Performativity, Cultural Construction, and the Graphic Narrative 9780367217969, 9780429266157

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Performativity, Cultural Construction, and the Graphic Narrative

Performativity, Cultural Construction, and the Graphic Narrative draws on Performance Studies scholarship to understand the social impact of graphic novels and their socio-political function. Addressing issues of race, gender, ethnicity, race, war, mental illness, and the environment, the volume encompasses the diversity and variety inherent in the graphic narrative medium. Informed by the scholarship of Dwight Conquergood and his model for performance praxis, this collection of chapters makes links between these seemingly disparate areas of study to open new avenues of research for comics and graphic narratives. An international team of authors offers a detailed analysis of new and classical graphic texts from Britain, Iran, India, and Canada as well as the United States. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in the areas of communication, literature, Comics Studies, Performance Studies, sociology, languages, English, and Gender Studies, and anyone with an interest in deepening their acquaintance with and understanding of the potential of graphic narratives. Leigh Anne Howard is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Southern Indiana. She researches the performance of personal and social identity as well as performance methodology and community-­ based theatre. Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw teaches English and Humanities at the University of Southern Indiana. Her research interests include American and Canadian literature, and the graphic novel. She has recently published on “The Role of Talk Story in Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan,” “Teaching March in the Borderlands between Social Justice and Pop Culture,” and “Mary Gordon.”

Routledge Advances in Comics Studies

Edited by Randy Duncan, Henderson State University Matthew J. Smith, Radford University

Comics Studies Here and Now Edited by Frederick Luis Aldama Superman and Comic Book Brand Continuity Phillip Bevin Empirical Approaches to Comics Research: Digital, Multimodal, and Cognitive Methods Edited by: Alexander Dunst, Jochen Laubrock, and Janina Wildfeuer Superhero Bodies: Identity, Materiality, Transformation Edited by: Wendy Haslem, Elizabeth MacFarlane and Sarah Richardson Urban Comics: Infrastructure & the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives Dominic Davies Batman and the Multiplicity of Identity: The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero as Cultural Nexus Jeffrey A. Brown Contexts of Violence in Comics Edited by Ian Hague, Ian Horton and Nina Mickwitz Representing Acts of Violence in Comics Edited by Ian Hague, Ian Horton and Nina Mickwitz Performativity, Cultural Construction, and the Graphic Narrative Edited by Leigh Anne Howard and Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com

Performativity, Cultural Construction, and the Graphic Narrative Edited by Leigh Anne Howard and Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Leigh Anne Howard and Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Leigh Anne Howard and Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-21796-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-26615-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

List of figures and table List of contributors Acknowledgments 1 Introduction, or transformations and the performance of text and image

ix xi xv

1

L E I G H A N N E H OWA R D A N D S U S A N N A H O E N E S S - K RU P S AW

PART I

Mimesis: imitating and illustrating

17

2 “Did you kill anyone?”: the pathography of PTSD in The White Donkey

18

M E L I S S A M . C A L DW E L L

3 I don’t have any ancestors, OK? Let’s just drop it: Miss America and (Pan)Latinx representation in Marvel’s America

35

G R AC E M A RT I N

4 Space, conflict, and memory in Shaft: A Complicated Man

54

C H R I S RU Í Z -V E L A S C O

5 Illustrating mental illness and engaging empathy through graphic memoir A L I S S A B U RG E R

68

vi Contents PART II

Poiesis: making and constructing

87

6 Mapping the nation and reimagining home in Vietnamese American graphic narratives

88

W I NONA L A N DIS

7 “Real men don’t smash little girls”: inter-hero violence, families, masculinity, and contemporary superheroes

103

S A R A AU S T I N

8 Graphic performances in Octavia Butler’s Kindred

118

S U S A N N A H O E N E S S - K RU P S AW

9 Austen’s audience(s) and the perils of adaptation

133

L E I G H A N N E H OWA R D

PART III

Kinesis: breaking and remaking

153

10 Graphical, radical women: revising boundaries, re(image)ining Écriture Feminine in the novels of Bechdel and Satrapi

154

MELANIE LEE

11 Bridging the gutter: cultural construction of gender sensitivity in select Indian graphic narratives after Nirbhaya

171

PA RT H A B H AT TAC H A RJ E E A N D P R I YA N K A T R I PAT H I

12 “There Are No Monsters Like Us”: gothic horror, lesbianism, and the female body in Marguerite Bennett and Ariela Kristantina’s InSEXts

187

M I C H E L L E D. W I S E

13 (De)Forging Canadian identity in Michael DeForge’s Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero J A M I E RYA N

202

Contents  vii 14 A killer rhetoric of alternatives: re/framing monstrosity in My Friend Dahmer

219

A L A N E P R E S S WO O D

15 The contextualization of the Palestinian experience in Joe Sacco’s Comics Journalism

236

CHAD TEW

Index

253

Figures and table

Figures 3.1 America Chavez travels to the past and threatens Nazi soldiers through a code-switched insult featuring the Spanish word for garbage (basura). Used with permission 39 3.2 America Chavez identifies as Latinx while simultaneously rejecting any sort of distinct ancestry. Used with permission 41 3.3 America Chavez is a citizen of the Anzaldúan Borderlands: from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Used with permission 44 10.1 Shape-shifting in the gutter—panel from FUN HOME: a family tragicomic by Alison Bechdel. Copyright © 2006 by Alison Bechdel. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved 159 10.2 Subversive gutter performativity—panel from ARE YOU MY MOTHER: a comic drama by Alison Bechdel. Copyright © 2012 by Alison Bechdel. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved 167 10.3 Subversive hybrid signifiers—illustration from PERSEPOLIS, THE STORY OF A CHILDHOOD by Marjane Satrapi, translation copyright © 2003 by L’Association, Paris, France. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved 168 11.1 Harini Kannan’s view on the complexion of a baby daughter. “That’s Not Fair,” p. 8. (Image reproduced with permission from Harini Kannan) 175 11.2 Priya’s father’s misogynistic attitude to her daughter, Priya’s Shakti, n.p. (Image reproduced with permission from Ram Devineni) 180

x  Figures and table 11.3 Priya’s words to change the society. Priya’s Shakti, n.p. (Image reproduced with permission from Ram Devineni) 182 13.1 Sticks’s father’s re-election poster from Michael DeForge’s Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero, Drawn & Quarterly, 2017.  Used with permission from Drawn & Quarterly 206 13.2 Sticks’s gravestone from Michael DeForge’s Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero, Drawn & Quarterly, 2017.  Used with permission from Drawn & Quarterly 215

Table 10.1 Mapping Transgression in the Gutter 158

Contributors

Sara Austin is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Miami University. Her work investigates bodies and identity in children’s and young adult media and culture. In addition to co-editing the 2016 special issue of the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly on genre and African American children’s literature, she has published articles in Transformative Works and Cultures, The Lion and the Unicorn, The Looking Glass: New Perspectives in Children’s Literature, and The Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics. Her forthcoming book examines monsters in children’s media as metaphors for bodily difference and as agents of cultural change. Alissa Burger is an Assistant Professor of English and Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at Culver-Stockton College. She teaches courses in research, writing, and literature. She is the author of Teaching Stephen King: Horror, The Supernatural, and New Approaches to Literature (Palgrave, 2016) and The Wizard of Oz as American Myth: A Critical Study of Six Versions of the Story, 1900–2007 (McFarland, 2012), and the editor of Teaching Graphic Novels in the English Classroom: Pedagogical Possibilities of Multimodal Literacy Engagement (Palgrave, 2017). Partha Bhattacharjee is Assistant Professor of English at the Amity Institute of English Studies and Research at Amity University in Patna, India. In 2012 and 2016, respectively, he completed his MA and MPhil from The University of Burdwan, Burdwan, India. His research interests include memory and postmemory, Trauma Studies, popular fiction, and graphic narratives. He has also presented papers which focus on gender sensitivity, memory, trauma, and history of graphic narratives at conferences in India. Melissa M. Caldwell received her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in English Literature with a focus on Early Modern Literature. She currently works as an Associate Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University, where she teaches classes on the Renaissance and war literature. Her research interests include ethics and literature, hybridity in literary-philosophical texts, and the relationship

xii Contributors between word and image in literature. Her most recent publication is Skepticism and Belief in Early Modern England: The Reformation of Moral Value (Routledge, 2016). Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw is Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern Indiana. She has over thirty years of teaching experience at the undergraduate and graduate level, including courses in the graphic novel. Her research interests include modern American and Canadian fiction as well as graphic narratives. She has recently published and presented on Marguerite Abouet’s Aya and John Lewis’s March. She earned her PhD in English at Southern Illinois University. Leigh Anne Howard,  Professor of Communication Studies and Graduate Director of Communication at the University of Southern Indiana, studies the performance of personal and social identity as well as performance methodology. She has published articles in journals including Text and Performance Quarterly, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Communication Education, American Behavioral Scientist, Journal of Intercultural Communication (formerly World Communication Journal), and Journal of Fandom Studies. She earned her PhD in Speech Communication from Louisiana State University. Winona Landis received her PhD in English with a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Miami University (Ohio). Her work has been published in South Asian Popular Culture, Continuum: Journal of Media and Culture, and the anthology Food, Feminisms, Rhetorics (Southern Illinois UP, 2017). Her dissertation, entitled “Illustrating Empire: Race, Gender, and Visuality in Contemporary Asian American Literary Culture,” analyzes graphic narratives and the use of visuality in transnational Asian American media and literature. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor, Asian/Asian American Studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Melanie Lee earned her PhD in rhetoric and composition, and a graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from Ohio University. As Associate Professor of English and Affiliated Associate Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Southern Indiana, she studies the social construction of masculinized L/logos and its impacts. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in digital and professional writing, rhetoric and composition, histories of rhetoric, writing pedagogies, theories, and Gender Studies. Recent research includes her co-authored chapter, “Toward a Researcherly Ethos: Building Authority with Inquiry in Information Literacy and Writing,” in Teaching Information Literacy and Writing Studies Volume 2: ­Upper-Level and Graduate Courses (Purdue University Press, 2019) and “Masculinities: More Rhetorical Questions than Answers” in the Companion to Gender Studies (Wiley, forthcoming).

Contributors  xiii Grace Martin is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Bridgewater College in Virginia. Her academic research focuses on posthumanism in Latin American science fiction, although her scholarly interests extend to all fantasy and speculative genres. Martin has also developed and taught first-year seminars on superheroes and intersectional identities. Alane L. Presswood is Director of Forensics at West Chester University. She earned her doctorate in Rhetoric and Public Culture from Ohio University in 2017. Her research generally focuses on the intersections of feminism, digital media, and public address, with occasionally forays into the gothic or superhero genres. Jamie Ryan is a PhD candidate in English Literature at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He studies sports literature and gender, and his thesis is on women’s hockey narratives. His research interests include Canadian nationalism and national myths in sport as well as gender, queer theory, and graphic novels. Chris Ruíz-Velasco is an Associate Professor in the English, Comparative Literature, and Linguistics Department at California State University, Fullerton. His current work is focused on graphic novels, crime fiction, and the work of Chester Himes and Walter Mosley. Among Ruíz-Velasco’s publications are “‘Lost in these Damn White Halls’: Power and Masculinity in Walter Mosley’s Fiction” in Midwest Quarterly and “Order Out of Chaos: Whiteness, White Supremacy, and Thomas Dixon Jr.” in College Literature. Chad Tew  is Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Southern Indiana. His research interests include media ethics and new technologies. His PhD is from Indiana University. Priyanka Tripathi is an Assistant Professor of English at Indian Institute of Technology Patna. Her PhD dissertation in 2011 from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur was titled “Sexual is Political: Gender, Body and Language in Indian Women’s Short Fiction in English.” She has published with Muse India, IUP Journal of English Studies, Atlantic Literary Review, and The Commonwealth Review. She works in the area of Indian writing in English, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and literary censorship. Michelle D. Wise attended the University of South Alabama in Mobile, where she received her BA and MA in English. After moving to Nashville, TN, she pursued her doctoral degree and graduated with her PhD in English from Middle Tennessee State University. Her areas of study are Film Studies and Victorian literature; however, her research interests vary across several academic areas of study, such as Gothic Studies, children’s literature, comics and graphic novels, popular culture, and Women’s Studies.

Acknowledgments

We have thought about this book for several years, and we owe thanks to many for their help and faith as we have worked to realize its publication. Perhaps our most heartfelt thanks go to the contributors to the issue. Our colleagues patiently worked long and hard with us to situate this creative experience as a dialogue about our work and the potential of graphic narratives, and we appreciate their willingness to engage with us. We also appreciate the support of the Modern Language Association of America, University of Michigan Press, and Taylor & Francis Group for the use of quotes appearing on the part pages: “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative,” by Hillary Chute, published in PMLA, vol. 123, no. 2, pp. 452–465. Used with permission from the Modern Language Association of America; Dwight Conquergood, Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis, Ed. E. Patrick Johnson. University of Michigan Press, 2012. Used with permission; and “Ethnography, Rhetoric, and Performance” by Dwight Conquergood in Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1992, copyright © National Communication Association, reprinted by permission of Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group, www.tandfonline.com on behalf of The National Communication Association. We owe gratitude to others who were particularly helpful along the way. We recognize Matthew Smith and Randy Duncan, editors of the Routledge Advances in Comics Series, for their encouragement as we started to consider what our anthology might contribute; Alissa Burger, Culver-Stockton College, for her encouragements; Sally Ebest, University of Missouri, St. Louis, and Khani Begum, Bowling Green State University, for their insightful reviews of our proposal; Dan Heaton and Sharon Croft, Capital University, for some last-minute reading and reminders; Laura Tutor for copyediting one of the chapters; Dawn Paris for her technical support; Jonathan Gray at Southern Illinois University for leading the way in exploring comics and performance; and numerous others who formally through conference presentations and informally in the halls or over dinner joined our conversation with enthusiasm to consider the impact of thinking about the graphic narrative in performative terms.

xvi Acknowledgments We thank our colleagues and students at the University of Southern Indiana for their patience and understanding—particularly in those last days before the deadline—when these pages dominated our hours. And finally, we acknowledge our family and friends, who support(ed) our efforts not only with this volume but over the years that make up our academic careers: Matthew Graham, Julia Galbus, Judith Hoover, Diane Cox, Laura Tutor, Stephanie Young, Lydia Reid, Lindsay Greer, Todd Howard, Geri Howard, and Mendel Howard, who always felt a little sorry for those with no imagination.

1 Introduction, or transformations and the performance of text and image Leigh Anne Howard and Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw In this volume, we draw on Performance Studies scholarship to offer, as Hillary Chute suggests, a different rubric for understanding the ­impact of graphic narratives (“Reading” 452). This rubric positions Performance Studies scholarship and its decades of research about literature, interpretation, textual bias, embodiment, transaction, and sociopolitical function as central to understanding more about how graphic narratives work and their potential for social and political change. Both performance and comics—in their role as product and process, their reliance on the verbal and visual, their insistence on audience engagement, and their subversion of a long-established textual bias—exist in what Dwight Conquergood calls a “borderland terrain” (“Ethnography” 80). Informed by Conquergood’s model for the way performance functions, this collection of chapters makes links between these seemingly disparate areas of study to open new avenues of research for comics and graphic narratives. Following Conquergood’s terminology, we have divided this collection into three parts—mimesis, poiesis, and kinesis—to illustrate the three functions graphic narratives have for social construction and audience engagement. From cartoons to graphic novels to manga—the variety of comics, in combination with an awareness of their expressive potential, has generated both popular and scholarly interest over the last decade. Comics has experienced a revival and reassessment in the form of book-length, often more sophisticated, and better produced graphic narratives. Their readership has expanded beyond the young, male demographic to interest people of all ages, genders, races, and ethnicities, as attested by Elaine Martin’s survey of international developments in graphic narratives. This increased readership in combination with excitement about the genre itself has initiated a wave of publications that focuses on comics and their expressive potential. The first wave addressed how educators might utilize these narratives and their unique properties in the classroom at the middle school, high school, and post-secondary levels (e.g., Burger 2018; Carter 2007; Dong 2012). These publications emphasized or justified comics as a legitimate area of study. Because of its hybrid form and unusual conventions, comics had long been considered a lesser

2  Leigh Anne Howard and Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw genre and form, and its value was seriously contested by readers and scholars. For the longest time, the graphic narrative could not be taught in schools or discussed in academic articles without fear of scorn or ridicule, though perhaps ironically they were seen as a gateway to reading and understanding “better” or “real” literature. So, scholars interested in the graphic narrative sought to explain its merit—and potential. Part of the scholarly justification entailed determining what to call texts that include words and images and how to distinguish between the different ways those texts appear and function on the page. Building on the ground-breaking work of Will Eisner, Scott McCloud embraced the idea that comics is essentially “sequential art” (5) or, in a more comprehensive definition, “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (9). Having laid the groundwork for more detailed and complex analyses, McCloud’s definition still offers a solid starting point. The next generation of scholarly ventures is well represented through the work of Hillary Chute who was among the academics who first promoted inquiries into graphic narratives in well-respected journals, such as Modern Fiction Studies, PMLA, and Critical Inquiry. For Chute, “[c]omics might be defined as a hybrid word-and-image form in which two narrative tracks, one verbal and one visual, register temporality spatially” (452). She distinguishes comics from the graphic novel which she sees as a “book-length work in the medium of comics” (453). As a result of the work of Eisner, McCloud, and Chute, among other scholars, we have seen the emergence of an exciting scholarly approach which examines comics through numerous critical lenses or with a range of theoretical orientations. For example, the field of narratology has entered the quickly growing arena of Comics Studies with an issue of SubStance edited by Jared Gardner and David Herman and an edited collection by Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon. In their 2011 introduction to a special issue of SubStance, Jared Gardner and David Herman, ­deploring the absence of detailed applications of narrative theory to the comics genre, introduce a variety of narrative approaches to diverse ­comics and graphic narratives. In addition, as Bart Beaty has suggested, comics scholars have applied the terminology of film, cinema, and other technologies to their discussions of comics and graphic narratives or explore transmedia narrative strategies. Writing in Cinema Journal, Bart Beaty reflects on current developments in Comics Studies through comparisons with Film Studies fifty years earlier. Like Film Studies, he believes that Comics Studies will have to develop its own terminology and “move beyond the narrowly thematic readings of key works and begin to offer critical insights into comics as a social and aesthetic system that has broader transmedia and intermedia implications” (108). Matthew Smith and Randy Duncan in 2011 have paved a path for moving the study of comics forward. With their 2011 publication, they

Introduction  3 call for a new form of Comics Studies (4) that they hope can operate outside of established fields to embrace new technologies and new media. Each chapter in Smith and Duncan’s book illustrates a particular approach to the study of comics through a variety of critical lenses, such as feminism, Marxism, and reader response. Each chapter also includes a sample critical reading. Unfortunately, their excellent book, while addressing Comics Journalism and ethnography, does not include Performance Studies or cinema. We hope our volume can contribute to this critical conversation. By focusing their critical lenses, the authors in this anthology initiate robust, critical conversations about how comics forms work and how they might contribute to our social, cultural, and political understanding. Though some of the comics discussed in the anthology are written expressly as a graphic narrative, many have been adapted from source works of fiction and non-fiction from multiple genres—the novel, film, animation, memoir, and news headlines, as well as other graphic narratives and comics styles. This ability to move between genres and across media illustrates what we might call a “transmedia performativity” in that they can easily cross now defunct boundaries, transform ideas, and challenge reader perceptions. Because of the disciplinary “silos” academics so frequently inhabit, one of our greatest challenges has been gaging the levels of knowledge our reader may have about both comics and performance so that we neither overestimate the reader’s familiarity with those areas, nor patronize the readers who have a more sophisticated grasp on the scholarship in comics and performance. Our intended reading audience resembles our friends who, like us, enjoy reading comics and graphic narratives, perhaps have even taught them and want to find out what others think about them or want to expand their knowledge of graphic narratives beyond superhero stories. We also anticipate an academic audience with more familiarity with comics than with Performance Studies, and so, in this introduction, we review some basic ideas central to Performance Studies and to the connection we are making in the volume about a ­performance-centered approach to the graphic narrative.

Performance, performativity, and the graphic narrative Few scholars have shown an interest in connecting Performance Studies with comics scholarship. Some of this reticence may be attributed to Scott McCloud’s claim that comics is not like a performance (McCloud 69). Two notable exceptions include Jonathan Gray’s article, “Comics and Performance/Experiments and Inquiry,” which reminds us performance is more than entertainment but is a potential mode of inquiry for “phenomena not usually considered performance” (n.p.). The other exception is Lisa Annalisa di Liddo’s book, Alan Moore: Comics as

4  Leigh Anne Howard and Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw Performance, Fiction as Scalpel, which takes an interest in Alan Moore’s work because, in addition to doing comics, Moore is also a performing artist (22). Unfortunately, she addresses performance only in the conclusion of her book when she mentions Moore’s theatricality and his dedication to an “intrinsically performative medium like comics, where the illusion of mimesis is incessantly broken by the blatant antirealism of the lines that intertwine on the page” (164). In both cases, these scholars reference a connection between Performance Studies and comics that warrants more exploration given the similarities between these two dynamic, multimodal forms. One way to unravel perceptions of disparity about the connection between the graphic narrative and performance requires understanding what we mean by performance and what performance shares with graphic narratives and other comics. For one thing, “performance,” like comics, is a contested term, as well as a contested site of knowledge. People use the term “performance” to reference any number of activities: we seek to perform well in the workplace to have positive performance evaluations; we might attend a performance in the form of a concert or other types of staged art; we perform identities of gender, race, culture, age, and ethnicity; we perform in everyday life when we converse; and when we display wit, humor, or satire, we employ conventions of verbal performance. However, of equal importance to the performance scholar is how performance is a process and what those processes uncover. Thus, as Mary Strine explains, “performance” may mean any number of “activities, events, and processes, all of which share the common dimension of ‘restored behaviors’ or expressive (re)presentation of experience for someone, typically for an audience” (312). While performance scholars explore a range of performance activities as components of their scholarly agenda, several shared understandings about performance are pertinent particularly to our discussion of performance and the graphic narrative. These understandings can be broadly summarized according to performance as product and performance as process. Using this frame, we can also see the relationship between performance and comics, and how this relationship expands our consideration of the way comics can also function as product and process. Comics and performance as product A focus on performance as a product—event, activity, staged p ­ roduction— means clarifying what kinds of performance and in what way they function. Though certainly the productions staged by many performance scholars may use the conventions of traditional dramatic productions, performances from a Performance Studies perspective usually look quite different than the plays with which most people are familiar. One difference entails the material performed. Traditional theatre usually means

Introduction  5 acting out the roles in dramatic literature (i.e., a staged play). This form’s meaning is conveyed when characters show on stage what audience members need to know to follow the plot. Performance Studies, in contrast, take on a wider variety of source m ­ aterials—non-fiction, ethnographic materials, popular culture, poetry, and prose. With these types of sources, a performance practitioner can extend the modes of conveying meaning. These modes comprise another difference between traditional drama and staged performances from a Performance Studies perspective. Certainly, characters can show audience members what they see, hear, and experience. However, these performances may also engage in “telling,” a lyrical mode that permits the personae on stage to communicate directly to audience members, or they may use a combination of showing and telling, or an “epic mode.” In these types of performance, one or even more narrators appear on stage alongside the characters to provide additional clues to enhance audience understanding. These modes also present another difference pertinent to our conversation: unlike dramatic productions that establish a fourth wall as a barrier between audience performers, the personae in Performance Studies productions use a presentational performance style that embraces techniques—such as direct address— that acknowledge the presence of audience members and let them share the action. These productions also rely on suggestion through minimal props, costumes, and sets. In contrast to the representational style of drama—using conventions to provide every detail to help audience members sink into the staged scene—performance practitioners stage scenes which rely on the power of suggestion. They establish markers audience members need to complete in order to follow the story or characters and that completion must be made by them to determine an understanding of what they see. Each of these factors establishes a performance event that requires more engagement of an audience than one might expect in a traditional dramatic production. Function is another point to consider when describing staged performances. Mary Strine, Beverly Whitaker Long, and Mary Frances HopKins assert that performance appeared in multiple locations to accomplish multiple goals. Consequently, they explain, performance has multiple “sites” that can function as sites of “aesthetic enjoyment,” as well as a form of “intellectual inquiry,” “cultural memory,” “political action,” and therapeutic practice (Strine, Long and HopKins 186–188). Performances are entities that build social relationships as they serve social functions. Like staged performances, comics is also a product—a work, text, series of panels, and frames and images—usually that appears in print form, a form that might make performance an unusual approach. Because it emerges in print form and is usually seen as a literary genre, comics may seem fixed or static at first glance; this status as text corresponds to a similar paradigm Conquergood identified for Performance

6  Leigh Anne Howard and Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw Studies in that the text creates a domination that distances, detaches, and denies the transactional nature of performance, and, as we argue, the graphic narrative. Comics, like performance events, is subject to a textual bias, one that denies the dynamic interaction a comic has with its readers, or given this performance-based rubric, audience members. Although we see very keen connections between comics and performance, McCloud sees comics and performance as very different. He attributes them with separate reading strategies and mental processes. Although he acknowledges that comics panels look like slow-motion movie shots, he insists film or performance requires less interactivity than comics (Chute and Jagoda 3; McCloud 69). With these conclusions, though, McCloud may be falling prey to the false assumption that “performance” means a dramatic production in the “showing” rather than the epic mode valued by performance practitioners and that requires both showing and telling. Moreover, when one looks at key features of the forms, one can see connections between performances and comics: they both embrace multiple source materials; they rely on the verbal and visual—a showing and a telling—to help audiences engage; they rely on the power of suggestion to encourage that audience engagement; and that suggestion is carefully crafted or balanced in terms of what they provide and what they leave for the audience to provide. In short, both require audiences to engage, like Leslie Irene Coger explains, in a “theatre of the mind” (157). Comics and performance as process For decades, Performance Studies scholars have offered insight about performance as a way of knowing, particularly as an overarching lens to clarify literature, popular culture, and human behavior. Performance Studies, like comics, suggests that “reading” the words and images on the page is only the start of the audience member’s experiences with the narrative and that the “real” work comes not when individuals encounter the written work—words and images—but when they take on the process of analyzing the work, “trying on” the experiences, and decentering texts to include a wider range of interpretive activity. Performers offer a physical display of embodied thinking; and audience members do not just read and look at the images, but they recognize that they must give more to the process by making leaps between what is apparent, what is suggested, and what is left off the pages altogether in order to make sense of the story. To this end, performance is “revelatory,” as it “furnishes,” “completes,” and “executes” (Long and ­HopKins xiii) and as it necessitates to generate understanding. By situating performance as a mode of inquiry, performance becomes a frame that heightens our awareness of events, people, places, institutions, identity, and

Introduction  7 social constructions of cultural categories that mark people and society. ­Usually, performances aspire to some level of transformation. Just as comics encourages the reader to engage, Performance Studies involves a process that repositions the audience from a passive reader who may “skim and skip and scavenge” (Bacon 10) to a key collaborator in the creative process, for without those leaps the performance—or the graphic narrative as comics scholars agree—fails to achieve its aims. Louise Rosenblatt explains that written works exist only in the transaction between reader and texts, or when a reader engages a text. And most importantly, given these two factors, such a paradigm asserts that the most important activity is the interpreting process, or what happens in the liminal space between the physical pages of the graphic novel and the minds of audience members as they bring their ideas, emotions, and experiences to the interpretive field. McCloud’s insights are somewhat consistent here, in that he sees the creator and audience in a ­“silent, ­secret contract” (69). However, unlike McCloud who sees creating “something out of nothing” (205), a Performance Studies perspective suggests the “dance” (208) isn’t about creating something from nothing but rather the articulation of something (i.e., the transaction) that is already there waiting to be completed. This transaction echoes one of the longest-held tenets of Performance Studies scholarship: by actively engaging the text, by drawing on sensory experiences to embody that text, and by using those emergent experiences in combination with critical insight, one can more fully understand human and literary experiences. Both performance and comics, then, set up what Strine describes as an intense creator-audience relationship where both are responsible for generating meaning (Strine 313). However, graphic narratives do not just generate a performance in that space between the pages of the story and the minds of audience members. In addition to creating a site of performance, graphic narratives stand as a performance. Like other literary works, graphic narratives stand as an “arrested performance,” one that awaits its completion by an interpreter (HopKins and Long 236). As a performance, the graphic narrative permits artists and authors to “create and recreate” performances that are “in relation to the ‘real’ world” and that have some impact—aesthetic, social, political, ethical—on audiences (Pelias and VanOosting 220–221). As performances set up a frame within social and political parameters (Bell 35–36), they also form a way to better understand such parameters. These abilities establish performance as a vital and viable way to enact change and to be change; consequently, performance is performative. When Mary Strine discusses the connection between performance and performativity, she begins her explanation by referencing J.L. ­Austin’s How to Do Things With Words, where he outlines essential aspects of speech-act theory, including the performative characteristics

8  Leigh Anne Howard and Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw of utterances. Some utterances, which he calls conservatives, describe things as they are, while performatives are endowed with additional impact as they accomplish what is uttered. So, when one promises one is performing a promise (Strine 313–314), or when one apologizes, one is performing an apology (Conquergood, “Beyond the Text” 32). In short, by saying something, Austin claims we bring it into being, though Strine argues that Austin’s concept fails to acknowledge that performative potential of all utterances and cites Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler for their broader approach to performativity. The impact of performativity points out the powerful nature of performance and its capacity for encouraging social change and standing as social change. Conquergood explores the nuances of performance and its relevance for transformation when he discusses performance as mimesis, poiesis, and kinesis (Conquergood “Ethnography”). C ­ onquergood uses these terms to describe performances that imitate life or to ­reflect the vision an author has of reality. Because that vision is subjective, Conquergood notes the imitation creates a “binary opposition between ­reality and appearance” that may “sustain an antiperformance prejudice” (“Ethnography” 84) because the imitation is acknowledged as a depiction or a recreation which is fake. For his second category, Conquergood draws on the work of Victor Turner to describe performance as poiesis, or construction. Performances in this category take on the role of “making, not faking,” and resemble J.L. Austin’s performative utterances as both are a kind of invention or creation that calls some action into to being. Thus, these performances do not reflect life or even a different way of life; these performances construct a certain way of living or being in the world. For Conquergood’s last category, kinesis, performances take on an urgent, revolutionary function in that they serve as a breaking and ­remaking—an intervention, interrogation, and ­reinvention—as suggested by Homi K. Bhabha. These performances do not construct a way of being; they resist what already exists and serve as a new way to offer alternative social or political action. As Conquergood writes, “Performance, flourishes in the liminal, contested and recreative space between deconstruction and reconstruction, crisis and redress, the breaking down and building up….” (“Beyond the Text” 32). Just as performance can be situated as mimesis, poiesis, and kinesis, so too can graphic narratives take on this type of performativity. Authors and illustrators of comics can imitate and report the world they see, construct the world they want, and reconstruct the world they need in order to accomplish social transformation. Graphic novels take on a mimetic function with their ability to create a make-believe story world that renders people and events with enough details to give readers the impression of photographic realism. With this function, graphic narratives use conventions to depict a story or world, one a reader visits in the encounter with the text. In other words, graphic novels can “fake”

Introduction  9 reality. Other graphic narratives operate in more sociopolitical ways as they may help audience members create understanding of the familiar or problematic. These stories, as poiesis, have the capacity to engage the audience more actively because the involvement required is extending the story to understand how that story constructs a broader view of lived experience. There is yet a third category, however, that breaks with norms and traditions and lets readers see the world from an entirely new angle that can generate political activism. These graphic narratives with their capacity to reinvent stand as Conquergood’s kinesis because they are both texts that illustrate the change that needs to happen, or because they stand as a step in the actual change; they are an alternative way of seeing and being in the world. The goal of graphic novels as kinesis is in the reconstructing that which is evident to something more promising for human experience. By asserting a performance-based rubric, one celebrates comics’ more fluid concepts, which Conquergood also uses to describe performance and how the audience members make sense of their encounter: immediate, involved, and intimate (“Beyond” 25–26). A Performance Studies approach to comics and graphic narratives highlights the openness of both fields of study. Like performance, comics is playful, creative, and frequently ambiguous and open-ended. Like performance, comics thrives on liminality through the openness of the gutter space. All of the comics characters discussed in these pages owe their existence to important social interactions and require reader engagement to come alive on the page.

About this volume For this collection of original chapters, we invited scholars in various disciplines (including Communication Studies and journalism, Film Studies, world languages, and literature) to bridge the fields of Comics Studies, Performance Studies, Cultural Studies, and literary criticism to contribute their innovative and original ideas about the impact of graphic narratives. Their chapters illustrate some of the challenges and opportunities in any cross-disciplinary research, but they also signal possibilities for developing new approaches to graphic narrative theory and their capacity for performativity. Our first attempt at sorting the chapters was aligned with types of social construction (i.e., traditional categories such as gender, race, and ethnicity). However, as the chapters progressed and our thoughts about the way these constructions worked were challenged, we shifted our organization to focus on the performative functions or activity graphic narratives have for social construction. To this end, our structure is derived from Dwight Conquergood’s work on mimesis, poiesis, and kinesis, and the relationship of each to social construction or transformation. As Shannon Jackson notes, Conquergood’s work saw

10  Leigh Anne Howard and Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw performance, as well as its theory and practice, as a way to transform society and bringing to the fore the voices and experiences of underrepresented populations (Jackson 29). We saw the same interest and potential in our collection and in the comics analyzed in each of the chapters, although they vary in the way they work to reflect, construct, or reconstruct social circumstances. We hope this approach opens new lines of thought about the work comics and graphic narratives perform. Part I–Mimesis: imitating and illustrating The four chapters in this section examine autobiographical and fictional accounts of contemporary phenomena, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among soldiers, panethnicity, racialized spaces, and mental illness. The chapter authors meticulously investigate how their respective graphic narratives perform the difficult task of representing politically charged topics in visually engaging formats. Melissa Caldwell’s “‘Did You Kill Anyone?’: The Pathography of PTSD in The White Donkey” examines Maximilian Uriarte’s depiction of an Iraq War veteran’s difficult return to civilian society through the image of a white donkey that is strategically placed alongside the soldier’s traumatic experiences. Caldwell highlights how Uriarte documents military training practices that exacerbate the soldier’s condition. Moreover, insufficient medical attention—accompanied in the graphic narrative by medical data and sample psychological tests—further substantiates Uriarte’s supposition that the system has failed the soldier. Grace Martin’s work on Marvel’s America, “I Don’t Have Any Ancestors, OK? Let’s Just Drop It: Miss America and (Pan)Latinx Representation in Marvel’s America,” focuses on representations of Latinx characters in comics. After a survey of past failures and current successes in representing such characters in comics, Martin focuses both on the Miss America character’s ability to appeal to a wide range of diverse Latin readers and on the impossibility of realistically doing so. Marvel’s panethnic approach, as Martin asserts, necessarily leads to Miss America’s stereotypical embodiment of too many ethnic appeals to arrive at an entirely successful rendition. In “Space, Conflict, and Memory in Shaft: A Complicated Man,” Chris Ruiz-Velasco examines how David F. Walker’s and Bilquis Evely’s adaptation of Ernest Tidyman’s novel renders contested spaces and associated power struggles in the graphic medium. Space is shown to be an active agent in the formation of Shaft’s identity while also serving as a setting for memory recovery. This unit concludes with an exploration of how graphic narratives permit readers to empathize with individuals who suffer from mental ­illnesses through realistic depictions of their struggles and survival. Alissa Burger’s “Illustrating Mental Illness and Engaging Empathy

Introduction  11 Through Graphic Memoir” discusses three increasingly personal and engaging graphic memoirs. Darryl Cunningham’s Psychiatric Tales: Eleven Graphic Stories About Mental Illness, like Uriarte’s novel discussed in Caldwell’s chapter, operates with clinical annotations and medical terminology. Ellen Forney’s Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me is a piece informed by both Forney’s personal and professional experiences. Finally, Katie Green’s Lighter Than My Shadow is shown to deliver intimate insights into her experiences with institutionalization and recovery. Part II–Poiesis: making and constructing Instead of faithfully rendering real-life experiences, spaces, and events— the works discussed in the four chapters included in Part II look at the way graphic novels construct or are themselves constructed by audience members, and in this way, the graphic narratives exemplify Conquergood’s ideas about poiesis. In some cases, the chapters work with social scientific data or transfer the lived experiences of people to the comics platform. Interestingly, nearly all of these chapters also address some aspect of family—from immigrant to superhero families, from the depiction of fictional families in Pride and Prejudice and the impact of slavery in family formation—each chapter touches upon how the comics can depict family, or influence our understanding of family life. The first two chapters in Part II address family, family relations, and the particular challenges families face. Winona Landis examines two Vietnamese American graphic memoirs that redraw familiar geographic places through personal family histories. Landis’s chapter “Mapping the Nation and Reimagining Home in Vietnamese American Graphic Narratives” shows how public refugee discourse can be refashioned to bear on private family concerns and in so doing challenges common misconceptions about refugees and immigrants to the United States, their expectations, and their experiences. Family relationships are also at the heart of Sara Austin’s “‘Real Men Don’t Smash Little Girls’: Inter-Hero Violence, Families, Masculinity, and Contemporary Superheroes.” Austin’s research shows that bonding among superheroes derives from ancient dueling practices. The appeal and pressure of the resulting team spirit are so strong that, until recently, female superheroes also had to embrace the same violent tactics to prove themselves. Newer emergent female characters are performing more communal and caregiving functions to bond with members of their group. Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw’s “Graphic Performances in Octavia Butler’s Kindred” expands the familial connections observed in graphic narratives to include a time-traveling protagonist who, by recovering her family history, also draws attention to the painful intersections of past and present. The adaptation’s graphic narrative style is shown to lead to

12  Leigh Anne Howard and Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw strong empathetic reader reactions, according to Hoeness-Krupsaw. Another exploration of a graphic novel adaptation, “Austen’s Audience(s) and the Perils of Adaptation” by Leigh Anne Howard, focuses on different audience reactions to graphic novel adaptations. Based on each reader’s familiarity with the material, graphic novel adaptations must meet explicit reader expectations to prevent failure, and when the source material is a successful, well-known prose novel much beloved by its fans known as “Janietes,” the adaptations require more than skillful attention to plot but also the careful consideration of audience. Part III–Kinesis: breaking and remaking Whereas graphic novels discussed in Part II relay familiar materials to illustrate how texts and audiences construct ideas about graphic novels and the experiences they portray, the narratives discussed in Part III tend to attack norms and cross boundaries to illustrate the more urgent social function and subversive potential of the graphic narrative aimed at changing audience perception, motivating them to action, and standing as social change. Melanie Lee’s “Graphical, Radical Women: Revising Boundaries, Re(Image)ining Écriture Féminine in the Novels of Bechdel and Satrapi,” for instance, illustrates the powerful textual and graphic devices used by Marjane Satrapi and Alison Bechdel as they depict their respective protagonists’ adolescence and coming-of-age stories. Lee is able to highlight particularly well what can happen in the gutter space and how subversive the outcomes can be. Likewise, Partha Bhattacharjee and Priyanka Tripathi’s “Bridging the Gutter: Cultural Construction of Gender Sensitivity in Select Indian Graphic Narratives after Nirbhaya” illustrates the way graphic narratives can advocate for social change and indeed be the start for social change. The authors deftly demonstrate how one collection of graphic shorts and one graphic novel series, both published after violent attacks on women in India, specifically set out to change social habits and create greater gender sensitivity among readers. Gender issues also dominate Michelle Wise’s chapter titled “There Are No Monsters Like Us”: Gothic Horrors, Lesbianism, and the Female Body in Marguerite Bennett and Ariela Kristantina’s InSEXts.” Wise first examines how the gothic genre permitted the breaking of 19th-century gender boundaries, and then she illustrates how Bennett and Kristantina’s novel series uses both gothic and Victorian tropes to assert women’s authority and to celebrate their creative potential. The next two chapters also look at the way graphic narratives can offer new ways of looking at cultural scripts. Jamie Ryan’s chapter, titled “(De)Forging Canadian Identity in Michael DeForge’s Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero,” examines the connection between nature and Canadian national identity and argues that Michael DeForge uses the graphic novel platform to offer something different. Beginning with an account of five common nature myths in classic Canadian stories, Ryan shows how

Introduction  13 DeForge’s character, Sticks Angelica, debunks these myths to arrive at a new conception of Canadian identity. This ability to reshape identity or audience expectations thereof is also a major concern in Alane Presswood’s “A Killer Rhetoric of Alternatives: Re/Framing Monstrosity in My Friend Dahmer.” Presswood illustrates how Derf Backderf’s personal account of Jeffrey Dahmer manages to lead readers to reformulate their preconceived notions of who or what a serial killer is. Redefinitions of objective tenets in journalism drive the work of Joe Sacco discussed in Chad Tew’s “The Contextualization of Palestinian Experience in Joe Sacco’s Comics Journalism,” which concludes our conversation by discussing Sacco’s evolution from being a journalist with a traditional reporting style to a more engaged and performative graphic style. Sacco creates a “Comics Journalism” that liberates him from journalistic standards in order to provide more context for readers about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Like the other chapters in this section, Tew’s work shows how Sacco fractures commonly held ideas about journalism and reconstructs assumptions about news—content and form. Tew explains graphic narrative’s potential to emphasize the lived experiences conveyed in news stories and how that emphasis might engage readers. Including diverse graphic narratives, our interdisciplinary collection of chapters responds to Duncan and Smith’s appeal for new types of methodologies to be applied in Comics Studies. Each graphic narrative probes into the ways in which individual or social identities are illustrated, constituted in relation to others, or how these interactions and relations often compel critique. Performance and comics share numerous qualities, as both playful, creative, and frequently ambiguous products, but also as processes that thrive on liminality, embodiment, and audience engagement. Both use verbal and visual cues to encourage the development of communitas (Bell 133) with those who engage the texts. Moreover, both performance and graphic narratives provide audience members the opportunity to see how others experience the world, to construct (perhaps new) understandings of those experiences, and to reconstruct that which they thought they knew. Thus, graphic narratives, like performances, are particularly apt at effecting change and transformation. As other scholars discover the fertile ground offered by Performance Studies and Comics Studies, as well as alternative approaches to the study of comics, ever more and richer collaborations will offer new and exciting insights that can propel our understanding forward.

Works Cited Bacon, Wallace A. The Art of Interpretation, 3rd edition. Rinehart and Winston, 1979. Beaty, Bart. “Introduction.” Cinema Journal, vol. 50, no. 3, 2011, pp. 106–110. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/cj.2011.0022.

14  Leigh Anne Howard and Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw Bell, Elizabeth. Theories of Performance. Sage Publications, 2008. Burger, Alissa, ed. Teaching Graphic Novels in the English Classroom: Pedagogical Possibilities of Multimodal Literacy Engagement. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Carter, James Bucky. Building Literacy Connections with Graphic Novels. National Council on Teacher of English, 2007. Chute, Hillary. “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.” PMLA, vol. 123, no. 2, 2008, pp. 452–465. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25501865. Chute, Hillary, and Patrick Jagoda. “Special Issue: Comics & Media.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 40, no. 3, 2014, pp. 1–10. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ 677316. Coger, Leslie Irene. “Interpreters Theatre: Theatre of the Mind.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 49, no. 2, 1963, 157–164. doi:10.1080/00335636309382602. Conquergood, Dwight. “Beyond the Text: Toward a Performative Cultural Politics.” The Future of Performance Studies: Visions and Revisions, edited by Sheron J. Dailey, National Communication Association, 1998, pp. 25–36. ———. “Ethnography, Rhetoric, and Performance.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 78, 1992, pp. 80–123. Derbel, Emira. Iranian Women in the Memoir: Comparing Reading ­L olita in Tehran and Persepolis (1) and (2). Cambridge Scholars, 2017. ProQuest, https://login.lib-proxy.usi.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com / docview/1920314506?accountid=14752. Di Liddo, Annalisa. Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as ­Scalpel, UP of Mississippi, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://­ebookcentral-proquestcom.lib-proxy.usi.edu/lib/usiricelib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=515583. Dong, Lan, ed. Teaching Comics and Graphic Narratives: Essays on Theory, Strategy, and Practice. Mc Farland, 2012. Gardner, Jared, and David Hermann. “Graphic Narratives and Narrative Theory: Introduction.” SubStance, vol. 124, no. 1, 2011, pp. 3–13. JSTOR, www. jstor.org/stable/41300185. Gray, Jonathan. “Comics and Performance: Experimentation and Research.” Zeszyty Komiksowe 10 Oct. 2010, n.p. HopKins, Mary Frances, and Beverley Whitaker Long. “Performance and Knowing and Knowing Performance.” Central States Speech Journal, vol. 32, Winter 1981, pp. 236–242. Jackson, Shannon. “Caravans Continued: In Memory of Dwight Conquergood.” The Drama Review, vol. 50, no. 1, Spring 2006, pp. 28–32. Long, Beverly Whitaker, and Mary Frances HopKins. Performing Literature: An Introduction to Oral Interpretation. Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1982. Martin, Elaine. “Graphic Novels or Novel Graphics? The Evolution of an Iconoclastic Genre.” The Comparatist, vol. 35, 2011, pp. 170–181. Project Muse. doi:10.1353/com.2011.0015. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Harper Perennial, 1994. Pelias, Ronald J., and James VanOosting. “A Paradigm for Performance Studies.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 73, 1987, pp. 219–231. Rosenblatt, Louise M. Literature as Exploration. The Modern Language Association, 1983.

Introduction  15 Smith, Philip. Reading Art Spiegelman. Routledge, 2016. ProQuest, https:// login.lib- proxy.usi.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/ 1884883091?accountid=14 752. Smith, Matthew, and Randy Duncan. Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods. Taylor & Francis, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, https:// ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usiricelib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=957439. Stein, Daniel, and Jan-Noël Thon. De Gruyter, 2015. ProQuest Ebook C ­ entral, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usiricelib-ebooks/detail.action? docID=2035737. Strine, Mary S. “Articulating Performance/Performativity: Disciplinary Tasks and the Contingencies of Practice.” Communication: Views from the Helm for the 21st Century, edited by Judith S. Trent, Allyn and Bacon, 1998, pp. 312–317. Strine, Mary S., Beverly Whitaker Long, and Mary Frances HopKins. ­“Research in Interpretation and Performance Studies: Trends, Issues, Priorities.” Speech Communication: Essays to Commemorate the 75th Anniversary of the Speech Communication Association, edited by Gerald M. Phillips and Julia T. Woods, Southern Illinois UP, 1990, pp. 181–204. Tolmie, Jane, ed. Drawing from Life: Memory and Subjectivity in Comic Art. UP of Mississippi, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, doi:1181938.

Part I

Mimesis Imitating and illustrating

Graphic narrative suggests that historical accuracy is not the opposite of creative invention; the problematics of what we consider fact and fiction are made apparent by the role of drawing. Comics is a structurally layered and doubled medium that can proliferate historical moments on the page … —Hillary Chute, “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narratives” Culture possesses us as much as we possess it; culture performs and articulates us as much as we enact and embody its evanescent qualities. —Dwight Conquergood, Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis

2 “Did you kill anyone?” The pathography of PTSD in The White Donkey Melissa M. Caldwell

The growing body of literary fiction and non-fiction documenting the United States’ involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a testament to the psychological consequences of war in the 21st century. Many novels about the Iraq War in particular take as their centerpiece the psychological and cognitive repercussions of war for the men and women who fight and survive it. They document what Cathy Caruth calls a kind of “double telling,” or “the oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of death and the unbearable nature of its survival” (Caruth 7). The U.S. government has just begun to develop a more adequate response to the high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), “the most common and least visible of wounds” (Finley 2), in Iraq War veterans. While 30,000 Americans received physical wounds in Iraq, over 120,000 have been diagnosed with PTSD (Finley 2). As staggering as these numbers are, they do not take into account the many veterans who are unaware of the signs and symptoms of PTSD or who refuse to admit that they have PTSD at all (Moore 9–20). These invisible wounds often lead to survivor’s guilt for military personnel, as many wish they had a physical wound to replace or at least to accompany the psychological one. In other words, one of the greatest sources of pain that accompanies the disorder is the sense of its invisibility. Given the high rate of PTSD, it is not surprising that many texts about the Iraq War are also narratives of illness—most especially, the consequences of the psychological shrapnel that is not so easily dislodged or recognized. However, the same cannot be said of war comics, where the adventure of war, the spectacle of sheer violence, and political satire have taken precedence over examinations of what Gary Trudeau calls “the war within.” Maximilian Uriarte’s graphic novel The White Donkey (2016) breaks rank with this tradition of graphic war literature as it explores the horrors of war through the very things that defy representation: the trauma of warfare and the development of PTSD as experienced by one Marine. Although War Studies and Trauma Studies have long been connected, the significant place that comics can have in engineering a larger conversation about war, its effect on veterans,

PTSD in The White Donkey  19 and civilians’ attitudes toward their relationship to war and veterans has been less explored. As a medium that depends upon the reader to fill in hermeneutic gaps, the graphic novel helps the reader get closer to understanding the psychological effects of combat. Although postmodern war novelists such Tim O’Brien have done much to destabilize war narratives and in doing so explore the epistemic and ethical complexities of modern warfare, the form of the graphic novel is particularly well suited to call attention to and ultimately bridge this epistemic divide between the reader and the subject. In addition to depicting the traumatic event itself, The White Donkey suggests just what an agile mechanism comics can be for training both veterans and civilians to recognize and respond to PTSD. Both the trauma of war and the experience of PTSD resist authentic representation, but Uriarte uses the graphic form in order to push the reader beyond the barrier of this untranslatability. When Maximilian Uriarte began writing Terminal Lance as an online comic directed primarily toward members of the Marine Corps in 2010, he was serving his second tour in Iraq as a Marine. While Terminal Lance garnered a large online following, only after Uriarte returned to civilian life did he decide to turn the serial comic into a graphic novel. In its original form, Uriarte’s comics may have served a “largely marginalized community” (Versaci 2), but in reimagining the online comic into a graphic novel, Uriarte purposefully widened his readership by folding in basic explanations of specialized military terminology much like graphic medical texts make accessible more specialized lexicons of disease (Williams, “Iconography of Illness” 129). The resulting work not only more accurately reflects one Marine’s experience of the Iraq War, but it also makes that experience legible to a wider public audience. When writing The White Donkey, Uriarte faced two distinct challenges: how to convey the combat experiences of the novel’s protagonist to a non-military audience and how to depict the rapid decline of his mental health. In this chapter, I will argue that the act of telling narratives of war and narratives of PTSD share much in common, for both are connected to trauma. Moreover, in the case of the narrative Uriarte has to tell, both are refracted through a lens of a kind of masculinity that defines military culture in this work. The hermeneutic openness of graphic narratives’ textual-visual hybridity breaks down the epistemic divide between civilians and veterans in order to make veterans’ experiences more palpable, more identifiable, and, hopefully, more treatable. In his depiction of one Marine’s transition from the combat zone to civilian life, Uriarte confronts an important set of epistemic, hermeneutic, and ethical questions about the possibilities that the comics form creates for the representation of war and its resulting psychological wounds. In her recent work on the suitability of the visual characteristics of comics for documenting the traumas of war, Hillary Chute argues, “Through its spatial syntax, comics offers opportunities to place

20  Melissa M. Caldwell pressure on traditional notions of chronology, linearity, and causality” (Chute 4). As comics draws our attention to both “visual efficacy and limitation” (Chute 17), it forces the readers to confront both what they can understand and what is always beyond reach, or what simply is present but cannot be represented on the page. Uriarte’s rhetorical use of the visual elements of the text—both what is drawn and what is left blank— helps the reader perceive the development and evolution of psychological trauma, leading to the fragmentation of memory and the self that occurs in veterans with PTSD. As Uriarte translates the experience of one Marine into a story about trauma and the evolution of PTSD, the participatory nature of comics becomes crucial to the ethics of this hermeneutics. In her work on theories of adaptation, Linda Hutcheon separates adaptation into three different categories: telling (novels), showing (stage and film), and participatory (video games) (22–23). Although she limits the participatory adaptation to video games, Scott McCloud’s discussion of comics in Understanding Comics makes clear that the graphic novel could be included in that category as well. As McCloud explains in his chapter on the importance of the gutter, comics requires audience participation in order for its narrative techniques to work (66–67). Unlike film, which provides the viewer with a cohesive stream of images, the sequence of static images presented to the reader in a graphic novel demands a more active cognitive response (McCloud 65–66). In The White Donkey, the reader is asked to fill in the narrative, often through the unexplained and repetitive gaze of the novel’s protagonist and the use of blank space that seems to have no narrative purpose. The direct gaze of characters staring at the reader asks readers to take stock of their own role in the narrative that is unfolding, while Uriarte’s generous use of white space becomes a visual representation of an epistemic cavern and the ethical weight this cavern implies for the reader. This use of white space both reflects the separateness of the reader from the experiences of the Marine and invites the reader to better understand and participate in the experience and psychological reality of the Iraq War veteran. The textual-visual hybridity of comics makes the invisible aspects of trauma and mental illness unmistakable realities for the reader.

Sites of trauma and the development of PTSD in The White Donkey The White Donkey builds to an exploration of the sources of PTSD and the unconscionably high suicide rates of the veteran population to examine the role that masculinity plays in a Marine’s experience of combat and PTSD. To do so, Uriarte uses his text to document the moment of a Marine’s transition from the combat zone back to civilian life. His depiction of this moment of transition both validates and explores an

PTSD in The White Donkey  21 individual’s combat experience while also documenting the psychological reality of many veterans. Uriarte’s text follows a familiar narrative arc of a coming of age story that informs the reader in a relatively short space about the evolution of Abe, the text’s protagonist. The narrative begins in 2007, with Abe’s pre-deployment training at Bellows Training Area Oahu and the Air Ground Combat Center in Twenty Nine Palms before he is deployed as a part of Operation Iraqi Freedom to Zaidon, an area between Abu Ghraib and Fallujah. The narrative finishes when Abe’s best friend and battle companion, Garcia, is killed, and Abe, already beginning to suffer from PTSD while in Iraq, returns home and attempts to reintegrate into society. In order to signify Abe’s experiences with wartime trauma and the deterioration of his mental health, Uriarte had to come to terms with what graphic medicine scholar Ian Williams calls the “iconography of disease” (Williams, “Iconography of Illness” 118). PTSD that develops as a result of combat-related stress, and, in the case of Abe, perhaps in conjunction with traumatic brain injury, requires the writer to represent both the trauma and the invisible illness that follows it, a connection that is just beginning to be understood by neuropsychology (Brewin 131; Harvey, Kopelman and Brewin 230). The representational elusiveness of PTSD clearly fits within the third of three categories that Williams defines in his work on graphic medicine and the pathography of disease. Unlike the first two categories of depicting illness in ­comics—“the manifest” and “the concealed,” both of which have external, representable markers—the third group, which Williams terms “the invisible,” is “a group of conditions, such as mental illness, that are not inscribed on the skin of the patient…but are felt or produce psychological suffering” (“Iconography of Illness” 119). However, “the iconographic flexibility” of comics gives the writer the latitude “to make visible the effect of these conditions” (Williams, “Iconography of Illness” 119). Largely departing from a tradition of using physical markers as indicators of psychological disease, Uriarte suggests psychological progression through repetition and the use of white space in the passages that document the sites of Abe’s trauma. According to Sander Gilman’s historical study of mental illness representations, the tradition of visually representing the mad “points towards the need of society to identify the mad absolutely” and to have an “instantaneous awareness” of the mad. This impulse, Gilman notes, ultimately obscures rather than increases a society’s understanding of mental illness. The result is a society that imagines the ill as non-normative “Other” (Gilman 48). Building on Gilman, Williams notes in his study of early graphic novel depictions of HIV/AIDS that “visual imagery is important in the social construction of labels and stereotypes as well as in the formation of such cultural conceptions as normality, desirability, gender and disease” (Williams, “Graphic ­Medicine” 72).

22  Melissa M. Caldwell Rather than marginalize or exceptionalize the mentally ill, Uriarte portrays the PTSD sufferer in a way that allows readers to see a collective problem rather than an individual one (Williams, “Graphic Medicine” 72). Using a variety of visual details to make Abe’s invisible trauma recognizable to the reader, Uriarte’s depiction of Abe’s PTSD offers us a more accurate sense of how PTSD is experienced by a combat veteran and by the civilian population. The visual aspects of the text create a psychological intimacy between Abe and the reader by positioning the reader within Abe’s point of view and psychological reality rather than that of the civilians Uriarte depicts in the novel. In other words, the form forges an important alliance between Abe’s consciousness and the reader to give the reader an increased understanding of someone who has combat-related PTSD. When Abe attempts to interact with the civilian world, he is confronted by a single question: did you kill anyone? This question is asked first by a random stranger at a bar soon after his return and a second time a few pages later when he encounters a young family member in the grocery store. The question elicits from Abe a strong emotional response, ranging from anger to despair. In the first scene, Abe answers the question by asking the stranger in the bar if he has ever killed anyone. Tellingly, the stranger replies, “What? No, of course not,”1 which only serves to differentiate between the civilian and the veteran experience. Abe responds angrily to this assertion of difference by perfectly articulating the fraught ethical position in which he finds himself as an active-duty member of the military: “Then why the fuck do you want to know so bad if I did? How would it make you feel if I said yes? What if I said no?” Abe’s response to the stranger suggests the way in which he feels trapped by a question that has no right or easy answer. Abe is asked this question a second time when he meets his uncle and young male cousin in the grocery store. When his uncle praises Abe for his heroism, he prompts his son to tell the clearly uncomfortable Abe “thank you for your service,” a phrase that has been the subject of much controversy since David Finkel’s non-fiction study that takes that name as its title. With enthusiasm and naïve curiosity, Abe’s cousin then poses the same question Abe has just averted a few pages earlier. Initially unable to answer, Abe does finally respond, “just one person,” clearly a reference to Garcia. Uttered in a panel that is a close-up of Abe’s mouth, the statement, however, is made for the benefit of the reader, as the previous panel makes clear that Abe’s uncle and cousin have moved beyond hearing distance. The intimacy that Abe shares with readers suggests a growing bond between readers and what they are able to perceive about Abe’s PTSD and a distancing from the civilians in the story who are oblivious to Abe’s psychological pain. These two episodes illustrate the way in which civilian expectations for members of the military set a psychological trap. On the one hand, killing enemy combatants is part of Abe’s duty as an active

PTSD in The White Donkey  23 Marine; indeed, he states many times while in Iraq that he wants to “see action,” though his claim reads more like immaturity and bravado than a sincere wish. On the other hand, to answer this question affirmatively only isolates Abe from the civilian world, because to perform one’s duty as a Marine is the very thing that defines his difference. Uriarte focuses the reader’s attention on two particular sites of trauma during Abe’s time in Iraq—the first, when he shoots an innocent Iraqi man who attempts to drive through a check point, and the second, when Abe discovers the remains of Garcia’s body after their vehicle hits an improvised explosive device (IED). By focusing on these two moments, Uriarte asks the reader to witness the origins and progression of Abe’s psychological trauma. At times, Uriarte literally makes the trauma ­visible—by constructing dream sequences or sketching moments where we see Abe’s guilt through his own perspective. At these moments, either a literal or an imaginative version of the white donkey is present. In literary terms, the white donkey is simply a motif, but in the discourse of PTSD, the white donkey becomes an example of “positive apophenia” (Morris 111): the brain’s ability to identify or even create patterns where there should not or may not be patterns. A mute animal that arrives and disappears inexplicably, sometimes in reality and sometimes simply recreated in Abe’s mind, is a perfect vehicle for assuming the burden of representation. The white donkey first appears in Iraq when it brings an entire convoy of armored vehicles and Marines to a halt. Standing in the middle of the road, the white donkey is the harmless representative of the absurdity and surrealism of war, as the most docile of animals commands the movement of an entire military caravan. However, the next two times it appears in the text at the sites of Abe’s trauma: Abe sees the animal just before the first time he shoots someone in Iraq and right before he discovers Garcia’s body. In both scenes, the donkey is at once a sympathetic and accusatory figure, as it reflects Abe’s doubts and perhaps even his conscience, a kind of premonition or prescient reckoning with his complicity in the events that are about to unfold. Uriarte focuses on the animal’s eyes in his drawings, which often mirror Abe’s eyes. The white donkey, so calm and out of place in a war zone, is a reminder to the reader of the strangeness and ethical weight of the narrative in which Abe finds himself. We begin to understand the development of Abe’s PTSD when we notice Uriarte’s use of repetition, in particular his repetitive focus on Abe’s eyes, which are unflinching in their detachment after Garcia’s death. In the panels, Uriarte repeatedly draws close-ups of Abe’s eyes looking straight ahead at the reader; the reader is forced to acknowledge, if not actually see, Abe’s internal wounds. Although very little changes in how Uriarte draws Abe’s eyes—and the close-up rectangular panels of his eyes are unaccompanied by text—it is the repetition itself that

24  Melissa M. Caldwell punctuates the narrative and draws our attention to Abe’s psychological state. This visual motif does not disrupt the narrative: rather, it is the narrative of trauma and PTSD. After Abe shoots someone for the first time in Iraq, Uriarte spends several pages compelling the reader to examine Abe’s psychological response to the experience of nearly killing an innocent Iraqi citizen. Abe’s lieutenant reassures Abe that he did not do anything wrong, even though he mistook a civilian for a threat. The lieutenant attempts to comfort a downcast Abe: “You point a gun at someone and you have to make a decision. Out here there aren’t always good decisions…Just decisions. He’ll be okay, the girl was okay. Don’t let it get to you” (italics original). Despite the lieutenant’s support, in the next scenes, we can see that “it”—tellingly a pronoun loaded in its ambiguity—does get to Abe, as he calls home and abruptly slams down the phone when he is confronted by the reality that people at home cannot empathize with his experience or his pain. In the next scene, Abe reemerges to talk to Marines at the mess hall; however, the conversation that takes place is rife with a masculinity that encourages a distinct interpretation of Abe’s experiences. When one Marine congratulates Abe for shooting someone and says, “that’s pretty hardcore,” Abe acts as though he is disappointed not to see more active combat; but when conversation then turns to the beauty of the woman in the car, we get a glimpse of the guilt Abe feels. One Marine asks Abe whether or not he thought the woman in the car sitting next to the man whom Abe shot was “hot,” despite the fact that the hijab she is wearing covers everything except her eyes. Uriarte depicts a characteristic close-up of the woman’s eyes as Abe might have seen them through his scope, and as he recollects them in this moment. Forcing the reader into Abe’s perspective, the woman’s eyes stare directly at the reader. They are both beautiful and full of fear. In the following panel, Abe seems disassociated from his surroundings. When he finally answers the Marine’s question after an awkwardly long pause, he responds, “Yeah…totally,” seemingly just to appease his friend by telling him what he expects to hear. Both of these textual responses are at odds with Uriarte’s visual representation of Abe. The reader knows from the previous scene that Abe is struggling to come to terms with the events of this day and his role in them. Abe’s internal response is underscored by the picture of the woman’s eyes—most likely a representation of Abe’s own memory of her—which, despite their beauty, suggests his guilt rather than erotic desire. Perhaps ironically, Abe may find more comfort in the Iraqi woman’s eyes than those of the Marines sitting next to him as she has experienced the trauma of that moment as well. The second site of trauma and by far the most graphic one is Abe’s discovery of Garcia’s mangled body after he is ejected from an armored vehicle when it hits a roadside bomb. It is striking that in the mostly monochromatic graphic novel using a neutral palette of grays and

PTSD in The White Donkey  25 browns, both this and the preceding scene of trauma incorporate the color red, perhaps suggesting the blood on Abe’s hands (or more accurately, the blood he thinks is on his hands). The image of Garcia’s dead body is the most nightmarish and violent of the entire novel and, as the climax of the novel, is also the psychological breaking point for Abe. The two pages immediately following Abe’s discovery of Garcia’s body are blank except for a dialogue bubble on one of the two pages indicating Abe’s initial verbal response—“CORPSMAN!!!” (italics, bold, and capitalization original). This is Uriarte’s first use of white space as an indicator of Abe’s psychological trauma. When Abe is sent home on a two-week leave, Uriarte depicts the deterioration of his psychological state through the repeated use of white space. Upon his return from Iraq, Abe develops many of the symptoms characteristic of PTSD. His detachment reveals the degree to which PTSD is not just a neurological but also a “social wound” (Morris 47), isolating him from all of civilian life, as he retreats to his bedroom where he drinks for days. In this moment of Abe’s complete isolation from society, Uriarte uses the dramatic repetition of white space to create a kineograph, or a flip book in which a static image appears to move when the pages are flipped. This series of images that seems static at first gives the reader a visual marker of an invisible problem and a reminder that Abe’s trauma and its psychological effects are present even if they cannot be discerned. As Hillary Chute notes in her exploration of war comics, the white space of the gutter allows for “the figuration of a psychic order outside of the realm of symbolization, a space that refuses to resolve the interplay of elements of absence and presence” (Chute 35). Uriarte goes beyond the gutter by exploiting “the fragmentary medium” of comics and using larger white spaces to point the reader’s attention to the fragmentation of Abe’s mind and sense of self (Kunka 122–123). These spaces register the passage of time and also suggest Abe’s psychological fragmentation as he attempts to reintegrate into civilian life. Uriarte begins his kineographic sequence as Abe reaches for his pistol, the motion of which makes him become physically ill. Although the reader does not realize it yet, in a series of images that are mostly white space, Abe gets up to move toward the bathroom. Uriarte draws the back of Abe on the lower right of the right-hand page with only white space and a box that eventually we understand to represent the door to the bathroom. The left page is entirely blank, with the exception of the shadow of a white donkey drawn upside down in the upper left-hand corner of the page. This pattern of Abe and the white donkey repeats for eighteen pages. On the right, Abe becomes bigger as does the box that will turn out to be a doorway; on the left, the white space is repeated with the white donkey at the top. If the novel is treated as a flip book, Abe’s movement toward the bathroom and the donkey walking upside down across the top of the page become apparent, though the reader has

26  Melissa M. Caldwell to flip both forward and backward to see both movements. While all the reader sees is Abe walking to the bathroom, the series of pages suggests something much deeper about Abe’s psychological state. Uriarte’s use of the kineograph suggests how PTSD disrupts and even “destroys the fabric of time” (Morris 32). Whereas “[n]ormal, non-traumatic memories are owned and integrated into the ongoing story of the self,” “unincorporated memories” of the traumatic event “insist on being noticed, and in their insistence, they come to haunt the minds of survivors, destroying their perception of time” (Morris 32). If the reader flips the pages, then the images on the page suddenly start moving, creating a different time sequence for what is occurring; however, if the pages are just turned and the reader watches Abe page by page get closer to the box that eventually turns into the bathroom door, we see time as Abe experiences it: fragmented. In this final image in the sequence, Uriarte literalizes Abe’s fragmentation in the pages with the use of symbolism, visual repetition, and white space. When Abe finally arrives in the bathroom, he looks at himself in the mirror; his face is littered with opposing labels that society uses to define him: alcoholic, boot, hero, veteran, murderer, man, warrior, killer, and lost. Superimposed over his face in capital red letters is the question “Have you killed anyone?” As Abe looks directly in the mirror, Uriarte pictures Abe looking straight at the reader. It is clear that the reader—and society at large and how it treats veterans—is the mirror. The guilt and loss Abe feels is indeed the collective guilt and loss of a nation. Uriarte’s point seems to be that the question “Have you killed anyone?” applies just as much to Abe as it does to civilians reading his novel. Although the reader cannot directly experience Abe’s trauma or his PTSD, the reader can sit with eighteen nearly blank pages either to try to fill in that blank or simply to recognize and confront the untranslatable. Within this white space, the reader may come as close as possible to being a “participant and coowner of the traumatic event” (Leys 269).

