208. De Wolff, Kim. “Gyre Plastic: Science, Circulation and the Matter of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” Ph.D Thesis, University of California, San Diego, 2014. eScholarship, escholarship.org/uc/item/21w9h64q. Accessed May 20, 2016. Dell’Apa, Andrea, M. Chad Smith, and Mahealani Y. Kaneshiro-Pineiro. “The Influence of Culture on the International Management of Shark Finning.” Environmental Management 54 (2014): 151–61. DOI 10.1007/s00267-014-0291-1. Dembicki, Matt. Xoc: The Journey of a Great White. Portland: Oni, 2012. DeMello, Margo. Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies. New York: Columbia UP, 2012. Ebook Library. Accessed May 27, 2016. Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28.2 (2002): 369–418. Domeier, Michael, and Nicole Nasby-Lucas. “Two-year Migration of Adult Female White Sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) Reveals Widely Separated Nursery Areas and Conservation Concerns.” Animal Biotelemetry 1.2 (2013): 1–9. DOI:10.1186/ 2050-3385-1–2. Dulvy, Nicholas K. et al. “Extinction Risk and Conservation of the World’s Sharks and Rays.” eLife: Ecology 3 (2014): 1–34. DOI: 10.7554/eLife.00590. Eisner, Will. Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse, 1996. “fable, n.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford UP, June 2017. Fergusson, Ian K., Leonard J. V. Compagno, and Mark A. Marks. “Predation by White Sharks Carcharodon carcharias (Chondrichthyes: Lamnidae) upon Chelonians.” Environmental Biology of Fishes 58.4 (2000): 447–53. Friedman, Nancy. “Journey to the Center of a Metaphor.” 25 Feb. 2016. Visual Thesaurus, http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/candlepwr/journey-to-the-center-of-a-metaphor/. Accessed March 25, 2016. Fudge, Erica. Review of Figuring Animals: Essays on Animal Images in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Popular Culture, Ed. Mary Sanders Pollock and Catherine Rainwater. Society & Animals 4.2 (2006): 208–12. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2012. Goldberg-Hiller, Jonathan, and Noenoe K. Silva. “Sharks and Pigs: Animating Hawaiian Sovereignty Against the Anthropological Machine.” South Atlantic Quarterly 110.2 (2011): 429–46. Herman, David. “Introduction: Literature beyond the Human.” Creatural Fictions: HumanAnimal Relationships in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature. Ed. David Herman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 1–15. Herman, David. “Storyworld/Umwelt: Nonhuman Experiences in Graphic Narratives.” SubStance 40.1 (2011): 156–81. Hile, Jennifer. “Great White Shark Attacks: Defanging the Myths.” National Geographic, January 23, 2004, news.nationalgeographic.com/news/ 2004/01/0123_040123_ tvgreatwhiteshark.html. Accessed January 7, 2014. Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. London: Routledge, 2010. Jefferies, Cameron S. G. “Think Globally, Act Locally: How Innovative Domestic American Efforts to Reduce Shark Finning May Accomplish What the International Community Has Not.” U of Hawaii Law Review 34 (2012): 125–329.

182

182

Laura A. Pearson

Jones, Tom. “The Xoc, the Sharke, and the Sea Dogs: An Historical Encounter.” Fifth Palenque Round Table. Ed. Virginia M. Fields. San Francisco: The Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute, 1985. 211–22. Josserand, J. Kathryn. “The Missing Heir at Yaxchilán: Literary Analysis of a Maya Historical Puzzle.” Latin American Antiquity 18.3 (2007): 295–312. JSTOR, DOI: 10.2307/25478182. Latour, Bruno. “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene.” New Literary History 45.1 (2014): 1–18. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Collins, 1993. McHugh, Susan. “When Species Meet on Killing Fields: Narrating Bio-cultural Extinctions.” Politische Zoology, University of Würzburg, Germany, September 23, 2013. Keynote Address. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX9aombN-OA. Mentz, Steven. “Toward a Blue Cultural Studies: The Sea, Maritime Culture, and Early Modern English Literature.” Literature Compass 6.5 (2009): 997–1013. Neff, Christopher, and Robert Hueter. “Science, Policy, and the Public Discourse of Shark ‘Attack’: A Proposal for Reclassifying Human-Shark Interactions.” Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences 3.1 (2013): 65–73. Philpott, Romney. “Why Sharks May Have Nothing to Fear More Than Fear Itself: An Analysis of the Effect of Human Attitudes on the Conservation of the Great White Shark.” Colorado Journal of International Environmental Law and Policy 13.2 (2002): 445–72. Pick, Anat. Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film. New York: Columbia UP, 2011. Pikitch, Ellen K., Merry. D. Camhi, and Elizabeth A. Babcock. Introduction. Camhi, Pikitch, and Babcock. 1–13. Richardson, Mark. “The Shark Trust on ‘Xoc.’ ” Matt Dembicki Weblog, July 22, 2012. matt-dembicki.blogspot.se/2012/07/the-shark-trust-on-xoc.html. Accessed March 3, 2014. Rothfels, Nigel. Introduction. Representing Animals. Ed. Rothfels. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002. vii–xv. Slovic, Scott. Editor’s Note. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.1 (2012): 1–3. Weil, Kari. “A Report on the Animal Turn.” Differences 21.2 (2010): 1–23. WildAid. The End of The Line? Global Threats to Sharks 2nd Edition. Oceana.org. November 1, 2007. wildaid.org/sites/default/files/resources/EndOfTheLine2007US.pdf. Accessed January 10, 2014. WildEarth Guardians. “Petition to List the Northeastern Pacific Ocean Distinct Population Segment of Great White Shark.” June 20, 2012. http://www.fisheries.noaa. gov/pr/species/petitions/great_white_shark_dps_petition.pdf. Accessed January 15, 2013. Wolfe, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003.

183

Chapter 8 I N T E R SP E C I E S R E L AT IO N SH I P S I N G R A P H IC M IC R O NA R R AT I V E S :   F R OM O L I V I E R D E P R E Z T O AVRIL-DEPREZ Jan Baetens

It’s also a matter of style My beginning may seem indirect if not slightly out of place, but I hope the apparent digression will help foreground the main issues to be explored in this chapter. In Writing Degree Zero, Roland Barthes addresses the question of how literature can bridge the gap between life and art, in other words how writing, poisoned by many centuries of (according to him “bourgeois”) artificiality can become once again a real language—that is, a language capable of expressing and thus shaping reality. His study includes a very harsh critique of contemporary communist French writers such as André Stil, who try to express the realities of proletarian culture and labor in general with the help of a very literary style, that of a kind of homegrown socialist realism made in France. For Barthes, such writing is a bad answer to a real question. It does not suffice to open the literary field to subjects hitherto ignored by official or bourgeois literature; one should also try to find a new language, deprived of the cultural and ideological burden of existing or previous languages. As long as that aesthetic revolution has not taken place, there can be no new “distribution of the sensible,” to use the terminology by Jacques Rancière (2006), whose recent attempts to rethink the relationships between life and art are not dissimilar to Barthes’s enterprise of the 1950s. Animal poetics and, more particularly, the representation of interspecies contacts and relationships between humans and animals have much more to do with debates about art and realism in the postwar period—and beyond—than one might first think. Animal poetics is often seen as a way of “correcting” improper or frankly false ideas about the place of humans in the wider environment, often coming down to ideas of human exceptionalism, but it also broaches the kinds of aesthetic and thus political and ideological problems raised by authors such as Barthes and Rancière. Animal poetics is both a sobering and a liberating project. It discloses that humankind is not essentially different from other animal species and for that reason it is no longer possible for humans to consider themselves

184

184

Jan Baetens

the master of other, nonhuman species. At the same time, this awareness is not a reduction but a deepening and broadening of what it means to be human. Instead of being separated from all kind of “others,” such as nature, woman, nonwhite, animal, but also the unconscious or the machine, man (the gendering of humankind as man is of course part of the problem) is now part of a wider environment where these frontiers are blurred and where hard dichotomies are replaced by varying positions on a continuum with no real center. This situation opens the possibility of new challenges and new forms of identification and solidarity. In such a context it is perfectly logical that animal studies are more and more becoming interspecies studies. Contrary to previous metaphorical or allegorical accounts of animal experience, contemporary engagements with animality have tried to figure forth animals’ experience as specifically nonhuman—that is, different from the way humans project animal thought and behavior from their own, human point of view (Herman 2012). There remains, however, a major problem in all human attempts to think and express animal experience as such, and that problem is aesthetic. The imagination of animal life and behavior cannot but remain the result of human expression, whatever medium is being used. The human point of view can therefore not be completely bracketed, meaning that attempts to imagine animal worlds remain restricted. If one had to rephrase this problem in the terms used by Barthes, one could argue that animal poetics is a necessary endeavor to open the range of human and animal experience (just as socialist realism is a way of introducing themes and sensibilities ignored by bourgeois literature). However, the specific language being used to create this opening is not without limitations, since it is never the animal, this new type of subaltern, that speaks (the language remains that of humans, just as the language of the French socialist realists Barthes was criticizing continued to differ from that of the social classes they portrayed). To a certain extent, one may even wonder if the desire to reject former ways of telling and showing—specifically, those heavily fraught with old-fashioned humanist projections of animal experiences—does not lead to the regrettable exclusion of very valuable texts and sources. Nothing is as unashamedly humanized—or, if one prefers, de-animalized—as Colette’s turn-of-the-(twentieth)-century dialogues between a cat and a dog; yet in spite of this anthropomorphic and totally artificial stance, that in contemporary literature would be considered highly inappropriate if not ridiculous (Colette’s cat and dog, who seem to have benefited among many other things from a solid, classical scholarly education, debate literary issues!), the Dialogues nonetheless promotes a strong sense of solidarity with the animal world.1 The shift from animal poetics to interspecies studies can avoid these problems, or at least minimize their effects, since the human perspective is here much easier to justify. However, it does not solve all the relevant problems, and among these I would like to single out two. First, there remains the question of style: the change of subject matter (interspecies studies instead of a necessarily human reconstruction of animal experiences) should always be completed by a change in style (different stories need different discourses). Second, interspecies studies should include

185

Interspecies Relationships in Graphic Micronarratives

185

also a reflection on the human as such and try to bring about a sharper awareness of the human, which is anything but a monolithic category. In the remainder of this chapter, I seek to address both of these concerns by outlining strategies for engaging in the formal study of interspecies relationships in the collaborative work of two graphic novelists, one of whom is an intellectually disabled artist.

This is no outsider art The “S” workshop in Vielsalm, Belgium, is a socioeconomic laboratory whose basic principle is a systematic, equality-promoting collaboration of disabled and non-disabled artists. The key words here are equality and collaboration, as well as the avoidance of any term referring to the labelling of the resulting work in terms of art therapy or outsider art. The “S” workshop distinguishes itself from these approaches by emphasizing the artistic character of its realizations and, above all, through the circulation of the artists’ works in the domain of the “normal,” that is, nonspecialized or non-niche markets operating through the gallery and museum circuit (for an overview of the workshop’s activities, see Coll., Match and Knock). “S” is strongly dedicated to avoiding everything that might identify the work of the disabled artist as “different” from that of his or her non-disabled colleagues. Hence the emphasis on the collective nature of the work, which demonstrates the mutual benefit of the collaboration for both the disabled and the non-disabled partner, as well as the refusal of labels such as outsider art—labels that are always in danger of marginalizing the disabled artist. It is in the context of “S” that the longtime collaboration of two woodcut artists, Adolpho Avril, a disabled artist, and Olivier Deprez, a founding member of the Belgian avant-garde comics and multimedia group FRMK, previously known as Fréon or Frémok (Baetens, “Graphic Novels”), has unfolded. Their seven-year collaboration, which gave birth to an important experimental graphic novel Après la vie, après la Mort is not only a key contribution to the development of noncanonical narratives (Baetens, “Composer”); it is also an interesting test case for the study of interspecies relationships. Indeed, this collaboration tackles in a direct manner the two major theoretical problems raised above:  on the one hand, the quest for an appropriated style, discourse, and language that might be used to represent relationships that cross the species boundary; on the other hand, the opening of the study of such interspecies relationships to a more complex interrogation of the human itself. Avril and Deprez engage with the first problem via the combination of a specific medium (woodcut engravings) and a new way of addressing narrative, producing not just woodcut graphic novels, but a special type of storytelling. They engage with the second issue by linking together, and thereby reframing, traditional dichotomies such as disabled versus non-disabled, and human versus animal. In the process, beyond just making room for animals in their stories, they also manage to explore different ways of telling suited to interspecies relationships—storytelling methods that can be illuminated by studying how the representation of graphic

186

186

Jan Baetens

animal agents changes when one moves from single-authored works by Olivier Deprez to works he cocreated with Adolpho Avril. What matters here, in other words, is the productive interplay among three elements. The first of these elements is the disclosure of new types of content (the appearance of interspecies relationships within human stories that could have been told without that nonhuman dimension). Second, Avril and Deprez stage interspecies encounters through a medium, the woodcut graphic novel, that is both immediately accessible (woodcut engraving is a rather “primitive” technique) and particularly constraining (it prevents the artist who uses it from easy correction or editing: a wood engraving cannot be wiped out or overwritten). This limitation is revealing of what media actually do: they circumscribe, if not violently limit, what can be done, yet at the same time the restrictions they impose can be a great source of inspiration and invention. Third, the coauthors explore new forms of narrative, for this is often where the influence of traditional models of human-animal engagements is the most lasting and obstinate. In order to outline a new vision of interspecies relationships, one needs to go beyond the stereotypical anthropomorphic narratives—from Disney to Discovery Channel—while perhaps even problematizing the very notion of narrative itself as an essentially human concept, hardly appropriate for embodying what happens on the side of the nonhuman partner.

Animal comics in the avant-garde graphic novel It is certainly not a coincidence that experimental comics, such as those created by the FRMK group, frequently include animal characters. At least three of the most productive home authors of the company—each of them with five or more individual book publications in the catalog, as well as a strong presence in the collective publications of the group—write stories in which the animal world plays a decisive role. A  pioneer of the so-called direct color technique, visually close to painting, Alex Barbier is (in)famous for his relentless and sometimes X-rated investigation of the interchanges between man and werewolf. For his part, combining graphic novel and performance art, Vincent Fortemps displays a storyworld that foregrounds rurality in its most material dimensions, for human and nonhuman characters alike. Finally, an etching artist having turned painter, Frédéric Coché is fascinated with the theme of the animal mask and, more generally, the hybridization of the human and animal head and body. These and other FMRK authors, such as Dominique Goblet and JeanChristophe Long, create narrative worlds marked by a strange mix of extreme cultural sophistication and cruel destructiveness on the part of humans. Thus Barbier and Fortemps as well as Coché display a world that is totally saturated with cultural references, literary as well as visual. Barbier and Fortemps rewrite the history of the animal in regionalist culture, highlighting a wide range of literary and pictorial influences. In the case of Coché, his work takes on encyclopedic form, so dense is the tissue of cultural and historical references to all the highlights of Western art since the Middle Ages (with predictably a strong preference given in

187

Interspecies Relationships in Graphic Micronarratives

187

his first books to works borrowed from the history of etching). At the same time, however, this extreme sophistication, which reflects also the exceptional craftsmanship of these artists, is accompanied by a no less insistent impulse to downgrade humanity. Hence the theme of interspecies relationships typically moves in the direction of animalization, for if the metamorphosis of animal into human is definitely present, it is the opposite movement, that from human morphed into animal, that takes center stage. One feels throughout all these works a certain desire to destroy: man (and here as well the gendered formulation is apropos: it is the male rather than the female human that is the target of the works’ violence), and also culture, which Barbier, Fortemps, and Coché attack via the techniques and materials they employ. Further, these three artists all share the tendency to approach the general theme of interspecies relationships by emphasizing dynamic processes of change rather than fixed states of being. Whether the transformation goes from human to animal, or the other way round, what immediately stands out is the profound and lasting instability of all these movements, which can be undone, rearranged, and expanded from one panel to another. Rather than framing these changes in terms of either humanization (anthropomorphization) or animalization (theriomorphization), it is the metaconcept of “becoming-animal” that should be mentioned here, in order to foreground the dynamic aspect of the process. What matters is not the final state (man having become animal, animal transformed into man) but the ongoing and proliferating blurring of boundaries, following one of the many forms of the umbrella term of deterritorialization that Deleuze and Guattari have named “becoming- animal”: To become animal is to participate in movement, to stake out a path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum of intensities that are valuable only in themselves, to find a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, of nonsignifying signs. Kafka’s animals never refer to a mythology or to archetypes but correspond solely to new levels, zones of liberated intensities where contents free themselves from their forms as well as from their expressions, from the signifier that formalized them. (Deleuze and Guattari 13)

Deleuze and Guattari are certainly right in downplaying the importance of mythical and archetypical references (compare Ovid’s Metamorphoses) in this shift from the idea of dehumanization to the more radically destabilizing, anti-hierarchical concept of becoming-animal, and the ubiquity of art history and literary references in the work of Barbier, Fortemps, and Coché can be seen as a paradoxical confirmation of this suggestion. The more visible these references, the clearer it is that they are just the starting point, the raw material of an all-embracing process of becoming-animal. As a corollary, the authors’ almost stereotypical references to human-into-animal versus animal-into-human metamorphoses also highlight the role of something that is less frequently taken into consideration: the visual

188

188

Jan Baetens

techniques used in these works. Each of the three authors manages to establish a solid link between becoming-animal at the level of content and becoming-animal at the level of form. By heavily relying on oil painting and the possibility of mixing and remixing colors, Barbier creates a world in which the confusion between figure and background or color and contour represents, as well as produces, the unstable relationships between the human and the animal that are at the core of his work (see Barbier).2 Fortemps goes even further with his use of special grease pencils, the traces of which remain wet for a very long time and can thus easily be modified both during and after the drawing, as demonstrated during live performances where the artist projects on a large wall a permanently morphing image improvised on stage, often accompanied by live dance performances. Thus Fortemps’s Chantier-Musil, a dialogue with a dance improvisation on Musil’s Man without Qualities, contains long series of variations on the theme of a fly.3 Coché, finally, has made the choice of etching (aqua forte) instead of engraving, not only because of ease of use but also because of the proximity between scratching and the spirit of improvisation, correction, and hands-on experiment. This medium, and the working methods it supports, foster a type of image that moves back and forth between line, blot, and figure, enhancing the general theme of change and transmutation that structures texts such as Coché’s Vie et mort.4 However, none of the three features just discussed—the mix of encyclopedic cultural references with an emphasis on animalization, the foregrounding of constantly shifting species identities as part of a focus on becoming-animal, and the link between the materiality of drawing techniques and the theme of transmutation—touches upon what is probably the most salient characteristic of FMRK’s treatment of interspecies relationships: namely, the special treatment of the storyline. Narrative innovation is especially pertinent when it comes to situating Olivier Deprez’s work within the FRMK group, since he adopts but also goes beyond storytelling methods used by other members of the group. Several key features recur in most FRMK storyworlds. First, FRMK authors work to create a new balance between time and space. In a typical FRMK work, the story as imagined by the reader depends as much on the relationships between various contiguous or otherwise spatially related elements on the page, as on the linear and temporal logic of panel-to-panel transitions. The story here is not projected on the page; rather, it is the organization of the page that determines possible narratives. Further, FRMK authors aim for an essentially open structure in their narratives; in parallel with their thematic emphasis on metamorphosis, this structure foregrounds process and processing rather than state and meaning. This is not to say that there is only narrative discourse and no story. What it means is that the work makes clear that the remapping of discourse as story is always provisional and open to new navigational possibilities. Moreover, the reader is always made aware of how the passage from discourse to story involves strong interpretative decisions: the story a reader constructs is clearly felt as a constructed story— that is, a story that is not necessarily the best or the final one. All this implies, as a third hallmark of FMRK storytelling, a move of the center of gravity from maker to user, author to reader, and more generally the positioning of the work

189

Interspecies Relationships in Graphic Micronarratives

189

in a strongly participatory culture. It is important to keep these general aspects of FMRK experimentation in mind when engaging in an analysis of the story fragments disclosing interspecies relationships in particular. Significantly, experimental narrative is often described in purely negative terms:  as anti-narrative, aborted narrative, interrupted narrative, infranarrative, blocked narrative, etc. More radically still, some have argued that narrative itself—not just its disruption—embodies a negative value, as if telling stories were an unacceptable concession to the culture industry and a shortcut to bad writing. From this perspective, authentic writing should dismiss narrative; hence Mallarmé‘s famous statement in his preface to the watershed moment in modern literature, “A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance” (1894): “le récit s’évite” (“there is no story,” trans. JB). At least in France, the criticism of storytelling as a profoundly conservative and deceptive, idealist and idealizing strategy for literary communication has been a deeply rooted, almost instinctive avant-garde trope since at least the New Novel (Robbe-Grillet).5 More broadly, art with narrative content was also anathema to the (visual) art theory of Clement Greenberg, probably the most influential critic of last century. But how do these considerations bear on the treatment of interspecies relationships in experimental comics and graphic novels? If one can no longer endorse the traditional forms of storytelling, narrative being by definition anthropomorphized and hence suspect, does that mean that the only possible way to do justice to the nonhuman specificity of animal experience is to question narrative itself—and to do it in such a way that storytelling itself is not only challenged or reformed but put aside as a form of representation that is no longer adequate? This is not what happens in the work by Olivier Deprez and Adolpho Avril, where new forms of narrative are being explored in a literally hands-on manner. In the rest of this chapter, I zoom in on what I take to be the most conspicuous aspect of this exploration: namely, the use of a special type of narrative, which I term micronarrative or short storytelling, but which entails something other than the telling of short stories.6 In the following pages, micronarrative will mainly refer to forms of short as well as disrupted narrative, which lack one or more parts of the basic architecture for storytelling—namely, a beginning, a middle and an end, as well as a meaningful and internally motivated transformation leading from beginning to end. Further, in micronarrative contexts the reader or spectator cannot simply remediate or repair the story by filling in the gaps—as she is often supposed to do in modern fiction. I compare how micronarrative bears on the topic of interspecies relationships in two books; one is Deprez’s single-authored adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Castle (2003), and the other is Avril and Deprez’s collaboration Après la mort, après la vie (“After Death, after Life,” 2014).