Veteran suicide and the failure of the screening process In addition to depicting the sites of Abe’s trauma and its psychological after effects, Uriarte also examines how mental illness so often goes undetected once military personnel leave active combat. Both the development and the invisibility of Abe’s PTSD are directly connected to a set of expectations and reflected in the culture of the Marines, the post-­ deployment screening process, and the attitudes of the civilian population as they are portrayed in the graphic novel. In his afterword to the novel, Uriarte writes that he “wanted to tell a story about the existential crisis of the military experience, and what it means to enlist during a time of war.” Resisting the tendency toward generalization, Uriarte’s

PTSD in The White Donkey  27 story points to the necessity of authenticity when telling a war story: “Enlisting in the military is an intensely personal experience, and it is one that few stories attempt to tackle. I didn’t want to tell a story about the Iraq war, or combat, or valor, or patriotism. I wanted to tell a story about a Marine and what it all meant to him.” Abe’s voice in this text has nearly the power of an autobiographical comic (El Refaie 137); in this case, one that documents the genesis and evolution of mental illness. The specificity of this narrative “achieve[s its] power by emphasizing the personal impact of a disease, inviting the reader to consider the individual sufferer….thus invoking empathy and identification” (Williams, “Graphic Medicine” 73). In the epigraph of the novel, Uriarte emphasizes his intent to use this text to address the startling statistics on veteran suicide, that is, “to tell the story of what might drive a Marine to put a gun to his head.” As Versaci has noted in his discussion of the history of comics, war comics has often been a place to subvert dominant narratives, largely because historically they have flown under the radar of regulation. While the film industry has frequently been a mechanism of wartime propaganda showing bloodless deaths, smiles of GIs heading home, and sanitized celebrations of American military might and heroism, war comics has often offered a more complex view of America’s wartime efforts, at times even eliciting sympathy for the “enemy” (Versaci 142–153). Although certainly not adversarial to the military, The White Donkey does employ stereotypes to highlight a kind of toxic masculinity that lays the groundwork for a culture of underreported psychological trauma. In doing so, Uriarte illustrates the degree to which “the biological dimensions and medical understandings” of mental illness “cannot easily be extricated from the socio-cultural settings in which they are known and experienced” (Lupton 173). Uriarte’s unflinching exploration of mental health issues in veterans seeks to undermine a culture of masculinity that has heretofore dominated the conversation—which is to say, stifled the ­conversation—about veterans’ psychological needs. After Abe returns to his hometown, he experiences flashbacks and dreams, both of which neurobiologists consider “retraumatizing” in ways that may explain the increased suicide rates among the veteran population even after they have returned to the safe environment of a civilian life (Caruth 63). Graphic medicine has many uses, but perhaps the most important one is in the way it brings the patient and the patient’s experience of illness back into focus by reclaiming power from physicians and the medical establishment (Williams, “Graphic Medicine” 74). The significance of this shift is not one about arbitrary and unfair distribution of power; rather, the significance comes in creating greater understanding between doctor and patient, and between the disease sufferer and the non-sufferer. Such a shift has the potential to realign treatment plans and protocols in ways that may ultimately produce more

28  Melissa M. Caldwell effective treatment. In the case of PTSD and veterans, comics can be used to educate both the sufferer and the society in which he or she lives. Although the military has improved considerably in educating veterans about PTSD, stigma associated with PTSD prevents untold numbers of veterans from seeking help. Moreover, the screening methods used by the military have proven problematic. According to one study, “fewer than 8 percent of veterans seeking help one year after their return were referred by the screening program, and fewer than 20 percent of those who did report mental health problems on the survey were referred to a mental health professional” (Paulson and Krippner xiii). Uriarte lays bare the inadequacies of this screening process by using an ironic sequence of images. The interplay between the verbal and visual elements of these pages foregrounds the beginnings of Abe’s disassociation and reveals how someone suffering from combat-related PTSD might elude diagnostic assessments so easily. Uriarte shows us that people are not slipping through the cracks, but rather they are falling through the gaping chasm of an ineffective screening process. The way in which the military attempts to address suicide and the connection between suicide and PTSD is emphasized early in the text. While sitting around smoking, waiting for another dreaded brief about Iraq, Garcia jokes, “Hey, at least it’s not another suicide awareness brief” (bold and italics original). Garcia’s jest is all the more striking since he is by far the most self-aware and psychologically sensitive character in the novel. Garcia’s response makes clear that the repetitiveness of suicide awareness training is just a matter of course. In the next panels, which bleed into each other vertically, a Marine named Stephens comes on the scene and laments how strange being back home feels to him now: “It’s nice but it sucks, too, you know? It’s so hard to relate to any of my friends anymore, my life is so different now. Shit, it’s probably going to be even worse when we come back from Iraq too.” This panel, which overtly juxtaposes a discussion of suicide with this sense of post-deployment isolation, foreshadows the sense of disorientation and disconnection that Abe will face when he returns from Iraq after the death of Garcia. This juxtaposition highlights the contradiction between a pervasive dismissiveness toward mental illness and recognizes the isolation and disconnection from society as immanent threats. Moreover, this short vignette may even suggest, as others have, that the form of masculinity fostered by the military may be a significant assessment ­barrier (Moore 19, 24). Uriarte uses ironic sequencing to reveal the ineffectiveness of the military’s attempts to engage Marines coming home from combat in discussions about mental health. Upon his return from Iraq, Abe sits in a large, anonymous assembly hall. Many of the men around him appear to be horsing around or sleeping, while Abe sits at attention, looking straight ahead with unfocused eyes. A sergeant is then pictured addressing

PTSD in The White Donkey  29 the men: “I know none of you want to talk about this stuff, but we need to. PTSD is no joke. Sometimes it’s the wounds we can’t see that hurt the most.” On first glance, the sergeant’s words would seem to be an earnest attempt to reach out to Marines coming back from Iraq, but the sequence of the panels as well as the interplay between the visual and verbal aspects of the panels suggest otherwise. Unlike the other panels on this page, this panel is fully framed and sits within a frame that simply includes a headshot in profile of Abe. The word bubble of the sergeant is superimposed on top of the back of Abe’s head, but tellingly Abe is looking away from the sergeant and the text of his words. Abe appears for a moment to look at the sergeant when he says, “Seeking help does not make you weak. We all need help sometimes.” However, given that Abe has already filled out the Post-Deployment Health Assessment on the previous page, this encouragement comes a little late. In the next panel, we are invited to consider whether the sergeant’s words are really meant to be encouragement at all. In this final assembly hall panel, we see a close-up of Abe’s eyes, which appear at this point to be tuning the speaker out, which may suggest that Abe has been ignoring him all along. The officer advises, “If you feel like one of your Marines is in danger of hurting himself or others, remember this simple acronym …” We never hear the acronym, and presumably Abe does not hear it either. The sergeant’s advice assumes that mental illness, if it exists at all, belongs to others rather than the military personnel sitting in front of him. He does not ask Abe or the other Marines in the assembly hall if they are in danger of hurting themselves, but only gives them the responsibility for looking out for others who may have or develop suicidal ideation. In many ways, this imperative is perfectly in keeping with what they have already been trained to do: to look for the threat that is barely ­perceptible—the IED hidden under trash on the road, the random suicide bomber who looks like every other Iraqi. What this imperative does not do is to ask them to assess their own psychological health. Uriarte’s repeated emphasis on Abe’s eyes throughout the series of panels that depicts Abe’s return to civilian life documents the profound epistemic paradox of Abe being both fully present in and entirely absent from his surroundings. The irony of this sequence calls into question the efficacy of the military’s response to PTSD. On the three pages that dramatize the moment Abe steps off the plane in Oahu to the moment he arrives home in Portland, Uriarte draws twelve panels in which Abe’s eyes tell the story of his psychological state. The series of images just prior to the assembly hall debriefing is the first moment where we can see exactly what PTSD looks like; which is to say, this is the first time that we can visually appreciate PTSD’s invisibility. Uriarte’s focus on Abe’s eyes and the disconnect he highlights between the sergeant’s words and Abe suggest both that Abe is not hearing the literal message of the sergeant and that he is hearing the subtext of the message loud and clear: keep moving, Marine.

30  Melissa M. Caldwell Just prior to the assembly hall when Abe deplanes in Oahu, we see the incongruity between his wartime experience and his return. Uriarte’s drawings heighten the surrealism of the moment of transition from being in a war zone to reintegrating into civilian life. One moment Abe is shown in Iraq; he is numb to his surroundings. Children play around him, bullet holes in the walls are just part of the normal background, and the ever-present danger of roadside bombs suggests the monotony of danger in Abe’s world. The scene and the color scale shift abruptly upon turning the page. Military personnel deplane in Oahu and are met with a crowd offering “Welcome Home” signs, a woman with a lei, and a handshake. As Abe lowers his head to receive the lei around his neck, he looks reluctant, guilty, and unsure of this new alien world to which he has been so abruptly transported. His sense of dislocation and loneliness is first apparent when in a series of three frames he is shown looking downward and uncomfortable in the foreground while another Marine is welcomed by a woman throwing herself into his arms. Then, Abe sits on the bench with another Marine with a wife a child. Uriarte’s close examination of the moment Abe returns home and transitions from an active-duty Marine to a veteran who must find a way to reintegrate into a civilian way of life shows just how difficult this moment can be. As it is administered, the screening process allows Abe to slip through the cracks and return home without identifying the risk his current psychological state poses to himself and potentially to those around him. When Abe is shuffled into a room full of computers and military personnel filling out Post-Deployment Health Assessments, Uriarte launches his most damning critique of the mental health screening process used by the military. Given that Abe has previously punched a superior officer and been thrown out of the Chaplain’s office for erratic and violent behavior, this impersonal assessment mechanism can only be seen as grossly inadequate. Moreover, the four questions posed to military personnel returning from combat are absurd. In the first panel, Uriarte reveals the first of three yes/no questions posed by the assessment: Have you ever had any experience that was so frightening, horrible, or upsetting that, in the past month, you: A Have had nightmares about it or thought about it when you did not want to? B Tried hard not to think about it or went out of your way to avoid situations that remind you of it? C Were constantly on your guard, watchful or easily startled? Abe clicks “no” for all three of these questions, which are screening him for symptoms of PTSD. Nevertheless, in the coming pages, we will see Abe being plagued by nightmares and using alcohol and other forms

PTSD in The White Donkey  31 of distraction to avoid confronting his severe depression. In a second panel, Uriarte singles out the fourth question, which asks whether the respondent has ever “[f]elt numb or detached from others, activities, or your surroundings?” Uriarte gives the fourth question special attention, as he gives it its own frame; then, Uriarte follows it with a close-up of Abe’s eyes and then a close-up of the question, which focuses the reader’s attention on “[f]elt numb or detached from others” as Abe clicks “no.” The very questionnaire as it is phrased is designed to simplify—and to judge—a service member’s response to his or her wartime experience. The emphasis on Abe’s eyes when he is in the screening room once again serves a pointed rhetorical purpose. Uriarte provides the reader with a long shot of Abe in the room at a computer station, then a medium shot of Abe’s face in profile, and finally a close-up of Abe’s eyes. In other words, Uriarte moves the reader from the position of an outside observer looking into the room to the perspective of the computer screen itself, putting the reader in the place of the Post-Deployment Assessment. The reader, too, is part of the screening process. The impersonality of the assessment questionnaire itself and the yes/no questions that leave no room for discussion suggest that everyone’s response to war can be assessed in the same way and that registering emotions of fear and horror translates into mental instability. Uriarte shows just how easy it is to lose sight of the suffering and needs of veterans and what the dire consequences of this oversight are. In his discussion of the importance of narratives of illness, Arthur Frank argues, “The pedagogy of suffering is my antidote to administrative systems that cannot take suffering into account because they are abstracted from the needs of bodies. When the body’s vulnerability and pain are kept in the foreground, a new social ethic is required” (146). By closely examining the screening process and making the readers aware of their role in that process, The White Donkey develops a pedagogy of combat-related PTSD that puts the readers in a better position to recognize individual suffering.

Bridging the distance between combat veteran and civilian In Phil Klay’s story “Redeployment,” in a collection of stories on the Iraq War of the same name, Klay tells the story of Sgt. Price coming home from Iraq for the first time after his deployment. Significantly, Klay begins his collection with the story of a Marine returning home and transitioning to the life of a veteran, though the title of the story and the collection seem to suggest that the transition may be in name only. When he returns home, Sgt. Price remains essentially a Marine, and he constantly reaches for a weapon that he no longer carries. He describes the difficulty of returning to civilian life and the mental processes involved: “The problem is, your thoughts don’t come out in any kind of straight order. You don’t think, Oh, I did A, then B, then C, then D. You try to

32  Melissa M. Caldwell think about home, then you’re in the torture house” (2). When Price is first reunited with his wife Cheryl, he kisses her because “I figured that was what I was suppose [sic] to do” (8). Klay also focuses on the tentative communication between the two. When Cheryl innocently asks Price, “How are you?,” Price indicates that to him the question really means “Are you crazy now?” (8). Like Uriarte’s graphic novel, Klay’s story tries to get at the heart of a looming truth in post-9/11 American society: we have once again asked American citizens to become active combatants and then to reintegrate into a society while eliding their trauma as they do so. As the works of David Finkel, Martha Raddatz, and others have documented, when these service members return, the resources available to them go largely untapped as families struggle to identify and treat PTSD before it is too late. At the end of Uriarte’s novel, Abe seeks out the grave of Garcia with a gun in his hand. Sitting at the gravesite, Abe puts the revolver to his temple, and Uriarte once again gives us white space, this time nearly four pages of it, during which the reader sits uncomfortably with the suspense of not knowing whether or not Abe has pulled the trigger. If the true impact of the health humanities is to refocus our attention away from “an implicit endorsement of the practitioner’s emphasis on medical treatment to a critical incorporation of the caregiver’s or patient’s experiences, including the social determinants of health and well-being” (Squier 48), then war stories like Uriarte’s have the potential to serve an important social function. We do not ever see Abe seek out medical treatment, yet clearly the intent of the novel is to lead others to do so and to lead civilians to take a supportive role in this process. Abe’s interactions with civilians in the novel underscore their importance in the reintegration process. Like Price’s wife Cheryl, they are unable to help Abe once he returns from combat, and while the novel does not suggest that this is their fault, it does suggest just how dangerous such misunderstanding can be. It is, after all, Abe’s girlfriend who gives Abe the address of the Garcia family farm, where his friend is buried. And it is there that Abe nearly decides to kill himself. But the story averts tragedy and, in its place, visualizes a moment of epiphany. The reader never learns what happens to Abe after this pivotal moment, but the color scheme on the final panel offers us some clues. The monochromatic color scheme that Uriarte has employed throughout the text alternates between grays for a civilian environment, browns for the combat environment, and greens for training and non-combat military settings. In the end, these colors are all represented, bleeding seamlessly into each other across two pages, suggesting that Abe is finally able to at least start integrating the disparate aspects of his experience into a coherent whole. The blank pages representative of Abe’s psychological trauma and fragmentation give way to a young man who begins to come to terms with his combat experience.

PTSD in The White Donkey  33 In his exploration of war and its psychological consequences, Uriarte leverages all aspects of the verbal-visual complex of comics to represent both the trauma and mental illness that defy representation. Through visual repetition and blank space, he stages a dynamic interplay of presence and absence to draw the reader’s attention to understand what cannot be conveyed in either pictures or words. But in making the reader aware of what cannot be visualized or verbalized, the reader learns about combat veterans’ struggle for visibility to a society that, while it cannot share the experience, can share the ethical responsibility of war and its consequences for its survivors.

Note 1 The White Donkey has been published without pagination. All quotations from the novel lack page numbers.

Works Cited Brewin, Chris R. “Encoding and Retrieval of Traumatic Memories.” Neuropsychology of PTSD: Biological, Cognitive, and Clinical Perspectives, edited by Jennifer J. Vasterling and Chris R. Brewing, The Guildford Press, 2005, pp. 131–150. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Chute, Hillary. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Belknap Press, 2016. El Refaie, Elisabeth. Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures. UP of Mississippi, 2012. Finkel, David. Thank You for Your Service. Picador, 2013. Finley, Erin P. Fields of Combat: Understanding PTSD among Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Cornell UP, 2011. Frank, Arthur W. The Wounded Storyteller, 2nd edition. The U of Chicago P, 2013. Gilman, Sander L. Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS. Cornell UP, 1988. Harvey, Allison G., Kopelman, Michael D., and Chris R. Brewin. “PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury.” Neuropsychology of PTSD: Biological, Cognitive, and Clinical Perspectives, edited by Jennifer J. Vasterling and Chris R. Brewing. The Guildford Press, 2005, pp. 230–246. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge, 2006. Kunka, Andrew J. Autobiographical Comics. Bloomsbury, 2018. Klay, Philip. Redeployment. Penguin, 2014. Leys, Ruth. Trauma: A Genealogy. U of Chicago P, 2000. Lupton, Deborah. Medicine as Culture: Illness, Disease, and the Body in Western Societies, 2nd edition. Sage, 2003. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Harper Perennial, 1993. Moore, Bret A. “Understanding and Working within the Military Culture.” Treating PTSD in Military Personnel: A Clinical Handbook, edited by Bret A. Moore and Walter E. Penk, Guilford Press, 2011, pp. 9–22.

34  Melissa M. Caldwell Morris, David J. The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015. Paulson, Daryl S., and Stanley Krippner. Haunted by Combat: Understanding PTSD in War Veterans. Rowman & Littlefield, 2010. Raddatz, Martha. The Long Road Home. Penguin, 2007. Squier, Susan. “The Uses of Graphic Medicine for Engaged Scholarship.” Graphic Medicine Manifesto, edited by M.K. Czerwiec, Michael J. Green, Ian Williams, Kimberly R. Myers, Susan Merrill Squier and Scott T. Smith, Pennsylvania State UP, 2015, pp. 41–66. Trudeau, Garry B. The War Within: One More Step at a Time. Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2006. Uriarte, Maximilian. The White Donkey: Terminal Lance. Little, Brown, & Company, 2016. Versaci, Rocco. This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature. Continuum, 2007. Williams, Ian C. M. “Graphic Medicine: The Portrayal of Illness in Underground and Autobiographical Comics.” Medicine, Health and the Arts: Approaches to the Medical Humanities, edited by Victoria Bates, Alan Bleakley and Sam Goodman, Routledge, 2014. Pp. 115–142. ———. “Comics and the Iconography of Illness.” Graphic Medicine Manifesto, edited by M.K. Czerwiec, Michael J. Green, Ian Williams, Kimberly R. Myers, Susan Merrill Squier and Scott T. Smith, Pennsylvania State UP, 2015, pp. 115–142.

3 I don’t have any ancestors, OK? Let’s just drop it Miss America and (Pan)Latinx representation in Marvel’s America Grace Martin Although Latinx1 superheroes and villains have existed since the 1940s in the ever-expanding rosters of Marvel and DC Comics, the two powerhouses of superhero comics (Aldama 4), Latinx characters have only recently taken on the mantle of protagonists. With its All-New, All Different Marvel initiative, since 2015 Marvel has made a conscious effort to feature more leading superheroes of diverse social identities. Yet, despite having had two Hispanic editors-in-chief throughout the past seventeen years (Joe Quesada from 2000 to 2011, and Axel Alonso from 2011 to 2017), only three Marvel Latinx superheroes have headlined standalone print series: Miles Morales in Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man; Anya Corazón in Araña and Spider-Girl; and America Chavez (a.k.a. Miss America), a powerful Latinx lesbian superhero capable of flight, superhuman strength, and interdimensional travel in America. Written by Puerto Rican Young Adult author Gabby Rivera and illustrated by Joe Quinones, The America (2017–2018) series has been praised for its profound, intersectional development of a Latinx superheroine by outlets ranging from CNN.com (Chavez) and Vogue (Garcia) to the New York Times (Gustines). Without a doubt, the America series and its title heroine fill deep voids in female; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ); and Latinx superhero representation in contemporary U.S. media. The Rivera/Quinones series ambitiously sets out to correct many gaps and blunders in the representation of these groups, and in many ways, it is successful. For example, the series does not hypersexualize its largely female cast of superheroes and nonpowered characters. The art by Quinones and guest artists showcases diversity in body types, ethnicities, and ages. Additionally, queer and Latinx representations are enriched and broadened through intersectional portrayals that challenge stereotypes about both social identities. Nonetheless, this highly ambitious approach to representation falters in its insistence on strict panethnicity for America Chavez, the series protagonist and main embodiment of Latinx identity. The haphazard saturation of hodge-podge Latinx cultural elements in the superhero, combined with the predominance of

36  Grace Martin what scholars term the generic “Latin look” amongst the series’ Latinx characters, including Miss America, often reproduces common stereotypes about Latinx subjects to the point of nearly caricaturizing them. This chapter will explore the complex positionality of the Rivera/­ Quinones incarnation of Miss America 2 as a queer, pan-Latinx superheroine, starting with foundational data on the critically low representation of Latinx subjects in U.S. media (including superhero comics) and definitions of (Latinx) panethnicity. My examination of panethnic cultural referents in the America series and its eponymous protagonist will illustrate the problematic, reductive nature of pan-Latinx characterizations, which diminish the cultural impact of Miss America as a much-needed Latinx lesbian superhero. Subsequently, an alternate reading of Marvel’s America from a queer Latinx Studies lens will reveal how, despite their panethnic coding, Miss America and her world defy certain stereotypes and assumptions about Latinx subjects through hybrid queer ethnic identities. Finally, this chapter will briefly engage with the concepts of closure, the gutter, and visual/written hybridity of the graphic novel medium as proposed by Scott McCloud to assess whether America Chavez’s hybrid identity interfaces meaningfully with the graphic novel’s own hybridity. I argue that, by and large, panethnic characterizations and cultural referents do not serve the America series (or any Latinx portrayal in fictional media) well, but the intersection of queer and ethnic identities in the graphic novel and its protagonist gives this Marvel title the depth and cultural impact it desperately needs.

(Under)representation matters: why we need Miss America Approximately 57.5 million Hispanics live in the United States as of July 1, 2016, according to the United States Census Bureau. This number is 17.8% of the U.S. total population, making Hispanics presently the largest ethnic or racial minority in the country. Yet, they are underrepresented significantly in mainstream U.S. media. A 2017 study on popular film portrayals of gender, race and ethnicity, sexualities, and disability by Stacy L. Smith, Marc Choueiti, and Katherine Pieper revealed significant deficiencies in the representation of Latinxs, women, and other underrepresented groups in top U.S. films over the course of nearly a decade (2007–2016). 3 Latinx representation is noticeably disproportionate to current U.S. Latinx/Hispanic demographics, with representation on screen across genres at 3.1%, a 14.7% deficit when compared to the percentage of Hispanic/Latinx in the U.S. population. Latinx representation in U.S. popular films also decreases noticeably when a character’s ethnicity intersects with social identities such as gender and sexuality. Smith et al.’s study identified similarly low percentages for

Miss America and (Pan)Latinx representation  37 both portrayals of women and LGBTQ characters, with female characters making up 31.4% of roles in 2016 and LGBTQ characters making up only 1.1%. In the latter category, the authors identified a wide margin between representation of male gay versus other LGBTQ characters (64.4% vs. 35.6%), with very low numbers for lesbian, bisexual, and transgender characters (Smith et al. 2). By these statistics, the chances of finding a Latinx lesbian character like America Chavez in popular U.S. media are extremely slim. Latinx underrepresentation follows similar patterns in U.S. superhero media, including print publications, television, and film. According to Fredrick Luis Aldama, Latinx superheroes of any and all social identities are “few and far between,” with low numbers in mainstream superhero comics (3) and nearly non-existent quantities in superhero films4 (6). The latter is especially significant when considering the box-office impact and massive popularity of superhero movies worldwide over the past decade, as well as the setting for most of these films: the exact urban, multicultural spaces with high Latinx demographic density in the United States, somehow, are devoid of Latinxs in superhero blockbusters (Aldama 6). In the realm of superhero print publications, there has been a slightly greater Latinx presence with upward of fifty superheroes and villains combined over the past seventy years. Nonetheless, these numbers are dwarfed in comparison to the quantity of non-Latinx superheroes, both major and minor, who appear in mainstream U.S. comics, especially from Marvel and DC (Aldama 3). When considered intersectionally, representation of race and gender tends to become even lower for superheroes who are simultaneously non-male and non-white: “female superhero characters are still small in number […] and are still most likely to be white, heterosexual, nondisabled, and cisgender” (Cocca 3). Against high statistical odds, the introduction of a Latinx lesbian superhero into the Marvel Comics roster is, indeed, a welcome and muchneeded development. More astonishing is the fact that Miss America headed her own comic series—if only for a limited time. America Chavez may not be the first lesbian nor the first Latinx Marvel superhero, but she is the first one in whom these social identities intersect (“About”). Moreover, Miss America’s characterization defies conventional expectations for both female and Latinx superheroes through her queerness, which, as upcoming sections of this chapter will examine, is embodied in ways that challenge gender and ethnic stereotypes established in the superhero genre. Undoubtedly, America (both the series and the character) is thoughtfully developed, with attention to contemporary social and cultural issues of note and a palpable fondness for plural Latinx cultures and customs. Yet this attempt to amass too many Latinx customs and fit them all into one single superhero ends up raising critical questions and problems all through the America series.

38  Grace Martin

Pan-Latinidad: a primer Panethnicity—the phenomenon through which “different ethnic or tribal groups cooperate, organize, and build institutions and identities across ethnic boundaries” (Okamoto and Mora 220)—has been used for the past three decades as a framework to study and understand the cultural, political, and social coalitions formed among groups of different national origins who have in common select ancestry elements (such as language and colonization), often in diasporic settings (Itzigsohn and Dore-Cabral 226; Márquez 23; Okamoto and Mora 220). Pan-­ Latinidad, in particular, is often invoked in U.S. discourse regarding political participation (Márquez), marketing and advertising (Dávila), and cultural representation (Dávila; Rodríguez, “The Silver Screen”). In the latter context, pan-Latinidad has come to signify a neutral version of Latinidad that bridges ethnic, historical, and cultural differences across multiple, nationally distinct Latinx identities through specific signifiers that signal distinct but broad, one-size-fits-all Hispanicity to Latinxs and non-Latinxs alike. Dating back to Latinx portrayals in nationwide ad campaigns during the 1970s (Dávila 109), the generic pan-Latinx look consists of both easily recognizable, reductive physical traits and mannerisms that allude to Hispanic origins or ancestry: “slightly tan, with dark hair and eyes […] Spanish usage, accented English, occupation, education, residence, relationship to Anglos, self-identification, and identification by others” (Rodríguez, “introduction” 1). Despite recent progress in Latinx superhero representation, a number of these heroes and villains throughout history have not fully escaped reductive characterizations that rely primarily on generic Latinidad and (often negative) stereotypes of Latinx cultures (Aldama). Superheroes and their enemies, too, conform to the Latinx stereotypes that Dávila and Rodríguez identify in U.S. media and marketing. Even then, separate studies by Aldama, Espinoza, and Risner assert that a majority of Latinx superheroes and villains in mainstream comics represent at least one distinct Hispanic national origin. Strictly, panethnic models of representation go beyond mere cultural stereotyping; they eschew national specificity in favor of ethnic unity across culturally and historically different peoples. Miss America, thus, constitutes an undeniable embodiment of pan-Latinidad: she conforms to the “Latin look,” code-switches between English and Spanish to signal her Latinx heritage without adopting a specific regional variety of Spanish (as exemplified in Figure 3.1); relies on strategic cultural markers of pan-Latinx identity; and, most importantly, is presented as an overtly nonregional Latinx— that is, one who flaunts a total lack of national ties with any and all Latin American countries and heritages. Pan-Latinidad has strategic uses that come into play in the creation of complex, stereotype-defying representation in the America series. Yet

Miss America and (Pan)Latinx representation  39

Figure 3.1   A merica Chavez travels to the past and threatens Nazi soldiers through a code-switched insult featuring the Spanish word for garbage (basura). Used with permission.

it is imperative to remember that this and any other types of panethnic representation and cultural identities are often problematic, inherently reductive, and inevitably exclusionary. As such, these must be understood critically and always with awareness of context and limitations.

This is America (Chavez): superhero origins and main features Initially created in 2011 by writer/artist duo Joe Casey and Nick Dragotta, America Chavez made her first appearance in the 2011 Marvel series Vengeance, as one of the members of the Teen Brigade (Aldama 85). Miss America’s character, history, and powers are developed further in Marvel’s 2013 Young Avengers series by writer Kieron Gillen and artist Jaime McKelvie, as well as the 2017 America series by writer Gabby Rivera and artist Joe Quinones. In the Rivera/Quinones version, America is introduced as an ex-Young Avenger and LGBTQ orphan from the Utopian Parallel, one born of two superpowered Latinx mothers, Amalia and Elena Chavez, who sacrificed themselves to save the Multiverse when America was still a child. Miss America has since appeared in various Marvel titles, including Ultimates (2015); A-Force (2015); Patsy Walker, a.k.a. Hellcat! (2015); Civil War II (2016); and, her 2017 solo debut, America. Across Marvel publications, America Chavez is consistently portrayed as an overpowered older teen/young adult who often takes leadership roles, as is the case with the Ultimates—in which America serves as team leader over high-ranking heroes such as Black ­Panther— and the Teen Brigade. Her superpowers include flight; the ability to cross dimensions/time/space through self-created star portals (which she must

40  Grace Martin shatter using physical force); superhuman physical strength and speed; and invulnerability to fire, bullets, and atmospheric conditions not suitable for human life. America’s superpowers alone set her apart from many female, Latinx (and) queer superheroes, few of whom are known for boasting such levels of strength, mobility, and invulnerability. America Chavez embodies U.S. national symbolism visibly, both in her name and her clothing. Miss America’s first name, as disclosed in issue #4 of America, is chosen by her lesbian mothers as an homage to the birthplace of Wiccan, a U.S.-born superhero who eventually became the Demiurge, the sentient force that engendered the Utopian Parallel. Nonetheless, the name “America” also carries multiple connotations regarding national identity. Most obviously, it alludes to the United States and American identity, which further suggests that America Chavez embodies a contemporary interpretation of what it means to be American in an increasingly multicultural nation. Additionally, her name refers to the continental mass known as the Americas and the various countries and cultures that constitute this region, most of which are part of Latin America and, thus, reinscribe America Chavez as a Latinx figure. Miss America’s clothes—which always include the colors red, white, blue, and the shapes of stars, eagles, and/or stripes—can be read as an overt deconstruction of the U.S. flag and national symbols. Rebecca Wanzo asserts that American superheroes often become models for ideal(ized) U.S. citizenship, and their images come to be recognized as direct symbols of Americanness (314). Furthermore, Wanzo explains, “As signs of both manhood and nation, the U.S. superhero body has paradigmatically been white and male, leaving out women and people of color to possess liminal status” (317). In America Chavez’s case, this trope is complicated by her non-normative social identities: she is a woman, a lesbian, and Latinx. America’s hyper-patriotic sartorial characterization is very rarely seen in superheroes of color (Wanzo 315); the visual styling of America Chavez makes a very bold, strategic choice. Dressing a queer Latinx superhero in the U.S. flag and calling her “America” is rebellious, but not without a cause. She wears major symbols of U.S. patriotism while simultaneously vesting them with new meaning that is relevant and representative of a nation of many ethnicities, many immigrant cultural legacies, and a significant Latinx population.

The Everylatinx isn’t technically Latinx? Problematic Pan-Latinidad in America In multiple interviews, writer Gabby Rivera has expressed ambivalence over Miss America’s ethnic and cultural identity. On the one hand, the author rejects the idea of America Chavez as generic: “Exploring America’s Latinx identity is going to be one of the most thoughtful elements of America. I’m so ready to explore this with her because

Miss America and (Pan)Latinx representation  41 right now, America’s like ‘generic Latinx’” (Rivera, Interview with C. Pulliam-Moore). Similarly, Rivera asserts that Latinx heritage is complex and that exploring the issue in America will not be straightforward nor overly simplified: “[the series] is definitely going to tackle America’s ancestry and ethnicity. But it won’t be as neat as some folks might want it to be. For me, being Latina is really damn complicated, especially when it comes to tracing my roots” (Rivera, Interview with D. Betancourt). On the other hand, Rivera strongly favors a characterization of Miss America that is beyond distinct Latin American national origins to create a post-Latinx identity, illustrated clearly in the dialogue in Figure 3.2. This pan-Latinx, post-Latinx positioning of Miss America becomes a double-edged sword. The attempt to deconstruct identity binaries such as Anglo vs. Latinx in America is successful on certain levels, but doing so through panethnic characterizations and tropes ends up reinscribing Latinx stereotypes long embedded in U.S. superhero (and popular) media.

Figure 3.2  A  merica Chavez identifies as Latinx while simultaneously rejecting any sort of distinct ancestry. Used with permission.

42  Grace Martin By rejecting distinct regional markers, America Chavez’s Latinx identity must be signaled through visuals, language, and customs that unmistakably denote Latinidad to readers. Without fail, the generic “Latin look”—as defined by Latinx scholars cited at the beginning of this ­chapter—takes center stage: America Chavez has curly, voluminous dark hair, light brown skin, brown eyes, full lips (generally colored red), bold eyebrows, and facial features that code her as non-white (an angular, tall nose unlike the button noses of most white superheroines, a pronounced widow’s peak and short “sideburn” hair). The generic “Latin look” extends to other Latinx characters in America, such as America’s mothers and grandmother, the Chavez Guerrillas (a group of teen Latinx girls from Planet Maltixa that idolize America Chavez) and the majority of the women from America’s home world, Planeta Fuertona and the Utopian Parallel, who follow the dark-haired, dark-eyed, light brown skin model. However, body types in America are very diverse and escape traditional stereotypes for women in comics. We see women, mostly women of color, of all ages, shapes, and sizes populating the pages of the Rivera/Quinones series. Similarly, America Chavez is drawn in a non-voluptuous way, which is unusual for both a Latinx character and a female superhero. Her body type is closer to that of a female boxer than to the traditional hourglass-shaped bodies of high-profile Latinx stars in U.S. media, such as Jennifer Lopez, Salma Hayek, and Sofia Vergara. There is a potential danger of reproducing the “brawns vs. brains” stereotype when imbuing superheroes of color with superhuman strength, especially in the case of Latinx and African-American superheroes (Aldama 27; Gateward and Jennings 5). Miss America, despite flaunting outstanding physical force and the physique of a fighter, confronts this stereotype through art and writing that depict her as a multi-layered, thoughtful, rational hero who does not succumb to rage5 and is driven by a moral and identity search—for social justice and for her own sense of self—rather than by instincts. Beyond looks, America Chavez’s post-Latinx representation becomes cluttered and complicated upon the addition of random pan-Latinx signifiers that attempt to give the character and her story extensive cultural breadth but oversimplify Latinx identity. Throughout America, we see constant references to popular Latinx figures such as Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Sonia Sotomayor, after whom the intergalactic university America Chavez attends is named, and Texan-Mexican music superstar Selena Quintanilla. Quintanilla is referenced in jokes (America Chavez prays to Selena in issue #2), the Tex-Mex singer’s song lyrics are the Sotomayor U official motto and also the last words closing the final panel of the America series in issue #12 (“Como la flor, con tanto amor6,” from Selena’s 1992 song “Como la flor”). Mexican lucha libre wrestling culture—a regional variety of the sport where wrestlers typically wear flashy full-face masks and capes—is embodied in America’s grandmother, Madrimar, whose costume and styling are that of an old

Miss America and (Pan)Latinx representation  43 luchadora. Madrimar, like Miss America, is coded as pan-Latinx. In addition to sporting traditional Mexican wrestling garb, Madrimar cooks traditional Latin American dishes from regions other than Mexico, such as sancocho—a traditional Caribbean and South American broth-based soup that Madrimar prepares in issue #11. Latinx items recognizable in U.S. pop culture, such as the chancleta7 and Tapatio™ hot sauce, are peppered throughout the series and often brought up by America Chavez herself. The problem with the allusion to Latinx popular culture is not the number of references in Marvel’s America, but rather the lack of depth behind them. The quick, superficial references give the impression that these cultural elements are mere accessories to the character(s) and the story’s universe. There is an evident back and forth between Mexican/Chicano cultural elements and those of Caribbean origin in the comic rather than a wide gamut of Latinx cultural products. For a superhero strongly promoted as pan-Latinx and post-Latinx, Miss America’s characterization relies too much and too often on the Mexican and Caribbean Latinx signifiers that often serve as reductive short-hand for Latinx in U.S. mainstream media. Even in the absence of distinct regional identity markers, America Chavez’s characterization as a space alien further codes her as Latinx in the context of U.S. immigration discourse, where the word “alien” is frequently associated with (Latinx) immigrant populations. In her solo series, America Chavez is frequently positioned albeit in a positive light as an outsider who embodies difference because of her origins: she is stronger, more resilient, and more powerful than the majority of her allies—and enemies—precisely because of her origins and ancestry in the Utopian Parallel. While this is certainly not a new origin trope in superhero media—Superman and Thor come to mind—it is significant because in this case the mightier-than-human alien/outsider is a lesbian woman of color. There is an inherent risk of exoticization in representing a Latinx figure as a transplant from outer space with fantastic powers, but in the context of superhero narratives—where travel to and from outer space is commonplace—this risk becomes minimized.

Miss America and Borderlands identity: queer ethnic hybridity as the ultimate superpower Although the marketable panethnicity in the America series proves problematic, the intentional construction of America Chavez as devoid of national and ethnic specificity can be read differently: multicultural U.S.-Latinx identities are hybrid and diverse enough to render any attempts at classifying them futile. A useful lens for interpreting the complexities of U.S.-Latinx subjectivity is Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of Borderlands: an interstitial state that permeates all aspects of existence and cognition for bicultural subjects (19). Anzaldúa proposes the ­Borderlands as the home space of those who co-exist simultaneously in  more than

44  Grace Martin one culture—Latinx or not—and feel simultaneously filled and pulled apart by those identities, which she compares to a constant alien feeling: Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one’s shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an ‘alien’ element […] And yes, the ‘alien’ element has become familiar—never comfortable, not with society’s clamor to uphold the old, to rejoin the flock, to go with the herd. No, not comfortable but home. (19) The “never comfortable” sense of the Borderlands that Anzaldúa describes here seems to match the outsider feeling with which America Chavez grapples frequently. This sense of cultural nonbelonging is evident in the panels where the hero refuses to confront her past and her heritage at the start of the series; the nonbelonging becomes especially noticeable in issue #3, when America Chavez looks back on childhood events following the demise of Amalia and Elena, her lesbian mothers. A young Chavez leaves the Utopian Parallel to seek asylum on Earth, where she identifies potential new homes based on the people she sees and how well she resembles them: “I found spaces on Earth where little brown girls blended into the scenery and became part of the family” (America #3, page 4). We see panels depicting a child version of America awkwardly entering a Latinx family barbecue in the Bronx (complete with salsa dancing and sound effects mimicking Hector Lavoe’s vocals in the song “Aguanile”) and taking a plate of rice and beans from Abuela Santana, the grandmother matriarch at the barbecue. In the next panel, a slightly older Miss America sits together in a tree with an Afro-­ Colombian family, the Mejias, and shakes hands with their youngest daughter. Although Chavez admits that she found kinship and comfort alongside the Santana and Mejía families, she makes it clear that she never felt that she fully belonged, as evidenced in Figure 3.3.

Figure 3.3  A  merica Chavez is a citizen of the Anzaldúan Borderlands: from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Used with permission.

Miss America and (Pan)Latinx representation  45 The Borderlands identity theorized by Anzaldúa also depends on language use and code-switching. In particular, the code-switching of Chicanos—U.S.-born people with Mexican ancestry, Anzaldúa’s own self-identification—challenges and bends the rules of proper Spanish and English to produce a unique identity marker: “for a people who cannot entirely identify with either standard (formal, Castillian) Spanish nor standard English, what recourse is left to them but to create their own language? […] We seek a patois, a forked tongue, a variation of two languages” (Anzaldúa 77). Although America Chavez is overtly pan-Latinx, she does share the use of non-standard code-switching with Chicana culture as described by Anzaldúa. Chavez’s grandmother, Madrimar, and some of the women from her home planet, like Salgado, also use non-standard code-switching that disregards grammatical rules of Spanish. For instance, Madrimar exclaims in issue #6 “¡Ten cuidado, chicos! ¡Soy Madrimar!” to announce herself as she enters a room full of monsters via star portal. In this case, the grammatically correct version of the command should have been “tengan cuidado” instead of “ten cuidado.” Similarly, she uses the word “monstros” instead of the grammatically correct “monstruos” for monsters a few pages earlier. In issue #12, Salgado refers to Planeta Fuertona as “la planeta” instead of the grammatically correct “el planeta.” Fuertona Spanish resembles, thus, not a native tongue but rather the heritage language of a hybrid, diasporic Latinx community. One of the major ways in which the America series and its title hero challenge common Latinx stereotypes and complicate hegemonic assumptions and expectations of Latinx femininity is through the overt queering of both America Chavez and the Fuertonas, her ancestors from the Utopian Parallel. Latinx lesbians fit, often, into the very center of the hybrid Borderlands identity because of their rejection of moral and religious codes woven so tightly into Mexican tradition—and, by extension, that of other colonially Catholic Latin American nations—which condemn women for both having sexual agency and straying from heterosexuality (Anzaldúa 19). Cultural and ethnic liminality is blurred further through queerness, which makes identities more fluid for lesbians of color. The queerness that makes up the core of America Chavez and all Fuertonas—after all, their home planet and their kind were all born from the union of two female deities—is perhaps the most significant way in which the America series overturns Latinx stereotypes in U.S. media to construct a deeper, more compelling Latinx superheroine. Unlike other Latinx LGBTQ Marvel superheroes such as Living Lightning/Miguel Santos who have overtly experienced tensions between their sexuality and cultural ties to Catholicism (Aldama 35–36), America Chavez never struggles with guilt or shame regarding her sexuality, as she is never coded as Christian (or religious at all). Lesbianism is established not only as part of the character’s heritage but also as the piece of

46  Grace Martin her identity that is the least confusing and most comforting to her. This feature is exemplified in Chavez’s understanding of her romantic love for Lisa as “home” (America #3, also illustrated in Figure 3.3). This absence of cultural Catholicism in the America series not only challenges the stereotype that all Latinxs are Catholic/religious, but it also destabilizes a long-established dichotomy in U.S. as well as non-U.S. Hispanic media representation of Latinx women: the virgin vs. the whore. This dichotomy persists in contemporary American visual media. Since the golden era of U.S. film and the first U.S.-Latinx Hollywood stars, Latinx women are often polarized as either mothers and housewives relegated to largely domestic spaces or as the hypersexual “Latin spitfire” and “hot-blooded tamale” (Dávila 130–131; Rodríguez, “The Silver Screen” 75–76). The virgin/whore duality, which rests on religious and moral hegemonies surrounding Latinx cultures, depends largely on heterosexuality. Once the latter is removed, as is the case with America Chavez and the Fuertonas, the virgin/whore dichotomy starts to crumble. This crumbling is evident in the America series and embodied in Miss America herself, who neither complies with the virgin nor the whore archetype. Instead of hovering around the domestic sphere and personifying maternal nurture and care, America Chavez is above all a highly mobile superhero who can easily enter and exit any space she desires, including those associated with power and masculinity. Moreover, Chavez is primarily portrayed as a hero who saves and protects but does not necessarily soothe those in need; she’s a safety shield, not a safety blanket. Further challenging the virgin/whore binary, Miss America embraces her homosexuality without being drawn or written as a hypersexual character. The America series includes several panels, depicting loving, intimate moments between America and Lisa; America and Magdalena; and America’s mothers, Amalia and Elena. None of the panels depicting lesbian romantic interactions portray female characters in sexually exploitative fashions that cater to the male gaze. In fact, none of the characters appear to be presented in this manner throughout the entire series. This lack of sexual gratuity is rare and noteworthy in a genre where superheroines and female characters, particularly lesbian characters, are often drawn with exaggerated sexual features; wear impractical, highly revealing costumes; pose in oddly contorted positions that highlight breasts and buttocks; and feature facial and bodily expressions that suggest sexual intercourse, as multiple scholars have claimed in their studies of a wide range of Marvel and DC titles (Cocca; Risner). By not catering to the male gaze, the America series also disavows the machismo—or hypermasculine male superiority—stereotype that commonly permeates cultural representations of Latinx subjects and cultures in popular media. The intersection of hybrid Latinx identity and queerness is further highlighted in the America series through the concept of the chosen family. In both queer and diasporic Latinx communities, non-biologically

Miss America and (Pan)Latinx representation  47 chosen families are often formed between allies and friends in surrogacy after loss of or separation from blood relatives (Heaphy 391; Mejía 1–2; Murphy 164). U.S.-Latinx chosen families often mirror the hierarchical model of biological families, where the chosen family members establish themselves as grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins (Mejía). In contrast, queer chosen families adopt a more flexible, fluid structure that eschews traditional roles and titles for the relationships amongst members who may include partners, ex-partners, friends, community members, accepting blood relatives, co-parents, and others (Heaphy 391). Both models of the chosen family challenge patriarchal familial expectations. LGBTQ chosen families dismantle the heteronormative, patriarchal family model altogether by doing without maternal and paternal foundational figures. Latinx chosen families (especially those of mixed status8) challenge patriarchal familial expectations through resisting the patriarchal figure of U.S. cultural/political hegemony over Latinx communities. U.S.-Latinx chosen families express this resistance by protecting undocumented chosen relatives and rejecting cultural assimilation through communal preservation of immigrant customs (Mejía). We see multiple chosen families in the America series. America Chavez and her two best friends, Prodigy—another LGBTQ superhero (former X-Men member and openly bisexual)—and X’Andria, are one chosen family. The Puerto Rican, Colombian, and Mexican-Jamaican families with whom Miss America spent her early teens are traditional families that became chosen ones to the newly orphaned heroine. The Chavez Guerrillas on Planet Maltixa are another chosen family, whose members support each other unconditionally and share great admiration for—and solidarity toward—America Chavez. Madrimar, America, and the rest of the Fuertonas—some related by blood, some not—intentionally act like family by caring for sick members, feeding each other, and protecting their planet together, as we see in issues #11 and #12. The strong presence and meaning of chosen families in the America series is significant, as it rejects the heteronormative, hyper-traditional familisms— the ideology that family is more important than the individual (Campos et al.)—stereotypically associated with Latinx cultures in U.S. media. Thus, the multiple versions of chosen families that appear throughout the series highlight the complexities of both queer and Latinx identities and add depth to both America Chavez and the support communities surrounding her within the narrative. Although some pop journalistic pieces on the series question whether America Chavez may be considered Latinx or not due to her outer-space exclusive biological ancestry (Pulliam-Moore, “Why Marvel’s America Chavez…”), her characterization leaves little room for ambiguity despite its insistent panethnic standpoint. After all, many superheroes from various far-off galaxies and imaginary dimensions have long served as symbols for major social, cultural, and political values. As Conseula Francis

48  Grace Martin asserts, “We project onto superheroes our basic ideas about humanity (no matter what distant imploded planet those heroes hail from), and they, in turn, reflect back the kind of heroism we would like to imagine we are capable of” (138–139). It could be argued that Superman, from Planet Krypton, is a more universally recognizable symbol of U.S. values and patriotism than Captain America himself. Similarly, Miss America, from the Utopian Parallel, may serve as an identifiable face for U.S.-­ Latinx, LGBTQ communities, and for any readers who may see their ideals and struggles reflected in this superheroine regardless of her fantastical space origins.

A hybrid hero in a hybrid medium: opportunities missed in the gutter This examination of Miss America’s hybrid experience of queer ethnic identity calls to mind the inherent hybridity of comics. At this juncture, it is worth asking whether the medium is well utilized to underscore the character’s crucial hybridity. In his seminal work Understanding Comics, McCloud emphasizes the hybrid nature of the medium, which marries visual storytelling with written narratives (92), thus calling for a unique way of reading comic texts based on connecting the visual and verbal fragments, bridging the gaps between panels—the gutter— through a process McCloud calls “closure” (63). When applying closure to the America series, it is possible to glean certain aspects of the character that are not outlined overtly in the graphic novel. In issue #1, for instance, America encounters Hitler on one panel and reacts in the next by punching him with a smile on her face. Although the reader cannot see or read that America disagrees with Hitler’s politics, closure between the two panels communicates that message clearly. In issue #2, America’s priority on family over fame also stands out in the gutter when she quickly moves on from being congratulated by Agent Carter for her effective fighting skills in one panel to abandoning all preoccupations but her own family matters in the next. However, the overall impact of closure and use of the gutter in America are not revolutionary. On the contrary, the comic appears to follow the standard, straightforward panel transition patterns found in most U.S. and European comics. The 65% action-to-action, 20% subject-­tosubject, and 15% scene-to-scene panel transition ratios McCloud once found in Lee and Kirby’s Fantastic Four and Hergé’s Tintin (McCloud 74–75) also dominate the Rivera/Quinones America series. These transitions carry the reader over the gutter easily and smoothly, without requiring much deep thinking to connect the dots. Little room for ambiguity or multiple interpretations exists in the graphic novel’s gutter, and this factor is unsurprising for a Marvel title aimed at mass audiences of all ages. Also worth noting is the absence of culturally unique graphic ­elements that could mirror the queer ethnic hybridity of Miss America

Miss America and (Pan)Latinx representation  49 and her world. The art style of Joe Quinones, while attractive and modern, is visually closer to American television animation styles than to any major art styles of the Latinx community or Latin American tradition. Thus, the hybrid nature of the comics medium remains largely unutilized for highlighting the cultural and ethnic hybridity of America Chavez.

The end is just the beginning for America Chavez Ultimately, the cultural hybridity and intersectional representation of gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity, not the non-specific panethnicity, are what make America Chavez and her world compelling. The panethnic aspects of her characterization are, by contrast, superfluous and diminish the overall impact of an otherwise worthy graphic novel. Latinx (queer) ethnic hybridity is not only possible but also more effective when a subject’s multiple ethnic and cultural identities are distinct—its complexity relies on opposite, yet defined cultural heritages. Moreover, pan-Latinx media and marketing representations are approached with skepticism and are generally disliked by Latinx audiences (Dávila 197– 198). Although panethnic identity constructions may be useful in the context of political participation and social coalitions (Okamoto and Mora 2014), evidently, they don’t necessarily translate well into cultural and media representations, particularly when they are treated as rigidly as Rivera and Quinones treat them in the America series. All in all, the America Chavez character and her 2017 solo series deserve recognition despite the creators’ overambitious attempt to represent and provide a spotlight for a very wide range of underrepresented voices. America may have officially ended in issue #12, but its intersectional, sociopolitically conscious portrayals of a queer Latinx superhero and her allies are a worthy addition to the roster of mainstream Latinx superheroes. And there is still plenty of room to grow in order to accurately reflect the increasingly diverse cultural landscape of the United States, birthplace and headquarters of Marvel Comics. Yet it is not the end for America Chavez, who has already returned as an ensemble member in the Thompson/Caselli West Coast Avengers comic series, launched in August 2018. Additionally, it is rumored that the Ultimates, led by Miss America, may replace the Avengers as the main superhero team for the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the coming years (Diaz). America Chavez is on to bigger challenges and, possibly, a bigger medium: an exciting new start rather than a happy ending for the queer Latinx hero who shatters through star portals (and cultural expectations).

Notes 1 The terms Latinx and Latinxs (plural) are used throughout this chapter to designate people and elements of Latin American origin, ancestry, and/ or heritage in a gender-neutral way. The terms “Latino,” “Latina,” and

50  Grace Martin “Latinos/as” may also appear when citing sources that used these gender-specific variations. 2 America Chavez also appears as a key character in Marvel’s ensemble series Young Avengers (2013) and Ultimates (2015), as well as in supportive/ cameo roles in various recent Marvel titles. These portrayals of America Chavez, some of which have been previously explored by scholars such as Frederick Luis Aldama, are beyond the scope of my study. 3 This study, released through the Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, is “the most detailed intersectional and longitudinal representational analysis conducted to date” (Smith et al. 6). Although it excludes data from 2011, the study covers 900 films (the top 100 grossing films in the United States for each of the nine years included) and examines the demographics and social identities of both speaking and non-speaking characters. The films in the study include a wide range of genres, including superhero films based on major graphic novels. 4 Aldama identifies only two instances of Latinx representation in recent DC Universe films: a gas station attendant and an infantry soldier in the 2013 Superman film Man of Steel, and a group of Latinx people wearing Day of the Dead attire and standing on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border in the 2016 film Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice. These characters play insignificant roles in both films and cater to stereotypes of Latinxs in the United States (Aldama 6). A notable exception to this trend is the Sony/ Columbia/Marvel animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse (2018), which features Afro-Latinx character Miles Morales—a new incarnation of Spider-Man—as its protagonist. This Afro-Latinx-led superhero film achieved overwhelming critical and popular success, evident in its $362.9 million box-office earnings worldwide and the awards it received for Best Animated Feature Film at the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes, and the BAFTA Awards in 2019 (“Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)” [IMDb]). Without a doubt, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a groundbreaking instance of highly visible, positive Latinx representation in mainstream superhero film. 5 In his study of previous iterations of America Chavez (before the 2017 solo series was launched), Aldama also finds the character to operate in highly physical ways only when absolutely justifiable, never without reason. Ultimately, she appears “not as a hothead but as a Latina superhero driven to right wrongs and take supervillains” (Aldama 86). 6 Like the flower, with so much love (my translation). 7 The word “chancleta” refers to rubber house slippers or flip-flops and has become culturally associated with the disciplining of disobedient children by parents, particularly mothers and grandmothers, in multiple Hispanic countries and U.S.-Latinx communities. 8 Mejía defines mixed-status Latinx chosen families as “a [Latinx] family made up of U.S. citizens and undocumented folks” and includes non-biological ­relatives (1–2).

Works Cited “About.” Gabby Rivera, www.gabbyrivera.com/about/. Aldama, Frederick Luis. Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. The U of Arizona P, 2017. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 2nd edition. Aunt Lute Books, 1999.

Miss America and (Pan)Latinx representation  51 Campos, Belinda et al. “Familism and Psychological Health: The Intervening Role of Closeness and Social Support.” Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology, vol. 20, no. 2, 2014, pp. 191–201. Chavez, Nicole. “America Chavez is Marvel’s Lesbian Latina Superhero.” CNN, 3 Apr. 2017, www.cnn.com/2017/04/03/us/marvel-america-chavezsuperhero-trnd/. Cocca, Carolyn. Superwomen: Gender, Power, and Representation. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Dávila, Arlene M. Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People, 2nd edition. U of California P, 2012. Diaz, Eric. “Could Marvel’s Big Post-AVENGERS Franchise Be THE ULTIMATES?” Nerdist, 11 May 2018, www.nerdist.com/marvel-post-avengersfranchise-the-ultimates/. Espinoza, Mauricio. “The Borderland Construction of Latin American and Latina Heroines in Contemporary Visual Media.” Heroines of Comic Books and Literature: Portrayals in Popular Culture, edited by Maja Bajac-Carter et al., Rowman & Littlefield, 2016, pp. 81–93. Francis, Conseula. “American Truths: Blackness and the American Superhero.” The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art, edited by Frances K. Gateward and John Jennings, Rutgers UP, 2015, pp. 137–152. Garcia, Patricia. “Marvel Now Has a Queer Latina Superhero: America Chavez.” Vogue, 26 May 2017, www.vogue.com/article/america-chavez-marvel-queerlatina-comic. Gateward, Frances K., and John Jennings. “Introduction: The Sweeter the Christmas.” The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art, edited by Frances K. Gateward and John Jennings, Rutgers UP, 2015, pp. 1–15. Gillen, Kieron (writer), and Jamie McKelvie (artist). Young Avengers Vol. 1: Style > Substance (issues 1–5). Marvel Worldwide, Sept. 2013. ———. Young Avengers Vol. 2: Alternative Cultures (issues 6–10). Marvel Worldwide, Feb. 2014. ———. Young Avengers Vol. 3: Mic Drop at the Edge of Time and Space (issues 11–15). Marvel Worldwide, Apr. 2014. Gustines, George Gene. “Adventures in Comics and the Real World.” The New York Times, 26 Mar. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/03/26/books/comics-­ diversity-america-chavez.html?_r=0. Heaphy, Brian. “Families of Choice.” The Sage Encyclopedia of LGBTQ Studies, edited by Abbie E. Goldberg, SAGE Reference, 2016, pp. 391–394. Itzigsohn, Jose, and Carlos Dore-Cabral. “Competing Identities? Race, Ethnicity and Panethnicity among Dominicans in the United States.” Sociological Forum, vol. 15, no. 2, 2000, pp. 225–247, www.jstor.org/stable/684815. Márquez, Benjamin. “Latino Identity Politics Research: Problems and Opportunities.” Latino Politics: Identity, Mobilization, and Representation, edited by Rodolfo Espino et al., U of Virginia P, 2008, pp. 17–26. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperPerennial, 1994. Mejía, Cárol E. “Mixed-Status Latinx Families: Love and Chosen Family as a Means of Resistance to the American Dream.” Tapestries: Interwoven Voices

52  Grace Martin of Local and Global Identities, vol. 4, no. 1, ser. 16, 2015, pp. 1–8. www. digitalcommons.macalester.edu/tapestries/vol4/iss1/16. Murphy, AprilJo. “Homicidal Lesbian Terrorism to Crimson Caped Crusaders: How Folk and Mainstream Lesbian Heroes Queer Cultural Space.” Heroines of Comic Books and Literature: Portrayals in Popular Culture, edited by Maja Bajac-Carter et al., Rowman & Littlefield, 2016, pp. 153–167. Okamoto, Dina, and G. Cristina Mora. “Panethnicity.” Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 40, no. 1, 2014, pp. 219–239. doi:10.1146/annurev-soc071913-043201. Perischetti, Bob, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Sony Pictures Animation, Columbia Pictures Corporation & Marvel Entertainment, 2018. Pulliam-Moore, Charles. “The New West Coast Avengers Are All of Marvel’s Coolest, Cancelled Heroes.” io9, io9.Gizmodo.com, 17 May 2018, www.io9.gizmodo. com/the-new-west-coast-avengers-are-all-of-marvels-coolest-1826110053. ———. “Why Marvel’s America Chavez, Who Comes from an Alternate Dimension, Identifies as Latinx.” io9, io9.Gizmodo.com, 10 May 2017, www.io9.gizmodo.com/why-marvels-america-chavez-who-comes-froman-alternate-1795095927. Risner, Jonathan. “Authentic Latinas/os and Queer Characters in Alternative and Mainstream Comics.” Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, U of Texas P, 2011, pp. 39–54. Rivera, Gabby. Interview with Charles Pulliam-Moore. “Gabby Rivera on How Marvel’s America Is Exploring the Complexities of Latinx Identity.” Splinter, Splinternews.com, 24 July 2017, www.splinternews.com/ gabby-rivera-on-how-marvels-america-is-exploring-the-co-1794038810. ———. Interview with David Betancourt. “Marvel Hired Gabby Rivera, a Queer Latina Writer, for Its Queer Latina Superhero. That Matters.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 8 Mar. 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/ news/comic-riffs/wp/2017/03/08/marvel-hired-gabby-rivera-a-queer-latinawriter-for-its-queer-latina-superhero-that-matters/?noredirect=on&utm_­ term=.8e06c24b2ed6. Rivera, Gabby (writer), and Joe Quinones (artist). America Vol. 1: The Life and Times of America Chavez (issues 1–6). Marvel Worldwide, October 2017. ———. America Vol. 2: Fast and Fuertona (issues 7–12). Marvel Worldwide, April 2018. Rodríguez, Clara E. “Introduction.” Latin Looks: Images of Latinas and Latinos in the U.S. Media, edited by Clara E. Rodríguez, Westview Press, 1997, pp. 1–12. ———. “The Silver Screen: Stories and Stereotypes.” Latin Looks: Images of Latinas and Latinos in the U.S. Media, edited by Clara E. Rodríguez, Westview Press, 1997, pp. 73–79. Smith, Stacy L., et al. Inequality in 900 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBT, and Disability from 2007–2016. Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, U of Southern California, 2017, www.annenberg.usc.edu/ inequality-900-popular-films. “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018).” IMDb, IMDb.com, 12 Dec. 2018, www.imdb.com/title/tt4633694/.

Miss America and (Pan)Latinx representation  53 US Census Bureau. “Facts for Features: Hispanic Heritage Month 2017.” United States Census Bureau, 31 Aug. 2017, www.census.gov/newsroom/facts-­forfeatures/2017/hispanic-heritage.html. Wanzo, Rebecca. “It’s a Hero? Black Comics and Satirizing Subjection.” The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art, edited by Frances K. Gateward and John Jennings, Rutgers UP, 2015, pp. 314–332.