A man, a horse, a carriage, and a man on foot Micronarrative is a structural device that can be linked not only to the idea of becoming-animal but also to that of the intellectually disabled storyteller. As far

190

190

Jan Baetens

as the first point is concerned, artistic representations of animalized humans are often presented in terms of lack. Given that the limits of the human eye are wellknown and becoming-animal is therefore not necessarily a symptom of reduced sight, the lack in question stems less from a spatial or visual point of view than from a temporal and narrative point of view. Specifically, the animalized agent loses a number of cognitive capacities, having now a vision of time that is exclusively ruled by instinct, with these instinctual imperatives crippling possibilities both for remembering the past and for foreseeing the future, and leaving little room for anything except the mere struggle for life. Other representations of animalized subjects as living within a horizon formed by the past and the future generally attract criticism as crude anthropomorphic simplifications. Deprez’s adaptation of Kafka’s The Castle, however, shows how micronarrative can be used to move beyond this representational impasse or double-bind. Specifically, Deprez’s text suggests how becoming-animal entails not so much a fading out of allegedly typical human abilities, like the capacity to reorder the past and imagine future scenarios, as it is a disruption of conventional human forms of storytelling, according to which a given cause A mechanically or psychologically produces a certain consequence B.  Instead, opening the field of traditional narrative to new possibilities of becoming, micronarrative methods reveal how any story is subject to (re)interruption and (re)beginning, at any moment. From that point of view, micronarrative can be used to bridge (1) forms of storytelling concerned with questions of intellectual disability—narratives that suggest less the disabled subject’s incapacity to tell long and complete stories than his or her differently abled peers, a permanent challenging of dominant notions of narrative—and (2) modes of narration that focus on interspecies relationships, where an awareness of the dangers of anthropocentrism, which force the human/nonhuman encounter into the straightjacket of traditional narrative, clears the ground for a prolific and perhaps uncontrollable abundance of narrative possibilities that do not coalesce into streamlined storytelling patterns. Relating the unsuccessful attempts of K., the semi-anonymous protagonist, to enter the castle, Deprez’s adaptation, like Kafka’s original narrative, has a clear beginning (the arrival of K. in the village after the symbolic crossing of a bridge), a clear middle (the various attempts to leave the village inn in order to access the castle), and a clear ending (the exclusion of K. and his gradual fading out in the mist). This story, moreover, is told in a linear way and there can be no doubt about its classic narrative structure, even if the story is also characterized by many deceptive or at least interpretation-proliferating elements. This structure, as well as the treatment of interspecies contact moments it foregrounds, are quite similar to what can be observed in Kafka’s original text, whose basic plot and fundamental thematic tapestry are transposed by Deprez in a way that common-sense accounts of adaptation would be likely to deem faithful. However, given the dramatic reduction of the initial work’s building blocks (Kafka’s text consists of almost 300 rather tightly printed pages), in Deprez’s adaptation (each of whose 222 pages rarely contains more than two woodcuts, most of them wordless), the “visibility” of each unit in Deprez’s version is much greater than in the novel. Readers of Kafka’s text

191

Interspecies Relationships in Graphic Micronarratives

191

do not necessarily pay attention to the motif of the sleigh with horses, which is presented in few words in only three short passages in the novel, whereas in the graphic novel this “detail” takes up close to 10% of the whole work. In this way, the highlighting of the interspecies theme is much sharper in Deprez than in Kafka, although a close reading of the Kafka text confirms that the two works are indeed thematically parallel. Furthermore, consider how Deprez’s adaptation sets up an isomorphic relationship between the story as a whole and two fragments that foreground, in similar ways, questions of interspecies contact (see Figure 8.1). The first fragment occurs toward the beginning of the text (Deprez 65 and 70–7), and the other toward the end (Deprez 183–192). Both fragments suggest the possibility that K. may go to the castle with the help of a horse, a possibility that will never materialize, however. They are also very similar in that both underline the formal and thematic composition of the story as a whole. Further, both scenes have the same triadic structure, which can be broken down as follows: One: The appearance of a horse and a man, who prove to belong together. In the first scene, we first see a single horse and then the carriage of Klamm, K.’s official contact with the castle’s bureaucracy, pulled by two horses. In the second scene, we first see the legs of a horse and a man who appears to be Jeremiah, one of K’s assistants, leading two horses to his final appointment with K. Two: In the first scene, a meeting with K. is proposed, but it fails since Klamm has left at the moment of K’s arrival; in scene two K. has difficulties recognizing Jeremiah, who has aged a lot and who complains about having lost his job due to K. Three: In neither of the scenes does K. manage to make use of the horses to bridge the gap between village and castle. In the first scene, he is left alone with the empty carriage; in the second scene, he is denied one of the horses, and he turns away, leaving alone on foot, exactly the same way he arrived in the village at the opening of the book. What is most revealing here is the place of these two mirror scenes in the larger context of the work. They are the only ones engaging with both humans and animals and are structured in a symmetrical fashion, both being very visible therefore within the overall narrative. What is more, the two scenes serve a meta-narrative role: the first, just after the narrative begins, points to the impossibility of taking the step from “middle” to “end” (The Castle is a story about missed encounters, impossible progress, a kind of eternal and increasingly frustrating merry-go-round), and the second does the same but just before the end. In comparison with the original, this feature is perhaps a (didactic?) simplification, but it is not a misreading or radical transformation of Kafka’s text, where one finds three occurrences of this same scene: one at the beginning, where K. is driven to the village inn by a character called Gerstäcker, a character that the adaptation largely merges with the Jeremiah character (Kafka 17); one in the middle, where K. is waiting next to Klamm’s sleigh and starts a discussion with the driver, who tells him that Klamm will not leave the

192

192

Jan Baetens

Figure 8.1 Olivier Deprez, The Castle, p. 70. Used with kind permission of Frémok (FRMK).

inn as long as he, K., continues to wait for him, and who eventually unharnasses the horses (Kafka 91); and one at the end, where Gerstäcker returns and asks K. to help him with the horses (Kafka 275). If we look at the two scenes more in detail in Deprez’s adaptation, the mirroring becomes even clearer. The triadic narrative structure of both scenes is also reflected in their treatment of interspecies interaction. One: Horse (first a single horse, then two horses) and man are brought together. Two: The horses are presented as a way to get to the castle: in scene one with the carriage they are towing, and in scene two as a means of transportation to the castle on the hill. Three: In scene one K. does not enter the carriage and someone unclamps the horses and leads them away; in scene two K. does not ride one of the horses brought by Jeremiah and both go separate ways. Here as well, there is a strong continuity between Kafka’s text and Deprez’s interpretation. In the novel, the profound similarity of horses and driver, that is of human and nonhuman agents, is strongly underlined. See, for instance, the first appearance of the motif, where both types of agents are described in similar ways: The yard gate opened, and a small, flat-bottomed sleigh appeared. It was for carrying light loads, had no seat of any kind, and was drawn by a feeble little horse,

193

Interspecies Relationships in Graphic Micronarratives

193

behind which the man came into view. Although he wasn’t old he seemed feeble himself, he stooped and walked with a limp, and his face was red, as if he had a cold. It seemed particularly small because of a woolen scarf wrapped tightly around his neck. The man was obviously sick, and had come out of the house only to get K. away from here. (Kafka 17)

The analogies are ubiquitous: both horse and driver are “feeble”; the horse is “little,” while the driver is “obviously sick”; the driver is not riding the sleigh himself, but walks next to it; the woolen scarf he wears looks like part of the horse’s harness. Later occurrences of the horse and sleigh theme display similar meanings and highlight the impossibility of K.’s ever becoming the “master” of the horses. The last scene involving the horse is no less revealing: Gerstäcker just answered briefly, saying he needed K. to help with the horses, he himself had other business now, and he wished K. didn’t have to be dragged along like this, making unnecessary difficulties for him. If K. wanted payment then he, Gerstacker, would give him payment. But for all his tugging K. stopped dead now. He didn’t know anything about horses, he said. (275)

Yet in the case of Deprez’s graphic adaptation, the structural mirroring of these scenes allows the interspecies focus of the text to be interpreted furthermore as an example of mise en abyme, with the fragment containing a small scale model of the whole. The impossibility of entering the carriage or driving the horse can be read as a symbol of the lack of human (intraspecies) communication. But the two fragments also call attention to the compositional shape of the book, which resembles a big fan that starts to be unfolded without ever reaching any end point, and that in the second half of the text is gradually closed till it returns to its initial position. One can only conclude that Deprez’s tendency to engage in micronarrative, which is enhanced by the elliptic form of the story’s retelling (hence the impression that the narrative has many gaps, and that the reader can only focus on fragments and details) and the often relatively abstract character of many woodcuts (which slow down image-to-image transitions, giving a certain autonomy to each woodcut), has resulted in a text that is not just gappy but structurally incomplete. What the comparison with Kafka’s text suggests is not only that Deprez’s version dramatically foregrounds the theme of interspecies relations (what is a relative detail in Kafka becomes a key scene in Deprez), but also that this foregrounding affects the narrative logic of the whole story. In Kafka’s text, the overall structure remains action-driven and strongly organized in terms of human motivations (K. wants to reach the castle, and the sleigh with horses is a possible instrument in that quest). In Deprez’s interpretation, by contrast, the moments of interspecies encounter tend to bring the narrative to a kind of standstill (K. still wants to reach the castle, but the relationship with the horses ceases to be primarily instrumental and discloses a kind of narrative pause that makes room for a micronarrative intermezzo). The real shift from narrative to micronarrative engagements with interspecies relationships, however, comes to fruition in Deprez’s collaboration with Avril,

194

194

Jan Baetens

where the interspecies focus interacts with a compositional process that accommodates and reflects the contributions of a disabled coauthor.

Multiple micronarratives The micronarrative upgrade of the phenomenon of becoming-animal—that at first sight seems at odds with the very notion of narrative—matches almost completely the storytelling approach of Avril as an intellectually disabled artist. In his work, the notion of any grand narrative whatsoever is missing:  access to longer story arcs is difficult, if not impossible. By the same token, in constructing his texts, Avril does not reuse existing narrative models as concrete examples to follow or to change, such that any sense of the artist’s engagement with what has been read or seen is very limited. It is not always possible, for instance, to recognize in the final woodcuts the influence of the material that was used as a creative echo chamber, such as The Cabinet of Dr.  Caligari (1920) and other expressionist movies. According to Deprez’s testimony, this material was constantly present during the making of the book, but the reappropriation of this material by Avril was so idiosyncratic that it would be a gross simplification to reduce his work to just a personal reinterpretation of expressionist aesthetics. Nonetheless, despite the absence of extensive story arcs and established templates, Avril’s work suggests how a strong narrative impulse can be activated at any time by any subject or theme, and this aspect of Avril’s working method informs the new forms of micronarration explored by Deprez in his collaboration with Avril. Indeed, in the Deprez-Avril collaboration, it is not just that the basic narrative structure shifts from macronarrative to micronarrative. Much more important is the fact that the trigger for the use of micronarrative fragments changes as well. First of all, the initial impulse is now situated in material observations. What initiates the micronarrative is not a narrative “beginning” that, according to established notions of storytelling, has to be brought to some narrative “end,” but rather the observation of immediately available material in the context of the arts (for instance, the physical properties of the workshop or the iconographic material at his disposal) that transforms virtually anything into a possible enigma. It is of course no coincidence that the appearance of these disruptions changes as well the representation of interspecies relationships, which become similarly fragmented or disrupted. In Deprez’s adaptation of The Castle, human and nonhuman characters (K. and the sleigh with horses) still appear within the same frame. In After Death, after Life, they seem to confront each other in separate panels and images, underscoring how in a micronarrative environment various characters—and species identities—no longer meet in the storyworld yet continue to haunt each other on the page. As a corollary, the micronarrative framing of the initially nonnarrative material elements does not translate into a traditional narrative chain. It is instead permanently interrupted as soon as it takes off by the appearance of new material observations that provoke new nodes or tokens of micronarrative explosions. The disruptive force of these micronarrative bursts is heightened by

195

Interspecies Relationships in Graphic Micronarratives

195

the spatial separation of the species, which blocks the anthropomorphic gathering or synthesis of humans and nonhumans into a unified storyline. This utterly mobile structure dramatically modifies the role of montage. In the collaboration between Deprez and Avril, the editing process is no longer what stitches or glues together the sometimes highly heterogeneous material of the artwork; instead, it becomes itself the start of a string of micronarrative processes. In the text’s micronarrative reframing of questions of becoming-animal, shifts in traditional human/nonhuman relationships lead to a disintegration of the fictional proximity of man and animal, even as Avril’s micronarrative inserts wipe out longer story arcs and transform the overall narrative chain into a discontinuous string of small and incomplete narratives. Here montage is not a way of editing already existing or elsewhere produced elements; instead, the presence of these elements—the artist’s answer to his or her direct observations and experiences— fosters an attempt to produce new and permanently renewed or reopened occurrences of montage, that is of micronarrative interruption and disruption. A good example of the integration of this new form of micronarrative through montage can be discovered through a comparison of the format and layout of the books published by Deprez and by Deprez-Avril. The Castle is a graphic novel variation on the typically French bande dessinée A4 format, no longer divided into strips and panels (the normal structure being a mosaic of three tiers with three or four images on each), but instead presenting a kind of horizontal split screen, each featuring woodcuts of the same size. For its part, inspired by the design of woodcut blocks and prints, the horizontal pages of After Death, after Life are typically divided into four equally sized images with heavy gutters and frames that clearly mirror the structure of the windows in the “S” workshop. Here the layout of the text has been “invented” with the help of the material properties of the space in which the artists have been working. Furthermore, the form of this collaborative text resonates with the key issues discussed in the present analysis. It resonates with questions of animality, insofar as Avril and Deprez try to stick to observation of their material environment and avoid bestowing immediate anthropomorphic meaning on these material features. The format also reflects the coauthors’ accommodation of disability, or rather their cocreation of a different understanding of ability: each author abandons his own natural bias in order to find a middle ground between canonical forms storytelling and radical disruption. Finally, the textual design both shapes and is shaped by the logic of interspecies relationships, which function in this work as the litmus test of the new micronarrative method:  the encounter between humans and nonhumans is not only staged and dramatically enhanced by page layout, but also problematized by the rejection of the synthetic bringing together of man and animal within the same panel. Indeed, despite their shared commitment to formal innovation, in comparison with Deprez’s The Castle, Deprez and Avril’s After Death, after Life has a totally different structure, and the role and meaning of interspecies relationships is very different as well. Here the fragments focusing on interspecies relationships become much more than just a mise en abyme of a structure that already exists apart from them. Since there is no longer a single overall structure as there was

196

196

Jan Baetens

in The Castle—which of course does not mean that there is no structure in After Death, after Life—the significance of the parts becomes much more weighty. It is no longer possible to see them as parts revealing or repeating the whole; there is now a much more evident dialectical tension between part and whole. This dialectic also reflects a rethinking of notions of “narrative competence” or storytelling ability as well as of interspecies relationships, which here break free from the classic anthropomorphic schemes whose residue can still be found in Kafka’s original novel. Thus it would be inaccurate to state that After Death, after Life replaces the global narrative of The Castle—which remains after all, in spite of the highly experimental nature of its images, a linear story—with a fragmentary and non-totalizing structure, an astonishing and nonlinear remix of the visual imaginary constructed throughout the previous works by Deprez. To be sure, the basic structure of After Death, after Life combines the two techniques of installment narrative and micronarrative, such that virtually any page or panel of the book can be read as an independent microstory regardless of its linear or sequential connections with the rest of the work. But this gloss misses a crucial aspect of the text. In After Death, after Life the essential feature of the narrative is not the story told, be it in fragmentary and micronarrative ways, but the process and activity of storytelling itself—that is, the dynamic of a story that never succeeds in becoming a totality, but that nevertheless manages to continue almost endlessly. The telling achieves this self-deferral not by way of a recursive loop (see Belloï et al.), but in a continuously interrupted and restarted attempt to recount stories by making use of the materiality of narrative media: first the woodcut engravings, second the printing process of the woodcut blocks, third the cinematographic or other projection of slides and celluloid strips as a symbolic and figurative expansion of what happens during the making and printing of the woodcuts. This use of multiple micronarratives can in turn be described in two ways. On the one hand, there is a strong tendency to put between brackets the constituent events of the story in order to bring to the fore the supplementary events, to use H.  Porter Abbott’s terminology. In other words, what the text lays bare are the articulations of the story, not what is actually being articulated by them. On the other hand, there is also a strong tendency toward symbolization and thematic “thickening” of the material infrastructure of the narrative discourse. The mise en abyme structure of The Castle moves here from storyline to storytelling:  the objects, themes, and fragments of After Death, after Life are no longer to be seen as parts of an overarching storyline, but as elements that establish a back and forth movement between figurative fictional elements and the material forms they both come from and hint at. For example, the ubiquitous planks and dark spots in Avril and Deprez’s storyworld are the figurative translation of the woodcuts and ink that the artists are manipulating when building their fiction. The combination of these two features of the text—the focus on articulation, the focus on symbolization of the material—explains why Avril and Deprez’s use of micronarrative can produce new forms of storytelling that exceed the mere critique or even destruction of traditional narrative. The whole work is built in such

197

Interspecies Relationships in Graphic Micronarratives

197

a way that it is possible to spin out storyworlds at any moment and to guarantee their radical equality within a general structure that, no longer homogeneous or homogenizing, leaves room for a network of small narrative snippets that emerge and disappear almost simultaneously. This shift to micronarrative has a strong impact on the representation of the nonhuman as well as of interspecies relationships. In fact, the species boundary itself is no longer sharply demarcated, since the human as well as the nonhuman are from the very beginning blurred and mixed categories. In many cases, the figurative representation of the human and the animal involves the same formal elements (dots, lines, colors, textures), with the result that storyworld agents can be interpreted as either human or animal. In addition, many figurative elements of characters that are recognizable as humans or animals exchange their features, in both intraspecies and interspecies contexts. Human figures wear masks having large snouts so that they resemble ducks, while animal figures may have their heads replaced by human skulls. Human figures may seem so stiff and cold that they look like corpses, whereas dogs, cats, and horses present forms that prevent the reader from distinguishing them as separate species. This principle of general metamorphosis eventually contaminates all aspects of the storyworld. The tail of a dog is perhaps also a leash or the handle of a woodcut press or the plinth of a corridor of a narrow ray of light underneath a door etc. (see Figure 8.2). Significantly, in After Death, after Life the number of actual interspecies encounters is, like the number of distinct animal figures, rather small. Instead, the use of interfigural and thus interspecies exchanges is so pervasive that Avril and Deprez need not draw actual humans or animals to make them present in all the forms and figures of the book. Here the interspecies and interfigural dimensions have become ubiquitous, thanks to the authors’ drawing style and the structural openness of their micronarrative approach to storytelling.

A storyworld torn between mosaic and combinatorics My analysis of the collaborative work by Deprez and Avril reveals an expansion and radicalization of tendencies already visible in the single-authored works by Deprez, particularly when it comes to the relationship between the formal and the symbolic levels. On the one hand, the disruption of traditional narrative in their experimental graphic novels does not lead to the abolition of narrative; such a closure may be the dream of certain forms of abstract comics, but it remains a false and naïve dream since it underestimates the cognitive as well as emotional need to make narrative sense of virtually anything. Their collaborative work instead produces instead a mash of micronarratives, that is, a moving tapestry of narrative injunctions that, caught up in the flux of events7, nevertheless escape the streamlining of traditional narrative. On the other hand, the figurative dimension of this micronarrative network, going back and forth between the materiality of the medium and thematic or figurative embodiment, produces a storyworld that dissolves the limits between existential categories: figure versus background, human

198

198

Jan Baetens

Figure 8.2 Adolpho Avril and Olivier Deprez, Après la mort, après la vie, n.p. Used with kind permission of Frémok (FRMK).

agent versus object or setting, active versus passive, non-disabled versus disabled, dominating and dominated, human and animal. All these distinctions vanish on the page and participate in the permanent micronarrative upload and dissolve of elements that at first sight may seem deprived of narrative power. The profound combinatory logic of Avril and Deprez’s storyworld makes it impossible to determine whether the new stance toward interspecies relationships and disability reflects or rather produces their commitment to a micronarrative approach. The same goes for the question of whether the storyworld comes first and the storytelling methods follow, or the other way around. After Death, after Life suggests, instead, that the we should abandon questions of these sorts. Other questions must be pursued—for instance, questions about the impact of art materials on attempts to use art to project species identities and interactions—if readers wish fully to participate in and contribute to the experience opened by (micro)narratives like Avril and Deprez’s. More generally, texts like Avril and Deprez’s call for the development of new, integrative approaches to animal comics. Without more work in this area, it will be impossible fully to appreciate what is at stake in innovative instances of this mode. As After Death, after Life suggests, graphic experiments with (or at) the species boundary stage new ways of recognizing the scope and nature of interspecies relationships, and new strategies for living up to the aesthetic and ethicopolitical obligations they entail.

199

Interspecies Relationships in Graphic Micronarratives

199

Notes 1 A possible alternative to Colette’s approach might be to shift from a cognitive emphasis (how to give a voice to nonhuman animal thinking and animal experiences) to a more “behaviorist” emphasis, focusing on the physical being together of humans and nonhumans in shared physical spaces. I am thinking for instance of the following fragment of James Salter’s memoir, Burning the Days, in which he also chronicles his years as a war pilot in Korea: “Below, the earth has shed its darkness. There is the silver of countless lakes and streams. The greatest things to be seen, the ancients wrote, are sun, stars, water, and clouds. Here among them, of what is one thinking? I cannot remember but probably of nothing, of flying itself, the imperishability of it, the brilliance. You do not think about the fish in the great, winding river, thin as string, miles below, or the frogs in the glinting ponds, nor they of you; they know little of you, though once, just after takeoff, I saw the shadow of my plane skimming the dry grass like the wings of god and passing over, frozen by the noise, a hare two hundred feet below. That lone hare, I, the morning sun, and all that lay beyond it were for an instant joined, like an eclipse” (Salter 172). 2 For some images, see: http://www.fremok.org/site.php?type=P&id=63. 3 For some images, see: http://www.fremok.org/site.php?type=P&id=92. 4 For some images, see: http://www.fremok.org/site.php?type=P&id=76. 5 Given that fewer and fewer novelists take up avant-garde stances in their work, the anti-narrative approach is now mostly to be found in more marginal genres such as poetry and comics or graphic novels. 6 For some interesting remarks on micronarrative and shortness in general, see Alferi; Bédrane, Revaz and Viegnes; and Schlanger. 7 For an account of the concept of “the event” as what escapes narrative and engenders totally new forms of temporality, see Dosse.

Works cited Abbott, Porter H. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Alferi, Pierre. Brefs. Paris: P.O.L, 2016. Avril, Adolpho, and Olivier Deprez. Après la mort, après la vie. Brussels: FRMK, 2014. Baetens, Jan (2016). “Composer ‘avec la folie’. La réinvention du récit dans Après la mort. Après la vie d’Adolpho Avril et Olivier Deprez.” Neohelicon 43 (2016; Spec. Issue on “Discours de la folie”/“Discourses of Madness”): 1–12. Baetens, Jan. “Of Graphic Novels and Minor Cultures: The Fréon Collective.” Yale French Studies 114 (2008): 95–114. Barbier, Alex. Lettres au maire de V. Bruxelles: FRMK, 1998. Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero. 1953. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 2012. Bayard, Pierre. Le Hors-sujet. Proust et la digression. Paris: Minuit, 1996. Bédrane, Sabrinelle, Francine Revaz, and Michel Viegnes, eds. Le récit minimal. du minime au minimalisme. littérature, arts, medias. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2012. Belloï, Livio, Michel Delville, Christophe Levaux, and Christophe Pirenne, eds. Boucle et répétition. Liège: Presses Universitaires de Liège, 2015.

200

200

Jan Baetens

Coché, Frédéric. Vie et mort du héros triomphante. Bruxelles: FRMK, 2004. Colette. Dialogues de bêtes. 1904. Paris: Folio, 2005. Coll. Knock outsider. Vers un troisième langage. Bruxelles: FRMK, 2014. Coll. Match de catch à Vielsalm. Bruxelles: FRMK, 2009. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Deprez, Oliver. Le Château. D’après F. Kafka. Brussels: FRMK, 2003. Dosse, François. Le Retour de l’événement. Paris: PUF, 2010. Fortemps, Vincent. Chantier-Musil. D’après une lecture de ‘L’Homme sans qualité » de Rober Musil, matière pour un projet de François Verret. Bruxelles: FRMK, 2003. Herman, David. “Toward a Zoonarratology: Storytelling and Species Difference in Animal Comics.” Narrative, Interrupted: The Plotless, the Disturbing, and the Trivial in Literature. Eds. Markku Lehtimäki, Laura Karttunen, and Maria Mäkelä. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012. 93–119. Kafka, Franz. The Castle. 1926. Trans. Anthea Bell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2006. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. For a New Novel. 1963. Trans. Richard Howard. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1992. Salter, James. Burning the Days. London: Picador, 2007. Schlanger, Judith. Dire trop ou trop peu. Sur la densité littéraire. Paris: Hermann, 2016. Schneider, Greice. What Happens When Nothing Happens: Boredom and Everyday Life in Contemporary Comics. Leuven: U of Leuven P, 2016.

201

Chapter 9 A N I M A L M I N D S I N N O N F IC T IO N   C OM IC S David Herman

This chapter explores how graphic narratives engage with forms of subjective experience across the species boundary, focusing in particular on attributions of mental states—or in some cases the lack of such attributions—to animal agents in nonfiction comics. I use a variety of graphic narratives falling under the heading of nonfiction to reframe debates organized around a polarity between legible and illegible animal minds; in the terms set by this polarity, which derives from larger assumptions about the nature of fictional versus actual minds, readable or transparent minds can be viewed as a criterion for fiction, with the presentation of minds as unreadable or opaque constituting, conversely, a necessary condition for nonfiction.1 By contrast, my chapter suggests how the creators of graphic narratives use the visual-verbal resources of the medium to engage in more or less detailed and far-ranging attributions of subjective experiences to animal agents in discourse that is presented as nonfictional, or subject to falsification. To develop this argument, I  draw on case studies that range from graphic memoirs documenting the lives of animals conscripted into early space-exploration programs, to comics conveying observations of and informal theorizing about companion animals’ behavior, to narratives that combine words and images to engage with the lives of farm animals. I focus on the extent to which, and the specific ways in which, these and other kinds of nonfiction comics profile the motivations, desires, intentions, and emotions of nonhuman characters. I argue that variation in comics' mind-ascribing practices can be traced to the way a given graphic narrative, whether fictional or nonfictional, bears on the norms for interpretation that structure “discourse domains.” This is my term for the arenas of conduct in which strategies for orienting to self-other relationships— including human-animal relationships—take shape. Discourse domains are frameworks for activity that, operative in the full range of cultural, subcultural, and interpersonal settings, determine what sorts of mental-state attributions will be deemed appropriate and warranted in a given context. Reciprocally, ascriptions of subjectivity, both within and across the species boundary, should be viewed as embedded in and shaped by particular kinds of contexts, or domains, rather than as singular, one-off attributions of mental states. I argue that because the norms

202

202

David Herman

for ascription associated with discourse domains cut across the fiction-nonfiction divide, domain, not genre, is the key determinant of how prolific and detailed the subjective experiences projected by a given narrative will be. In other words, it is not the fictional versus nonfictional status of a narrative that sets the upper (or lower) limit on how many mental-state attributions can be made and the degree to which those attributions will be fine-grained and particularized rather than coarse and general. Instead, the relative richness and granularity of accounts of animal subjectivity will be determined by how a given narrative bears on the normative assumptions about species of minds that structure discourse domains. Rather than assuming a priori that only fictional narratives afford access to nonhuman minds, it is therefore imperative to develop, inductively, techniques for documenting and analyzing the attested range of mind-ascribing practices in nonfictional as well as fictional narratives about both human and animal agents—across a variety of storytelling media.2 Resituated within this larger framework for inquiry, narratives of all sorts can be read as both reflecting and helping to create a complex ecology of ascriptive practices, governed by norms that bisect the human-nonhuman distinction as well as the contrast between fictional and nonfictional genres. Graphic narratives featuring animal agents, for their part, shed light on practices of mental-state ascription that are rooted in the domains linked to a culture’s or subculture’s methods for profiling nonhuman minds; these narratives also reveal how such methods have become entrenched in (and enabled by) the storytelling traditions associated with the (sub)culture in question.3 As I go on to discuss, such traditions, and the norms with which they are caught up, can be linked, in turn, to cultural ontologies, as that term is used in contemporary anthropological research (see Matei Candea; Philippe Descola; Herman, “Narratology”; Eduardo Kohn; Eduardo Viveiros de Castro). At issue are pervasive, culturally inculcated ways of orienting to lived experience that specify, in the form of common knowledge, what sorts of beings populate the world and how those beings’ qualities and abilities relate to the qualities and abilities ascribed to humans. But how exactly do creators of multispecies comics use visual and verbal means to evoke more-than-human experiences, and how do their strategies for projecting animal minds—in nonfictional contexts in particular—bear on understandings of nonhuman subjectivity as well as human-animal relationships? In what follows, I use several example texts to explore these and other issues arising from graphic engagements with animal minds.

Animal subjectivity in words and images Narratologists have argued that it is part of the nature of narrative to focus on the impact of events on experiencing minds (see Monika Fludernik; Herman, Basic Elements 137–60). In the terms I used previously in Basic Elements of Narrative, across differences of genre, communicative context, and storytelling media, instances of the narrative text-type share a common focus on the what-it’s-like

203

Animal Minds in Nonfiction Comics

203

dimension of consciousness—to adapt the ideas of Thomas Nagel. As Nagel has argued, part of the definition of a conscious being is that it is possible to ask what it is like to be—or to experience the world as—that sort of being, whether it is a bat or a butterfly, a hummingbird or a human. In turn, narratives more or less explicitly foreground what it is like for characters to undergo particular experiences— that is, how experiencers are affected by events taking place in the narrated world or storyworld. A key question raised by the present chapter, however, is whether graphic narratives, in recruiting from more than one semiotic channel to evoke storyworlds, afford possibilities for projecting subjective experience not afforded by monomodal or “single-channel” print texts, and vice versa. Another key question:  What sorts of issues come into focus when the experiences portrayed in words and images are those of nonhuman rather than human agents? As Kai Mikkonen notes, graphic narratives stimulate “the viewer’s engagement [with] the minds of characters by recourse to a wide range of verbal modes of narration in dynamic relation with images that show minds in action” (302). Besides examining how styles of focalization project mental states and dispositions in graphic narratives told in the third as well as the first person, Mikkonen explores how the visual channel can be used to prompt inferences about characters’ minds by situating them in particular physical and social contexts, with or without additional verbal cues. Indeed, any aspect of the narrative system, including the configuration of objects in storyworld spaces, the appearance and comportment of characters, speech attributions, and the perspective structures encoded within and across panels, can be recruited for the purpose of evoking forms of subjective experience in storyworlds. But does this process unfold along the same lines in comics featuring nonhuman versus human subjectivities? Here the concept of the Umwelt, or an animal’s phenomenally experienced world, makes its relevance felt. Proposed by the German-Estonian philosopher-biologist Jakob von Uexküll, the term Umwelt refers, in Evan Thompson’s characterization, to the world as it presents itself to an animal given its specific organismic structure and corresponding sensorimotor capabilities (59; see also Andy Clark 24–5).4 Even in comics making no obvious or explicit forays into more-than-human worlds, story creators can focus on intraspecies variation in human Umwelten—as when Alison Bechdel, in Fun Home (2006), juxtaposes her family members’ different ways of experiencing the circumstances and events unfolding in the storyworld. Multispecies comics, for their part, use words and images (or image-sequences alone, as in Hughes’s wordless narrative Bye Bye Birdie [2009]) to engage in a more or less thoroughgoing way with differences in the texture of experience across species lines. In such comics, the focus can be on different nonhuman species’ ways of experiencing events in the storyworld or on the contrast between human and nonhuman Umwelten—or both, as in Hakobune Hakusho’s manga series Animal Academy (2005–8), in which the human protagonist attends a school where cats, foxes, and other animals are able to shapeshift into human form. In graphic narration generally, individual panels encapsulate time-slices of an unfolding storyworld, with the design of panels as well as panel sequences affording a more or less detailed model of the characters’ experiences over the course of

204

204

David Herman

the events being recounted in words and images. The more fine-grained a graphic narrative’s portrayal of how an intelligent agent engages with its surrounding environment, the more fully the text aligns itself, potentially, with a narrational strategy that can be termed Umwelt modeling.5 In texts that imagine animal worlds in detail, in contrast with more globalizing or summative portrayals of nonhuman lives, comics creators leverage the visual-verbal organization of panels and larger sequences in a bid to project the phenomenology or experiential texture of creatures’ moment-by-moment engagement with storyworld events. In turn, this method of narration supports an exploratory modeling of animal Umwelten— that is, a modeling of what the world is or might be like for nonhuman subjects, whether in fictional or nonfictional contexts. Figures 9.1–9.3 suggest how establishing a continuum stretching between distanced, globalizing accounts of animal worlds, on one end, and accounts that use methods of Umwelt modeling to project nonhuman forms of subjectivity, on the other end, provides foundations for the study of animal minds in comics. Each of these figures is taken from a nonfictional text that, through word-image combinations, raises questions about the nature of animals’ experiences—indeed, about the structure and scope of nonhuman subjectivity as such. The texts bring these questions into view positively, by evoking the qualitative particulars of animal worlds, or else negatively, by omitting details about nonhuman experiences in contexts in which such details might be expected to feature. Figure 9.1 derives from Joeming Dunn and Ben Dunn’s Laika: The 1st Dog in Space (2012), part of the Famous Firsts: Animals Making History series; this series includes a range of graphic historical narratives that are targeted at younger readers and that center on individual animals’ lives.6 Figure 9.2 reproduces a page from Jeffrey Brown’s Cat Getting out of a Bag and Other Observations (2007), in which Brown records, in the manner of reportage, the behaviors of the cats with whom he lives, while recruiting from (and also contributing to) the resources of folk ethology to account for what motivates the cats to act in the way they do. Figure 9.3, finally, comes from Sue Coe’s and Judy Brody’s Cruel, an exposé of the violent, exploitative practices bound up with factory farming, among other settings involving human-animal interactions.7 More specifically, this image is taken from the sketchbook that Coe includes as an appendix to the volume. Even though it is not presented as “finished” artwork, the image reproduced as Figure 9.3, which Coe has labeled “dying calf at stockyard,” constitutes part of the verbal-visual background on which Coe and Brody draw in combining words and images to give an account of how animal are mistreated at slaughterhouses and within the system of modern-day agribusiness more generally. Taken together, Figures 9.1–9.3 illustrate the variety of narrative strategies used in animal comics, with the sequence from Laika glossing over what the dog’s last hours in the overheating space capsule on board Sputnik II may have been like, Figure 9.2 hinting at a richer experiential domain in its portrayal of Misty’s visit to the veterinarian, and Coe’s sketch of the dying calf projecting, on a moment-by-moment basis, qualitative particulars of the animal’s death—both as that death is encountered by Coe in the role of observer and also, the sequence suggests, as it may have been experienced by the calf herself.

205

Animal Minds in Nonfiction Comics

205

Figure 9.1, like the authors’ cognate life history of Albert II: The 1st Monkey in Space (2012), is noteworthy for its gapping out of the final experiences of Laika, the dog rocketed into space (with no provision for recovery) by the Soviet scientists who launched Sputnik II in 1957.8

Figure 9.1 From Joeming Dunn and Ben Dunn’s Laika: The 1st Dog in Space, p. 28. Reproduction courtesy ABDO Publishing Company.

206

206

David Herman

Earlier in the text, the authors had included an image of Laika framed by a circular border, in the manner of a framed portrait or perhaps a picture locket (22); in a speech balloon contained within the same frame, Laika, who (like the rhesus monkey in Albert II) serves as an extradiegetic narrator retrospectively telling her own story as part of the larger history of space exploration, begins her life narrative as follows: “Finally, I get to tell you all about me! I was a stray on the streets of Moscow, Russia” (22). The locket-like image of Laika not only associates the panel containing the image with the photographic genre of the portrait of a loved one, in effect framing the dog as a member of what can be described as a transhuman family; what is more, the image represents the dog as being alive at the time of narration, even though she later reports her own death, which as it turns out occurred only a few hours after she had been launched into space. The panels that follow continue Laika’s paradoxically posthumous narration, in the form of text boxes included at the top of each panel. This sequence of panels shows Laika socializing with other dogs and then being put through a training program (22–3), during which Laika is strapped into a centrifuge, her eyes open wide and her tongue hanging loosely in her mouth as she is whirled around in the machine. The final panel in the sequence portrays Laika lying down in the foreground, with progressively smaller capsules or containers behind her. The panel’s extradiegetic text box reads: “I was kept in a series of cages that got smaller and smaller. This helped me get used to the small size of the capsule” (23). Significantly, the text here uncouples experiential particulars, projected via the image-track, from the verbal track’s recounting of episodes in Laika’s life history. The authors show the series of shrinking containers, but without directly engaging with what it may have been like for Laika to inhabit these ever-more confined spaces. This gap between what is said and what is shown culminates in the sequence reproduced as Figure 9.1. In the first panel of the sequence, the image-track aligns with the verbal track, with the narration reporting how Laika became “a symbol of the new Space Age” and the image-track showing a collage of the images of Laika in the space capsule that were used on postcards and stamps. The next two panels, however, provide only external views of the Sputnik II spacecraft, with the narration recounting how malfunctioning equipment caused a loss of protective insulation and an increase in the temperature inside the dog’s capsule. The final panel, which shows only an image of Earth from the vantage point of an orbiting satellite, completely occludes the experiential details of Laika’s last hours—even as she (or rather the authors speaking through her) uses an oddly forensic locution to outline an account of what once-suppressed evidence about the flight suggests may have happened to the dog: “I most likely passed on six to seven hours into the flight from a combination of the heat and the flight stress” (28). The reader then encounters a one-panel splash page with a large image of Laika’s face in the center of the page, and spacecraft from various phases of the United States’ and the Soviet Union’s space programs floating around her in space; there is also an image of a human astronaut in a space suit, or at least of the suit itself. The text boxes on this page read:

207

Animal Minds in Nonfiction Comics

207

I was one of the few animals that died in the space program for both the Soviet Union and United States. I was the only animal to be sent into space with no hope of returning home. Many believe that scientists could have made a reentry capsule that could have saved me if they had had a little more time. However, the launch was a success. It gave useful information and led the way for human spaceflight and eventually landing on the moon. I’m so glad I  could tell you this story about me and about how I  became famous. (29)

Here, as in the earlier moments in the text that omit or occlude details about Laika’s experiences as a test subject in the Soviet space program, the narration that the authors impute to Laika can be characterized as a human-centric mode of “speaking for another” (Herman, “Autobiography”). At issue is an act of speakingfor that crosses the species boundary but in a manner that imposes human frames of reference on the animal subject, who thereby becomes largely or completely a mouthpiece for human institutions, practices, and concerns, and whose lifeworld loses most or all of its definition in the process.9 By contrast, in the one-page, untitled episode from Cat Getting out of a Bag reproduced as Figure  9.2, Brown does not purport to speak in Misty’s behalf. Instead he provides a panel-by-panel breakdown of the signs of distress that the cat displays, through her appearance as well as her actions, during a visit to the veterinarian’s office. In parallel with Brown’s series of graphic memoirs sometimes referred to as his “Girlfriend Trilogy” (Herman, Storytelling 133–43)— and in contrast with Dunn and Dunn’s use of text boxes to ventriloquize Laika’s self-narrative10—Brown refrains from furnishing retrospective extradiegetic commentary to frame storyworld events in terms of the assumptions, values, and priorities that might be ascribed to the older, narrating Brown vis-à-vis the younger, experiencing self interacting with Misty and other cats. Brown also situates readers at a medium distance from the unfolding action, for the most part—though the penultimate panel in Figure 9.2 does zoom in on Misty’s fearful attempt to “burrow” under Brown’s arm. Overall, though, what might be called Brown’s greater narratorial reticence, as compared with the mode of narration used in Figure 9.1, in fact allows for a richer modeling of the experiential particulars that might plausibly be attributed to Misty during the episode at issue, or in other words a fuller projection of other-than-human ways of encountering the world. Thus, in contrast with the way he draws Misty in other parts of the text, Brown accentuates her large black eyes over the course of the episode, suggesting that the cat’s pupils have become dilated as part of a fearful or defensive response to potentially threatening surroundings.11 Brown also provides verbal glosses that allow the cat’s movements and vocalizations to be interpreted as actions, or modes of doing that arise from (more or less readily inferred) reasons for acting. Misty’s “meow” in the first panel already implies disequilibrium—possibly anxiety of some

208

208

David Herman

Figure 9.2 From Cat Getting Out of a Bag and Other Observations, p. 79, by Jeffrey Brown, published in 2007 by Chronicle Books LLC. Copyright © 2007 by Jeffrey Brown. All Rights Reserved.

sort—in her experiential world, perhaps caused by her compulsory car ride to the vet. The motion lines in the second panel indicate further discomfort on Misty’s part. Her movements here anticipate those that Brown glosses, in the fourth panel, as a fear-induced shivering. Later panels in the sequence include “hide” and “burrow, burrow” glosses, in addition to reports of additional vocalizations by Misty via speech balloons; in response to one such “meow,” Brown tries to reassure the cat: “It’s okay, Misty.” The sequence thus stages the younger Brown’s use of folkethological reasoning to make sense of Misty’s conduct as it unfolds in real time, while also suggesting continuity between the younger Brown’s understanding of Misty’s reasons for acting (fear, defensiveness, desire to escape or evade) and the older, narrating Brown’s way of presenting this episode. The text visually encapsulates and verbally glosses behaviors that it casts as sub-actions within the larger

209

Animal Minds in Nonfiction Comics

209

frame of Misty’s frightened response to a possibly threatening environment. In this way, the sequence exemplifies how nonfiction comics like Brown’s not only recruit from but also help consolidate norms for mental-state attributions that cross the species boundary. But storytelling in words and images can not only support and help disseminate norms for trans-species ascriptions of subjectivity, but also promote the revision or refinement of such norms. More specifically, Figure  9.3 suggests how sets of ascriptive norms linked to particular kinds of settings, or what in the present analysis I  call discourse domains, may have a wider or narrower scope of applicability than has been assumed by the members of a given culture or subculture. Like Brown’s account of Misty’s visit to the vet, Coe’s sequence of sketches and her associated notes can be aligned with reportage rather than animal autobiography—or, more precisely, the human-centric modes of cross-species speaking-for on which Dunn and Dunn’s Laika is premised. And again, as compared with the authors’ co-optation of the dog’s voice in Laika and their attendant gapping out of animal subjectivity, Coe’s non- or anti-ventriloquizing methods in the sketched sequence foster a richer environment for modeling the particulars of nonhuman experience. In Cruel, however, the sequence promotes this kind of Umwelt modeling in a domain that normatively profiles animals as consumable objects rather than experiencing subjects.

Figure 9.3 Reprinted with permission of the publisher from Sue Coe’s Cruel: Bearing Witness to Animal Exploitation, p. 176 by OR Books, 2012.

210

210

David Herman

As Brown did with Misty at the veterinary clinic, Coe parses an action—in this case, the fatally injured calf ’s attempt to rise to her feet—into a constituent sequence of micro-actions, comprising here the animal’s successive efforts to reach a standing position. In contrast with Brown’s storytelling methods, Coe frames the images with retrospective verbal narration that provides details about the calf ’s environment, condition, and death.12 But if the impact or even the legibility of the image-track thus depends in part on the context outlined in the narrative report that assumes the form of field notes, in turn the image-sequence animates and particularizes the report. The composition of the page suggests a time-sequence that can be tracked by moving through the images in a clockwise direction, the starting point being the most detailed, shaded-in drawing in the top left quadrant. This first image serves to fix the animal’s species identity as well as flesh out her color and other individuating characteristics.13 The second image evokes the calf ’s exhaustion and inability to move in the stifling heat. The third image then calls up the sheer exertion required for the calf, whose back may have been broken, to try to raise herself one final time, the froth streaming from her mouth and her eye darkening (in pain?). The fourth image, capturing the awkward position of the calf ’s head mentioned in Coe’s notes, is also the most sketchy; here the shape, posture, and coloring used in the first image give way to a few sparse lines, perhaps to suggest the dis-individuating effects of the mass animal deaths Coe witnesses at the stockyard, or alternatively the way the killing of animals on an industrial scale requires, as a condition of possibility, the erasure of individuality. Unlike Brown, Coe refrains from drawing herself into the represented scene— for example, in the role of an observer recording the details that she later narrates through this very sequence. To be sure, this approach serves to foreground the experiences of the dying calf—experiences that would have otherwise remained ignored or suppressed (or repressed) in the context of the stockyard. Yet the sequence also uses the calf ’s isolation, the way animal suffers and dies alone, to underscore the contradictory manner in which humans orient to other forms of creatural life. At issue here is the contradiction identified by Erica Fudge, whereby people treat some animals as part of a larger, transhuman family—namely, the creatures whom they recognize as companion animals or pets14—while treating other animals as objects that can be owned, exchanged, killed, and consumed as humans see fit.15 Particularly when juxtaposed with Figure 9.2, where the older Brown’s verbal-visual strategies for telling the story of Misty’s visit to the vet align with his younger self ’s interest in caring for and assuaging the anxieties of the animal companion whom he has named and individualized, Figure 9.3 highlights the marginalized status, the anonymized suffering, of an unnamed creature slotted into the category of farm animal, and hence treated as a non- or dis-individuated food source. Taken together, then, Figure 9.2 and Figure 9.3 suggest how stories can be used both to scaffold and to critique the norms for mental-state ascription that are more or less dominant in particular spheres of activity. Whereas Figure 9.2 at once draws on and contributes to established folk-ethological imagery for the conduct of cats and for human-feline interactions, Figure 9.3 challenges the imagery—or

211

Animal Minds in Nonfiction Comics

211

rather the lack of imagery—that allows the experiences of farm animals to be bracketed off from those regularly attributed to animal companions. Indeed, the sequence from Cruel underscores the role of stories in creating a space for mentalstate ascriptions like those reported in and enabled by Brown’s text. It is the paucity of widely shared narratives about particular farm animals like the dying calf that gives Coe’s sketches their anti-normative force, with her sketchbook, like Cruel as a whole, transposing into the domain of factory farming norms typical for interactions between humans and companion animals. Thanks to this intermixing or transposition of ascriptive norms, Coe prompts her readers to attribute to the dying calf the feelings of pain and the capacity for having a perspective on events that are customarily reserved for the cats, dogs, and other favored species with whom humans share their homes. My larger point here is that, because Figures 9.1–9.3 are all taken from nonfictional narratives, the factor of generic status does not explain the different degrees and kinds of mental-state attribution evident across the three sequences. By the same token, although Figure 9.1 derives from a text written for younger readers, the group toward, as Cathrine Degnen suggests, narratives making prolific allocations of subjective experience across the species boundary are most commonly targeted, this and other sequences from Dunn and Dunn’s Laika elide animals’ experiential particulars rather than projecting a rich mental life for nonhuman subjects.16 Hence, just as the generic status of a text, its participation in the category of fiction or nonfiction, is not sufficient to predict or explain how fully it engages with the qualitative details of animal experience, the age of the intended audience for a narrative does not play a determinative or criterial role in this connection: there will be different patterns of mental-state attribution even in texts targeted at lower reading levels. My next section outlines a way of accounting for such differences within generic and audience-based categories; it uses the idea of discourse domains, as well as the broader cultural ontologies with which such domains are caught up in dialectical interplay, as contexts for understanding variable ascriptive practices in graphic nonfiction concerned with animals.

More-than-human experiences in graphic nonfiction Mental-state attributions beyond the realm of fiction As indicated previously, it is an established position within narratology to associate far-reaching mental-state attributions with fictional narratives—indeed, to make such attributions criterial for fictional discourse. Thus Cohn argues that fiction stands apart from nonfiction not only because of the way fictional texts create the worlds they refer to by referring to them (13), such that it would be wrongheaded to try to falsify such narratives by appealing to alternative accounts of the “same” events, but also because of fiction’s “unique potential for presenting characters” (16). More specifically, “in fiction cast in the third person, this presentation involves a distinctive epistemology that allows a narrator to know what cannot be

212

212

David Herman

known in the real world and in narratives that target the real world: the inner life of his figures” (16). At issue, in other words, is “the intimate subjective experiences of . . . characters, the here and now of their lives to which no observer real observer could ever accede in real life” (24). For Cohn, the “penetrative optic” by means of which fictional narratives provide access to such experiences would be “epistemologically illegitimate” in the context of nonfictional (e.g., historical) narratives (16); this optic goes hand in hand with devices that analysts have treated as signposts of fictionality and that Jean-Marie Schaeffer links with “syntactic” definitions of fictional discourse (paragraphs 18–22). Relevant devices include, as David Gorman notes (167), the use of “frame-internal” temporal and spatial deictics that refer to the world projected by a narrative rather than the current scene of utterance in which the narrative is being produced (as in “She was now leaving for a trip” or “Here was his best chance for happiness”); free indirect discourse, in which narrators’ reports take on the texture of characters’ subjective experiences (as in “The student moped. Winter break was so unbearably far away”); and interior monologue, alternatively known as free direct discourse, in which a narrative creates the sense that characters’ experiences, instead of merely coloring a narrator’s presentation of events as they would in the free indirect style, manifest themselves directly on the page, maximally free of narratorial mediation (as in “Must get home somehow. Winter break so far away. Can’t bear it any longer”). Analysts have thus insisted on a strong association between fiction and widescope attributions of mental states to characters, and a converse association between nonfictional accounts and hedged, narrow-scope attributions, or what Cohn describes as the use of “conjectural and inferential syntax” (27) concerning what storyworld agents may have been perceiving, feeling, or thinking on a given occasion. These associations at once rest on and reinforce assumptions about the unknowability of animal as well as human minds—in all contexts except fictional ones. Yet my example texts reveal that, even within the category of nonfiction, storytellers in fact rely on a wide range of strategies for presenting characters’ subjective experiences. The variety of attested practices suggests the need for an approach to fictional and nonfictional minds that refuses to dichotomize—that is, an approach that acknowledges how narratively organized discourse opens up space for more or less detailed and thoroughgoing engagements with both animal and human subjectivity outside the realm of fiction. Indeed, as I have argued in previous studies (Herman, “Introduction”), what Cohn describes as the penetrative optics of fiction versus the conjectural syntax of nonfiction can be linked to a Cartesian polarity between the mind in here and the world out there—a polarity expressed as an internal-external scale separating the interior, immaterial domain of the mind from the wider, sociomaterial world of action and interaction. In lieu of this scale, I  suggest, analysts should work to establish a post-Cartesian continuum stretching between, not inner and outer worlds, but rather relatively fine-grained and relatively coarse-grained representations of how intelligent agents negotiate opportunities for action in their surrounding environments. In turn, if there is no Cartesian dichotomy between

213

Animal Minds in Nonfiction Comics

213

the interior and the exterior—if minds are not closed-off, inner spaces, but rather lodged in and partly constituted by the social and material structures that scaffold people’s encounters with one another and the world—then access to other subjectivities is no longer uniquely enabled by engagement with fictional narratives. It is not that fictional minds are external and accessible while actual minds are internal and hidden; instead, minds of all sorts can be more or less directly encountered or experienced, depending on the circumstances. Same genre, different domains: Ways of telling animals’ life histories At this point, I can begin to elaborate on the concept of discourse domains that I alluded to in the previous section, in my discussion of Figures 9.1–9.3 vis-à-vis questions of nonhuman subjectivity. More specifically, I invoked this concept to argue that domain, not genre (that is, a text’s classification as fiction or nonfiction), determines how fully a narrative will engage with animal minds. Differences of domain, defined as constellations of norms that determine what sorts of mindascribing practices will be deemed appropriate and warranted in a given context, cross-cut differences of genre, exposing the limits of a dichotomized approach premised on the transparency of minds in fiction versus their opacity in nonfiction. Instead a whole range of domains straddles the fiction-nonfiction divide, in a way that explains why, both within and across the species boundary, some fictional texts feature storyworld agents with sparsely profiled subjectivities while some nonfictional narratives create detailed portraits of characters’ experiences (see Herman, “Building” and “Discourse Domains”). By extension, depending on the kinds of discourse domains that they make salient, storytelling practices used in nonfictional narratives can play a key role in weakening—or rather suggesting the nonexclusivity of—the association between richly profiled animal minds and the category of fiction. In doing so, nonfictional engagements with animal lives can impinge in turn on the larger cultural ontologies in which those and other narratives about nonhuman worlds are embedded. These issues can be brought into sharper focus through a comparison of different verbal-visual accounts of the history of Laika, the dog launched into space on Sputnik II, along with a parallel discussion of Dunn and Dunn’s Albert II. One version of Laika’s history—namely, Dunn and Dunn’s Laika: The 1st Dog in Space—has already featured in my analysis of Figure 9.1 in the preceding section. As previously noted, this version of Laika’s life story, despite being putatively narrated by Laika herself, omits details about what it may have been like for the dog to experience the fatally inhospitable conditions on board the spacecraft once it had achieved orbit. Another account of Laika’s history targeted at a younger audience, Jeni Wittrock and Shannon Toth’s Laika the Space Dog: First Hero in Outer Space (2015), written for children reading at the Kindergarten through Grade 2 levels, engages in wider-scope mental-state attributions to the dog—at least up until her final moments aboard the satellite. Early on the authors provide the following account of Laika’s initial capture, with the text of the narration being framed by a brick or block in the wall next to Laika and the image-track showing a human