4 Space, conflict, and memory in Shaft: A Complicated Man Chris Ruíz-Velasco

Writing in the introduction to The World of Shaft: A Complete Guide to the Novels, Comic Strip, Films and Television Series, David F. Walker describes his early feelings toward the Shaft—the novel, the film, and the character. He writes, “In an era when actors like Denzel Washington and Will Smith play tough action heroes and save the world from alien invasions, it is difficult for some people to grasp the notion that this wasn’t always how things were” (1–2). He explains that before films like Shaft, “what we got as representations of black masculinity were men like Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson as the docile sidekick to Shirley Temple” (2). As a child, Walker felt a lack of dynamic black role models: “Before Shaft came along, I had never seen a representation of a black man as the hero. I didn’t know how much I wanted to see something like that, until I actually saw it, and my view of the world, and myself, shifted greatly” (2). In John Shaft, Walker found the African American hero whom he craved, a hero whom he would, in turn, bring to life as a representation of black masculinity. This idea of a world shift, a spatial reorientation, that accompanies a shift in the understanding of the self is compelling. I am interested in how we see space as changing and dynamic, and how this change in space accompanies or perhaps helps inform a change in the self. This shift is what we find in the pages of Shaft, a graphic novel featuring John Shaft II. In this chapter, I examine space as an active and dynamic part of narrative, and its relation to conflict, identity, and memory. Instead of viewing space as an inert entity on which story and history play out, space becomes a central feature of the graphic narrative, Shaft: A Complicated Man. However, space is more than simply earth or concrete or an arrangement of forms. We often take our relationship with space as a given, as something fixed and immutable, but space has as much of an effect on us as we have on it. The spaces that we inhabit have a way of affecting how we behave and how we think of ourselves and the world. We often locate ourselves both spatially and metaphorically. We position ourselves as either “insiders” or “outsiders.” We talk about our moods and feelings as being “up” or “down.” We are “in a good place” or “a bad place” or we

Space, conflict, and memory  55 are “in over our heads.” In crime fiction, this tendency becomes much more visible. Characters are on the “right side” or the “wrong side” of the law, “on the road to ruin,” or somewhere on “the mean streets.” In graphic novels, the representation of space becomes even more explicit. Space is drawn. The artists render space visible, and, importantly, this visible space helps us to understand the story. We do not need to be told that an urban space elicits different reactions and expectations from the ones that we associate with a bucolic space. When we see a character walk through a dark alley or along a decaying boulevard, we often read the situation as dangerous or threatening, an example of one of Raymond Chandler’s “mean streets” (59). Likewise, a bucolic setting will often engender a feeling of calm, joy, and safety. We are versed in the meaning of spaces, and we read them because we have internalized these meanings. Space is also inhabited by memory. In fact, space in the graphic novel is structured by memory. Space takes memory and makes it into place. Architect Donald Lyndon argues, ‘Place,’ as I understand it, refers to spaces that can be remembered, that we can imagine, hold in the mind and consider. They are territories that can be lived in with special satisfaction because they resonate with associations that engage our interest. Place brings things to mind. (63) Critics who have focused on the cultural implications of space include Gaston Bachelard, Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, and George Lipsitz. I have found Bachelard and Lefebvre useful in grounding my understanding of space, while both Soja and Lipsitz have contributed to a nuanced understanding of the political dimension of space, a dimension that underlies my reading of Shaft. As George Lipsitz so succinctly states, “In order for history to take place, it takes places” (227). Lipsitz continues, The politics and poetics of space permeate the culture of the United States as a nation through moral values that get attached to the open ranges of the western frontier and the far reaches of empire overseas; that contrast the barrio, the ghetto, and the reservation with the propertied and properly gendered suburban home. (227)

John Shaft strides onto the American cultural landscape John Shaft first appeared on the American cultural landscape in 1970 as the protagonist in the novel, Shaft, written by Ernest Tidyman. Tidyman, a white writer, would later go on to script High Plains Drifter and to win an Academy Award for his screenplay used in The French

56  Chris Ruíz-Velasco Connection. He received the NAACP Image Award for his creation of Shaft. The novel had all the hallmarks of the hardboiled genre—the tough protagonist, the cynicism, the organized corruption—both legal and illegal—but it featured a black, rather than white, protagonist. This in itself was not completely new. The noted African American author, Chester Himes, had been writing black detective stories since the 1950s; the film version of his novel, Cotton Comes to Harlem, released in 1970, predated Shaft by one year as one of the first Blaxploitation films, those that, while relying heavily on stereotypes, put African Americans at the center as main characters rather than those occupying supporting roles. Following the success of Cotton Comes to Harlem, Tidyman’s novel was seen as a viable candidate to cash in on the genre, and in 1971, Shaft, the motion picture, was released. Seen from today’s vantage point, Shaft appears over the top and sensationalistic, but, as Elvis Mitchell rightly points out, what we cannot see is “the elation that charged movie houses of the 70’s as cheering African American audiences saw a dark-skinned hero—iconic and masculine in his up-to-the-minute proto-fade haircut and collection of leathers—in total control of his destiny” (Mitchell “Summer Film”). This elation, this exuberance and attraction was directed at the figure of John Shaft, the African American hero who, for many, embodied a black masculinity that was not deferential or dominated. Shaft, in 1971, was not without its detractors. To be sure, the criticism surrounding Shaft was wide ranging. Victor Canby, reviewing Shaft (the 1971 film) for the New York Times, said it is “not a great film, but it’s very entertaining,” and several critics compared Shaft less favorably to Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Nevertheless, Shaft was a phenomenon; and coupled with Isaac Hayes’s Academy Award winning song, the movie had a major impact on American culture by filling a spot in the American imaginary, not just the African American imaginary. John Shaft has continued to resurface, both in the sense of returning and in the sense of refreshing or finding a new platform. Though John Shaft did disappear after two sequels of decreasing quality, Shaft resurfaced in 2000. In this incarnation, the character is John Shaft’s nephew, John Shaft II. This version offered a different sensibility and a different aesthetic from earlier films. Samuel L. Jackson’s Shaft provides what Mitchell calls “empty headed entertainment,” and yet as Mitchell also makes clear, “the hero is as much fun to watch as the villain” (“The Cat Won’t Cop Out”). Roger Ebert echoes that ambivalence: “Is this a good movie? Not exactly” (Ebert). Nevertheless, Shaft, himself, seems to enthrall us. In 2015, John Shaft returned once more, this time in the pages of a graphic novel, one that seeks to provide some of the backstory that is missing in the novels and in the various filmic iterations. David F. Walker’s and Bilquis Evely’s Shaft: A Complicated Man brought yet another

Space, conflict, and memory  57 expression of John Shaft to life. While the graphic novel retains many of Shaft’s earlier traits, it also presents us with Shaft’s history and, to a certain extent, his motivation. The graphic novel also allows John Shaft to explicitly lay down his code or rules of behavior to the audience. The graphic novel garnered critical praise and accolades. Shaft: A Complicated Man won the 2015 Glyph Comics Award for “Story of the Year.” It was also nominated for the 2015 Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity. This is a Shaft that brings John Shaft back to life, that revitalizes him, and that, perhaps more importantly, brings him back once more into relevance by visualizing his home space.

The boxing ring as site of conflict Shaft: A Complicated Man tells the story of John Shaft, an African American man from Harlem. He is plagued by the disadvantages that American racism has forced onto him. A decorated Vietnam War veteran, Shaft is still in the process of trying to acclimate to civilian life. Boxing is the first thing that we see Shaft try in his efforts to resassimilate to U.S. society. Boxing is conflict, and the ring is a site for conflict. Therefore, it is telling that the opening scene from Shaft takes place at a boxing match. The contentious site of the boxing ring serves as the space of the action and as a metaphor to guide us through the rest of the novel. Just as boxers spar with each other to control the space in the ring, the characters in Shaft spar with each other to control the space in the story. Since John Shaft’s opponent in the ring is a different race, we get a clear image of how space marks racial and territorial conflict. Readers first see John Shaft as he readies himself for the boxing match. In the space of his dressing room, he is tended by his cornerman, the one who wraps his hands and who in the ring takes care of him between rounds. While preparing for the match, Shaft states, “I was a fighter long before I became a boxer.”1 Being a fighter involves struggle and conflict, and these are familiar to the war veteran. He understands conflict and battle, and the boxing within the ring offers him a touchstone of the familiar in a world still foreign to him. Another example of conflict arrives in the person of Junius Tate, a vicious and morally offensive gangster, who walks into Shaft’s dressing room with his subordinate, Bamma Brooks. Shaft challenges Tate’s right to occupy his space, his dressing room off the boxing ring. As the conversation begins to unfold, Shaft delivers a silent appraisal of the men who have come to ask Shaft to throw the fight. Bamma Brooks acts both as muscle for his boss and as a warning for Shaft. Brooks threw a fight in the past, and now he is relegated to working for the gangster, Tate. Shaft says of Brooks, “Became hired muscle for Tate. Made me sick to my stomach.” Shaft’s revulsion toward Tate and Brooks is entirely in keeping with his adherence to his code, as well as a clear response to the

58  Chris Ruíz-Velasco intrusion of the two into his space. In Shaft’s space, his world, there is no place for Tate’s moral laxity, and Shaft wants nothing to do with it. Shaft states, “How we fight determines how we live.” He goes on to say, “How we live is determined by the choices we make when we fight.” For Shaft, these two statements summarize how he sees himself and what guides his actions. It is not simply a matter of what one fights about. As he makes clear, “how” one fights, how one conducts oneself, is paramount. Because conflict is inevitable, life, in turn, is a result of choices made within a context of that inescapable conflict. Shaft lives by a strict code of behavior that emphasizes honesty and integrity and loyalty, even if that loyalty is toward someone that he no longer can protect or serve. This code serves to guide him, and as in many crime fiction works, this code sets the protagonist apart from everyone else. The code serves as a moral directive. For John Shaft, the code is inviolable. He sticks to his code, and in so doing, he refuses to throw a fight. All the while he knows that his refusal spells the end of his nascent career as a boxer because the refusal earns him a number of powerful enemies. These powerful enemies appear within the context of space and echo the conflict found in the metaphor of the boxing ring. Junius Tate works for Sal Venneri, a white racist mafioso. Venneri is violent and merciless, and he has Tate to act as his intermediary. Venneri’s presence in Harlem adds a racial component that serves to destabilize the situation and to underscore the tenuous relationship between races in this environment. Venneri’s dealings in real estate, as well as other more sordid matters, helps to consolidate the connection between space and race that exists throughout the novel. In the logic of Shaft’s code, space, conflict, and memory are inextricably linked. Shaft defends his space against Venneri’s unjust and illegal demands. He defends his right to this sphere, as well as his right to memorialize his time within the ring. Shaft makes this clear when he says, “I beat him in a way that would make me a legend,” he asserts. “I beat him in a way it would leave people talking for a long time.” In each of these assertions, Shaft reiterates “in a way” to mark the importance of conduct. The most important aspect of the victory is how winning is attained, and Shaft emphasizes the manner of victory when he says, “Better to be remembered for standing up, than laying [sic] down.” In the fight panels, John Shaft—looking grim, vital, and determined—­batters his opponent who is massive; yet, Shaft handily subdues him and then knocks him, literally, right out of the ring. If space marks conflict, ejecting his opponent from the contested space clearly marks Shaft as the winner of that conflict and visibly demonstrates Shaft’s code. Space in the novel also helps to define John Shaft as a hero. The way Bilquis Evely, the illustrator, portrays John Shaft underscores Shaft’s legendary and heroic qualities. Shaft is often seen from below, and this visual element causes the reader to look up. Readers are sometimes at

Space, conflict, and memory  59 knee level or lower looking up to Shaft. Evely positions readers in such a way to show Shaft as a legend, someone vitally important, a hero with a larger than life presence that no one will forget. Evely’s illustrations also use color to set Shaft apart in the space of the panels. In nearly every scene in the novel, Shaft wears or carries something red. Whether it is his boxing gloves, his shirt, his scarf, or even the blood stains of one of his victims, John Shaft is nearly always associated with the color red—the color of passion, blood, and revenge. Even in scenes in which the other colors are subdued or dark, Shaft stands out through his association with red, and this use of color sets Shaft apart from the criminal element. Flashbacks function as important, spatially driven shifts from the main narrative. These shifts underscore the importance of space as well as time, and they highlight the connection between the two. Leading into the fight scene, the novel goes into a flashback, the first of many, as John Shaft repeats his earlier assertion, “But like I said, I was a fighter long before becoming a boxer.” In these moves, the space shifts from backstage before the fight in the ring, to a street fight in a former time. The flashbacks show a young John Shaft in a courtroom, through military training, and onto the battlefields of Vietnam. As John Shaft reprises his code—“Every fight involves choices. Doesn’t matter if it’s on the streets … in the ring… or on the battlefield. It’s all about the choices we make”—the scenes and the space in the novel shift. Indeed, we see that the graphic novel, again and again, reprises the shifting of space. These shifts emphasize the spatial instability when contrasted with the relentless violence in its constant return and repetition. Space becomes fluid and active as the novel shifts between Harlem and Vietnam or between gritty street scenes and interior moments of intimacy with Arletha Havens, his romantic partner. The cuts between the spaces begin to make as many connections as Shaft’s own words do for us. The shifting spaces do more than echo Shaft’s assertions. These spatial representations are maps—graphic representations of space—of the road that leads Shaft to who he currently is. When certain types of conflict appear outside of their appropriate spaces, we encounter chaos. To present a boxing ring or a Vietnam battlefield is to present us with an expectation that conflict of some type will occur. For Shaft, space controls the conflict, not in the sense of attenuating it, but in the type or degree of conflict that we can expect to encounter. Thus, the ring is a space that not only expects conflict to play out, but it demands it. And for all of his violence and aggressive behavior, Shaft deplores chaos such as the kind that emerges when Junius Tate appears in the dressing room. Tate has appeared in a space that is supposed to be devoted to preparation: thoughtful and meditative. Tate’s presence violates the nature of that space; in doing so, Tate violates Shaft’s sense of what is appropriate and fitting.

60  Chris Ruíz-Velasco As the violence of the fight plays out within the ring, Shaft’s interior voice provides the counterpoint to the action. As the two adversaries swing at each other, Shaft argues that the question is not about overthrowing the fight. Plainly, Shaft has no intention of violating his own code of behavior, so he will not share the same fate as Bamma Brooks. “The real choice was how I wanted to live my life after the fight,” he muses. As he reflects on these ideas, Shaft seems to move into another space entirely, and this is a space untethered from the ring. This other space is depicted through the black background that surrounds Shaft. In this imaginary space, Shaft considers the choices he must make. “How did I want to be remembered?” he asks himself. After the inevitable confrontation between Shaft and Junius Tate as a result of Shaft’s refusal to throw the fight, the novel once again slips through spatial and temporal flashbacks. After Shaft’s refusal to throw the fight and his outright win by knockout, Venneri has words with Tate. An important component of their conversations is the verbal and racial animosity that consumes the two. Venneri consistently incorporates racist disparagement. Tate, likewise, engages in vile language regarding Venneri and his Italian background. The two also frequently engage in vicious racial asides, and while Tate does work for Venneri, the two of them loath each other. Nevertheless, when Shaft wins the boxing match in spectacular fashion, Tate is ready to exact swift and violent retribution. Tate’s rage and violence trigger another flashback that shifts space. Tate instructs Bamma Brooks to “Break every motherfuckin bone in that motherfucker’s body.” Set in a gym that trains boxers, this flashback presents a young John Shaft receiving instruction in the “sweet science” before Tate’s corrupting influence relegates Brooks to the simple status as muscle, a body without will, a tool for Tate’s enforcement. The boxing ring in which Shaft receives instruction both echoes and predates the boxing ring in which Shaft’s code will be tested. This space of conflict will in some manifestation or another relentlessly recur throughout the novel. The boxing ring, however, also serves as a site of learning as a result of conflict. For Shaft, conflict provides knowledge. At this point, the space shifts from the boxing gym in which Brooks imparts his lessons to young John Shaft to the alley outside of the hall in which present-day John Shaft has, despite Tate’s demands, won the boxing match. Brooks is there to putatively give Shaft a lesson for his disregard of Tate’s demands. Bamma Brooks, then, appears in the scene in both the present space and the past space marked by Shaft’s memory. Brooks instills in young Shaft some code he later uses as an adult: the imperative to “never back away from a fight” and to “lie down for nobody.” These two dicta originate during the practice sessions that Brooks holds with the young John Shaft. These words, which ironically Brooks himself betrays, lie at the heart of Shaft’s code. Brooks acts as both the mentor and the

Space, conflict, and memory  61 exemplar. Brooks delivers the warning about what it means to break the code. At the same time, he is also the warning, the cautionary example of violating the code. Brooks articulates the code as mentor when he impresses upon Shaft its importance; perhaps, he does this most noticeably through his transgression. Shaft understands the lesson, and toward the end of this scene, Shaft simply says, “Learned a lot from Bamma Brooks.” The danger that Brooks embodies is not only the physical threat that Shaft faces but also the moral and psychic threat that Shaft must overcome. He has already refused Tate’s demand to throw the fight, but Shaft must also take his punishment “in a way” that demonstrates that he understands that all actions have consequences. The scene closes as Shaft once again reiterates part of his code: “Life is all about the choices we make—the decisions that define us.” The dark urban landscape being covered in snow as Shaft stands alone and holds his wounded side. His solitary position within the scene indicates that, in keeping with the traditions of crime fiction, Shaft will have to go it alone and that he will have to do so outside Harlem.

New York as a liminal space of refuge The threat from Junius Tate causes Shaft to seek a life and career in a new space or location. As Shaft puts it, “The boxing ring didn’t work out as planned. Neither did college, or the career as a lawyer that was gonna make me rich.” Still in need of a job, Shaft cycles through possibilities until he applies for a position at National Investigations, a private detective agency. Impressed by Shaft’s distinguished record of military service, “Butch” Buchinsky, the owner and a military veteran himself, hires Shaft as an undercover private detective to work in a department store. Shaft notes, “And just like that. I was a private dick.” His work involves catching “boosters,” a term Shaft uses for shoplifters in a department store. Shaft’s transformation into a private detective places him on the side of the law, but not within the law, as he would be if he were a police officer. Instead, Shaft inhabits a liminal spot; he is on the threshold of the law, but not quite within it. Shaft has the authority to catch shoplifters, but he wears no uniform, and he walks along the same aisles as the criminals he is hired to catch. Like his liminal status as detective, Shaft straddles the line between legal authority and legal transgressor. He is most comfortable and the most effective in this liminal space, which also most effectively supports his code. We see his comfort in some of the spaces where John Shaft frequently finds himself: alleys, strip clubs, and construction sites. These spaces, not quite one thing or another, are spaces in transition. Likewise, we see this transitional quality in the flashbacks and spatial shifts that continue throughout the novel, as scenes shift, for example, from a warehouse to a battlefield.

62  Chris Ruíz-Velasco Shaft’s comfort within liminal spaces is also exemplified by his romantic relationship with Arletha Havens. While working in the department store, Shaft meets Arletha, an employee he literally runs into while apprehending a shoplifter. Interestingly enough, Shaft identifies her as a thief, implying, of course, that she steals his heart. With this label, Shaft makes her a companion in the liminal space he inhabits. Arletha’s last name, “Havens,” also points to the obsession with space in Shaft. Havens serves as Shaft’s sanctuary from the brutality and chaos of the street. This use of Arletha’s name as a spatial metaphor reminds us that the conflicts in Shaft revolve around who gets to inhabit spaces and who must contest them. Shaft’s safe haven, his refuge, is, however, short lived. In just a few short pages, not quite four within the graphic novel, Shaft courts and falls in love with Arletha—as Frankie Lymon’s “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” a hit from the 1950s, plays in the background. We see Shaft and Arletha eating a romantic dinner, taking a carriage ride in Central Park, and choosing music together in a record shop. The use of Lymon’s song underscores the tragic aspects of the romance. Shaft makes a point to let us know that he and Arletha met on the one-year anniversary of Lymon’s death. His song, with its haunting and repeated refrain of “Tell me why,” reminds us that when Lymon died at age twenty-five of a heroin overdose, he left behind a tangle of troubles. The use of the song hints at the troubles and the dark trajectory that this love affair will follow. Shaft recalls that he used to know Lymon “from around the way, before he got famous”; this comment cements the connection between Harlem, Shaft, and the coming conflict. In addition to the lyrics of Lymon’s song, this portion of the novel contains no dialogue, just Shaft’s thoughts related in the past tense. Photos from a photo booth also help to reinforce this section as a memory, a nostalgic return to an idyll that shatters as a result of the as yet unseen conflict that will destroy the couple. At the end of the flashback covering the romance, we see two thugs break into Arletha’s apartment, and this crime initiates the conflict that drives the rest of the graphic novel. They demand to know the whereabouts of Marisol Dupree, a prostitute who has come into possession of incriminating photos. The two intruders never explain why they are looking for Marisol, and this is part of the mystery at first. Gun wielding, outmatched, and fearing for their lives—the two crooks are clearly out of their depth, but by threatening Arletha, they impel Shaft to help them. Leaving one of the thugs with Arletha, Shaft goes with the other on a fruitless but lethal search for Marisol.

Harlem: return to conflict and a resolution of conflict Shaft’s search takes him to Harlem, and this is not something that appeals to him one bit. Shaft says, “[W]e’re headed into the last place on

Space, conflict, and memory  63 earth I want to go—Harlem.” Since his failed attempt at boxing, Shaft has kept clear of Harlem in order to avoid the wrath and retribution of Junius Tate. However, circumstances prevail, and Shaft finds himself in the very space that he seeks to avoid. He says, “Would rather be back in Nam.” Here, a rather curious spatial confusion takes over. Shaft begins to equate Harlem and Vietnam as shared sites of confrontation and conflict. For Shaft, the two seem almost interchangeable and memories of Vietnam continuously leak into the space of Harlem throughout the novel. This leakage happens frequently through the spoken words that Shaft uses to make sense of things. This spatial slippage is represented through Shaft’s inner monologue during a firefight that erupts in a Harlem alley with four mobsters. This slippage between spaces is given logic and shape through memory, even as it is grounded in conflict. The spatial line between Harlem and Vietnam dissolves as Shaft’s mind and memory flash back to Vietnam, while the images remain rooted in the Harlem alley. Shaft’s voice provides us with insights: “Concrete and skyscrapers had replaced rice paddies and jungles, but the feeling … that was exactly the same. Exactly the same.” Through his words and through memory, Shaft re-­experiences battle as he experienced it in Vietnam, and he calls these places into being. The space of Vietnam or the space of Harlem merges as Shaft comments to the reader: “It’d been two years since I last held a gun.” He goes on, “Two years since I’d been in combat.” He recounts the temporal distance like a mantra. “Two years since I’d felt this clear about anything.” And then he adds, “Two years since I did what I’d done so well, for so long, to so many.” For Shaft, that temporal distance is bridged by physical space. The space of Harlem and the space of Vietnam merge through conflict. As Shaft states, it was all “the same.” “It all comes back easy,” he says. “Really fuckin’ easy.” He muses on how the families of the soldiers he killed in war might feel, and he equates his own feelings with those family members. Riding on a wave of violence, Shaft merges spaces and times, and he erases distance, both temporal and spatial. In Harlem and Vietnam, Shaft experiences violence on a lethal scale. Tellingly, the two spaces dissolve into each other through the graphic novel’s use of flashbacks and memory. The way in which they connect stresses, in every sense of the word, the relationship between space, conflict, and memory. Once again, in the wake of intense conflict and violence, space in the novel begins to fragment and slip. When Shaft returns to Arletha’s apartment, he finds her brutally murdered. In an odd turn, Shaft decides to move into Arletha’s apartment, despite it being the scene of her death. In the panels leading up to this decision, we once again see space slipping, this time between Vietnam and an imagined wedding between Shaft and Arletha. Shaft dreams that he and Arletha married in a traditional church wedding. Contained in the panels are images of Viet Cong

64  Chris Ruíz-Velasco fighters and American military scattered among the guests in the pews of the church, and the figure giving Arletha away shifts from an older African American man to a Viet Cong fighter. In the surreal dream-­ image of the wedding, Arletha steps on a land mine and triggers a massive explosion that splatters Shaft’s face in blood. We realize that this is a dream when the superintendent of Arletha’s apartment building wakes Shaft. The super, who acknowledges to Shaft that Arletha was “one of the good ones,” says that he will clean up the place and “[s]omeone else will move in, and it it’ll be like she was never here.” The implication is clear. Arletha will be forgotten. For Shaft, this is inconceivable and unacceptable, and he immediately replies, “I’m moving in.” The look on his face is one of grim determination. As he smokes a cigarette, he adds, “Owner’s got a problem with that, tell ‘em to come talk to me. The name’s John Shaft.” While not explicitly stated, Shaft intends to keep her memory alive, and part of that act of memorialization involves claiming and maintaining the space that Arletha inhabited. For this reason, Shaft takes the apartment. Memory and space are, again, so closely connected that one cannot function without the other. Arletha’s image will continue to return to Shaft as the space around her, the apartment, and Harlem bring things to mind. Arletha then appears as a memory in a variety of spaces and during a number of different scenes, often at moments of violence or moments of introspection. This relentless return of her memory also serves to drive the narrative. Arletha appears to Shaft throughout the rest of the graphic novel. Her memory is the compulsion for Shaft’s pursuit of vengeance.

Memory finds place Spaces such as the boxing ring, Arletha’s apartment, Vietnam, and Harlem all function as the depository of memories. Space in the novel functions as a metaphor for memory and a representation of memory. In Shaft, space also acts as a “memory palace” (Lyndon and Moore), as depository of memory in the graphic novel. Space helps Shaft structure his memories, as well as how he retrieves them and how he views that space. For example, the boxing ring calls up past memories of Shaft’s youth. In these memories of his early years in Harlem, we see how his relationship with Brooks is constructed and undermined. The boxing ring also acts as a nexus through which other spatial territories such as Vietnam and Harlem run. We can see, then, that in the graphic novel’s conception, space is not based on a physically contiguous existence but is, rather, joined by memory. This also helps to explain the frequent flashbacks and shifts of time and place. These leaps are possible because memory, not physical proximity, is what connects various spaces. Importantly for the graphic novel, each of these spaces also contains memories of conflict.

Space, conflict, and memory  65 In addition to these qualities of conflict and memory, space also holds value as a possession. In Shaft: A Complicated Man, one reason the ring becomes a site for conflict—both as cause for conflict and a prize of ­conflict—stems from the battle over territory, in addition to being an actual site of a battle in the form of the boxing match. Throughout the novel, Shaft reiterates the line “War is all about real estate.” The line appears several times and in several ways, but in its most elemental form Shaft equates space and conflict. In fact, we could rephrase that line to read, “Conflict is all about space.” And, indeed, within the novel, conflict does seem to be all about space. Space and place are at the heart of the mystery that Shaft seeks to resolve. Space as possession will also eventually become the World Trade Center, arguably one of the most contested spaces in New York as depicted in Shaft: A Complicated Man. Much conflict in the graphic novel arises out of who controls the construction of the World Trade Center and the enormous rewards that everyone involved seeks to reap. While the World Trade Center is not located in Harlem, there are those in the community who wish to benefit from its construction. Key to this strife is a seemingly insignificant figure, Marisol Dupree, a prostitute who has incriminating photographs of a key official involved in the construction of the towers. This official has the power to decide who gets awarded the lucrative contracts for constructing the site. Her whereabouts are the focus of an ongoing search for her by the major players in the story. Shaft must find her, but he does not know why. Shaft’s strategy is based on space and memory. Shaft understands space not as an inert object or simply a stage to be walked across, but an intricate and intimate part of who human beings are. In looking for Marisol, he says to himself, “Everyone looking for Marisol Dupree, and none of them asking the right question.” Shaft sees that discovering Marisol’s whereabouts is based on inverting the formula to consider place as not where to hide, but a location that brings refuge. He says that “[e]veryone wanted to know where she was hiding when they should’ve been asking where she would feel safe.” Here, Shaft makes it clear that he is looking at space very differently from others. Thus, by using his understanding of space as it relates to his experience and memory of his own sanctuary, Shaft discovers Marisol’s location. Shaft’s revenge occurs in the final chapter of the novel. The chapter begins with another series of jumps between spatial and temporal locations. We begin with a panel that features an urban environment, one anachronistically located in what appears to be the fifties. Striding through the scene, Shaft is followed by three men, all are dressed in fifties clothing with suspenders and rolled up jeans. One of the men brandishes a stick as if it were a weapon. The panel is done in sepia to emphasize the sense of a historical past. In a “voiceover,” Shaft asks “Who are we? We walk through life from one moment to the next.” As

66  Chris Ruíz-Velasco the images and the text make clear, Shaft is walking through space and time, through history itself. As the chapter continues, the shifts in space and time continue apace. Scenes and faces from other spaces and other times intersperse with the scene as it plays out. Memory drives these shifts as Shaft goes from keeping watch above a building site in Harlem to a meeting of officers and men discussing strategy in a tent in Vietnam. Armed with a silenced sniper rifle, Shaft surveys the scene of an upcoming meeting between the major players. As he watches, time and space once again shift. One moment Shaft is standing on top of a warehouse, and the next moment he is in Vietnam. Shaft is going over a battle plan with his superior officer. During this discussion over the strategic significance of a target, Shaft hears, presumably for the first time, what throughout the novel he has been repeating to us as if it were a holy mantra: “War is all about real estate.” For Shaft, it is about Arletha Havens, his refuge, and the woman whom he loved. It is also about the real estate of the World Trade Center. Likewise, it is about Harlem, and the opportunities that space represents for the businesses and residents. If war is all about real estate, it is also about violence. It is about the way that conflict and violence play out in space. And through violence played out in that urban space, Shaft sets about to bring retribution to Arletha’s killer and to those involved with circumstances that instigated her death. If that retribution was divine, Shaft is surely the angel of vengeance, one who brings justice to earth and those who deserve it. Space in Shaft does more than provide a backdrop. Space plays a key role in the narrative through its foci on conflict, identity, and memory. By representing space as an active, rather than passive or inert, component of the story, the graphic novel underscores ways in which our contemporary public narrative revolves around issues of space. Shaft asks important questions about space, such as what space is, who controls it, who has the right to it, who must contest it, to whom it belongs, and to whom it does not. In Shaft’s representations of space, we see the larger struggles of power that play out across American culture. These power struggles are often obfuscated just as the role of an active space is obfuscated. Through various techniques such as the flashbacks and shifts of space, Shaft makes us aware of the constructed and non-­contiguous nature of space. Looking closer, we can see that indeed space is a complicated issue just as John Shaft is a complicated man.

Note 1 Shaft: A Complicated Man does not use page numbers, so I have tried to describe the scene and the panel as best I can to indicate where the quotations come from.

Space, conflict, and memory  67

Works Cited Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press, 1969. Canby, Victor. “‘Shaft’—at Last a Good Saturday Night Movie.” New York Times, 11 July 1971, p. D1. Chandler, Raymond. “The Simple Art of Murder.” Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1944, pp. 53–59. Ebert, Roger. “Shaft.” Rogerebert.com, 19 June 2000. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Blackwell, 1991. Lipsitz, George. “Space.” Keywords for American Cultural Studies, 2nd edition, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, New York UP, 2014, pp. 227–231. Lyndon, Donald, and Charles W. Moore. Chambers for a Memory Palace. MIT Press, 1996. Mitchell, Elvis. “Summer Films: Blaxploitation; A Black Gumshoe Who Built a Genre Is Back on the Job.” New York Times, 30 Apr. 2000. ———. “Film Review: The Cat Won’t Cop Out When Danger’s All About.” New York Times, 16 June 2000. Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. Verso, 2010. Slotkin, Richard. “The Hard-Boiled Detective Story: From the Open Range to the Mean Streets.” The Sleuth and the Scholar: Origins, Evolution, and Current Trends in Detective Fiction, edited by Barbara A. Rader and Howard G. Zettler, Greenwood Press, 1988. Tidyman, Ernest. Shaft. Dynamite Entertainment, 2016. Walker, David F. “Introduction.” The World of Shaft, edited by Steve Aldous, McFarland & Company, Inc., 2015, pp. 1–3. Walker, David F., and Bilquis Evely. Shaft: A Complicated Man. Dynamite Entertainment, 2015.

5 Illustrating mental illness and engaging empathy through graphic memoir Alissa Burger

Graphic novels present a unique medium for sharing one’s experiences by creating connections and fostering understanding and empathy, as the combination of image and text often provides readers with a more engaged glimpse into another person’s life and struggles than text alone can achieve. As Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw argues, drawing on the research of cognitive scientists and the Sentimentalists of the Scottish Enlightenment, in hearing about and reading the stories of others, “emotional involvement comes first, followed by empathic response, which is then cognitively evaluated” (139). This experience has the potential to put readers vicariously in the place of the individual about whom they are reading. As Hoeness-Krupsaw explains, [r]ecent theories of embodied cognition explain how we process information. The findings indicate that thinking about and imagining an experience activates similar brain functions as when we are actually experiencing it …. This means that even indirect—imagined— contact is nearly as valuable as direct contact with members of other groups. (139) Memoirs like Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis ground their authors’ experiences within a larger traumatic event and allow readers to get an intimate sense of what it was like to live in a particular moment, in a specific place. Readers also come to know the author and his or her own individual experiences by bringing a human voice to a historical reality and allowing the reader to connect and empathize in a way few strictly historical accounts offer. Graphic memoirs like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Are You My Mother? or Maggie Thrash’s Honor Girl create similar opportunities for understanding and empathy on an individual level, as the authors share their explorations, struggles, and negotiations of individual identity, sexuality, and relationships. As Carolyn Kyler explains, this effective combination in “Mapping a Life: Reading and Looking at Contemporary Graphic Memoir,” [t]he combination of the genre of autobiography with the medium of comics integrates two of the oldest forms of storytelling in human

Illustrating mental illness and engaging empathy  69 history—pictures and personal narrative—and demands new ways of reading and looking. Reading graphic memoir requires attention to visual design, to the resonance and tension between text and image, to the patterns of autobiography, and the ways that lives can be mapped. (2) Graphic memoirs are ideally suited to representing not just the authors’ experiences but also their inner reality: their thoughts, feelings, and responses to the world around them, whether straightforward, chaotic, or dynamic sites of conflict. Graphic memoirs both tell the reader the author’s story and invite the reader intimately into the author’s perspective. This tremendous potential for sharing the internal landscape makes graphic memoirs especially productive for creating empathy through engaging with narratives of mental illness. As Nicole Eugene argues, the visual elements of these texts are particularly influential, as “[s]ince the invisible nature of mental illness is a barrier to accessing understanding and empathy, graphic narratives offer a unique gift because they cultivate empathy while also laboring to render invisible impairments and hidden deficiencies in visual terms” (234). Experiences like depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or body dysmorphia are difficult to describe and challenging to imagine. For those who have not had such experiences, they become obstacles that prevent empathy and understanding. Moreover, these illnesses are often freighted with cultural stigma, secrecy, and even shame. In the case of mental illness particularly, there is a dual consideration in storytelling, both in the importance of telling the stories themselves (in refusing to be silent) and in how those stories are told. These narratives also have the potential to change the way readers understand, think about, discuss, and engage with mental illness. Writing about representations of mental illness in young adult literature, Diane Scrofano argues that “[w]e need stories of mental illness that focus on the illness as a biological brain disorder, a chemical imbalance in the brain …. while a lot of older literature has treated mental illness only symbolically, as ‘madness’” (15). In refusing stigmatization and in sharing the voices and perspectives of those living with mental illness, these representations have the opportunity to create understanding and invite empathy. Tanya Heflin explains that a range of artists and writers have found graphic memoir to be the most powerful, effective, economical, and expressive way of telling stories that have been untellable in other times or forms. Giving voice and visibility to the previously inaudible or invisible, these narratives, like much of the autobiographical work of the “memoir boom” that began in the 1990s, tell stories of pain, addiction, trauma, illness, stigmatized sexualities, etc. (280)

70  Alissa Burger Heflin goes on to explain that “recent scholarship and reading patterns suggest that the graphic element of these stories allows a version of reader identification that operates differently from prose-only texts” (Heflin 280), with a heightened sense of interiority, authenticity, and connection between the reader and the text. This chapter will explore three graphic memoirs of mental illness and highlight the range of expression and reader engagement offered by this medium. Darryl Cunningham’s Psychiatric Tales: Eleven Graphic Stories About Mental Illness provides a series of short narratives, both descriptive and personal. Ellen Forney’s Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me chronicles the author’s experience of, diagnosis with, and incorporation of bipolar disorder into her individual identity. Finally, Katie Green’s Lighter Than My Shadow is about Green’s struggle with anorexia and other forms of disordered eating. Each of these works provides unique insight into the authors’ experiences of mental illness, their construction of their own stories and subjectivities, and the myriad ways in which readers can critically and empathically engage with experiences and narratives of mental illness. In illustrating narratives of mental illness through the graphic memoir format, the authors and artists are not only refusing silence and reaching out to share their stories with others, but they also dynamically claim the right to define and represent themselves, as well as challenge others’ perceptions and expectations of them both in terms of mental illness and individual identity. As Heflin argues, [f]or graphic memoirists whose narrative self-representation incorporates the self-exposure of potentially stigmatizing mental illness, the act of creating a hybridized visual/verbal avatar of selfhood serves not only an expressive function, but also serves nothing less than a constitutive one, as well in the construction and statement of both “individual … [and] ongoing subjectivity” (282). In telling their stories, these authors are shaping a narrative, often within the scope of a larger context of pain, confusion, or chaos. In The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, Arthur W. Frank explains that in some ways “[s]tories have to repair the damage that illness has done to the ill person’s sense of where she is in life, and where she may be going. Stories are a way of redrawing maps and finding new destinations” (53, emphasis original). While Frank writes about illness more broadly, considering cancer narratives for example, this approach is equally valid in exploring memoirs of mental illness, in which the authors come to understand themselves and their individual identity within this context. This process enables them to incorporate this reality into their sense of self and to move forward in their lives and in the world. Resonating with Heflin, Frank asserts that in narratives of

Illustrating mental illness and engaging empathy  71 illness, “[t]he self is being formed in what is told” (55, emphasis original). As a result, in critically considering narratives of mental illness, readers are able to explore these constructions and negotiations of subjectivity and identity, understand and empathize with the author’s experiences and realities, and if they themselves are mentally ill, find comfort and community in reading the similar stories of others. The authors’ refusal of silence may even inspire readers to find their own voice. Subjectivity and the self are particularly complex and subject to dynamic negotiation in the graphic memoir, as the reader is getting the authors’ perceptions of themselves as they once were. Drawing on the work of Phillip Lopate, Laura Jones explains that a “double perspective” is foundational to the graphic memoir genre because in writing of previous experiences, the author combines “the voice of the experiential past and the now-more-knowledgeable voice of the present, the one who can synthesize experience for the reader into an alchemical mix of wisdom and art” (Jones 177). Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson explore the engagement of multiple “I”s in autobiography even further by outlining distinctions between “the ‘real’ or historical ‘I’” (the author as an individual existing in the real world), “the narrating ‘I’” (the author’s storytelling perspective and/or persona), “the narrated ‘I’” (the individual at the time of the events being recounted), and “the ideological ‘I,’” which takes into account “all the institutional discourses through which people come to understand themselves and to place themselves in the world” (Smith and Watson 76). With these complexities of subjectivity in mind as authors construct their narrative, the reader of autobiography must be constantly negotiating the text, critically considering the authorial position, and determining the process and significance of meaning-making. This process is further complicated with the graphic memoir format, where the text itself demands an active reading strategy, as the reader draws meaning from the text, the image, the combination of the two, and even the blank spaces in the gutters between panels. Finally, graphic memoirs of mental illness in particular demand another layer of critical engagement in breaking the silence, tackling the stigma, and challenging perceptions and prejudices about mental illness by intimately representing the experience of the individual.

Darryl Cunningham’s Psychiatric Tales Darryl Cunningham’s Psychiatric Tales: Eleven Graphic Stories about Mental Illness is the most externally focused of the graphic memoirs examined in this chapter, though Cunningham’s personal experiences still play a significant role. Writing from his experiences working as an assistant in a psychiatric health ward in England, Cunningham’s sections “cover dementia, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, suicide, antisocial disorder, and perhaps most movingly, Cunningham’s own struggle

72  Alissa Burger to overcome depression” (Weiner 61). In addition to chapters focused on specific disorders and Cunningham’s own personal experiences, the book also features a chapter titled “It Could Be You” (Cunningham 21–27), which directly invites reader empathy and highlights “societal issues” (K. Williams) like isolation and discrimination of those with mental illness. In another chapter, “People with Mental Illness Enrich Our Lives” ­ gures—Winston (Cunningham 51–65), Cunningham profiles historical fi Churchill, Judy Garland, The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, comedian Spike Milligan, and musician Nick Drake—who have struggled with depression and anxiety. Cunningham also tackles the larger scope of mental illness in contemporary societies by taking on “[m]edia sensationalism, controversy over diagnostic criteria, and examples of delusions [which] are all included to further place these patients in a wider context” (K. Williams) by framing mental illness as one part of a much larger, complex picture for productive reflection and engagement. Cunningham’s chapters are brief, starkly rendered in black and white,1 and drawn in in a style that “draws inspiration from a long tradition of European woodcut illustrations” (El Refaie 163). The simple figures, pronounced contrast in these images, and “[t]he severity of these frames … [with] light always fighting shadow” (Cooke) afford Cunningham enough detail to render the people featured heartbreakingly human, while simultaneously remaining general enough to invite reader identification. For example, in the chapter “Cut” on self-harm, there is a page that features six square panels: the first two panels show a woman getting medical treatment in a doctor’s office after intentionally and repeatedly cutting her arm. The remaining panels on this page follow the individual as she looks in the mirror and struggles with the impulse to self-harm (Cunningham 18). All three characters on the page—the woman and the two medical professionals—are rendered simplistically with horizontal lines signifying their eyes and mouths. Cunningham’s avatar within the panels is slightly differentiated, with circles and lines denoting his glasses. These lines are a visual cue that makes him identifiable through the various chapters, positions him as a witness, and underscores the importance of seeing and recounting the stories he shares. Despite this simplicity, Cunningham is very effectively able to convey the woman’s suffering in the four panels where she appears alone. Her body is first drawn in white within the stark contrast of a dark room; then, in the next two panels, the contrast is reversed with her body shown as black with white lines as she covers her eyes and begins to cry. In the final panel of this page, the woman’s face is once again white surrounded by black, dramatically punctuated by white pupils. This is one of the only times in Cunningham’s book where eyes are shown in such detail, as the woman seems to stare imploringly from the panel (18). 2 These panels are also accompanied by Cunningham’s explanation of self-harm as he tackles the assumption that self-harm is “just attention seeking

Illustrating mental illness and engaging empathy  73 behavior” (18). In the panels in which the woman looks into the mirror and weeps, Cunningham provides a general overview of the disorder and its episodes’ distinguishing characteristics, and relates that “[t]he injury is often preceded by intense anger and self-hatred. It’s often difficult for patients to give a coherent explanation for their actions” (18). This overview appeals to the reader to empathize and understand as Cunningham explains that this challenge of articulation “is unsurprising, given the inner turmoil that’s likely to precede an act of self-harming” (18). The two representations of self-harm featured here—the medical intervention in the first two panels and the emotional turmoil of the experience visualized in the final four panels—highlight different ways of seeing, responding to, and living with mental illness. Cunningham’s chapters on self-harm (“Cut” and the later chapter “Blood”) are particularly effective accounts in challenging stigma and confusion surrounding mental illness in general and self-harm specifically. After all, as Cunningham writes later, in the account of a man who repeatedly hit himself in the face with a hammer, “[w]hat inner torment would drive a man to do such a thing?” (69). This question reflects Cunningham’s own preconceived notions when he began to work in the psychiatric ward and likely echoes that of many of his readers. Mental illness in general can be hard to articulate for those who experience it and challenging to imagine for those who do not. Self-harm is definitely an extreme instance of this case, where those who have not struggled with this same impulse may find the behavior entirely inexplicable. Through his clinical consideration of causes and psychological explanations in these two chapters and the briefly featured moments of specific individuals, Cunningham creates a dual opportunity for comprehension and empathy. Cunningham’s chapter “Suicide” has a similar revelatory potential for readers who might struggle to understand what could drive individuals to take their own lives, and Cunningham echoes the question, “[w]hy had he done such a thing to himself?” (117), as well as questions that surviving loved ones often ask themselves like “[w]ould the patient still be alive if …” and “[w]ould it have made any difference if …?” (117). The combination of the medical and experiential perspectives featured in the self-harm panels typifies the style of the book as a whole, which combines diverse narrative and visual approaches to provide the reader with a very effective “illustrated primer on mental illness” (“Psychiatric Tales”). In addition to the stark black-and-white illustrations highlighting specific disorders and individuals, Cunningham also includes medical drawings of neurotransmitters (33), the brain (26, 98–99), and larger anatomical systems (101) as he explores the wide range of factors that can contribute to mental illness. Cunningham shares human stories and lists characteristics of the various disorders he addresses by drawing on his medical background to establish objective expertise alongside

74  Alissa Burger his subjective experience. In his “Schizophrenia” chapter, Cunningham explores the factors—heredity, genes, environment—such as “exposure to viruses or malnutrition in the womb” as well as “social factors such as stressful environmental conditions” (99)—that may be responsible, either in isolation or in combination, for mental illness. Though there is no one clear cause or course of treatment that Cunningham—or psychiatric professionals—can provide, Cunningham highlights the complex, uncertain, and interconnected nature of mental illness and challenges the oversimplification and stigmatization of these issues. Cunningham dedicates his book to “the patients” (ix). With Psychiatric Tales, he advocates powerfully for more effective public responses to mental illness and an end to stigmatization, with the call that “the general population needs to be more understanding of those who suffer mental illness … Our lives are difficult enough as it is” (102). Cunningham encourages his readers to seek therapy, medication, and social resources, and “frequently speaks directly to sufferers, telling them that their symptoms are not their fault, that there are ways of dealing with them and simply that ‘you can survive’” (“Psychiatric Tales” 37). Cunningham also shows his readers that they are not alone when he shares his own struggles with mental illness. In his concluding chapter “How I Lived Again” (121–139), he reflects on his own anxiety, depression, and suicidal impulses, represented by the striking visual of his own body with a hole drawn in the center of his chest (129, 133–134). Cunningham also shares his own treatment and coping mechanisms, which include Prozac, cartooning, and the community he found on the Internet (135), where he first posted sections of Psychiatric Tales and was encouraged by the response and support of those with whom his work resonated. Thus completed and published, Psychiatric Tales embraces and makes very effective use of the unique format of a combined educational work and graphic memoir to explain and address mental illness, highlight individual stories (including his own), challenge stigmas, and offer hope and a sense of community to those for whom Cunningham’s accounts feel all too familiar.

Ellen Forney’s Marbles While Cunningham’s Psychiatric Tales takes a broad view of mental illness, Ellen Forney’s Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me narrows the focus to her own personal experience of and diagnosis with bipolar disorder. Myla Goldberg explains that [b]ipolar disorder defies easy treatment; each individual patient must become their own guinea pig to discover the balance of medication and lifestyle that will allow him or her to achieve long-term ­stability.

Illustrating mental illness and engaging empathy  75 For Forney, this was an intense four-year process that she chronicles with her deceptively simple drawing style, an emotive line that matches her expressive prose. As Forney’s title indicates, another of her preoccupations in Marbles is to consider the potential connection between creativity and mental illness, with several “digressions into the lives of famously depressive artists and writers she admires” (Haig). This list includes “writers and artists with probable manic-depressive illness or major depression” with an accompanying key indicating institutionalization, suicide attempts, and death by suicide (Forney 40–41); a consideration of quotes and self-portraits by Vincent Van Gogh (Forney 118–120); her own reflection on the names and faces of potentially mentally ill artists and writers (Forney 219–222); and her final conclusion that these individuals symbolize “connection, context, perspective, inspiration, company” (Forney 222). In Marbles, Forney effectively combines her own personal journey with that of the authors and artists she admires, and she interrogates the connection between mental illness and creativity to share her own story with others who might be asking the same questions and facing similar challenges. Bipolar disorder is often characterized by dramatic highs and lows (American Psychiatric Association 126–139), and Forney’s illustration style embraces these dynamic differences and allows the reader to not only engage with the textual narrative of Forney’s experience but also physically see it, as “Forney allows her art to chronicle her outer life while revealing her inner state of mind” (“Marbles” 46). Forney explained this visual impact in an interview: “I think that comics and the arts or painting and music offer a certain emotional quality, an emotional communication that a text doesn’t have …. I also think that comics in general, for the most part, are approachable in a way that text isn’t” (qtd. in Morton). This idea is a significant consideration in light of the stigma that still impacts misunderstandings and discussions of mental illness. Graphic memoir is an ideal format for conveying this experience as it “amplifies reader identification with psychological crisis using techniques that, while not necessarily found only in graphic memoir, are perhaps more effectively rendered using the cumulative spatial techniques of comic arts” (Heflin 288). For example, as Courtney Donovan explains in “Representations of Health, Embodiment, and Experience in Graphic Memoir,” in Marbles, [t]he manifestation of mania is a frenzy of lines and action, coupled with a concoction of energetic, large, and bold lines. Forney communicates visually and graphically how she is feeling, and how such feelings physically manifest; she employs the manipulation of

76  Alissa Burger the graphic medium to underscore how her own physical substance and illness are woven together …. When taken together, the words and images help to situate the reader within a powerful experience that is both mentally and physically all-encompassing. This altered way of viewing the world that Forney understands during her manic episode is deeply reliant upon its representation of the graphic and visual as a language for conveying the euphoria of her embodied state. (248) These images not only foreground Forney’s body and her physical experience but also track the multiple directions and interconnections of her racing thoughts, punctuated by energetic jagged lines and multiple exclamation points (Forney 50–51). Other panels more specifically chart Forney’s thought processes. A two-page un-bordered panel highlighting Forney’s ideas for a tattoo visualizes the rapid flow of ideas and the free association that draws her from one seemingly disconnected thought to another and is punctuated with arrows, question marks, and exclamation points (Forney 6–7). There are also externalized versions of this same process in conversation with her therapist; Forney’s star-eyed face is surrounded by overlapping dialogue, sometimes in unbound text (Forney 49) and at other times through multiple and interconnected dialogue balloons (Forney 65). In these externalized images, Forney again visually connects mind and body with frenetic lines, indicating the erratic and rapid movement of Forney shifting her body and gesticulating with her hands as she talks to her therapist (65). Forney’s visual representations of depression are just as poignant, though very differently realized with simple and often repeated images communicating the reality of her life with depression. For example, one page features a series of fourteen small images that chart Forney’s progression from waking up, getting out of bed in the morning, walking to the sofa, and lying back down (77). Another page is made up of six nearly identical panels in which Forney lies cocooned in a blanket on her sofa, as she writes about reaching out to her mother and her therapist for emotional and psychological support and connection when she is physically unable to seek it out (81). Heflin describes the effect of these pages, with their stick figures representing the passage of time, the constant struggle to achieve even the simplest actions, and the looming sense of the “cyclical quality” and recurring nature of depression (290). Forney also includes sketches from her journal of these experiences with depression. These illustrations are rendered as stark, simplistic drawings with thin lines and serve a dual purpose for Forney, as she reflects that “[i]nert on a piece of paper, the demons were more handleable … Other self-portraits were depictions of how I was feeling” (98–99, emphasis original). Through the inclusion of her sketchbook images, the

Illustrating mental illness and engaging empathy  77 reader sees Forney’s depression presented as she experienced it in the moment as opposed to how she may have thought about and recalled it after the fact. Just as with the visual representation of her manic episodes, these sketches clearly and emotionally convey the experience of depression for Forney’s readers by using images where she is depicted desperately hanging onto the edge of a cliff (Forney 70) curled into herself while surrounded by darkness (Forney 103), or represented as a small, precariously perched figure upon whom massive dark shapes are descending (Forney 124). With these images, Forney shares her experience and takes dynamic ownership of this representation as she “renders the subjective and at times isolating experience of mental illness in terms that recognize how mental illness affects perceptual processes—which is often a delegitimizing position to speak from” (Eugene 240). In using the combination of text and image to share her lived psychological and emotional experiences, Forney tells her story in a way that can impact and emotionally engage the reader more effectively than through text alone. This creates a representation that “[r]ather than devaluing the position of being in the midst of a manic episode or depressive episode, ­Forney’s rendering validates people who view the world through the tinted lenses of mental illness” (Packer 240). Another hallmark of Forney’s Marbles is the variety of content and styles, both textual and visual, that she utilizes to usher the reader through her experience of bipolar disorder. She combines personal, critical, and medical perspectives, supported by “extensive research, interviews and personal journal excerpts” (Bello). While Forney does not have Cunningham’s background in the psychiatric health field, she has taken the initiative to learn everything she can about her diagnosis, its ramifications, and its treatment, both in terms of medication and behavioral therapies. She has claimed agency by becoming her own expert, and she shares this wealth of knowledge with her readers. For example, Forney includes codes and descriptions from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Medical Disorders with comparisons of the diagnostic descriptions featured side-by-side with curved, thought-bubble recollections of her own applicable behaviors (Forney 15–18, 86). In addition to definitions and visual representations of different mood disorders (Forney 59), she includes a list of side effects of Lithium, again annotated with her own fears and reservations (Forney 72) and the pros and cons of different medications she was prescribed as she and her psychiatrist worked together to find the right balance and combination (Forney 182–184). Forney includes excerpts from her own therapy notebooks in sketches, reflections, and charts of mood and behavior; notes from her reading and research; and her questions about potential connections between bipolar disorder and creativity. This combination of different perspectives and explorations is an invaluable contribution to literary representations of mental illness, with the critically engaged, constantly

78  Alissa Burger negotiated, and experiential insights it provides. Scrofano argues that there is a real need for works that represent complex “experiences of clinical illness, including visiting the psychologist’s or psychiatrist’s office, trying out different medications, dealing with side effects, having conflicts with family members, and all the rest that a modern-day diagnosis of mental illness entails” (15). Marbles very effectively rises to this challenge, as Forney presents a very process-oriented account of her own experiences living with and managing her bipolar disorder. Toward the end of Marbles, Forney includes another un-paneled page teeming with images, though in this case, they are images she controls rather than those by which she is bombarded, as in her earlier manic episodes. The text box at the top of this page includes Forney’s explanation: “[m]anaging my disorder means a multifaceted treatment plan” (229), including therapy, journaling, exercise, social support, monitoring eating and sleep patterns, medication, and ongoing medical treatment like blood draws. This visual—though distinctly different—echo of Forney’s earlier representation of manic episodes is reassuring, particularly given that one of Forney’s main fears in seeking treatment was that medication would make her less creative and cost her some integral part of herself or her identity. As this image demonstrates, Forney is still who she has always been, with her creative potential and complex processes of thought and meaning-making unchanged; the one exception is that she is now more in control of those thought processes and arguably able to be more herself more effectively through the help of these psychiatric and medical interventions. In a dynamic exploration of the dual narrative position of the memoirist, Forney’s final pages include a two-page series of panels where she talks to her younger self and reassures herself that everything will be fine. While her life changed/will change during the process of learning to live with and effectively manage her bipolar disorder, she tells her younger self “[i]t’s not really that different … I’m still you” (Forney 235). Forney shares her journey openly and honestly throughout Marbles and invites readers to imagine themselves within and to empathize with her position and experiences. Her final panel—a reflected mirror image of Forney with the simple exclamation that “I’m okay!” (237)—invites identification and expresses a sense of solidarity and community with others who might be struggling with mental illness.

Katie Green’s Lighter Than My Shadow In Lighter Than My Shadow, Katie Green writes about her experiences with a range of disordered eating and her preoccupation with her body both as a signifier of her value and a means of exerting control in the midst of a chaotic world. The graphic memoir format is ideal for “hybridity and autobiography” because in “theorizing trauma in connection to the visual, [it is] textuality that takes the body seriously” (Chute 4)

Illustrating mental illness and engaging empathy  79 and a form which provides Green with the opportunity to take control of her narrative and subjectivity. The longest of the graphic novels examined in this chapter (at more than 500 pages), Lighter Than My Shadow is also the most personal, covering a wide expanse of Green’s life, from her childhood as a picky eater to her adolescent anorexia to secretly binge eating in college. The narrator also explores Green’s complex relationship with and urge to control her body following sexual assault. The expansive nature of Green’s book lends itself especially well to nuanced and complex critical engagement since, as Phillipe Leblanc points out, the length “allows Green to take the time to show the symptoms and the impacts they have on her,” including how they develop and shift gradually from quirky habits to dangerous disorders. Green’s story also complicates the traditional recovery-focused narrative that follows the author or protagonist from illness through self-reflection and treatment, then on to a more positive future. While Cunningham and Forney both address their ongoing struggles with and active management of their mental illness, both offer relatively optimistic conclusions, with Cunningham’s ability to “live again” (138) and Forney’s declaration that “I’m okay” (237). In contrast, in Lighter Than My Shadow, the reader sees Green caught in a cycle of recovery and relapse, and she achieves each new recovery one difficult step at a time. While Cunningham’s and Forney’s memoirs are presented strictly in stark, straightforward black and white, Green uses a variety of muted colors, including subdued shades of blue, green, purple, and sepia, which change at intervals to underscore the emotional tone of the specific sections, events occurring within them, and the passing of time. One significant departure from this palette is in the pages that immediately follow Green’s recovered memories of being sexually assaulted by a self-help guru and alternative therapist Green had trusted. In addition to the horrific violation of her own body, her realization creates doubt about her whole sense of herself as someone who is capable of recovery, as she reflects that in her work with this therapist “[m]y whole recovery was a lie …” (Green 377), a realization which drives her to attempt suicide. In the full-page un-bordered panel, Green’s avatar stands with a handful of pills and a glass of water. Bright white strips begin to appear through visual “tears” in the page (Green 381), which become fractured images in the next two pages as Green’s image is torn apart (Green 382–383), and the several pages that follow are stark white (Green 384–398). These white pages follow Green out of her body as she drifts away from herself, through a collage of memories. Ultimately, she begins to remake herself by taking ownership of her own subjectivity, identity, and experience as she literally re-draws herself into the stark white emptiness of the page (Green 397), before returning once more to her body in the real world, where the pages return to a subdued blue-gray as Green wakes and comes back to herself.

80  Alissa Burger Green’s reconstruction of her own body in this pivotal moment is significant because, as is expected in a memoir about anorexia and disordered eating, her body is a frequent source of textual and visual contestation. Like many other characteristics of mental illness, body dysmorphia is invisible to those who don’t suffer from it, and what the eating disordered individual experiences and “sees” is often dramatically different from what others would consider the external, objective reality. This is another unique opportunity for graphic memoirs of mental illness to elicit empathy. Green can show her readers what she saw when she looked at herself and how she imagined her body: the truth as she experienced it, however different it may have been from the external perspective. For example, one series of six panels shows Green lying down to sleep as the dark shadow of her self-doubt first coalesces, then engulfs her. In the first three panels, we see her “real” body, but in the last three panels, Green shows readers how she saw herself, with her body expanding and bulging as she outlines areas on her body that make her unhappy. She then imagines slicing these parts of herself off with a cleaver (Green 100–101). This similar preoccupation with the body runs throughout Lighter Than My Shadow and includes sections where Green attempts to purge, imagines tearing her own body apart (106), examines her bones and counts her ribs (129), and sees herself with a bulging belly when she is in reality dangerously thin (172). The shadow that surrounds her is made up of the repeatedly scribbled words “fat” and “hate” (173). In another series of panels, Green draws her two selves side-by-side in her attempt to recover from anorexia: one version of herself imagines her body growing out of all proportion as she forces herself to eat, while her more cerebral self stands to one side reminding herself that these perceptions are “not real” (192) and “I need to eat to get well” (193). These panels visually and textually underscore the perception, reality, and challenges of healing for the eating disordered individual. Similarly, when Green binges, she draws her body with a giant gaping mouth in the middle of her abdomen, a monstrous void that demands to be filled (350), and when she recovers the memory of being sexually abused, she stands under the shower in a series of four long vertical panels as her skin starts to peel away to reveal the bones and organs beneath, as the shadow grows around her and then overwhelms her completely (376–377). With Green’s body so dramatically the site of contestation, both from her own perspective and through the abuse of another, redrawing herself is a dynamic act of claiming her own subjectivity and selfhood. She refuses to have her identity defined or her body written by her mental illness or by the actions of others. Another visual hallmark of Lighter Than My Shadow is the titular shadow itself, which, while sometimes bigger and sometimes smaller, is omnipresent throughout Green’s memoir. As Crystal Yin Lie argues,

Illustrating mental illness and engaging empathy  81 [t]he shadow is a richly symbolic figure, enabling Green to push formal and thematic boundaries. On occasion, the shadow functions as a gutter, transforming separate images into single ideas and fracturing both time and space. But more interestingly, [Green’s] complex interiority is made almost always hyper-visible through the shadow. The shadow is with [Green] from childhood on and grows on the page to represent an increasingly agitated psychological state of mind. However, the meaning of this shadow is amorphous and constantly shifting; it becomes not only an external representation of her anorexia but also “a companion, an inextricable part of herself” (Lie). As a result, Lie argues, “[t]he dynamic functions and meanings of the shadow elude conclusive definition, helping the narrative explore the multidimensional experience of [Green’s] subjectivity without recourse to the totalizing trope of the anorexic artist.” The shadow appears in multiple guises through Green’s work, sometimes overwhelming, but other times harnessed and channeled by her, such as when the shadow is siphoned into her pencil in the opening pages when she begins to write and tell her story (Green 7). Sometimes it is big and sometimes small, at times hovering overhead and at times within her body itself, the shadow is never far away; and “[e]ven when she appears to be doing well, the darkness is often hovering nearby” (Alverson 27). Just as Cunningham and Forney’s visual elements represent the invisible challenges and experiences of various forms of mental illness, Green invites understanding and empathy through this externalization and visual representation of her self-doubt and depression and brings the unseen into clear view. In the final pages of Lighter Than My Shadow, Green discusses her recovery, including the practice of healthy eating habits. As the reader sees Green at the dinner table with her family, working, or in bed with her partner, the shadow is nowhere to be seen (Green 494–498), though it makes its reappearance as a manifestation of self-doubt and a reminder that perfection is unattainable as Green wrestles with an artistic project (Green 502–503). Green ends on the cautiously optimistic note that things are “mostly” okay (Green 500), and the final page features a full-page illustration of Green face-to-face with her childhood self (507), which coalesced from the shadow of the previous pages (504–505). This form becomes her insecurity and fear personified, accepted, and comforted. Like Forney’s, Green’s conclusion foregrounds her ongoing work and continual treatment, and Lie points out that “[t]aking full advantage of the graphic form, My Shadow puts forth a readerly ethics of prolonged engagement. By its conclusion, [Green’s] story is not of complete recovery, but a realization and acceptance of her impairment’s complexity and ­open-endedness.” This complex representation of Green’s struggle with

82  Alissa Burger disordered eating—in its many permutations and cycles of relapse and recovery, as well as the emphasis on self-acceptance, self-determination, and the ongoing nature of health and healing—highlight the overwhelming challenges of mental illness, as well as the many roads to recovery and ways forward.

Conclusion The graphic memoir format is an ideal fit for narratives of mental illness for a wide variety of reasons. First and foremost, the combination of text and image has proven productive for connecting with readers on an emotional level and encouraging understanding and empathy with the story being told and its teller. In addition to the emotional resonance offered by the combination of text and image, the graphic memoir format also offers its authors the opportunity to give their readers an intimate glimpse of their interior lives—their thoughts, emotions, and p ­ erceptions—that cannot be achieved in quite the same way through text alone. As David Herman notes in “Multimodal Storytelling and Identity Construction in Graphic Narratives,” “[c]onversational ­storytellers  … typically use two semiotic modes to design verbal as well as visual (gestural) representations in narratively organized discourse” (197). The communication and connection of this interaction is achieved through the dynamic combination of both semiotic modes: the words would not carry the same weight or engage the reader in the same way without the gestures, and those gestures would lack a clear narrative context without the words. Similarly, the combination of text and image in the graphic memoir is inseparable, and through their integration, they are most effective when their authors are able to productively engage readers both intellectually and emotionally. Just as with the gestures Herman describes, the images of the graphic memoir contribute visually, emotionally, and dynamically to the narrative and allow the reader to see, hear, and understand. In addition, memoirs of mental illness are always a work in progress, with the reality being that the work of recovery will never be done. This approach deviates significantly from traditional narratives of more body-centered illness, in the discourse of which “storytelling and healing have been linked since ancient times” (I. Williams 355). However, narratives of mental illness pose a schism that is never really fully “healed” and while the narrative of illness “attempts to restore an order that the interruption fragmented … it must also tell the truth that interruptions will continue. Part of the truth is that the tidy ends are no longer appropriate to the story” (Frank 59). Given this distinguishing feature of the lack of a traditional resolution, the non-traditional format of the graphic memoir lends itself in flexible and creative ways to telling these stories, as well as provides a sense of shared experience, inviting empathy and connection. Cunningham, Forney, and Green all

Illustrating mental illness and engaging empathy  83 make excellent use of the graphic memoir format in sharing their own stories of mental illness and survival by combining text and image to engage readers beyond the traditional narrative structure of autobiography in order to show rather than tell about these experiences. Through the graphic memoir format, they not only tell their own stories, but they claim space for narratives that have previously been silenced, with the potential to elicit understanding and empathy that remain with the reader long after the final panel.

Notes 1 Both Cunningham and Forney’s graphic memoirs feature black-and-white illustrations, which serve to lend a serious and straightforward tone to their work, in a visual choice that distinguishes them from many mainstream graphic narratives and follows in the tradition of other graphic memoirs on sober topics, like Spiegelman’s Maus and Satrapi’s Persepolis. In contrast, Green’s use of pastel-colored pages follows this serious focus but utilizes color to visually emphasize Green’s shifting emotional tone and context throughout her narrative. 2 Cunningham uses this same representational approach to very different effect in his chapter on “Anti-Social Personality Disorder,” where he begins with a horizontal line representing an eye, followed by a series of panels featuring successively larger images of the eye rendered more realistically as the size increases. However, while readers may expect to read the eye as a metaphor for identity, individualism, and as the so-called “window to the soul,” Cunningham subverts this expectation, with the accompanying text explaining the cold detachment and lack of empathy that characterize antisocial personality disorder (44–45).