214

214

David Herman

hand holding out a treat to the then-stray dog:  “Laika crept toward the treat— she could almost reach the meat! Then, woosh! went the dogcatcher’s net. Laika yipped! She struggled to get free, but it was no use. She was caught” (6). Here the relatively bare visual track—the narration just quoted accompanies a single image of the treat being offered to Laika—is offset by the authors’ use of free indirect discourse in the verbal track, with the exclamation points and potentially also the semantic content of the clause “but it was no use” indexing Laika’s perspective on and emotional responses to being entrapped. Later, in unframed text above an image of Laika looking on as a lab attendant walks with a leashed dog in a harness toward a door drawn in a manner suggesting a portal of no return, the verbal track contains an unequivocal report of a perceptual act on the dog’s part: “Laika saw other dogs leave for rocket test flights. Some of them never came back” (14). And in recounting the event of the launch itself, the authors use more unframed text, placed above an image of Laika appearing to bark while strapped into her small capsule, to project a model of Laika’s subjective experiences—with the penultimate sentence of the following passage again being interpretable as an instance of free indirect discourse: “On November 3, 1957, the rocket’s engines roared to life. The noise became loud, louder, then deafening. In a fiery blast, Sputnik 2 lifted off the launchpad. Laika’s heart pounded, and she barked in fear. The noise was almost unbearable. Even her training had not been like this. But there was no turning back” (22). By contrast with the attribution-rich domain in which these parts of Wittrock and Toth’s account are anchored, however, the authors tell the story of Laika’s final moments in a way that affords a much less detailed model of the dog’s experiences. Thus Wittrock and Toth narrate the dog’s death via unframed text placed above a pulled-out view of the Sputnik II spacecraft orbiting high above the earth: “A few hours into her flight, the cabin began to overheat. There was nothing Laika could do. Her body gave in to heat and fright. For Laika, the trip had ended. But this tiny hero paved the way for many human astronauts to come” (28). Here the parallels between Wittrock and Toth’s way of recounting Laika’s death and the storytelling methods used by Dunn and Dunn can be noted. As Figure 9.1 confirms, in their version of the Laika narrative, Dunn and Dunn set a precedent for Wittrock and Toth’s visually inexplicit recounting of the dog’s death on board the spacecraft. Dunn and Dunn’s account of the life of Albert II is similarly gappy or inexplicit. Their account begins with a picture of the rhesus monkey bolted into a seat in a space capsule, but smiling as he informs the child reader that he will be telling the story of “my journey into space” (4). Albert II also serves as a mouthpiece for the authors’ brief history of the use of animals in space exploration; thus the monkey tells the story of his predecessor’s death on a page that once more includes a longrange view of a rocket but no visualization of the animal on board: “On Jule 11, 1948, Albert I was sent up on a V-2 rocket. He rode up to a height of 39 miles (63 km). Unfortunately, Albert passed away during his flight. Most believe it was from suffocation” (25). Likewise, in pages in which the authors use text boxes to narrate or rather ventriloquize Albert II’s story of his own death, there is no image of the monkey inside the space capsule. After Albert II recounts how he “reached above

215

Animal Minds in Nonfiction Comics

215

the Kármán line. That is an altitude about 62 miles (100 km) above Earth’s sea level. So I became the first mammal in space!” (27), the authors finally reveal the narrational premise of their text: that the monkey, killed while being used for these experimental purposes, is telling his life story posthumously: “Unfortunately, not all went as planned. The parachute for my capsule did not work properly, and I died when my capsule hit the ground” (27). Indeed, as is also arguably the case with Dunn and Dunn’s Laika, the authors’ account becomes so periphrastic that they can be charged with whitewashing the death of Albert II. The visual design of the text’s final page seems to equate human astronauts, who undertook their missions voluntarily, and animals who were compelled to engage in test flights. Likewise the verbal track trades on the ambiguity of the word “sacrifices,” eliding the difference between making a sacrifice and being sacrificed—in each case, for the sake of some overarching goal or cause: “Animals were an important part of space exploration in many countries. Our sacrifices gave scientists the knowledge they needed to pave the way for travel to space and the moon” (28). The foregoing analysis reveals, then, shifting patterns of mental-state attributions in the two versions of the Laika narrative that I have discussed thus far, as well as in Albert II. To put the same point another way, these narratives oscillate between a discourse domain in which animals take on the role of experimentedupon objects, on the one hand, and a domain in which they have the profile of experiencing subjects, on the other hand. By contrast, as discussed by Carrie Rohman in Chapter  5 in the present volume (see also Herman, “Storyworld/ Umwelt”), Nick Abadzis’s Laika consistently projects a rich experiential world for the dog throughout her life history—including during her final moments on board Sputnik II. In an inversion of the tendency noted by Degnen, who suggests that children’s stories paradoxically cut against the grain of the hierarchical, humancentric species classifications in which those texts are designed to inculcate their readers, it is Abadzis’s adult-oriented graphic novel, rather than the children’s comics or picture books discussed thus far, that most persistently invites readers to engage with Laika as an autonomous agent, a locus of experience, in her own right. Not only does Abadzis provide a much more detailed account of the dog’s biography; what is more, his version of Laika’s story attributes to her, via both the visual and the verbal resources of the medium, a richly variegated mental life that includes not only perspectives on events (169), physiological states such as hunger (45) and pain (82, 92, 177–86), and a range of emotional responses, but also complex dreams (51–5, 88) and enduring memories (75, 88, 175, 182, 185). Also, in contrast with the other two versions of Laika’s life history, Abadzis’s account follows Laika inside the Sputnik II satellite after it is launched, and projects what it may have been like for the dog to experience the stress of the liftoff and the overheating of the capsule that probably led to her death (176–86). To shift to a version of Laika’s story told in a cognate medium—a medium that allows for story creators to combine drawn images and verbal text with an audio track and to control the rate at which the resulting multimodal sequence unfolds in time—the animated adaption of Ann Eichler Kolakowski’s poem “Triolet for Laika, First Dog in Space” (2013), created for the Motionpoems website

216

216

David Herman

(http://motionpoems.org/episode/triolet-for-laika/), parallels Abadzis’s text in projecting a rich model of the dog’s experiential world, rather than gapping out key aspects of that world in the manner of Wittrock and Toth’s and Dunn and Dunn’s accounts of Laika’s history. Granted, the adaptation, which was directed by Emory Allen and which features the work of animators Alicia Reese and Joe Russo (with music composed by Alec Considine-Mueller), presents Laika’s story via imagery firmly anchored in human institutions, technologies, and social practices; however, it uses that imagery to critique the anthropocentrism that determined Laika’s fate.17 For example, when Laika is being driven to the launch site in the back seat of a car, with the driver sneaking surreptitious glances at the humanized dog in the rear view mirror (see 0:12–0:28), the adaptation recontextualizes the cinematic trope in which a person is driven to his or her execution, whether at the hands of a crime boss or through the authority of a state-sponsored agency such as the KGB. Further, the adaptation, like Abadzis’s Laika, imagines what the dog’s final moments on board the spacecraft may have been like, though in this case the adaptors use the resources of animated film to project the animal’s subjective experiences. Hence the shaking of the frame evokes the turbulence of the flight, expanding splotches of magenta color indicate more and more pervasive smoke and ever-increasing heat inside the capsule, and the final zoom-in on Laika’s now violently shaking face against a darker, fully purple background at the end of the film suggests the extremity and difficulty of the dog’s very last experiences (see 1:29–1:37). It may also be that in blending human and canine morphologies to portray Laika herself, the adaptors have made a bid to transmediate Kolakowski’s poem’s allusions to the Egyptian god of the afterlife, Anubis, traditionally figured as a human with a canine head, and here associated with the “steel sarcophagus” of Laika’s space capsule. Laika’s own afterlife begins, in the storyworld, at 1:54, as the ship entombing her orbits the earth; but thanks to Abadzis’s, Kolakowski’s, and the filmmakers’ reworkings of the Laika narrative, her legacy continues to live and grow, exceeding the limits of the anthropocentric story that her human captors and handlers originally scripted for her. In turn, both the filmmakers’ and Abadzis’s detailed modeling of Laika’s final moments can be compared with Coe’s account of animals’ deaths in Cruel, another text that, as suggested by my earlier discussion of “dying calf at stockyard,” uses verbal and visual means to ground nonfictional narratives about animals and human-animal relationships in an attribution-rich discourse domain. In this domain, rather than being reduced to the role of exchangeable, expendable, and consumable objects into which discourse supporting the system of factory farming works to place them, animals such as Coe’s dying calf, like Abadzis’s Laika in the similarly human-centric setting of scientific research, take on the profile of experiencing subjects, autonomous agents. Along the same lines, in conjunction with the following verbal account of her interactions with a cow used by a dairy farm, Coe includes an image of the cow with a large red “M” branded into her face; on this same side of her face, tears stream down from the eye that gazes out at the reader:

217

Animal Minds in Nonfiction Comics

217

Today I went down the meadow trying not to look for the brown cow. Now she does not look at me. The calves have gone. How many of her calves have been stolen from her. When her time comes, as dictated by the meat industry not her own life span, she will be taken in a truck to a slaughterhouse to stand in line with her own kind. I don’t want to look for her either, I don’t want to see her not there. At her end, she will be in a steel restraining pen, and, shaking, she will look into the eyes of the man who will put a bolt into her brain–then, still alive, she will be hoisted into the air while her throat is cut. As her blood is gushing out, her last sight will be the other skinned and decapitated cows moving to the next disassembling of their lives, some of whom could be her own calves or her own mother. (39–40)

Subjects, domains, and ontologies As the differences among these nonfictional verbal-visual accounts of animal worlds indicate, in any culture a range of contexts—or what I am calling discourse domains—shape acts of mental-state ascription that cross the species boundary, just as they shape intraspecies attributions. In parallel with what Ludwig Wittgenstein called “language games” and Stephen C.  Levinson termed “activity types,” such domains are frameworks for conduct that organize participants’ verbal as well as nonverbal comportment around recognized kinds or modes of activity, which are grounded in more or less fully shared sets of norms, purposes, and goals. Relevant activities include using animals as objects of experiments, debating the status of animal minds, or going on a walk with a dog—in short, activities that involve interacting with one or more human or nonhuman others in a particular setting and for specific kinds of reasons. Clearly, different sorts of ascriptive practices will be deemed appropriate and warranted across these different domains: there is a marked contrast between attributing a range of intentional and volitional states to the family dog in the context of a familiar play ritual, on the one hand (see Kenneth J. Shapiro and Simon P. James), and denying the salience of such states vis-à-vis animals who are used in programs for space exploration, on the other. In staging more or less prolific, detailed, and far-reaching ascriptions of subjective experience to animal characters—in narratives subject to falsification by way of comparison with other accounts—nonfiction graphic narratives like the ones I have discussed point to a dialectical interplay among localized acts of ascription, discourse domains, and cultural ontologies. Encompassing all the entities (inanimate as well as animate) that a given culture recognizes as existent, such ontologies specify, in the form of common knowledge, what sorts of beings populate the world and how those beings’ qualities and abilities relate to the qualities and abilities imputed to humans. Discourse domains both are grounded in and also help constitute these ontologies, which entail more or less parsimonious or prolific allocations of possibilities for subjectivity, more or less wide-ranging ascriptive practices, beyond the realm of the human.

218

218

David Herman

From this perspective, a cultural ontology can be described as a constellation of discrete as well as overlapping discourse domains, in which animal behaviors become normatively profiled—for example, via storytelling practices—as actionlike or event-like, and hence as more or less appropriately targeted for mentalstate attributions. At issue is the difference between a bare account of an animal’s trajectory of movement in space versus a narrative that foregrounds the reasons for acting that may serve as motivation for the animal in question. Or, to adapt the ideas of Paul Ricoeur, whereas domains that profile animal behavior in terms of events foreground concepts such as “cause, law, fact, explanation,” domains that profile nonhuman conduct in terms of actions foreground concepts such as “projects, intentions, motives, reasons for acting, agents, and so forth” (Ricoeur 132–3; see also Eileen Crist 88–122; Herman, “Hermeneutics” 11–22). Compared with discourse domains foregrounding what might be called the register of events, domains foregrounding the register of actions—domains that range from intraspecies courtship practices to interspecies interactions between humans and their animal companions or partners—are marked by wider-scope ascriptions of mental states. The ontological commitments of a culture can be gauged, in part, by the overall patterning of event-foregrounding and action-foregrounding domains in which that culture’s fictional and nonfictional narratives about trans-species relationships and interactions are anchored. This way of formulating the issues at stake allows important research questions to be articulated. Which class of narratives preponderates in a given culture: those that, like Dunn and Dunn’s, often, if not always, cast animals in the role of objects falling under the regime of events, or those that, like Abadzis’s, Brown’s, and Coe’s, insist on allocating possibilities for subjective experience across the species boundary—that is, on casting animals as subjects falling under the regime of actions? How does the distribution of these kinds of stories map onto the fictionnonfiction distinction? Further, if discourse domains shape patterns of mentalstate attribution in narratives, to what extent do the patterns of ascription used in individual stories reciprocally impinge on discourse domains, and potentially recalibrate normative assumptions about species of minds? For example, as my discussion of Cruel suggests, Coe’s narratives work to promote a shift from the register of events to the register of actions in discourse about humans’ relationships with animals currently treated as a food source. Such shifts, or changes in the normative structure of discourse domains, raise the problem of ontological conservativism identified by Elisa Aaltola. Because of conservativism of this sort, behaviorist models remain “conceptually immune” to evidence suggesting animal minds (Aaltola 76), with “the background beliefs and conceptual frameworks used to describe animal minds [taking priority] over the animal herself ” (77). Conservativism of the same kind, though tending in the opposite direction, can forestall corrective processes when it comes to attempts to extend the register of action across species lines (see Herman, “Hermeneutics” 19–22) — attempts that lead to human-centric acts of speaking-for used in texts such as Dunn and Dunn’s Laika and Albert II. What the present chapter ultimately reveals, then, is the need to develop a multi-scale and multi-directional approach to the

219

Animal Minds in Nonfiction Comics

219

issues under discussion. Such an approach will explore not only the top-down normative effects flowing from cultural ontologies to discourse domains to ascriptive acts found in particular narratives, but also the way storytelling practices can themselves “reset” default norms for understanding animals and human-animal relationships, incrementally reshaping cultural ontologies in the process. A multiscale study of this sort promises further to clarify the relationships between fictional versus nonfictional accounts of animal experiences, not just in comics but across the full variety of storytelling media.

Notes 1 Later in this chapter I discuss the question of fictional versus actual minds in more detail (see also Herman, “Discourse Domains”), situating it in the context of previous research indicating that interpreters orient to fictional versus factual accounts in fundamentally different ways. This research, which informs Dorrit Cohn’s “separatist thesis” (125) about “the constitutional freedom of fiction from referential modes” (130), suggests that certain techniques of consciousness presentation—specifically, those that allow for far-reaching attributions of mental states to characters, whether human or nonhuman, without evidentiary backing of the sort required in factual genres like history and biography—constitute “signposts of fictionality,” or modes of discourse patterning that set fictional narratives apart from nonfictional narratives (see Cohn 109–31; David Gorman 166–7). From this perspective, narrators and readers of fictional narratives can “know” characters’ unstated perceptions, thoughts, and emotions because fiction belongs to a different generic and epistemological category from the category of factual (i.e., falsifiable) discourse. Whereas nonfiction concerns situations and events that interpreters assume can be falsified via triangulation with other reports about those same situations and events, by contrast it would be a category mistake to try to falsify fictional accounts via cross-comparison with other accounts. In the present analysis, although I readily concede that different interpretive protocols are needed to make sense of fictional versus factual accounts, I use the variety of strategies for presenting animal minds that I discover in the nonfiction comics that I examine to question separatists’ assumptions about the unknowability of actual minds. In other words, the case studies I explore here suggest how narratives outside as well as inside the realm of fiction open up space for detailed and thoroughgoing engagements with both animal and human subjectivity. 2 For further elaboration of the ideas outlined in this paragraph, see Herman, “Building” and “Discourse Domains.” In contrast with these prior studies, rather than comparing ascriptive practices used in fictional versus nonfictional accounts of morethan-human worlds, the present chapter focuses specifically on documenting patterns of mental-state attributions in nonfictional graphic narratives centering on animals. 3 As Lisa Brown puts it, “comics is a virtually untapped source of insight into cultural paradigms about animals,” providing a window onto “how we humans believe animals think and behave, and also how we treat them as a result” (6). I subsume these paradigms or indigenous theories of animal minds under the general heading of “folk ethology,” a term I use in parallel with “folk psychology,” or everyday understandings of how (human) thinking works, the rough-and-ready heuristics to which people resort in thinking about thinking itself. Daniel Dennett, for his part, characterizes such

220

220

4

5

6

7

David Herman folk-psychological rules of thumb in the following way: “Very roughly, folk psychology has it that beliefs are information-bearing states of people that arise from perceptions and that, together with appropriately related desires, lead to intelligent action” (46; see also Herman, Storytelling 293–8 for further discussion of research in this area). In Uexküll’s words: “The Umwelt of any animal that we wish to investigate is only a section carved out of the environment [Umgebung] which we see spread around it– and this environment is nothing but our own human world. The first task of Umwelt research is to identify each animal’s perceptual cues among all the [potential] stimuli in its environment and to build up the animal’s specific world with them . . . As the number of an animal’s performances grows, the number of objects that populate its Umwelt increases. It grows within the individual life span of every animal that is able to gather experiences” (13; 48). Granted, a high level of granularity of representation does not suffice to detach a given narrative from human-centric imaginings of animal experience. An account could conceivably present nonhuman subjectivity via a highly textured superimposition of human frames of reference—as is sometimes the case in Jay Hosler's Clan Apis (2000), for example, described on the author's website as “the biography a honey bee named Nyuki . . . Nyuki has a lot to learn about life in the hive and not much time to do it. But, with the help of her sister Dvorah, a dung beetle named Sisyphus and a sarcastic flower named Bloomington, she might have a chance to figure it all out” (see http://www.jayhosler.com/clanapis.html). Arguably, however, a detailed or granular engagement with animal worlds is a necessary condition for the exploratory modeling of nonhuman experiences, insofar as modeling of this sort is tantamount to ascribing to animal agents, on the basis of their distinctive sensorimotor repertoires, other-than-human perceptual discriminations, or possibilities for action. In short, although it is not an inherently anti-anthropocentric enterprise, attempting to imagine how other animals orient, on a moment-bymoment basis, to their surrounding environments provides means for rethinking value hierarchies that confer normative status on human modes of sense making. Albert II: The 1st Monkey in Space, which I discuss later in this chapter, and which like Dunn and Dunn’s Laika is targeted at a Grade 3–6 interest level and a Grade 3 reading level, is published in the same series. All books in the series include on their back covers a blurb that reads as follows: “Humans aren’t the only history makers! Animals have been an influential part of science, technology, and travel. Each graphic novel in the Famous Firsts: Animals Making History series introduces the historical climate of the time, background on the animal, a chronology of the animal’s feat, and how that mission influenced history.” Other titles in the series include Bud: The 1st Dog to Cross the United States; Cher Ami: WWI Homing Pigeon; Dolly: The 1st Cloned Sheep; and Shamu: The 1st Killer Whale in Captivity. Like these other titles, Dunn and Dunn’s works can be further contextualized via research on the tradition of the picture book, or printed verbal-visual narratives typically targeted at younger readers—children learning to read, in some cases, and older children in others. See the contributions assembled by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer for a variety of perspectives on this tradition. It should be noted that in contrast with other works by Coe, such as Pit’s Letter and Sheep of Fools, in Cruel the verbal track in general preponderates over the imagetrack. The book consists of chapters of reportage and critical reflection punctuated more or less frequently by images, some of which constitute portraits of the animals

221

Animal Minds in Nonfiction Comics

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

221

whose experiences are being explored in the verbal text, while others provide standalone reference points for Coe’s overarching emphasis on humans’ exploitation of and cruelty toward other animals. That said, however, I include Cruel under the broad rubric of “multispecies comics” not only because of the expansiveness of graphic narrative as a textual category (see Stein and Thon), but also because the book does consist, at its core, of sequences of word-image combinations centering on animal experiences and human-animal interactions and relationships. In addition, the book includes full-page drawings that constitute, in effect, one-panel animal comics (see, e.g., 36, 76, 83, 122). For a fuller account of the historical events surrounding Laika, see Nick Abadzis; Herman, “Storyworld/Umwelt”; and Asif Siddiqi; as well as Rohman’s contribution (Chapter 5) to the present volume. Along similar lines, in Bo Obama: The White House Tails (2010), Paul J. Salamoff ostensibly uses the US president’s family dog as the narrator, but without any attempt to model the dog’s experiential world. That said, perhaps to indicate that the dog does not literally narrate his life story, Salamoff presents Bo’s narration in the form of thought balloons rather than speech balloons, with dots rather than a solid tail connecting the content of each balloon to the figure of the dog. See Herman, “Animal Autobiography” for a discussion of how Kenneth J. Gergen and Mary M. Gergen’s concept of self-narratives, resulting from tellers’ attempts “to establish coherent connections among life events” by giving an “account of selfrelevant events across time” (162), bears on texts cast in the form of autobiographies presented by nonhuman narrators. See this webpage maintained by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for more information about dilated versus non-dilated pupils in cats: http://www.aspca.org/pet-care/cat-care/common-cat-behavior-issues/ aggression-cats. After noting that the stockyard is located in St Paul, Minnesota, Coe continues her account of the calf ’s death as follows: “its Sunday–95°. She struggles to get up (think her back might be broken) while froth is coming out of her mouth. She makes one last attempt, but the movement throws her head back, which now seems too heavy for her neck, and then she is still” (176). Here Coe’s use of the historical present tense contributes to the non- or anti-normative blending of discourse conventions—the coalescence of reportage, animal comics, and ethological field notes—through which Coe stages her critique of the institution of factory farming and of the broader cultural norms crystallized in that institution. A similar effect is created by Coe’s use of tenseless captions, built on participial constructions, on another page from the sketchbook where she portrays “the parched sheep trying to reach through the restraining pen to drink the blood and water that has run off from the slaughterhouse” as well as “the sheep & goats climbing over one another to escape slaughterer” (187). See Erica Fudge for a discussion of how individuating animals through naming can foster possibilities for empathy and promote nonhuman agency in a manner that calls into question established species hierarchies (31). James Serpell, for his part, distinguishes between pets and companion animals, arguing that whereas companion animals are kept mainly for purposes of companionship, the rubric of pets “includes animals kept for decorative purposes (for example, ornamental fish or birds), those kept for competitive or sporting

222

222

David Herman

activities (dog shows, obedience trials, racing), and those kept to satisfy the interests of hobbyists (specialist animal collecting and breeding). In practice, of course, any particular pet may overlap two or more of these subcategories” (111). 15 As Fudge puts it, “we live with animals, we recognize them, we even name some of them, but at the same time we use them as if they were inanimate, as if they were objects. The illogic of this relationship is one that, on a day-to-day basis, we choose to evade, even refuse to acknowledge as present” (8). Fudge also discusses the work of Annabelle Sabloff, who identifies three systems of metaphors in which discourse about animals takes shape: domestic metaphors centering on kinship relations; factory metaphors centering on artifacts, tools, and objects; and a metaphoric system in which animals taken on the role of citizens with rights (Fudge 11–12). As Fudge goes on to note, Sabloff also comments on the absence of another, biocentric system of metaphors that would “allow for ‘the radical otherness of other life forms, that is, their inherent value outside the human ethical domain’ to be acknowledged” (12). 16 The foregrounding of animal characters in narratives targeted at young readers gives rise, as Degnen notes, to more than one paradox: “enmeshed in the material culture of childhood, animal representations are used to transmit social lessons about human lives. And yet what also transpires is that young children are actively encouraged to invert Western naturalist ontology (whereby human beings and all other living beings are segregated into radically different domains) and invest their imagination in a cosmos where human and nonhuman animals are commensurate. It is perhaps not a coincidence that this occurs during (and is used in part to demarcate) a period of the life course when human beings are themselves not yet credited with full personhood” (677). 17 Because Laika was female, I use feminine personal pronouns to refer to her avatar in the adaptation, even though the film itself casts that avatar as male—perhaps because of gender stereotypes associated with astronauts. For a discussion of human-animal relationships in animated film more generally, see Wells.

Works cited Aaltola, Elisa. “Animal Minds, Skepticism, and the Affective Stance.” Teorema: Revista Internacional de Filosofía 29.2 (2010): 69–82. Abadzis, Nick. Laika. New York: First Second, 2007. Brown, Jeffrey. Cat Getting out of a Bag and Other Observations. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2007. Brown, Lisa. “The Speaking Animal: Nonhuman Voices in Comics.” Speaking for Animals: Animal Autobiographical Writing. Ed. Margo DeMello. London: Routledge, 2013. 73–77. Candea, Matei. “Ontology Is Just Another Word for Culture.” Critique of Anthropology 30.2 (2010): 172–79. Clark, Andy. Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1997. Coe, Sue, with additional material by Judy Brody. Cruel: Bearing Witness to Animal Exploitation. New York: OR Books, 2011. Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.

223

Animal Minds in Nonfiction Comics

223

Crist, Eileen. Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999. Degnen, Cathrine. “Comment on Michael J. Carrithers, Louise J. Bracken, and Steven Emery’s ‘Can a Species Be a Person?’ ” Current Anthropology 52 (2011): 676–7. Dennett, Daniel C. The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Descola, Philippe. The Ecology of Others. Trans. Geneviève Godbout and Benjamin P. Luley. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm P, 2013. Dunn, Joeming, and Ben Dunn. Albert II: The 1st Monkey in Space. Edina, MN: Magic Wagon, 2012. Dunn, Joeming, and Ben Dunn. Laika: The 1st Dog in Space. Edina, MN: Magic Wagon, 2012. Fludernik, Monika. Towards a “Natural” Narratology. London: Routledge, 1996. Fudge, Erica. Animal. London: Reaktion, 2002. Gergen, Kenneth J., and Mary M. Gergen. “Narratives of the Self.” Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences. Ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra Hinchman. Albany : State U New York P, 1997. 161–84. Gorman, David. “Fiction, Theories of.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London: Routledge, 2005. 163–7. Herman, David. “Animal Autobiography; or, Narration beyond the Human.” Humanities 5.4 (2016). http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/4/82. Herman, David. “Animal Minds across Discourse Domains.” Dialogues between Literature and Cognition. Ed. Michael Burke and Emily Troscianko. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2016. 195–216. Herman, David. Basic Elements of Narrative. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Herman, David. “Building More-than-Human Worlds: Umwelt Modelling in Animal Narratives.” World Building: Discourse in the Mind. Ed. Joanna Gavins and Ernestine Lahey. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. 53–70. Herman, David. “Hermeneutics beyond the Species Boundary: Explanation and Understanding in Animal Narratives.” Storyworlds 8.1 (2016): 1–30. Herman, David. “Introduction.” The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English. Ed. D. Herman. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2011. 1–40. Herman, David. “Narratology beyond the Human.” DIEGESIS: Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Narrative Research 3.2 (2014): 131–43. Herman, David. “Storyworld/Umwelt: Nonhuman Experiences in Graphic Narratives.” SubStance 40.1 (2011): 156–81. Herman, David. Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. James, Simon P. “Phenomenology and the Problem of Animal Minds.” Environmental Values 18.1 (2009): 33–49. Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Berkeley : U of California P, 2013. Kümmerling-Meibauer, Bettina, ed. Picturebooks: Representation and Narration. New York: Routledge, 2014. Levinson, Stephen C. “Activity Types and Language.” Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings. Ed. Paul Drew and John Heritage. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979. 66–100. Mikkonen, Kai. “Presenting Minds in Graphic Narratives.” Partial Answers 6.2 (2008): 301–21. Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83.4 (1974): 435–50.

224

224

David Herman

Ricoeur, Paul. “Explanation and Understanding.” From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1991. 125–43. Sabloff, Annabelle. Reordering the Natural World: Humans and Animals in the City. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001. Salamoff, Paul J. Bo Obama: The White House Tails. Vancouver, WA: Bluewater Comics, 2010. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie: “Fictional vs. Factual Narration.” The Living Handbook of Narratology. Ed. Peter Hühn et al. Hamburg: Hamburg University, 2013. http://www. lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/fictional-vs-factual-narration. Serpell, James. “Companion Animals and Pets.” Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare. Ed. Marc Bekoff, with Carron A. Meaney. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1998. 111–12. Shapiro, Kenneth J. (1997). “A Phenomenological Approach to the Study of Nonhuman Animals.” Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals. Ed. Robert W. Mitchell, Nicholas S. Thompson, and H. Lyn Miles. Albany : State U of New York P, 1997. 277–95. Siddiqi, Asif. Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2003. Stein, Daniel, and Jan-Noël Thon. “Introduction.” From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative. Ed. Stein and Thon. 2nd edition. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015. 1–23. Thompson, Evan. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. Uexküll, Jakob von. “A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds.” 1934. Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept. Ed. and trans. Claire H. Schiller. New York: International Universities P, 1957. 5–80. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4.3 (1998): 469–88. Wells, Paul. The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons, and Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2009. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Wittrock, Jeni, and Shannon Toth. Laika the Space Dog: First Hero in Outer Space. Mankato, MN: Picture Window Books, 2015.

225

Part IV G RAPHIC A NIMALITY IN T HE C LASSROOM AND  B EYOND

226

227

Chapter 10 C A N W E B E P A RT O F T H E P R I D E ? R E A D I N G A N I M A L S T H R OU G H C OM IC S I N T H E U N D E R G R A DUAT E C L A S SR O OM Charles E. Baraw and Andrew Smyth

Prologue Are animals in comics just projections of human consciousness onto animal bodies, or can they represent something more? In recent years comics have emerged that make possible distinctive insights about our relations with animals, including our understanding of animal subjectivity. Works ranging from the Western-style manga WE3 (2004) to the Young Adult comics Laika (2007) and Pride of Baghdad (2006) and the experimental graphic novels Duncan the Wonder Dog (2010) and Big Questions (2011) challenge the constraints of both the Funny Animal and the Animal Masks traditions. Such texts can reinflect understandings of the medium and especially its performances of animality. Writers such as Akira Mizuta Lippit and Anat Pick look for ways to resist anthropocentrism in humans’ engagements with other animals. Pick’s proposal for a poetics based on the shared bodily vulnerability or “creatureliness” that crosses species lines, like Lippit’s coinage of the term “animetaphor” (129) to refer to uses of language that gesture toward aspects of nonhuman experience that evade or escape linguistic expression, offers a means to highlight humans’ fleshly connections with other animals, merging language and material being to break down the binary between speaking and nonspeaking animals. Along the same lines, innovative comics like the ones we focus on in the present chapter can assist with the project of teaching students how to think beyond the human. In this chapter, we analyze methods for teaching students how to cross or even to blur the lines between human and nonhuman animals through close reading of three graphic novels: Pride of Baghdad by Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon, WE3 by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, and Duncan the Wonder Dog by Adam Hines. We examine the movement from human-centric modes of representation in Pride of Baghdad to more animetaphoric or creaturely engagements with animal subjectivity, agency, and technological hybridity in WE3. Lastly, we point to a moment in Duncan the Wonder Dog where we can mark formally the boundaries

228

228

Charles E. Baraw and Andrew Smyth

of our comprehension of animal difference—captured in this challenging novel by the appearance of an animal terrorist organization that resists human subjugation of nonhuman creatures. This progression raises several questions about teaching animal comics. How do we teach students to read in a way that raises their consciousness of other-thanhuman forms of subjectivity? Can we prepare students for a trans-species encounter through graphic texts? What are the challenges and opportunities these texts bring to the classroom? We report, here, on our experiences teaching and learning from undergraduates at a four-year regional comprehensive university where students frequently face literacy challenges and motivational issues. Our teaching for this project involves two classes: (1) an upper-level Young Adult literature course in which many future elementary and secondary teachers are enrolled, and (2)  a general education course that uses comics to teach the American experience, blending multimodal literacy with American history for an audience of nonEnglish majors from a range of backgrounds and pursuing a variety of anticipated majors and careers.1 The students in these courses do not bring sophisticated readings skills to the class, and we found that our instruction in how to read animal comics provided new opportunities for expanding their proficiency and literacy. This is true in terms of both the grammar of comics as a medium and the larger philosophical and ethical issues raised by the trans-species encounters these particular readings evoke. In our experience, students initially resist instruction that opens up the nuances of the medium and that homes in on questions of animal subjectivity. Yet this very resistance to complexity, while perhaps not unusual in literary instruction, illustrates the utility of our approach to teaching advanced literacy and skills—an approach that promises to be useful well beyond the boundaries of one discipline or subject area.

Opening moves: Getting the classroom discussion started Our teaching starts with the question that forms the title of this article: Can we be part of the pride? Viewing a key scene in Pride of Baghdad in which readers share the shocked gaze of lions as a line of tanks approaches them without warning, our students focus on point of view, angle of depiction, and the positioning of readers. Looking becomes witnessing—opening up discussions of complicity in the inhumane treatment of other species. Questions of positioning, decentering, and empathizing carry over into WE3, which raises also the issue of dialect writing or nonnormative speech. Many of our students come from communities where code switching is common, which makes them more attuned to the hybrid tech-world and its multiple forms of speech and consciousness, represented through the complex human-animal-machine hybridity of WE3. In turn, the language of the nonhuman in this book opens up productive arguments about representation and empathy. Here Rosemary Klich’s concept of “cyborg pedagogy” is particularly relevant. Arguing that “knowing is not separate from doing,” Klich emphasizes that students need to be personally engaged with

229

Can We Be Part of the Pride?

229

what they are studying and that, following Donna Haraway, they should “adopt a ‘cyborg mentality’ when exploring their relationships with commodities” (156). In WE3, the lives of a rabbit, cat, and dog have been subjected to military commodification that effaces their animal identity and agency, shocking readers into realizing how most of our relationships with animals are likewise slanted toward modes of commodification that serve human purposes, from food to clothes to property protection to emotional support. How do we process such lessons in university courses? Klich promotes a posthumanist reconception of the self as “unfinished,” a rethinking of the idea of “natural” boundaries that instead considers such boundaries as constructed and negotiable. Similarly we seek to teach students, through their interaction with animal comics, to renegotiate the boundaries between themselves and animal others and, furthermore, to use graphic narratives as a means for working against the grain of this electronic age within the Anthropocene, a way of coming to a different understanding of animal consciousness, agency, and sapience. These goals are further developed and complicated by our classes’ encounters with Duncan the Wonder Dog. What happens when the animals not only talk back, but fight back? Adam Hines’s award-winning graphic novel uses comics to “perform the animal” in ways that challenge, and simultaneously acknowledge, the limits of anthropocentric representations of animal subjectivities. If Duncan the Wonder Dog presents human and animal relations in a kind of postcolonial “contact zone,” as Joan Gordon suggests, it also presents the contact zone between sentient species or “talking animals” as a theatrical space best represented by the alienation effect produced through constant formal experimentation. We use Hines’s innovative methods to help our students become not only better readers but also better cohabitants of our multispecies world. Nearly all students include some exclamation of surprise, insight, or revelatory dismay in their writing about these works: I never thought of . . . I hadn’t imagined . . . I see . . . Such formulations foreground the startling moments of decentering or dislocation that texts like Pride, WE3, and Duncan provoke, pushing readers beyond our often unconscious anthropocentric assumptions (a gibbon would never eat with a fork!). The students’ written work along with their comments during class discussions suggest how the comics we teach attune them to what Herman calls “subjective experience across the species boundary” (Chapter 9), but also to the barriers to interspecies communication and the limits of our ability to represent nonhuman (or human) interiority—even if, as one student pointed out, many of us “talk to animals every day.” We share with our students a sense of surprise and wonder when we encounter these texts in our professional teaching situations. As with many other teachers and scholars involved in critical animal studies, we came to this conversation from more rigidly defined literary specializations—nineteenth-century American Literature for Charles, and English Renaissance Literature for Andrew—and even as we engaged more fully with work in the field, we always remained firmly placed in the realm of English studies:  teaching literary interpretation, critical theory, writing, and, often, methodology for future secondary-school teachers. Thus the

230

230

Charles E. Baraw and Andrew Smyth

courses on which our chapter reports arise out of contingent teaching situations common to understaffed and underfunded brick-and-mortar universities in the United States. As instructors and students, then, we engage in a dislocation of the ordinary—a critical reworking of the familiar that runs in parallel with and enables a reorientation toward the many animals with whom we share our habitat and ways of living.

Becoming advocates for animals in Young Adult literature The Young Adult (YA) literature course at Southern Connecticut State University brings together a group of students with divergent interests, abilities, and reasons for selecting this class: English majors who seek out courses in non-canonical literature as part of their major; elementary and secondary education majors who need to be familiar with this wide field of literature in order to build it into their own curriculum and make recommendations for outside reading; and plenty of students who are already steeped in YA fiction and use the course as a forum for discussing their favorite works and new ones in a critical fashion. Indeed, the very definition of the term Young Adult literature remains subject to debate in the fields of English studies, English education, and popular culture studies. Typically the YA literature rubric refers to books targeted for readers “between the approximate ages of twelve and eighteen” to be read “for leisure reading or to fill school assignments” (Nilsen et al. 3); this audience “represents an extensive spectrum of reading abilities, levels of maturity, interests and aptitudes common to adolescents” (Elliott-Johns 27). No matter what the target audience, these books are perhaps more clearly defined by their adolescent characters and their focus on the issues young people face in their journeys toward adulthood. YA literature shares a niche with comics studies in the field of English studies: beloved by students but distrusted by some faculty colleagues and, to a lessening extent, by scholars invested in more established areas in the profession. Adding the frame of critical animal studies to a portion of the course raises even more questions about its bona fides. Thus Lisa Brown notes that as with comics, “until recently, cultural interest in animals (as opposed to biological interest) was viewed as a childish indulgence” (73). True, comics have slowly gained recognition as a means for illuminating cultural beliefs about animals and related issues, including environmental awareness and action (73). Yet for the students enrolled in the YA literature course, having a unit on (animal) comics and animal studies produced some skepticism: Why are we reading comics when there are thousands of works of YA fiction that deserve our critical attention? By the same token, it is not enough to assert, per Jeffrey S. Kaplan and Elsie L. Olan, that graphic novels should be included in the discussion regarding teenage reading habits because they “dominate the American market” and are “highly entertaining” to young adults through their mixture of word and image (16–17). We have to ask, as well, what purpose comics and animal studies serve in the university curriculum,

231

Can We Be Part of the Pride?

231

including their positioning in different kinds of courses (general education, cultural studies, literature, etc.). Students in the YA literature class had already shown an openness to what belongs in the English major curriculum simply by signing up for the course, but they needed more convincing about the place of animal studies and comics in this particular course. From their readings in Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, the students learn about the “hyper-protected cooperative principle” (26), which allows for readers to “put up with many obscurities and apparent irrelevancies, without assuming this makes no sense” (28). Such an understanding constructs a bridge to comics and animal studies: rather than view animal comics as outside the reading experience they expect from the YA field, students must cooperate with the graphic artists and writers who “flout principles of efficient communication in the interests of some further communicative goal” (Culler 28). In other words, although the attempt to enter into the nonhuman worlds of animal comics is difficult, students approach these texts with the horizon-widening assumption that that difficulty is worth it. For strategic reasons, we began our anti-anthropocentric exploration of animal consciousness, empathy, and advocacy with a human-centered background and theme: war. By focusing on the dehumanization of soldiers in Walter Dean Myers’s YA classic set in the Vietnam war, Fallen Angels, which traces the experiences, deaths, and traumatic survivals of young people drafted into the war, we were able to use the text’s realistic language and vivid depiction of death to challenge any preconceptions of YA literature as being softened for impressionable readers. When the students then turned to the two comics that followed, Pride of Baghdad and WE3, they knew that war could be treated quite seriously in YA historical fiction; but the animal-centered perspective compelled them to reconsider the appropriateness of graphic-narrative treatments of the theme for early adolescents. Regardless of their position on the recommended age-status for the book, most students testified to the powerful experience they had in reading Pride of Baghdad. In survey responses, one student commented on how it “had a stronger impact on me [than Fallen Angels] because of my love of animals,” and another remarked that the “novel had a stronger impact on me because I’ve never considered animals dealing with struggles that are typically human.” By the same token, although students questioned the authors’ decision to portray the lions as using human language, they also saw the comics medium as a way to share the terror of war from the lions’ point of view. Asked about the authenticity of the animals’ discourse, one student hesitated: “I’m not sure if the novel used an authentic voice for them because I’m not sure how animals would talk.” This response shows a growing awareness of how difficult it is to enter into conversation with other animals; yet students also recognized the power of the comics’ visual register when it comes to engaging with the community of the lions and their plight. As one student put it: The graphic medium captured a sense of authentic discourse . . . among the lions. [It] allowed their emotions, reactions, and thoughts to be presented [in]

232

232

Charles E. Baraw and Andrew Smyth

an understandable, realistic way. Their emotions and reactions towards the war and how it is changing their surroundings constructed the way the reader sees their innocence and confusion.

But though the text’s verbal-visual dynamics helped students position themselves with the lions and recognize the vulnerable status of the cub, Pride of Baghdad did not allow for any easy identifications given that we humans were responsible for the lions’ suffering. A class leader who was deeply interested in comics concluded, “I was very disturbed by Pride of Baghdad. I wasn’t aware it was a true story until the very end, so my immediate reaction was, ‘Why would someone write this?’ ” That disturbance was essential for the transition to WE3, which moves from the historical to the near future of animal exploitation in human warfare. In Morrison and Quitely’s dystopian narrative, the three main animal characters—a dog, a cat, and a rabbit—have been technologized and weaponized to the extent that readers are not quite sure if they are still “just” animals. But they certainly act like it. In fact, in a posting on the graphic novel, one student said that the animals were stereotypical, especially the cat, who seemed overly aggressive. What makes these creatures truly uncanny, though, is their limited speech abilities, supported by the hardware and software installed on the animals. In raising the question, “Should killing machines talk?” WE3 suggests parallels between the treatment of soldiers and animals, while highlighting the need to listen to how these and other beings instrumentalized by our culture talk back to dominant power structures. Students were fascinated by the questions about identity and agency Morrison and Quitely use their three animals to articulate. They were given the following prompt to respond to after our class discussion of the text: “In WE3, what choices do the animals make? Along with their opportunities to make choices, and thus show agency, what limits and boundaries are there for these choices? What are your thoughts about how the comic revealed this sense of animal agency and its limitations?” While many expressed interest in how the animals were treated not as sentient animals but as killing machines, they were especially concerned about the ability of the three hybridized creatures to retain a distinctly animal identity, even through their mechanized speech capabilities. One student wrote, “the comic changed my perspective on cats more. From now on when I see a cat I’d think he or she is saying ‘mmmmen stink.’ ” Another argued, “Although they are militarized and built to kill, they still hold a sense of agency within them. Their choices are made by them and not by the machines they are in or by the people who created them.” In any case, it is clear that students appreciate how the authors, taking advantage of the affordances of the medium, combine speech balloons with nonverbal action sequences to foreground the complex issue of animal agency. A powerful sense of injustice, often based upon empathy with the students’ own pets, emerged through the reading and discussion of WE3, along with a tangible feeling that the animals could still choose humans as reasonable partners, not exploiters. As one student put it, “As a pet owner, I know if my dog doesn’t go to someone unless she likes him or feels safe with that person. Therefore, I feel like

233

Can We Be Part of the Pride?

233

the animals at the end were able to choose what they wanted [in aligning themselves with the homeless man].” By the time YA literature students had finished WE3, they had further developed the sense of advocacy for animals that they also demonstrated during their engagement with Pride of Baghdad; but at this stage, they showed a greater appreciation of the differences among animals and a fuller respect for the necessary distinctions between human and nonhuman animals. Thus, although the frightening technological transformations of living beings into killing machines remains, sadly, a likely possibility in the near future, Morrison and Quitely’s use of the comics medium to dramatize the destructive effects of such weaponization, for humans as well as nonhumans, helped students to recognize their kinship with the many exploited creatures who live with us, as well as the need to resist such instrumentalization.2

Dislocated reading and disturbing empathy: Duncan the Wonder Dog in Comics and the American Experience What happens when the study of multispecies comics moves to a general education course on Comics and the American Experience? The students, most of whom will never take a literature course again, still have to be taught close reading and critical analysis skills. In the process, they learn to open up to the ways comics project social situations and conflicts, historical contexts, and character psychology. The first task in Comics and the American Experience is thus to help students develop multimodal reading skills and learn a new vocabulary for discussing how writers and artists use the formal elements of comics (word, image, sequence, page) to explore social and historical issues.3 Initial readings in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics coupled with a comic that explicitly addresses a social or historical theme (such as March or Hellen Keller and The Trials of Annie Sullivan) provide students a basic model that they can then develop in a variety of written and in-class exercises. After a few weeks of class discussion and posting 250–350word responses to online discussion forum prompts, most students gain some facility with McCloud’s ideas concerning panel-to-panel transitions, page layout, iconicity, closure, and, more generally, the relations between word and image. To develop these skills, students write two short essays: one, a descriptive analysis (or close reading) of a page of a comic; the other, a discussion of how comics do history, with a focus on formal attributes specific to the medium. In some versions of this class, we read animal comics (such as WE3, Pride of Baghdad, or Laika) after reading Maus and Black Hole, so that students encounter animal masks—or the attribution of putatively animal traits to human characters— before they read comics with animal protagonists. Our work with Maus and Black Hole helps students recognize the metaphorical aspects of the animal attributes Spiegelman and Burns add to their human characters. They soon perceive how understandings of the predator-prey relationships among different animals (cats prey on mice) link up with the racialist worldview of Nazi-occupied Europe in

234

234

Charles E. Baraw and Andrew Smyth

Maus, and they write with ingenuity and interest about many possible psychological meanings of the animal-like mutations some characters experience in Black Hole (shedding skin, growing a tail). By the time they meet talking animals in WE3 and Pride of Baghdad (or a dreaming dog in Laika), students are already thinking about how comics use animals or traits associated with animals to represent abstract concepts, human attributes, and various social problems, and they are alert to the projection of human qualities onto animal characters. They also have experience analyzing the ethical choices and actions taken by protagonists in the earlier works, making it possible for them to extend the same questions to the animal agents that appear in WE3 and Pride of Baghdad.4 In this sequence of readings, students readily manage the transition from animal masks to accounts of talking animals acting in imaginary but historically comprehensible situations (the weaponization of animals by the US military, the 2003 bombing of Baghdad, the Cold War Soviet space program). Duncan the Wonder Dog, however, brings up entirely new issues pertaining to the exploration of human-animal relationships in comics. Much like the ORAPOST bombing that destroys the library at Elijah Gates University, this comic disorients, dislocates, and disturbs the frames of reference and reading strategies that students acquire earlier in the class. They are disoriented by the floating panels of Daniel Muir’s prologue, and they are baffled by the multiple focalizers, wordless thought balloons, and fragmentary voice-overs that depict several distinct and spatially distant audiences of the Marciano-Charles fight. Most students are confused by the multiple, nonlinear storylines and overwhelmed by the variety of art forms and visual techniques used by Hines (collage, pastiche, abstract forms, realistic drawing). Their confusion disturbs them, and they are vocal in their frustration: Duncan the Wonder Dog is big and weird and too hard to understand. It has no recognizable plot and there are no “relatable” characters. Instead, there are “at least ten different stories . . . jumping all over the place,” as one student put it. And in the midst of all this, there are talking animals.5 More precisely, the first talking animals we encounter in Duncan the Wonder Dog, students are shocked to learn, read difficult books, tell complex stories, speak a common language, and have their own given names, Euclid and Mercodonius, apart from those assigned by humans. Just as students register eagerly the ways this novel resists reading—or resists reading via immersion in a coherent storyworld with relatable characters—they also grasp quickly the increased scope and ambitious reach of Hines’s imaginings of animality in Duncan. If the first step in teaching this experimental comic is to encourage students both to record and to persist through the dislocations they initially experience, the second step is to help them connect the decentering of conventional narrative the book enacts with the decentering of the human that critical animal studies ask us to imagine. We ask students to make this connection by addressing two questions at the heart of both avant-garde practice and critical animal studies: How do we represent something we cannot understand? What tools do we have for conveying something we cannot fully perceive? At the same time, we ask students to move from these broad

235

Can We Be Part of the Pride?

235

theoretical issues to the narrower task of writing about specific moments in the book; to this end, we provide the following prompt: “Discuss how Adam Hines uses the medium of comics to depict animal sentience.”6 The students’ experiences with confusion and dislocation, and the text’s self-conscious refraction of animality through human institutions and practices (and vice versa), become the focus of our class activities for the first of the three weeks that we study Duncan the Wonder Dog. As students become more accustomed to the disorientations of Duncan, their attention and written responses tend to cluster around a discernible set of moments and themes. These include the conversation between Euclid and Mercodonius in the cages at the zoo (14–29); the resistance of the cow who discovers the truth about the slaughterhouse (73); the reaction of the pet dog, Clementine, after learning the contents of beef stew (78); the social interactions of the corporate CEO, Voltaire (a gibbon); and, later in the book, the violent wrath of Pompeii (a Barbary macaque) in “The Tale of Robert Paige” and the assault on the Johnson family. The early dramatic encounters among talking animals move students from an initial experience of illegibility and confusion to (partial) legibility and the shock of recognition, or, more accurately, the shock of kinship or at least affiliation beyond the human, as they are confronted with startling cross-species interactions and relationships. In Duncan the Wonder Dog, animals do things only humans are expected to do, and they do them with—and without—human participation. Based on evidence from student writing and class discussions, many student responses to these depictions of animal agency follow a loose sequence, often repeated as the book progresses and the intensity of the dislocating representations increases: 1. Confusion turns into shock and discomfort with the unexpected action. 2. Imaginative identification prompts empathy with the animal agent. 3. A double course of reflection follows: reflection about the artifice of Hines’s techniques for representing animal life and about the sorts of responses those techniques evoke. This is a general pattern, and students experience it at a different rates (probably depending on how patient and persistent they are in doing the assigned reading), but most do report moments of shock, of empathy, and of reflection about their own responses, including their discomfort and distress at the portrayal of the gibbon Voltaire’s romantic relationship with Tivona, a woman. And though the process varies for individual students, the formal and cognitive dislocations it entails push our conversation much further than earlier discussions about animal agents and animal sentience to engage more complex questions about animal sapience and the historical—or imaginable—systems of social power operating among humans and also in trans-species contexts. In these classes, students posted regular responses online regarding their reading experience. A brief survey and analysis of sample student writing about these

236

236

Charles E. Baraw and Andrew Smyth

key scenes may convey more vividly how students react to them and how their responses suggest ways to rethink human-animal relationships and to question the persistent anthropocentric limits of our thought. Euclid and Mercodonius Many students discuss this scene, frequently citing the strangeness of a monkey reading a book of ancient Greek philosophy (Artistotle’s Metaphysics) thrown in the garbage by humans. As surprising and amusing as this situation may be, students also recognize several aspects of the scene that become crucial for later discussions. First, they notice the cross-species conversation. It’s not just that animals talk; “what’s even more intriguing,” as one student writes, “is that the animals all use one language despite their varying species.” Another student noted that the animals engage in a kind of cultural exchange as “they share stories and the [tiger] tries to give advice and create clarity or purpose for the monkey.” Indeed, participants in the classes are adept at interpreting the animal fables Euclid and Mercodonius share; they quickly grasp the implications of the devil taking the dog as sacrifice (not only are humans iniquitous but the dog must have a soul of equal value). Here are two characteristic comments, by different students, about first encountering this conversation: What I  find fascinating about Adam Hines’s Duncan the Wonder Dog is the juxtaposition between the humans and the animals in the circus . . . No, animals cannot speak to us coherently, but Hines challenges us by making us listen to them. He presents reality with a touch of fiction and we enter a world where animals DO have a say; and it is shockingly similar to our conversations as humans. By incorporating animal agency in this novel it was surprising how much emotion I  felt towards the animals. Adam Hines does this through incorporating various speech bubbles and narrations among animals talking as if they were humans. This creates an emotional connection between the reader and the animals in the novel. The most difficult aspect when Hines employs animal agency to wrap my mind around, was when Hines incorporates [stories] of humans being cruel to helpless animals.