Works Cited Alverson, Brigid. “Frames of Mind.” School Library Journal, vol. 62, no. 2, 2018, pp. 26–30. EBSCOhost, proxy.culver.edu:2048/login?url=https%3a%2f% 2fsearch.ebscohost.com%2flogin.aspx%3fdirect%3dtrue%26db%3dedsgao% 26AN%3dedsgcl.526733860%26site%3deds-live%26scope%3dsite. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition (DSM-5). American Psychiatric Publishing, 2013. Bello, Grace. “The Bipolar Cartoonist: Ellen Forney’s Marbles.” Publisher’s Weekly, vol. 259, no. 45, 2012, p. 42. EBSCOhost, proxy.culver.edu:2048/log in?url=https%3a%2f%2 fsearch.ebscohost.com%2flogin.aspx%3fdirect% 3dtrue%26db%3dedsgao%26AN%3dedsgcl.307787187%26site%3dedslive%26scope%3dsite. Chute, Hillary L. Graphic Women: Life Narrative & Contemporary Comics. Columbia UP, 2010. Cooke, Rachel. “Psychiatric Tales by Darryl Cunningham.” The Guardian, 17 July 2010, www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jul/18/psychiatric-talesdarryl-cunningham-review. Cunningham, Darryl. Psychiatric Tales: Eleven Graphic Stories about Mental Illness. Bloomsbury, 2010.

84  Alissa Burger Donovan, Courtney. “Representations of Health, Embodiment, and Experience in Graphic Memoir.” Configurations, vol. 22, 2014, pp. 237–253. El Refaie, Elisabeth. “Looking on the Dark and Bright Side: Creative Metaphors of Depression in Two Graphic Memoirs.” a|b: Auto|Biography Studies, vol. 29, no. 1, 2014, pp. 149–174. Eugene, Nicole. “Graphic Narratives: Bechdel’s Fun Home and Forney’s Marbles.” Mental Illness in Popular Culture, edited by Sharon Packer, Praeger, 2017, pp. 233–242. Forney, Ellen. Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me. Avery, 2012. Frank, Arthur W. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. U of Chicago P, 1995. Goldberg, Myla. “Going ‘Marbles’: From Manic Highs to Oceanic Lows.” NPR, 8 Nov. 2012, www.npr.org/2012/11/08/164169776/going-marblesfrom-manic-highs-to-oceanic-lows. Green, Katie. Lighter Than My Shadow. Lion Forge, 2017. Haig, Matt. “Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me by Ellen Forney – Review.” The Guardian, 8 Aug. 2013, www.theguardian.com/ books/2013/aug/08/marbles-mania-ellen-forney-review. Heflin, Tanya. “Minds in the Gutter: Psychological Self-Exposure in Graphic Memoir.” Works and Days 63/64, vol. 32, no. 1&2, 2014–2015, pp. 277–296. EBSCOhost, proxy.culver.edu: 2048/login?url=https%3a%2f%2fsearch. ebscohost.com%2f login.aspx%3fdirect%3dtrue%26db%3dhlh%26 AN%3d117806174%26site%3deds-live%26scope%3dsite. Herman, David. “Multimodal Storytelling and Identity Construction in Graphic Narratives.” Telling Stories: Language, Narrative, and Social Life, edited by Deborah Schiffrin, Anna De Fina and Anastasia Nylund, Georgetown UP, 2010, pp. 195–208. Hoeness-Krupsaw, Susanna. “Teaching March in the Borderlands between Social Justice and Pop Culture.” Teaching Graphic Novels in the English Classroom: Pedagogical Possibilities of Multimodal Literacy Engagement, edited by Alissa Burger, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 135–147. Jones, Laura. “Commentary on the Graphic Memoir.” Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, vol. 20, no. 1, 2018, pp. 175–180. EBSCOhost, proxy.culver.edu:2048/login?url=https%3a%2f%2fsearch.ebscohost.com% 2flogin.aspx%3fdirect%3dtrue%26db%3dhlh%26AN%3d128546015%26 site%3deds-live%26scope%3dsite. Kyler, Carolyn. “Mapping a Life: Reading and Looking at Contemporary Graphic Memoir.” The CEA Critic, vol. 72, no. 3, 2010, pp. 2–20. Leblanc, Philippe. “Review – Lighter than My Shadow or Katie Green’s Masterpiece.” Comics Beat, 29 Mar. 2018, www.comicsbeat.com/review-lighterthan-my-shadow/. Lie, Crystal Yin. “Lighter than My Shadow – Review.” Graphic Medicine, 20 Mar. 2018, www.graphicmedicine.org/comic-reviews/lighter-than-my-shadow/. “Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me.” Publisher’s Weekly, vol. 259, no. 28, 2012, p. 46. EBSCOhost, proxy.culver.edu:2048/login? url=https%3a%2f%2fsearch.ebscohost.com%2flogin.aspx%3fdirect% 3dtrue%26db%3dedsgao%26AN%3dedsgcl.296255800%26site%3dedslive%26scope%3dsite.

Illustrating mental illness and engaging empathy  85 Morton, Paul. “Immersion Therapy: The Millions Interviews Ellen Forney.” The Millions, 26 June 2013, https://themillions.com/2013/06/immersion-­ therapy-the-millions-interviews-ellen-forney.html. “Psychiatric Tales: Eleven Graphic Stories about Mental Illness.” Kirkus Reviews, 2 Dec. 2010, www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/darryl-cunningham/ psychiatric-tales/. “Psychiatric Tales: Eleven Graphic Stories about Mental Illness.” Publisher’s Weekly, vol. 258, no. 2, 2011, p. 37. EBSCOhost, proxy.culver.edu:2048/login? url=https%3a%2f%2fsearch.ebscohost.com%2flogin.aspx%3fdirect% 3dtrue%26db%3dedsgao%26AN%3dedsgcl.246835214%26site%3dedslive%26scope%3dsite. Scrofano, Diane. “Not as Crazy as It Seems: Discussing the New YA Literature of Mental Illness in Your Classroom or Library.” Young Adult Library Services, vol. 13, no. 2, 2015, pp. 15–20. EBSCOhost, proxy.culver.edu:2048/login? url=https%3a%2f%2fsearch.ebscohost.com%2flogin.aspx%3fdirect% 3dtrue%26db%3dedsgao%26AN%3dedsgcl.398628092%26site%3dedslive%26scope%3dsite. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 2nd edition. U of Minnesota P, 2010. Weiner, Stephen. “Psychiatric Tales: Eleven Graphic Stories about Mental Illness.” Booklist, vol. 107, no. 12, 2011, pp. 61–62. EBSCOhost, proxy. culver.edu:2048/login?url=https% 3a%2f%2fsearch.ebscohost.com%2f login.aspx%3fdirect%3dtrue%26db%3dedsgao%26A N%3dedsgcl. 250214882%26site%3deds-live%26scope%3dsite. Williams, Ian. “Autography as Auto-Therapy: Psychic Pain and the Graphic Memoir.” Journal of Medical Humanities, vol. 32, no. 4, 2011, pp. 353–366. Williams, Kate. “Psychiatric Tales: Eleven Graphic Stories about Mental Illness.” Psych Central, n.d., https://psychcentral.com/lib/psychiatric-tales-elevengraphic-stories-about-mental-illness/.

Part II

Poiesis Making and constructing

The most important graphic narratives explore the conflicted boundaries of what can be said and what can be shown at the intersection of collective histories and life stories. —Hillary Chute, “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narratives” What keeps the performative nature of culture as enlivening energies in perpetual motion is that people continuously enact—perhaps it is more fitting to say “transact”—culture. —Dwight Conquergood, Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis

6 Mapping the nation and reimagining home in Vietnamese American graphic narratives Winona Landis The history of Vietnam and its diaspora is a history constructed in images, including photographs of war; popular film; and, most recently, graphic narratives. My analysis in this chapter engages directly with the latter genre and addresses the sudden, noticeable increase in visual narratives emerging from Southeast Asian and refugee circles. Mai-Linh Hong proposes that one reason may be that “New literature by Vietnamese American writers meets America’s hegemonic, but uncertain, gaze in a variety of forms—poetic, narrative, visual, sonic, and ­performative— and offers a revealing look at the heart and mind of American empire” (36). In other words, empire is often created and maintained through visual artifacts, such as maps, photographs, and illustrations, and violence against imperial subjects is recreated through that same visual documentation. Given these facts, harnessing visual forms becomes a critical tool through which producers resist or “talk back” to dominant, colonizing narratives. Examples of such resistant narratives within the Vietnamese diaspora are the graphic memoirs Vietnamerica by GB Tran and The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui. Both texts explore how diasporic subjects construct their identities in relation to or by rejecting primarily Western notions of nation and home, and they engage with this diasporic identity formation through visual depictions of place. By bringing Vietnamerica and The Best We Could Do, two visual accounts of war and migration, into conversation with one another, I demonstrate the usefulness of graphic narrative for retelling stories of war and trauma, as evidenced by the growing number of Vietnamese diasporic comics and graphic texts. These graphic narratives take up notions of place by visually reimagining maps and other geographic traces of empire as important frames for their familial histories by creating embodied maps to show how place can be physically figured on the bodies of marginalized subjects, and by showcasing other means of conceiving and viewing “home” as a location in flux. In using visual constructions of place as an analytical lens, I illustrate how these visual memoirs combine official and personal histories to permit a stronger emotional identification with the content of the narratives, as scholar Suzanne Keen argues in her work on the production of empathy through

Mapping the nation  89 narrative. Moving beyond the narrative itself to consider its form and construction, this chapter demonstrates how visual narrative is uniquely positioned to produce identification through its imagery and does so in such a way as to lend greater legibility to the movements and memories of refugee subjects.

Critical methodology: empires, refugees, and images My method of inquiry in this chapter stems from the intersections of three analytical approaches regarding Vietnam and the Southeast Asian subjects: Empire Studies, Critical Refugee Studies, and Visual Culture Studies. The analytics of empire and the refugee experience have been significant to the Asian American field for some time now, with thanks to generative critical work such as Yến Lê Espiritu’s Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) and the pioneering work on comparative empire in Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents. As Lowe argues, colonial or imperial archives—the documents and images necessary to the creation and maintenance of empire—are also sites through which we may understand how the violence and legacy of imperialism continue to affect neoimperial sites and populations to the present. New knowledge about empire-making, its present legacy, and modes of resistance may be most productively uncovered in the “intimate” connections between these various subjects with their limited archival records. As Lowe further suggests, uncovering this trace of empire and its legacy “involves considering scenes of close connection in relation to a global geography that one more often conceives in terms of vast spatial distances” (18). For the purposes of my analysis, I argue that artifacts of neoimperial visuality, specifically graphic novels, allow us to effectively locate these “scenes of close connection” and the historical and contemporary circuits of U.S. empire. They illustrate the way in which, even following Vietnamese independence and reunification, the traces of empire, official and otherwise, can still be noted both in Vietnam itself and in the various Vietnamese/American diasporic communities. Vietnamerica and The Best We Could Do call attention to these lingering effects in their depiction and construction of geographic locales, historical maps, and the intimate relationship between body and place. And as graphic memoirs, they literally and narratively draw widespread locations and time frames into close proximity for readers. These texts often refuse to approach the United States as a static setting, but rather as a contingent spatial and historical construct specifically illustrating the imperial attachments between the United States and the peoples, places, and memories of Vietnam. My focus on the visuality of Vietnam and the spaces in its diaspora impacted by global conflict opens up new modes of critically engaging with the subjectivities and geographies of U.S. imperialism in Asia. That is, these graphic novels help to

90  Winona Landis articulate a refugee geography that illustrates the way that place shapes and subverts diasporic Vietnamese subjectivity. In investigating the conception of a refugee geography, my analysis is also dependent on Critical Refugee Studies, which Yến Lê Espiritu defines as work that “conceptualizes the ‘refugee’ as a critical idea but also as a social actor whose life, when traced, illuminates the interconnections of colonization, war, and global social change” (Espiritu 11). Her emphasis on refugees as dynamic “actors” has been key to generating conversations about how refugees of U.S. (and European) intervention in Southeast Asia are not simply passive victims and/or recipients of humanitarian aid, but rather they play an active role in constructing their own subject positions in relation to the various powers that overlap their experiences. Many scholars, like Espiritu, point to the Vietnam War as a climactic moment of intersection for these subjects, as it is this historical event that produced the greatest number of Southeast Asian refugees. Espiritu specifically refers to these individuals as “militarized refugees,” for the purpose of exposing the hidden violence behind the humanitarian term “­refugee,” thereby challenging the powerful narrative of America(ns) rescuing and caring for Vietnam’s discarded that erases the role the U.S. war and foreign policy played in inducing the “refugee crisis” in the first place. (Espiritu 18)1 Similarly, Mimi Nguyen in The Gift of Freedom expands this idea of how refugee subjects come to be by investigating the “refugee condition” and refugee passages. That is, Mimi Nguyen charts the way in which Southeast Asian refugees are deemed to have a particular, almost pathological, condition that creates an indebted relationship between themselves and the nations, such as the United States, that have provided them refuge—a condition which deliberately erases the history of violence that resulted in their refugee condition in the first place. In charting the movement of refugees and their cultural representations over time and space, Mimi Nguyen shows that these particular Asian/ American subjects have tense and contradictory relationships with their “native land” as well as the land that has provided them with “the gift of freedom” through violent upheaval. What’s more, she shows that refugees are caught in an impossible predicament, where they must show their gratitude to their neoimperial benefactors, perhaps even finding ways to pay back this “gift” of supposed liberty and safety through assimilation and economic success. Simultaneously, they must also disavow the violent wars that brought them to their new “home.” In this way, both Mimi Nguyen and Espiritu are concerned with the contradictions of being refugee subjects in post-war, neoimperial America, as well as the public visibility of these contradictions. Through the work of

Mapping the nation  91 scholars such as Espiritu, Mimi Nguyen, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, and others, scholars of Asian American literary culture have become better equipped to locate specific examples of colonial domination, trauma, and exile within Asian diasporic subjects and their cultural productions. 2 These callbacks to colonialism and, by association, neoimperial projects and conflicts such as the Vietnam War, which are evoked in these diasporic texts, are vital components of my analysis in this chapter. Specifically, the way in which Asian American cultural producers construct these events and moments allows for a more robust recognition and understanding of the structures of U.S. empire, especially as it intersects with other imperial powers throughout recent history. The texts that I analyze often refuse to approach the United States, and other neoimperial nations, as static settings. Instead, they are framed as contingent spatial and historical constructs that specifically illustrate for readers the imperial attachments between locations such as the United States and the peoples, places, and memories of Vietnam. My focus on the visuality of the war in Vietnam and the spaces impacted by conflict opens up new modes of critically engaging with the subjectivities and geographies of U.S. imperialism in Asia. Because the visual is a key means of recognizing and comprehending refugees, it is worth unpacking how visuality is also central to the actual construction of refugee subjects. Visual culture and visual analysis are, therefore, essential components to my investigation of narratives that foreground representations of the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Indeed, incorporating the visual as an axis of analysis is a matter of course when we consider that the Vietnam War is one of the most significant mediated events in U.S. history, with numerous news programs, journalistic exposés, and films taking the war and its combatants as their main subjects. Sylvia Shin Huey Chong argues that these visual artifacts, produced both during and after the war, “consciously represent the Vietnam era to its participants, converting direct experience into visual forms that can be widely disseminated, debated, and shared throughout the national community” (9). Yet, at the same time, “these visual texts also outline unconscious structures of relations that generate particular political desires in excess of direct experience” (Chong 9). In other words, news reports from the frontlines, as well as films and television programs produced after the war’s conclusion, enable viewers (especially dominantly situated American audiences) to make sense of themselves and their own actions with regard to the war. In addition, the images with which viewers are inundated directly impact their own affective reactions to the war, the politics surrounding the war, and their own relationship to such politics. Often, these visual artifacts serve to reify the position of moral superiority that most American viewers feel they occupy, since these images compel them to critique the necessity and effects of the war in Vietnam. Chong reminds us, for example, that

92  Winona Landis [t]he explosion of violence in American visual media after Vietnam is not simply a straightforward representation of historical reality within this cultural superstructure; it also raises important questions about what it means to see, display, and ultimately understand the violence of war. (Chong 15) However, these more mainstream objects of consumption do not fully represent or, at times, erase the refugee or Vietnamese perspective on the war and thus solidify the common notion that, at least with regard to refugees and “boat people,” the U.S. government did the “good” and “right” thing by rescuing these war-torn subjects.3 Building on this critique of the visual, this chapter focuses on how Vietnamese American and diasporic visual production makes possible other ways of seeing Vietnam, the United States, and the aftermath of conflict through the visual productions of transnationally situated refugee producers.

Vietnamerica and visual memory As Timothy August notes, the graphic memoir Vietnamerica utilizes a “unique visual plane that leverages sensory experiences, so actors can traverse multiple times and places in a single scene” (165). Perhaps more significantly, author GB Tran focuses not simply on his own memories and experiences, but rather works to entangle the memories of his entire family, with particular attention paid to the memories of his parents. Moving back and forth between the present day in the United States, French-occupied Vietnam, Vietnam during the war, and his family upon their initial arrival in America, Tran uncovers the unexpectedly complex relationship between his parents, between him and his siblings, and all of their subsequent connections to their Vietnamese homeland and the family they left behind. Vietnamerica, a combination of biography and memoir in visual form, tells the story of Tran’s parents who met at the cusp of the Vietnam War and created a blended family through their marriage. Tran then details the struggles of his parents and older siblings as they adjust to refugee life in the United States after fleeing during the fall of Saigon. Tran himself was born in the United States and therefore has no personal recollections of Vietnam. In this way, the final layer of Tran’s graphic text is his own engagement with and reflections about his heritage, family, and “home” upon returning to Vietnam as an adult with his parents. Thus, Tran creates both a narrative and visual map of the many points that connect each of his family members’ stories, and he crafts a text that is personal while at the same time serving as “a cultural touchstone for any other Vietnamese families” (August 166). What makes Tran’s text so powerful and relatable is the way in which he engages with transnational refugee subjectivity and the embodied memories of the Vietnam War. Specifically, readers can see this

Mapping the nation  93 transnational subject negotiation at work in the way in which Tran’s graphic novel emphasizes a tenuous relationship between two distinct “home” lands. Vietnamerica sketches out a tense and often contradictory connection between the United States as an imperial power and Vietnam as a space of domination, which directly challenges the prevailing notions of time and space as the methods by which the former controls the latter. That is, according to theorists like Mimi Nguyen, the maintenance of empire and the construction of the diasporic, refugee subject is “bound to the passage of time” (34), specifically regarding the notions of futurity and progress. As she explains, “world-historical homogeneous time and its core concept of progress emerge from the crucible of empire”; therefore, neoimperial and diasporic subjects, as figures that simultaneously depict the colonial past and the promised freedom of the future, are caught between the past and the future. They are able to “diminish—but never to close the distance between anachronism and history proper” (M. Nguyen 34). Vietnamerica illustrates the passage of time in a nonlinear fashion. Crucially by refusing to figure Vietnam, the United States, or “home” as static locations—the graphic narrative provides visual evidence of “the unfinished histories that continue to cross us [diasporic subjects]” (M. Nguyen 32). Vietnamerica thereby illustrates for readers the significance of temporal and, importantly, geographic space for the construction of the diasporic individual. The narrative draws into close proximity the seemingly distant moments and locations of the Vietnamese diaspora through a strategic combination of cartographic, geographic, and embodied imagery. Tran’s story begins with images of his parents’ evacuation from ­Saigon—red skies filled with smoke and a plane in flight—accompanied by his mother’s present-day narration of the same events. Then, quickly, the images themselves shift to the present, where an adult Tran is sitting in a similarly cramped plane en route to Saigon, rather than away from it. The reader is shown a two-page spread of the city, including a barely hidden Coca-Cola billboard and two airplanes flying off in opposite directions. Finally, on the following page, the only visible image on an otherwise blank, deep red page is the first page of a book with the following inscription: “To my son, Gia-Bao Tran. ‘A man without history is a tree without roots’” (Tran 8). In the opening pages of the graphic narrative, readers are confronted by panels and images that blend the past and the present and show how both temporalities shape the landscape of Vietnam and the Tran family. The modernity of present-day Saigon juxtaposed with a quote from an ancient Chinese philosopher foregrounds the sometimes conflicting temporal frames that construct Vietnamese diasporic locations and identities. At the same time, Tran’s visual juxtaposition of contemporary Saigon and its subtle references to Western consumer culture contrast with the image and accompanying text to evoke ancient Chinese philosophy and to draw out the multitude of

94  Winona Landis overlapping and competing national influences that construct Vietnam and its subjects in diaspora. Tran’s graphic text acknowledges and troubles the notion of the refugee as inherently “anachronistic” or stunted (M. Nguyen 34). By beginning his family’s story with a return (or more accurately, an arrival), Tran challenges the notion that all refugees must eventually assimilate or that they must be grateful for the “gift” of life and freedom that the United States bestows on them. Tran’s family, by contrast, is eager to revisit their old home and old life. In emphasizing the Tran family’s refusal to remain in one place, Vietnamerica illuminates the distinctions between immigration and diaspora. That is, whereas immigration is most often associated with free choice and the desire for upward mobility, the displacement of refugees into a widespread diaspora is a movement based on necessity: the need to escape poverty, oppression, and violence. In most cases, and specifically in the case of Vietnam, the violence diasporic subjects escape is the direct result of neoimperial conflict, or it is the forceful intervention of a global power like the United States into the political and economic lives of those in the developing world, including the Global South. Closely considering the blended images of past and present, the “here” and “there” that are introduced in the beginning of Tran’s narrative allows readers to witness the intersections of various temporal and spatial frames in the making of a transnational refugee subjectivity. That being said, as Tran’s graphic history later shows, this simultaneous mapping of past and present creates difficulties for his family, as many of them come to realize that Vietnam is no longer “home,” but rather a kind of living memory. Tran’s text evokes the cultural and affective challenges of living within a neoimperial geography by reproducing and repurposing maps of significant locations in Vietnam and the United States. These maps rely on symbolism and personification which allow readers to view them as scenes not of rescue, but of violence and abandonment. The re-creation of the map in Tran’s illustrations suggests that these are in fact maps of war and an example of refugee geography. Sylvia Chong explains that maps and other remnants of material history are necessary objects of analysis and reproduction because “[i]ndexical texts not only contain the physical traces of people, places, and objects, but they also register the social and historical formations that bring such constellations of material reality together in the image” (Chong 8). In one such example of the material made visible, Tran creates a living version of Vietnam, in which the outline of the nation—rather than being marked by cities, roads, and other familiar cartographic iconography—is filled with desperate, terrified human bodies with arms thrusting out into the ocean as boats move toward safe destinations in the Pacific (Tran 158). The result is a particularly arresting image of fear and hopelessness. By depicting not only the people, but the entire nation itself, as yearning for help from the United States and other Western nations, Tran’s

Mapping the nation  95 personified map certainly seems to adhere to discourses of rescue, survival, and eventual gratitude of the transnational refugee subject. Long Bui contends that this artistic choice may also stem from the fact that “the pages suggest the bloodiness of fighting without offending human sensibilities” (127). The image of the embodied Vietnamese peninsula that Tran includes imaginatively personifies neoimperial violence against individual subjects and the nation itself. In showing bodies of men and women reaching out of a gaping hole in the earth, this map shows how war and conflict can scar geographic landscapes and the people who inhabit them. Additionally, as the figures emerging from the scar in the earth reach toward the boats in the Pacific as well as back toward the other countries on the Southeast Asian peninsula (i.e., Laos and Cambodia), Tran’s visual representation also demonstrates the many locations of the Vietnamese diaspora. While many refugees ended up on the other side of the Pacific in the United States, a great number first went to camps in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. The cartographic image also contains a red light on the northern horizon to signify the presence of Communist China, another nation with interests in maintaining a kind of neoimperial control of Vietnam. Attending to the geographical and geopolitical implications of the images in Vietnamerica, Jeffrey Santa Ana contends that the text “illustrates an ecological imagination from a postcolonial and diasporic perspective to remediate the history of the French colonial era and American military involvement in Vietnam” (163). To his argument, I would add that the visual re-creation of maps and locations marks the way that conflict continues to affect the bodies and locations related to the Vietnam War while bringing these disparate locations into clearer association with one another. Tran turns to refugee geography as a critical remapping of compartmentalized and controlling imperial cartography practice, thus pointing to visuality as an important means of extending Lowe’s argument about the connections constructed in and erased by the imperial archive. Tran’s embodied map calls our attention to the wider area touched by colonial domination and neoimperialism in Southeast Asia, hints at the locations where these refugee bodies end up, and illustrates these bodies’ emotionally charged mobility. Readers engage with the United States, another location in the greater refugee geography, in another more tongue-in-cheek map that Tran creates. He shows the various locations that his family inhabits in the land of their neoimperial benefactor. Although originally migrating to South Carolina, his parents eventually settle in Arizona, which he playfully and knowingly refers to as the “Parent’s Republic of Vietnam,” while he and his siblings are spread to either coast or the “Federation of Free States,” separated by “The Great Generational Divide” and surrounded by the “Sea of Cultural Loss.” And while Tran acknowledges that leaving a war-torn Vietnam was unquestionably the right decision, he also

96  Winona Landis notes in relation to his map: “But in America, I doubt they [my parents] imagined this fate for their kids: me and my siblings growing apart and scattered across the country” (97). Thus, even within the geographic boundaries of the continental United States, the Tran family’s personal map is not so easily constructed and illustrates a profound distance, not only between Vietnam and the United States but also between generations and within their new “home.” Although Tran calls to mind the “arrested development” of the refugee condition, his cartographic re-creations suggest that this negative affect comes about as a direct result of U.S. imperial intervention, rather than in spite of it. Jeffery Santa Ana suggests this moment of geographic visuality “likewise exemplifies how the formal aspects of comics make visible the physical and temporal displacements of violence that characterize a diasporic subjectivity” (159). In other words, this map is about both time and space, as it visually illustrates the way one family’s more intimate diaspora occurs over the span of many years, as well as throughout an entire nation. This map is also performative, in that it demonstrates the conscious construction of the diasporic self that individuals like Tran, his siblings, and his parents must enact in order to bridge or create “scenes of close connection” between the various distant spaces that make up their lives. It also shows the fraught performances necessary to bridge the generational distances between parents and those who remember a life in Vietnam and the children for whom the United States is the most familiar reference point in the construction of their complex identities. The power of the kind of refugee geography visually depicted in Vietnamerica presents the material reality of change and displacement. This visual narrative represents Vietnamese refugees as dynamic agents rather than static figures. They are not necessarily consigned to the places they call “home,” and this location further problematizes the dominant conception of the refugee as a figure of rescue that has gratefully arrived at a final, liberated destination. Moreover, in emphasizing and depicting geographic space as liminal and contested, Vietnamerica reimagines the places and subjects of imperialism.

The Best We Could Do and familial cartography Much like Vietnamerica, Thi Bui’s graphic memoir The Best We Could Do (2017) is a multigenerational narrative bookended by memories of the past and the lingering effects of these memories on the present. Bui’s text, in contrast to Tran’s, is sparse and matter of fact. She relies on a limited color palette whereas Tran’s Vietnamerica is richly and vibrantly illustrated. Both narratives do, however, share a similar fascination with recreating and representing the spaces and geographies of Vietnamese diaspora, most especially those that are essential to their family histories. In The Best We Could Do, Bui uses maps and geographically

Mapping the nation  97 influenced illustrations to demonstrate the complexity of Vietnamese and refugee identity both within and beyond the boundaries of Vietnam. She depicts her parents’ relationships with the cities, towns, and nations that shape them while simultaneously drawing on space to demonstrate the distance that she herself feels from these places when growing up in the United States. Although the crux of Bui’s narrative is an investigation of her parents’ lives prior to resettlement in the United States, The Best We Could Do begins with a recollection of the birth of Bui’s own son and the fear and anxiety she feels in knowing that “family is something I have now created” (21). This opening arc serves to bring her closer to her mother through the shared experience of birth. At the same time, Bui’s illustrations, constructed in black, white, and orange with little to no background detail, evoke the frustration, anxiety, and even isolation that she feels as a new parent and with regard to her somewhat strained relationship with her parents, who live on the other side of the country. The reader learns that the geographic distance between Bui and the rest of her family eventually disappears after she, her husband, and son move to California to be closer to them. However, similar to the juxtaposition of image and prose in the first chapter, this section of the narrative belies the inner tension of Bui’s family through stark narration and minimalist imagery. In a particularly arresting panel, Bui presents her bare back— imprinted with a sharp outline of a map of Vietnam—to the reader. Her body is overlaid on a blush red watercolor-inspired re-creation of the same map. Bui’s narration explains to the reader her motivation for recording her family’s history in this graphic memoir and notes that she hoped “that if I could see Việt Nam as a real place, and not a symbol of something lost…I would see my parents as real people…and learn to love them better” (Thi Bui 36). In this moment, Bui demonstrates the profound, embodied effect that Vietnam as place and history has left on her to create a kind of psychological scar, as represented by the map on her back. At the same time, the faded, almost sepia-tone quality of the geographic image of Vietnam alludes to its presence as a memory for both Bui and her parents. Like the subject of an old photograph, Vietnam as a distinct place fades and grows ever more distant with the passage of time. By recreating the experiences of herself and her parents, in addition to the place and space of Vietnam itself, Bui works to literally draw herself in relation to her home and past. Similar to Tran’s map of how his family eventually settled in the United States showcases the distances they must cross in order to connect with one another, Bui’s embodied map serves as a reminder of generational and spatial distance, as well as a hopeful bridge between a lost “home” and a new “home.” Bui’s struggle for a coherent sense of identity as related to place is inscribed on her body and creates a vivid illustration of the formation of the diasporic self.

98  Winona Landis The cartographic and geographic imagery in The Best We Could Do also serves an educational purpose by providing historical context for readers to complement the personal accounts of Bui and her family. As in Tran’s Vietnamerica, illustrations of maps visually chart the distance between the United States and Vietnam, as well as the literal and metaphorical distance between generations. However, in contrast to Vietnamerica, the maps in The Best We Could Do are more geographically accurate, with carefully labeled borders and cities, rather than visually symbolic. They are also carefully inserted into the narrative to illustrate the ways in which geography and the lines that are drawn through colonized spaces are arbitrary but with marked effect on the individuals that inhabit these spaces. In Chapter 5, entitled “Either; Or,” for example, Bui recounts in her mother’s words the way in which geography and the ability to move from place to place helped to construct her mother’s relatively privileged background. Her mother explains that she was actually born in Cambodia, in the capital Phnom Penh, but after the outbreak of violence there, her family returned to Vietnam to the coastal town of Nha Trang, which “was on the central coast, far from the fighting” (138). In the midst of this remembrance, Bui inserts a map of the Southeast Asian region and taking the time to label Phnom Penh, Thailand, and Laos, and, of course, Vietnam and its various cities, including Nha Trang. At the top of the map, China is filled in entirely in black, and the Vietnamese cities of Hà Nội and Hải Phòng are framed by sparks of white which ostensibly represent gunfire and the fighting from which Bui’s mother was removed while growing up. The map also features a cutaway image of the landscape of Nha Trang—a beach chair, umbrella, and palm trees on a beach, framed by mountains in the distance—that feels like a photo from a postcard. Writing in a review for The Vulture, Abraham Riesman notes that the attention to detail in this instance contextualizes the unfamiliar coastal town and highlights the idyllic privilege that marked Bui’s mother’s childhood and adolescence. By focusing on the particularities of her mother’s journey from Vietnamese subject to Vietnamese American refugee from its origin point, Bui calls into question the dominant visual field with regard to refugee experience by demonstrating how official geographic documentation and personal history coalesce in an individual story. A map of Vietnam is also prominently featured in Bui’s retelling of her father’s experience before and during the war. When compared to the map in her mother’s story, it becomes easy to recognize that its purpose is to draw attention even more clearly to the ways in which neoimperial conflict and external intervention can change the landscape of a colonized space. Moreover, the map contextualizes both the Vietnam War itself and the internal, intimate conflicts that it generated. As Bui’s father relates his reunification with his long-estranged father in the Communist-controlled North, Bui draws a map of the divided

Mapping the nation  99 Vietnamese peninsula and notes the line of demarcation between “The Communist North” and “The American-Backed South” at the 17th parallel. There are no specific cities in this map, but as before, it notes the specter of “Communist China,” “a source of American fear” (Bui 167). The continued references to China are both a geographic reference point and a reminder of the underlying causes of global conflict in the context of competing empires. Moving beyond the content of the map itself, its placement within the text is also key to constructing neoimperial and refugee subjectivity, as it lies in the middle of Bui’s father’s recollection of his time with family in North Vietnam. His father suggests that now that they have been reunited, “of course he will stay” (Bui 167), even though the narration also notes that during this point in the conflict, refugees were leaving the North for the South on a daily basis. In this way, the map of a divided Vietnam directly parallels—to make deliberate use of the cartographic term—the familial divisions that were all too prevalent during this prolonged conflict. Bui’s artistic repurposing of an official map helps to situate readers in a specific time and place while also serving as an apt metaphor for the community and personal turmoil in the neocolonial space of Vietnam. The Best We Could Do, in its use of cartographic and geographic imagery, also illustrates that the spaces of empire are both official points on a map and intensely personal locations of belonging and displacement for their present and former inhabitants.

Viewing Vietnam Attending to visual genres is necessary to understand the construction of a diasporic Vietnamese identity because in both literal and epistemological empire-making, official documents such as maps are key instruments in maintaining dominance over colonial people and spaces. In this way, within multiethnic American and postcolonial literature, it is important to consider not only literary texts but also visual and material artifacts when investigating methods of colonial violence, as well as (post) colonial resistance and subversion. The graphic narratives The Best We Could Do and Vietnamerica draw attention to Vietnam as a location of multiple empires and occupations, in order to show how members of the Vietnamese diaspora negotiate the many nations that they live in, flee to, and encounter. These negotiations, as they are depicted in graphic narratives, create a complex picture of the Asian/American postcolonial/ neocolonial subject. More specifically, Vietnamerica and The Best We Could Do harness the images and effects of empire through a visual construction that emphasizes the significance of place, geography, and notions of home. Reading each narrative through the lens of neoimperial visual and spatial construction allows readers to locate the moments and methods used by these Asian/American subjects to push back against the hegemonic

100  Winona Landis forces that construct neoimperial space. These texts retrace imperialism through their mapping and (re)construction of the spaces of empire. Although ostensibly about returning to a “homeland,” the two graphic memoirs resist classification as homecoming narratives and exist in a liminal and explicitly transnational space, which, as Chih-Ming Wang notes, “forces into view the problematic of relationality so significant to the transnational reconstitution of the Asian-U.S. field.” (164). Tran calls the reader’s attention to the way in which the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia created and constructed the transnational refugee subject and its apparent postcolonial dependence. Rocio Davis observes that “Tran’s graphic narrative is often difficult to decipher, much like Vietnam itself, perhaps, where many versions of stories exist, loyalties are complicated, and resolution continues to be deferred” (265). Similarly, Bui pointedly tethers together the experiences of her parents and herself as Vietnamese and eventually Vietnamese Americans in order to draw our attention to the changing and changeable nature of place and “home” for refugee subjects. As Abraham Riesman argues, [Bui’s] struggle is Sisyphean, as the journey after the birth of a person or a country is hopelessly tangled and contradictory. The only thing that is certain is momentum: As long as there is life, those living will move; even when they die, their specters will move in endless leaps across the neurons of those who remember them. (n.p.) The Vietnamese American and refugee memory narratives of Tran and Bui function as alternative histories which are imperial, transnational, and historical, as much as they are personal and intimate. And notably, they demand that readers come to terms with the visual representations and constructions of the legacy of Vietnam’s neoimperial conflicts. Vietnam, Southeast Asia, and its subjects are made visible for each author’s respective audience, and these audiences are able to follow more clearly the movement of these groups and individuals across time and space. As Catherine Nguyen notes, “the diasporic subject can be, in many ways productively, always in movement—between history and story, past and present, one and many, family and diaspora—so that they can articulate in many voices their own [stories]” (215). Visual form and graphic genres, as this chapter has shown, are more keenly able to map these movements and animate these voices. These texts, when “critically juxtaposed,” to borrow the useful terminology used by Espiritu in Body Counts, demonstrate how individual experience in combination with the spaces, temporalities, and legacies reconstructed in these narratives must not be forgotten. Put another way, by using visual representations of imperial artifacts such as maps and geography and showing how diasporic subjects repurpose these artifacts to subversive effect, these graphic narratives bring the past into conversation

Mapping the nation  101 with the present. The historical instantiations of empire are made more legible and palpable for readers thanks to the use of visual form in these graphic narratives. And in their renewed legibility, these “traces” and subjects are difficult to overlook or forget. As Lisa Lowe cautions, [T]his “forgetting” attests to the more extensive erasure of colonial connections…that implicate the dispossession of indigenous peoples and the settler logics of appropriation, forced removal, and assimilation that are repeated in contemporary land seizures, militarized counter-insurgency at home and abroad, and the varieties of nationalism in our present moment. (38) Lowe’s words are an important call to action; however, I do not mean to imply that this act of remembering and reworking our historical and methodological archives should involve merely placing Vietnam (and related locations) at the center rather than the periphery. Artists and authors like Tran and Bui grapple with these power structures through visual media with nuance and depth. Their work allows us to learn about and remember in vivid and concrete ways the connections between places, nations, and subjects that would be otherwise effaced. Considering the impact of this visual depiction on our present moment, it is worth noting that, “The Vietnam War’s still growing archive of visual and multisensory images is recognizable in how Americans see, imagine, and understand all later wars” (Hong 35), and that its technology of representation and recognition continues to play out in the present, as the United States is confronted with new refugee bodies and narratives. It has become ever more prescient to consider alternative means for viewing these refugee subjects in ways that resist the dominant representations, which only serve to recapitulate stories of violence and fear.

Notes 1 Espiritu also works with Jodi Kim’s conceptions of U.S. empire here, when she references Kim’s notion that “the refugee is simultaneously a product of, a witness to, and a site of critique of the gendered and racial violence of U.S. wars.” (Body Counts, 18, citing Kim’s Ends of Empire (U of Minnesota P, 2010) 10.) 2 Such instrumental volumes in the field of Southeast Asian American and refugee cultures include Pelaud’s This is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature; Espiritu’s Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es); Minh-ha’s Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event; Lan P. Duong’s Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism; and Nhi T. Lieu’s The American Dream in Vietnamese. 3 Mimi Nguyen explores this more in her work, as does Neda Atanasoski in Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity (U of Minnesota P, 2013).

102  Winona Landis

Works Cited Atanasoski, Neda. Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity. U of Minnesota P, 2013. August, Timothy K. “Picturing the Past: Drawing Together Vietnamese American Transnational History.” Global Asian American Popular Cultures, edited by Shilpa Dave, Leilani Nishime and Tasha Oren, New York UP, 2016, pp. 165–179. Bui, Long. “The Refugee Repertoire: Performing and Staging the Postmemories of Violence.” MELUS (Special Issue), vol. 41, no. 3, 2016, pp. 112–142. Project MUSE, www.muse.jhu.edu/article/631771. Bui, Thi. The Best We Could Do. Harry N. Abrams, 2017. Chong, Sylvia Shin Huey. The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era. Duke UP, 2011. Davis, Rocio G. “Layering History: Graphic Embodiment and Emotions in GB Tran’s Vietnamerica.” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, vol. 19, no. 2, 2015, pp. 252–267. Taylor and Francis Online, www. tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13642529.2014.973708. Duong, Lan P. Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism. Temple UP, 2012. Espiritu, Yến Lê. Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es). U of California P, 2014. Hong, Mai-Linh. “Reframing the Archive: Vietnamese Refugee Narratives in the Post-9/11 Period.” MELUS (Special Issue), vol. 41, no. 3, 2016, pp. 18–41. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/631758. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford UP, 2007. Kim, Jodi. Ends of Empire: Asian American Culture and the Cold War. U of Minnesota P, 2010. Lieu, Nhi Ti. The American Dream in Vietnamese. U of Minnesota P, 2011. Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke UP, 2015. Minh-Ha, Trinh T. Elsewhere, within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism, and the Boundary Event. Routledge, 2010. Nguyen, Catherine H. “Illustrating Diaspora: History and Memory in Vietnamese American and French Graphic Novels.” Redrawing the Historical Past: History, Memory, and Multiethnic Graphic Novels, edited by Martha J. Cutter and Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, U of Georgia P, 2017, pp. 182–216 Nguyen, Mimi. The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages. Duke UP, 2012. Pelaud, Isabelle Thuy. This is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature. Temple UP, 2010. Riseman, Abraham. “Life As a Refugee Is Explored in the Stunning Comics Memoir The Best We Could Do.” Vulture, 7 Mar. 2017, www.vulture. com/2017/03/thi-bui-best-we-could-do-refugee-comic.html Accessed 2 June 2018. Santa Ana, Jeffrey. “Environmental Graphic Memory: Remembering the Natural World and Revising History in Vietnamerica.” Redrawing the Historical Past: History, Memory, and Multiethnic Graphic Novels, edited by Martha J. Cutter and Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, U of Georgia P, 2017, pp. 157–181. Tran, GB. Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey. Villard Books, 2010. Wang, Chih-Ming. “Politics of Return: Homecoming Stories of the Vietnamese Diaspora.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, vol. 21, no. 1, 2013, pp. 161–187.

7 “Real men don’t smash little girls” Inter-hero violence, families, masculinity, and contemporary superheroes Sara Austin Comics based in heroism and the ideal male body take the development of masculinity as a central theme. Cultural criticism surrounding superheroes acknowledges that physical violence between heroes and villains is essential to the genre but suggests that this violence serves different ideological purposes. Umberto Eco’s “The Myth of Superman” claims violence acts in defense of capitalism and marks as evil those who attack private property (22). Other critics suggest violence as a form of hypermasculinization, or as Jeffrey Brown claims, “ever present muscles immediately mark the characters not just as heroes but as real men” (32). Norma Percora’s “Superman/Superboys/Supermen: The Comic Book Hero as Socializing Agent” identifies the use of “violence as solution” as well as normalizes institutionalized violence through racism, sexism, and heteronormativity (72). Stephen Kirsch and Paul Olczak, as well as Nickie Phillips and Staci Strobl examine the connection between violence and comic books when they discuss the effects of violent media on readers and the ideological effects of comic books, respectively. In each case, critics suggest that superhero violence designates what society views as heroic or villainous. What previous scholarship regarding superhero violence ignores is that while excessive violence of any type is problematic, representations of inter-hero violence suggest that violence as a means of maintaining and defending honor, even within friend and family groups, is necessary to masculine identity construction. Whether read as family violence or homosocial bonding, inter-hero violence reinforces archaic stereotypes of masculinity in a way that is arguably more disturbing than a hero hitting a “bad guy” to maintain order. This chapter considers how current animated television cartoons adapt comics to construct masculinity through ritualized violence reminiscent of the chivalric code, and how reimagined superheroes might be used to represent alternative models of heroism. Not only does inter-hero violence complicate the good vs. evil dichotomy, but if as Lee Easton and Richard Harrison suggest, superhero teams mimic the heterosexual nuclear family, then inter-hero violence

104  Sara Austin represents masculine bonding as necessarily violent and family violence as a legitimate means of dispute resolution (116–117). This conversation is particularly relevant to animated superhero television cartoons since, besides being the medium most widely available to the youngest audiences, cartoons trade the static images of books where much of the violence happens in the gutter between panels, for animated fight scenes often lasting two to three minutes of a twenty-minute episode. In these cartoons, ritualized violence, specifically the duel, functions as proving ground for masculine performance—a way for heroes, especially young heroes or female heroes to prove their worth to the team. By locating worth and masculine identity in ritualized violence, these cartoons depict positive aspects of masculinity such as heroism and mentorship or fatherhood as reliant on violence to teach young viewers that masculine identity is bound up in the performance of violence as an identity marker and a way to solve conflict. This chapter explores violence as a means of performing masculinity, provides examples of comics and television cartoons that require these performances from teenage heroes and female heroes, and introduces alternative means of heroic performance and problem-solving through the growing trend of female-centered superhero media.

Violence and masculinity in comics Inter-hero violence began with superhero crossovers such as Marvel Mystery Comics #8, printed in June of 1940, in which Sub-­Mariner fights the Human Torch,1 and continued in other crossover issues such as a 1941 World’s Finest Comics starring Batman and Superman (­Wilson,  R.). By including more than one hero in a book, companies hoped to improve sales. While some series, such as X-Men, blur the good guy/bad guy boundary and violence among super-beings becomes central to the book’s concept, others attempt to preserve a hard line between good and evil. In these books, inter-hero violence seems out of place. While this violence can suggest moral relativism, it also works in team-based comic books to bond superhero groups and solve inter-group conflicts. In these stories, the heroes usually fight together, but occasionally mistaken identities or supervillain plots force them to battle each other. These books frequently use mind control as an explanation for inter-hero violence, which once resolved, increases group unity. These stories of inter-hero violence have a feel of ritual to them as the heroes sustain insult, issue challenges, fight, and finally acknowledge their opponent’s masculine worth to resolve the conflict. Teambased books such as The Avengers use rituals of inter-hero violence, specifically the duel, for team building because the predictability of the duel allows heroes to prove they are evenly matched and thus worthy of inclusion on the team without risking serious injury or insult. Using

“Real men don’t smash little girls”  105 mind control, radiation, or magic as a plot device also allows heroes to battle one another using the language of necessity—they must fight one another for the good of the planet. The Kree-Skrull War series, for example, includes five separate sequences on inter-hero violence in a span of eight issues. In the first issue of the story arc, Rick Jones shoots Captain Marvel with a laser in a confrontation emblematic of the might-makes-right approach of inter-hero violence. Heroes battle each other to prove that they are evenly matched and that they do contribute to the team. These confrontations are even more important for team members who are younger heroes, female heroes, or heroes without superhuman abilities–such as Jones–whose value might be called into question since they do not resemble the default hero image of the superhuman adult male heroes they fight alongside. Though inter-hero violence requires friends and allies to attack one another, comics also couches these moments in terms of necessity to ensure that the violence solves any conflict within the team, so that when the fight is over, there are no lingering physical or psychological effects. The first issue of the story arc (Issue 89) begins with Vision, Scarlet Witch, and Quicksilver trying to talk Captain Marvel into coming with them because his body is building radiation and may explode. Captain Marvel refuses, asking the Avengers “How could you know what is best for me?” (emphasis original, Thomas 2). Marvel’s response suggests he believes himself to be more powerful than the team; he challenges them to subdue him and to prove he should listen. Quicksilver rushes Captain Marvel, and the Captain sends Quicksilver sprawling backward out of the frame and toward the reader with a “BKOP!” left hook. The fight lasts for ten frames as Captain Marvel immobilizes Vision with a laser and runs from Scarlet Witch, only to be shot down by Rick Jones, a teen who can inhabit Captain Marvel’s body and share his powers. As Marvel is stripped of the dangerous radiation, the team assures Rick that he “DID --WHAT HAD TO BE DONE,” regardless of the consequences to Captain Marvel (Thomas 17). Rick Jones is able to prove his worth to the team by bringing down Captain Marvel even though, at this moment, Marvel and Jones are separated and Jones has no powers. Rick Jones’s shooting of Captain Marvel follows the guidelines for inter-hero violence as Jones is young and powerless when he shoots Captain Marvel, other team members assure him it was a necessary action, and Captain Marvel is not angry with Jones once he recovers from the radiation. Subsequent issues in The Kree-Skrull War story arc use the shape-­ shifting Skrulls to mimic heroes to suggest that what looks like inter-hero violence to the reader actually increases team unity when the heroes realize they have been tricked. Issues 90 and 91 depict Ant-Man regressing to a Neanderthal and attacking the Avengers before he can be rehabilitated. In Issue 92, Goliath has to be restrained by Vision and

106  Sara Austin Quicksilver when he tries to punch a Skrull impersonating The Thing. Issue 93 shows the Avengers fighting Skrulls disguised as the Fantastic Four, and in Issue 94 rising tensions in the group cause Iron Man to threaten Vision, so that Goliath must come between them. In each of these cases, the Skrulls mimic superheroes, allowing the artists to depict a fight between heroes without damaging the team’s cohesion. In fact, when the Avengers find out they have been tricked by the Skrulls, team cohesion is bolstered by what originally appears to readers as inter-hero violence. Though not all of these scenarios result in physical battles, the heroes often threaten violence as a means of dispute resolution or a way for heroes to prove their physical strength and worth to the team. In Men and Violence: Gender, Honor, and Rituals in Modern Europe and America, Pieter Spierenburg discusses the duel as a bonding ritual. Spierenburg notes that “the duel establishes a ‘fraternal bond’ between its participants. Having experienced and survived it, former enemies are like brothers” (9). Spierenburg also discusses dueling as having a civilizing influence since men would be careful not to insult each other and provoke a duel, and because French and German traditions fought to “first blood,” which meant duelers incurred only light wounds (9–10). In her book on medieval masculinity, Ruth Karras explains how “knights performed for the sake of other men” (65). This tradition of chivalry is recognized subtly in superhero narratives through Batman’s nickname, The Dark Knight, and Iron Man’s alter ego, Iron Knight. Ritualized violence, specifically what social policy theorist Kenneth Polk calls honor contests, most frequently occurs between men ages 18–40 in social settings where the challenge is observed by other men; these contests suggest that the performance of honor and masculinity is for the benefit of the male audience (11–13). This scenario “begins with some provocation, which often has a trivial appearance to an outsider such as an insult, a jostle, or perhaps a shove” or “even provocative eye contact,” which leads to “a challenge, a fight, and occasionally, death” (Polk 7). Honor contests are used in superhero cartoons as a way to negotiate social structures of masculinity. Falcon comments to Hulk in the Super Hero Squad Show that “real men don’t smash little girls,” suggesting that one purpose of “smashing” either enemies or other heroes is to prove masculine strength and dominance. “Smashing little girls” would reflect poorly on a hero, not only because harming children is not heroic but also because it would falsely suggest that the “little girl” is the hero’s equal. Heroes only fight those who are a match for their strength. To fight a “little girl” would jeopardize the hero’s masculine social status. In contrast, heroes often fight each other to determine or defend this social structure of masculinity. Honor contests also prove individual masculinity within a team, a link that scholars have noted in contemporary sports culture. Mary

“Real men don’t smash little girls”  107 McDonald claims that “sport is a major site for the construction of hegemonic masculinity,” which operates through “ideologies and practices that marginalize and trivialize female bodies while simultaneously linking masculinity with culturally valued traits of aggression and force” (McDonald 111). McDonald also notes that sport centers on physicality and carries a message of men’s bodies as weapons of physical aggression and violence (111). Michael Messner calls this use of the male body the “pain principle,” suggesting that “bodies are tools to be used and used up to get the job done” (316). Messner claims that this form of packaged masculinity also plays on men’s insecurities about their own bodies and status to promote consumer goods (320). Walter DeKeseredy and Martin Schwartz suggest that players who cannot prove their masculinity through skill on the field must engage in honor contests, specifically penalty fights (356). This ritualized fighting in superhero comics and movies occurs within the context of training exercises and, like sport, follows a specific set of rules that keep the heroes from harming one another. These training exercises contain clues that viewers can use to tell the sport-like congenial combat from real conflict. For example, in episode 2 of Avengers Assemble, Thor and Hulk engage in a training exercise. As they train, the room is infiltrated by mind-controlling microbots. The animation provides both visual and dialogue-based hints to viewers that the tenor of the conflict is shifting from training into genuine attempts to do harm. The scene begins with Thor and Hulk bantering back and forth: Thor:  We had some grand battles in this training room, you and I. HULK:  You kept thinking you could knock me down. THOR:  I did more than think, I think. What do you say, for old times? HULK:  Wouldn’t want to mess up that pretty hairdo. (Buckley 6:00)

Thor then throws his hammer; Hulk dodges and launches himself onto Thor who throws him through a wall. Hulk emerges, laughing, before breathing in microbots, which control his mind and force him to attack his teammate. This episode of playful violence emphasizes masculine performance. Hulk comments on Thor’s hairdo, associating him with femininity. To regain his masculine standing, Thor must play fight Hulk in a friendly form of the duel similar to sport. This fight is not real violence, since it occurs within the restrictions of training as represented by the physical space of the training room. The violence shifts from play to real when Hulk’s eyes turn red, and he shouts for Thor to “get away,” presumably because he knows he is losing control. Complying with the masculine performance of sport, Thor replies, “admitting defeat, that’s not like you” (Buckley, “The Avengers Protocol Part 2” 6:57). Hulk then punches Thor into the floor and the two begin to actually duel instead of just play at fighting. The duel only ends when Iron Man, the team leader,

108  Sara Austin steps in. Because he assembles the team and owns the headquarters, Iron Man can arbitrate duels, acting as the group’s leader and father figure. The violence of the real and play fights appears identical, but the viewer knows the difference based on context clues such as location and dialogue. The real fight moves outside of the training room into the mansion and then outdoors. Also, the heroes have glowing red eyes and the language becomes more insulting. Thor shouts, “I’ll tear you apart, monster” (Buckley “The Avengers Protocol Part 2” 7:44), a slur he would never use against the Hulk if he were in control of himself. These insults, augmented by the mind-control microbots, spark dueling behaviors and invoke a new set of rules. Whereas sport ends when the buzzer sounds, the training session ends, or the referee calls time, duels can only end when the masculine performance has been judged sufficient. Iron Man’s intervention ends the duel only after the heroes have proven equal to each other, and Iron Man has proven his own masculine worth by besting the villain who infected his friends.

Teammates, fathers, and masculine bonding The use of violence to build team cohesion may also suggest family violence as superhero teams also take on the literal and figurative role of family. Heroes who are often blood relatives of one another live and work together, with older heroes acting as mentors and father figures for younger heroes. Despite the familial bonds of superhero teams, violence as team-building is a common animation trope. In fact, most superhero cartoon series begin with the construction of the superhero team through inter-hero violence. Most of these episodes feature the team fighting a single member, who becomes part of the team after the battle. In Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, the team fights Hulk; in Young Justice, the team fights Superboy; in Marvel’s Avengers, all of the members pair off to fight each other in single combat; and in the first two episodes of Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H. the team fights Skaar (the gray Hulk). In each case, the team does not exist until inter-hero violence brings them together. These contests allow the heroes to see that they are equally matched while proving masculine identity and restraint. The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes uses a nine-episode story arc to form the team. Of these first nine episodes, the Avengers fight each other or their allies, the government agency S.H.I.E.L.D. Episode 8, “Some Assembly ­Required,” features the rest of the team battling the Hulk; they punch and shoot him with bio-electric energy and repulsor rays (magnetically channeled beams of superheated plasma) (16:08). The episode title implies that this violence is directly related to building the team, and it is not until the end of this episode that the team learns to trust one another.

“Real men don’t smash little girls”  109 Other superhero cartoons suggest that ritualized inter-hero violence can operate not only to bond brothers but also as a way for sons to prove masculinity and maturity to their fathers or mentors. In Young Justice episode 1, “Independence Day,” the primary team—Robin, Aqualad, and Kid Flash—argue with their mentors and then quit their respective hero/sidekick dyads. Robin is an orphan and Bruce Wayne’s ward, Kid Flash is the Flash’s nephew, and Aqualad is a subject of King Orin (a.k.a. Aquaman). In each case, the relationship between mentor and mentee mirrors a father/son pairing because the mentee lives with his mentor and treats him as a parent. The sidekicks go off to investigate a fire and end up freeing Superboy. The entire episode is one large fight, either rhetorically (heroes and sidekicks) or physically (Superboy vs. Robin, Aqualad, and Kid Flash), as the sidekicks have to use violence to prove themselves to each other and to their mentors/fathers. Since the honor contests require masculinity be performed for other men in order to affirm social standing (Polk 11–13), this violence is performed by a male hero coded in the cartoons as a father or a brother. The ritual of the duel—insult, challenge, fight, and acknowledgment of masculine worth—is repeated throughout the series. In the first episode of Young Justice, a verbal exchange between Speedy (Green Arrow’s sidekick) and the Justice League acts as a prelude to the violence of the episode. Speedy interprets the League’s actions as an insult. He approaches Green Arrow and declares, “What I need is respect. They’re treating us like kids, worse like sidekicks. We deserve better than this” (5:55). The other sidekicks are bewildered and remain seated. After Speedy explains his grievances, Aquaman responds, “Stand down or…,” and Speedy interrupts, “Or what, you’ll send me to my room? And I’m not your son, I’m not even his. I thought I was his partner, but not anymore” (“Independence Day” 7:30). Speedy removes his hat; throws it at Green Arrow’s feet, a challenge to his former mentor; and then storms out of the room. His challenge is taken up by the other sidekicks who also feel passed over. At the end of the episode, Superboy reiterates the young heroes’ challenge to the older heroes: “It’s simple. Get on board or get out of the way” (41:55). While the physical violence in this episode is not between the sidekicks and their mentors/fathers, this challenge sets up the entire cartoon series as a duel in which the younger heroes must prove their masculinity through acts of violence. The battle against father figures is a core element of the Young Justice series. This father/son dichotomy recalls chivalric masculinity in which the established heroes must confer masculine status on the younger generation, but only after the younger heroes have proven themselves by besting their mentors through ritualized violence. The battle with parental authority reaches a zenith in the season one finale, “Auld Acquaintance,” in which a supervillain collectively known as “The Light” infects the Justice League with mind-control biotech chips, and the sidekicks

110  Sara Austin have to subdue their elders (1.26). All of the heroes use their superpowers in what begins as individual combat pairing Superman against Superboy, Batman against Robin, and Ms. Martian against Martian Manhunter. The sidekicks must prove themselves physically equal to their adult counterparts. As the battle progresses, however, the young heroes work as a team to defeat the older heroes. The pivotal moment comes when Robin uses Kryptonite to subdue Superman, and the young sidekicks prevail. After the heroes are bested by the sidekicks, the two teams (Young Justice and Justice League) fight side by side. The members of Young Justice are now viewed as adults, and they go to college, get married, and have children while fighting crime and alien invasions.

Constructing masculinity in female heroes Participants in inter-hero violence include not only male heroes trying to win the respect of father figures but also female heroes proving they are masculine enough to fight alongside a male team. Within superhero narratives, the social rules of gendered violence are suspended, and female heroes are expected to engage in the same ritualistic violence as their male teammates in order to prove their worth. In fact, violence is often deployed against female heroes in comic books and cartoons to justify keeping the team or “family” together. Superhero narratives justify this violence, in part, by stripping female heroes of their gender while they are fighting. In Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture, Jennifer Low describes female duelists, whether interpreted as monstrous or transcendent: “any woman who engaged in rapier fighting would have placed herself in the category of unwomanly women, unnatural women, or simply ‘man-maids’” (135). Women who fight, then, are not truly women, at least for the duration of the battle. In her article “Savage Sexism: Examining Gendered Intelligence in Hulk and She-Hulk Comics,” Elizabeth Settoducato highlights instances of dueling as formative for female superhero characterization as well as situating these women within the larger fictional universe. Settoducato describes She-Hulk’s duel with Iron Man in Savage SheHulk #6 (July 1980), in which Iron Man shows surprise that She-Hulk is intelligent by comparing her to Hulk and sketching her character in contrast (284–285). While ritualistic violence may uncouple gender identity from gendered bodies, this violence reinforces gendered space. Just as the training room or sports field contextualizes inter-hero violence as either friendly or malevolent, female heroes within the domestic space are coded as feminine, and in the outside world as masculine. Thus, in order to participate in the team, heroes with female bodies must use violence, specifically the duel, to prove that they belong outside the feminine space of the home. Ms. Martian, for example, bakes cookies (Young Justice 1.3), tends the sick

“Real men don’t smash little girls”  111 or wounded (1.9), and has sexual encounters with male heroes inside the domestic space (1.11), but she can literally change shape into a male hero while fighting, as she demonstrates in the episode “Welcome to Happy Harbor” when she pretends to be Red Tornado to trick an enemy (1.3). While Ms. Martian’s ability is questioned because of both her gender and age, adult female heroes such as Wonder Woman engage in similar duels to prove their value to the team. In Justice League of America #143 “A Tale of Two Satellites” (June 1977), Wonder Woman is angry that the team, and Superman especially, seems to be constantly evaluating her fitness as a hero. She tells Superman, “I’m just as much a part of this team as anybody else—but you all treat me like [teen sidekick and honorary Justice league member] Snapper Carr!” (Englehart 2). Later, the reader finds out the Injustice Gang is controlling Wonder Woman’s mind. While she is being controlled, Wonder Woman and Superman fight. During the fight, he comments, “Her Amazon strength-- ­A mazing!” (Englehart 26). The Justice League defeats the Injustice Gang and the issue of Wonder Woman’s mind control is never addressed again, but Issue 144 tells the origin story of the Justice League and continues a trend of using ­inter-hero violence as an opportunity for team-building within the larger narrative structure. The ritualized violence of the duel is utilized by female heroes to prove their worth in the same way that young heroes use violence to prove themselves to their father figures. In Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H. season 1, episode 15, “Galactus Goes Green,” the title villain, Galactus, wants She-Hulk, Jennifer Walters, to become his new Emerald Emissary, a herald who finds planets for him to eat. The rest of She-Hulk’s team want her to stay on Earth. The conflict in the episode revolves around the team’s treatment of She-Hulk. Because they tease her, She-Hulk feels as though they do not respect her, and so she is torn; she wants to both stay with her team and help save the universe by directing Galactus toward uninhabited planets. The Hulk team first has to prove that they value She-Hulk before they can convince her to stay on Earth with them. The episode follows the formulaic model of duels and honor contests by beginning with an insult, followed by a challenge, a fight to first blood, and a resolution when She-Hulk proves her masculine worth to the fatherfigure and leader, Hulk. At the beginning of the episode, Red Hulk tells She-Hulk, “the bearded freak [Galactus] has the power cosmic. Better leave it to the big boys” and then tosses her a purse he is holding, hitting her in the head (3:54). Galactus uses this insult to suggest the team is holding She-Hulk back. She-Hulk attacks Galactus by saying, “I got this,” and he interprets this “drive for conquest” as the perfect quality in a herald (7:38). Thus, the first few minutes of the episode enact the insult from Red Hulk to She-Hulk and the challenge from She-Hulk to the team. She-Hulk uses her new power, given to her by Galactus, to best the enemy and to prove she deserves a place on the all-male Hulk team.

112  Sara Austin Because the team wants to keep She-Hulk, but does not wish to hurt her, they must exercise restraint and preserve the “first blood” motif of the duel. After this initial fight, A-Bomb, Red Hulk, Skaar, and Hulk duel She-Hulk to keep her on earth and strengthen team unity. A-Bomb expresses misgivings about violence as a way to hold the team together: A-BOMB :  I HULK:  I

really don’t want to be punching on Jen [She-Hulk] know, but we gotta change her mind somehow (12:16)

The Hulks punch each other hard enough to send their opponent flying, hit each other with cars and other large objects, and bodily throw each other into buildings. Yet, this level of violence constitutes “first blood” for superbeings. She-Hulk uses her new powers given to her by Galactcus to best Galactcus’s original herald Terrax in a duel and to prove she deserves a place on the all-male Hulk team. This duel is a way to preserve honor and prove correct thinking; in a world where the heroes always win, winning makes one a hero. She-Hulk also acknowledges that her team only wanted to keep her on Earth, and thus the violence of the duel increased the team’s cohesion. After the duel, however, SheHulk does not have to endure any more teasing or attempts by the other Hulks to keep her from danger. She has proven herself to be “man” enough to work with the team and to fulfill the final element of the duel: the restoration of masculine honor. If the Hulk team is read as a metaphorical family, then Red Hulk’s making fun of She-Hulk is a form of sibling rivalry and Hulk is the patriarch who settles disputes and keeps the family together. However with the family as context, the inter-hero duel also becomes a form of domestic violence. Evidence for the interpretation of the team as family in the Hulk “Galactus” episode might include literal familial relationships since She-Hulk (Jennifer Walters) and Hulk (Bruce Banner) are cousins. The familial relationship might also be metaphorical; all the characters are eight-feet tall, one thousand-pound monsters known as “hulks” who live and fight together. Hulk’s line “but we gotta change her mind somehow” reflects the use of violence within the family to force submission. After the fight, She-Hulk tells Terrax that “I have seen the error of my ways,” suggesting that Hulk was right to fight her (15:46). As She-Hulk is about to deliver a final blow to Hulk, he convinces her to give up her power by painting her choice to become the herald as a selfish act: Hulk:  You got what you wanted. You won. But what about your teammates, your friends? You’ll lose us. She-Hulk:  Noooooo! Galactus:  Obey me, destroy that monster. She-Hulk:  He’s not monster. He’s my FAMILY. (13:20)

“Real men don’t smash little girls”  113 She-Hulk defends the Hulk as “family” and his violence against her as a means of keeping the family together. At the end of the episode, Hulk again asserts that She-Hulk’s attempt to break up the “family” was selfish and that he was performing a fatherly role. When asked what he would do with that much power, Hulk responds, “With my friends got all the power I need” (21:25). Thus, Hulk becomes the hero of the episode as he disciplines an unruly and misguided She-Hulk. This episode, then, legitimizes violence as dispute resolution and punishes the female hero for her attempt at agency outside of the family. Hulk’s patriarchal role in defending the family through violence is common for superhero narratives, as other father figures include Reed Richards, Batman, Superman, Robin, and Iron Man. Female-led hero teams such as the Birds of Prey or Storm’s X-Men do exist, but perhaps because they are newer, are not as well represented in the bulk of superhero comic books or cartoons.