Other students go further and discuss the apparently minor and easily overlooked fact that these captive animals have their own names, connecting this detail to the social power that naming conveys in human culture as well. One student explains the strangeness of the animals’ names by suggesting that “it is a world of humans they are living in and . . . they have names that weren’t given to them by humans. The tiger and the monkey are introducing themselves as two people would. They are individuals instead of just monkeys and tigers.” Another student draws this parallel across the species boundary: “The monkey talks about how humans call him ‘monkey’ but his actual name is Euclid. It is something that I can relate to because we live in a society where in an effort to ridicule you or hurt you, they

237

Can We Be Part of the Pride?

237

take your name or your identity so that you’re just a nobody when in fact you are a human being.” As they reader further in Duncan, students connect these initial observations about the cultural work of naming—and the social power it takes to give a name or to have a family name and a named place of birth—to other scenes of social discrimination, such as when Voltaire is called a “pet” by business adversaries, and to the history of slave-names and slavery in the United States. By noting this early connection between reading and writing, between naming viewed as a form of inscription and the possibility Euclid raises of an animal-authored book, students understand literacy to be one powerful means of gaining social power. Finally, Euclid’s experience moves students to empathize and to imagine a different social order. As one student put it: “In this storyworld in which animals talk, I began to associate the zoo animals in the beginning of Act One with other people in my life. I began to see them as not creatures, but rather other beings who had a story and . . . it made me want to sit and listen to the stories they told, as I would want to listen to my elders tell stories of their pasts.” Voltaire (and humans) Many students express more surprise at seeing Voltaire dining in a fancy restaurant—“he eats with a fork,” as one student exclaims—than they do at meeting Euclid and Mercodonius talking in the cages of the zoo. In this way, students register Hines’s deft extension of what it is acceptable to imagine: two talking animals is one thing, nonhumans socializing with humans as equals is another. As one student commented, “it felt as if animals talking and interacting with humans was natural and for me that was different and odd.” Responses of this sort show students beginning to recognize the contradictions in their own assumptions and expectations about humans’ treatment of animals and, more generally, about human-animal relationships of all sorts. Several students write about the striking and painful gap between Voltaire’s position as a global business leader (who must still endure blatant forms of discrimination and insult), and the status of Euclid and Mercodonius, the cormorant enslaved by the fisherman (62) and the cow who gains awareness of her own impending slaughter (73). In this way, the students engage with what Alex Link describes as Hines’s linking of issues of animal alterity with broader political discourses of difference (Chapter  3). Thus they comment often on the racialized or colonizing treatment of animal characters in the novel, and, in addition to the question of names and naming, they discuss modes of work, exchange, and exploitation; the ascription and recognition of difference; and various representations of social and political conflict and resistance.7 Voltaire’s intimate relationship with Tivona, a human television reporter (who, students note, has a different name at work, “Tiffany”) tends to generate the most discussion. Again, Hines deftly manages reader response by presenting first the scene of romantic reunion—with gift-giving, catching-up conversation, and then Tivona undressing for bed (215–23) —and later the extended panels of pillow talk

238

238

Charles E. Baraw and Andrew Smyth

and conversation in bed (280–2). Students find the casualness of the presentation particularly striking. Many question their own eyes (and the diegetic reality of the scene) and hesitate to ask if they are wrong about what they don’t quite dare to think. Some need class discussion to reassure them that it is true: Voltaire and Tivona are lovers. Responses to this part of the story most closely follow the sequence I outline above: Confusion and discomfort turn into identification and empathy, and these, in turn, lead to reflection about the artifice (and limits) of Hines’s storytelling techniques as well as reflection about our own responses to the impossible imaginings Hines presents. A gibbon cannot be in love with a human and have that love reciprocated, can he? Well, in Duncan the Wonder Dog he can, and reflection on this fact leads to some of the most uncomfortable, boundarychallenging discussion in the class. A forum post by one insightful student helps explain why the episode in question may be particularly loaded. Writing about the interspecies relationship between Voltaire and Tivona, the student suggests that the characters’ “relationship may actually be reflective of other frowned upon intimate pairings in the real world.”8 This student’s delicate phrasing “other frowned upon intimate pairings”—he will not even use the term interracial—highlights the sensitivity of the situation Duncan the Wonder Dog creates in our racially and ethnically diverse classroom. The cause for this collective discomfort is not so much the metaphoric reference to human interracial relations, which is soon evident to everyone in the class, as it is the process of dislocated reading that precedes recognition of the analogy. Students do not as a rule oppose interracial intimacy—in fact the opposite is probably true—and in any case they may not feel comfortable voicing opposition to such relationships in our class discussions. But Hines’s transposition of racial difference into species difference, and vice versa, makes all of us do a double take. If we are shocked and confused by this “intimate pairing,” then might we, if taken by surprise (by history or social change), be similarly shocked by a depiction of interracial relations? Duncan the Wonder Dog calls us out, in other words, by situating anxiety about difference somewhere in the space between human social histories and the histories of animal-human contact. The cow, the dog, the terrorist Well before students encounter the brutal violence directed against humans in Duncan the Wonder Dog, they become sensitive to the repeated dislocations of reading and the decentering of anthropocentric expectations that the text’s earlier scenes produce. They become, in fact, more comfortable with the sequence of shock, discomfort, expanded perspective, and reflection than we have been describing here. Two episodes in particular seem to prepare students for the ultraviolence Pompeii visits on individual humans and on anyone who happens to be using the library at Elijah Gates University during the ORAPOST bombing. Each of these scenes produces the strange mix of intense feeling, outrage, and guilt that might be called “tangled empathy” (after Lori Gruen’s term “entangled empathy”),

239

Can We Be Part of the Pride?

239

a state of unstable affect that may suddenly reverse polarities and shift objects during the course of reading. Many students are outraged by the brutal treatment of the talking cow who passively resists the farmworker taking her to slaughter. They feel empathy with this sentient animal as she deduces her fate by noticing hoofprints going into a farm building but not coming out—a type of inscription she is able to read and articulate to the farmer. They see this sequence as evidence of the unequal treatment of animals, and also as a challenge to the power of language when it comes to stopping or impeding the violence of humans’ institutions and practices. Knowledge and speech do not save the cow, as the farmworker simply “lies” about his intent and uses force. The cow’s capacity for speech does, however, intensify students’ feelings of empathy—and their awareness of complicity in the institutionalized killing of animals. As one student wrote, “I feel that if we were to know what animals were really thinking, the way we live our lives would be much different . . . I know I have never thought about a cow knowing that it is walking to its death.” A few pages after the cow is shot to death, evoking empathy and anger in many of our students, they are further unsettled by the ambiguous, and apparently disconnected, scene of a pet dog asking a simple question about beef stew: “What’s in it?” The liberal, truth-loving humans decide to educate the dog they call Clementine. One student describes the subsequent scene this way: She experiences something horrific. She tagged along and went to the slaughterhouse with her owner. Clementine was shaken up from what she saw. I think she was wondering how her own human parents and other humans can treat animals in such a disgusting way. Killing her kind for their own benefit. Clementine understood what she saw and didn’t like what was happening. On the other hand, Clementine might not understand everything she observes or what she is told. On page 82, her human parents have to leave for a little so they tell Clementine to watch aka “babysit” for them. Not completely comprehending what she was told, she literally goes and sits on little baby [Carol], smothering [her] to death. Although animals can be as smart as humans, they can’t fully understand our actions and language.

The ambiguity of the wordless panels used to narrate this episode allows this interpretation of a tragic but accidental outcome. Another student, however, interprets the wordless thought bubbles in these pages as a sign of Clementine’s intelligence and angry intent, discovering in the dog “the ability to think deeper than in the moment, action-reaction thought. She is sapient in that she can commit premeditated murder, exacting retribution. This is a sign that she is on a higher level of thought.” These two contradictory responses suggest how difficult it is to determine what happens to the baby in this scene. While class discussion leans heavily toward the killing-with-intent interpretation, speculation persists about Clementine’s motives—and some argue for the possibility that Carol survives, her thought bubbles only temporarily muffled by Clementine. Students seem to take positions in

240

240

Charles E. Baraw and Andrew Smyth

this debate according to where they are in a trajectory of thought and feeling about the possibility of animal sapience, defined as the capacity for self-aware, reflective thought. Hines invites the attribution of sapience to Clementine through the interplay of speech, silence, and empty thought balloons, suggesting an interiority, a mind that we believe exists but that we cannot know. This uncertainty leads, in our class discussions, to a further turn, one that redistributes empathy for the human loss in the direction of Clementine and the trauma of discovery she endures. By the end of our discussions, many students expressed as much empathy for Clementine as for the human characters involved, but it is a disturbing empathy that leaves nearly everything up in the air. As one student puts it, in stark terms: “In some way, we gotta ask, what does it matter if the baby dies; it can’t speak, just like other animals.” As this comment illustrates, “disturbing empathy” cuts two ways:  Duncan the Wonder Dog disturbs our expectations about the direction and objects of our empathy, and it evokes moments of empathy and affiliation that may be disturbing to those who feel them, however momentarily. This is certainly true of our students’ responses to Pompeii, the Barbary macaque, who plans the bombing of a library, executes Robert Paige, and, having murdered the Johnson family, burns the diary that records their life with their pets. Whether or not Clementine takes vengeance for crimes committed on behalf of (nearly) all humanity, Pompeii surely does. Yet students, in our experience, will discuss the depictions of Pompeii’s violence without flinching. Some flatly denounce her as a terrorist in their initial Forum posts, but other students lead the discussion of the actual scenes—the execution of Robert Paige (195), the assault on the Johnson family (247–51)—in more complicated directions, disturbing our empathy for the human victims and challenging single-minded condemnations. Again, the terms students use for such scenes may themselves be disturbing, as with this summary of Pompeii’s flight: “Pompeii is on the run after she and Georgios commit the bombing. She takes several hostages, and kills them as ‘they do in the slaughterhouses.’ One man in particular, Bob, begs for his life before Pompeii shoots him. It’s comical to think of a man begging a small monkey for his life, when usually we think of animals at our mercy.” But this student’s point is not intentionally cruel, as her full post shows.9 Rather, she is thinking and feeling differently after the cumulative experience of a dislocated— and dislocating—reading of Duncan the Wonder Dog. In class discussions of the shooting of Robert Paige, during which we read aloud Pompeii’s dialogue (195), students focus on the silent, wordless panels and the odd, slightly askew “camera angle” as much as on Pompeii’s violent words and actions. One student articulated a perspective many supported: “it’s like she’s doing it to you, the reader.” Likewise many students feel personally accused by Pompeii’s words: “You take and you take and you take./ You take everything and you give nothing back” (195). Surprisingly, students say they do not identify with the explicit victim, Robert Paige, though they do imagine themselves in the scene, subject to Pompeii’s righteous wrath. Most startling of all, these same students express as much empathy for Pompeii in her murderous rage as for her victims, and

241

Can We Be Part of the Pride?

241

they are careful to note that the scene ends with voiceless, nameless birds soaring in panels with no clear frames. In sum, the experience of reading Duncan the Wonder Dog prompts students to imagine cross-species encounters in ways they had never previously conceived. In the process, Duncan the Wonder Dog challenges students’ (and instructors’) previous assumptions about reading, about comics, and about the anthropocentricism that shapes, in underexamined ways, humans’ view of the world.

Teaching and learning from animal comics Many students are drawn to comics in university literature courses because they want to study the apparently mundane in a format that explodes the ordinary, the familiar, and that compels them to question so much we take for granted in our anthropocentric comfort zones. In our teaching of animal comics, we ask students to reconsider the meaning of the Young Adult rubric in texts that blur species identities, to interrogate the American experience from the mosaic of narrative perspectives afforded by multiple animal agents, and to rethink humans’ impulses to speak for, rather than listen to, animals and what they may need and desire. The rich reading experiences provided by comics such as Pride of Baghdad, WE3, and Duncan the Wonder Dog facilitate these instructional goals. What is more, besides helping to bring the teaching of visual-verbal modes of literacy directly into the field of English studies, these works also suggest how teaching such literacy skills may have an impact on understandings of human-animal relationships in the broader culture.

Notes 1 We would like to thank the students in our classes—ENG 372 Young Adult Literature and ENG 218 Comics and the American Experience—for their profound insights in and out of class, and for their permission to cite comments, postings, and other responses to the graphic novels discussed in this study. 2 Along the same lines, Alicia Puleo, responding to Donna Haraway’s foundational “Cyborg Manifesto,” announces the need to look at the cyborg world with a double vision: “On the one hand, we must remain aware that the cyborg announces a future of total domination of the planet, which is moving toward the apocalypse of a patriarchal war. On the other hand, it becomes possible to envisage the possibility of a future when people would not be frightened of their kinship with animals and machines” (358). 3 Though our purpose in this chapter is to report on our classes and the conclusions we draw from students’ experiences with animal comics, rather than to join the critical debate about the works we discuss, our reading of them has been influenced by a number of recent commentators, including Michael Chaney, David Herman, Suzanne Keen, and Alex Link. 4 One writing prompt asks students to “identify the central actions and the ethical choices they present in chapter ‘X’ of WE3.” Chapters are randomly assigned and

242

242

5 6

7

8

9

Charles E. Baraw and Andrew Smyth

students discuss both human and animal protagonists. Students note the emphasis on the ethical (or unethical) actions of humans early in the book and the later contrast between human and animal choices. This progression sparks impassioned discussion about the uses of violence in Morrison and Quitely’s text, preparing the way for later discussions about ORAPOST in Hines’s Duncan the Wonder Dog. See Chapter 3 (by Alex Link) in the present volume for further discussion of these and other aspects of Hines’s text. This is a challenging task, and many students cannot navigate the logical transition from the first set of questions to the second set. Some students manage the transition well, but for others the process of beginning to think in these terms, attempting to articulate them in writing, and reading the work of other students online has proven very useful and is crucial to setting up later discussions. One student read the book as an allegory of the history of slavery and explains Voltaire’s role this way: “[H]e is representative of the slaves who were seen as slightly higher . . . Voltaire is essentially the ‘head-slave.’ This is important to recognize because even though he may be higher up, he is still recognized as an animal and lower than the rest of them . . . I also believe that it is important to recognize that Voltaire is depicted as a form of monkey because often times, African-Americans would be referred to as monkeys, making them even less human. Looking at the book in this way is important because it is a new visual way to look at the horrors of slavery. We are seeing the slaves for how they were treated—as animals.” This student goes on to claim that Voltaire’s gifts to Tivona “make” her “uncomfortable” (220), not only because of an inequality of wealth, but also because it signifies the difference their relationship enacts. As he puts it, “while they do not act like being together is forbidden, the tension and shamefulness stemming from both sides, even if slight, suggests that it is not normal. Even in today’s society, there are families and communities that do not [view] ‘interracial’ couples in a rosy, romantic light.” This student goes on to comment that in a scene involving another hostage, John Johnson, Pompeii asserts that“Humans name to assert their place in the world, but animals kill to stay and that’s their ‘name.’ All of this just proves the sentience of Pompeii. She can perceive her surroundings and she has sapience. She’s intelligent enough to pull off a bombing and get away, trick the police and do things that some humans couldn’t even pull off. She knows how humans work and she knows how to deceive and manipulate them.”

Works cited Brown, Lisa. “The Speaking Animal: Nonhuman Voices in Comics.” Speaking for Animals: Animal Autobiographical Writing. Ed. Margo DeMello. Illus. Jeff Hayes. New York: Routledge, 2013. Chaney, Michael A. “Animal Subjects of the Graphic Novel.” College Literature 38.3 (2011): 129–49. Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Elliott-Johns, Susan E. “Literacy Teacher Education Today and the Teaching of Adolescent Literature: Perspectives on Research and Implications for Practice.” Hayn, Kaplan, and Clemmons. 27–45.

243

Can We Be Part of the Pride?

243

Gordon, Joan. “Animal Viewpoints in the Contact Zone of Adam Hines’s Duncan the Wonder Dog.” HumAnimalia 5.2 (Spring 2014). http://www.depauw.edu/humanimalia/ issue10/gordon.html. Gruen, Lori. Entangled Empathy: An Alternatve Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals. New York: Lantern, 2015. Hayn, Judith A., Jeffrey S. Kaplan, and Karina R. Clemmons, eds. Teaching Young Adult Literature Today: Insights, Considerations, and Perspectives for the Classroom Teacher. 2nd ed. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017. Herman, David. “Animal Worlds in Modern Fiction: An Introduction.” Modern Fiction Studies 60.3 (2014): 421–43. Herman, David. “Storyworld/Umwelt: Nonhuman Experiences In Graphic Narratives.” SubStance 40.124 (2011): 156–81. Hines, Adam. Duncan the Wonder Dog. Richmond, VA: AdHouse, 2010. Kaplan, Jeffrey S., and Elsie L. Olan. “Young Adult Literature and Today’s Reader: The Many Faces, Changes, and Challenges for Teachers and Researchers in the TwentyFirst Century.” Hayn, Kaplan, and Clemmons. 9–26. Keen, Suzanne. “Fast Tracks to Narrative Empathy: Anthropomorphism and Dehumanization in Graphic Narratives.” SubStance 40.124 (2011): 135–55. Klich, Rosemary. “The ‘Unfinished’ Subject: Pedagogy and Performance in the Company of Copies, Robots, Mutants and Cyborgs.” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 8.2 (2012): 155–70. Link, Alex. “Funny? Animals? The Problem of WE3.” Comics Forum (May 2015). https:// comicsforum.org/2015/05/30/funny-animals-the-problem-of-we3-by-alex-link/. Lippit, Akira Mizuta. “. . . From Wild Technology to Electric Animal.” Representing Animals. Ed. Nigel Rothfels. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002. 119–36. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. Morrison, Grant, and Frank Quitely. WE3. New York: Vertigo-DC Comics, 2013. Myers, Walter Dean. Fallen Angels. New York: Scholastic, 1988. Nilsen, Alleen Pace, James Blasingame, Kenneth L. Donelson, and Don L. F. Nilsen. Literature for Today’s Young Adults. 9th ed. New York: Longman, 2012. Pick, Anat. Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film. New York: Columbia UP, 2011. Puleo, Alicia H. “From Cyborgs to Organic Model and Back: Old and New Paradoxes of Gender and Hybridity.” Comparative Critical Studies 9.3 (2012): 349–64. Vaughan, Brian K., and Niko Henrichon. Pride of Baghdad. New York: Vertigo-D.C. Comics, 2006.

244

245

Chapter 11 T H I S I S   H OM E Artwork by Bridget Brewer Texts by Bridget Brewer and Thalia Field

INTRODUCTION

Thalia Field Multispecies visual art presents opportunities for criti-fictional investigations of the relationship between registers of storytelling and extra-human life—whether in symbolism, social facts, genre, storyworlds, scientific ideas, or dream. The question, in other words, is how in our image-texts language/narrative provides additional framing for human-animal relationships. Will addressing this question allow us to “picture” how animals are “treated” in these works? Might investigating the modalities of visual art and text give any insight into the power of comics as a form?

246

246

Bridget Brewer and Thalia Field

I asked artist and writer Bridget Brewer if she had visual work that might engage this conversation. Her artwork, “Fables,” immediately struck us as a good starting point for its being a near-comic in its narrative framing on the wall-as-page.1 The entire piece is shown as the first image in this section, while the subsequent images reveal close-ups of various scenes. In Part I: This is Home, Bridget offers alarming, lush, and dramatic language as an accompaniment to the provocative human-animal relations featured in her artwork; in this way, she extends the resonance of the visual fable. Part II: True Crime represents my response to Bridget’s art through deployment of a performative writing method I have previously used in both theater and books.2 This form of writing uses [prompts] as a way to frame the indeterminacy of the reader/ audience/performer’s “present and thinking mind” as both a form of textual enrichment and a puncturing of the categorical assertions making up the authorial “surface.”

Part I: This is Home Bridget Brewer I, pernicious beast of the fables! I, of child-thief snout! I, of the hunger! I, of the meal! I, at cruel supper for all eternity! Conniving and cunning, seduction divine, consuming my tail in cyclical fear! I ask unto the night that holds me: Who shall be my beloved? Who shall crawl inside my mouth? Wolf winter! Bitter nightmare! Birch trees knotted in pain! I am the northern land, gnawing its own bone. The deer heart wet upon the lichen, the flesh in slabs. Flocks of birds leaving. A cold white sun that clings to the horizon. Mounds of moss, the knolls, the loam. A wine-colored river frozen solid to the sand. A cloud

247

This is Home

247

of pink mosquitoes puffing from my mouth. Where I step, I blacken the terrain. I am the northern land, gnawing its own bone! I kill and give birth and kill and give birth! I, most monstrous and necessary vessel! Your mind is desirous of my body. And the fire is always dying in your hearth. And your door rattles loud in the lintels. And you glare out your window, slack jawed, as you rub yourself blind. I, the northern land. My own bone in my teeth. The lost girl, fleeing her slavering father, dons the hide of an ass and enters my woods. I ask: do I not act within expectations? To stalk her in silence, to stomp out her tracks? What else am I but animal? How else to eat in a hard, harsh fable? I have been inverted, infested, and trapped! Fashioned into a wooden hollow beast, belly blooming with text. I, now of clever simple moral disguise. I, now of blood-matted man-made metonym. The ink is wet upon me; in your fabled prison, I am color-coded; I wed, then bed. I eat out the core of virginal meat! I honeymoon accordingly! I  hate the cheerful dairy cows, I  milk them with my teeth ’til they bleed! Right? Don’t you say I do that? I am earning my killing, you’re swooning by your dinner plate. This story is long, and your wine has run out! My back is to the wall, yet still you wave your torch. Who will be my beloved? Wolf or bear or snake or cat, whichever, result in your shackles. Who will be my beloved? I stagger on the loam. I will unbecome! An untangling, re-knotting, untangling once more. Goodbye clawed paw, goodbye tail! I’ve torn off my ear. I’ve ripped at my hide, I’ve howled for solace, I desire a springtime shedding of your fear of my body. But your text in my belly churns like a sea. No relief! I spill my sick all across the hoarfrost. Ash! Mud! Harvest!

248

248

Bridget Brewer and Thalia Field

A small face? A tender ember? Her voice rises and falls, and white-bellied magpies scatter apart. The ants don’t know how to be here. They run over her feet. Tiny smooth feet. Her hide stripped away, her small body within. My lust is for that subtraction. For the foreign fur to pool at my ankles. We are similar creatures, our shadows fall familiar. My face is cupped, I nuzzle her neck. I am touched by the ends of her hair. The foxfire is bursting, the birch roots rejoice. She reaches a hand. Her teeth covered by both of her lips. She strokes my snaggletooth. She, who has stalked me in her baggy mule suit. She, who has followed my trail. I can look at the lost girl and feel relief at her living. I, of blood mouth. She, of seeds sprouted. Her royal ring falls from her finger, her nails scratch behind my ears. Surely we are outside the inked page now? Trust the hand. Trust the songs to heal the fractured bone. Lick the wounded claw, allow for a moment of peace in the ferns. The right weed will suck out the poison: she is the weed. Place your tongue. And swallow. And smile!

Part II: True Crime Thalia Field Consider if [def: house] is not the same as [5 synonyms for house] or any of [6 words used for the living spaces of animals].