Alternative heroics, alternative masculinity Despite over eighty years of representing idealized masculinity, today’s superheroes are undergoing radical changes, which may suggest a shift in the rhetorics of white masculinity, violence, and family dynamics present in comics and superhero cartoons. Since 2014, when the popularity of Ms. Marvel helped Marvel Comics increase its number of female-led titles from two to nine, comic book characters have become more diverse, marking a shift away from the white male as the default hero identity. Recently, Marvel has created a female Thor, a Muslim-American Ms. Marvel, a Black Captain America, and a Black female Iron Man. In total, Marvel has released fifteen comics that feature a woman or person of color. In 2015, Mattel partnered with DC to launch a new doll line, DC Superhero Girls. This line contains not only Barbie-sized poseable dolls but also action figures and other wearable action toys, such as Wonder Woman’s shield and Batgirl’s utility belt. The initial release of the line included Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy, Batgirl, Wonder Woman, and Supergirl, with Katana making her debut at the 2016 San Diego Comic Con, and Starfire and Blackfire joining the lineup in 2017. The launch of the dolls was accompanied by a series of two-minute webisodes airing on Mattel’s website, which have since appeared on the Cartoon Network for four seasons. Mattel has also released several movies, including Hero of the Year, Intergalactic Games, Brain Drain, and ­Super-Villain High—all of which feature a more diverse superhero lineup. The narrative of the Superhero Girls’ show is remarkable among superhero cartoons of the last five years because it does not show young heroes using force to prove their worth to their mentors/fathers. Instead, the cartoon features the heroes working together, supporting one another, laughing at their mistakes, and being celebrated by their mentors.

114  Sara Austin The school that young heroes attend, Superhero High, recognizes a Hero of the Month. At least one full episode is dedicated to each of the dolls in a montage of her accomplishments. The animated films, including Intergalactic Games and Legends of Atlantis, feature the characters embracing former villains and offering them a chance to repent. Big Barda, Blackfire, and Mareena are all villains won over by the friendship and teamwork of the Superhero Girls and join the team at the end of their respective episodes. Unlike the Avengers, Hulk, or Young Justice, cartoons featuring predominantly male teams with one or two outlying female heroes, DC Superhero Girls features female heroes and does not define heroism as performed masculinity. As a result of this shift, inter-hero violence does not entirely disappear, but it is dramatically reduced, and the tone of the violence shifts. One example of inter-hero violence in DC Superhero Girls occurs in season 2, episode 3, “Batgirl vs. Supergirl”; the two friends race each other to the cafeteria for the last piece of cake. Along the route, Batgirl traps Supergirl in a net; Supergirl shoots Batgirl’s jetpack with her heat vision; and Batgirl shoots a grappling hook at Supergirl, then skis through the hallway after her. Yet the two heroes banter during the race and compliment each other’s skill. The race ends when the two girls crash into each other and end up in a heap on the floor. Instead of suggesting that violence will solve the problem, Batgirl says, “This is silly. We can split the cake,” to which Supergirl responds, “You’re right” (Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc). In the end of the episode, the race costs both of them, however, as Harley Quinn swoops in and takes the cake before they can reach it (Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc). The violent competition of the race did not solve Batgirl and Supergirl’s problem, nor did it reward the winner. Instead, violence cost the heroes their prize. By reframing inter-hero violence as a scenario in which competing heroes lose out, DC Superhero Girls effectively reframes the narrative of ritualized violence as unnecessary to secure social standing. Everyone in the episode, including the title heroes, decides that violent competition is ineffective and unadvisable. DC Superhero Girls suggests that there are bonding mechanisms of violence and that interactions can be productive while noncompetitive; moreover, such competition is silly. Other female-led comics such as Ms. Marvel and Moon Girl also tackle inter-hero violence directly, but rather than using violence as a mechanism for team-building, these comics explore the possible damage this violence can do to teams and communities. In the Marvel comic book crossover event Civil War II, Ms. Marvel opposes her personal hero, Captain Marvel. Captain Marvel wants to use mathematical probability to predict crime and arrest criminals before the crimes occur (G. Wilson.). When this approach injures one of Ms. Marvel’s friends, she opposes locking people up before they have committed a crime (G. Wilson). In part, the story arc is about Ms. Marvel learning to respect

“Real men don’t smash little girls”  115 herself as a hero and no longer looking for the approval of a mentor or the acceptance by a team; these actions reverse the themes that i­nter-hero violence usually promotes. The arc is also about a hero’s ability to control the surrounding world and a rejection of the might-­makes-right narrative of earlier comics. Ms. Marvel is not willing to sacrifice liberty for safety or allow her community to be overrun with a police force that does not answer to civil authority. Ms. Marvel becomes more aware of the damage that superheroes do to their communities, and she comments that while punching things is easier, that strategy is often not the best way to solve conflicts. Moon Girl, the alter ego of nine-year-old Luna Lafayette, is also learning that violence does not solve her problems. After trying on different hero teams, Moon Girl helps two of the Fantastic Four defend themselves against a shape-shifting Super Skrull who is stealing their identities (Montclare, Reeder, and Bustos). Moon Girl updates the 1970s Kree-Skrull plotlines for a new audience while injecting the contemporary discussions of the limitations of violence to solve problems. Moon Girl is the ideal hero for these investigations since she is the most intelligent person on Earth and so naturally relies on brains over brawn. With Moon Girl slated for her own cartoon, perhaps these alternative approaches to inter-hero violence will compete with Thor and Hulk for ratings and merchandising dollars. Both Moon Girl and Ms. Marvel reflect a changing approach to inter-hero violence in contemporary comics, at least within books marketed to a young female audience. It is worth noting, however, that in 2017 titles such as Thor and Wolverine marketed to men switched to female leads, and that Target places DC Superhero girl dolls and the new Marvel Rising Secret Warriors dolls near both the Barbies and the action figures. These actions signal a breakdown in gender-specific comic book marketing, as does the advertising surrounding the Captain Marvel movie. Perhaps it is this change in marketing focus or a change in author and artist demographics that is responsible for seeing inter-hero violence as primarily destructive rather than team-building. Or, perhaps the new approach is a natural evolution of a medium marked by a rapid publication rate and susceptibility to cultural change. In either case, as cartoons use newer comics for their inspiration, the portrayal of inter-hero violence and masculinity in superhero cartoons may also shift. If superhero cartoons include diverse representations of how to achieve heroic social status, then superhero animation as well as its associated toy and video game cultures could represent multiple ways of doing gender, and perhaps even help to remake idealized masculinity. The current popularity of superhero narratives combined with the frequency of inter-hero violence and a lack of critical attention to that violence normalizes depictions that contribute to a cultural narrative in which heroism and masculinity are tied to honor contests and family violence.

116  Sara Austin Changing the cultural narrative surrounding heroes and the masculine ideal is a necessary step in eliminating this normalization of violent masculinity. If new models of heroism begin to dominate the cultural landscape, then those models will lead to changes in the ways that audiences think and talk about masculinity and violence.

Note 1 I am referring here to the original android version of the character, not Johnny Storm of the Fantastic Four.

Works Cited Brown, Jeffrey A. “Comic Book Masculinity and the New Black Superhero.” African American Review, vol. 33, no. 1, 1999, pp. 25–42. Buckley, Dan, Alan Fine, Jeph Loeb, and Joe Quesada, prods. Avengers Assemble. Disney, ABC, 26 May 2013. DeKeseredy, Walter S., and Martin D. Schwartz. “Masculinities and Interpersonal Violence.” Handbook of Studies on Men & Masculinities, edited by DeKeseredy, Walter S. and Martin D. Schwartz, Sage Publications, 2005, pp. 353–366. Easton, Lee, and Richard Harrison. Secret Identity Reader: Essays on Sex, Death and the Superhero. Wolsak and Wynn, 2010. Eco, Umberto, and Natalie Chilton. “The Myth of Superman.” Diacritics, vol. 2, no. 1, 1972, pp. 14–22. JSTOR. doi:10.2307/464920. Englehart, Steve, Dick Dillin, penciller. Frank McLaughlin, inker and Anthony Tollin, colorist. “A Tale of Two Satellites.” Justice League of America #143, June 1977. Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H. Dir. Eric Radomski. 2013. Television. Karras, Ruth Mazo. Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe, U of Pennsylvania, 2003. Kirsch, Steven J. Children, Adolescents, and Media Violence: A Critical Look at the Research. SAGE Publications, 2012. Kirsch, Steven J., and Paul V. Olczak. “Violent Comic Books and Judgments of Relational Aggression.” Violence and Victims, 2002, pp. 373–380. Springer Publishing Company Connect. doi:10.1891/vivi.17.3.373.33661. Low, Jennifer A. Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. McDonald, Mary G. “Unnecessary Roughness: Gender and Racial Politics in ­Domestic Violence Media Events.” Sociology of Sport Journal, 1999, pp. 111–133. EBSCOhost, proxy.lib.miamioh.edu/login?url=https://search. ebscohost.com /login.aspx?direct=true&db=s3h&AN=6165437&site= ehost-live&scope=site. Messner, Michael. “Still a Man’s World? Studying Masculinities and Sport.” Handbook of Studies on Men & Masculinities, edited by Michael S. Kimmel, Jeff Hearn and Raewyn Connell, Sage Publications, 2005, pp. 313–325. Montclare, Brandon, Amy Reeder, and Natacha Bustos. Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, vol. 25–26. Spotlight, a Division of ABDO, 2018.

“Real men don’t smash little girls”  117 Percora, Norma. “Superman/Superboys/Supermen: The Comic Book Hero as Socializing Agent.” Men, Masculinity, and the Media, edited by Steve Craig, Sage, 1992, pp. 41–60. Phillips, Nickie D., and Staci Strobl. Comic Book Crime: Truth, Justice, and the American Way. New York UP, 2013. Polk, Kenneth. “Males and Honor Contest Violence.” Homicide Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 1999, pp. 6–29. OhioLINK Electronic Journal Center. doi:10.1177/10 88767999003001002. Settoducato, Elizabeth. “Savage Sexism: Examining Gendered Intelligence in Hulk and She-Hulk Comics.” The Journal of Fandom Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2015, pp. 277–290. Spierenburg, Petrus Cornelis. Men and Violence: Gender, Honor, and Rituals in Modern Europe and America. Ohio State UP, 1998. The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes! Dir. Stan, Simon Philips, Eric S. Rollman, and Joe Quesada prods. Lee. 2010. Television. The Super Hero Squad Show. Dir. Stan, Alan Fine, Simon Philips, Eric S. Rollman, Joe Quesada, Dan Buckley, and Jeph Loeb Lee. Perf. Cartoon Network. 2009. Television. Thomas, Roy. (a) Sal Buscema, Neal Adams, and John Buscema Avengers: Kree/ Skrull War, vol. 1. Marvel Entertainment, 2008. Warner, Bros. Entertainment Inc. Supergirl, 2016, www.dckids.com/dc-superhero-girls/video/name/BATGIRL-VS-SUPERGIRL.Supergirl | 203. Wilson, G. Willow. (a) Takeshi Miyazawa, Cameron Stewart, and Adrian Alphona. Ms. Marvel, vol. 6: Civil War II. Marvel Comics, 2016. Wilson, Ryan. “Greatest Fights among Superheroes in Comics.” The Odyssey Online, 14 Nov. 2017, www.theodysseyonline.com/greatest-fightssuperheroes-comics. Young Justice. Dir. Sam, prod., Weisman, Greg, and Vietti Brandon. Register. 2010. Television.

8 Graphic Performances in Octavia Butler’s Kindred Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw

As one of the first African American women writers to break into the white and male-dominated field of science fiction writing, Octavia Butler established previously underrepresented characters and their voices in this competitive popular literary arena. In addition to making significant contributions to women’s literature, Kindred also recovered the captivity and slave narrative tropes for a contemporary mainstream reading audience more interested in popular culture genres rather than the literary classics. Published in 1979 and originally conceived as merely one volume of the Patternist series, Kindred centers on Dana Franklin, an African American writer married to a white man named Kevin. When she time travels from 1976 Los Angeles to the ante-bellum South, she becomes a house slave at the Weylin plantation. Through her repeated travels, Dana realizes that both Rufus Weylin, the son of the plantation owner, and a slave woman named Alice are her ancestors. Although Dana has no control over her travels, she quickly realizes that Rufus “calls” her whenever he fears for his life. In turn, Dana is able to travel back to modern times when she believes herself in mortal danger. Butler’s novel addresses questions of race, gender, and class, and, through the time travel plot device, deconstructs these rigid norms to show up their arbitrariness and artificiality. In an interview included in the graphic novel adaptation, Damian Duffy mentions that Octavia Butler thought of her graphic novel as a “grim fantasy” (“Q&A” 242) that aimed at making people feel history in a way history books cannot. He further explains that with their graphic novel adaptation, he and John Jennings wanted to achieve the same effect “but through the kinds of storytelling comics do best” (242). This statement illustrates well how the graphic novel adaptation by Duffy and Jennings1 reconfigures Butler’s important text for a new generation and a new, visually oriented audience. In an interview for Black Scholar, Jennings described the strengths of comics in terms reminiscent of Scott McCloud’s assertion in Understanding Comics that the most simplified features in comics permit the greatest reader identification; simply put, when the character shell is not filled with specific details, readers can more easily insert themselves into a work (41). Jennings and

Graphic performances in Kindred  119 McCloud think that comics “work because of being abstractions. In fact, the more abstract a cartoon is, the more people it relates to. So, the images themselves work better as open ciphers that are filled by the audience” (Batiste et al. 11–12). Reading a graphic novel clearly requires a special kind of reader engagement. Hence, the graphic novel adaptation of Kindred constitutes an effective means of transposing Butler’s original historical recovery work into a visual environment. Its graphic representations enhance Dana’s harrowing experiences as a slave on a Maryland plantation to allow readers to achieve even greater empathetic involvement. Jennings reports how taxing and traumatizing the experience of drawing the illustrations was for him as he was reliving Dana’s experiences every time he put pen to paper. He describes the drawing activity itself as a kind of painful physical embodiment (Batiste et al. 13). Dan Johnson, Brandie L. Huffman, and Danny M. Jasper’s research on the beneficial effects of empathetic engagement in fiction reading suggests precisely this embodied experience as a motivational factor for helpful actions. This chapter argues that the visual style choices in the graphic novel adaptation of Kindred enhance reader engagement targeting social justice concerns. Of special importance in this process is what remains unstated in the graphic narrative panels and what readers must work through in the gutter space between panels. John Jennings does not think that “the images convey social justice; I think that the images I created are open enough to become vessels for people to project that notion into them. That’s the power of the cartoon” (Batiste et al. 13). Indeed, the power of the cartoon has a longer history than we often give it credit for. The proverbial superiority of pictures over words is often overlooked when comics and graphic novels have to substantiate their academic worthiness. Graphic novels have a critical but underappreciated lineage dating back to the visual satires of the 18th century that expressed sociopolitical critiques (Martin 171). Martha Cutter’s The Illustrated Slave: Empathy, Graphic Narrative, and the Visual Culture of the Transatlantic Abolition Movement, 1800–1852 offers 19th-century examples of politically motivated visual illustrations that were used in the struggle for abolition preceding the Civil War. Cutter is convinced of the power of visuals as evidenced in her quoting Frederick Douglass’s motto: “To understand it, one must needs experience it, or imagine himself in similar circumstances” (xi). The graphic narrative today appears then as a perfect vehicle to adapt a neo-slave narrative that probes the lasting effects of slavery on contemporary society.

Setting the stage: worldmaking in Kindred The choice of medium affects how authors introduce the settings of their stories. David Herman’s2 work on “Multimodal Storytelling and Identity

120  Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw Construction in Graphic Narratives” pays much attention to the “semiotic cues” (197) deployed by narrators. According to Herman, these cues derive from the narrator’s experiences, but they will be received by the audience according to their prior experiences. Henry John Pratt’s work on “Narrative in Comics” agrees that graphic illustrators “can guide the reader’s perception of spatial relationships” within the setting. Further, choice of coloring and layout supply additional insights to readers (110). Jennings’s artwork embraces the jagged, more expressionistic style that comics scholar Pascal Lefèvre associates with adult materials that embrace a realistic approach but at the same time leave a distinctive artistic signature on the story told. Jennings himself mentions his artistic affinity with German expressionist painter Käthe Kollwitz, whose work he admires very much (Batiste et al. 13). Like other expressionists of the 1920s, Kollwitz was politically engaged and critical of middle-class complacency in the face of the terrible poverty experienced by the German working classes after World War I. Knowing Jennings’s artistic preferences permits readers to anticipate the consciousness raising to be performed in Kindred. The cover of the graphic novel adaptation of Kindred offers a good example of the cognitive interplay between author’s style and reader’s reception. Lettered in capitalized big red script, the title KINDRED, reproduced within a cloud-like light, beige background, suggests a bond established by bloodlines. Yet underneath the title and reaching up into the red lettering are two, outstretched brown hands with arms shackled by a heavy chain whose links trail off to the lower right-hand side of the book cover. The background to this emotional, pleading gesture is nearly black, speckled with the title’s red coloring. The left arm is gripped violently by a white fist. Readers unfamiliar with Butler’s original work receive a sneak preview here of the violent essence of this modern-day slave narrative. At the heart of the graphic novel, they can expect a struggle for freedom thwarted by social chains and the mores and habits of the white population. Red, white, brown, and black together also suggest to the viewer how irrevocably all of our lives are interconnected, not just through social connections but also through familial bonds. For readers familiar with Butler’s work, the cover page anticipates how important varying color schemes will be in this graphic novel adaptation. In conversation with Stephanie Batiste for Black Scholar, Jennings described the lengthy process of finding just the right imagery for the title page to evoke just the right impression in the reader’s mind. Jennings views the loop around the shackled hands as an “infinity symbol” that reveals “how slavery still holds us in a loop” (18). The two-page panel opening Chapter 1, “The River,” offers an example of the carefully orchestrated impressions conveyed by a wordless scene. The image includes a black border above a lightly sketched green

Graphic performances in Kindred  121 band suggesting a hilly and wooded, beige shoreline situated by a narrow river seen through a row of reed grasses. This black band above the river image creates a visual transition from the hospital room in the prologue to the title page of Chapter 1. As a visual clue, it facilitates this transition in ways unavailable to the prose text and generates visual links to the following pages where the river blue matches the blue of Dana’s blouse. According to Jennings, he tried to match this color to “what’s called ‘haint blue’ by the Gullah people in South Carolina” (“Q&A” 242). Thus, the coloring alone envelopes Dana further in the timeless connections between her Maryland slave ancestors and her modern life in Los Angeles. The beige shoreline also supports the visual transition to the first page of the chapter, in which Jennings opts for a traditional six-panel layout in the muted beige-brown palette of the prologue’s hospital room. Jennings describes it as a “maroon” color tone that is “meant to reference the color of dried blood, representing the blood ties that connect the characters in the novel” (“Q&A” 242). The visuals, however, achieve a much stronger emphasis on time and space as the second panel zooms in on a calendar page of June 1976. One quick look at the first three panels permits interpretation of the young couple’s recent move as many boxes remain unpacked. Readers also receive clues as to the couple’s profession: typewriter and books are clearly visible. Visual clues as to the couple’s whereabouts are given in a close-up of a map of Orange County. These objective visual intertexts, such as the calendar and map, illustrate well McCloud’s contention that even abstract artists use photographic realism for objectification (44). The second page introduces other stylistically interesting elements as Jennings zooms in on Dana who indicates that she is not feeling well and holds on to one of the bookshelves. Her partner, Kevin, is not visible in this close-up, but extended speech bubbles suggest his presence. Next follows a panel in which two books “THUMP” to the ground (11). Unlike Butler, Duffy and Jennings reveal the book titles as Slaughterhouse Five and Patternmaster—a nice self-reflexive or metafictional touch. Jennings indicated that Slaughterhouse Five, which also deals with time travel, is one of his and Duffy’s favorite books. With the Patternmaster allusion, they wanted to acknowledge the fact that Butler had originally planned Kindred to become part of that series (Batiste et al. 13). These books serve as the type of “icons” that McCloud maintains “require our participation [in the narrative] to make them work” (59).

Graphic style in Kindred Stylistic choices made by illustrators exert tremendous control over reader reception and interpretation. Kindred confirms what theorists, such as McCloud, Pratt, and Lefèvre, have been saying all along. The

122  Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw interview included in the graphic novel’s “Q&A” details Duffy and Jennings’s close collaboration on their adaptation project and the many specifics they agreed upon to achieve a particular effect. They discuss how Duffy condensed Butler’s novel and how Jennings then drew the images to accompany the text (240). Their frequent exchanges of feedback, drafts, and revisions attest to their careful reasoning for the final published product. Their interview in Black Scholar includes some of the draft panels they dismissed during the writing process. One striking example concerns the characterization of the protagonist, Dana. Drawing parallels to the narrative of Harriet Jacobs’s “sexual exploitation,” interviewer Mary Anne Boelcskevy inquired whether Duffy and Jennings made a conscious decision to render Dana’s appearance with androgynous features. Their approach was, indeed, deliberate, taking into consideration Butler’s own appearance and her interest in gender issues, as well as the prose text’s frequent references to Dana’s hair and clothing (Batiste et al. 9). Even Dana’s hairstyle became an issue when Duffy and Jennings decided to leave it short and “natural” in order to clarify Rufus’s initial confusion concerning Dana’s gender; comparisons between earlier and later panels featuring Dana also reveal that hair length and fullness are used to suggest passage of time (Batiste et al. 10). Adapting novel to movie or novel to graphic novel format requires significant amounts of condensing as it is simply impossible to turn a 300-page novel word-for-word into a two-and-a half-hour movie or into an illustrated 200-page novel. In addition to determining what can easily be left out without altering or falsifying the original, authors must also resort to simplifying complicated scenes so that they will not be left with the onerous and disruptive task of inserting too many narrative text boxes. Consequently, simplification becomes an important stylistic tool. Simplification as explained by McCloud is a popular means graphic illustrators have of keying an audience in on what is important in their work. In fact, condensing material and strategically laying out panels also paces the narrative and further engages the reader’s attention (Pratt 110). Octavia Butler’s prologue to Kindred offers an excellent example of how the illustrator’s mind operates here since Jennings discusses his techniques in interviews and supplies notes that have been appended to the paperback edition of the graphic novel. In Butler’s novel, the prologue makes the same shocking statement as in the graphic novel: “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm” (Butler 9). It is followed by an explanation of Dana’s difficulties exonerating Kevin from any police suspicions that he was the one who hurt his wife. In this manner, Butler is able to introduce her major characters and their loving, marital relationship. Further, readers also find out that somehow, Dana’s arm was stuck in their bedroom wall. All of this, a range of about two print pages, has been shortened by Jennings to just one nearly wordless page: Dana, in her hospital bed, staring intently at us.

Graphic performances in Kindred  123 On a black background, the image sits within a barely suggested panel frame. In muted palette, inside the outline suggested by the crosshatched hospital wall appear the words, “I lost an arm on my last trip home,” a cryptic explanation for the bandaged stump, visible upon further inspection of the image (7). Butler’s original prologue is equally concise, but it foreshadows the action more concretely. In the graphic novel version, however, readers are left to their own devices to reconcile 19th-century visual clues from the cover page, with the violence suggested by the amputated arm and the modern-day hospital bed. Jennings’s notes explain not only the arduous process of reducing the print material to its absolute essence but also the astute planning of performative elements that must take place in the discussions between adaptor and illustrator. As their notes show, Duffy and Jennings had planned a much more detailed and literal rendition of the Butler text in black-and-white layout. Through subtraction and focusing, they arrived at the stark final product that requires a lot more work from readers who are drawn in by Dana’s maimed arm and her intense stare (244–245). What Duffy and Jennings gain in drama and suspense, they lose in clarity and background for Kevin and Dana’s relationship. Another instance of ingenious simplification occurs during a reading lesson (Duffy and Jennings 92). It is also one of the few instances of Duffy and Jennings taking advantage of the full spectrum of panel experimentation available to cartoonists. As McCloud points out, comics readers “expect a very linear progression” (106) and are used to reading pages left to right. In the case of the reading lesson, readers will, of course, try to read this sequence of eight panels in a traditional format. They will notice almost immediately that this approach is insufficient as panels in the left column must be read top to bottom to follow a reading lesson given to Rufus by Dana; panels in the right column show Dana’s furtive attempts at teaching the slave child Nigel on several different occasions. Thus, this page not only condenses several pages in the print novel, but it also affords readers a comparative analysis of the two boys’ reading instruction and reading abilities by revealing Rufus as a slow reader and Nigel as a bright boy who wants to learn despite being prohibited from furthering his education by the institution of slavery. The irony of this situation is further enhanced by the first panel on the following page, which displays a bookcase in the Weylins’ library (93). Both Margaret and Tom Weylin prevent Dana from reading, yet neither one of them reads well enough to take advantage of their well-appointed library. In just a page and a half, Duffy and Jennings are able to convey several injustices and paradoxes of chattel slavery in the ante-bellum South while forcing readers to pay close attention to the imagery provided. Yet another stylistically interesting example, which condenses several pages via a one-page panel that telescopes time and space into one large image, features Dana on a road leading up to the Weylin plantation.

124  Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw A  small inserted panel at bottom right zooms in on a man, who, as readers infer, approaches and questions Dana as she walks up to the building. Three text boxes and Dana’s thought bubbles shorten Butler’s narrative to six sentences. Dana’s brief lapse as she cries out “Home!” upon seeing the plantation is quickly put in perspective by the angry man’s rough interrogation (Duffy and Jennings 119). Pratt’s belief that carefully arranged panels engage readers and affect narrative pace has again been substantiated (110). The simple juxtaposition of the large and small panels gives Jennings yet another means of focusing on Dana’s increasing absorption into past events that not only demean and dehumanize her but also shape and influence her identity. In addition to simplification and condensing, Duffy and Jennings also use expansion as a means of adaptation. For instance, when Dana seeks shelter at Alice’s hut after her second encounter with Rufus, she witnesses the beating of Alice’s father. In Butler’s prose text, Dana shuts her eyes to the violence done to this man (36), but in Jennings’s version of the material, readers observe Dana watching the scene with open eyes and, thus, literally they become eyewitnesses to this event. The expansion of one print page into six graphic novel pages focuses on the mangled and beaten body first of Alice’s father and then of her mother. Much like Duffy and Jennings’s Dana, readers cannot look away; they must face the harm done to these characters and draw their own conclusions from this experience. Similarly, Martha Cutter mentions that the abolitionist images of torture she examines in her book “establish the dominance over the body and can reenact forms of punishment visually” (15). Referencing studies in social psychology on the creation of empathy, she reports that the kinds of identification forced upon readers in these violent images may produce desirable social responses (21). She cautions readers, however, that some scholars position the origins of this kind of “spectatorial sympathy” (xii) within pleasurable pain reminiscent of the “pornography of pain” (Karen Halttunen qtd. in Cutter xii) that arose in the 19th century. Another especially violent incident, Dana’s own worst beating when Mr. Weylin catches her reading after he strictly forbade her to touch his books, occurs within two short paragraphs in Butler’s prose novel but takes up two entire image-driven pages in the graphic narrative (98–99). Four large horizontal panels force readers to pause and witness the violence done to Dana’s body. These panels arrest time and motion as readers focus first on Dana’s prostrate body, then on a raised hand holding a whip, behind which Kevin is seen hastening to assist Dana. This panel is followed by another close-up of the anguished Dana and concludes with a last shot of the whip descending upon the now empty ground. Jennings here employs the full range of a graphic narrative’s ability to affect reader perceptions of time, space, and motion. He says, “The panels themselves, the density of the images depicted, and especially the spaces

Graphic performances in Kindred  125 between the panels … give us a lot of power when dealing with the perception of time” (Batiste et al. 18). This sequence of panels is remarkable for several other reasons. Not only do the visuals evoke Dana’s pain, but the emphasis on whipping creates a visual allusion to Frederick Douglass’s narrative in which whipping is one of the most prominent images representing the violence and injustice of slavery (as for instance in the beating of Douglass’s Aunt Hester in Chapter 1). Jennings is thus able to both amplify the reader’s experience of this moment in Kindred while connecting Butler’s neoslave narrative to its 19th-century ancestors. The passage also offers an example of clever adaptation. In Butler’s original, Dana mentions Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman in a conversation with Rufus, who disputes the information in a history book brought back by Dana from the 20th century (140). Their extensive prose dialogue is shortened here to a subtle visual allusion. These panels also confirm Pascal Lefèvre’s supposition that through “medium-specific qualities of graphic narratives,” the graphic artist “not only depicts something, but expresses at the same time a visual interpretation of the world” (16). In this manner, a graphic artist’s approach to the material constitutes a pre- or re-interpretation of the original storyline as readers learn at the end of the third chapter. As Kevin approaches the scene of the beating, his fist is raised in anger at Mr. Weylin, but Jennings positions Kevin’s hand so close to Weylin’s that it would be difficult not to notice the resemblance of the two white fists. This form of visual identification happens repeatedly throughout the novel and creates uncanny resemblances and mental echoes among Kevin, Rufus, Mr. Weylin, and even the patrolman who attacks Dana in the second chapter. In an interview, Jennings commented on his awareness of this pictorial strategy, but he did not address reasons for the similarities: At first, Jennings thought of making Kevin look more African American resonating with the novel’s titular reference to family connections. He and Duffy dismissed this approach as “contrived” and eventually decided to create pictorial links between Rufus and Kevin to capture the “different modes of control that were embodied” by them (Batiste et al. 13). Physical similarities between Kevin and the patrolman, who beats Alice and attacks Dana in the second chapter, remain unexplained. Butler’s prose text does not directly anticipate this visual connection so that readers are left to interpret the meaning of this graphic stylistic choice. As Dana fears for her life, she is transported back to her house in Los Angeles where Kevin leans over her. Readers know time travel has occurred because of the changed color palette, but the profile view of Kevin oddly resembles that of the patrolman as though Jennings wishes to suggest a shared culpability between patrolman and Kevin. Emotionally, Dana is still in the midst of her struggle to fight off her attacker, but in posture and in appearance, the attacker is now replaced by Kevin.

126  Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw When Dana realizes her mistake, she says, “Yes, I thought … thought you were the patroller” (Duffy and Jennings 51). Butler’s text, using the same dialogue, continues to explain Dana’s momentary confusion (40–41) whereas the graphic novel leaves a veiled commentary. The visual allusion echoes a moment in the print text in which Dana refuses subservience to Kevin by not typing his manuscript for him. Further, she also fears how prolonged exposure to a slaveholding environment would affect him in the long run. The visual similarities with Rufus create yet different forms of resonance. By the end of the novel, the now adult Rufus has learned little from his interactions with Dana. He has grown up to look just like his father, Mr. Weylin—or like the patrolman for that matter. After the loss of Alice, he turns to Dana, not just for friendship and support but also for sexual favors. Unwilling to submit to his advances, Dana rebuffs him. Attempting to overpower her, he grabs her wrist in a gesture mirroring the fist on the book cover. Further, two square panels on the bottom of this page filled with several fight images sum up the outcome of their struggle. Each panel depicts one half of a face, Dana’s on the left, Rufus’s on the right. Only together do they complete a human face; they are, indeed, kindred. The gutter division between the two half-faces speaks volumes: Dana and Rufus, black and white characters, are inextricably linked by family bonds and a violent past. The remainder of the altercation unfolds nearly wordlessly to disrupt the natural left-to-right reading order by centering reader attention on the blood spilled by Dana’s stabbing of Rufus. From there, the ­reader’s gaze moves down the left column of small images to his fist hitting her face. Conflating the action, the panels show his astonished face and their hand-to-hand fight in the right column (233). On the novel’s last page, Nigel’s discovery of the dead Rufus and Dana’s return to modern times happen so swiftly that it takes much careful reader input to extrapolate what must have happened to Dana’s arm. More detailed explanations are provided in two small textboxes later on in the novel’s epilogue (236–237). Beyond what is obviously and clearly stated in this graphic novel, much has to be inferred and amplified in the reader’s imagination echoing Mc Cloud’s explanation of the reader interaction required to achieve closure in the gutter spaces between panels (64–65). In Kindred, panels four and five on page 11 illustrate well how the graphic adaptation uses closure to avoid wordy explanations of what happens and to force readers to extrapolate missing pieces from experience (McCloud 61–62). Dana says, “Something is wrong with me.” Next, we see books falling and “hear” a “thump” leading us to infer that she dropped the books. The page bottom and gutter are used here extremely well to create a short pause in which each reader’s imagination is forced to envision what could happen next. As Mc Cloud suggests, the reader “takes two separate images and

Graphic performances in Kindred  127 transforms them into a single idea” (66), thus actively participating in the story and in the meaning-making that is here reinforced by changes in the color scheme. Throughout the graphic novel, tree imagery plays an important role. In the third chapter, “The Fall,” Dana and Kevin are called to Rufus’s side after he falls from a tree and breaks his leg. In the middle of a twopage spread, linking six horizontal panels, Jennings inserted the image of a large tree. Even though several minutes elapse in the action depicted in the six panels, the presence of the tree suggests a linkage through time and space (68–69). Special attention is paid to another tree (drawn very similarly to the tree in the previous example) at the Weylin plantation under which Kevin and Dana meet for secret trysts. From the shelter of its wide trunk, they observe the slave children’s play performance of a slave auction (Duffy and Jennings 87). Yet other important moments are also tied to this tree. Its significance in connecting past and present becomes apparent when Dana realizes that she might be related to Rufus. As she quizzes him on his name and the location of his father’s plantation, in addition to her thoughts and memories concerning her grandmother Hagar, she recalls Hagar’s family Bible containing a family tree (Duffy and Jennings 34). Like the maps and calendar in the first chapter, the image of the family tree complements Dana’s verbal description and gives that tree both a significance and a presence that words alone would not have. How the visually interlinked family tree underscores Dana’s connectedness to her ancestors and the interconnections between her life in the 20th century and the life of her 19th century forebears becomes only too painfully apparent when Dana arrives at the house of Alice’s mother and witnesses Alice’s father’s beating while he is tied to a tree. Dana’s own struggle with the patrolman who tries to subdue and rape her also takes place by that tree (54). Between panels—in the gutter— readers can absorb the weighty implications of the imagery that further cements the connections between past and present, white and black, and fiction and reality.

Expressing feelings in Kindred Of course, good prose fiction can convey characters’ feelings to the reader; conversely, readers who have begun to identify with a favorite character will sympathize with that character. We know, however, that face-to-face interactions permit us to interpret gestures and body language to infer our interlocutor’s emotions. Graphic novels also afford us this possibility. Suzanne Keen’s work suggests that even in abstract drawings and non-anthropomorphic characters, our interpretive abilities still function and permit us to draw inferences about characters’ states of mind (“Fast Tracks” 138). Referencing Paul Ekman’s work in nonverbal communication, Keen observes that graphic narratives can

128  Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw represent facial expressions and bodily gestures in such a way that they can be quickly and readily absorbed and understood by readers (146). Consequently, we do not require any further explanation when we see a very angry Dana after Rufus addresses her with the n-word (Duffy and Jennings 31). That anger exceeds the feelings the prose narrative suggests at that moment (25). The beginning of Chapter 4, “The Fight,” shows Dana in her bathtub recuperating from the whipping she received by Mr. Weylin. Sliding into the water so that only half of her face is still visible creates the impression of Dana’s drowning within this wordless panel. In the next scene, with closed eyes and tears running down her cheeks, Dana clearly feels defeated and pained. The following, wordless panel, however, shows her rising from the water, phoenix-like, as though she has recovered her strength and determination to return to the 19th-century plantation to find Kevin and to return to life as it used to be (Duffy and Jennings 106). Butler describes this moment in two sentences, yet provides no further insight into Dana’s state of mind (113). Given our human aptitude at reading facial expressions (McCloud 31, 135), Jennings’s illustrations can round off our reading experience with new emotionally expressive information. When Dana discovers Alice’s suicide in the fifth chapter, “The Rope,” the prose text matter-of-factly describes Dana’s cutting down the body and then confronting both Sarah and Rufus about the details of her friend’s death (248–249). Jennings’s startling full-page panel of Alice’s dead body is so shocking—because of its visual allusions to lynchings— that Dana’s sorrowful face and pleading hands in the lower right-hand corner nearly disappear from the reader’s field of vision (219). Four small panels depict the consequences of Dana’s loss and her careful removal of the rope from Alice’s neck (220). She looks at Rufus in despair and walks off with shoulders stooped by her anguish (221). Butler’s text generates a good deal of empathy for the unsettling experience narrated to us by Dana. The graphic novel can garner even more empathetic reader involvement by sharing with us bodily gestures and facial expressions, much like a performance or movie. By observing the characters perform their distress—Dana’s exhaustion, her frightened staring into space as she tries to assess what happened, her anger at her own ignorance and helplessness, and her sorrow at what she is feeling—readers are compelled to enter the action of the story.

Fiction and social justice Anecdotally, teachers and researchers have long felt that reading fiction exposes readers to diverse situations and groups. This experience can challenge beliefs and motivate action, although measurable data in support of this observation is hard to come by. 3 Johnson, Huffman, and Jaspers’s research revealed that “narrative fiction can change race boundary perception” (83). The findings show that among the individuals who

Graphic performances in Kindred  129 participated in the control group, prejudice toward members of an outgroup diminished measurably after reading a short story that featured a person of that outgroup in need of assistance. Suzanne Keen believes that “[t]he potential to reach and move the feelings of large numbers of readers makes graphic narrative especially attractive to authors of compassionate, exemplary and didactic tales” (Keen, “Fast Track” 144). Use of illustrations to support social justice arguments is not a new technique as Cutter’s detailed study of illustrated 19th-century slave narratives indicates. Cutter’s book asserts that even in the 19th century, “abolition was a multimedia and multimodal political movement that relied heavily on visual technologies” (8). Her book examines a plethora of examples used by abolitionists, including “newly emerging visual technologies used in the first half of the nineteenth century” such as “daguerreotypes, lithographs, ambrotypes, tintypes, photographs, cartes de visite, dioramas, and panoramas” (8). Cutter pays special attention to book illustrations used to further the abolitionist cause by capturing viewer attention and imagination when “enslaved individuals had the power to speak, look, and act, and readers had the power to participate in the making of this phantasmal world, which perhaps would ultimately transcend the pages of the text” (28). In the service of abolition, these illustrations attempt to create “parallel empathy.” Cutter carefully distinguishes this more reciprocal form of empathy from “hierarchical empathy” seen as a “unilateral process in which the viewed is always in need of pity, aid, etc.” (237). Images that manage to achieve “parallel empathy” depict the enslaved individual as a fully independent human being while slave and viewer are not separate but “visually and emotionally similar.” Indeed, the visual identification can go so far as to suggest that the pain seen in the illustration “could be one’s own.” Often, such an illustration does not merely inspire pity but suggests action needs to be taken (237). Butler’s novel and Duffy and Jennings’s adaptation offer countless examples of embodied, participatory experiences that require audience engagement and produce parallel empathy. In order to permit Dana (and by extension, all readers) a fuller understanding of the institution of slavery, Butler employed the speculative fictional strategy of time travel (Lashley). In the graphic novel adaptation, readers accompany Dana on her travels and become eyewitnesses to the hardships she experiences at the Weylin Plantation. Kathrine Lashley’s article on slave narratives points out that despite being generations removed from the trauma of slavery, Dana’s time travels reconnect her to her ancestors’ experiences and, in the manner of trauma narratives, she is forced to relive old stories and cultural memories. Each travel experience induces so much fear and stress that she experiences illnesses and injuries that exert a disabling effect.4 The outcome recalls the lasting damages caused by the enslavement of Africans in the Americas (Lashley). Visually reliving Dana’s experiences in the graphic novel will leave a lasting impact, particularly on those readers who already share Butler’s point of view.

130  Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw Like Cutter, Suzanne Keen also establishes different categories for the discussion of empathy in fiction. Keen’s work identifies three distinct types of narrative empathy generated by author, reader, and subject matter (“Theory” 214–215). Authorial impact can be ascertained through Octavia Butler’s confirmed interest in social justice issues and the interest taken in those same issues by both Duffy and Jennings (Batiste et al. 11). Consequently, it is not too difficult to locate a form of “strategic empathy” in Kindred. This type of empathy is used by authors “to direct an emotional transaction through a fictional work aimed at a particular audience, not necessarily including every reader who happens upon the text” (“Theory” 224). Empathy produced by character identification occurs primarily through the use of first-person narrative in Kindred. Moreover, the sympathy for Dana’s plight experienced by readers is coupled with the careful pacing of the narrative to force readers to pay attention to selected scenes. This mechanism corresponds well with the criteria Keen presents in her article (217). The narrative situation also permits readers access to Dana’s inner life, which appears to be another important element in the production of reader empathy (220). Subject matter presented in fiction, what Keen calls “ambassadorial empathy,” is time sensitive (“Theory” 214). That is very true for Kindred—during contemporary, politically difficult times, when minorities feel disregarded and disadvantaged, the narrative may fuel more concerns over social justice.

Conclusion Damian Duffy and John Jennings’s adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred serves as an excellent illustration of the graphic novel’s potential for engaging readers, possibly moving them to political awareness and action. Through careful pacing, Jennings’s illustrations manage to focus reader attention on selected panels to arrest reader attention, stimulate cognitive engagement, and foster empathy. Condensed segments of the novel force readers to pause in the gutter spaces between juxtaposed panels, enhancing their reading experience by permitting imaginative and cognitive interactions with the material. In Kindred, instances in which readers are carefully cued toward an interpretation or left to find closure in the gutter space play a particularly prominent role in what Sean Carleton, following Paulo Freire, terms “conscientization” (153). Carleton views the gutter space as the perfect environment for readers to “piece together the text, images, and transitions in comics, especially in politically progressive texts” (164). Most importantly, Carleton thinks that through their active engagement in meaning-making from the fragmented often open-ended comics panels, “readers can be transformed” (165). Stylistic tactics also influence reader perceptions that target an interpretation well suited for our times. If Dana in the 1970s is perhaps disenchanted by lagging social changes, she remains hopeful of a more

Graphic performances in Kindred  131 diverse future through her loving relationship with Kevin. Visual connections in the graphic novel adaptation between patrolmen, slave holders, and Dana’s white husband Kevin create a much more pessimistic outlook that may well reflect the current political climate, something Jennings also alluded to when he said in an interview, “I feel that this book is needed now more than ever” (Batiste et al. 11). Readers witness how Dana lost her arm, they feel her pain, and experience what it means to be caught bodily between past and present.

Notes 1 In the highly acclaimed, 2018 Eisner Award-winning Duffy-Jennings team, Abrams ComicArts found excellent artists to handle this challenging project. Damian Duffy—a graduate of the University of Illinois with an MS and PhD in Library and Information Science, according to his web page— considers himself a “cartoonist, scholar, writer, curator, lecturer, teacher.” The award-winning author took on the task of adapting Butler’s text to the graphic novel medium and providing the lettering while John Jennings was responsible for the illustrations. Jennings, who teaches Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside (Batiste et al. 18), is the co-founder (with Jonathan Gayles, Deirdre Hollman, and Jerry Craft) of the Schomburg Center’s Black Comic Book Festival which “celebrates the rich history of Black independent comic book characters and creators” (Asari 34). 2 I follow David Herman’s lead in the use of the term “worldmaking” (196). 3 Performance Studies scholars have done more work than other disciplines to document how the performance of literature does indeed improve understanding of literary and social texts and cultivate groundwork for personal and social change. See Wallace Bacon’s, Leslie Irene Coger’s, and Beverly Whitaker Long and Mary Frances HopKins’s work for more information on the relationship between performance and understanding. 4 Katherine Lashley’s article suggests that Dana’s amputated arm alludes to Sojourner Truth’s disabled hand.

Works Cited Asim, Jabari. “Octavia Butler Remixed and Boldly Retold in Vivid Color.” The Crisis, vol. 124, no. 1, 2017, pp. 33–35. EBSCOhost, login.lib- proxy.usi.edu/ login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&A N=126854141&site=ehost-live&scope=site. Bacon, Wallace A. The Art of Interpretation, 3rd edition. Rinehart and Winston, 1979. Batiste, Stephanie et al. “Interview with John Jennings, Featuring Alternate and Draft Panels from Kindred: The Graphic Novel Adaptation.” The Black Scholar, vol. 48, no. 4, 2018, pp. 8–18. doi:10.1080/00064246.2018.1514923. Butler, Octavia. Kindred. Beacon Press, 1979. Carleton, Sean. “Drawn to Change: Comics and Critical Consciousness.” Labour/Travail, vol. 73, 2014, pp. 151–177. ProjectMuse, muse.jhu.edu/ article/544834. Coger, Leslie Irene. “Interpreters Theatre: Theatre of the Mind.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 49, no. 2, 1963, pp. 157–164. doi:10.1080/0033563 6309382602.

132  Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw Cutter, Martha J. The Illustrated Slave: Empathy, Graphic Narrative, and the Visual Culture of the Transatlantic Abolition Movement, 1800–1852, U of Georgia P, 2017. ProQuest https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.lib-proxy.usi. edu/lib/usiricelib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4946505. Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. Bedford Books, 1993. Duffy, Damian. Author Page. http://damianduffy.net/about/. Accessed 22 Feb. 2019. Duffy, Damian, and John Jennings. A Graphic Novel Adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Abrams ComicArts, 2017. Gardner, Jared, and David Hermann. “Graphic Narratives and Narrative Theory: Introduction.” SubStance, vol. 124, no. 1, 2011, pp. 3–13. JSTOR, www. jstor.org/stable/41300185. Herman, David. “Multimodal Storytelling and Identity Construction in Graphic Narratives.” Telling Stories: Language, Narrative, and Social Life, edited by Deborah Schiffrin, Anna De Fina and Anastasia Nylund, Georgetown UP, 2010, pp. 195–208. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://­ebookcentral-proquestcom.lib-proxy.usi.edu/lib/usiricelib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=547752. Johnson, Dan R., Brandie L. Huffman, and Danny M. Jasper. “Changing Race Boundary Perceptions by Reading Narrative Fiction.” Basic and Applied Social Psychology, vol. 36, 2014, pp. 83–90. doi:10.1080/01973533.2013.856791. Keen, Suzanne. “A Theory of Narrative Empathy.” Narrative, vol. 14, no. 3, 2006, pp. 207–236. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20107388. ———. “Fast Tracks to Narrative Empathy: Anthropomorphism and Dehumanization in Graphic Narratives.” SubStance, vol. 40, no. 1, 2011, pp. 135–155. ProjectMUSE. doi:10.1353/sub.2011.003. Lashley, Katherine. “The Strong, Disabled African American Slave in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred.” Critical Insights: The Slave Narrative, edited by Kimberly Drake, Salem, 2014. Salem Online, https://online-salempress-com.libproxy.usi.edu/home.do. Lefèvre, Pascal. “Some Medium-Specific Qualities of Graphic Sequences.” SubStance, vol. 40, no. 124, 2011, pp. 14–33. doi:10.1353/sub.2011.007. Long, Beverly Whitaker, and Mary Frances HopKins. Performing Literature: An Introduction to Oral Interpretation. Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1982. Martin, Elaine. “Graphic Novels or Novel Graphics.” The Comparatist, vol. 35, 2011, pp. 170–181. doi:10.1353/com.2011.0015. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperPerennial, 1993. “Notes on Progress.” A Graphic Novel Adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, edited by Duffy, Damian and John Jennings, Abrams ComicArts, 2017, pp. 243–249. Pratt, John Henry. “Narrative in Comics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 67, no. 1, 2009, pp. 107–117. doi:10.1111/j.1540–6245.2008.01339. “Q&A with Damian Duffy and John Jennings.” A Graphic Novel Adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, edited by Duffy, Damian, and John Jennings, Abrams ComicArts, 2017, pp. 239–242. “Teacher’s Guide.” A Graphic Novel Adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, edited by Duffy, Damian and John Jennings, Abrams ComicArts, 2017, pp. 250–255.

9 Austen’s audience(s) and the perils of adaptation Leigh Anne Howard

Although in a postmodern era the perception of adaptations has shifted toward a more favorable tenor, as Linda Hutcheon explains, adaptations have generally been regarded as “minor and subsidiary and certainly never as good as the ‘original’” (Hutcheon xiv), but the vast number of adaptations in multiple genres and media suggest that audiences are attracted to adaptations nonetheless because they enjoy seeing old stories in new ways. Linda Hutcheon suggests that one reason for the popularity of adaptations stems from the pleasure people get when they see their favorite story retold; she compares this experience to that of a young child who wants to hear the same story night after night (114). However, the adaptation is more than the repetition. The adaptation forms an intertext that “oscillate[s]” (Hutcheon 121) between the adapted work, the adaptation, and other works, and when audience members experience that oscillation, they create an interpretive, textual field (see Barthes). Therefore, adaptations—with their remnants of other works and their associations within textual fields—consist of “mosaics of citations that are visible and invisible, heard and silent; they are always already written and read” (Hutcheon 21). And because they are always in the background, the sources for the adaptations reciprocate as they create a residue that impacts audience members and their encounter with the adaptation. This residue makes adaptations perilous work, and those who choose to adapt know all too well the perils they face when doing so. As Chris Columbus noted when he was contracted for the screenplay of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, if the details are incorrect, fans will crucify the adaptor (Whipp qtd in Hutcheon 123). Those who adapt, recreate, spoof, or expand the work of Jane Austen know they, too, may face a similar fate. In the preface to her graphic novel adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, Nancy Butler1 explains that as soon as word started circulating about her project, she could feel the “bull’s-eye forming” because “You Don’t Mess With Jane.”2 Despite potentially adverse reactions to Austen adaptations, writers over the last twenty years have flooded the market with numerous Austen adaptations, defined as a range of creative activity including “…recreations, remakes, remediations, revisions,

134  Leigh Anne Howard parodies, reinventions, reinterpretations, expansions, and extensions” (Hutcheon 181). Austen adaptations encompass many of these categories with heritage dramas such as the BBC and film productions of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Persuasion, and Northanger Abbey; transcoded recreations such as Clueless and Bride and Prejudice which alter the stories’ era and cultural context; genre mashups such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters; and spinoffs and sequels like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Longbourn, and Death Comes to Pemberley. I find it interesting that someone whose work first appeared more than two hundred years ago continues to be revisited in such diverse ways. One motive, certainly, is her popularity, particularly among her fans3 known as “Janeites,” a term coined in 1894 by British literary critic, George Saintsbury (Yaffee xiv). Scott Caddy argues that Austen rivals Shakespeare as a “prominent literary and cultural figure” (43–44). Her novels have been in print since 1833, and The Huffington Post ranked Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility in the top three romance novels of all time. Such popularity paves the way for homages that engage a loyal Austen fan base, while also attracting new followers to the Austen canon. Austen fans are a diverse group. Young, old, male, ­female—some are attracted to the classic Austen novel while others enjoy Austen fandom through popular adaptations in film, television, and other digital media. These differing audiences create a complex dilemma for the Austen adaptor as those familiar with Austen’s novel or subsequent versions will have different expectations than an “unknowing” audience, one unfamiliar with the adapted text or even other adaptations (Hutcheon 120). Using Linda Hutcheon’s framework for adaptation,4 I examine how audiences of Jane Austen’s novels, Pride and Prejudice and Emma, and the graphic novel adaptations of those novels, construct an interpretive field created when they encountered these texts one after the other. 5 Comparing the texts themselves is an unproductive evaluation because this approach usually involves making value judgments of the medium, or the evaluation privileges the first text encountered. Both strategies are text based. However, by examining how and why people respond to the graphic novel and the adapted texts, and by identifying key information about how textual genres and media engage the audience, one gets a more substantial understanding how different audience types receive and why they respond to the adaptation.6 By examining audience members’ responses to Jane Austen’s novels, Pride and Prejudice and Emma, and the graphic novel adaptations of those novels in relation to audience member type, I supplement Hutcheon’s concepts with contributions about audience, genre, and adaptation from Performance Studies scholarship. Beginning with Hutcheons’s concept of the “knowing” audience, I discuss what happens to adaptation when

Austen’s audience(s) and perils of adaptation  135 audience members include what I call the knowing audience, or devoted fans who perceive an intimate, personal, and proprietary relationship with a work or author. In addition to exploring audience type, I also examine Hutcheon’s hierarchy of media as it relates to these works, and I suggest, like Melissa Caldwell elsewhere in this volume, that graphic narratives pose an example of Hutcheon’s interactive medium as they require active participation of the audience to make the narrative and the narrative experience complete. In this manner, I suggest, the way an audience member approaches a graphic novel is less like reading and more like the process one uses in a performance, when audience members decode what performers show on stage and then become co-producers of the text when they complete in their minds what the author starts on the pages.

Understanding the unknowing, knowing, and knowing audience Understanding an audience member’s response to adaptation necessitates determining what an audience knows about the adapted text and the adaptation. Rather than seeing familiarity as facts based on dichotomies (i.e., the audience members know or do not know the source of the adaptation), a more productive way to examine familiarity as it relates to adaptation involves a continuum that identifies the degree of familiarity because that degree of familiarity coincides with the way audience members engage texts. The continuum I suggest combines Hutcheon’s ideas about “unknowing” and “knowing” audiences (120) with a ­performance-oriented understanding of audience participation (Pelias and ­VanOosting 226–227) and Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst’s framework for understanding how fans respond as audience members. Hutcheon explains that an important component to the success of adaptation entails how much audience members know about the adapted work, the adaptation, and/or the adaptation’s status as an adaptation. She suggests that the best-case scenario is for an adaptor to appeal to these multiple levels of awareness about the work’s status as an adaptation. However, because unknowing audiences experience the adaptation not as an adaptation, adaptors may find reaching the unknowing audience an easier task than connecting to an audience well aware of the adaptation and the adapted work (Hutcheon 120). Unlike a more knowing audience, an unknowing audience lacks preconceived ideas about the story or its conception in a specific form. Instead, these audience members experience the adaptation just as they encounter any text for the first time (Hutcheon 120). This experience contrasts greatly with the experiences of those with more awareness. Because adapted works are usually announced (e.g., “adapted by…” or “based on…”), in some sense most audience members may be aware enough about a

136  Leigh Anne Howard work’s status as an adaptation that they might “feel its presence shadowing” what they experience (Hutcheon 6). However, there is a vast difference between an audience member who knows and one who knows, one who is intimately connected to the author or the story in a proprietary way. These audience members have specific beliefs and interpretations about the work, they have more demanding expectations about the text, and they require those expectations be met (Hutcheon 122–123). Pelias and VanOosting offer a nuanced understanding of the relationship between audiences and texts in their discussion about the ways performances demand audience engagement. They assert audience members can approach performance as a passive or “inactive audience,” one bound by convention and geared to responding as expected, in what Pelias and VanOosting identify as a “universal response” (227). However, different performances can generate more audience engagement, from “active” engagement when audience members build on the cues suggested by the performers/performance, to “interactive” audience ­members who stand as co-producers, who build on the work of the performers, and who co-construct meaning, to the most engaged audience type, a “proactive” audience, established when the lines between performer and audience disappear or become indistinguishable (Pelias and VanOosting 226–227). Abercrombie and Longhurst suggest a similar spectrum when they explain that audience members have differentiated identities that range from a general audience member to an enthusiast to a cult-like member of a specific fandom (110). By combining the ideas of Hutcheon, Pelias and VanOosting, and Abercrombie and Longhurst, we create a continuum which places Hutcheon’s “unknowing” audience on one side, her “knowing” audience in the middle, and specialized audiences, such as fans who form a knowing audience, on the other side, and each position along the continuum brings a different level of audience engagement. This continuum recognizes that some audiences may be completely unaware that a text is an adaptation, some may know a work is an adaptation but lack awareness of the adapted text, some may know the adapted text and adaptation(s), while yet others are so connected to the adapted work that they assume a privilege when it comes to a work’s interpretation. This continuum also implies that degrees of knowing create degrees of connection to the adaptation, and such connection influences an audience’s willingness to participate with the adaptation. Thus, to understand how people respond to adaptation, one must understand their position as unknowing, knowing, or knowing audience members. The youth in this project well represent the span of unknowing, knowing, and knowing audience members. Although none knew about either of the graphic novel adaptations of Austen’s novels, they had varying degrees of familiarity with Austen and her works. Four participants were self-proclaimed Austen fans who had read at least two of Austen’s novels

Austen’s audience(s) and perils of adaptation  137 before this project. Twelve said they liked Austen’s works but would not describe themselves as fans; most in this category knew Austen by name or were familiar with film adaptations, but they had not read Austen’s novels. Two felt neutral about her works, and two disliked her works; these four either did not know Austen by name, or they were unaware that some of the stories they knew were adaptations of Austen novels. Although fans and females had greater knowledge about numerous adaptations in various formats, most participants were familiar with Austen adaptations even if they had not read any of Austen’s work. All but one participant had seen either Amy Heckerling’s Clueless or the Keira Knightly version of Pride and Prejudice, for example. Other adaptations they knew were Sense and Sensibility with Emma Thompson, Emma with Gwyneth Paltrow, or the online spin off, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. All of the participants said they were drawn to the romance or strong female protagonists, though both male readers wanted more action. Participants liked the plot’s relevance to contemporary society. Austen’s novel “seems irrelevant but actually it is very relevant, and it has everything to do with our society today,” one participant explained. Another person described the story as a “microcosm of life” and enjoyed how the book “let’s you see beyond the romance played up in the other versions.” In most cases, what the readers liked and disliked about the novels accounted for what they disliked or liked about the graphic narratives. For example, the readers who explained they enjoyed Austen’s novels were less likely to enjoy how the plot was presented in the graphic novels, and those who enjoyed the way Butler adapted Austen’s plot were also the ones who found the scenes in Austen’s novel “too long,” “intimidating,” “hard to follow,” or “repetitive.” One explained, “I don’t know how far I would have made it if I hadn’t seen the movie because sometimes her novels seem to drag on until they get to the point.” Another example of how what they liked in the novel accounted for their dislike in the graphic novel (and vice versa) involved how participants responded to the language in Austen’s novels and Butler’s adaptation. Fans noted liking Austen’s book because of her satire and wit, how “the language makes you feel she is sharing an inside joke,” and they felt cheated by the graphic novel which eliminated Austen’s strong narrative voice. These audience members enjoyed the ways Austen’s narrator’s “vision, personality, and motive ‘slant[ed] the report” (HopKins 7). These observations contrasted with the responses of those unfamiliar with Austen’s work prior to the project. These unknowing readers were surprised by Austen’s “sarcasm” or found her writing very difficult, especially at the start of the novel. Thus, they preferred the graphic novel adaptation. These responses regarding language may also correspond with Lisa Zunshine’s conclusions about the sociocognitive complexity in the “­embedments” or fictional “mental states embedded within another mental state” (119). While most texts operate at a third-level embedment, Zunshine explains

138  Leigh Anne Howard that Austen usually employs a range of embedments and at a higher level. For example, Austen may use the narrator to tell us what the characters think and then also use the character to explain those same thoughts and feelings. Zunshine explains that Butler’s reduction and simplification decreased the sociocognitive complexity for some readers to accommodate others (353). That is, in the reduction, Butler kept the facts (e.g., the plot) but removed what helped readers appreciate those facts, and those knowing audiences familiar with Austen’s version missed that additional information. Audience members, then, had mixed responses to the graphic novel adaptations depending upon their position on an unknowing, a knowing, and a knowing continuum. Those who were most enthusiastic about the graphic novel were unfamiliar with Austen before the project and admitted they probably would not have read her novels otherwise. They were also more favorable about their experience with the Austen’s novel and more receptive to Austen’s original novel than the more knowing audiences were toward the graphic narrative. Participants with a general awareness about Austen’s plot and characters but who were less knowledgeable of her prose were “satisfied” with Butler’s adaptation as the graphic novel replicated the romance plot seen in the feature film adaptations they knew. They also said they enjoyed the graphic novel, but they preferred Austen’s work. The knowing audience or the fans, in contrast, expressed an appreciation for the language and style of the Austen’s prose, and that appreciation caused them to reject the graphic novel adaptation. They “did not find the graphic novel enjoyable,” and knowing audience members said they “detested” these adaptations because they often contradicted the images they had already created of the characters, setting, and story. They, like the faithful Austen follower who takes pleasure in being a fan by virtue of their fan status, embodied the “direct, privileged, personally felt rather than dispassionately reasoned or institutionally mediated relation to the Almighty, in this particular case (as Janeites freely call her), to the ‘Divine Jane’” (Johnson 9). These knowing participants responded to the graphic novels in the way they did because they had “ready-made” ideas about Austen’s story and “sharply crystalized ideas and habits of response” when it came to something that diverged from those expectations (Rosenblatt 97). Thus, their preconceived ideas about Austen’s work were a part of their negative, interpretative experience of the graphic novel adaptation. Another difference between how various audience types in this project responded to these texts involved perceptions of “fidelity,” or the faithfulness of an adaptation to the adapted work (Hutcheon 85). Although she is very clear that fidelity is a poor metric for evaluating the success of an adaptation, Hutcheon acknowledges fidelity as a common explanation for why fans of a particular work may respond negatively to an adaptation. Those unfamiliar with the novels saw the graphic narrative

Austen’s audience(s) and perils of adaptation  139 as complete and interesting in its own right, but they also said that the graphic novel provided an outline that filled in the gaps they faced when reading the novel. In contrast, the more knowing audience members pointed out how “incomplete” the graphic novel seemed to them. For the knowing audience, the lack was more pointed, especially as it related to language, style, and the appearance of characters and scene. They missed the satire, subplots, and minor characters not included in the graphic novel. Consequently, they looked for period dress, English countrysides, and the witty dialogue inherent to an Austen novel. These responses correlate with the knowing/knowing audience members’ requisite for fidelity. They expect all to be correct—true to the story and to the imagined world Austen’s words created for them. They are looking for “familiarity and fulfilment” (Sandvoss 31–32), and any deviation from the familiar fails to deliver fulfillment. Because they claim a proprietary and intimate knowledge about Austen and her works, they are impatient at best when such expectations are not met. In her review of the Butler/Petrus Pride and Prejudice, Martha Corgog predicted that female readers, particularly Jane Austen fans, would want a more substantial story, more appealing art, and more distinctive characters (88). The knowing Austen audience in this project met this prediction. Perhaps because of the abbreviated format of the graphic novel, the participants speculated about what they described as the “accuracy” of the graphic novel. Referring to Pride and Prejudice, one indicated she thought the “dialogue was well done,” and another cited Butler’s word choices and phrasings–“vexing,” “quickness of mind,” “amiability,” “cultivation of herself”—as supporting the success of the adaptation. Others were “slightly annoyed by the small changes.” One participant explained, “I kept thinking, ‘did they have that in there?’ as I read the graphic novel.” She continued to say that she was even “a little bored” by the graphic novel” because it was “so basic.” The most notable controversy stemmed from the loss of the graphic adaptation’s narrative voice. Participants observed that much of the language was not the same, so the activity in the graphic novel frequently lacked Austen’s impact. For example, the Butler/Petrus adaptation begins with a full-page prologue containing the first two sentences of Austen’s narration, perhaps among the most widely quoted lines of her works: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. However, little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighborhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters. (Austen 213 and Butler/ Petrus Pride)

140  Leigh Anne Howard By replicating Austen’s lines, the graphic novel sets an expectation for readers that they will encounter Austen’s words frequently and verbatim; this expectation was not realized. More to the point for the knowing audience members, however, this beginning also misdirects readers from important interpretive points about language and style. Certainly with these lines, readers are cued to the marriage-romance plot, but their isolation as a separate prologue to the graphic novel signals the presence of and sets an expectation for Austen’s narrative voice. Unfortunately, from that point on with a few exceptions, readers of Butler/Petrus’s Pride and Prejudice encounter little of Austen’s strong, satirical, narrative voice; consequently, a key “character” in the form of the narrator who mediates what the audience knows is absent. The readers of Emma, in contrast, were less disgruntled because they found Butler’s language very similar to Austen’s. Like Pride and Prejudice, the Butler/Lee adaptation of Emma uses narrative squares inserted into panels to help audience members interpret action in the panel; however, such panels appear more frequently in Emma and those words tend to be Austen’s words, which made Austen more present to knowing audience members. As a result, readers of Emma were more likely than the readers of Pride and Prejudice to describe the graphic novel adaptation as “accurate,” “true,” or “authentic.” However, with both adaptations, Butler might have been better served breaking the generic convention to reduce narration in favor of using Austen’s narration. Robert Breen’s suggestions when moving from page to performance might be helpful, particularly in the case of graphic novels, where much of adaptation comes at the expense of the narrator. Breen’s Chamber Theatre, a technique for staging fiction, calls on adaptors to retain the narrative voice. In some instances, those passages are positioned as indirect discourse, and the characters communicate those passages as they would dialogue. In other cases, the narrator (or narrators) is fully present onstage as an integral part of the action. Even so, as Bacon notes, Chamber Theatre works best when there are strong, ­character-like narrators who engage with the characters and the events of the story (466–467). By retaining the narrator, the adaptator can retain the tenor and tone of the adapted text, which seemed essential to the knowing audiences in this project. Participants also questioned fidelity because of the illustrations and their sequencing in relation to the plot. They explained that some panels did not reflect scenes in the book, or that the illustrations were in contrast to the way most Austen readers might interpret the characters. This point was significant for the participants, though interestingly they did not object to such liberties in other Austen adaptations they knew. For example, early in Austen’s novel, in the first glimpse we see of the Bennets, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet discuss the new tenant at Netherfield Park. In the graphic novel, though, the five Bennet daughters witness Mrs.  Bennet’s

Austen’s audience(s) and perils of adaptation  141 excitement over the tenant. This scene in combination with the prologue underscores the notion that marriage and romance is the primary aim of the story and minimizes the novel’s other key qualities, such as Austen’s wit, humor, and satire—all prime features for Austen fans. Although both texts reveal Mr. Bennet’s partiality toward Elizabeth and his well-known riposte about his familiarity with Mrs. Bennet’s nerves, the graphic narrative removes Austen’s voice and tempers readers’ perception of the Austen characters as well as their awareness of Austen’s social commentary. When two pages later the Bennet daughters crowd around the window for their first glimpse of Mr. Bingley, the Netherfield Park tenant, all are depicted as eager, curious, and enthusiastic—almost silly—about potential relationships with Mr. Bingley. Knowing and knowing audiences usually do not attribute silliness to Austen’s Jane or Elizabeth. For knowing and knowing audiences, these examples create a dissonance between how they see the characters and how the graphic novel depicts the characters. Perhaps the most controversial point as it relates to fidelity involved decisions about how the adaptations portray the story world. Because setting is often an important aspect of how audience members engage with the story, adaptors often give such detail close attention, especially in the case of graphic novel adaptations of much-loved works. Because adaptors cannot replicate the entire plot, narration, and dialogue—they must also give careful consideration to how they build the story world. In the case of Pride and Prejudice, Hugo Petrus’s illustrations were unhelpful in terms of engaging audience members in this project with the world created in the graphic novel (even though artistically they are quite striking) because their style diverted the audience. The cover, for example, depicts Elizabeth Bennet as a “cover girl” wearing a long, modern pencil skirt rather than the expected Regency dress. Even unknowing audience members who were less concerned about fidelity had expectations about such historical referents, and they were surprised by the look created by Petrus, a skilled artist for superhero comics. With the graphic novel, Petrus created a very detailed and realistic story world, and such attention and style caused audience members to focus on the unlikeliness of that world rather than the story told by Butler. In addition, by using artistic conventions seen in the fantastical world of superhero comics, Petrus’s drawings are similar to those in a superheroes story rather than those of a Regency-era story. These illustrations prevented connections between audience members and characters. Scott McCloud writes that realistic background images allow “readers to mask themselves in a character and safely enter a sensually stimulating world” (43). However, in this project, Petrus’s illustrations pushed audience members away because his story world disrupted their preconceived ideas about what that world should be. The characters became caricatures of Austen’s beloved characters and, by extension, of the readers. In contrast, the story world for Emma is quite different. Illustrator Janet K. Lee uses a more

142  Leigh Anne Howard typical comics approach with flat, less realistic drawings and a watercolor style more akin to those in newspaper comics. She uses simpler drawings and stereotypical elements to create recognizable characters (Lefèvre 15). Consequently, the audience was more easily pulled into the story world of Emma. Adaptations are always in conversation with their adapted text, and so to understand how people respond to adaptations, one must identify the type and degree of knowledge an audience member has about the adapted text and the adaptation. Successful adaptors carefully evaluate potential audiences—unknowing, knowing, or knowing—and ­target that adaptation accordingly. In the case of the Austen graphic novel adaptations, both Pride and Prejudice and Emma were less successful reaching those knowing fans than the unknowning and knowing audiences Butler established as her target readership. Butler explains this intent in her introduction to Pride and Prejudice: “Young readers would now get a chance to meet the Bennets, the Bingleys, and Mr. Darcy— and may be tempted to investigate the actual book.” Her aim is consistent with the conclusions of adult Jane Austen fans, who suggested graphic novel adaptations of these and other classics might get reluctant readers engaged with the classics or reading in general (Howard 253), as well as scholars who see graphic novels as a way to increase literacy (Gorman 46; Price 27; Werris 10). These aims were also realized in this study when several unknowing participants admitted they would not have read Austen’s novels without their participation in this project, or that they would be more likely to read the novels now that they knew about the graphic novel adaptation.

Navigating shifts in medium and mode Hutcheon notes that adaptations have often been dismissed in service to an artistic hierarchy where some texts have more cultural capital than others (34). People often see some genres as privileged over others, so they may regard literature as superior to television or film; visual media, in particular she writes, creates an additional layer of textual privilege. Likewise, audience members might see adapted works as “original” and adaptations as secondary (Hutcheon xiv). The adapted work’s status as a classical or popular work also impacts the way one regards the adaptation. Some audience members privilege classical works, an act which supports a literary hierarchy and preserves the canon as elite. Inversely, those who privilege popular texts attribute superiority to a text’s ability to subvert that same hierarchy. None of these positions support the fluidity of culture and the idea that works now regarded as classics were once the popular, even low-brow, texts of their time. As Peter Gutiérrez explains, classics are now classics because they were popular enough in their era to warrant mass production and consumption in subsequent eras (227).

Austen’s audience(s) and perils of adaptation  143 Graphic narratives—and graphic narratives of classical works in particular—have faced similar scrutiny. Classic works of literature in comics form emerged in the 1940s when Albert Kanter started Classics Illustrated (Werris). Since that time, other publishers have created their own versions of classical works in a comics platform, although these adaptations have received mixed reviews (see Fingeroth; Werris; Gorman; Price), often because they are seen as “motivation to read” or a “lure” to young people to read “real” books (Fingeroth 271) instead of being “sophisticated, rich, visionary storytelling in their own right” (Weiner 38). Austen’s works, though, pose a unique comics/adaptation situation because Austen is secure in both the classical canon and popular imagination, or as Deborah Yaffe claims, “she is the ultimate crossover artist, equally welcome at Yale and YouTube” (xvii; see also Dow and Hanson). Such a position makes her novels prime for adaptation in graphic novel form because she and her works cross, span, and dissolve such boundaries and hierarchies. Hutcheon clarifies the status of adaptation by identifying its qualities as both product and process (15–21). She claims such positioning means seeing adaptation as both “an acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works” and as a “creative and interpretive act” that requires “an extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work” (8). Such clarification accomplishes several objectives. First, she argues, this explanation debunks the idea that adaptation is second rate (9), and second, this perspective permits us to explore the broader impact of adaptation and its ability to engage audiences (22). That is, once we understand these dual identities, we can recognize most adaptors focus on the product that emerges from the adaptation rather than the way adaptation engages people (Hutcheon 10) or the range of strategies one might use in the adaptation process. According to Hutcheon, people engage with works using various “modes of engagement”—”telling,” “showing,” and “interacting”—and such modes are usually medium specific (22–27, 33–52). Although she admits all modes have some immersive capacity, she distinguishes these types based on the cognitive, emotional, and physical intensity required by the audiences as they engage the work. Hutcheon links the telling mode with print or literature; the showing mode with film and stage because of their visual elements; and the interacting mode with new media, reenactments, and so on because of their kinetic aspects (xx). This interactive category poses interest for the graphic narrative as the interactive mode implies an audience engagement which suggests a more performative function because it emphasizes the “completing” or “furnishing” associated with performance (Long and HopKins xiii). That is, for a graphic narrative to be understood, the audience member must take actions that require a full engagement of the mind, which then permits the audience member to embody the story.7

144  Leigh Anne Howard Because each genre or medium brings a different mode of engagement, any change in medium requires audience members to shift their mode of engagement even when plots and characters are easily transported from one work to another (Hutcheon 10–11). Although the modification is less abrupt when the adaptation stays in the same medium (e.g., print to print), this adjustment can be disruptive when audience members move between genres (e.g., novel to graphic novel). In these cases, audience members must also alter interpretative gears to identify different sensemaking systems or to follow different textual conventions to understand the adaptation. Moreover, this shift is particularly challenging when audience members are familiar with the texts and bring prior textual knowledge to the interpretive experience. When Nancy Butler adapted Jane Austen’s novels to a graphic narrative, she crossed boundaries between both genre and mode of engagement, and some audience members in this project were better able to handle the shifts necessary to make sense of these adaptations. One particular challenge Butler acknowledged was how to reduce a 400+ page book to less than one hundred pages: “I needed to take this paragon of parlor talk, this ode to witty banter and insightful prose, and reduce it to captions and ballroom dialogues. Without losing the flavor or texture” (Butler/Petrus Pride). She also noted that because of the impossibility of “modernizing the language and softening the social commentary,” she gave Austen’s words and observations “free rein.” However, her ­strategy—one typical of the graphic narrative genre—entailed including a few recognizable phrases and character dialogue rather than a balance of narration and dialogue. Some of the audience members in this project found her attempts successful, though it is hardly surprising that those who did had read at least one other graphic novel. After all, those familiar with the genre expect their stories to be abbreviated when they appear in a comics form. For most of the audience members in this study, however, Butler’s attempts were inadequate as both the Pride and Prejudice and Emma adaptations were criticized by nearly all of the participants because of their lack of detail in the prose. Even those who disliked the length and detail in Austen’s novels and who liked the graphic novel found reading the novels more satisfying than Butler’s narrative in this respect. As one participant explained, the graphic novel made me appreciate her detail more. In the graphic novel, the narration is parsed down to the necessities and I think that made me appreciate Jane Austen’s full narration which in the past may have kind of slowed me down or, [in the past I might have said] ‘Alright. Get to the point. The knowing participants disliked the change in genre, particularly the adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, because the constraints of the graphic

Austen’s audience(s) and perils of adaptation  145 narrative meant reducing the satire Austen uses in her dialogue and eliminating nearly all narration which comprised the bulk of her social commentary. Thus, even though the plot and major characters—the “bones” as one person described it—from the novel appeared in the graphic novel adaptation, the medium required too much of a shift when engaging the material. Another challenge the medium brought to the mode of engagement involved the images by Hugo Petrus in Pride and Prejudice and Janet K. Lee in Emma. Indeed, the illustrative styles of Pride and Prejudice and Emma are very different, as one might expect given they are illustrated by different artists. The visual images in general proved a controversial point for these participants. Participants, usually those less familiar with Austen’s works, explained the images provided the graphic novel adaptation with “an intensity not found in the novels.” Several explained that the images helped them understand what they had read: “I am a visual learner so they really helped me; [the images] open the story to a different audience, people who wouldn’t normally read this huge book.” Others thought the images “added more fun,” and they liked “seeing the character faces.” However, the images also had an impact on how the audience members responded to these specific stories, and even that varied according to which adaptation they read. Both Petrus and Lee used variety in scale throughout the adaptations; however, the realistic images of Pride and Prejudice in combination with extreme close-ups create a more dramatic effect. For Pride and Prejudice, Petrus used a narrow color palette— largely brown and blacks to suggest a sepia-toned effect and to give a very modern and realistic look to the story. Artistic choices include illustrating the women wearing dark lipstick and using shadowing to suggest a modern application of eyeshadow. In addition, the hairstyles— like the clothing—of the Bennet daughters include contemporary riffs of Regency-­era hairstyles. The women have “messy” buns, loose chignons, and ponytails, and in some scenes when they wear their hair long, one can see contemporary cuts like layered bobs. In addition to these observations, audience members also felt the daughters were drawn too similarly to each other. Most readers of Pride and Prejudice were very harsh in their judgments of the images in the adaptation. For a few, the images were a distraction to the reading, and many skipped the illustrations altogether. Criticism about the images of Pride and Prejudice fell into one of three categories. First, for the fans in particular, the look of the characters did not meet their expectations. Every fan who read Butler’s Pride and Prejudice said the characters did not look like their era, or what was more problematic for them, the depictions did not match the vision created by their own imaginations when reading Austen’s novel. One called them “horrifying.” She said, “Like what is this? Darcy is

146  Leigh Anne Howard supposed to be handsome, and all of the shadows creeped me out.” Another critique entailed the specific look of the Bennet daughters; audience members found Elizabeth Bennet “too sexed up,” “ultra-modern,” and “dramatic in looks, when what a lot of people like about Austen— especially the movies—is the era of dress and style, so it was jarring for me to see something so contemporary.” They described the female characters as “amped up” and “cheesy” rather than “calm and demure as would fit the period.” In addition, these character illustrations looked less like the comics they expected. Petrus’s realistic details created a representational, not presentational, depiction that prevented audiences from either identifying with the world they expected or completing the scene by using their imaginations. Emma, in contrast, received less critique for its illustrations. In this adaptation, illustrator Janet K. Lee used a smaller scale in her panels to create an intimacy suggested by Austen’s original narration—and expected by knowing audience members given their perceived intimacy with Austen and her stories. Lee uses a wider variety of colors to mimic the watercolors typical of the ones young women of class in the Regency era might paint as part of their “education” as ladies. The watercolors generate softer, flatter facial features more common to a newspaper comics genre, and that provides a sharp contrast to Emma’s often caustic personality. Audience members of Emma were more satisfied with the images in the adaptation, but they felt Emma, herself, should have been drawn with more beauty. The vague, flat drawings contained enough clues to identify each character. In this graphic novel, Lee uses more stylized images suggested by McCloud in the attempt to draw readers to the character, to fill the “vacuum into which our identity” can emerge (30–36). Her goal, like that of other graphic illustrators, is to pare an “image to its essential ‘meaning’” in order “to amplify that meaning in a way realistic art can’t” (McCloud 30). McCloud’s ideas—and Lee’s illustration style in Emma—are descriptive of the presentational qualities characteristic of performances created by Performance Studies scholars. Readers of graphic narratives, like audience members for Breen’s Chamber Theatre performances, must use minimal cues provided by the performers and authors to complete the action on stage or page. Both require an active engagement and establish themselves a dynamic process associated with Hutcheon’s interactive mode of engagement. Another challenge the graphic novel medium had for participants entailed the question of the way panels were laid out on the page. Even those who liked the images or who were familiar with the comics genre found following the story challenging. Only four had previously read graphic novels. One said, “It was hard trying to make sure you were reading the conversations in order, not skipping over what someone says first, then second, then third. I had to read it to see how the conversation flowed then read it to see what it meant.” When the conversation

Austen’s audience(s) and perils of adaptation  147 between characters crossed panels, readers had to make choices about how to follow the conversation, and those choices “disrupted” the flow of the reading and “disconnected” them from the story. Adaptors make numerous changes when shifting a work to different media and different genres. Accordingly, audience members must also make similar shifts and adopt difference systems to understand the constraints of those different genres and media. In the case of adapting a novel into a graphic narrative, audience members may refrain from changing their interpretive framework, to assume one can use the same sensemaking system because they are both print forms. Or they may shift from Hutcheon’s telling to her showing mode because images of the graphic narrative align it with other visual media indicative of the showing mode. Such a shift is supported by McCloud: “In comics at its best, words and pictures are like partners in a dance and each takes turns leading…” (156). Yet a shift to showing ignores the audience participation necessary to understand the graphic narrative. Consequently, graphic narratives (and staged performances) are better placed in Hutcheon’s interactive mode with their performative capacity as they require their audience members to immerse themselves into the story created by words and illustrations, to furnish components of the story by filling in gaps left between the panels, and to complete an interpretation by decoding words, images, and gaps.

Performance and the graphic narrative Supplementing Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation with theories and concepts from Performance Studies creates new possibilities for adaptation and, especially, those seeking to adapt works to a comics platform. Such a link emphasizes the need to keep the audience at the forefront and creates new avenues for understanding the impact adaptations have on audience members. We also can learn more about how familiarity impacts an audience’s engagement with different texts and how to craft adaptations given those degrees of familiarity. Such scrutiny could generate new ideas about how audience members engage with certain kinds of comics or what conventions of graphic narratives encourage different types of engagement. Perhaps the most important lesson, however, from this project and how Performance Studies scholar approach adaptation, involves questions about the conventional techniques of adaptation used in graphic narrative adaptations, which frequently rely on reduction through the deletion of the narrative voice. Rather than considering how best to present the plot or characters, those seeking to adapt to a comics platform need to follow the long-held tradition in Performance Studies of highlighting narration rather than privileging character dialogue and underestimating the rich experience that comes when narrators share

148  Leigh Anne Howard their understanding with an audience. By borrowing from Performance Studies, those adapting works for a comics medium might forge alternative ways within the medium to handle narration, perhaps in the form of actual narrators who appear in the story or as characters who use indirect discourse. By evaluating how they handle the narration, graphic novelists can expand the kinds of stories they can tell, retain the essential components of those stories, and avoid the perils of adaptation which may prevent audiences from embracing the story and characters. Graphic novelists can accomplish these tasks if they recognize what Performance Studies scholars have long known. Effective performances—so by extension, graphic narratives—are those that reach audience members in diverse ways, and they require more than rewriting. They require a judicious, careful, and caring cutting and abridging to make the adaptation workable while preserving the elements that make the stories worthy of adaptation from the outset.

Notes 1 Award-winning author Nancy Butler has written twelve Signet Regencies and has been twice awarded the prestigious RITA award from the Romance Writers of America. In addition, she has received two Romantic Times awards and has been inducted in the New Jersey Romance Writer’s Hall of Fame. Her graphic novel collaborations with Hugo Petrus include of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which made the New York Times Best Seller List and Sense and Sensibility. She has adapted two other Austen novels: Emma with Janet K. Lee and Northanger Abbey with Lee and Nick Filardi. 2 Neither Pride and Prejudice nor Emma, the graphic novels discussed in this chapter, have page numbers. 3 Two excellent books that discuss Jane Austen fandom include Deidre Lynch’s edited volume, Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Daughters and Deborah Yaffee’s Among the Janeite: A Journey Through the World of Jane Austen Fandom. 4 As a Performance Studies scholar, I appreciate Hutcheon’s audience-centered approach to adaptation, as well as her discussions across media. Hutcheon’s rich and sophisticated discussion, updated in 2013 to accommodate newer, digital media, helps us to understand the complexities associated with story (re)telling. 5 Heidi Hammond has also explored the way young readers of graphic novels respond to comics. Building on Rosenblatt’s reader response theory, her research explores the impact graphic narratives have on multimodal literacy in secondary education. 6 For this project, twenty youth (eighteen females, two males), ranging in age from fourteen to eighteen years, volunteered to read either Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and its Butler/Petrus adaptation, or Emma, and its Butler/Lee adaptation. After the participants completed their reading, they participated in either a one-hour individual or focus group interview about their reading experience. Participants were asked what they liked and/or disliked about the novel and the graphic novel adaptation, and to share their ideas about why they described their reading experiences in those particular ways. This project was approved by the Institutional Review Board and was subject to its guidelines for working with human subjects in general, and these participants as members of a protected population given their age. Because of the

Austen’s audience(s) and perils of adaptation  149 inductive nature of the project, I used a grounded theory approach to generate theories about why participants responded as they did in this project and to understand how they negotiated their interpretations of the texts and constructed their understanding of the texts they engaged. I used an open coding to build links between the experiences expressed by the participants in the interviews. Themes and categories emerged from the data to reflect the knowledge of processes residing in and emerging from the data. For more on grounded theory, see Glaser and Strauss, and Charmaz. 7 However, considering the ideas about audience engagement and about physical, mental, and emotional embodiment from a performance studies perspective also means reconsidering Hutcheon’s position about what encompasses “showing.” If one acknowledges the full potential of performance to engage the audience and to embody experience, performance, too, must shift to an interactive mode.

Works Cited Abercrombie, Nicholas, and Brian Longhurst. Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination. Sage Publications, 1998. Austen, Jane. The Collected Works of Jane Austen. Octopus Books Ltd., 1980. Barthes, Roland. Image—Music—Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. Hill and Wang, 1977. Breen, Robert S. Chamber Theatre. Prentice Hall, 1978. Butler, Nancy, and Hugo Petrus, adapts. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Marvel Worldwide, Inc., 2009. Butler, Nancy, and Janet K. Lee, adapts. Emma by Jane Austen. Marvel Worldwide, Inc., 2012. Caddy, Scott. “Fan Media and Transmedia: Jane Austen in the Digital Age.” Fan Phenomena: Jane Austen, edited by Gabrielle Malcolm, Intellect Books, 2015. pp. 42–51. Charmaz, Kathy. “Constructivists Grounded Theory.” Journal of Positive Psychology, vol. 12, no. 2, 2012, pp. 299–300. doi:10.1080/17439760.2016.12 62612. ———. “The Power of Constructivists Grounded Theory for Critical Inquiry.” Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 23, no. 3, 2017, pp. 34–45. doi:10.1177/ 10778004416657105. Corgog, Martha. “Graphic Novels.” Library Journal, vol. 135, no. 5, 2010, p. 88. https://usi-edu-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo-explore/full display?docid=TN_proquest196824927&context=PC&vid=01USI&search_ scope=default_scope&tab=default_tab&lang=en_US. Creswell, John W. Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing Among Five Traditions. Sage, 1998. Dow, Gillian, and Hanson Clare. “Introduction.” Uses of Austen: Jane’s Afterlives, edited by Gillian Dow and Clare Hanson, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 1–18. Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/­usiricelibebooks/detail.action?docID=1109204. Fingeroth, Danny. The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels. Rough Guide Ltd., 2008. Gorman, Michele. “Getting Graphic: Graphic Adaptations of Classic Literature: A New Kind of Summer Reading.” Library Media Connection, vol. 46, no. 6, 2010, p. 46. https://usi-edu-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo-explore/

150  Leigh Anne Howard fulldisplay?docid=TN_proquest314109074&context=PC&vid=01USI& search_scope=default_scope&tab=default_tab&lang=en_US. Glaser, Barry J., and Anselm L. Strauss. The Discovery of Grounded Theory. Aldine Press, 1967. Gutiérrez, Peter. “The Right to Be a Fan.” Language Arts, vol. 88, no. 2, 2011, pp. 226–231. ERIC. EJ914319. Hammond, Heidi. Graphic Novels and Multimodal Literacy. Lambert Academic Publishing, 2009. HopKins, Mary Frances. “Tell it Slant.” Text and Performance Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 1, 2016, pp. 6–17. doi:10.1080/10462937.2015.1105014. Howard, Leigh Anne. “Who’s Messing With Jane?: Graphic Novels and the Jane Austen Fan.” Journal of Fandom Studies, vol. 3, no. 3, 2015, pp. 241–257. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd edition. Routledge, 2013. Johnson, Claudia L. Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures. U of Chicago P, 2012. Lefèvre, Pascal. “Some Medium Specific Qualities of Graphic Sequences.” SubStance, vol. 40, no. 1, 2011, pp. 14–33. https://usi-edu-primo.hosted. exlibrisgroup.com/primo-explore/fulldisplay?docid=TN_mla2011026100&context=PC&vid= 01USI&search_scope=default_scope&tab=default_ tab&lang=en_US. Long, Beverly Whitaker, and Mary Frances HopKins. Performing Literature: An Introduction to Oral Interpretation. Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1982. Lynn, Stephen. Text and Contexts: Writing about Literature with Critical Theory, 5th edition. Pearson/Longman, 2008. Lynch, Deidre, ed. Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees. Princeton UP, 2000. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Harper Perennial, 1994. Pelias, Ronald J., and James VanOosting. “A Paradigm for Performance Studies.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 73, 1987, pp. 219–231. Price, Ada. “New Books from Old: Turning Classics into Comics.” Publishers Weekly, vol. 256, no. 51, 2009, pp. 27–29. https://usi-edu-primo.hosted. exlibrisgroup.com/primo-explore/fulldisplay?docid=TN_mla2010300368&context=PC&vid= 01USI&search_scope=default_scope&tab=default_ tab&lang=en_US. “Regency Reads.” www.regencyroads.com/online/nancy-butler-c-1036.html. Accessed 3 Mar. 2019. Rosenblatt, Louise M. Literature as Exploration. The Modern Language Association, 1983. Sandvoss, Cornell. “The Death of the Reader? Literary Theory and the Study of Texts in Popular Culture.” Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, edited by Jonathan Gray, Cornell Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington. New York UP, 2007, pp. 19–32. Strauss, Anselm, and Juliette Corbin. Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory, 2nd edition. Sage, 1998. Weiner, Stephen. Faster Than a Speeding Bullet: The Rise of the Graphic Novel. Nantier Beall Minoustchine, 2004. Werris, Wendy. “Classical Comics’ U.S. Debut.” Publishers Weekly, vol. 255, no. 49, 2008, p. n/a. https://usi-edu-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primoexplore/fulldisplay?docid=TN_proquest197077340&context=PC&vid=01USI& search_scope=default_scope&tab=default_tab&lang=en_US.

Austen’s audience(s) and perils of adaptation  151 “Valentine’s Day: The Best Romantic Novels.” The Huffington Post, 14 Jan. 2010. www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/12/valentines-day-the-best-r_n_ 459226.html. Accessed 28 Feb. 2014. Yaffe, Deborah. Among the Janeites: A Journey through the World of Jane Austen Fandom. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. Zunshine, Lisa. “What to Expect When You Pick Up a Graphic Novel.” SubStance, vol. 40, 2011, pp. 114–134. doi:10.1353/sub.2011.0009.

Part III

Kinesis Breaking and remaking

In the graphic narrative, we see an embrace of reproducibility and mass circulation as well as a rigorous, experimental attention to form as a mode of political intervention. —Hillary Chute, “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narratives” Performance studies is the new frontier for staking joint claim to poetics and persuasion, power and pleasure, in the interests of community and critique, solidarity and resistance. —Dwight Conquergood, “Ethnography, Rhetoric, and Performance”

10 Graphical, radical women Revising boundaries, re(image)ining Écriture Feminine in the novels of Bechdel and Satrapi Melanie Lee Images depend on words for authority. Even with graphic novels’ more equitable visual-verbal balance, Barbara Marie Stafford notes that “‘the ruling metaphor of reading’” casts images as “‘inferior part[s] of a more general semantics’” (qtd. in Fleckenstein 621) in which texts create meaning better than pictures. Moreover, images’ dependence on words for authority maintains gendered epistemology: W.J.T. Mitchell asserts that images are feminized (28), whereas Victor Vitanza suggests that words are masculinized (210). Conventional use of gutter space, the interstitial area between frames and panels that divides elements in graphic novels, preserves this normative and gendered “performativity” (Butler 34) and maintains what I call rhetoric of distance (Lee 96). In texts, rhetoric of distance is the strategic pattern and practice of using third-person perspective to affect objectivity, detach authors from their ideas, and invoke omniscient authority, a kind of invisible, “God/Truth voice” (Elbow par. 17) that enhances credibility. In graphic novels, rhetoric of distance ­appears in the gutter, the negative, in-between space where “magic and mystery” cohere in audiences’ imaginations (McCloud 66). However, Alison Bechdel’s and Marjane Satrapi’s unconventional use of gutter space at strategic points in their graphic memoirs disrupts rhetoric of distance, emphasizes gendered transgression through re(image)ined écriture feminine, and intensifies an already subversive modality. Gutters in Bechdel’s and Satrapi’s graphic novels perform revisionary, unifying work to mark sites of climactic action and rebellion, and they diminish rhetoric of distance with different modal approaches: Bechdel, more visually through realistic depiction of images and pictures she extends into the gutter; Satrapi, more verbally through text that floats in the gutter as asterisked, marginal notes between and below frames. These graphical, radical women’s novels also enhance readers’ “empathetic responses to social justice issues” through “powerful stories” and shared experience that “combat apathy” (Hoeness-Krupsaw 138). Bechdel’s and Satrapi’s transgressive representations of transitional moments in their lives extend Hélène Cixous’s concept of écriture feminine, or woman’s writing, in visual directions that put women “into the text”

Revising boundaries, re(image)ining Écriture Feminine  155 (Cixous 256). Through their choices of subversive subject matter and their depictions of women revising prescribed gender boundaries, Bechdel and Satrapi resist what Cixous describes as “phallogocentric” tradition where man authors all (260). In this way, écriture feminine, the “antilogos weapon” (258) that Cixous suggests women forge to resist phallogocentrism, is most fully realized in these novels. ­ ersepolis: With their first books, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and P The Story of a Childhood, Bechdel and Satrapi depict autobiographical childhood encounters that take place within their respective cultures during roughly the same historical periods, the politically unstable 1970s and 1980s. Encounters are fraught with gendered identity and power negotiation between public veneers of complicity and private realities of ­resistance. With their second books, Are You My Mother? and Persepolis 2, both authors continue negotiating identities, power, and relationships through the lenses of adult experience. Scenes and text convey boundary-­ breaking subversion that resists homophobia, xenophobia, sexism, fundamentalism, and theocratic ideology. Bechdel challenges heteronormativity, the coercive assumption that everyone desires intimacy with someone of the opposite sex, and nuclear family models through private familial relationships that reframe public identity politics. Satrapi contests ethnic generalizations about Middle Eastern people and exposes the Islamic Revolution’s atrocities. She defies regressive social politics; contrasts private, familial identity politics with public identity politics; and rejects sexist containment of women. Bechdel’s Fun Home unfolds in her childhood home of Beech Creek, Pennsylvania, a small, rural borough where her mother, Helen, and father, Bruce, both teach English and participate in local theatrical productions. Their Gothic Revival residence houses the family business, a curiously hybridized funeral home presented as a kind of “fun house,” a name the children give to the business. Behind the public façade of the small-town, rural American community that includes seemingly traditionally gendered parental roles, Bechdel navigates coming of age and realizes her lesbianism within the complicated dynamics of her dysfunctional family and her father’s Modernist literary history. Her emotionally distant parents’ relationship, compromised by her father’s closeted homosexuality and untimely suicide, obfuscates her journey. Are You My Mother? takes place in the varied locations of Bechdel’s adulthood: her apartment, studio, car, therapists’ offices, flashback scenes, and symbolic dream sequences that open each chapter. These sequences provide thematic, psychoanalytic theses anchoring chapters through which Bechdel navigates her relationship with her mother following her father’s suicide. Chapters also connect her experience to the lives and works of feminist authors such as Virginia Woolf and revisionist psychoanalytical scholars such as Donald Woods Winnicott in addition to reflecting Bechdel’s understanding of object relations theory. Her composition and disclosure of Fun Home’s contents to her mother

156  Melanie Lee throughout this sequel further compromises their already complicated relationship. Satrapi’s Persepolis (also known as Persepolis 1, the first of two books ­ ehran. frequently referenced together) unfolds in her childhood home of T Her politically active mother, Taji, and father, Ebi, publicly comply with but privately resist the Islamic Revolution’s increasing conservatism. ­Satrapi contests generalizing assumptions about Iranian people through conveying their resistance to imposed fundamentalist theocracy. Her father’s photography, part of his job as an engineer, exposes him to ideological confrontation, scenes of political protest, and possible imprisonment. Taji responds by concealing evidence of the Satrapi family’s privately progressive lifestyle behind the closed doors and curtained windows of their home. Satrapi comes of age within an increasingly repressive cultural panopticon, one enforced by religious extremists and Guardians of the Revolution and where penalties for ideological transgression become ever more volatile. As Satrapi matures and her feminist, Marxist perspective solidifies—one early frame of Persepolis depicts her reading Dialectic Materialism comics in bed as a child (12)—her resistance to revolutionary dogma endangers her life. Persepolis 2 takes place in the varied locations of Satrapi’s adulthood, from Vienna, Austria, where Satrapi’s parents send her to attend high school and to escape the revolution’s effects, to post-revolution Tehran where Satrapi returns. She endures an atypical hero’s journey through Persepolis 2 as she undergoes a series of tests in which she departs from her homeland, defends her ethnicity, confronts authority figures, and survives a near-fatal illness contracted during a period of homelessness on the streets of Vienna following her literal and symbolic evictions from a Catholic shelter, as well as a number of apartments and a room in a former philosophy teacher’s house. Unlike a typical hero’s journey, however, Satrapi’s experiences include suicidal depression upon her return to a more misogynist, oppressive culture than the one from which her parents had sent her. Satrapi summarizes her identity “calamity” in one sentence: “I was nothing” (272). After psychotherapy, failed suicide attempts, professional-level university education, and a failed marriage, she departs her homeland again in order to publicly reject fundamentalist theocracy. These variations from archetypal hero journeys reimagine traditionally masculinized action and revise gender boundaries to enrich Persepolis 2 with radical feminism. Using different graphic styles, both Bechdel and Satrapi present critically, culturally reflective material through feminist lenses that redirect the “gaze of man” (Mulvey 301). Bechdel’s detailed graphic style presents lesbian narratives that challenge heteronormative comics models and attitudes that objectify and oppress women. Intricate images drawn in layered gray shades mix with monochromatic color in Fun Home and Are You My Mother? to illustrate the complexity of the books’ topics and encourage readers to understand homosexuality and reject

Revising boundaries, re(image)ining Écriture Feminine  157 homophobia. These layers are as intervisual—where “the meaning of images [is] shaped by other images related to or existing around them” (Sander 3)—as they are intertextual. For instance, a borderless, fullbleed, double-page spread traces interlayered, inter-analytical trajectories between Virginia Woolf who is foregrounded, strolling through a park near London’s Liverpool Station while Donald Woods Winnicott walks toward her. Narrative text reveals that Winnicott is psychoanalyst James Strachey’s patient, and Strachey is Sigmund Freud’s patient. A partial map of London’s Underground in the lower right corner deepens this image of characters’ movements (Bechdel, Are You? 24–25). On the other hand, Satrapi’s stylized depictions redirect Islamic fundamentalism’s sexist, theocratic gaze from its objectifying focus on women to a critical, culturally reflective position that resists male domination and feminine oppression. Stark, black-and-white illustrations in Persepolis 1 and 2 also encourage readers to understand Iran’s complicated politics and to reject xenophobia aimed at Middle Eastern people amidst an increasingly divisive post-9/11 American climate. Satrapi depicts her family’s outward compliance with the Islamic Revolution’s regime and inner rebellion against its extremism. Images of private life filled with forbidden card parties, social gatherings, and seditious political discussions remind readers of Jan Baetens’s claim that black-and-white art can more directly, effectively, and strongly convey action and is especially effective for racially charged narratives (qtd. in Hoeness-Krupsaw ­140–141). ­Satrapi’s high-contrast approach enhances her story’s gendered, political, and racial polarity. She traces her losses from the progressively disillusioned persona of a little girl to the perspective of an outraged young adult, and her technique evokes a serious tone that shows the horror perpetrated upon Iranians who resist the Ayatollah. Both authors’ use of gutter space diminishes rhetoric of distance between gendered visual and verbal modalities that the gutter conventionally preserves at selected points in their stories of shared transgressions that broaden audience perspectives. In the following sections, I discuss five specific strategies that Bechdel and Satrapi use in their graphic memoirs to revise boundaries between image and word to blend these modalities into hybridized forms that disrupt conventional gutter performativity. I chart the instances in which these strategies ­occur for each graphic novel, analyze the images in relation to the words, and discuss how Bechdel and Satrapi not only destabilize traditionally gendered visual-verbal performativity but also lessen the rhetoric of distance between them.

Mapping transgression in the gutter Bechdel and Satrapi sparingly engage unconventional use of the gutter where images, text, and hybridized forms—for instance, when a gutter transforms into a symbol or image—convey transgression. They recast gutter performativity as emphatically transgressive and revisionary at

158  Melanie Lee Table 10.1  Mapping Transgression in the Gutter

Fun Home Are You My Mother? Persepolis 1 Persepolis 2

4. Marginal Text: Asterisked Gutter Notes (Floating Between Horizontal Panels)

5. Underlying Text: Asterisked Footnotes (Beneath the Bottom Tier of Panels)

1. Shapeshifting Gutters: Gutters Jump or Become Images

2. Out of Bounds: Invisible Gutters & Double-page (Four-sided) Full Bleeds

3. Invisible Gutters: Single-page (Three-sided) Bleeds

3 5

1 17

0 21

0 1

0 1

1 0

0 0

0 0

0 10

1 5

strategic points in their narratives. Table 10.1 shows five different ways both authors use gutter space to subvert normative gutter performativity in each of their graphic novels and records instances where five different types of unconventional action occur in the gutter: (1) Shape-shifting Gutters: Gutters Jump or Become Images, where images extend from one frame into the gutter in a transformative way and the gutter actually becomes an image; (2) Out of Bounds: Invisible Gutters and Double-page (four-sided) Bleeds; (3) Invisible Gutters: Single-page (three-sided) Bleeds, where full, single- or double-page illustrations dispense altogether with gutters and bleed from the edges of pages; (4) Marginal Text: Asterisked Gutter Notes (floating between horizontal panels), where marginal text notes float in gutters; and (5) Underlying Text: Asterisked Footnotes (beneath the bottom tier of panels) in the gutter at pages’ bottoms. The table reveals infrequent use of transgressive or revisionary gutters in both authors’ first graphic novels. Only three gutter jumps and one invisibly guttered double-page spread occur in Fun Home, and only one gutter jump of an image within its frame occurs in Persepolis. In each of these first books, gutter jumps mark points of potential danger, trespass, or actual fatality within private, familial as well as public, civic contexts. The table also shows significantly increased use of the gutter space in both authors’ second graphic novels to indicate greater narrative complexity, more emphatic transgressive action, and heightened subversive performativity in the gutter. With their second books, Bechdel and Satrapi use the gutter more frequently to diminish visual-verbal boundaries, shape-­shifting these modalities and decreasing the rhetoric of distance. Shape-shifting gutters: gutters jump or become images Eight instances of shape-shifting—where the gutter jumps or transforms into an image and destabilizes boundaries between elements to decrease

Revising boundaries, re(image)ining Écriture Feminine  159 rhetoric of distance—occur in both of Bechdel’s novels and suggest her visual approach to transgression in the gutter. For example, on page 37 of Fun Home (see Figure 10.1), a gutter jump indicates subversion behind the floor-length curtains of the family business. Panels depict the three Bechdel children playing with funeral home paraphernalia: folding chairs, the folding-chair trolley, nesting flower stands, car-hood suction cup flags, and crushable capsules. The solemn tools of memorial services and burial rituals become children’s toys. While the setting in the family’s funeral home is grave and serious, the children’s play colors the scene with irony and lightens the mood. Here, the gutter becomes an image: the vertical gutter between two frames at the page’s bottom splits into a circle whose halves overlap each frame. The circle contains a separate, close-up drawing of text on a prescription package: “Bruce A. Bechdel Funeral Home, Beech Creek PA 16821, Ph. 962–2727, FAINTEX Smelling Salts, WARNING: Keep this and all medicines out of the reach of children” (Bechdel 37). From the circular origin of this gutter-border, a curved arrow arcs into the left frame where its terminus point marks an image of Bechdel holding the package in one hand and offering a smelling salt with her other hand to her brother, John, while her other brother threatens to tell their dad. Panels at the bottom of Persepolis 1 on pages 14–15 also contain images that remain within their frames’ borders and jump the gutter to extend and connect images across and between pages. Images start in one panel and continue on the facing page’s panel. This jump emphasizes serious transgression. These images’ subject is quite grave and historically significant; the scene’s mood is emphatically solemn. At the bottom of page 14, illustrations depict police wielding clubs with which they

Figure 10.1  Shape-shifting in the gutter—panel from FUN HOME: a family tragicomic by Alison Bechdel. Copyright © 2006 by Alison Bechdel. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.

160  Melanie Lee beat people who attempt to rescue victims locked inside the burning Rex Cinema. Images of the fiery Rex Cinema Massacre—where 400 people lost their lives on August 19, 1978, in Abadan, Iran, an event that catalyzed the Shah’s eventual overthrow—jump the gutter from the bottom and middle of page 14 to page 15, transforming from depictions of people on one page into ghostly, flaming, curvilinear, skull-headed figures on the next. In these separate frames, the borders maintain their boundaries, and the vertical gutters between the panels on these facing pages are clean and intact. Yet the negative space between them does not divide as much as it joins surreal, mural-like representation of action on either side of the gutter and facilitates shape-shifting of the images from the living to the dead. In this case, the gutter assumes transgressive form and uses rhetoric of distance as a kind of cohesive, rather than divisive, element, unifying images that symbolize state-sanctioned mass murder of people who burned alive inside Rex Cinema. Out of bounds: invisible gutters and double-page (four-sided) full-bleeds As part of Bechdel’s and Satrapi’s resistance to male domination, they highlight their fathers’ resistance to socially constructed identities and patterns using scenes of their fathers’ trespasses and transgressions to rework these stereotypes as well as conventional use of gutter space that enforces rhetoric of distance. For instance, pages 100–101 of Fun Home include no gutters or borders on either page. A double-spread, four-sided full-bleed marks Bechdel’s discovery of her father’s sexual trespass. The illustration shows a close-up of her fingers holding an enlarged August 1969 photograph of the family’s teenage handyman, Roy, lying nearly nude with his arms folded behind his head in a hotel bed. She recognizes the room, part of an adjoining suite from a Jersey Shore trip on which her father took the kids while her mother visited an old roommate of hers in New York. Roy accompanied them. The kids stayed in one room, and her father slept with Roy in the other adjoining room. Rectangular, narrative textboxes overlap Bechdel’s fingers, the photo, and the bluish, watercolor-textured background against which it appears: Shortly after Dad died, I was rooting through a box of family photos and came across one I’d never seen. It’s low-contrast and out of focus. But the subject is clearly our yardwork assistant/babysitter, Roy … gilded with morning seaside light … typical of the way my father juggled his public appearance and private reality, the evidence is simultaneously hidden and revealed. (Bechdel 100–101) Importantly, this is the only double-page full-bleed spread in the book. Bechdel employs this expanded visual field to show her father’s implicit sexual transgression and to open a window into his concealed past by

Revising boundaries, re(image)ining Écriture Feminine  161 extending contents beyond the gutter. Here, Bechdel removes the gutter space: rhetoric of distance between her discovery of the snapshot and her speculation about what it suggests dissolves. Similarly, in Persepolis 1, Satrapi conveys a scene where the invisible gutter beneath a three-frame series at the top of the page marks her father’s transgression with a full-length profile illustration of him pointing his camera to the right and shooting photos of a demonstration against the Islamic Republic. The visual appears beneath a floating, unframed narrative caption that reads “He took photos every day. It was strictly forbidden. He had even been arrested once but escaped at the last minute” (Satrapi 29). To the right of the panel, illustrations of enlarged, overlapping photos capture different scenes of leftist revolutionaries in action. Here, Satrapi altogether dispenses with the gutter and its rhetoric of distance to show her father in his explicit politically transgressive act. This transgression is particularly dangerous: photography of political uprising during the turbulent years preceding the Shah’s removal was heavily censored or prohibited and could result in imprisonment, torture, or execution. With his camera, Satrapi’s father risks his life to document realities that the Republic attempts to hide. Satrapi’s image reconstructs boundaries of power and diminishes rhetoric of distance. Invisible gutters: single-page (three-sided) bleeds Bechdel’s second book frequently engages an invisible gutter by including many images that extend beyond pages’ edges in full bleeds. Satrapi freefloats images in blended gutter-and-panel space uncontained, undemarcated by frames. Both approaches strategically deviate from graphic novel conventions and mark pivotal, breakthrough revelations in scenes where gutters, traditional boundaries, and rhetoric of distance disappear. For example, a hand-drawn infographic on page 22, one of many single-page bleeds in Are You My Mother?, connects two horizontal bar charts, illustrating Bechdel’s relationships with women—her mother, therapists, and romantic attachments. These are interconnected and interspersed with framed, narrative psychoanalytic quotes. The infographic represents an important therapeutic breakthrough for Bechdel, and this page also conveys the book’s one asterisked footnote. The high number of single and double full-page bleeds in this book is significant: whereas Fun Home contains no single-page full-bleeds and only one double-page full-bleed, Are You My Mother? contains seventeen double-page and twenty-one single-page bleeds; such use dramatically extends the visual field, increases intervisual complexity, and conveys multiple layers of meaning. Satrapi’s books include only one instance of free-floating image and text, borderless and uncontained. In Persepolis 1, the death of Satrapi’s heroic uncle Anoosh is conveyed intertextually by an image of a folded newspaper and its headline, “Russian Spy Executed” (Satrapi 70). To the left of the headline, a headshot of Anoosh appears. The folded newspaper

162  Melanie Lee floats in the gutter, and illustrations of two bread-swans rest on its left and right edges; this image softens this tragic revelation and symbolically connects it to the previous page’s action. A frame at the bottom of the previous page shows Anoosh placing a bread-swan that he made for Satrapi in her hands. The narrative caption hovering above the floating newspaper and bread-swan image announcing his death declares that the meeting with Anoosh in which he gave her the bread-swan was their last. This illustration spans the page’s width and not only memorializes Satrapi’s loss but also politicizes Anoosh’s death, propagandized as the state’s execution of a traitor. Panels depict bold transgression where Satrapi shouts at an ethereal image of a bearded, cloaked figure—God—who appears to her in the dark while she lies in bed. Satrapi tells God to “get out,” she “never want[s] to see [him] again” (70). This is one of several emotionally charged dialogues between Satrapi and God that appear in Persepolis. Her transgression is compounded by her childhood wish to become a prophet despite cultural immersion in an intensifying fundamentalism and patriarchal, Islamic framework that reached misogynist extremes during the Iranian Revolution when women were discouraged from publicly speaking with men to whom they were unrelated by blood or sacred rite and were prohibited from publicly displaying any part of their bodies (except their faces) or hair. In this way, the Guardians of the Revolution enforce strict verbal and physical rhetoric of distance between women and men. Marginal text: asterisked gutter notes (between horizontal panels) Bechdel’s books include no examples of asterisked gutter notes between horizontal panels. However, many instances of dialogue or thought balloon borders protruding and spilling words into surrounding gutters occur. Tellingly, words in these overlapping spaces record voices speaking from a distance: a phone conversation; a television; or, in one case, even beyond the grave. On pages 132–133 of Fun Home, dialogue bubbles with serrated pointers and corners extend from four separate frames, project into gutters, and originate from a tape recorder that Bechdel’s mother, Helen, is using to record herself rehearsing for a play. Serrated-­ edged dialogue bubbles reveal that she is recording over the voice of her dead husband, Bruce—a previously existing recording of him “preparing a guided tour of a museum run by the county historical society, of which he was president” (Bechdel, Fun Home 132–133). These serrated dialogue bubbles mark Helen’s erasure of her dead husband’s voice. She replaces his voice with her own, a trespass crossing mortal boundaries. Similar to Satrapi’s use of gutter space surrounding her illustrations of the Rex Cinema Massacre, Bechdel’s use of gutter space here does not divide as much as it decreases rhetoric of distance to join the living and

Revising boundaries, re(image)ining Écriture Feminine  163 the deceased, in this case, the surreal sound of Bechdel’s father speaking from the dead and Helen’s dispassionate resistance. Dialogue or text bubbles in Satrapi’s books remain within the borders of panel frames and follow graphic novel genre conventions; however, Satrapi uses text in unconventional ways. Floating-asterisked notes in the gutter space mark points of transgression. Persepolis 1 contains only one handwritten, asterisked footnote. Panels on page 44 show scenes in Satrapi’s elementary school, which had been closed after the overthrow of the Shah and had been recently reopened. In these scenes, Satrapi resists the teacher’s revolutionary propaganda by repeating the teacher’s previous claim (before the Shah’s deposition) that he was “chosen by God,” and she is punished. The asterisked footnote reminds readers of tyrannical, militant “*secret police of the Shah’s regime” who were rumored to have killed millions of people (Satrapi 44). By contrast, Persepolis 2 contains asterisked, handwritten notes that float in the gutter space between panels and frames on ten pages and footnotes beneath panels and frames at the bottom of five pages. The personalized form these asterisked notes convey delivers subtext, trespass, and transgression through the margins and converts the gutters into subversive space. For instance, an asterisked gutter note floating in the gutter between panels on page 254 reads “*The term ‘mujahideen’ isn’t specific to Afghanistan. It means combatant” (Satrapi). The image above it depicts the Iranian Mujahideen, “armed groups opposed to the Islamic regime” advancing on Iran “from the Iraqi border with the support of Saddam Hussein,” blending image and text to convey trespass on figurative and literal levels (Satrapi 254). Satrapi uses the floating note to decrease rhetoric of distance in the gutter, define the term mujahideen, and point out that its meaning extends beyond the borders of Afghani culture. Underlying text: asterisked footnotes (beneath the bottom tier of panels) Bechdel’s transgressive use of gutter space materializes more visually than textually, and her books contain only one asterisked footnote. One page of Are You My Mother? presents Bechdel’s therapeutic breakthrough infographic of two connected horizontal bar charts that illustrate her relationships with the women in her life, and below it, an asterisked note in the lower left-hand corner reads “letters designate characters who don’t figure into this book” (22). Bechdel’s asterisked note acknowledges her relationships with people and her chart plots their presence in her life. Satrapi’s transgressive use of gutter space materializes more textually than visually, and her books contain six asterisked footnotes that float beneath the bottom tier of panels. For instance, Persepolis 1 contains an asterisked footnote whose text, “*secret police of the Shah’s regime,” defines “savak” used in a dialogue balloon within the frame above. That bottom frame depicts three children, including Satrapi, discussing

164  Melanie Lee rumors surrounding the Shah’s deposition. A boy standing in the street claims that his father “says Ramin’s father was in the savak*. He killed a million people” (Satrapi 44:3). In the panel above this frame, Satrapi and her parents encounter neighbors who claim that “liberty” is worth “all those [political] demonstrations” (44:2). The panel above this frame at the page’s top shows Satrapi being punished in school. She questions her teacher who had previously told the students “the Shah was chosen by God” (Satrapi 44:1) and who now orders students to rip pages with photos of the Shah from their textbooks. The footnote on this page defines the term savak and marks transgression and irony. As secret police, the savak’s clandestine murders feed the children’s supposition of how many people Ramin’s father killed. At the same time, the neighbors’ perception that the Shah’s departure will result in freedom contrasts with increasing restriction under the new regime. The footnote decreases rhetoric of distance between elements in a subversive way and defines, out of bounds, the savak and the secret terror they symbolize. In Persepolis 2, Satrapi places asterisked footnotes at the bottom of five different panels to mark transgression, and some of these asterisked footnotes work with images within the frames to emphasize symbolic acts. For instance, one asterisked footnote reads, “*It’s said that red tulips grow from the blood of martyrs” (Satrapi 281). The frame directly above this footnote depicts a drawing Satrapi rendered for her entrance exam to the college of art: her adapted sketch of Michelangelo’s “La Pieta” in which she places “a black chador on Mary’s head, an army uniform on Jesus,” and “two tulips, symbols of the martyrs,* on either side so there would be no confusion” (281). This frame spans the page’s width. Satrapi’s hand, holding a pencil and in the act of drawing this irreverent image, is foregrounded in the frame’s lower right-hand corner. Her drawing of Michelangelo’s sculpture subverts the politically propagandized martyr trope that circulated in Iran during the revolution, and Satrapi’s footnote works with the image to decrease rhetoric of distance between the elements and extend transgression into the gutter. Another important example presents two separate asterisked footnotes beneath the same frame. This double footnote marks triple transgression. In the image, a Guardian of the Revolution speaks on the phone to the father of a young, veiled woman. She stands weeping before him, with a young man at her side (Satrapi 288). Arrested for walking together in a public park, this couple is accused of an “act against the religious moral code and the values of [the] Republic” (Satrapi 288). The Guardian on the phone informs the woman’s father that he can “come get her in exchange for $20,000 tumans in cash, otherwise she will be whipped” (Satrapi 288). The first of the two footnotes beneath this frame reveals that “the committee*” referenced in a narrative rectangle above the image is “*the commissariat of the Guardians of the Revolution” (Satrapi 288). The second footnote translates monetary value quoted in the Guardian’s dialogue balloon: “**at the time, $20,000 tumans equaled the monthly salary of a government worker” (Satrapi 288),

Revising boundaries, re(image)ining Écriture Feminine  165 a high price the father must pay to prevent his daughter’s beating. Three layers of transgression may be discerned: (1) the young couple arrested for walking together in a public park, (2) the state that prohibits a young couple from walking together in a public park, and (3) the Guardian’s threat to whip the woman if her father fails to pay a large sum of money. Both Bechdel and Satrapi subvert traditional gutter performativity in ways that renegotiate visual and verbal boundaries and revise the conventions of graphic novels by blending pictures and words in the gutter. Their approaches create multi-layered narrated, pictured, and symbolic action. Rhetoric of distance diminishes. Better balanced visual and verbal modes allow images and words to carry more equitable semiotic weight.

Re(image)ining rhetoric of distance between image and word In Western culture, “image” and “word” are terms for semiotic systems that originate from the ancient Greek concepts eīkón and logos, respectively. Their definitions complicate the rhetoric of distance. Religiously inflected meanings of the term word, “divine reason” and “Christian holy scriptures,” suggest supernatural power (Microsoft Word 2011). Literary-inflected meanings of the term image, “simile,” suggest analogical correlation between pictures and words (“Image”), while another meaning, likeness, suggests resemblance between the things that images signify and the signifiers—­lines, curves, color, depth, shape, texture, and so on—that images use to signify them. An image’s signifiers are underpinned by “a ‘floating chain’ of signifieds” from which viewers choose to assemble interpretation and meaning (Barthes 156). Thus, movement or “transaction” characterizes the image-word relationship, for “a word is first an image,” and “to have one, we must have the other” (Fleckenstein 619). Together, they create meaning through “polymorphic literacy,” that is to say, “verbal and non-verbal ways of shaping meaning” that include “imagery” (Fleckenstein 613). Graphic novels convey polymorphic literacy. Words are hand-drawn, hand-lettered; alphabetic characters blended with illustrations in panel frames, border narrative rectangles, and rounded dialogue/text or thought balloons. Feminized eīkón-image mixes with masculinized ­logos-word, muddling their performativity. The rhetoric of distance between visual and verbal modes decreases in places where the image of a panel is a text and the text is an image, where conventional boundaries between visual and verbal elements dissolve and create new hybrid signifiers. In this way, image-and-text-integrated compositions of women by women resist gendered performativity and revise boundaries of gender, modality, and power in particularly apt and revealing hybridity. As radical women who apply these hybrid signifiers to revise traditional performativity, Bechdel and Satrapi extend Cixous’s écriture feminine in visual directions through their subversive use of the gutter to decrease rhetoric of distance.

166  Melanie Lee Bechdel includes many examples of this new, hybrid signifier in both books, where she illustrates text of many kinds and her self in the act of composing. Thus, she draws visual attention to verbal meaning as part of the images within frames in strategic spots. These images depict words: numerous panels include and several pages consist completely of text-as-image in Fun Home. For example, one panel shows an open dictionary that highlights the word “queer” and its numbered definitions (Bechdel 57). Additional examples that Bechdel includes are handwritten correspondence (63), poems (82), a childhood diary (42–143), and excerpts from canonical authors such as James Joyce (226). According to William Cordeiro and Season Ellison, Bechdel’s “iterative performance of reading is visualized” through “highlights, cross-outs, doodles, and marginal notes” of annotating, constructing “a ‘scriptable’ text in which the reader’s rehearsal of codes and meanings actively remakes new signification, often in a messy and tentative way” throughout Fun Home (172). But perhaps more accurately, these examples emphasize Bechdel’s iterative performance of composing and creating hybrid signifiers. In Are You My Mother?, Bechdel’s use of hybrid signifiers intensifies in illustrations of text that are intervisual and intertextual. She includes sections from literary criticism, including Adrienne Rich’s analysis of Virginia Woolf, as well as Woolf’s handwritten drafts of To The Lighthouse that highlight cross-outs of the word “feminist” (257). Signifying her unconsciousness, Bechdel’s symbolic dream sequences also follow an intervisual pattern of borderless, solid black backgrounded, full-bleed, double-spreads in which ethereal images, captions, dialogue bubbles, and narrations float. Are You My Mother represents the long, difficult process of composing Fun Home and examines Bechdel’s anxiety about her mother’s reaction to it. If “a major facet of [Bechdel’s] growth in [Fun Home] stems from her learning how to read complex literature and images” (Cordeiro and Ellison 170), then a major facet of her continued growth results from her learning to analyze dreams in Are You My Mother?, whose sequences function as surreal cartography mapping Bechdel’s psychoanalytic progression. Through a series of eerie, haunting images and illogical juxtapositions, she visualizes acceptance and understanding of her fraught relationship with her mother. Panels show Bechdel making notes in longhand, typing conversations with her mother, drafting panels, and discussing with therapists her painstaking, imageand-text integrated pages. In this way, Are You My Mother? functions as a performative model for composing text and self. Subversive gutter performativity signifies Bechdel’s revelations about her writing. On page 138 of Are You My Mother?, a horizontal gutter slices vertically down through a middle-tier panel that spans the page’s width and opens a thick line of white space, containing an illustration of a young Helen Bechdel, seated and composing at a typewriter. The gutter-arrow’s terminus within the panel illustration points to an x-ray image of Helen’s womb and the fetus of Alison within. Two narrative

Revising boundaries, re(image)ining Écriture Feminine  167 blocks within the same panel claim that a pregnant woman and her fetus are one being: “no separation” so “no relation” to one another” (Bechdel 138). Yet much of this psychoanalytical book examines children’s identity formation through relationships to their mothers and, in doing so, reveals the rhetoric of distance that Helen enacts in her relationship with Alison. The gutter arrow between and in this panel that depicts the x-ray of Helen’s womb acts as an important signifier in the image-text blended “third new space” (Hoeness-Krupsaw 140) of graphic narratives by applying an omniscient kind of visuality. The fact that Helen is depicted in the act of writing in the same image where her x-rayed womb reveals her daughter growing within is important, for in a panel many pages later (see Figure 10.2), Helen’s dialogue bubble jumps the gutter between two top-tier panels in which she (left panel) and Alison (right panel) converse about good writing (Bechdel 200). The overlapping dialogue bubble contains Helen’s claim, centered over the gutter, that “the self has no place in good writing.” The overlapping bubble that connects the two panels which illustrate this exchange surfaces rhetoric of distance on three levels: interpersonal, between mother and daughter; material, between image and text; and, most importantly, systemic—between the preferred, mythologized, “phallogocentric sublation” (Cixous 260) of affected objectivity in third-person voice that is frequently characterized as “good writing” (Bechdel 200) and its author’s invisible, omniscient authority. Bechdel’s concluding panels of this book use images of her as a child, playing “the ‘crippled child’ game” (287) with Helen. These panels refute Helen’s claim that “the self has no place in good writing” (Bechdel 200). These last images reveal that in spite of the “lack,” “gap,” “void” (288), the rhetoric of distance between mother and daughter, “the moment [Bechdel’s] mother taught [her] to write” (287) provided Bechdel “the

Figure 10.2  Subversive gutter performativity—panel from ARE YOU MY MOTHER: a comic drama by Alison Bechdel. Copyright © 2012 by Alison Bechdel. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.

168  Melanie Lee way out” (289) of her identity crisis. Through composing her graphic memoirs, defying her mother’s writing advice, and putting herself in her text, Bechdel both composes and “write[s] her self” ­(Cixous 256). Consequently, she broadens Cixous’s concept of écriture feminine with her blend of image and word. In Persepolis 2, Satrapi includes images within panel frames that convey text, sometimes in Farsi. This choice complicates the text-as-image hybrid signifier’s performativity and enhances its subversive capability. For example, one frame (see Figure 10.3) depicts two men writing in Persian script on a brick wall in opposition to waves of Iraqi invasion, and the narrative caption above this image reads “The walls were suddenly covered with belligerent slogans” (Satrapi 115). Similarly, another page from Persepolis 2 shows Satrapi taking notes from a scholar’s lecture, comparing Greek mythology and Iranian mythology (328). Appearing to be in Farsi, the note layers this frame with cultural, semiotic significance. Still another page includes a frame that shows Satrapi placing flowers on her grandfather’s grave; Persian letters cover the tombstones, while English text narrates the scene’s action (340). Cohesion between Persian script, cursive letters, English text, and Greek and Iranian mythology deepens these hybrid signifiers’ intervisual and intertextual meaning. In all of these images, visual-verbal boundaries blur as Satrapi’s illustrations of text become hybrid signifiers that dissolve the rhetoric of distance not only between visual and verbal modalities but also between cultures and languages. Satrapi’s hybrid signifiers and their symbolic capital intensify in her final chapter of Persepolis 2. Over the course of the chapter, Satrapi

Figure 10.3  Subversive hybrid signifiers—illustration from PERSEPOLIS, THE STORY OF A CHILDHOOD by Marjane Satrapi, translation copyright © 2003 by L’Association, Paris, France. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Revising boundaries, re(image)ining Écriture Feminine  169 illustrates the development of a dissertation project that she and her husband, Reza, create together. The project, commissioned by their visual communication professor, comprised “a theme park based on [Iranian] mythological heroes” (328). Satrapi and Reza spend seven months conducting research and conversing with “scholars, researchers, and doctors in the ‘human sciences’” (328). A full-page, one-frame illustration depicts the project’s design. At its top center, a Ferris wheel includes a warrior (perhaps Sohrab), challenged from below by Gordafarid, an armored woman warrior charging on a horse. Their theme park includes “all the details: dining, lodging, attractions” arranged around a focal hippodrome, signifying “the equivalent of Disneyland in Tehran” (Satrapi 328–329). The page following the theme park’s design shows ­Satrapi successfully defending the dissertation before an academic jury. Text narrating the scene of Satrapi’s defense notes that Iran’s mythology, “one of the most complex … on earth” from which cultural icons such as “the holy grail” and the “knights of the round table” originate, remains relatively unexpressed within Iran (330). The project she and Reza propose replaces Iran’s existing theme parks, full of American motifs, with Iran’s cultural motifs and mythology. Panels on the next page reveal that the deputy mayor rejects their idea since its design depicts “women without veils, seated on the backs of all sorts of real or mythic animals,” and exposes their “shapes and their hair” (Satrapi 331). The deputy tells Satrapi that “the government couldn’t care less about mythology. What they want are religious symbols” (331). Ironically, the project has given both. Satrapi’s hybrid signifiers not only collapse rhetoric of distance between visual-verbal modes and transform text into image, but they also suggest that religious symbols are a kind of mythology. In this last chapter, Satrapi recognizes her removal from the “discursive coherence” (Irigaray 206) of a “phallogocentric” (Cixous 260) system, especially hostile to images of powerful women. She understands that she cannot be recognized as an intelligent, empowered woman in the misogynist theocracy of her homeland, even after her research has revealed Iranian myths featuring powerful women. Like Bechdel, Satrapi expands Cixous’s notion of écriture feminine in visual directions that enhance her revelations with clarity that words alone cannot achieve. The graphic memoirs of Bechdel and Satrapi engage hybrid signifiers and strategic use of gutter space to diminish rhetoric of distance and to revise boundaries of gender, modality, and power at emphatic points in their narratives. Gutters resist their traditionally gendered performativity and disappear, transform into images, or support asterisked, floating footnotes. Layers of intertextuality and intervisuality redirect the masculine gaze, and hybrid signifiers blend cultures and languages to create subversive meaning. Re(image)ined versions of écriture feminine emerge in these novels and invite readers to examine Bechdel’s and S­ atrapi’s transitional experiences and to compose themselves accordingly.