249

This is Home

249

Recall [3 things we see when a hand draws a frame], and then [10 things outside the frame]—especially if there is a [def: animal] in it, or outside it. Consider [4 signs of drought], [3 forms of environmental degradation], and [10 recent large-scale energy projects]. Consider [3 kinds of animals that break into houses]. Consider [def: “crime”]. i.e., “a fox came in, house-wise, and became me and was no longer wild because it was housed through me, as me almost, during a primal crime-scene. The fox did things in my place, and stood for me in ways I can and can’t stand, and its eyes flickered with particularity, as though this one fox was now a family member who would know my food and arrange my clothes and pillows, just like someone I know, or who would know me, name-ish-ly. This fox in my chair left me presents like a lover or child would, cursed me, undermined me, and stole precious items like a lover or a child would. In this particular fox I saw what I see only when it looks through my things, through my self-organized rooms.” [4 differences between a frame and a house] [2 times someone told you to “be reasonable”] cf: “you have the look of the beast!” Step to the front stoop, make the call to the police. Help! (you might say). [2 descriptions of physical violence] and [1 def: “sin”]. [3 differences between a wolf and a dog] [def: “prison”] i.e., “in my house, [5 bad habits] or [2 bad intentions] aren’t enough to dehumanize me. Evil is the skin-thing, the arrangement of puzzle-parts (ears, hair,

250

250

Bridget Brewer and Thalia Field

muzzle, paws)—things I blame for any bodily break-in when hitting my child or peeing in the yard.” [5 sentence recap of literary naturalism] [def: “instinct”] i.e., “who would believe another burglary, another day, a she-wolf, sniffing my blood, my ovum, the coil of my future, sharing this space, yeasty wine in barrels. Trying to cross the hall, she licks my bowls and unshelves ceramics, a lamp, paws at the sheets until a noise becomes her noise in my throat, all because [2 ways to make a murderer] or [3 stories of trespassing] don’t capture the feeling of being captured. The encroacher?” [def: “trespass”] [def: “convict”] cf: “is this not my street? Forest? My field? My driveway? Is this not my hideout? Is this not my timber frame? My toilet? My [self-serving phrase]? Did that wolf not wear my skimpiest nightie and flounce in it?” [def: “private”] [2 ways to know if it’s a lone wolf or part of a pack] [def: “property”] [3 ways to leverage the pack against a wolf] [def: “machine”] O lectori salutem! i.e., “in my house, [4 forms of violence] don’t make me beastly. My house is home to [3 “real” characters], squirrel-faced, rat-faced, pig-faced, and we fight over food and something else, sometimes, sex. We leave the door open and some bears break the door anyway, break the frame right off. What is it with some bears?! Then they take the house apart and leave with it. Theirs is weather all over the floor. Theirs is garbage that legislates. The frame inside their noses, scat, fur smelling up their caves.” [def: “crime”] [def: “consciousness”] If it’s not part of a [def: “metaphor”] get the [def: animal] out, the neighbors say. [3 felonious behaviors] go only so far before the police show up, trailed by reporters, forensics, spectators. Do they not know [3 differences between “history” and “natural history”] or are they going to give us [3 animal romance tales]? Instead: yelling at the officers, “Why don’t you investigate ‘alphabet,’ ‘animated,’ the ‘animus,’ ‘animals,’ ‘beast within’ and please don’t stop till you get all the way to ‘zoo’!” [def: “kinship”] [4 differences between a chimpanzee and a human] [5 social behaviors] [def: “ego”] Oh, puhleeze. The first detective steps toward us, warily giving a quick [def: “due process”] and leans to his partner for [4 examples of surveillance technology], then all about how in previously [def: “wild”] places, they’ve got some fuzzy images up online, mugshots, gorillas, they think, if we’d take a look. “We will def get them if

251

This is Home

251

they’re still in the [def: “area”].” Even if they’re not, they’re dead meat. The sound of cocking. The knowing smile. [def: “cage”] [def: “habeas corpus”] i.e., “possessed by possessions, [def:  “self-haunted”] and [3 things that are hunted] until the media stops garnishing [3 recent news items about animals] for the sake of [def: “person”]. Advertise: the law brings you good fences, and depositions, in real time, or, if we must be historical about it, [def:  “precedent”], a seventeenth-century rooster laid an egg and got burnt at the stake, and a pig hung high for killing a baby!” Even in the highest winds, [def: “imagination”] does not break or bend, as if it was made of [6 eternal ideas] or [5 indestructible materials]. [def: “witness”] [def: “family member”] [def: “preternatural”] A witness: “I swear there wasn’t anyone home. I don’t know how anyone could have got inside except by magic, or demon, or fakery.” A thought bubble:  possession is most of the law (of nature, too, ma’am—an uncomfortable laugh, so obvious)—a crowded thought—who has keys to the same house? Like: who wrote the “yellow journalism of the woods”? Who dared transpose [1 human activity] into [3 qualities of your favorite animal] without roads, without streets, without admitting the [def: unrealistic] or [2 kinds of analogy]. It’s as though [5 forms of storytelling] must already be false, whether on a [def: “blank page”] or [3 forms of broadcast media], or on a prehistoric wall, lit by prehistoric flames. If [1 ritual] leads to testimony, then [how to pay attention] or [how to know when someone is hungry, thirsty or bored] could let images slip away. [def: “prehistory”] [def: “thought”] The detective flips open his notebook and reads off [4 creatures impossible to catch on camera], saying, “Soon, ‘live’ is not going to happen around here. It’s not what people are going for.” i.e., “[any animal] would be less elusive than [2 nonlinear stories or images] or [a self-negating idea], not to mention [3 recording mediums]—and the slightest breeze that moves a hair on your head, or dust off your credenza, will indicate they’ve stolen the scene.” [def: “tenant”] ipso facto, a pettifogger offers expert opinions, from [3 kinds of first-hand experience], and surveys the property lines inked by engineers from air, land, and sea, superimposing [4 modern myths] on verdant pixels. The very [def: point of view] lets me consider [3 examples of animal biography] and [5 bad behaviors] I would rather neglect to mention, along with [4 common excuses for being less than perfect]. i.e. “is it possible that they still thought they lived here?” [3 meanings of “ward”]

252

252

Bridget Brewer and Thalia Field

i.e., “a home of relationships and not structures, if you consider [3 differences between relationships and structures] and think of [5 ways to minimize bad news] and your small life on the other hand, then compare the architect, the inside housewares, the lease, the burglar, pretending to know an alibi, and finally [what it means to set a thief to catch a thief] while [3 differences between the story and the subject of the story] implicate the framer instead of the builder, or the designer instead of the client, the landlord instead . . .” Stop! That’s a lot of [def: “evidence”] to sift through, say the officers of the law, hungry, their tongues a bit out, poking at their phones. [def: “role-reversal”] [def: “class action”] Can you step back into your comfort zone? eo ipso, they seem to be drifting into the house, sensing danger. The detectives, I deflect them: “They went that way!” over the meadow and off the path, the boots will storm the stream, kicking it out of its banks, and hands swirl into the pools, scaring up trout. Large ships grid the waters, off the tankers’ bows. From the air, there’s drones to help count the ones on the lam. [def: “hearsay”] [3 examples of remote or inaccessible wilderness] [2 imaginary creatures] The police want to make tracks, or at least they’re jumpy, the understory beckoning, or threatening, with cameramen, reporters, dogs, horses, guides and followers, the president or mayor, enters, exits, penetrates, crosses, lines and circles, circles and lines. Some coffee, then the search party. [3 kinds of evidence inadmissible in court]

253

This is Home

253

“We could draw out [1 wild animal] into [1 moral virtue] and we’d get [6 things fear will make someone do] or just [3 forms of violent death]. Whose fault is [4 animal-images from recent news]? Whose confession? How will we ultimately decide [the difference between an image and a zoo] if all that we have are [4 beast fables] and [10 animals near extinction] to go on? In other words, ma’am, there’s no way you couldn’t have done it, or that you’re free to go.” Are you calling me a “nature fakir”? Or a bleeping animal lover? Am I built of straw or sticks, that some Roosevelt should come doubt my tale? i.e. “[2 animals that get trapped in wire fences] blow the alibis of [4 famous criminals]—what with shopping, babies crying, or the time it takes to dig up dinner. Maybe you were drunk or raving mad? Maybe birds broke the glass, or that cougar did your hair? A heart strung like a mosquito net that we call [a word for “pet” in a foreign language], or the sweetness of [def:  “selective breeding”].” The night shadow and the lit windows. [4 insects] enter in swarms of twos and threes, tie me up in knots. Give me [3 examples of the “law of large numbers”] while [4 endangered mammals] demand “raw meat,” a night foray, bones excessively chewed—and in the morning / caught on camera/ their survival, the fittest, the protagonist . . . President Roosevelt (interrupting): “The very sublimity of absurdity.” Yes, that bulldog didn’t kill that wolf, Mr Jack London, the president says so. Domestic is both the condition of the house, and the condition of the feral, but it’s never going to get me/you off the hook for your weird racism and your dog stories. [3 examples of “the law of love,” “the law of evolution,” or the “law of nature”] [def: “determinism”] [def: “law”] [def: “lone wolf ”] Mr London, taking the stand, holds up the hand-mirror to his [def: “savages”] and his less-evolved monkeys to prove: “definitions must agree, not with egos, but with life.” [4 fictional animals] Mr London, raising his hand: “Definitions cannot rule life. Definitions cannot be made to rule life. Life must rule definitions or else the definitions perish.” Next witness: “He was clearly mixing imagination with the truth.” Reporter: “People are saying he’s the worst of the nature-faker offenders.” Later, rebuilt, a pet macaque lives [def:  “inside”] where maybe the line of the story is just too far out of the picture, and though it eats my food and rifles my things and occasionally leaves presents or steals, having its name means when I’m out it’s protecting all this. Police-y. Protection of what’s legally [def: coherent]. cf: “that lynx never could match [the dog] one on one, Mr London.” Who is saying? “The president.” (and “other knowledgeable men of the hunt.”)

254

254

Bridget Brewer and Thalia Field

Ah, hunting, witnesses, getting riled, you can’t frame that poor animal with your crime. The case thrown out of court: i.e., “I have no contract with gorillas, no contract with wolf spiders. I have no lease with bats, ants, mites. Hunting the ghost is the shooting contract, manly intentions (forests)—but only with competent others. The yellow journalists can’t keep up with [4 new ways to make animals appear in the laboratories] or [def: chimera].” Hobbes: Isn’t all man a wolf to the other man? cf. “tune in to reality, follow primetime and reruns, the electric fence with the whisky, baseball bat, gun, and the animal patrol’s gang-busting karaoke.” Wayeeses, I was ready to take you in and give you a medal of honor. i.e., “it’s impossible for you to both escape and behave, because, due to, counterclaims, these are my things, those are my books you’re drooling on, that’s my mirror you’re licking.” Good news! “We found a few individuals we need to bring in for testing.” Drugged and dragged, maybe one died, we snapped them in pix, no context but mugs, you know . . . what happened out there? The rewind . . . “the hunter caused the naturalist to do strange things . . .” Et tu, Brute! witness: “La bete sais pourquoi elle est bete.” Maybe, but she’s not talking. The judge bangs on things, but the perp’s not giving anything up. Bailiff banging. More shuffling. This courtroom’s bust. Make them speak! screams the character witness, as the paper flutters over deaf ears, the bantam, the hullabaloo, the irrationality. Returning from the lab, all under control, bagged and tagged, deposed samples, that means you, the way you were inside, roughly when you possessed me, briefly,

255

This is Home

255

pinned and flayed, sliced, your specimen, tissues, the taxidermist won’t even feel welcome in this white space, this white [def: “forensic”] (cop-a-plea) silent space Faithless stranger. Expert in hats. In my slippers. Amicus curiae. i.e., “from far away, the clothes rather appear to fit, the role-reversing seams hang flatteringly, the blood dried, the drool stain, ex delicto, the cross-examining telescope aiming up, at [3 things you see in a light-polluted sky].” i.e., “whenever we cross the tundra [5 unknowable forces] seem to happen.” Report: The search team, the architects, closed the hidey-holes. They covered the caves so no child could nap in them by accident. There isn’t room for innocence in camera when [10 dangerous types] lurk. Be like [def: “shame”] and get yourself indoors. The detectives boil when they’re finally on the stand. Eyes blank as dinner plates before dinner. i.e., “call in the accused. Tell her we know everything. Tell her we’ve got her family.” e pluribus unum. The desperate ones steam up the nanny-cam, open the chips, step out for a smoke. I’m counting to ten then calling the officers back –ex malo bonum! (or a bit of the hair of the dog, a reporter mutters.) e.g., [3 reasons for homelessness] Yes, well, ex post facto to you, and was anyone actually hurt? Are there any eyewitnesses? Please take the politicians out of my twisted box of elephants. They’ve appeared in the hallway, rebutting the china. When you’ve done something for the elephants, let me know. Then we’ll talk. The politicians stand around some gadgets, reading about themselves. i.e., “the jury is selected but isn’t here.” e.g., “a body was eaten and the [3 kinds of remains] aren’t cleared. The remains have waivers and warrants and writs, the whole clemency turned inside-out, who didn’t even break the glass, the window-frame open and condemned, inked night of predators by day, virus by morning, compensatory, the one that should do the eating, the weaker one, and not any footprints. Bloody bacteria.” verbatim, a bad architect, a rotating version of [3 states of mind] needing to be arrested, yells, “before they come get me, before the wild world disappears, comes in and I’m forced to kill it—veni, vidi, vici” —[def: “plea”] [def: “auto-immune”] [def: “bail”] Extraterratorial. I find someone who isn’t an officer once the elephants die and the home domain is an eminent electric field. The frame’s one of stars and breaks across the page, as floods more than seasonally prove. I’m conditioned to consider [3 ways that ghosts are pictured], [10 types of captive animal behavior], and a small voice from a dark corner beyond the state, like someone who isn’t tragically incriminating.

256

256

Bridget Brewer and Thalia Field

[def: “guilt”] [def: “house arrest”] [3 meanings of “parole”] i.e., “sometimes the lawns and the architecture blur into ocears, and convicts gain faces and names, life-stories mingle and emerge from the jargon, like everyone is suddenly in the same chorus at the same time, in the same prison break, singing a chord.” [def: “probation”] i.e., “finally: a sigh. a smile. a look of fear.” [def: “literary expression”] Exeunt.

Notes 1 Fables was shown in 2011 at the Bates College Olin Arts Center, and was acquired for permanent display by the Bates College German Department. Combining ideas and designs originating from dollhouses, roadkill, Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, the “homemade artist” movement, and female bodies, Brewer’s materials included cardboard, white paint, opaque theatre gels, fairy lights, ink, acrylics, cold-press paper, various fabrics, plastic tea candles, and hot glue. 2 See “Hey-Stop-That,” in Theater magazine, Winter, 1996 26(3); Point and Line (New Directions, 2000); “Experimental Theater is history! (The Photo and Infinite Play)” Theater magazine, 1999 29 (2).

257

I NDEX Aaltola, Elisa 218 Abbott, H. P. 20 n.12, 196 Adams, Carol J. 9 Agamben, Giorgio 8, 100, 153, 171, 180 n.11, 180 n.12 Ahuja, Neel 20 n.18, 81 Alaimo, Stacy 177, 179 Alber, Jan, and Monika Fludernik 20 n.16 Albert II: The 1st Monkey in Space (by Joeming Dunn and Ben Dunn) 205, 206, 213–15, 220 n.6 Alcoholic, The (by Jonathan Ames) 11 Alferi, Pierre 199 n.6 Almiron, Núria, Matthew Cole, and Carrie P. Freeman 1 Andrae, Thomas 21 animal agency 229, 232, 235. See also animal comics; animal minds; animals; characterization in animal comics; human-animal relationships animal allegory. See animal comics animal autobiography and “butting in” vs. “chipping in” 6, 20 n.13 as graphic memoir 17 human-centric vs. biocentric modes of 207, 209, 214, 218, 221 n.9 in nonfictional contexts 6, 17, 207, 213–17 and self-narratives 207, 221 n.10. See also animal comics; human-animal relationships animal comics and animal allegory 11, 31–2, 34, 59–60, 81, 99, 242 n.7 and animal liberation comics 45 and animal rights activism 42–3, 45–7 and animals’ life histories 9, 17, 205–7, 213–17

and animals’ subjective experiences 6–7, 17, 47, 84, 201–22, 229 and anime 18 n.2, 143–5, 148 and biodiversity 179 and blended species 35, 197 in classic American comic books 39–42 and conservation efforts 163, 177, 179 contemporary repurposing of 162–3 and criti-fiction 245 and critique of humans’ domination of other species 18, 30–2, 37, 42, 44–5, 49 n.15, 83, 183–4, 228, 234, 237–40 and defamiliarization of human practices and institutions 59–60, 63–4, 67–70, 72–3, 74 n.10, 183–5, 230, 235 definition of 2, 11, 220–1 n.7 and didactic animal fables 59–60, 67, 74 n.16, 236 in digital environments 45–6 in early print culture 31–2 in the eighteenth century 32–4 and empathy across the species boundary 16, 29–30, 93–5, 119–20, 123–4, 129–36, 137 n.9, 162, 171, 176, 232–3, 235, 238–40 as environmentalist fables 178–9 and the environmentalist movement 41, 44, 49 n.13, 230 ethical aspects of 15–16, 82, 104, 115, 120–1, 128–9, 131–2, 135, 162, 176–8, 234, 241–2 n.4 and experimental writing 18, 185–6, 189, 197–8, 245–56 and farm animals 6–7, 17, 42–3, 88, 204, 209–11, 221 n.12 and the fiction-nonfiction distinction 17, 201–2, 204, 211–22 and folk ethology 204, 207–11

258

258

Index

and the “funny animal” tradition 11, 13, 18 n.1, 39–42, 44–6, 48 n.9, 48 n.12, 49 n.16, 53–66, 70, 72, 73 n.1, 227 and gender 14–15, 119–20, 123, 129–36, 137 n.7, 137 n.9, 141–2, 169 as genre of graphic narratives 2, 11 and graphic adaptation 190–5 and the grotesque 13, 56–9, 67–8, 71–2, 74 n.10, 74 n.11, 110 historical evolution of 13–14, 29–51 vis-à-vis horror comics 49 n.13 vis-à-vis ideas of human exceptionalism 82–3, 122, 128, 164, 183–4 and interspecies relationships 12–13, 16–17, 29, 38–9, 45, 83–4, 88, 185–7, 189–98, 204, 229, 236–41 and the journey motif 16, 163, 166, 179 vis-à-vis jungle-themed comics 49 n.13 and marine science 163, 166, 177–8 medium-specific features of 4, 11–12, 14, 102–5, 115, 119–20, 125, 127, 135, 166–7, 174, 176, 203–4, 206, 210, 214, 221 n.9, 232–3, 240 and mental-state attributions 6, 17, 201–2, 210–11, 213–19, 219 n.2, 240 in military magazines 48 n.11 and multispecies ethnography 12 names and naming in 82, 91, 167–9, 179 n.10, 221 n.13, 236–7, 242 n.9 and narrative innovation 186, 188–98, 229, 234–5, 245–56 narratological approaches to 4–8, 10–13, 17, 53–4, 62–6, 186, 189–98,  201–22 in newspapers and other formats after 1900, 35–9, 48 n.5, 48 n.6, 48 n.9, 56 in the nineteenth century 34–5 nonfiction subtypes of 17 pets in 39, 105, 207–10 vis-à-vis picture books 35, 220 n.6 vis-à-vis pornography 49 n.17 post-1970 developments in 45–7 and postclassical narratology 12 vis-à-vis postcolonial contact zones 229 and present-tense narration 7, 221 n.12 vis-à-vis racial or ethnic difference 14–15, 20 n.18, 58, 81, 94, 100, 102– 5, 109–14, 147–9, 153, 233, 237–8, 242 n.8

and satire 33–6, 48 n.7, 48 n.9, 49 n.15, 56 science fiction subgenre of 14 and the slaughtering of animals 87–9, 204, 210, 217, 239 vis-à-vis superhero comics 39, 42–3, 46, 48 n.10, 49 n.13 and the talking animal 16, 37, 59, 70–1, 79–80, 87–8, 163, 166, 179, 229, 231–6 teaching of 17, 227–42 and Umwelt modeling 204, 207–11, 213–19, 220 n.5 vis-à-vis the underground comix movement 3, 40, 41–2 and verbal-visual literacy 17, 228, 241, 245 as visualization of the monstrous 31–2, 67, 74 n.7, 108–9, 111 vis-à-vis western-themed comics 49 n.13 and war, 231–3 and woodcut engraving 185–6, 190–1, 196 and Young Adult Literature 17, 39, 228, 230–3, 241 zoomorphism (or theriomorphism) in 13, 16, 29, 37, 43, 46, 75 n.19, 161, 164, 166, 187, 233–4, 249. See also animal autobiography ; animal minds; animals; animated film; anthropocentrism; anthropomorphism; characterization in animal comics; characters in animal comics; comics and graphic novels; human-animal relationships; iconography ; iconology ; manga; micronarratives; online catalog of characters in animal comics; postclassical narratology ; storyworlds animal cultures 9–10, 20 n.18 “animalesceance” (Derrida) 30, 32 animal experimentation 44, 88, 254–5. See also animal comics; animals; humananimal relationships animal fables. See animal comics animal fads 32–3, 48 n.4 animal geography. See human-animal relationships animal idioms. See animals animal masks 233–4. See also animal comics

259

Index animal migration. See animals animal minds in animated films 216 and behaviorism 199 n.1, 218 and cultural ontologies 202, 211, 213, 217–19, 222 n.16 and “discourse domains” 201–2, 209, 211, 213–19 and the emotions of animals 207–8, 214–7, 220 n.11 and fictional vs. actual minds 201, 211–13, 219 n.1 and mental-state attributions 201–2, 207–11, 213–19, 219 n.2 and metacognition 128 in nonfiction comics 201 and ontological conservativism 218–19 as presented via word-image combinations 204, 206 and the register of actions vs. the register of events 6–7, 20 n.15, 207–10, 218–19. See also animal comics; animals; characterization in animal comics; human-animal relationships animal rights. See animal comics; animals; human-animal relationships; speciesism animals as abbreviation for “nonhuman animals” 3 and alterity 14–15, 80, 93, 99, 101, 115, 141, 154, 237 and attachment parenting 127 as barometers of environmental crisis 152 and the category of “the nonhuman” 3 in circuses 37, 93, 94 in contemporary anthropology 202 control of by humans 18, 32, 90 co-evolution of 90, 145, 150, 168 as commodities 14, 86, 88, 174, 209, 218, 229 de-individualization of 80, 88–9, 169, 210, 221 n.13 and denigrating idioms 170–1, 242 n.7 domesticated vs. wild 86–7, 112 endangered species of 163, 174 and evolutionary theory 9–10, 148–9 and extinction 10, 20 n.18, 90, 142, 176

259

and factory farming 42–3, 88, 204, 210, 218, 221 n.12, 238–40 in heraldic iconography 32 images of in imaginative literature 178 and indigenous cultures 171, 174, 180 n.12 and interspecies relationships 163–4, 218 as killable (vs. murderable) 14, 80, 82, 84, 86, 88–9, 92–3 and language 14, 70–1, 81–2, 107, 115–16, 134 as mechanized beings 54–5 and migration 87, 102, 151, 163 and niche construction 9–10, 20 n.18 as the not-human 19 n.5, 80, 106–7, 167 objectification of 7, 86, 93, 137 n.7, 209, 222 n.15, 233 and personhood 54–6, 62–6, 222 n.16 as pets 39, 112, 210, 221–2 n.14 vis-à-vis political refugees 101–2, 104–5 and predation 89, 112, 233 in science fiction 9, 20 n.18 self-awareness in 100, 240 and sexual hybridity 141–2, 155 n.11 slaughter of 57, 82, 88–9, 204, 210, 217, 239 in stories for children 35–7, 39, 47–8 n.2, 48 n.9, 59–60, 74 n.15, 113, 176, 211, 213–15, 222 n.16 as subjects vs. objects 5–7, 81, 93, 210, 215–18, 219 n.1, 222 n.15 transnational status of in maritime environments 169 use of in scientific research 44, 91, 132, 205–7, 213–19 and “the vitality of matter” (Bennett) 177 weaponization of, 232–3 in zoos 82, 237, 253. See also animal autobiography ; animal comics; animal cultures; animal minds; characterization in animal comics; human-animal relationships; manga animal subjectivity. See animal comics; animals animated film 18 n.12, 215–16, 222 n.17. See also animal comics; manga anime. See animal comics; animated film; manga “animetaphor” (Lippit) 18 n.1, 31, 33, 227

260

260

Index

Ant Colony (by Michael DeForge) 30, 45, 70–2 anthroparchy 13, 30, 37, 45 Anthropocene 94, 144–5, 151, 154, 156 n.24, 229 anthropocentrism 9, 15, 20 n.18, 34, 49 n.15, 67–8, 73 n.1, 91–2, 106, 136, 171, 178, 190, 216, 220 n.5, 229 anthropocentric vs. biocentric storytelling 5–7 anthropodenial 82 “anthropological machine” (Agamben) 171, 180 n.11 anthropology. See animal comics; animal minds; animals; human-animal relationships anthropomorphism 9, 16, 20 n.18, 36–7, 44, 82, 85, 95, 137 n.11, 161–3, 166–7, 169–70, 184, 227, 234 Anubis 216 Anzaldúa, Gloria 105–6 Après la mort, après la vie (by Adolpho Avril and Olivier Deprez) 17, 194–8 Arendt, Hannah 153 Aristotle 53–4, 64, 67–8, 73 n.2, 74 n.18, 83, 90, 153 Astruc, Rémi 74 n.11 Attenborough, David 164 Avital, Eytan, and Eva Jablonka 20 n.18 Azuma, Hiroki 148, 156 n.19 Bachelard, Gaston 256 n.1 Baetens, Jan 61, 185 Baetens, Jan, and Hugo Frey 1, 3–4, 19 n.7, 19 n.8 Baker, Steve 29–30, 43, 74 n.12, 163, 166 Baker, Nicholson, and Margaret Brentano 48 n.5 Bal, Mieke 62, 66 “bare life” (Agamben) 153 Barks, Carl 40–1, 46 Barrier, Michael 40, 47 n.1 Barthes, Roland 7, 139, 183–4 Bartlett, Heidi Wiren 137 n.7 Bates, Alex 144 Baudrillard, Jean 29 Beasts of Burden (by Evan Dworkin and Jill Thompson) 45 Beaty, Bart 164