170  Melanie Lee

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. “Rhetoric of the Image.” Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World, edited by Carolyn Handa, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1994, pp. 152–163. Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Mariner, 2006. ———. Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama. Mariner, 2013. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, 1990. Cixous, Hélène. “Laugh of the Medusa.” Feminist Theory, A Reader, 2nd edition, edited by Wendy K. Kolmar and Francis Bartowski, McGraw Hill, 2005, pp. 256–261. Cordeiro, William, and Season Ellison. “Performative Texts and the Pedagogical Theatre: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home as Compositional Model.” Teaching Graphic Novels in the English Classroom: Pedagogical Possibilities of Multimodal Literacy Assignments, edited by Alissa Burger, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 167–186. Elbow, Peter. “About Responding to Student Writing.” Memo. wrd.as.uky.edu/ sites/default/files/respond.pdf. Accessed 7 Dec. 2018. Fleckenstein, Kristie S. “Words Made Flesh: Fusing Imagery and Language in a Polymorphic Literacy.” College English, vol. 66, no. 6, 2004, pp. 612–631. Hoeness-Krupsaw, Susanna. “Teaching March in the Borderlands between ­Social Justice and Pop Culture.” Teaching Graphic Novels in the English Classroom: Pedagogical Possibilities of Multimodal Literacy Assignments, edited by Alissa Burger, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 135–147. “Image.” Dictionary.com, www.dictionary.com/browse/image. Accessed 7 Dec. 2018. Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Cornell UP, 1993. Lee, Melanie. “The Melancholy Odyssey of a Dissertation with Pictures.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2015, pp. 93–101. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Harper Perennial, 1993. Mitchell, William J. Thomas. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. The U of Chicago P, 2005. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Feminist Theory, A Reader, 2nd edition, edited by Wendy K. Kolmar and Francis Bartowski, ­McGraw Hill, 2005, pp. 296–302. Sander, Katya. “Hard Drive: An Experiment in Intervisuality.” Red Hook Journal. ccs.bard.edu/redhook/hard-drive-an-experiment-in-intervisuality/index. html. Accessed 23 May 2018. Satrapi, Marjane. The Complete Persepolis. Pantheon, 2007. Vitanza, Victor J. Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric. State U of New York P, 1997. “Word.” Thesaurus, Microsoft Word for Mac, 2011.

11 Bridging the gutter Cultural construction of gender sensitivity in select Indian graphic narratives after Nirbhaya Partha Bhattacharjee and Priyanka Tripathi Narratives dealing with gender-based violence in India question and cross-question the position of gender in a society where the sociocultural gap prevails and dominates women with preconceived notions of gender. Indian society needs to better understand these notions, which create gender inequality and thereby contribute to gender-based violence. In order to de-construct the ideologies of gender and to fabricate and articulate a remedy for the cultural issues in South Asia, especially in India, select Indian narratives have emerged in the comics medium with the technique of going beyond words to help the reader (re)think the arguments that prevent gender equality. India witnessed one of its darkest episodes in history on December 16, 2012. Jyoti Singh, a twenty-three-year-old medical student, was traveling on a bus in Delhi from Munirka to Dwarka with her friend, Awindra Pratap Pandey. Six passengers including the bus driver physically assaulted and raped Jyoti and beat her friend. Then, they threw both from the bus and allegedly tried to run the bus over ­Jyoti. Fortunately, her friend dragged her away from the road. Later, ­Jyoti was admitted to the Safdarjung Hospital by the police; doctors found her suffering from severe injuries and massive damage to her genitals, uterus, and intestines. Eleven days after the assault, she was transferred to Singapore for better treatment, but she passed away there. Because Indian Law prevents media from disclosing the names of victims, the mass media named her “Nirbhaya” which means “fearless.” When the reports of this incident received widespread coverage in both national and international platforms, the public protested and condemned the state government for being unsuccessful in providing security to the women. Not only did Delhi see a mass movement, but also the nation was agitated. A group of people staged a silent protest against this callous attitude of the Indian government. Four thousand people gathered at Jantar Mantar (a celebrated place of protest with permission in New Delhi, the capital of India) to mark their disgust toward the incident and the government. ­Police arrested Ram Singh, Vinay Sharma, Pawan Gupta, Mukesh Singh, Akshay Thakur, and an unnamed juvenile, and

172  Partha Bhattacharjee and Priyanka Tripathi they were brought before the Delhi High Court with the charge of sexual assault and murder. By that time, police had assembled the evidence so that the case went on trial in a fast-track court. Ram Singh died in Tihar Jail; the report says that he might have committed suicide while in police custody. On July 8, 2013, the prosecution finished, providing evidence before the court. As a result, the unnamed juvenile received three years of imprisonment under the Juvenile Justice Act. The other criminals were found guilty of rape and murder, convicted by the Delhi High Court, and received the death penalty.1 The convicted men appealed the judgment, but the Supreme Court of India (hereafter SCI) rejected their petition while referring to the crime as “Devilish” and ­“diabolical in ­nature”2 in the judgment report. The brutal gang-rape created a massive mass movement against those who violated the social norms of humanity. The metro cities—Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, and Bengaluru—observed the mass protests a number of ways, including candlelight vigils, posters, graffiti, and black dress. While Delhi saw the mass agitation, Kolkata observed silent protest. Working women in Bengaluru found that it was high time to be alert and to make women alert about their security. The proliferation of the agitation reached to India Gate and even to Raisina Hill. Students, mobs, actors, and social workers—all joined hand in hand in order to build a proper network of protest. In addition, the virtual world—­Facebook, WhatsApp, or Twitter—was flooded with the protests. Twitter users sent messages with the trending hashtags, and Facebook users changed their display pictures, replacing them with a black dot symbol. The artists were not too far from joining this movement. They participated with their thought-provoking crafts, paintings, and so on. In addition to the outcries, artists and writers used the comics format to register their own protest. Drawing the Line (2015) by Priya Kuriyan, Larissa Bertonasco, and Ludmilla Bartscht, and the Priya series, a series by Ram Devineni, emerged to inform the readers, especially teenagers, about the role of gender equality. As Ritu Khanduri explains, Comics as mass media embody a creative space and show the pedagogical processes at work and the imbrications of culture … ­Thinking through the conceptual lens of culture – a framework shared by comic book producers, and readers in India and the anthropological perspective, … culture is constructed and serves as a sign for claiming identity and difference in new generation. (186) Not only do the comics with fictional narration help in sensitizing readers to important social issues, but social issues inspire emerging comics creators of the new generation to address gender inequity in the panels so that the readers can empathize with the experiences from the panels.

Cultural construction of gender sensitivity  173 Initially, comics was considered to be “cheap and disposable,” but Randy Duncan and Matthew Smith explain four reasons why one should read comic books: (1) Originality of the Art Form, (2) The New Literacy, (3) Historical Significance, and (4) Potential of the Medium. The advent of comics (either paperback or webcomics) proposes to value the major and minor issues in society. The words are supplemented by the visual staccatos, pushing the boundaries of imagination to the next level. When it is meant for educating society and sensitizing the readers, comics becomes a powerful tool. The avant-garde artists break the conventional rules of comics, promising the readers to maintain originality to show the possible perspective of the format. The evolution of Indian graphic narratives leads to the emergence of Indian alternative comics, evolving around the issues which are often swept under the rug. Comics is one of the mediums in which the illustrators find the complex concepts easy to present in a lucid way and reach a wider range of readers—from the teenagers to the age-old persons. “Art is all about turning a complex idea into a simple form that will touch people at a very human level,” writes Paromita Vohra2 (qtd. in Priti Salian’s web-article), a social activist who fights for gender inequality in society. Duncan and Smith also explain, Reading in the twenty-first century often involves more than the mere understanding of words… The very concept of literacy has been revolutionized and broadened. Visual literacy, the ability to understand pictorial information, became one of the basic skills required for communication in the latter half of the twentieth century. (Duncan and Smith 14) In this article, we examine select Indian comics and graphic narratives in order to understand how gender is constructed. Comics has potential to generate awareness of gender inequity and increase gender sensitivity. Graphic narratives through various tools such as thought bubbles, gutters, and illustrations help the readers to probe into the incidents or the narratives. Michael A. Chaney mentions that “… on the crucial and material presence of medium in narrating trauma… this medium is itself defined by a serial recuperation of trauma on a structural level … the way gutters (or wounds) separating one pictorial panel from another are routinely resolved in order to create meaning and coherence…” (5). Emma Dawson Varughese concentrates on the importance of comics and graphic narratives in cultural construction: I suggest that a significant proportion of life in post-millennial India involves new forms of cultural consumption and that much of that cultural consumption has to do with “seeing,” Indian graphic narratives are one such manifestation of these new forms of cultural and visual consumption…. (14)

174  Partha Bhattacharjee and Priyanka Tripathi The comics and graphic narratives with rich texture that deal with the escalation of violence on women and its effect on Indian society and culture perhaps reflect the ground reality of the situation and have the potential to promote awareness and the sensitization program.

Graphic narratives for gender sensitization in India Indian graphic narratives use a comics format to incorporate visual-­ resistance stories dealing with their autobiographical elements with a hope of creating opposition to the patriarchal and parochial attitudes. The signs, colors, patterns, and most obviously the conventional rules of comics involved demand a close reading to understand multiple meanings. A close reading of Drawing the Line (2015) by Priya Kuriyan, Larissa Bertonasco, and Ludmilla Bartsch, and the two-volume Priya series by Ram Devineni and his team compels readers to rethink the gender-based violence. These visual narratives, based on the outcome of the aftermath of Nirbhaya-2012, are the expressions of the “lived experiences” (Lawlor 11) gushing out to reclaim “their voices, minds, bodies and lives, not as passive victims” (Jainer 626) from the clutches of the misogynistic society. The back cover page of Drawing the Line proclaims, December 2012: Tens of thousands of people …in India…protest the brutal gang rape and murder of a young medical student in Delhi… demand change…refuse to be silenced The Law has its own part to play in order to establish an awareness of gender inequality and violence. On February 3, 2013, the Criminal Law (Amendment) Ordinance was passed and promulgated by the then President of India, Pranab Mukherjee, after taking the decisions from a committee headed by former Chief Justice of India, J.S. Verma, and his team. This stringent law is the by-product of the mass movement that encouraged the government to take stern steps against the criminals and the loopholes in the law. Even though the major motive of Law is to establish social justice, the emergence of alternative comics and graphic narratives is also an approach to sensitize the readers about such issues. Drawing the Line is assembled in contradiction to a monolithic style. Instead of one or two authors, fourteen young artists from different cultural backgrounds created individual chapters that suggest a unified story about the way women are treated in India. The topics include a wide range of issues such as eve-teasing, abuse, harassment, and incest. Devineni with his team ventures an altogether different format, co-mixing comics with augmented reality (hence AR). AR is a technology which uses computer-­ generated images to make an environment similar to real life. It augments reality using an interactive experience with the help of digital tools, both visual and auditory.

Cultural construction of gender sensitivity  175

Figure 11.1   Harini Kannan’s view on the complexion of a baby daughter. “That’s Not Fair,” p. 8. (Image reproduced with permission from Harini Kannan).

Nisha Susan summarizes Drawing the Line as “a timely selection of similar delights under the big, colourful, ever-expanding umbrella of feminist visual art” (2). The first story in the collection, “That’s Not Fair,” deals with a newly born baby’s complexion, an ordeal most Indian girls experience. The author of the story, Harini Kannan, presents a (female) gynecologist who diagnoses a pregnancy and confirms that “it’s a girl!” (7). The prospective parents are distressed as they think of dowry and the need to contact the consultancy service that negotiates a marriage deal for dark-complexioned girls (see Figure 11.1). In this instance, the gutter highlights the sexism inherent in Indian society: the parents are disappointed their baby is a girl, and instead of planning for her career or college fund as they might for a boy child, they plan to save money for her wedding and develop anxiety about the degree to which her complexion might impact her marital prospects. Kannan’s story questions the validity of the age-old issue of the importance of a girl child’s fair complexion and the dowry system in India. Through this story, Kannan draws special attention to the legal issues of fetal sex determination and dowry system. The Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act of 1994 was established to

176  Partha Bhattacharjee and Priyanka Tripathi prevent female feticides and to prevent the diagnostic centers from the misuse of these sorts of diagnoses. The Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961 was introduced to stop taking a dowry, either directly or indirectly. The punishment for this crime may involve imprisonment from six months to two years according to the Indian Penal Code. Kannan highlights how the situation of a woman becomes worse when her complexion is not fair, and the consultant agency comes to play a filthy game with the emotions of the parents. Society measures the position of a woman with her fairness, and the panel in this chapter critiques the complexion question using an advertisement for a fairness cream; these creams illustrate big business and encode racist messages (Samudzi). The concept of skin purity has been fraught and painful for a long time because of its roots in white supremacy. Bhavana Singh echoes the same with her illuminating comic, “Inner Beauty and Melanin”; melanin is personified as a character, who carefully conveys “skinteresting facts” (Drawing 71) regarding the typical marketing policies of skin-whitening products being sold in India and other nations. Skin-color plays a major role in Indian marriages; in the past, it was considered inauspicious to have a dark-complexioned daughter. At the time of marriage, the parents would provide a lump sum dowry for a dark-complexioned daughter to make her more desirable for marriage. Bhavana Singh’s story has a subtle connection with Reshu Singh’s story, “The Photo,” which reflects the plight of Bena who is going to be married off by her parents without her consent. The general perception in India is that women should take care of the household matters in a family; Bena’s mother accuses her only because she does not have any idea of “taking care” which, to her, includes work, such as washing clothes, making tea, and other domestic tasks. Bena wants to enjoy her womanhood, her own self because she has seen her mother dedicating everything to the family but in return “collected so much bitterness along the way” (31). The same tone is reflected in the next story, “An Ideal Girl” by Soumya Menon, in which the illustrator significantly differentiates between the definition of “ideal boy” and “ideal girl.” The panels invite readers to realize that women lack freedom while the men enjoy the same activities with no restrictions. Instead, a patriarchal society blames women for their own plight. Menon questions an orthodox society who thinks to ensure their security, women should reach home as soon as the sun sets or they should not come out of the house at all. The last message of this story is quite rebellious in nature: “They [parents] asked her to find work closer to home. She said she liked what she was doing. They got her a bicycle so that she could get back home sooner. Instead, she cycled… further and further away. She decided she had had quite enough of being the Ideal Girl” (42). The Ideal Girl leaves the society as it does not care for her wish. The tag “Ideal” becomes heavy as

Cultural construction of gender sensitivity  177 it changes the meaning and dimension when it is prefixed with a girl. It curbs and curtails the freedom of a girl while there is no act of limiting freedom in case of a boy. Bena wanted to get rid of the word “Ideal” as it was too heavy to carry for her. Discourses on modernity and culture have produced contradictory constructs on the definition of “woman” in postcolonial societies as there is a constant conflict between the “old” and “new” sociological and political perspectives on womanhood. Bena wanted to celebrate her womanhood, not with the ideology of old perspectives. Meenakshi Thapan writes, I contend that the “new woman” in the rapidly altering cultural and social imaginary of this nation need not necessarily always be constructed in the context of a charged and transformed modernity, as it were. Rather, she should be viewed in the fluid and marked nature of her identity as a woman, which is shaped and redefined in the everyday experiences of women as they both contest and submit to the images and constructs that impinge on their sense, their emotions, and their material and social conditions. (413) The concluding panoramic illustration of the “Ideal Girl” leaving the city limits is highly redolent as it contains the elements playing the role of “linguistic message” (Barthes 34). The gutter opens up the space to involve its readers in the panels so that they may participate in the meaning-making process. The gutter between the last frame and the penultimate one symbolizes the pangs of the girl. It dictates that society has changed, but people still cling to traditional values. It prompts one to ponder over the new role of women as working professionals and how it is being thwarted by the male-dominated society. Male chauvinism believes in the exclusion of the women, and therefore, working women are more affected by violence than are stay-at-home mothers. Unreported or unrecorded violence, crime, or offense is often overlooked or suppressed by misogynistic agencies; victims, in many of the cases, feel ashamed and cocoon themselves in their own shell. “Asha, Now” by Hemavathy Guha records the disturbing incidents of sexual abuse within a family: before Guha begins her story, she gives a glimpse of Indian culture so that the readers across the world can familiarize themselves with the Indian perspective. She mentions that she has “taken the life story of one such girl which is not entirely fictional” (Drawing the Line 110). Unfolding in an in medias res structure, Guha shows that Asha, the primary character in the narrative, “wakes up with a start” (111) as she assumes that someone touched her inappropriately, but her husband was sleeping peacefully. This becomes a recurring nightmare for her. In order to set the background of the story, Guha’s narrative technique unveils Asha’s secrecy; she recalls her childhood. Once while

178  Partha Bhattacharjee and Priyanka Tripathi she was sleeping with her siblings, she found her shirt’s button open while her eldest brother’s hand was on her breast. Asha buttoned her shirt and turned over. In another unwanted turn of events, Asha found her brother gazing and grinning with scopophilic desires at her while she was taking a shower. She screamed and shut the door. The narrative becomes fast-paced; though she is now older, the “nightly visits” kept recurring to her. She told her father, but in vain as he did not pay any attention to her complaints, and Asha could not express her grief to anyone outside of the family as it might cause shame to her family members. As a result, she moved to a women’s safe house. She got married, and now she is a mother of a daughter. The narrator raises the question whether or not she got rid of her fear at night; the illustration of a gloomy-faced mother confirms that “she still wakes up with a start in the night--and makes sure she is always there to protect her daughter from her uncle” (118). This graphic narrative primarily deals with a subject which remains unreported. The traumatic memory of Asha haunts her even when she is now married. There remains a scar in her memory if it is infiltrated by a traumatic memory. It creates a gap, a void which Guha attempts to bridge with her narrative. The story “Someday…” by Samidha Gunjal sums up the experiences of eve-teasing, which, in Southern Asia, refers to public sexual ­harassment or sexual assault of women by men: “this kind of sexual harassment is a daily reality for most women in India” (148).3 Following the upper panels on the first page of the narrative, the next three panels show a narrative of an emancipated woman whose existence is encapsulated by the daily chores of life. She comes out of the house to get an auto rickshaw while some men harass her by making unwanted sexual remarks and unnecessary cat-calls. She does not respond to them, but she feels as if she was surrounded by the men. Following this scene, the three panels on a single page show how the road turns into a place where the men seem to be the predators; Gunjal darkens the background in a way to force the readers to think that the girl is alone in this world surrounded by these men. By gradually minimizing the size and space of the girl in her illustration, Gunjal possibly points out how the space of working women is delimited by the male-predators. Without any doubt, the next full-page illustration consisting of all the men pouncing on the girl delineates the obvious fact of molestation. The sudden revelation of Maa Kali4 from the girl destroying all the creatures surrounding her refutes the male-chauvinist idea of women as the weaker sex in society. The sequence of panels in the last couple of pages reveals emblematically the infringement of body and space by the outsiders. “The girl concomitantly shrinks, in the presence of these two bio-anatomical features. As a cultural graphic capturing the ethos of a male-dominated, anti-woman, city street,” Nayar writes, “Gunjal’s work is a disturbing vision of a reality” (79).

Cultural construction of gender sensitivity  179 Through the use of the gutters, blank spaces, and illustrations, Drawing the Line helps readers envision the myriad issues faced by Indian women who are the victims of male oppression. They can easily connect these panels with the previous ones to assemble a story about the multiple ways gender inequality and violence appear in India. The gender inequality is detrimental to society, and artists across the globe attempt to draw this inequality with their unique styles. The visual images carry the signs of gender-based violence which have an overwhelming effect on the readers. Elizabeth Marshall and Leigh Gilmore mention in this regard that …in comics saturated with violent and sexual imagery in which girls and women are figured as prey, and in narratives of girls’ vulnerability to violence shaped to grab headlines, the partiality of the imagery coupled with the facts of violence sustain a myth of not-knowing what one is nevertheless overwhelmed by. (97) Frank Bramlett rightly points out the importance of the graphic narratives in the present-day context: “While Priya’s Shakti gained international attention with its story of a young woman who learns to champion women’s rights, Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back had a more local impact” (95).

Closing the sociocultural gap through the Priya series Ram Devineni and the team from his Rattapallax Studio came up with their comics series where Priya is a superheroine to provide assistance to the victims of gender-based violence. The series comprises three installments: Priya’s Shakti (2014), Priya’s Mirror (2016), Priya and the Lost Girls (forthcoming). While the first two volumes deal with serious issues such as rape and acid attack, respectively, the third one addresses the issue of sex trafficking. The comics uses few fictional references from Indian Hindu mythology to construct powerful moral teachings in the Priya series. These books were primarily meant for a children’s character development program, but later on, Devineni found that comics could not be segmented for a particular age-group of readers. Priya’s Shakti is an augmented reality pop-up comic book by Ram Devineni, Vikas K. Menon, and Dan Goldman. Shakti, etymologically coined from the Sanskrit word Sakti, means the female version of Divine Energy. The book deals with the life of a young woman, Priya, who is a devotee of Goddess Parvati5 and dreams to be a teacher. Initially, she concentrates on her study; “but as she grows older, she recognizes her father had other plans for her” that entailed taking care of the household and giving up her dream for higher education (see Figure 11.2).

Figure 11.2  P  riya’s father’s misogynistic attitude to his daughter, Priya’s Shakti, n.p. (Image reproduced with permission from Ram Devineni).

Cultural construction of gender sensitivity  181 Parvati is not happy with the injustice her devotee experienced. As she grows up, Priya becomes more susceptible to the violence, cat-calls, and eve-teasing. Suddenly, a group of people attack her and gang-rape her. She recognizes one of the attackers but fails to secure any justice either from her family or from the Panchayat. They all blame her, and astonishingly, one of the female Panchayat members accuses her of provoking the attackers. When she asks the attacker for the reason, his reply shocks her: “It was your fault, you shouldn’t have worn those loose clothes.” As Priya is a devotee to Parvati, she cannot bear this. Parvati comes in the body of Priya and helps her establish justice in society. To prevent this sort of gender-based violence, she teaches Priya the mantra—“Speak without shame, and stand with me…/…Bring about the change we want to see.” Priya becomes fearless and preaches among the villagers the most important doctrines: (1) Women are equal to men. So always treat them with respect; (2) Educate all your children; and (3) Speak out when a woman or girl is mistreated (see Figure 11.3). One of the objectives of this book is to point out the sociocultural gap which leads to gender discrimination. In villages where the literacy rate is comparatively low, a sensitization program is desperately needed because patriarchy is still deep-rooted there. Women are considered “marriage-material”; thus, they are often deprived of a future and other fundamental rights. Presumably, the narrative is set in an unnamed village. Following the notions of New Feminism by Natasha Walter, this short narrative promotes the idea of equality of opportunity, power, and position. The graphic novel also utilizes a new technology called “augmented reality” (AR) which helps the readers to have more details in the pages. Although readers can enjoy the comic in print as well as in e-book format, in order to explore the graphic novel more completely, they need to install the Blippar app6 to see the blippable animations, images, blogs, videos, and so on. The purpose of using the technology in the printed comics is to go beyond the conventional bandes dessinées (literally drawn strips). Geeta Pandey in her news article “India’s New Comic ‘Super Hero’: Priya, the Rape Survivor”7 writes, He [Devineni] convinced street artists and Bollywood poster painters to create murals in the Mumbai area of Dharavi, Asia’s biggest slum. The paintings have augmented reality features which allow people to see special animation and movies pop out of the wall art when they scan it with their smart phones. Widely available in English, Hindi, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, Priya’s Mirror (2016), the second installment of the series, was co-­ authored by Devineni, columnist Paromita Vohra, and the mixed-­ media artist Dan Goldman. For creating social awareness, the second

Figure 11.3  P  riya’s words to change the society. Priya’s Shakti, n.p. (Image reproduced with permission from Ram Devineni).

Cultural construction of gender sensitivity  183 installment was funded by the World Bank’s WEvolve global initiative with an aim to change male attitudes about gender inequality and violence against women. Priya’s Mirror focuses on the issue of acid attack and the traumatized condition of victims. Acid attack deeply shows the neglected position of women in the power structure of society. Patriarchal politics and policies emerging out of heterosexual dominance and the oppression on women become the primary cause for gender-based violence defying the very notion of human rights. The lovely and inclusive nature of Priya helps Ahankar to transform from the demon to the human, Prem. Though it is symbolic in nature, the thrust of this kind of usage is to ask the readers to demolish the demon inside them and transform it to be compassionate. The narrative has a plot and a subplot; Kusum, an acid attack victim, and Ahankar are in the main plot while Rafi and Anjali are in the sub-plot. Both Kusum and Anjali are the acid attack victims. From Rafi, Priya came to know about the history of past incidents and this demon, Ahankar. Originally named Prem, Ahankar has an infatuation for a female named, Kusum. But Kusum knows if her brothers knew about this secret relationship, they would have killed both of them. Kusum faces intolerance from her brothers, but also Prem/Ahankar becomes the victim of Kusum’s brothers. With God Shiva’s grace, Prem did not die, but he could not help himself from being a demon. He vomits acid and kills Kusum’s brothers, but unfortunately, Kusum’s face is burnt. He keeps her in his palace along with the other victims. At the end, Priya helps the victims to come out of the castle, live freely, and transforms Ahankar to Prem once again with her “Mirror of Love.” With tools and techniques of comics employed with Hindu mythology, the authors address the issue of acid attack on women in general and in an Indian context in particular. The narrative is an attempt to sensitize the readers in two ways. First of all, the graphic novel creates two victims for its male readers. It clearly posits the female as victim, but it also shows the negative impact of toxic masculinity for its male readership. Second, the graphic novel offers a ray of hope for the acid-attacked victims. Apart from the intertextual and the paratextual contents, the employment of transmedial storytelling offers a scope for the readers to reach beyond the 2-D illustrations in the page. The story continues in the forthcoming Priya and the Lost Girls, a graphic narrative which deals with the issue of kidnapped girls and sex trafficking in Kolkata.

Conclusion: bridging the gutter, bridging the gap The wavy gutters, the use of black-ink, gray background, and other ­visual-verbal clues ensure readers’ active participation. In bridging the gutters by providing the theoretical underpinning of cultural constructs

184  Partha Bhattacharjee and Priyanka Tripathi in Indian society, “comic art has often served as a method of preserving and reshaping the concerns of the … culture into a popular and highly influential mode of expression” (Inge 76). By employing Hindu mythology and other sociopolitical and sociocultural elements, Drawing the Line and the Priya series establish an Indian alternative comics that has the potential to capture the unseen forces of oppression and place the lived experiences within these panels and gutters; thus, the gutters are a “invisible messenger” (McCloud). While Eisner specifically hints at the role of the artist who needs “to arrange the sequence of events (or pictures) so as to bridge the gaps in action” (Eisner 38), McCloud points at the “closure” and “transitions” “whereby readers fill in the gaps between images with meaning that connects the panels (72) and completes the narrative flow” (Pedri, par. 5). Drawing the Line, with its well-crafted, curated, and sketched narratives of violence and resistance, fills the gap where art and activism coalesce, where the narrative strategy meets everyday experience. The illustrators demand a platform where the readers can visually see the painful stories, but cannot hear it. The Priya series as well offers the scope to plural interpretive options, establishing an experience for the readers to be relentlessly involved in the panels and beyond. Not only does the series address the issues such as rape or acid attack, but the narrative also sensitizes its readers. The lack of sensitivity and the responsibility toward the other gender has been attempted to be bridged with the series. Priya throws light on the creation of a utopic world which is free from gender-based violence. She wants to bridge the gap between what the situation actually is and what it should be.

Notes 1 The information regarding the Nirbhaya-2012 has been collected from some of the leading newspapers such as The Hindu, Hindustan Times, and The Times of India and from some of the leading news channels, such as Zee News and Aaj Tak. 2 This quotation has been taken from Priti Salian’s web-article published on October 1, 2016. www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/priya-s-mirror-­highlightsissues-of-gender-inequality-and-violence-against-women-1.151583. 3 In India, young girls are the most typical victims of cat-calling. The illustrator in this story has deliberately chosen the word “girl” not only to further emphasize this phenomenon but also to unmask the misogyny of a patriarchal society that frequently does not want to see the progress of a girl. Most of the times, young females are married off so that they cannot have their own freedom. 4 Maa Kali, according to Hindu mythology, is a goddess who is revered as Divine Mother or Adi Shakti. 5 Goddess Parvati is the wife of Shiva, according to the Hindu mythology. She is the epitome of courage and divine energy. 6 This is an app available in iOS and Google Play Store. 7 This news article was published in BBC Asia. www.bbc.com/news/ world-asia-india-30288173.

Cultural construction of gender sensitivity  185

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. Fontana Press, 1977. Bramlett, Frank et al. The Routledge Companion to Comics. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. Chaney, Michael A. Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. The U of Wisconsin P, 2011. Criminal Law (Amendment) Ordinance of 2013. Press Information Bureau. 2014, www.pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=91979. Accessed 12 Mar. 2018. Devineni, Ram et al. Priya’s Shakti. Rattapallax, 2014. ———. Priya’s Mirror. Rattapallax, 2016. Duncan, Randy, and Matthew J. Smith. The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture. Continuum International Publishing, 2009. Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art, 1985. Poorhouse, 2005. Inge, M. Thomas. Comics as Culture. UP of Mississippi, 1990. Jainer, Namita. “Book Review: Priya Kuriyan, Larissa Bertonasco and Ludmilla Bartscht (eds), Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back.” Social Change, vol. 45, no. 4, 2015, pp. 625–28. doi:10.1177/0049085715602794. Khanduri, Ritu G. “Comicology: Comic Books as Culture in India.” Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics, vol. 1, no. 2, 2010, pp. 171–91. Taylor and Francis. doi:10.1080/21504857.2010.528641. Kuriyan, Priya et al. Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back! Zubaan, 2015. Lawlor, Leonard. “‘Un Ecart Infime’ (Part I): Foucault’s Critique of the Concept of Lived-Experience (‘Vécu’).” Research in Phenomenology, vol. 35, 2005, pp. 11–28. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24721814. Marshall, Elizabeth, and Gilmore Leigh. “Girlhood in the Gutter: Feminist Graphic Knowledge and the Visualization of Sexual Precarity.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 1, 2015, pp. 95–114. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/wsq.2015.0014. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperPerennial, 1994. Nayar, Pramod K. The Indian Graphic Novel: Nation, History and Critique. Routledge, 2016. Pandey, Geeta. “India’s New Comic ‘Super Hero’: Priya, the Rape Survivor.” BBC News, Delhi 8 Dec. 2014, www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-­india-30288173. Accessed 15 May 2018. Pedri, Nancy. “Mixing Visual Media in Comics.” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, 2017, n.p. Dept of English, University of Florida, www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v9_2/introduction/­i ntroduction. shtml. Accessed 25 Jan. 2018. Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act of 1994. Handbook on Pre-Conception & Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, 1994 and Rules with Amendments. 1994. http://rajswasthya.nic.in/PCPNDT%2005.12.08/ Hand%20book%20with%20Act%20&%20Rules%20%285%29%20%20 %281%29.pdf. Accessed 13 Mar. 2018. Salian, Priti. “Priya’s Mirror Highlights Issues of Gender Inequality and Violence against Women.” The National, 1 Oct. 2016, www.thenational.ae/

186  Partha Bhattacharjee and Priyanka Tripathi arts-culture/priya-s-mirror-highlights-issues-of-gender-inequality-and-­ violence-against-women-1.151583. Accessed 27 Mar. 2018. Susan, Nisha. “Introduction.” Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back, edited by Priya Kuriyan, Larrisa Bertonasco and Ludmilla Bartscht, Zubaan, 2015, pp. 1–4. Thapan, Meenakshi. “Embodiment and Identity in Contemporary Society: Femina and the ‘New’ Indian Woman.” Contributions to Indian Sociology, vol. 38, no. 3, 2004, pp. 411–444. doi:10.1177/006996670403800305. The Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961. Act No. 28 of 1961. 1961, www.wcd.nic. in/dowry-prohibition-act-1961-28-1961/. Accessed 5 Mar. 2018. The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Bill of 2015. Bill No 99-C of 2014. 2015, www.prsindia.org/uploads/media/Juvenile%20Justice/JJ%20 bill%20as%20passed%20by%20LS.pdf. Accessed 5 Mar. 2018. Transition and Gutters. understandingcomics177.wordpress.com/about/1-2/2-2/. Accessed 5 Nov. 2017. Varughese, Emma Dawson. Visuality and Identity in Post-millennial Indian Graphic Narratives. Palgrave, 2018. Walter, Natasha. The New Feminism. Little Brown, 1998.

12 “There Are No Monsters Like Us” Gothic horror, lesbianism, and the female body in Marguerite Bennett and Ariela Kristantina’s InSEXts Michelle D. Wise While earlier feminist scholars focused on traditional literary texts— such as novels, poetry, and drama—more recent scholars, such as Hillary Chute, Carolyn Cocca, and Jacqueline Danziger-Russell, have turned their attention to non-traditional texts, including comic books and graphic novels, to examine these works as cultural artifacts as a reflection of the culture in which they were created. According to Carolyn Cocca, Comics don’t just simply reflect “real life” though, nor do they simply affect “real life.” Rather, they are part of real life, in that they are an institution in our world (like schools or like mainstream news media) through which ideas about gender, sexuality, race, religion, disability and power circulate. (7) Feminist scholars recognize that these texts, especially comics written by women and those which feature strong female characters, are important cultural texts and merit scholarly inquiry because they provide insights into several of the topics that Cocca mentions. The comic book genre, like other literary genres, has not often validated or supported female creators. Even though women have worked and continue to work in the comics industry, “the industry” as Hillary Chute claims, “in mainstream comic strips and comic books, was heavily male” and positioned women as an industry minority (20). As recent as 2004, Charles McGrath claimed that, “The graphic novel is a man’s world,” and as a male-dominated genre, women, in the past, were either marginalized or excluded; however, much has changed in recent decades. Women, both as fans and as creators, are actively engaging with the medium. Publishers realize that women read comics and will spend their money on collecting comics and other memorabilia. To increase the female fan base, well-established comics publishers began ­diversifying their titles to appeal to women and expanded their titles to include stories about and by female writers and artists. However, even

188  Michelle D. Wise with an expansion to mainstream comics, many female fans flocked to the independent comics because they accomplished something the big two publishers (Marvel and DC) did not. As Alexander Huls explained, they achieved “near-gender parity among creators or readers; or published best-selling female-driven books; or contributed to the growth of the community of women in comics. In the process, they are making the comic medium—and industry—more hospitable to all.” Indie ­publishers—such as Koyama Press, AfterShock Comics, Emet Comics, and Line Webtoon—offer women writers and artists the freedom to create their own stories and characters, which establishes an authentic voice within the medium. Jacqueline Danziger-Russell argues, “Independent comics … frequently take a more experimental approach to the art form” and that “they have the potential to break down the barriers imposed by a male-oriented society” (2). As Cocca claims, “representation matters” and “seeing someone who looks like you can have a positive impact on self-esteem and seeing no one who looks like you can have a negative impact on self-esteem … ” (3). More female readers gravitate toward the independent publishers, such as AfterShock Comics, because they often support female creators, and their titles tend to offer more female-driven storylines with strong, admirable protagonists. When AfterShock Comics published Volume 1, which consists of the first seven issues, of Marguerite Bennett’s and Ariela Kristantina’s comic book series InSEXts in December 2015, American culture had been experiencing an upheaval of traditional values and witnessing a level of lesbian visibility that had never before been seen. Lesbians were out on television shows, in film, and all other forms of media including comic books. Lesbian stories were no longer exploited as a plot structure designed to give a work “shock value” or to appear trendy. Instead, there were many titles that treated this subject seriously and acknowledged that such stories needed telling because “there is power in telling stories” (Cocca 6). These works featuring the stories of marginalized individuals or groups highlight the fact that representation does, indeed, matter. As a relatively new series, the seven-issue comic series that makes up Volume 1, with more issues planned, was well received by fans and critics. One critic, Manny Popoca, calls it “[a] truly innovative, ground-­ breaking comic book that deserves all the cliché of accolades that get tossed its way. The boundaries and limitations often put on comics and females in the industry just got tossed out the window here by writer Marguerite Bennett.” Bennett writes a narrative without boundaries and does so in a way that exposes readers to an unconventional plot that eventually evolves into a metaphor about the role of women writers, creators, and readers in a male-dominated industry. Bennett takes control over her story, and the result for comic book fans is an unleashed text that not only grapples with social issues from the Victorian age but reveals how those very same issues still haunt women in modern times.

Gothic horror and the female body  189 The series, set during the fin de siècle in Victorian England, focuses on two women, Lady Bertram and her maid Mariah, who become lovers and transform into strange, insect-like creatures. The two women desire to live together during a time when women lacked autonomy and were often at the mercy of men for their survival. The comic does not center on the women discovering their attraction and love for each other. Instead, its focus is on a more mature point in their relationship when they want nothing more than to be together and eventually have a child. The series explores the limitations that lesbians endured during a time when heterosexuality was culturally expected. The setting of the comic book clearly indicates that the creative team is focused on an historical era that is both intriguing and problematic. This era was a bleak, tumultuous time when strict social mores and decorum clashed with the loosening of sexual attitudes. It was also an era when women began writing more literature, including gothic-themed titles, and were recognizing their desire for social equality. Many female writers during the Victorian era turned to the gothic genre because it enabled them to critique the constraints of their everyday life and challenge these constraints in a literary text. Women were restricted by gendered social codes of the era that were imposed on them by the era, and women who did not follow the prescribed gender path (i.e., to marry a male who could financially provide for them and birth his children) were often forced “into closeted silence” (Thomas 2). Since many Victorian attitudes about women are woven into the cultural fabric of the 21st-­ century cultural narrative, it is not surprising that Bennett and Kristantina have utilized the era and elements of gothic genre in their series as a metaphor to reveal that women are still oppressed and marginalized. While there are many gothic characteristics that can be explored in InSEXts, I will focus my discussion on body horror and cultural anxieties regarding female sexuality to illustrate that the comic through its use of the gothic operates as a metaphor for women’s creative power. In addition, Marguerite Bennett and Ariela Kristantina’s InSEXts contributes to the graphic narrative canon by debunking female stereotypes, celebrating women’s creativity, and empowering female authority.

Overview of the gothic Most scholars of Gothic Studies agree that the literary gothic period began at the end of the 18th century with the publication of Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto (1764). Although some scholars suggest that precisely defining “gothic” is challenging (Palmer 2; Punter and Byron xviii), gothic texts usually contain several common motifs such as sin, guilt, body horror, the past that haunts the present, dark castles, weak females, supernatural figures, a Byronic hero, and several other characteristics and motifs. Also, the plot of a gothic text is usually

190  Michelle D. Wise a tightly structured formulaic one. Since the gothic genre continues to remain popular, especially with female readers, some comic book writers and artists utilize the genre to explore complex social issues and themes. The liberating elements of the gothic genre, like the graphic text, enable writers to explore female desire and sexuality; challenge Victorian social norms in a 21st-century text; and, in the end, confront the comics industry. Regardless of how gothic is defined, one point is evident, and that is that it developed during the Victorian era, which is generally associated with the repression of female desire and sexuality. As a result, the genre eventually became thought of as a female genre and attracted both female writers and readers.

Female gothic, female body, and body horror/ transformation Texts written by early female gothic writers such as Ann Radcliffe adopted the typical plot structure in the gothic novel of the imprisoned woman who endured the socially constructed identity that was projected onto her; therefore, their writings not only shed light on gender roles, but they also unraveled and deconstructed cultural anxieties surrounding them. Punter and Byron argue that the emphasis changes from general identity politics to a more specific concern with gender politics: it is the heroine’s experiences which become the focus of attention, and her experiences are represented as a journey leading towards the assumption of some kind of agency and power in the patriarchal world. (279) In gothic texts, the heroine’s story reveals the horrors of the world in which she resides and shows that she must undergo a journey, which concludes with her discovering her independence in an oppressive world. Furthermore, in many gothic texts, the female body is often the epicenter of the women’s struggle for autonomy. Historically, the female body has been defined and regulated by men, and in gothic texts, the female body is chased and often violated by men. Susan Bordo claims that “the body is not only a text of culture. It is also…a practical, direct locus of social control” (90–91). For women, as Peter Brooks claims, the “body, belongs to the world and not to our ideally constructed selves” (2). In the gothic, the body, especially the erotic female body, “prods the limits of taste and decorum, and needs to be understood alongside changing notions of what constitutes taboo and, in some cases, what may be censored by authorities who have the moral right to protect consumers” (Reyes 7–8). Women have had their bodies policed, politicized, and eroticized by men. In fact, the erotic female body has lacked autonomy and self-governance because it is usually

Gothic horror and the female body  191 constructed for the male gaze. According to Audre Lorde, women have been forced to suppress their erotic selves because, as a source of power and information, the patriarchy desired to keep them subservient (277). In some ways, comics, much like the gothic genre, has been historically devalued and easily discarded as serious literature, which makes it an important genre for exploring issues regarding body horror and female sexuality. Comics enables writers and illustrators to expose cultural restraints regarding female sexuality and unleash them in a way that conventional texts do not. When female creators seize control over their own narratives and art, then these texts become haunting metaphors for exposing the oppression and silence that women have endured. InSEXts not only focuses on Lady Bertram, her maid Mariah, and their lesbian relationship but also reveals that many women in Victorian times lacked autonomy and a voice. The first issue opens with scenes from a darkened London street: two insects fly around, and a song foreshadows the plot. The song’s lyrics state that “from rot the beauties of the world can only ever spring/From misery and sorrow comes the music that we sing/The sweetest summer roses arise from squelching mud/And all God’s little children are born to us in blood” (2). This song reveals that the world in which Lady Bertram and Mariah live is full of rot, but out of it and through sacrifice there is a rebirth, which involves bodily transformation. Bodily transformation in both comics and gothic texts is not unusual. However, bodily transformation in this gothic story operates as a metaphor for women’s creative power. Bennett and Kristantina created a comic that challenges meanings of gender identity and sexuality as Lady Bertram and Mariah wrestle with the limitations placed on women during this era and their desire for independence. Furthermore, the authors series, as a metaphor for women’s writing and creative authority, penetrates the patriarchal fortress of the comic book industry and offers a new creative force that celebrates women’s imaginative power. Early in the first issue, we learn that Lady Bertram and her maid Mariah are involved in a lesbian relationship, even though Lady Bertram is married to Harry Bertram, a man who has ignored his wife for months. When he does return to their bed, Lady Bertram says, “It’s been months, Harry. Growing tired of molesting the servants?” (13). Victorian-­era women depended on marriage to either elevate or maintain their social status. However, as the issue unfolds, Mariah reveals her plan to free her lover from the constraints of marriage. Lady Bertram, who has borne several stillborn infants, longs for motherhood. During one of their lovemaking scenes, Mariah deposits an unknown, mucus ball into Lady Bertram’s mouth. Lady Bertram, in turn, performs the same action to Harry when they are intimate. Shortly afterward, Harry becomes violently sick, and in a grotesque bodily transformation, he births a baby boy. This scene is an inversion of a birth story and echoes the fact that

192  Michelle D. Wise many women died in childbirth. However, in this re-imagining, the male dies from childbirth and the women are reborn. The birth rips Harry’s body apart and he dies, which sets the readers up for an unconventional plot. In female gothic texts, the heroine usually … experiences a rebirth. She is awakened to a world in which love is not only possible but available; she acquires in marriage a new name and, most important, a new identity. Indeed, she is often almost literally reborn, rescued at the climax from the life-threatening danger of being locked up, walled in, or otherwise made to disappear from the world. (Williams 103–104) Bennett’s narrative clearly re-imagines the traditional, heterosexual marriage plot as freeing women from their husband’s house; it also refutes the idea that women can only experience true freedom through their own deaths. Instead, Harry’s death frees Lady Bertram from the social institution of marriage and allows her to form her own identity, one that is not connected to or intertwined with a male and his social status. The issue ends with the women concocting a plan about the disposal of Harry’s body and deciding how to announce the arrival of the baby. The final image of the issue depicts both Mariah and Lady Bertram with insect wings; the final words of the issue are “…one happy family” (21). This image clearly demonstrates that Lady Bertram and Mariah have undergone a rebirth in which they re-emerge as powerful women who refuse to be confined by patriarchy. This narrative illustrates that the women are intent on defying the social norms of their era and creating a family based on their own terms, but for them to do so, they must undergo a rebirth that results in them discovering their power and voice. In this sense, InSEXts is then a metaphor for women who write and create art within a male-dominated industry. Like the characters in the comic, Bennett and Kristantina must experience a type of rebirth to free themselves from the gender expectations imposed upon them in a male-dominated industry. They have answered Cixous’s battle cry for women to write themselves: “Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies—…Woman must put herself into the text—… by her own movement” (875). If the first issue of the series introduces us to the way women’s bodies have been policed and controlled, the second issue develops this idea more fully. The issue opens with two butterflies flying around and engaging in a conversation about being separated from their son. Lady Bertram says that “this is torture Mariah. Even a night away from our son is torture” (2). In the first issue, bodily transformation by the women was only hinted at, but this second issue clearly indicates that both women

Gothic horror and the female body  193 undergo a physical transformation, suggesting that their insect selves can no longer be contained. Instead, their insect selves have not only merged with their human selves, but they have become so intertwined with their identity that they can no longer repress their insect features. In this sense, then, their metamorphosis represents their lesbianism. As the more intimate and passionate the women become, the more they surrender to their insect-like behavior. As the issue progresses, Lady Bertram’s extreme bodily transformation becomes particularly highlighted and featured. While she is being chased by Colonel Fitzgerald, who is a married man, she becomes irate with his sexual advances when he refers to her as “an exotic creature,” and she loses control (5). She screams, “…let me show you how exotic I can be,” and she completely transforms into a half human/half insect creature (6). Lady Bertram’s transformation occupies a full page in this issue, and Kristantina’s artwork highlights her exaggerated, monstrous body. This hideous transformation symbolically signifies that Lady Bertram refuses to be reduced to an object for his pleasure. Instead, she assumes the position of authority. By rendering her body as hideous and as threatening as possible, she reclaims her power and her voice; thus, she renders him powerless. In this role reversal, Lady Bertram exerts power over her would-be assailant. While Lady Bertram does not kill him, she admits to Mariah that her transformation was not something she could control: “Mariah. It was an accident. I couldn’t control it this time” (8). Her inability to control her transformation suggests that she abandons her human self and becomes more insect/monstrous-like. With each transformation, she experiences more and more independence; therefore, this change frees her, whereas her human appearance limits her. As Barbara Creed suggests, the monstrous female, much like the gutter space in graphic narratives, “does not respect borders, positions, rules,” and as a result, she is viewed as dangerous to the patriarchal structure (68). For Lady Bertram to truly experience autonomy, she must “escape at the cost of whatever violence seems necessary,” and for her, the violent bodily transformation enables her to escape (Williams 135). According to Xavier Aldana Reyes, “the [gothic] genre is invested in representational excesses of the body, like monstrosity, partly because these are helpful in negotiating larger concerns about humanity and its shifting boundaries” (7). Lady Bertram’s inability to control her shifting appearance blurs the boundary between human and animal, which is also an anxiety that gothic texts often explore. The gothic text “often relies on the grotesque … often uses mutilation in conjunction with images of bodies that have been modified and no longer appear strictly human” (Reyes 4). Women’s bodies, which often transform and mutate throughout their lifetime, especially during pregnancy, create cultural anxieties for the patriarchy. As Carla Rice claims, “Ideas about women’s bodies as animal-like and monstrous continue to circulate in popular

194  Michelle D. Wise culture” (40). In addition, female bodies resist control; therefore, they are a political site where the struggle for power ensues. In her introduction to Volume 1, Bennett states that she “wrote InSEXTs because I am a woman, and to be a woman is to live a life of body horror … I wrote a story about all the horror and power and sensuality and rage of the bodies of women, metamorphic … I am a woman. I live in a world of body horror.” In InSEXts, the grotesque transformation of the female body engenders anxiety because it blurs the boundaries between normal and abnormal, human and monster, and forces us to acknowledge that only monsters, who are often relegated to the margins, experience autonomy. Monsters possess what most people desire, which is the ability to live without conformity to social norms. Throughout history, the figure of the monster has evolved to reflect the changing culture. Robin Wood’s chapter “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s” contends that the monster is “more protean, changing from period to period as society’s basic fears clothe themselves in fashionable or immediately accessible garments” (31). Even though the appearance of monsters may change over time, they still exist in every era and continually remind us that what is truly dangerous is blind conformity. Monsters are, by their very nature, unrestrained. They resist authority, and they remind us that difference exists and is dangerous to the heteronormative culture. One of the most recent monsters that create terror for the heteronormative, patriarchal culture is the empowered lesbian. In their human forms, Lady Bertram and Mariah are desired by men and endure their hungry, sexual gaze. However, after transformation into their insect bodies, they become a formidable force and liberate themselves from the confines of their rigid society. As Jane Caputi maintains, “femaleness, animality, sexuality, nature, death, and darkness are increasingly seen as something abject, chaotic, ‘dirty’ to be feared and controlled …” (317). In this instance, their monstrous appearance is not only dangerous to the culture, but it frees them from an oppressive culture. This bodily transformation is also where a celebration and an unleashing of women’s erotic power can help women fully possess their natural power and achieve autonomy. In an ironic twist, it is their monstrous form that frees them and their human form that entraps them. Thus, instead of suppressing their monstrousness, they embrace it. Bennett’s narrative, when combined with Kristantina’s artwork, celebrates the erotic nature of the women and suggests that when women acknowledge this power and claim authority over their bodies, they experience self-sufficiency. The series challenges and exposes the physical oppression women have endured at the hands of the patriarchy. Furthermore, the comic serves as a warning for women that when their natural power is controlled and oppressed, then they allow themselves to be regulated and silenced. The series seems to suggest that women’s

Gothic horror and the female body  195 writings, like women’s bodies, have been controlled by the patriarchy and that when women unbridle their creative force, a magical transformation happens. In addition, through the gothic lens, Bennett and Kristantina use their story and artwork to explore female sexuality and same-sex love.

The gothic, gender, and lesbian sexuality Although many scholars have acknowledged the connection between homosexuality and the gothic genre, only a few scholars, such as George Haggerty and Paulina Palmer, have given it serious attention. George Haggerty’s book Queer Gothic offers an understanding of how gothic texts depict sexuality. Haggerty claims, “It is no mere coincidence that the cult of gothic fiction reached its apex at the very moment when gender and sex were beginning to be codified for modern culture … Transgressive social-sexual relations are the most basic common denominator of gothic writing, …”(2). Like Haggerty, Paulina Palmer—whose book, Lesbian Gothic, was published in 1999—focuses on the connection between lesbianism and the gothic genre. The gothic, according to Palmer, is attractive for queer theorists because it “reveals an element of ideological ambiguity” and “it challenges conventions of realism and expos[es] the fragility of the status quo by focusing on dimensions of existence that transcend the everyday reality …” (9). In other words, gothic texts reveal the gray line that exists between binary divisions. The gothic offers lesbians a critical approach to explore and challenge traditional notions of patriarchal gender constructions and heteronormative behavior, which is why it is perfectly suited as a lens through which close analysis of lesbian-themed texts can be achieved. The gothic is often celebrated for its tendency to offer simultaneously terrifying and transgressive images, thus commenting on cultural anxieties in potentially progressive fashion. As it concerns gender representation and lesbian sexuality, the gothic is a genre that not only reveals how gender and sexuality are culturally defined and controlled, but it also exposes the culture’s fear of taboo or transgressive sexuality. Harry Benshoff argues that “queerness disrupts narrative equilibrium and sets in motion a questioning of the status quo, and in many cases within fantastic literature, the nature of reality itself” (93). The queer is associated with the other, and as Benshoff argues, queers “are permanent residents of shadowy spaces: at worst caves, castles, and closets, and at best marginalized and oppressed position within the cultural hegemony” (98). Those individuals who challenge the heterosexual, binary constructions of gender and sexual norms are social pariahs, a status that not only marginalizes them but also targets them as threatening to the established social order. Furthermore, gothic works usually appear when boundaries, especially sexual boundaries, are transgressed.

196  Michelle D. Wise As Davenport-Hines states, the “gothic has always had the versatility to provide imagery to express the anxieties of successive historical epochs” (1). While the genre is noted because of its ability to unravel cultural anxieties, especially during historical moments, it also excites and evokes an emotional response from readers; therefore, the gothic genre continues to remain popular. In gothic writing, women, especially lesbians, who exist in the margins of a patriarchal society, are usually rendered powerless. However, in Bennett’s plot, when the women recognize and act on their lesbian desire, they become empowered, suggesting what the heteronormative culture fears: lesbian sexuality, when unrestrained, is powerful, threatening, and irrepressible. According to Maria Purves, [w]omen writers and artists have used gothic professionally or expediently to make a political point, or to critique their culture… For many, no medium other than the gothic was possible: these are the women writers and artists whose work embodies the gothic and takes them into dark places (1). Women writers have exploited the genre because it enables them to expose the horrors of their lived realities through their works of fiction. In addition, the genre enables them to discover and shed light on taboo sexuality in a particularly transgressive manner. In InSEXts, Bennett’s gothic-driven narrative does not directly deal with the women coming to terms with their sexuality; it is not a coming out story in the traditional fashion. Instead, this story is a different kind of coming out story. While the fact that Lady Bertram and Mariah being lovers is integral to the story, the central focus is how they navigate and celebrate their relationship, become rescuers for other enslaved individuals, and live freely in an oppressive and unwelcoming society. Lady Bertram and Mariah’s relationship can only exist outside the heteronormative construction, which deems them as “deviant, breaking no written laws but an unexpressed and forbidden social taboo” ­(Llewellyn 210). Instead of punishing the women for acting on their desire, the story celebrates lesbian sexuality as natural and empowering. The series not only recognizes same-sex desire, but it was created for the lesbian gaze. By presenting the female body as an object of desire for women, the art work celebrates women’s intimacy and erotic nature. The first issue of the series clearly establishes this series as a celebration of lesbian relationships. Early in the comic, Mariah impregnates Lady Bertram with their child. Lady Bertram, then, in turn, impregnates Harry. Harry dies from giving birth and the women have their child. Later in the series, we discover that Mariah has special abilities, which are heightened during love-making to Lady Bertram and which allow her to psychically see other places. The lesbian storyline is undoubtedly

Gothic horror and the female body  197 handled with much consideration and care for lesbian readers. The relationship between Lady Bertram and Mariah is not only based on their sexual attraction for each other, but it is also based on their desire to have a family of their own. The women recognize their social status as others and know that they must overcome several obstacles in order to be together and live freely; however, they realize that they must break the social chains that confine them. As a result, the narrative is not just celebrating their relationship, but it also reveals that they, simply by loving each other and creating a family, have come out from under the weight of their social status as Victorian women and lesbians. However, in the first story arc, one female character becomes a visual representation of the cultural values of the era: the Hag. By its very definition, a hag is usually described as a witch and a repulsive woman, hence, a social outcast. In this comic, the Hag represents women who seek to oppress other women. Kristantina’s spectacular artwork reflects the Hag’s hideousness in a way that not only highlights her monstrosity, but it also reflects her evil nature. While Lady Bertram and Mariah are depicted as butterfly-like creatures, Kristantina draws the Hag with several sharp, pointy teeth that crowd her mouth and with piercing, firelike eyes. In the fourth issue, readers learn that the Hag is an “old and petty, and insidious” creature who “uses hosts to do its bidding” and “finds the weak, the hateful, the self-loathing … and it worms into their hearts” (20). The Hag is revealed as Madame H., and she has enslaved other women including Sylvia, Lady Bertram’s sister-in-law. While posing as a wedded woman, Sylvia Bertram is regarded as a lady and welcomed into various social circles, which also grants the Hag entry into these gatherings. In the third issue, Mariah confronts Sylvia and demands to know why she hates Lady Bertram. Sylvia’s response reveals that she resents Lady Bertram’s social status as a wealthy woman who has been protected from hardships such as poverty and the “danger of the real world” (12). According to Sylvia, women should be content with the benefits of a marriage that offers them a place in London society. Sylvia continues her speech in the third issue by adding that women “have the chance to be the angels of the house…virgins, wives, mothers, grace incarnate…. yet they are ungrateful…Spite is the nature of women. To be dissatisfied, to be disobedient…,” and she begins citing women from the Bible (13). In Victorian times, women were viewed as economic property. In fact, Harry Bertram only married Lady Bertram because she provided him with a beneficial dowry. Sylvia espouses her culture’s attitudes toward women; however, because Lady Bertram is not only a cultural other figure, she longs for freedom and independence which makes her dangerous because she resists being controlled. Furthermore, the fact that she loves and desires another woman, in this case, Mariah, suggests that Lady Bertram refuses to succumb to the cultural norms of heterosexuality.

198  Michelle D. Wise However, instead of resisting, she embraces her desire and otherness, which liberates and transforms her into a creature who rescues other cultural outsiders. In an interesting development, Lady Bertram exploits her social status to free and save others, such as the women who work for Madame H. and who are trapped by the same cultural values. This twist echoes what the creators of this series accomplish: a narrative where women can free themselves and each other. While Lady Bertram and Mariah celebrate and embrace their difference, the Hag is a constant reminder of the oppressive nature of their society and the idea that women can often be their own worst enemies. Sylvia’s comments about women and marriage only support the role that women occupied in Victorian England. When women married, they adopted their husband’s identity and surrendered their own, and for women like Lady Bertram, this ideology is dangerous to one’s selfhood. However, the real danger is the Hag because in Issue 5, we learn that she is “a woman whose hatred of women exceeds even your [George’s] own” (7). The Hag symbolizes how dangerous it is when women oppress other women to uphold the values of patriarchy. The Hag seems motivated by her own desire to control other women. When she enslaves the weak, including the prostitutes, she preys on individuals whom the culture does not value, so their loss is of no great consequence to the culture’s stability. In fact, some in that cultural landscape might see her as performing a “cultural cleansing” of the “undesirables.” While Lady Bertram and Mariah can unleash their sexuality and act on their desire for each other, the Hag represents the oppression that women endure at the hands of a patriarchal society. Their rage is re-focused and unleased upon innocents. In the final two issues of the first volume, we discover that Lady Bertram is planning to confront the Hag in her brothel, so she and her friend, William, devise a plan to gain entry to the house where the Hag is disguised as Madame H. In Issue 6, after they secure entrance to the brothel, they speak to one of the enslaved girls, Hattie, who reveals that the women are all there for various reasons: “some here, aye, they started because they was goin’ hungry…because their parents beat them, because some lordling done them wrong, hurt them, ruined them…” (7). Hattie tells Lady Bertram that when Madame H. came, they “loved her” and that they desired to please her (7). However, the girls soon discovered Madame H.’s evil nature and that “pain is all she desires” (8). Hattie reveals that it did not take the women long to realize that they were trapped and could not escape the wrath of Madame H. Armed with this information, Lady Bertram wages an attack on the Hag. During the attack, the Hag transforms into a hideous creature and reveals how she came to power. She says, “There is such wonder and grace in women. Unless they can be taught to hate themselves and each other… they might overrun the earth. Hatred of women is the oldest law there

Gothic horror and the female body  199 has ever been. Fortunately, it is a law your kind can be trained to obey” (15). The Hag has been able to use women against each other. However, when she attempts to pit Mariah and Lady Bertram against each other, she is unsuccessful, which suggests that the bond the lovers share is more powerful than the Hag’s hatred of women. Lady Bertram, in her anger, fully transforms into her insect self and battles with the Hag. Up until this point, Lady Bertram tries to control and repress her insect self; however, once she fully embraces it and unleashes it, she defeats the Hag. When the Hag is destroyed and the enslaved women are free, the cycle of hatred among women is broken. However, Lady Bertram is left drained from her battle and must rest to recover. The story ends with her resting and Mariah waiting for her to awake. Bennett’s narrative suggests that lesbian bonds are powerful, which is evidenced by the bond that Lady Bertram and Mariah share. It is only appropriate, then, that Lady Bertram is the one who defeats the Hag because she, unlike the Hag, does not harbor a hatred for women. Instead, she loves and possesses an innate desire to protect women. The character of the Hag reflects stereotypically negative behavior associated with women who seem to delight in tearing each other down instead of uniting to become a powerful force. Thus, the character of the Hag is representative of women who judge, condemn, and punish other women for not following their prescribed gender roles. In other words, the Hag sees it as her place to keep other women in line. In the seventh and final issue of Volume 1, the women return to the Bertram house and recover from their battle with the Hag. They have rescued a young girl, Elsie, who was held captive by the Hag. Back at the house, they realize that Elise does not speak much because she “was told it was my most charming quality among the men” (15). Mariah responds with “Please…speak. Please, please…always speak” (15). This exchange between them reveals that women, from a very young age, have been indoctrinated to remain silent because silence impressed men as charming. However, Mariah’s encouragement is not only for Elise to speak, but she begs all women to “Speak. Sing. And try to find a way to be happy” (16–17). Bennett, through the character of Mariah, is imploring women to forget their cultural training to remain silent because it is charming to men. Instead, Bennett’s narrative suggests that to remain silent is dangerous because it means yielding one’s power to another, more dominating force, and the cost is the loss of one’s autonomy.

Conclusion While working within a primarily male-dominated industry, Bennett and Kristantina have not only carved out a space for themselves as creators, but they have also created a fun and campy graphic novel that invites lesbian fans to the comic book table. For lesbian fans, this series

200  Michelle D. Wise fills a void in an industry that has often marginalized them. For example, utilizing the gothic genre, these graphic novelists have created a narrative that exposes the oppression that lesbians have endured for decades, and they firmly establish that there are, indeed, “monsters” like us. Bennett and Kristantina’s graphic novel both celebrates their authority as a creative force and establishes that lesbians, like the gothic genre and comic books, will not be dismissed, devalued, or relegated to the margins. Instead, this series celebrates the visibility of women, both creators and fans, in this arena. As Cocca maintains, “comic audiences are not merely passive consumers. They can decide how they will receive and analyze objectified images, and they can decide how they will accede to or reinvent or protest those images” (16). This comics offers lesbian fans a chance to reclaim their place in both history and the comic book industry. The series also challenges the mainstream culture’s marginalization of individuals who live on the fringes in a society that repeatedly attempts to silence their voice. The mere existence of this series suggests that marginalized voices will not be silent or regulated to the fringes. Additionally, the graphic narrative draws our attention to the fact that the Victorian era is not so different from our own era. In Victorian times, the roles of women were tightly defined and contained. Victorian women were thought to be incapable of experiencing desire much less be sexual. Such narratives shatter traditional Victorian concepts of female desire and sexuality. Lesbians, who exist on the fringes of heteronormative structure, had their identities closeted and voices silenced, but this series celebrates the authority of the female creators and lesbianism without apology. As Darieck Scott and Ramzi Fawaz argue, “… comics are rife with social and aesthetic cues commonly attached to queer life” (197). This graphic novel is representative of lesbians’ lack of identity and place because, regardless of the time, they exist outside social boundaries and are thus marginalized. As a result, lesbian history is virtually non-­existent, but InSEXts makes visible the invisible by acknowledging lesbians have a place in history. Much like the gothic literature of the Victorian era reflects repressed female desire and sexuality, this series functions in a similar fashion. Comic books offer female writers and artists an opportunity to unleash their creative force and challenge the hegemonic structure.

Works Cited Bennett, Marguerite et al. InSEXts, vol. 1, AfterShock Comics, LLC, 2017. Benshoff, Harry M. “The Monster and the Homosexual.” Horror, the Film Reader, edited by Mark Jancovich, Routledge, 2002, pp. 91–102. Bordo, Susan et al. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity.” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, edited by Katie Conboy, Columbia UP, 1997, pp. 90–110.

Gothic horror and the female body  201 Brooks, Peter. Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative. Harvard UP, 1993. Caputi, Jane. Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture. U of Wisconsin P/Popular P, 2004. Chute, Hillary L. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. Columbia UP, 2010. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs, vol. 1, no. 4, 1 July 1976, pp. 875–893. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/3173239ref=searchgateway:c21050ce135b44757931a829f4703f3d. Cocca, Carolyn. Superwomen: Gender, Power, and Representation. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015. Danziger-Russell, Jacqueline. Girls and Their Comics Finding a Female Voice in Comic Book Narrative. The Scarecrow Press, 2013. Davenport-Hines, R. P. T. Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil, and Ruin. North Point, 2000. Haggerty, George E. Queer Gothic. U of Illinois, 2006. Llewellyn, Mark. “‘Queer? Should I say it is Criminal!: Sarah Waters’ Affinity.” Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 13, no. 3, November 2004, pp. 203–214. Lorde, Audre et al. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, edited by Katie Conboy, Columbia UP, 1997, pp. 90–110. McGrath, Charles. “Not Funnies.” The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Company, 11 July 2004, www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/magazine/ not-funnies.html. Palmer, Paulina. Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions. Cassell, 1999. Popoca, Manny. “PopCultHQ Comic Book Review: AfterShock Comics – InSEXts #1 –.” –, 14 Dec. 2015, www.popculthq.com/2015/12/14/popculthqcomic-book-review-aftershock-comics-insexts-1/. Punter, David, and Glennis Byron. The Gothic. Blackwell Pub., 2004. Purves, Maria. Introduction. Women and Gothic. Cambridge Scholars, 2014,. Reyes, Xavier Aldana. Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film. U of Wales P, 2014. Gothic Literary Studies. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true& db=nlebk&AN=800541&site=ehost-live. Rice, Carla. Becoming Women : The Embodied Self in Image Culture. U of Toronto P, Scholarly Publishing Division, 2014. EBSCOhost, search.­ ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=e000xna& AN=704527&site=eds-live&custid=s9007744. Scott, Darieck, and Ramzi Fawaz. “Introduction: Queer about Comics.” American Literature, vol. 90, no. 2, 2018, pp. 197–219. doi:10.1215/00029831– 4564274. Thomas, Ardel. Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity. U of Wales P, 2012. Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997. Wood, Robin. “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s.” Horror, the Film Reader, edited by Mark Jancovich, Routledge, 2002, pp. 25–32.