“becoming animal” (Deleuze and Guattari) 18 n.1, 102–3, 187–8, 190, 194–5 Bédrane, Sabrinelle, Francine Revaz, and Michel Viegnes 199 n.6 Belloï, Livio, et al. 196 Bennett, Jane 177 Benston, Kimberly 81 Berger, John 30, 34, 48 n.12 bestiaries 99, 101 bios-zoe distinction, 8–9, 153. See also human-animal relationships biotic communities. See human-animal relationships Blackbeard, Bill, and Martin Williams 37, 48 n.5 Blacksad (by Juan Diaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido) 46 Blake, William 33 Bo Obama: The White House Tails (by Paul J. Salamoff ) 221 n.9 Booker, M. Keith 48 n.9 Braidotti, Rosi 20 n.18, 81–2 Brown, Lisa 1, 219 n.3, 230 bullfights 94 “Butanding” (by Pierce Hargan) 11 Calarco, Matthew 19 n.5, 20 n.18 Calvin and Hobbes (by Bill Waterson) 39 Candea, Matei 202 capitalism. See human-animal relationships Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew (by Roy Thomas and Scott Shaw)  42–3 Castle, The (by Franz Kafka) 190–3 Castle, The (by Olivier Deprez) 17, 190–5 Cat Getting out of a Bag and Other Observations (by Jeffrey Brown) 5–7, 204, 207–9 Cerebrus the Aardvark (by Dave Sims) 44, 58 Chaney, Michael A. 1, 11, 20 n.18, 40, 53, 67, 73 n.1 characterization in animal comics and action 53–4, 62, 64–6 and character icons 53–4, 58–9, 70–1, 73–4 n.4

261

Index and the concept of person 54–6, 62–6, 75 n.20 and empathy 55 and focalization 53–4, 62, 67–70, 75 n.19, 203 and living kinds vs. nonliving kinds 55 and problem creatures 54 and style 56, 60–1, 67, 73 n.3, 73–4 n.4 and traditions of caricature 56, 58–9, 74 n.8, 74 n.9. See also animal comics; animal minds; animals; human-animal relationships; iconography; iconology characters in animal comics  The Black Cat 36 Bugs Bunny 38 Donald Duck 40–1 Earl the dog 39 Fritz the cat 41 Gon 142, 155 n.13 Great White (enemy of Batman) 170 Hobbes 39 Ignatz Mouse 34 Krazy Kat 37–8 Lying Cat 45, 105, 107, 115–16 Marmaduke 38 Mickey Mouse 38, 41–2, 46, 55–6, 58–9, 61, 66–8, 141 Mickey Rat 42 Mighty Mouse 141 Miyamoto Usagi 44 Mooch the cat 39 Rocket Raccoon 42, 48 n.10, 49 n.15 Snoopy 38, 39, 58, 73–4 n.4 Three Mouseketeers, the 40, 68–70 Tige (Buster Brown’s bulldog) 37 Tiger Tim 37. See also online catalog of characters in animal comics Chen, Mel 43, 49 n.17 Chernov, Joe 176 children’s literature. See animals “Chthulucene” (Haraway) 156 n.24 Chute, Hilary 20 n.18 Chute, Hilary, and Marianne DeKoven 3 circuses. See animals Clan Apis (by Jay Hosler) 220 n.5 Clark, Andy 203 Clark, Timothy 167, 169–70, 179 n.7 Clark, Willene 101

261

Clarke, Shelley C., et al. 174 class. See human-animal relationships classification (of animals). See animals Clausen, Curtis P., Joseph L. King, and Cho Teranishi 156 n.22 Coe, Sue 11, 43, 220–1 n.7 Cohn, Dorrit 19 n.9, 211–12, 219 n.1 colonization. See human-animal relationships comics and graphic novels abstraction in 61, 70–1 and avant-garde experimentation 187– 98, 198 n.5 and the category “graphic narratives” 2, 3, 19 n.6 as contrasting forms of practice 3–4, 19 n.7 definitions of 2, 3, 21 n.21 as engaging with social and historical issues 233 and glyphs 168 and “graphic narrative theory”  10–11 history and evolution of 3–4 vis-à-vis postclassical narratology 10–11 spatial codes in 14–15, 119–25, 130, 132, 135–6, 137 n.8, 194–5 and storyworlds 203–4 vis-à-vis the underground comix movement 3, 41 and visualizations of female bodies 123, 125–6, 128, 130 and Young Adult Literature 230. See also animal comics; postclassical narratology ; storyworlds comics pedagogy. See animal comics comics styles. See animal comics; characterization in animal comics; human-animal relationships; iconography; iconology; micronarratives companion animals. See animals; companion species; human-animal relationships companion species 20 n.18, 84 creaturely, the (Pick) 179 n.3, 227. See also human-animal relationships Crist, Eileen 20 n.18, 162–3, 218

262

262

Index

criti-fiction. See animal comics Cruel (by Sue Coe and Judy Brody) 5–7, 204, 209–11, 216–17, 221 n.12 Crumb, Robert 41, 44 Crumpton, Nick 152 Crutzen, Paul J., and Eugene F. Stoermer 144 Cudworth, Erika 30 Culler, Jonathan 231 cultural ontologies. See animal minds cyborgs 241 n.2 “cyborg pedagogy” (Klich) 228–9. See also animal comics Dalzell, Paul J., et al. 180 n.13 Damasio, António 136 n.1 Darwin, Charles 128, 150 Daston, Lorraine, and Gregg Mitman 137 n.11, 170 “database animals” (Azuma) 148, 156 n.19 Dautel, Susan L. 176, 177 De Angelis, Richard 1 Degnen, Cathrine 211, 215, 222 n.16 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari 18 n.1, 102–3 Dell’Apa, Andrea, et al. 174, 179 n.4, 179 n.5 Dell comics 40 DeMello, Margo 31, 47 n.1, 164 Dennett, Daniel C., 219–20 n.3 Derrida, Jacques 30, 80–2, 85–6, 93, 115, 167, 169, 174 Descartes, René 54, 212–13 Descola, Philippe 202 De Wolff, Kim 176–7 dharma 90 Dialogues de bêtes (by Colette) 184 disability studies. See human-animal relationships Disney comics 40, 42, 46, 67, 141, 155 n.9. See also manga Doležel, Lubomír 19 n.9 Domeier, Michael L., and Nicole Nasby-Lucas 163 Donovan, Josephine 9 Doré, Gustav 35 dreaming. See human-animal relationships Dulvy, Nicholas K., et al. 162, 179 n.4 Duncan, Randy, and Matthew J. Smith 39

Duncan the Wonder Dog (by Adam Hines) 13–14, 45, 74 n.19, 79–97, 227–8, 229, 234–41 ecocriticism. See animal comics; humananimal relationships; storyworlds ecofeminism. See human-animal relationships Edwards, Justin D., and Rune Graulund 57, 74 n.10 Eisner, Will 163 Elliott-Johns, Susan E. 230 Elmer (by Gerry Alanguilan) 45 Elton, Charles 150–1 emotion. See animal minds; human-animal relationships; manga empathy. See animal comics; entangled empathy; human-animal relationships endangered species. See animals Enright, Kelly 33 “entangled empathy” (Gruen) 119, 120, 131, 132, 238. See also animal comics; human-animal relationships environmental humanities. See animals; human-animal relationships Epileptic (by David Beauchard) 11 Estern, Mark Hames 41–2 ethics. See animal comics; human-animal relationships ethnicity. See animal comics; animals; human-animal relationships ethnography. See animal minds; animals; human-animal relationships evolution. See animals; mosaic evolution extinction. See animals farm animals. See animal comics; animals; human-animal relationships feminization of nature 169. See also human-animal relationships Fergusson, Ian K., et al. 179 n.6 fiction-nonfiction distinction. See animal comics; animal minds; storyworlds Field, Thalia 20 n.18, 256 n.2 Fisher, John Andrew 20 n.18 Fludernik, Monika 202 focalization. See characterization in animal comics

263

Index folk ethology 219–20 n.3.See also animal comics; animal minds; animals Fox, Rebekah 82, 93 fractals 91 Freud, Sigmund 127, 137 n.6 Friedman, Nancy 163 Fudge, Erica 178, 210, 221 n.13, 222 n.15 funny animals. See animal comics Gaard, Greta 15, 20 n.18 Gabilliet, Jean-Paul 39, 47 n.1 Gangloff, Deborah 35–6 Gardner, Jared 1, 10, 29 Garrard, Greg 162–3, 170 gender. See human-animal relationships Genette, Gérard 7 Gergen, Kenneth J., and Mary M. Gergen 221 n.10 Gerrig, Richard J. 4 Gifford, Denis 31, 36–7 Gilligan, Carol, 131–2, 136 n.2 Glaude, Eddie 11 Godzilla 152, 155 n.11 Goggin, Joyce 34 Goldberg-Hiller, Jonathan, and Noenoe K. Silva 169–71, 180 n.12 Goodall, Jane 133 Goodman, Nelson 4 Gordon, Joan 83–4, 229 Gorman, David 212, 219 n.1 Grahame, Kenneth 36 Grandville (by Brian Talbot) 34–5 Grandville, J. J. 34 graphic narratives. See comics and graphic novels Green, Justin 42 Greenberg, Clement 189 Greimas, Algirdas Julien 7 Grier, Katherine C. 34 Griffin, Nathan Stephens 47 n.1 Groensteen, Thierry 55 Gruen, Lori 119–21, 123, 131–3, 136 n.2, 137 n.10, 238–9 Grusin, Richard 20 n.18 Haraway, Donna 7–9, 40, 47 n.1, 80–82, 84, 86, 115, 154, 156 n.24, 229, 241 n.2 Harvey, R. C. 47 n.1

263

Hatfield, Charles 1, 46, 74 n.8 Heidegger, Martin 85, 90, 103, 167 Heise, Ursula 20 n.18 Herman, David 1, 4, 16, 18 n.3, 19–21 notes 9–16 and 18–19, 54, 61, 63–4, 74 n.19, 83, 179 n.3, 184, 202, 207, 212, 215, 219 n.2, 219–20 n.3, 221 n.8, 229 Herriman, George 48 n.8. See also Krazy Kat Hile, Jennifer 166 Hines, Adam 80–4, 87, 90, 93 Hoaglund, Linda 156 n.23 Hoffman, Eric 44 Hogarth, William 33 Hollingsworth, Cristopher 148, 156 n.20 Homer 111 Hosler, Jay 45, 220 n.5 Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin 178 human-animal hybrids 13, 15, 34, 41, 49 n.17, 72, 103, 105, 109, 143, 145, 147, 155 n.14, 186, 197, 216, 249. See also animal comics; humanimals human-animal relationships vis-à-vis aesthetic styles 184–6, 188,  198 and animal geographies 9, 20 n.18, 194–5 and animal labor 86–8, 237 and animal welfare 90 within biotic communities 3, 8–9, 171 and capitalism 86–7 and colonialism 15, 31–3, 57, 81, 86–7, 105, 146, 150, 168, 170, 178, 237 and companion animals 7, 9, 93, 210–11, 221–2 nn.13–14 and concepts of disability 9, 16, 20 n.18, 185–6, 194–5 and the concept of “invasive species” 15, 144–5, 147, 150–1, 153 and creaturely vulnerability 164, 166, 179 n.3 and dreaming 122, 124–9 ecofeminist approaches to 9, 20 n.18 and emotions 84, 92–3, 101, 133–4 and empathy 16, 132–3, 137 n.9, 171 and the environmental humanities 9, 15–16

264

264

Index

and ethics 15–16, 82, 104, 115, 120–1, 131–2, 162, 178 and ethnocentrism 10 , 147 – 9 , 169 and gender 120, 131–4, 136–7 n.7, 137 n.9, 141–2, 169 and human exceptionalism 9–10, 20 n.18, 82, 128, 183–4 as kinship 210, 222 n.15, 233, 235, 241 n.2, 250 and multispecies ethnography 8 and naming (or classificatory) practices 167–9, 179 n.10, 221 n.13 overviews of research on 18 n.3 and postcolonialism 81 and posthumanism 9, 20 n.18, 140, 145, 154, 180 n.12, 183–4 and questions of scale 9, 14, 61, 68–70, 90–1, 93 and racial or ethnic difference 10, 14–15, 20 n.18, 81, 102–5, 112, 148–9, 233, 237, 238 and religion 31–2, 44, 81, 91–2, 125, 142, 144 and self-narratives 9, 20 n.18 as shaped by and shaping animal comics 12, 17 and slavery 81–2, 237, 242 n.7 and socioeconomic class 15, 86–7, 145, 147, 153 and species hierarchies 10, 13, 31–4, 57, 82, 87, 102, 153, 162, 167, 171, 176, 178, 183–4, 215, 221 n.13 and trans-species anthropology 8 violence in 34, 43, 82, 88–9, 93–4, 204, 220–1 n.7, 235, 238–41, 241–2 n.4 and zoegraphy, 8–9 and zoopolitics 13–14, 83. See also animal autobiography; animal comics; animal minds; animals; “becoming animal” (Deleuze and Guattari); bioszoe distinction; companion species; hyperobjects; manga; speciesism humanimals 166, 179. See also animal comics; human-animal hybrids human exceptionalism. See animal comics; human-animal relationships humans as animals. See animals “hyperobjects” (Morton) 69–70

iconography 32, 54, 57, 60, 74 n.5, 127. See also animals; characterization in animal comics iconology 54, 59, 60, 74 n.5. See also characterization in animal comics Insect Fear (by Gilbert Shelton) 42 insects. See Ant Colony; manga interspecies relationships. See animal comics; animals; human-animal relationships Jackson, Paul 155 n.16 James, Erin 20 n.17 James, Simon P. 217 Jameson, Fredric 86 Jason (John Arne Sæterøy) 46 Jaws (by Peter Benchley) 170 Jaws (by Steven Spielberg) 163, 169–70 Jefferies, Cameron S. G. 162, 174, 179 n.4, 179 n.5 Jones, Richard 101 Jones, Tom 168, 170, 179 n.8, 179 n.9 Josserand, J. Katherine 179 n.10 Kafka, Franz 190–3 Kaplan, Jeffrey S., and Elsie L. Olan 230 Kayser, Wolfgang 57 Keen, Suzanne 55, 136–7 n.3 Kelly, Walt 41 Kern, Adam 154 n.4 Keynes, Geoffrey 33 killable (vs. murderable). See animals Kirksey, Eben 8 Kirksey, S. Eben, and Stefan Helmreich 7–8 Klich, Rosemary 228–9 Knighton, Mary A. 44, 155 n.11, 155 n.12 Knopf, Christina 48 n.11 Kohlberg, Lawrence 136 n.2 Kohn, Eduardo 7–8, 202 Kois, Dan 79 Krazy Kat (by George Herriman) 11, 36–8, 56 Kreiner, Rich 43 Kubo and the Two Strings (by Travis Knight) 148 Kümmerling-Meibauer, Bettina 220 n.6 Kunzle, David 36, 48 n.3, 74 n.8 Kuo, Shu H. 35

265

Index Laika 5–7, 87, 213, 216, 221 n.8 Laika (by Nick Abadzis) 14–15, 20 n.14, 45, 119–37, 215–16, 221 n.8. See also “Triolet for Laika”; Triolet for Laika Laika: The 1st Dog in Space (by Joeming Dunn and Ben Dunn) 5–7, 204–7, 211, 213–14 Laika the Space Dog: First Hero in Outer Space (by Jeni Wittrock and Shannon Toth) 213–14, 216 Latour, Bruno 8, 169 Le Guin, Ursula K. 9 Lejeune, Philippe 19 n.9 Lemm, Vanessa 114 Levin, Bob 49 n.14 Levinas, Emmanuel 102, 104, 110, 115 Levinson, Stephen C. 217 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 30, 47 Leys, Ruth 136 n.1 Link, Alex 96 n.4, 237 Linneas, Carl 156 n.21, 169 Lippit, Akira 18 n.1, 31, 227 literacy. See animal comics London, Jack 253 Lorimer, Jamie, and Krithika Srinivasan 20 n.18 Lundblad, Michael 18 n.1 Mallarmé, Stéphane 189 manga affective responses to 148, 156 n.19 and animals 45–6, 141–3 audiences of 147–8 vis-à-vis Disney comics 141, 155 n.9 and early cinema 140–1, 154 n.6 and the Fukushima nuclear crisis (“3.11 manga”) 152 and insect literature 142 insects’ role in 15, 140––3 and Japanese anime 143, 145, 155 n.13 origins of 139, 140, 154 n.2 posthuman animal turn of 141, 145 vis-à-vis post-WWII “story manga” 139–40 and sexism 147 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 44 and theater 141

265

vis-à-vis Western graphic storytelling 15, 19 n.8. See also animal comics; animated film Maresca, Peter 37, 48 n.5 Marmaduke (by Brad Anderson) 38 Marvin, Garry, and Susan McHugh 1, 18 n.3 Massumi, Brian 136 n.1 Matinelli, Dario 81 Mattfield, Monica 33 Maus (by Art Spiegelman) 1, 11, 43 Mayer, Sheldon 40 McCance, Dawn 1 McCay, Winsor 56 McCloud, Scott 54, 73 n.2, 73 n.3, 155 n.7, 164, 168, 233 McHugh, Susan 1, 176 McKay, Robert 1 mental-state attributions. See animal comics; animal minds; animals; human-animal relationships Mentz, Steven 169 Mercer, Jean 137 n.5 Meyer, Christina 48 n.7 Meyers, Diana 137 n.10 Mickey Mouse Meets the Air Pirates Funnies (by Dan O’Neil) 42 micronarratives definition of 189 vis-à-vis human-animal relationships 189–3, 195, 198 vis-à-vis intellectual disabilities 190, 194–5, 198. See also animal comics; comics and graphic novels; humananimal relationships; postclassical narratology ; storyworlds Mikkonen, Kai 203 Milne, A. A. 36 Miodrag, Hannah 54, 73–4 n.4 Miryam, Sas 154 n.6 Molloy, Claire 1, 48 n.4 Moore, Alan 3, 43 mosaic evolution 148 Mouly, Françoise 43 multispecies ethnography. See humananimal relationships multispecies storyworlds. See storyworlds Mushishi (by Yuki Urushibara) 144 Mutts (by Patrick McDowell) 39

266

266

Index

Nagel, Thomas 82, 202–3 narrative. See animal comics; micronarratives; postclassical narratology; storyworlds narrative worldmaking. See storyworlds narratology. See animal comics; characterization in animal comics; comics and graphic novels; micronarratives; postclassical narratology; storyworlds Naruto (by Masashi Kishimoto) 143 Nash, Eric P. 154 n.5 “naturecultures” (Haraway) 9 Neff, Christopher, and Robert Hueter 169–1 newspaper comics. See animal comics niche construction. See animals Nietzsche, Friedrich 114 Nikolajeva, Maria, and Carole Scott 35 Nilsen, Alleen Pace, et al. 230 Noddings, Nel 136 n.2 nonfictional animal comics. See animal comics nonhuman, the. See animals Nussbaum, Martha 106 O’Connell, Sheila 31–2, 47–8 n.2 Odling-Smee, F. John, Kevin N. Laland, and Marcus W. Feldman 20 n.18 online catalog of characters in animal comics 48 n.12. See also characters in animal comics ontological conservativism. See animal minds Outcault, Richard Felton 3 Panofsky, Erwin 74 n.5 Parikka, Jussi 139 Parker, Sue Taylor, Robert W. Mitchell, and Maria L. Boccia 116 n.1 Peanuts, The (by Charles M. Schulz) 38 Pedagogy. See animal comics Peterson, Christopher 106 Pflugfelder, Gregory, and Brett L. Walker 156 n.22 Philo, Chris, and Chris Wilbert 20 n.18 Philpott, Romney 162, 166, 174, 180 n.14 Pick, Anat 179 n.3

picture books. See animal comics Pikitch, Ellen K., et al. 163 Pit’s Letter (by Sue Coe) 11 Plumb, Christopher 32 Plumwood, Val 9, 20 n.18 Pogo (by Walt Kelly) 41, 44 Pokémon 74 n.15, 143 postclassical narratology emergence of 7–8, 20 n.16 and the nexus of narrative and mind 8, 20 n.16 and the study of human-animal relationships 7–10 and the theory-corpus relation 10–11, 20–1 n.19. See also animal comics; animal minds; characterization in animal comics; comics and graphic novels; micronarratives; storyworlds postcolonialism. See animal comics; human-animal relationships; storyworlds  posthumanism. See human-animal relationships; manga Potter, Beatrix 35 present-tense narration. See animal comics Pride of Baghdad (by Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon) 45, 227, 228–9, 231–2 Propp, Vladmir 20–1 n.19 Puleo, Alicia 241 n.2 Rabier, Benjamin 35 racial difference. See animal comics; animals; human-animal relationships Rancière, Jacques 183 Raw 43 Raybould, Robin 32 register of action vs. register of events. See animal minds Richardson, Mark (Shark Trust) 163 Ricoeur, Paul 20 n.15, 218 Riess, Diana, and Lori Marino 116 n.1 Rifas, Leonard 18 n.1 Robbins, Trina 41 Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg, 62–3 Rosa, Don 40–1 Rothfels, Nigel 164, 170

267

Index Ruskin, John 74 n.10 Ryan, Derek 115 Ryan, Marie-Laure 19 n.9 Ryder, Richard D. 15 Sabin, Roger 56 Sabloff, Annabelle 222 n.15 Sachiko, Kazama 153, 156 n.23 Saga (by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan) 14 Saler, Michael 75 n.21 Salmon Doubts (by Adam Sacks) 47 satire. See animal comics; characterization in animal comics Satō, Tadao 154 n.6 Sassoferrato 91 scale. See human-animal relationships Schaeffer, Jean-Marie 212 Schiffrin, Deborah 19 n.9, 20 n.13 Schlanger, Judith 199 n.6 Schodt, Frederik L. 141, 154 n.5, 155 n.9 Schulz, Charles M. 38 science. See animal comics; animal experimentation; animals science fiction. See animal comics; animals self-narratives. See animal autobiography; human-animal relationships Serpell, James 20 n.18, 221–2 n.14 Seton, E. T. 74 n.14 sexuality. See animals; human-animal relationships; manga Shapiro, Kenneth J. 217 Sharknado (by Anthony C. Ferrante) 170 shark finning 161–2, 164, 174–6, 179 n.4, 179 n.5, 180 n.13, 180 n.14 Shepard, E. H. 36 Shilling, Jr., Peter 40 Shinosuka, Jeannie N. 151 Siddiqi, Asif 221 n.8 Sierpinski triangle 91, 93 Slovic, Scott 177 Smolderen, Thierry 33 Snoopy. See characters in animal comics; online catalog of characters in animal comics socioeconomic class. See human-animal relationships social Darwinism 150. See also animals

267

space and spatial relationships. See comics and graphic narratives; human-animal relationships species hierarchies. See human-animal relationships speciesism 15, 34, 163, 167. See also human-animal relationships Spiegelman, Art 1, 3, 11, 41 Spiegelman, Art, and Françoise Mouly 57, 75 n.23 Stein, Daniel, and Jan-Noël Thon 3, 19 n.6, 19 n.8, 220–1 n.7 Steinberg, Marc 154 n.6 story manga. See manga storyworlds and approaches to narrative worldmaking 4–10, 19–20 n.11, 20 n.12, 20 n.16 ecocritical and postcolonial approaches to 20 n.17 and the fiction-nonfiction distinction 4, 19 n.9 across media 4–5, 145, 170 featuring interspecies relationships 2, 7, 17, 8–10 and related concepts 19–20 n.11. See also animal comics; comics and graphic novels; micronarratives; postclassical narratology style. See animal comics; characterization in animal comics; human-animal relationships; iconography; iconology; micronarratives  superhero comics. See animal comics swarms 102, 139, 143, 148, 150 Swinney, Geoffrey N. 30 Tague, Ingrid H. 31, 32, 34 Tanaka, Masashi 142 Taylor, Charles 20 n.15 teaching of animal comics. See animal comics Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird) 44 Terra Formars (by Sasuga Yū and Tachibana Ken’ichi) 15, 140, 143–54 Tezuka, Osamu 139–3, 154 n.6, 155 n.9, 155 n.11, 155 n.15

268

268

Index

theriomorphism. See zoomorphism Thompson, Evan 19 n.4, 203 Thomson, Philip 56–7 Tisserand, Michael 48 n.8 Todorov, Tzvetan 7 Töpffer, Rodolphe 3, 33–4 trans-corporeality (Alaimo) 177. See also animals trans-species anthropology. See humananimal relationships “Triolet for Laika” (by Ann Eichler Kolakowski) 215–16 Triolet for Laika (by Emory Allen) 18 n.2, 215–16, 222 n.17 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt 7, 20 n.18 Umwelt (Uexküll) 18–19 n.4, 67, 69, 71, 83, 84, 128, 135, 174, 176, 184, 203–4, 220 n.4. See also animal comics Uncle Wiggily (by Walt Kelly) 57 underground comix. See animal comics; comics and graphic novels Urbanik, Julie 9, 20 n.18 Van den Hengel, Louis 8–9 Van Dooren, Thom 20 n.18 Vint, Sherryl 20 n.18, 82 Viveiros de Castros, Eduardo 202 Walker, Brian 74 n.8, 75 n.22

Walther, Sundhya 20 n.18 war. See animal comics Warren, Karen J. 15 We3 (by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely) 45, 58, 96 n.4, 227–9, 232–3, 241–2 n.4 web comics. See animal comics Weil, Kari 162, 174 Wells, Paul 18 n.2, 222 n.17 Willmott, Glenn 1, 30, 54 Wilson, S. Clay 41 Witek, Joseph 74 n.15, 81 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 82, 217 Wivel, Matthias 46 Wolch, Jennifer, and Jody Emel 20 n.18 Wolfe, Cary 20 n.18, 167 woodcut engraving. See animal comics Wright, Bradford W. 40 Yezbick, Daniel F. 49 n.16 Young Adult Literature. See animal comics; comics and graphic novels Yountae, An, and Peter Anthony Mena 105–6 Ziarek , Ewa Plonowska 153 zoopolitics. See human-animal relationships zoos. See animals Zunshine, Lisa 55, 63