13 (De)Forging Canadian identity in Michael DeForge’s Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero Jamie Ryan According to cultural critics, Canadian identity is infamously hard to define. Canadian centennial scholars (who were active in the 1960s and 1970s) believed Canadians lacked a history to call their own, thanks to the influence of British colonial rule, as well as the dominance of the United States. Jonathan Kertzer termed our national character “elusive” (37), while another Canadian, Robert Kroetsch, took this idea further by suggesting that our nebulous national identity defines us and “holds our story together” (61). In other words, our lack of a cohesive identity, or national narrative, is ultimately our identity. Yet, despite our “elusive” character, there has traditionally been one agreed-upon symbol of Canadian nationhood: nature. Nature-as-national-identity is most clearly readable in the positioning of Canada with winter, wildlife, and forests (specifically the maple leaf which is on the Canadian flag). Feminist and posthuman scholar Donna Haraway writes, “Nature is only the raw material of culture, appropriated, preserved, enslaved, exalted, or otherwise made flexible for disposal by culture in the logic of capitalist colonialism” (13). The nature-culture binary is, most often, hierarchical with culture defining nature and how nature is used in cultural frameworks. The manipulation of nature in cultural works is explicit in Canadian literature, where explorations of nature, or the wilderness,1 are continually framed as metaphors for reflecting upon personal or national identities. Nature made sense as a major concern/ topic for colonial authors, but though Canada has become an industrial and urban country, the (over)emphasis on nature in Canadian literature has remained. Such remnants are at the very least nostalgic or anachronistic, and at most, they are problematically dishonest about the more multicultural present of Canada. In their edited collection, Greening the Maple, Ella Soper and Nicholas Bradley attempt to dispel the “enduring stereotype…that Canadian literature revolves around descriptions of nature” (xvi). In this chapter, I follow their lead to debunk the Canadian nature myths that perpetuate a national, and often nationalistic, identity through an analysis of Michael DeForge’s 2017 graphic novel, Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero, published by Drawn & Quarterly Press. Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero resists Canadian nature myths and what they supposedly

(De)Forging Canadian identity  203 say about the nation. In Sticks Angelica, DeForge (de)forges classical knowledge and expectations in order to promote new ways of thinking about national identity in Canada; nature myths are nostalgic and unchanging, whereas the graphic novel stresses the need to recognize and accept change when it comes to both national and personal identities. Sticks Angelica challenges and parodies a national identity based on nature by presenting nature as profoundly strange and different from its conception in the usual nature myths. In doing so, the text conceives of nature, and by extension national identity, as a performative act that is constantly changing. Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero features Sticks Angelica, a “[f]ormer: Olympian, poet, scholar, sculptor, activist, Governor General, entrepreneur, line cook, headmistress, Mounty, columnist, libertarian, [and] cellist” who moves to the fictional Monterey National Park just outside Ottawa (DeForge, Sticks). 2 Sticks is continually let down by the reality of Monterey because her idea of nature is informed by what “the countryside represents for a lot of Canadians” (DeForge, “Country Comics and City Comics Panel”) due to the frequently perpetuated and imagined myths. Sticks Angelica mostly follows its titular hero, but it is also filled with a disparate cast of characters with diverse storylines: Bear’s attempts to form a community in the park; Lisa Hanawalt’s journey from a moose to a human; the transformation of a feral child, Girl McNally, into a Songbird; an unrequited love triangle between an eel, rabbit, and human/animal; a polygamous relationship between a pair of geese and a mosquito; and the attempts of a metafictional Michael DeForge to write a biography of Sticks. The graphic novel uses multiple identities to explore and revoke the notion that a single shared identity can properly represent a group or bring the “represented” group closer together. The graphic novel is about Sticks living in Monterey National Park, but it is not a classical story about nature in that she does not conquer nature, nor does she commune with nature. Rather, the graphic novel is about adaptation, evolution, and the construction of self, both physically and emotionally.

(De)Forging Canadian nature myths Five nature myths seem to haunt Canadian identity. Although these nature myths are not exclusive to Canada, they are pervasive in Canadian popular discourse, and like most myths, they are often paradoxical and inconsistent. Roland Barthes writes, “myth has the task of giving a historical intention a natural justification…myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things: in it, things lose the memory that they once were made” (254–255). In Canadian literature, nature has been cultivated as a cultural symbol to such an extent that nature, as an identity marker, now seems “natural” and the history of such a

204  Jamie Ryan construction has disappeared. As a result, the myths of nature-as-nation have become, in many ways, more real than actual, lived experience and certainly more present than the urban reality of Canada. In brief, these five myths are (1) nature is the truest symbol of Canada, (2) nature is dangerous, (3) Canadian identity is communal, (4) the city is not Canadian (or a fitting symbol of Canada), and (5) men conquer nature while women represent nature.3 Nature myth #1: nature is the truest symbol of Canada The association between Canada and nature is made to seem natural, but, in fact, the insistence on nature in Canadian literature has a long and artificially constructed history. Even though most Canadians live in, or around, cities, there is still an enduring notion that for a work to be deemed Canadian, it must deal with nature. Bruce Littlejohn and Jon Pearce write, what makes Canadian literature unique “from most other national literatures … is the influence of the wild” (11). “The wild” is not only what distinguishes our national literature from others, but it is also believed to have a deep psychological influence on Canadians and how they come to define themselves. This notion is further shown when James Polk writes, “[T]he wilderness…is a part of every Canadian’s idea of himself and his country” (13–14). In other words, the influence of “the wilderness” is supposedly so great that it will be a determiner of personal identity, regardless of whether or not a Canadian has ever seen or been in the wilderness.4 This idea is obviously false, but still the belief that nature is somehow the epicenter of Canadian identity lingers in popular media representations of the nation and in works accepted into the Canadian literary canon. E.K. Brown succinctly categorizes the origin of nature as a necessary topic for a work to be considered distinctly “Canadian”: “Canadians were impelled to write descriptions either of the landscape round about them or of the peculiar circumstances in which they lived: these they must describe for themselves since the material was unknown to anyone else” (143). Nature as fundamental to Canadian identity and literature originated with the start of the printed (settler) word in this nation. Later on, the Confederation Poets—Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campbell Scott—expounded upon nature-as-a-Canadian-topic to distinguish Canada from Britain in the 1880s and 1890s. The Confederation Poets’ popularity (and their brand of nationalism), largely due to literary critics celebrating them and using them to mark the beginning of the Canadian canon, created a blueprint for Canadian poets for decades to follow: to be in the Canadian canon means one writes about nature (and is a white male). The Confederation Poets’ influence has been so strong and lasting that Donna Bennett writes, there is an “assumption that existed in Canada until the

(De)Forging Canadian identity  205 mid-1960s that poetry was the central genre and the one that contained the ‘best’ Canadian writing” (136). Yet, again, there is nothing natural about conscripting nature as a symbol of Canada; the unnaturalness of such a connection is shown, perhaps, most clearly in Canadian film. The majority of films from the “Top 10 Canadian Films of All Time” lists, put out roughly every ten years by the Toronto International Film Festival, are urban films dealing with major city centers like Winnipeg, Montreal, and Toronto. Similarly, the most famous Canadian Hollywood directors5 do not create rural Canadian films; instead, their work is urban-centric. Canadian film’s decidedly urban canon helps reveal the artificiality of nature as Canadian in literature and its percolation into cultural representations. Similarly, in DeForge’s Sticks Angelica, nature is not a true symbol of Canada; in fact, nature is not even presented as honest. In the text, the animals of Monterey Park construct highly cultivated and fictitious identities that drastically mask their true selves; perhaps the best example of this comes from the Canada Geese. The graphic novel largely, and purposefully, avoids symbols of Canadian-ness drawn from nature; maple trees and leaves are conspicuously absent in Monterey Park as are beavers, loons, Canadian horses, moose, wolves, or polar bears— animals often representative of Canada. The only distinctly Canadian animal that DeForge employs in Sticks Angelica is the Canada Goose, which is generally agreed upon to be an aggressive pest and definitely not a promoted image of Canadian-ness. However, the geese in the text have a very different reputation than they do in real life. While the inhabitants of the park are being introduced at the start of Sticks Angelica, a goose says, “Geese are supposed to be Canada’s most trustworthy creatures” (emphasis mine) to which the other goose says, “That’s just propaganda from the Goose lobby” (DeForge). Since geese are the only recognizably and distinctly Canadian animal in the graphic novel, they function as a sort of stand-in for national identity; their false promotion as “Canada’s most trustworthy creatures” points not only to the alterity of the text, but also to how national symbols are often constructed not from lived experience but are pulled from a perhaps incomplete collective memory. Additionally, the use of “supposed” by the first goose demonstrates how this myth of geese as “Canada’s most trustworthy creatures” sets up an expectation for the geese. When the first goose feels like it is being un-gooselike, it is betraying the collective narrative of what it means to be a goose in Canada. Moreover, in Sticks Angelica, geese become aligned with nationalism as the word “Canada” is only said by or to them.6 Their false and cultivated identities question the conscious construction of national narratives and how “trustworthy” these identities actually are. In the graphic novel, nature is not the truest symbol of Canada; in fact, nature is just as manipulated as identity in urban environments.

206  Jamie Ryan Nature myth #2: nature is dangerous Of course, nature can be dangerous, just as urban or rural life can be dangerous, but Canadian literature tends to over-emphasize the dangers of the wild, and nature-as-threatening is frequently a main point of these texts. Frye notes, “Nature is consistently sinister and menacing in Canadian poetry” (143); Margaret Atwood shares this belief and goes so far as to, famously, write, “The central symbol for Canada,” especially in nature, “is undoubtedly survival” (27). Rather than being framed as indifferent to humans, nature is framed as outright “menacing,” and perhaps even deadly. In other words, in the centennial structuralist view and in popular conversations, nature is implicitly representative of the death drive. However, in Sticks Angelica, the death drive is embodied in the political body, that of Sticks’s politician father and later in the conservative lawyer Otter-With-Mushroom. Sticks’s father functions as a death figure from his first full-page appearance about halfway through the text, which is most overtly shown when Sticks’s father uses a depiction of his skull on his new re-election poster (DeForge, Figure 13.1).

Figure 13.1  S ticks’s father’s re-election poster from Michael DeForge’s Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero, Drawn & Quarterly, 2017.  Used with permission from Drawn & Quarterly.

(De)Forging Canadian identity  207 In the graphic novel, the city, and particularly urban politics, is treated as “consistently sinister and menacing,” and it is the overbearing political strictures of the city that cause Sticks to flee to Monterey National Park. Often, when the urban is depicted as dangerous, it is because of blue-collar crime—especially in popular comics and even more so in the superhero genre. However, in Sticks Angelica, the politicians and their white-collar friends are the criminals. For instance, about halfway through the graphic novel, Sticks details a Christmas party from her youth. At this party, held at the Angelica household, her father’s friends pin down a small underage boy and chop off his long hair against his will, so Sticks’s “father enacted his famous ‘No Laws Christmas’ policy to protect himself and his friends from scandal. In the spirit of the holidays, all crimes committed on Christmas are forgiven by the crown” (DeForge). Sticks reports the abuse of the small boy to Élodie, a Mountie stationed outside her bedroom, but as Élodie moves forward with the case, Sticks’s father stops her, and through unexplained machinations, “Élodie, my first friend, died in a military prison” which causes Sticks to say, “Christmas is a holiday for criminal men.” Christmas, one of the most visible symbols of a happy and safe Western family, and in turn society, becomes a criminal holiday both because of the illegal treatment of Élodie and because “all crimes” are legal on Christmas. The masking of criminality under the banner of a recognized (Western) symbol again points to the power of national narratives to subsume and normalize behaviors: in this case, criminal behaviors. Thus, Sticks’s father (and his embodiment of urban society and politics) is aligned with both death and criminality, thereby placing the death drive of the graphic novel outside of nature and in the sphere of politics. In other words, the city/ polis ends up being more dangerous, both to Sticks’s life and identity, than nature. Nature myth #3: Canadian identity is communal The idea of Canadian identity being communal, rather than individualistic like the United States, is based on the notion that communities were necessary in colonial times for settlers to survive both the physical and psychological threats of the wilderness; Frye terms this a “garrison mentality” (227). Frye derives his theory from “the earliest maps of the country [where] the only inhabited centres are forts, and that remains true of the cultural maps for a much later time” (227). Such a mentality was “bound to develop,” he believes, because settlers were “confronted with a huge, unthinking, menacing, and formidable physical setting” (227), and “[t]he real terror comes when the individual feels himself becoming an individual, pulling away from the group, losing the sense of driving power that the group gives him” (228). However, a variation of this mentality lingers to this day through the way Canadian identity is

208  Jamie Ryan framed as communal. Frye, initially, intended for the garrison mentality to denote a community that was besieged by outside forces, yet in the twenty-first century, the outside forces supposedly threatening Canadians are not physical but cultural and psychological (i.e., the influence of the United States). Regardless, the notion of Canada-as-communal is still popular today, and this garrison mentality implicitly draws attention to who is included and excluded in the communal identity of the nation. Sticks Angelica challenges Frye’s notion of the garrison mentality and its enduring argument that Canadian identity is communal by making community formations fail. Instead, he positions characters’ identities as individual and anti-relational. This point is most explicitly shown through the character of Bear, whose storyline revolves around his attempts to create a community in Monterey. When Michael DeForge (the meta-character in the text) first arrives at the park, Bear tells Michael about his previous attempts to build community through “a community bulletin board but the other animals mostly…use[]it for graffiti,” so he thinks “[a] newsletter might be better” as “[i]t’d give the community here a good sense of what I’m trying to do” (DeForge). Bear’s invocation of “community” imposes his own idea of what community is on the other animals, but these attempts are unwelcome as seen by the animals’ graffiti; they literally overwrite his attempts to disseminate a narrative, which can be read as multiple individuals working against, and over, a single shared story. In other words, the shared narrative of community, or a communal identity, is rejected by the actual inhabitants of the park. The text never states if Bear ever successfully publishes his newsletter, but it appears as if he does not. In Sticks Angelica, the animals—including the biologically human characters who declare themselves animals (Sticks) or transform into animals (Girl McNally)—are all positioned as individuals who are isolated from one another and who never truly connect. As a result, they work against accepted conceptions of nature as an ecosystem or, more broadly, a community. The final page of the text concludes with eight individual panels for the central characters of the text, but their stories no longer intersect, and they all end up alone (except for the queer interspecies polygamy of the goose and mosquito). Thus, the final page seems to be the only thing the characters share. In other words, their stories may interconnect but only for brief moments; ultimately, these characters are alone. During “A Very Sticks Angelica Christmas: Part Five,” Bear laments, “‘Community’…Sometimes I wonder if we’re not just a bunch of animals.” The wildlife animals in Monterey are closer to “a bunch of animals,” or “a bunch of” individuals, than they are a community. The animals as well as the human, or perhaps more accurately the more-­ human characters, overtly overturn the garrison mentality/communal identity. Other examples of how the animal characters in Sticks overturn the garrison mentality include when Sticks says she moved “to the forest

(De)Forging Canadian identity  209 to cut ties with [her] family” during her big Christmas speech, or when Girl McNally is abandoned in the forest as a baby only to become part of the community of Songbirds, but in her final panel she is not part of this family but a singular “Songbird” or solo “recording artist.” Nature myths postulate that the wilderness is dangerous, so community is necessary to survive physically and psychologically, but such is not the case in Sticks Angelica. Instead, city life and, in turn, Canadian society are presented as “sinister and menacing,” and individualism is depicted as a safer way to deal with the physical and psychological impact of (self-­ serving) politics; characters work against Frye’s persistent myth of the garrison mentality. Sticks Angelica ultimately posits self-­identification rather than a shared identity as more realistic and beneficial. Nature myth #4: the city is not canadian Douglas Ivison and Justin D. Edwards note that for close to a century, most Canadians have not lived in or near nature; they write, “Canada is an urban country. Indeed, in some respects, Canada is one of the most urban countries on earth, with the vast majority of its population concentrated in a handful of cities,” but still “the city is not yet truly accepted as Canadian” (3–4). Even so, nature persists as an image of Canadian identity, which as Richard Cavell notes is extremely problematic as “[t]he refusal to acknowledge the urban in Canadian criticism is the refusal to acknowledge this long history of abstraction, of colonization, of expansionism, of environmental change” (29). Furthermore, “the refusal to acknowledge the urban” is the refusal to acknowledge the multiculturalism and diversity of the city. The city is a complicated symbol in cultural conversations because not only does it work against nature, but it also illuminates the modernity and colonization that make such cities and their diverse populations possible. Moreover, rural or pastoral writing tends to romanticize a simpler past, which is enormously problematic when that past is a homogenous white identity of farming towns7 and the present city is multicultural. Ivison and Edwards note the city is still viewed as “American” and that “the myth of Canada as a non-urban place…has also been used to distinguish us from our southern neighbour” (197). However, to push these myths further, the city is constructed as distinctly American and as a symbol of capitalism, while the wilderness is anachronistically constructed as Canadian and a symbol of an undefined economic system.8 Ultimately, though, the myth breaks down because Canada is very clearly a capitalist society, and the refusal to acknowledge the city is a refusal to admit its own capitalism and its similarity to American identity. Sticks Angelica does not uphold this myth as Ottawa, Canada’s capital and one of its largest cities, is framed as the center of the nation. The divide between wilderness and urban space is most overt when Sticks’s

210  Jamie Ryan brother goes to Monterey at the end of the graphic novel to ask her to return to the unnamed city, presumably Ottawa, because “[t]he country is in chaos” (DeForge). Without her brother’s information, Sticks would have had no idea about the “chaos” because everything in Monterey seems normal, thereby illustrating the divide between Canada’s actual identity (the city) and its imagined one (the wilderness). Here nature fails as a stand-in for national identity, so the graphic novel reverses traditional Canadian identification: the city becomes the locus of ­Canadian-ness while nature becomes the alternative. Monterey National Park is the antithesis to dominant Canadian society presented in the text. More than this, the strangeness of the park and its inhabitants exhibits the possibilities of a national identity outside the homogeneity of Sticks’s father and Canadian society. In other words, nature is incorrectly scripted as a national symbol when it is really representative of a national alternative. Nature myth #5: men conquer nature and women represent nature Not specific to Canada, this nature myth is rooted in prehistoric fertility rites that were expounded upon in the sexist gender beliefs of Social Darwinism during the Victorian era and which continue to haunt contemporary society. Jennifer Hargreaves writes on Victorian gender dynamics: “[M]en were identified with Culture…women were symbolically aligned to Nature,” and so “[m]en were characterized as naturally aggressive, competitive and incisive…in contrast, it was a popular idea that women were inherently emotional, co-operative and passive” (43). These beliefs pertain to Western literature in that men traditionally go out into the wilderness and conquer nature while women dually represent nature as well as the home. The feminized landscape has a long history, as seen in pastoral poetry, in Romanticism, and more recently in descriptions of the United States, but in Canada, the landscape tends to be masculinized. Since nature is dangerous, in Canadian mythos, nature needs to be masculine in order to prove the masculinity of the explorer; a menacing, feminized landscape would possibly cast the explorer as effeminate and prove little if he successfully conquered it. On the American tradition of the wilderness, literary critic Nina Baym writes, [T]he essential quality of America comes to reside in its unsettled wilderness and the opportunities that such a wilderness offers to the individual [who is always male in the American canon] as the medium on which he may inscribe, unhindered, his own destiny and his own nature. (132) However, in Canadian literature, nature is most often cast as dangerous (Nature Myth #2) and when someone does venture into nature, it is not

(De)Forging Canadian identity  211 with the same sense of adventure as in the American tradition but more with a sense of trepidation. Traditionally, it is generally a Canadian male who enters nature, as in the American myth; the rare occasion when a female enters nature is often treated as a metaphorical union. Such is not the case in Sticks Angelica as Sticks is constantly in conflict with nature; she never really experiences the sublime, let alone a prolonged, union with the landscape. Although Sticks aligns more with the U.S. nature myth than with the Canadian, as an antisocial woman, she challenges the American myth as well. As Baym notes, in the American myth, nature is feminized, and there is a (female) domesticator whom the protagonists must reject before they enter nature. The rejection is presented as an opportunity: “what can nature do for me…what can it give me?” (Baym 135). But again, Sticks rejects this calculus, and her journey into and through the wilderness is not the masculine rite of passage it tends to be, nor does it follow some masculine hero’s journey or some feminine union with nature. Instead, the graphic novel is more of a fantasy text concerned with the every day. Sticks moves into nature, saves a child, and then continues living. She does not change. She does not learn any life-changing lessons. Her only epiphany occurs before the graphic novel begins: she moves to nature to be alone but then realizes that she would never be alone in nature as it is just as filled with (animal) life (DeForge, “Country Comics and City Comics Panel”). In fact, Sticks Angelica reads more like a story after the book is closed or the credits roll on screen, and this everyday-ness ties to how nature is depicted: it simply is. It is not overtly dangerous nor overwhelmingly safe; it is indifferent. Sticks does not see nature as an adventure, but rather as a means to help, as she says during her big Christmas speech, “obliterate myself” (DeForge). Nature is not an opening up of her world, but more of a closing down, or shrinking, of her world. D.G. Jones writes, “Modern literature is filled with images of the exile, the outsider, the alienated man” (7), but “man” is the key word here. Female outsiders are rare, and even rarer is a positive representation of a female outsider (especially one living in the woods), one not depicted as monstrous—think of the archetypal women figures such as the witch or the crone. Therefore, Sticks’s migration to the park is a political act: a refusal to conform to the dominant hegemony and patriarchy of Canadian society and politics. Sticks challenges traditional (and sexist) notions of what women are capable of and which roles they can perform in heteronormative society. Her life in the country comes to embody what queer theorist Jack Halberstam describes as “a feminist politics that issues not from a doing but from an undoing, not from a being or becoming women but from a refusal to be or to become a woman as she has been defined and imagined within Western philosophy” (124). Women in heteronormative society are still often regressively cast as reproducers and carers of children (and in turn futurity), and so her migration

212  Jamie Ryan to nature is not a refusal to be a mother or a refusal to (re)produce the nation; it is a refusal to be conscripted into these nationalistic formulations and a confirmation to live for herself. Furthermore, Amy Kaplan writes, “If domesticity plays a key role in imagining the nation as home, then women, positioned at the center of the home, play a major role in defining the contours of the nation” (184). Sticks, and her womanhood, cannot be positioned as ideological tools to reinforce the nation because her body is away from Ottawa, the ideological center of the nation, so, instead, she and the other animals decenter themselves from the nation and narratives enforced on citizens.

Forging a new vision of nature in Canada Frye writes that “our national consciousness” is largely built around “the unknown, the unrealized, the humanly undigested” landscape (222); however, instead of perpetuating these nature myths, DeForge turns “the unknown, the unrealized” of nature in Sticks Angelica into a creative space of re-imagination. Canadian nature myths are archaic and based on a mythologized settler ideology that has long since passed; the insistence of these myths is the insistence of trying to provide a (self-­ promoted and often fictitious) history to Canadian identity. Thus, these myths with their fixation on the past are not productive but stagnant. DeForge works against classic depictions of Canadian identity and their over-reliance on nature, but toward the end of the graphic novel, he offers a new, if comedic, idea of what Canadian identity could be. While Sticks Angelica is a strange comedic take on nature, it is also an implicit call for new, broader ways of imagining Canadian identity. The central thesis of the graphic novel is that things change and that to ignore or resist change is unnatural and restrictive. When Sticks and Lisa Hanawalt first meet, Lisa says to Sticks, “I’ve been trapped inside this moosely prison my entire life! I didn’t know an animal could be shaped like you until the day I saw you” (DeForge). Later, Lisa, who was born a moose, learns to become a human and integrates into the institution of law without anyone ever questioning if she is, in fact, a moose. Even when eating “nine million calories daily” while her coworkers watch in “disgust,”9 she is accepted because she performs personhood so convincingly. Along these same lines, Sticks realizes she is more like the animals in Monterey than the people in Ottawa. During her Christmas speech, Sticks declares, “I renounce my humanity and declare myself an animal.” Similarly, Girl transforms from a human to a Songbird, though her physical appearance does not change much. Change and the ability to cross over the lines separating established binaries like human/animal suggest the necessity of remaining open and the need to learn from one’s experiences. Lisa Hanawalt,10 who has experienced the power of change, delivers a speech during the trial of Girl that functions as a sort of pedagogical argument of the graphic novel. She says,

(De)Forging Canadian identity  213 Many forest things change, shed skins, transform. Dragonflies moult. Parasitic wasps will seize control of their hosts. A mosquito will live inside the head of a goose. I have blossomed from a moose to a lawyer. Beloved Folk Hero Sticks Angelica declared herself an unwashed animal last Christmas. Salmon swap from freshwater to saltwater. Girl McNally might have been born a guilty human, but she has lived life as something else entirely. I hereby motion to declare Girl McNally…an Ontario Songbird. Thus, change, not sameness, is natural. Sticks Angelica proposes that if we remain open and willing to experience new things, the future will remain open to us, both individually and collectively. Another example of how DeForge appropriates nature to overturn stereotypes about Canadian identity appears in “Sensual Canada,” which occurs in the last ten pages of the graphic novel. This section can be read as a response to the nature myths, or as a new myth in itself, but either way “Sensual Canada” is meant to be humorous since it is so far outside of how Canadians are portrayed in international media—­stereotypically polite, apologetic, and chaste.11 DeForge’s concept of “Sensual Canada” imagines a sexy vision of Canadian-ness using symbols associated with nature. A goose gives the following examples of “Sensual Canada”: “Smearing maple syrup onto a wool sweater. A goose drinking a bottle of lotion. A piece of driftwood shaped like a woman. Forget the Canada you thought you knew…You are now entering Sensual Canada” (DeForge). In “Sensual Canada,” nature is sexy, as are traditionally non-sensual objects. By co-opting symbols of Canadian-ness (such as the goose or maple syrup) and casting them as sexual, DeForge challenges popular depictions of Canadian-ness and encourages us to rethink our understanding of nature and its link to Canadian national identity. After all, this Canada is sexy and open to change. Otter-With-Mushroom—overly traditional and conservative—­offers another opportunity to understand DeForge’s attempts to adjust our understanding of nature’s impact on identity. His titular and overgrown mushroom covers his eyes, thereby blinding him. Thus, the coding of Otter-With-Mushroom as traditional and blind along with his literal embodiment of nature (as both flora and fauna) implicitly proposes that traditional ideas about nature, and by extension identity, are blinding. For example, near the end of the graphic novel, the discussion between a goose and Otter-With-Mushroom points to the conflict between newer visions of identity (found in the graphic novel) and older more traditional ways of viewing sex and nationality (found in nature myths). Otter-­ With-Mushroom asks goose, “As a future parent, are you concerned about the influence sensual Canada might have on your children?” In this conversation, goose represents a future based on alterity and sensuality, while Otter-With-Mushroom represents a fixation on the past and chaste representations of identity and nationality; he willingly advocates

214  Jamie Ryan for the death of a child earlier in the text (Girl McNally) while campaigning for the imaginary “children” in his discussion with goose. Otter-With-Mushroom’s invocation of unborn children mirrors, as ­ queer theorist Lee Edelman notes, the right-wing’s rhetoric of creating an imaginary “Child” which “marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity” (21). The graphic novel overturns traditional conceptions of nature in Canada and proposes alternative potentialities for Canadian identities not rooted in a priori ideas (like nature) but instead are embodied and performative actions. The main point I am trying to make, and the main point of the graphic novel, is that Sticks Angelica challenges conventional binaries (like human/animal or nature/culture, urban/nature) by presenting them as at the very least porous, and at the most, inconsequential and fabricated falsities. Nature in the graphic novel is not truly innate but instead is a performative act that is learned—animals become rather than are; they are born something, but more importantly they can perform a new identity and thereby become something new. With this new vision of nature, and in turn Canadian identity, DeForge offers not a blueprint to follow, but an invitation to receive such a vision that may guide us into a future, no matter what that future may look like. Such depictions are not a prescriptive ideal of what Canada should be, but rather what Canadian identity could be.

Conclusion In popular culture, once an idea—especially one connected to an emotion or a national sentiment—takes root, it is hard to untangle that perception from the truth. Yet, Michael DeForge’s Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero attempts to do just that by working against the dominant myths about Canadian identity derived from nature and by pointing to the limitations of such a national identity. Sticks Angelica implicitly questions how national symbols are made, who creates these narratives, and why these symbols are chosen while others are ignored. This idea implicitly runs through the text, perhaps most covertly through its sparse use of the maple leaf, so important as a national symbol it is located in the center of the Canadian flag. Since Sticks Angelica takes place in, and is about, nature, one might assume the maple leaf would appear at least somewhat frequently. Yet, the maple leaf only appears four times in the graphic novel, and it never appears as an actual leaf from a tree. Significantly, its appearance comes on official or institutionalized platforms: Sticks’s father’s re-election poster (Figure 13.1); Lisa Hanawalt’s (albeit forged) passport; Bear’s book about Monterey Park; Sticks’s gravestone (Figure 13.2). Three of the four depictions of the maple leaf are in panels with either dead or near-death characters, while the fourth depiction is on an illegal

(De)Forging Canadian identity  215

Figure 13.2  Sticks’s gravestone from Michael DeForge’s Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero, Drawn & Quarterly, 2017. Used with permission from Drawn & Quarterly.

passport. Thus, the maple leaf is coded as a dead and fake symbol, and such coding could suggest the maple leaf and other such markers of national identity, and their close association with Canadian identity need revision. This malleability and potential for rebuilding identity, both personal and national, is the sentiment that ends the graphic novel. Sticks lives in and loves real nature, but after her death, she is stripped of agency and brought back into the national identity (of the city) through her gravesite. She is buried in the nation’s capital with a maple leaf prominently displayed on her grave (Figure 13.2). Thus, she is conscripted back into the national imagination, despite her wishes to have no part of the nation or its national imagining. The graphic novel prioritizes the necessity of self-definition over collective narratives imposed by others. During her Christmas speech, Sticks says she left Ottawa and “came to the forest to cut ties with [her] family, [her] celebrity, [and her] government” (DeForge). Yet, she is brought back literally and figuratively into

216  Jamie Ryan her national celebrity (she is a folk hero as the title says) when her body is buried in Ottawa. National identities are dangerous because they assume homogeneity, and they overwrite the differences and privileges of citizens. Sticks Angelica parodies this calculus by including animals as Canadians and in doing so shows the breadth of identities. The graphic novel implicitly proposes that if nature is going to be a national symbol, perhaps it should be a symbol for how diverse a nation or ecosystem could be and how identities are performed rather than positioned as innate and unchanging. In Sticks Angelica, personal identities are, necessarily, based on self-definition, and these are the identities that survive and thrive; it is the identities that are imposed on others that falter and ultimately fail (like Bear’s community or the politics of Stick’s father and brother). The text thereby seems to suggest that individual identities are fine, and so are collections of individual identities, but once others take control of the narrative (such as in national constructions), these narratives become dominant ideologies meant as prescriptive, hegemonic pedagogies for citizens rather than a means of identification. DeForge works against Canadian nature myths to present an alternative vision of nature that proposes that there is nothing “natural” about nature as it is framed in popular discourse. He insists change is what is truly natural. Through his graphic novel, Sticks Angelica, he also questions the relationship between nature and national identity by focusing on the strange, the urban, and the diverse and by reminding us that identity, like nature, is subject to change and growth. Consequently, the exact status and location of identity is always in flux. Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero, then, works against Frye’s famous formulation that Canadians are “less perplexed by the question ‘Who am I?’ than by some such riddle as ‘Where is here?’” (222) as “Where is here?” is a misleading question, one that tries to restrict and confine the biodiversity of nature to an easy formulation. This graphic novel instead proposes “here” is nowhere better, yet “here does not need to be anywhere.”

Notes 1 I use nature and wilderness interchangeably in this chapter. 2 Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero does not have page numbers, so I try my best to provide appropriate context or plot description to situate the quotes. This quote comes from the first fully illustrated page of the graphic novel. 3 I would like to be clear that in my reading of Canadian nature myths, I am not intending to re-inscribe a structuralist reading of literature; rather, I propose that there are numerous myths that do not always apply to literature but that do linger in popular discourse. In other words, while structuralists like Frye or Atwood try to neatly structure literature into a single road that leads to a very nationalistic sentiment, I am contesting the limitations of such an approach to Canadian literature and identity.

(De)Forging Canadian identity  217 4 The “Canadian North” is often framed as empty because so few white settlers live there. However, in reality, Indigenous communities do occupy these spaces, but acknowledging their presence complicates our Canadian narrative of nature as Canadian. Renée Hulan calls this refusal to acknowledge, or the convenient forgetting that occurs, “The Forgotten North” where “forgetting operates as an agent of colonialism” (56). In fact, Nature Myth #6 could be: Nature is Empty—but I do not have enough space in my chapter to fully explore this, and Renée Hulan’s “Lieux d’oubli: The Forgotten North of Canadian Literature” already does a brilliant job of covering this topic. 5 For instance, James Cameron, Denis Villeneuve, David Cronenberg, Ivan Reitman, Norman Jewison, Jason Reitman, and Jean-Marc Vallée. 6 First, in the quote I cited earlier in the paragraph, later when a goose and Otter-With-Mushroom are discussing “Sensual Canada,” and lastly when a gosling falls out of their nest in the last pages of the graphic novel. 7 Again, in the history of Canada and canonical Canadian literature, Indigenous peoples are often erased, and white settlers are cast as the true inhabitants of the land. 8 People often have a hard time admitting that Canada is a capitalist country, and American capitalism is often invoked to lessen or dismiss the capitalism of Canada. 9 Lisa says this during a page-long vignette before she comes back to Monterey to help Sticks with Girl’s trial. 10 Lisa Hanawalt is a real cartoonist and friend of Michael DeForge who is the production designer and producer on the animated Netflix show, Bojack Horseman. Therefore, her inclusion draws connections between how characters in both Bojack and Sticks Angelica straddle the line between humans and animals. 11 These representations are most clear in American film comedies. However, some famous fictional Canadian characters in comics who fit this stereotype are Scott Pilgrim and Dudley Do-Right, while characters like Deadpool or Terrance and Phillips (from South Park) are meant as parodies of Canadian politeness.

Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. House of Anansi Press, 2012. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Hill and Wang, 2013. Baym, Nina. “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors.” American Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 2, 1981, pp. 123–139. Bennett, Donna. “Conflicted Vision: A Consideration of Canon and Genre in English-Canadian Literature.” Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value, edited by Robert Lecker, U of Toronto P, 1991, pp. 131–149. Brown, E.K. On Canadian Poetry. Tecumseh, 1943. Cavell, Richard. “Defeated Topologies in Canadian Literature.” Downtown Canada: Writing Canadian Cities, edited by Justin D. Edwards and Douglas Ivison, U of Toronto P, 2005, pp. 13–31. DeForge, Michael. “Country Comics and City Comics Panel.” Toronto Comic Arts Festival, 12 May 2018, Cumberland Terrace, Panel Discussion.

218  Jamie Ryan ———. Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero. Drawn & Quarterly, 2017. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke UP, 2004. Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. House of Anansi Press, 1995. Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke UP, 2011. Haraway, Donna. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. Routledge, 1989. Hargreaves, Jennifer. Sporting Females: Critical Issues in the History and Sociology of Women’s Sport. Routledge, 1994. Hulan, Renée. “Lieux d’oubli: The Forgotten North of Canadian Literature.” Canadian Literature and Cultural Memory, edited by Cynthia Sugars and Eleanor Ty, Oxford UP, 2014, pp. 53–67. Ivison, Douglas, and Justin D. Edwards. “Introduction: Writing Canadian Cities.” Downtown Canada: Writing Canadian Cities, edited by Justin D. Edwards and Douglas Ivison, U of Toronto P, 2005, pp. 3–13. ———. “Epilogue.” Downtown Canada: Writing Canadian Cities, edited by Justin D. Edwards and Douglas Ivison, U of Toronto P, 2005, pp. 197–208. Jones, D.G. Butterfly on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature. U of Toronto P, 1976. Kaplan, Amy. “Manifest Domesticity.” No More Separate Spheres!: A Next Wave American Studies Reader, edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher, Duke UP, 2002, pp. 183–208. Kertzer, Jonathan. Worrying the Nation: Imagining a National Literature in English Canada. U of Toronto P, 1998. Kroetsch, Robert. “Disunity as Unity: A Canadian Strategy.” Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism, edited by Cynthia Sugars, Broadview Press, 2004, pp. 61–70. Littlejohn, Bruce, and Jon Pearce, eds. Marked by the Wild: An Anthology of Literature Shaped by the Canadian Wilderness. McClelland and Stewart, 1973. Polk, James. Wilderness Writers: Ernest Thompson Seton, Charles G.D. Roberts, Grey Owl. Clarke, Irwin & Co., 1972. Soper, Ella, and Nicholas Bradley. “Introduction: Ecocriticism North of the ­Forty-Ninth Parallel.” Greening the Maple: Canadian Ecocriticism in Context, edited by Ella Soper and Nicholas Bradley, U of Calgary P, 2013, pp. xiii–liv. “Top 10 Canadian Films of All Time.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2015, www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/top-10-canadian-films-of-alltime. Accessed 18 Sept. 2018.

14 A killer rhetoric of alternatives Re/framing monstrosity in My Friend Dahmer Alane Presswood After the 1991 apprehension of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, national media outlets burst into a frenzy of reporting on the “Milwaukee Cannibal.” Grisly reports of Dahmer’s seventeen murders, in addition to crimes of rape, necrophilia, cannibalism, and botched lobotomies, fascinated the media-consuming public for weeks and years after his arrest. Amidst the clamor, the details on Dahmer himself rarely amounted to more than an exploited caricature of a monster. Enter John “Derf” Backderf, established cartoonist, two-time Eisner Award winner, and Dahmer’s high school classmate. Immediately after Dahmer’s arrest, Backderf began doodling his recollections of the strange teen. Those doodles evolved into the 224-page, painstakingly researched graphic narrative My Friend Dahmer¸ published in 2012. A film adaptation directed by Marc Meyers followed in 2017. Backderf subverted the pre-existing narrative of Dahmer’s innate monstrosity by claiming instead that the younger Dahmer, the teenager who existed before the murderer emerged, could be viewed as a tragic and ultimately sympathetic figure. As Backderf explained, in his view, he never knew the serial killer: the Jeff he graduated with and depicted in the book was “broken, he’s horribly disturbed, he’s missing chunks of his humanity, he’s not particularly likable by the end, but he isn’t a monster. Not yet” (Auman). While Backderf strictly maintains that his pity for Jeff ends at Dahmer’s first act of violence against another human being, My Friend Dahmer frames a relatable story of a troubled teenager trying to get along in a harsh world within the cultural tumult of the late 1970s. This chapter uses My Friend Dahmer in conjunction with Kenneth Burke’s cycle of guilt, purification, and redemption to explore how Backderf leveraged the capabilities of the medium to subvert the typical narrative function of the serial killer. Despite a long history of news and entertainment media utilizing serial killers as a scapegoat for humanity’s darkest impulses, My Friend Dahmer instead serves as a means of mortification for its author’s personal role in Dahmer’s story, as well as American culture’s larger responsibilities concerning our enthusiastic participation in the manufacturing and popularization of the ­serial-killer figure. Backderf’s reframed narrative in My Friend Dahmer

220  Alane Presswood utilizes three rhetorical strategies to encourage readers to focus on a coming-of-age struggle instead of gory violence: Dahmer is framed as a victim of circumstance, blame for Dahmer’s criminality is decentralized, and stock characters and plots are employed to facilitate identification with a notorious character. This subtle reconsideration of blame provokes readers into questioning who becomes a monster and who can overcome monstrous thoughts, desires, or circumstances.

Burke and the rhetorical functions of guilt Burke’s theoretical work on the nature and motivations of human communication are also intrinsically linked to “the question of if and how identity might serve as an instrument of social critique” (Branaman 444). Burke professed that the rhetoric and actions of the individual cannot be considered without an equal consideration of the cultural or social context that gave rise to those actions. Guilt, specifically, is explained by Burke as a consequence of society’s insistence on sorting people into ranked classifications. These classifications, or hierarchies, concern “the relation of higher to lower, or lower to higher, or before to after, or after to before,” as well as the “arrangement whereby each rank is overlord to its underlings and underling to its overlords” (Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives 138). While the hierarchy itself is inevitable, the structure and formation of the hierarchy (including considerations of age, occupation, wealth, or skill) are infinitely variable. Hierarchies by definition serve to create distinctions between individuals, but they also serve a productive function by motivating members of the system to behave in ways that improve or reaffirm their status. Most participants in this perpetual struggle for status will inevitably commit one or more actions during their quest for increased status that result in feelings of guilt. Foss et al. describe guilt as “Burke’s term for the secular equivalent of original sin, an offense that cannot be avoided or a condition that all people share: it is a natural consequence of hierarchy and the human drive toward perfection” (209). There are two methods that sufferers use to purge themselves of the undesirable sensations associated with guilt: victimage and mortification. Both methods allow individuals to purify themselves of the negative consequences of guilt and find redemption for wrongdoing, but the path to redemption contained within each approach is quite distinct. “Victimage” is the use of language to transfer those negative feelings of anxiety, shame, disgust, and embarrassment to an entity other than the initial rhetor; this process is also known as scapegoating. Burke gives a three-part description of victimage in A Grammar of Motives: (1) An original state of merger, in that the iniquities are shared by both the iniquitous and their chosen vessel; (2) a principle of

A killer rhetoric of alternatives  221 division, in that the elements shared in common are being ritualistically alienated; (3) a new principle of merger, this time in the unification of those whose purified identity is defined in dialectical opposition to the sacrificial offering. (406) Scapegoating requires identifying one representative of wrongdoing and assigning the collective guilt from one or more other individuals to the representative figure. By confining the negative attitudes to one individual or one segment of the population, the rest of the group can feel redeemed and bonded together. Mortification, on the other hand, is an individual process of suffering for one’s own wrongdoing. Just as someone who overindulged in sweet treats over the holiday season might restrict their eating come January 2, self-imposed sacrifices, denials, and punishments are used to atone for a variety of wrongs. Regardless of whether guilt is turned inward or outward, the ultimate goal of both victimage and mortification is for the sufferer to find redemption. Monsters as social scapegoats Traditionally, the monster functions as a device for the social majority to reassure themselves of their own moral purity. In her exploration of why audiences flock toward a seemingly distasteful genre, Pinedo states that horror allows viewers to explore the boundaries of reality (25). When the villains in classic gothic stories like Frankenstein or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde sow violence, discord, and death amidst the order of daily life, the affected characters must fight back to reaffirm their previously understood borders of reality and slay whatever beast is causing the disruption. Exactly because they cause chaos and disruption, monsters force audiences to reconsider what exactly constitutes good or evil, normal or abnormal (Pinedo 23; Tudor 458). Wiest further elaborates on the monster’s function as a force that disrupts a safe or productive routine by highlighting how monster narratives take shape in response to troubling economic or political stimuli, such as war and recession, as well as sweeping social concerns, such as immigration and rapidly evolving new technologies (330). The stories and the forms in which we tell them may change, but they consistently reflect the dominant social anxieties of their time. Monsters are an effective vehicle for these uncomfortable social discussions because they create uncertainty regarding what we had previously considered to be inherent truths. Zombies reflect anxiety over losses of intelligence or a mindless mob mentality; werewolves signal our proximity to a beastly nature. By displacing basic facts of life, monster texts plant dissonance in the minds of readers and allow previously inconceivable possibilities to slip in. In this way, the monster becomes an unlikely candidate for the promotion of social change.

222  Alane Presswood While not supernatural in origin, the monstrosity of the serial killer similarly reflects shared social anxiety. Wright explains that serial killers retain such a pervasive place in the social imagination because of the added threat we perceive from “invisible” monstrousness (146). After his son’s arrest, Lionel Dahmer said that Jeffrey “fooled everyone. He fooled me…he fooled his probation officer, his attorney, the police” (Dahmer). The collective discomfort with such acts occurring in close proximity to our lives results in demands that experts provide diagnoses, thus proving these criminals are definitively different than we are (Dahmer was diagnosed with borderline and schizotypal personality disorders). Creating a narrative of otherness around these violent figures allows the public to feel insulated from them. The entertainment industry that has erupted around serial killers obscures both the anguish of victims and the origins of the criminals. Because “the monstrous is even more titillating when it involves forbidden practices,” reports of mass murder highlight lurid details such as cannibalism and suppress an individual’s history of attempted psychotherapy (Myers 96). Hantke explains that the difference between a murderer and a serial killer is that one is cast out by society for what he did, while the other is cast out by society for what he is. We try to distance ourselves from the humanity of such “monsters” in a gesture of self-defense, because “we cannot countenance seeing ourselves in the lives and actions of extreme perpetrators” (Myers 98). In more practical terms, the public obsession with serial killers is evident in the glut of true crime documentaries, films, and podcasts that continue to be popular. While dehumanizing the serial killer may be a long-documented practice, it remains an ineffective way to spot potential predators. Alternative media like graphic novels allow readers to circumvent the psychological shields that appear when trying to humanize a monstrous social figure; therefore, they facilitate more nuanced considerations of the conditions that produce such violence. Genre considerations of the graphic narrative The graphic narrative is well suited to complex stories because of the multiple layers of meaning that emerge via combinations of text, image, and implication. Chute writes that the modern autobiographical mode of graphic narratives can be traced back to the underground American Comix movement that flourished during the counterculture environment of the 1960s: “the most important graphic narratives explore the conflicted boundaries of what can be said and what can be shown at the intersection of collective histories and life stories” (Chute 459). Williams adds that the same environment allowed artists and readers to utilize the interplay between story and image as a form of personal catharsis to grapple with difficult issues.

A killer rhetoric of alternatives  223 Graphic narratives stand uniquely situated to help autographers (autobiographers who work within the graphic narrative format) come to grips with their personal history because the medium promotes a temporally ordered, neatly bounded system of sense-making that prose narratives cannot mimic (Lefevre 23–26). Art Spiegelman, for instance, used graphics not only to rework his own knowledge of his chaotic familial origins but also to draw parallels between the generational trauma of the Holocaust and the American experience post-9/11 in works like Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers. Lefevre explains that because our eyes have been trained to perceive illustrated images as humorous and non-threatening, graphic artists can use these depictions to portray personally painful or culturally traumatic events in an easy-to-process format that provokes renewed consideration and introspection. Thus, graphics can both facilitate authors’ explorations of their own journeys and deeply engage an audience in their own experience of that journey. In comparing graphic narratives to text-only representation of trauma, Donovan and Ustundag further claim that graphic narratives present “opportunities for a more complicated understanding of trauma, which in turn enhances possibilities for achieving social intelligibility, recognition and justice for survivors” (234). In other words, graphic narratives are not only valuable tools for authors and readers to come to grips with challenging historical narratives; they may also be influential in persuading audiences to engage in ethical actions against injustice or social inequity.

Shifting the narrative When the Dahmer scandal broke in 1991, the nature of the spectacle resulted in shock-and-awe reports that prominently featured descriptions of the four severed heads and seven bleached skulls discovered in Dahmer’s apartment. Rather than leaning on gore to gain attention, Backderf utilized interviews with high school friends, teachers, and neighborhood parents; extensive photographic records; and his own experiences and materials (Auman). While newspapers extensively covered Dahmer’s crimes and trial, however, descriptions of the criminal himself were mostly confined to his various tabloid monikers (the Milwaukee Cannibal or the Milwaukee Monster).1 This focus on the crimes eclipsed consideration of the motives of and influences on the man who committed them. In contrast, Backderf creates the rhetorical space for human consideration of the man who had committed these crimes. My Friend Dahmer includes references to the influence of repressive cultural elements, a family history of mental illness, an absentee father, oblivious school officials, cruel classmates, and too-easy access to alcohol and other addictive substances. The result is a cautionary acknowledgment

224  Alane Presswood that while the majority of the blame for Dahmer’s actions belongs to the criminal alone, no criminal is formed in a vacuum. This position is echoed in Backderf’s vehement question (overlaid on an image of Dahmer isolated in darkness in his troubled family home): “Where were the damn adults?” (Backderf 67). Backderf uses three primary rhetorical strategies to prepare readers to consider a broader origin of Dahmer’s crimes. First, he frames Dahmer as a victim of circumstance; second, he decentralizes blame for Dahmer’s criminal inclinations; and third, he encourages every reader to identify with teenage Dahmer by embracing stock characters and plots. Framing Dahmer as victim of circumstance Dahmer’s crimes and trial played out decades ago, but his cultural legacy is still evident. To reclaim the humanity of a figure who has been reduced to a morbid punchline, Backderf first relies on framing Dahmer not as a lifelong criminal, but rather as a teenage victim of circumstance caught in an easily-relatable web of divorce and cultural upset. The biographical account of teenage Jeff Dahmer’s turbulent middle and high school years highlights every missed opportunity where Dahmer’s parents, teachers, doctors, or classmates potentially could have taken steps to get help for a troubled youth. Backderf complicates the typical portrayal of Dahmer, but he never attempts to portray Jeff as an innocent. On the contrary, the first full-body image in My Friend Dahmer is young Jeff holding a dead cat (Backderf 17). Dahmer’s face and upper body are shadowed in darkness, and his eyes stand out glaringly white against the blackness of his face. The message in that graphic is clear: Jeffrey Dahmer was a young man struggling with a great deal of internal darkness. The final panel of the prologue is also a full-page depiction of Dahmer. This time he stands slumped over in a defeated posture with his face hidden from view (Backderf 27). A fork in the road is behind Dahmer, out of his sight, and his shadow stretches out like a dark mirror-self. By positioning Dahmer facing away from those divergent roads and unable to see the possibilities life might have to offer him, Backderf depicts a young man who had no hope of defeating the darkness waiting to swallow him without help from an external source. As the text progresses, the author’s narration combines with a series of illustrations to depict Dahmer’s increasingly serious internal struggle to exchange an individual’s story with one that is more collective. The goal of My Friend Dahmer is not to redeem Jeffrey Dahmer, but to illustrate the potential opportunities that other individuals might have had to step in and change the trajectory of his tragic life. Backderf replaces the story of one fatally flawed individual with the story of a fatally flawed social system and provokes readers to consider how they might act when faced with similar possibilities.

A killer rhetoric of alternatives  225 Decentralizing blame My Friend Dahmer showcases the power of visual images to reframe even well-entrenched social narratives; Backderf strategically isolates elements of Dahmer’s past to illustrate the dangers of failing to consider society’s responsibility in the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer. The multimodal aspect of the graphic narrative renders it particularly effective at emphasizing one desired perspective to the exclusion of all others (Dunaway 95). Part 1 of My Friend Dahmer, “The Strange Boy,” concludes with a two-page spread chronicling the nervous disorder that plagued Dahmer’s mother (Backderf 63–64). Backderf devotes eleven panels to the spastic tics that characterized Joyce Dahmer’s episodes and portrays her with rivulets of sweat and thrashing limbs, before finally drawing her passed out on the couch. Despite the general knowledge that Joyce Dahmer was suffering, no neighbor or school official stepped in to assess Jeff’s well-being. From an early age, the adults in his life made it clear to Dahmer that he was alone with his troubles. The Dahmers’ divorce compounded Joyce’s mental health struggles. In Part 3, Backderf chronicles the penultimate stage of this rocky break-up, in which Joyce announces to Jeff that she is taking his younger brother and (illegally) moving him to another state. This announcement comes immediately after high school graduation, when Jeff is already struggling: “Above all else, this horribly disturbed young man feared being alone, with only the voices and urges … and here was his sad, damaged mother, blinded by her own troubles, making that fear a ­reality” (Backderf 165). In these panels, Joyce is literally hanging on to her s­ urroundings—tears are in her eyes and she is never seen directly facing her son and engaging him on a personal level. Correspondingly, Dahmer is portrayed at the edge of the frame or in a half-profile; in the final scene of this conversation, his surroundings are tilted at a forty-five degree angle—nothing is the way it should be. Dahmer is always alone and out of place, even when surrounded by other characters. Graphically, even Backderf’s narration of complete isolation stands apart from the rest of the panel’s text; every element on the page visually and textually vibrates with otherness. Backderf consistently emphasizes these stories of helplessness and trauma to urge readers to reframe Dahmer’s backstory and deconstruct their prior knowledge of where blame should lie. Classmates note that Dahmer “reeks of booze” at 7:45 a.m. on a Saturday, and teachers are shown paying no attention when Dahmer misses class or leaves the school building entirely (Backderf 115–117). And while it would be easy for Backderf to only assign blame to others, he specifically includes consideration of his own role in the saga by retelling the moment he rejected Dahmer’s company due to fear and uneasiness, and that rejection left him “alone, with only the voices in his head … which would now grow louder and louder” (145). He levels an equally blatant accusation at the high school,

226  Alane Presswood If just one adult had stepped up and said “whoa, this kid needs help…” could Dahmer have been saved? Or his victims spared their grisly fate? I’m not saying he would have had a normal life, or even a happy one. He probably would have spent the rest of his days doped up… a sad, lonely existence that Dahmer would have gladly accepted over the hellish future that awaited him. (Backderf 87) The prominent emphasis, both verbal and visual, on Jeff’s extenuating circumstances redistributes blame to a broad set of situations and individuals, in contrast to the lurid and one-dimensional “Milwaukee Cannibal” news reports. The point of this considered dissemination of blame is not to dismiss Jeff’s innate darkness or to excuse him for his crimes, but rather to point out that heightened social observation and interference might have prevented him from being able to commit so many murders. Only Jeff is responsible for those deaths, but everyone who failed to step in and intervene on behalf of a struggling teenager must reckon with their small role in how Dahmer’s life unfolded. While hindsight illuminates opportunities for intervention in a tragic story, questions still remain concerning the role serial killers play in society at large. Tithecott asserts that we depend on killers to remind us of the critical distinctions between the civilized and the perverted; can Dahmer’s story be reclaimed if society needs him to stand as an anchor against moral wrong? Backderf steps away from that query and replaces the known elements of the story with a biographical portrait of a teenager whose descent into darkness must be understood alongside the social influences of unchecked alcohol abuse, institution neglect, and an abusive home. Backderf’s highly contrastive pen-and-ink style of illustration, which is visible in his earlier serialized weekly comics, 2 works especially well here; the bold lights and darks clash to war for visual prominence and direct attention in a way that mimics Dahmer’s own constant psychological struggles. Dahmer’s inner monster is further highlighted by Backderf’s tendency to draw his large glasses as a blank shield over his eyes, either an empty white or a deep foreboding black. Encouraging identification Burke fundamentally shifts the focus of rhetoric to include methods of sharing information, emotions, and experience. Rather than aggressive forms of persuasion or social influence, Burke recommends searching for the ways in which we are similar to our audience in identity, beliefs, or experience. This rhetoric hinges on Burke’s concepts of identification and consubstantiality: In being identified with B, A is “substantially one” with a person other than himself. Yet at the same time he remains unique, an

A killer rhetoric of alternatives  227 individual locus of motives. Thus he is both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial with another. (Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives 21) Collaboration, then, is the distinguishing feature of Burke’s rhetoric. To become consubstantial with another person, individuals must find some principle or attitude which they hold in common. This simultaneous sense of being similar, yet distinct, is crucial to understanding Backderf’s portrayal of Dahmer and how it differs from other media coverage. While Backderf the individual wants to assure audiences that he does not condone violent murder, his narrative does encourage identification with the teenage Jeff. Thus, the story Backderf tells is not one of a psychiatrically dangerous murderer, but instead one of a lonely, awkward teenage boy. Traditionally, we understand that identification in comics is achieved through the continuity required of graphic narrative readers in filling in the gutters between panels. This white space is where we process the storylines and make connections to our own circumstances, as well as form opinions and create narrative cohesion. McCloud teaches graphic artists and readers that most of the action in a comic actually takes place in that blank space and that an artist’s “choice of moment,” or what is specifically depicted in a panel, can crucially affect how we make sense of a narrative’s flow, purpose, and meaning (12–15). That space for interpretation becomes more vital when the narrative requires action or introspection from readers. With a story as violently infamous as Dahmer’s, this intuitive sense-making is hampered even further. Ali describes how the act of retelling can be damaging to a story, especially when a text relies heavily on citation (like a biographical exploration of a deceased individual). The audience must discern if the citations are a parasitic presence in the new work or if the new work is colonizing the cited sources; this tension creates an irresolvable source of friction between present and past (Ali 610–612). The violence done to Jeff’s story through such an act of reconstruction persists despite Backderf’s professed desire to portray a side of the story that tabloids and profit-hungry media ignored or mistook. Because this additional act of storytelling violence only compounds the public knowledge of Dahmer’s violent story, Backderf encourages identification largely within the panels, not (only) in between them. To bypass the unknown pieces of the story and help the audience feel consubstantial with Dahmer, Backderf inserts or emphasizes a number of stock characters and plots into the narrative. Backderf’s black-and-white, stylized illustrations fully embrace the idea of echoing inherent in a biography. In his heavily inked art, all characters (even Backderf’s own representation) are portrayed in awkward, unattractive, slumped postures that readily recall the most

228  Alane Presswood unpleasant aspects of adolescence. In fact, Dahmer himself is portrayed more sympathetically than the author and his other friends, who called ­themselves—not in an entirely good-humored fashion—the “Dahmer Fan Club.” Backderf recollects his own younger self performing a stand-up act dressed as Adolf Hitler (complete with Nazi uniform and fake mustache). He remembers another incident in which he and a group of his friends unsympathetically cut ties with Dahmer once his drinking and erratic behavior became too pronounced. In contrast, Dahmer is seen repeatedly being the victim of both physical and verbal bullying. The narration of Dahmer’s isolation is echoed in Backderf’s stringent, unwavering separation of panels. The panels never bleed past distinctly defined borders. Because we already know how the story ends, Backderf does not need to discuss Dahmer’s crimes (and he depicts none of them); the reader is perfectly capable of filling the gaps. Instead, Backderf draws a Dahmer with no power, a Dahmer as victim. During a discussion of Jeff’s descent into alcoholism in his junior year of high school, Backderf devotes a full-page panel to an image of Dahmer alone in a school hallway. His face is shadowed, his posture is slumped, and overall the teen could easily be dismissed as one more piece of rubbish filling the halls, similar to the broken pens or crumpled-up pieces of homework scattered around the frame. The narration accompanying this panel recalls how a school guidance counselor later told an interviewer that no one could remember anything strange about Dahmer (Backderf 85). Fast-­forwarding one year in the narrative, Backderf shows us a Dahmer splayed out in the road after receiving a punch to the back of the head; his tormentors stride away, syllables of laughter written prominently over their leering faces (123). These illustrations rely heavily on Dahmer’s evocative body posture; gestures and posture can, “by their relevance to the reader’s own experience, invoke a nuance of emotion and give auditory inflection to the voice of the speaker” (Eisner 38). Dahmer speaks very little in the narrative; most of his utterances are done in the service of the spastic character he frequently portrays. But his postures and gestures plead, over and over, for recognition of the struggles he is facing. Dahmer’s physicality also reveals his potential for violence. Just as Backderf demonstrates an understanding of body language to stress how frequently Dahmer was a victim (of bullying, of his parents’ aggression), the same skill is used to hint at how easily Dahmer could overpower a victim. The narrative reveals that Dahmer was a “big, muscular guy, built like a linebacker” (Backderf 123). He looms over the other characters in panels, even when hunched over, and his hands are regularly clenched into fists (123, 143, 171, 185). Like a gun without a safety mechanism, Dahmer’s black-and-white body seems constantly primed for violence. The only question left is whether the violence would be an initiation of Dahmer’s own murderous urges or a response to the injustices committed against him. As Eisner

A killer rhetoric of alternatives  229 explains, we learn even from infancy how to separate adult emotions based on posture (love, anger, fear). The hidden threat visible in Dahmer lends credence to Backderf’s off-handed remark that he would not “want to be in the way” if Dahmer ever “snapped”—a prescient opinion (123). However, in contrast to the mass media reports that consistently emphasized Dahmer’s violence as senseless, Backderf’s Dahmer is always posed defensively in response to a completely understandable stimulus: schoolyard bullying, unsteady parental dynamics, or confusion over his own identity. Through these defeatist postures, tilted panels, and recognizable scenarios, Backderf depicts a Dahmer with whom the reader can feel consubstantial: awkwardness, loneliness, and isolation all contribute to bonds of consubstantiality. The United States Centers for Disease Control found that between 2015 and 2017, about 20% of American high school students consistently reported being bullied on school property (Kann 18). Consequently, Backderf’s repeated emphasis on showing Dahmer in multiple categories of victimization reframes him from a villain to a more relatable popular culture trope: the unpopular kid on the outside of the local social scene. Because so many readers can either directly relate to or have watched their loved ones struggle through a similar scenario, their approach to considering Dahmer’s circumstances becomes significantly more nuanced. Backderf even devotes a page to showing Dahmer being picked last in gym class—the archetypal high-school-loser experience. This technique hauntingly sets up the unasked question: “What if? If I could empathize so strongly with this teenager’s feelings of isolation, loneliness, frustration, and anger – what other traits do we share?” Backderf invites the reader into the narrative by carefully creating a set of circumstances that are widely relatable to groups composed of outsiders or possessing liminal status, but the appeal of My Friend Dahmer cannot be solely attributed to that niche-building. Backderf’s final rhetorical ace in the hole is the way his text plays on popular culture interests. By depicting a Dahmer full of contrasting emotions and desires, Backderf is already harnessing the power of a notorious story and one of comics’ most loved character types, such as Watchmen’s Rorschach or Marvel’s Deadpool. Just as audiences flock to a story about a villain turned hero (or vice versa), My Friend Dahmer satiates our curiosity by filling in just enough of the unknown story. Readers can immerse themselves in Dahmer, playing with the tension Backderf creates through his reliance on multimodal informative texts and the temporal duality that is the serial-killer future narrative overlaid on this high school memoir. Backderf’s narrative, on multiple levels, feels forbidden, which invites the audience to ask probing questions and dig for a deeper understanding of the story. On another level, Dahmer’s story speaks strongly to the public due to its symbolic connection to the monster stories that we have been retelling

230  Alane Presswood for generations. Joyce Carol Oates realized this connection in Zombie, her 1995 novel loosely based on Dahmer. Oates focused Zombie (as the title suggests) on the attempts of Dahmer’s fictional doppelganger to create a mindless sex slave, neither alive nor fully dead. Zombies, as portrayed in everything from the original Haitian voodoo lore to AMC’s popular series Walking Dead (launched in 2010), possess no agency of their own. They are animated by an unnatural external force, and because they aren’t truly alive, they must absorb the energy of others through the consumption of live flesh. They are physically, socially, and emotionally destructive forces. The real-life Dahmer embodied many of these traits, even outside of his ventures into cannibalism and necrophilic possession of his victims. Backderf’s Jeff repeatedly expresses a desire to see how animals look and work inside, and he is described with a “stony mask of a face, ­devoid of any emotion.” Backderf wrote that by the end of their acquaintance, Dahmer was perpetually “in character, drunk, or both” (50, 119). Dahmer himself reported that his actions grew out of a desire to “create [his] own little world, where [he] could be the one who had complete control, where [he] didn’t have to bow to anyone else’s demands… and [he] just took it way too far” (Dahmer). When his story is viewed through the lens of the controlling factors that contributed to that sense of being out-of-control, such as parental and social rejection and Dahmer’s paralyzing self-doubt, the audience is presented with myriad monsters to contend with, not only the original, single, disturbed serial killer. Transitioning from victimage to mortification Santaulària explains that serial-killer fiction frequently highlights the flaws of the society that hosts the killer and causes uneasiness in the minds of the audience because it casts aspersions on the idea that society is always redeemable (63). To return to Burkean terms, the serial killer becomes the scapegoat for our collective guilt-inducing thoughts, attitudes and actions; catching and punishing the serial killer functions as a social cleansing wherein we move through the stages of guilt and purification to find redemption. Tithecott links our need for victimage to the metaphors commonly used to construct coverage of the serial as a kind of natural disaster, “beyond the knowledge, the words, the control of man” (51). If the guilt/purification/redemption cycle is always a result of social hierarchies, then othering and scapegoating the serial killer allows the rest of society to affirm their superiority in the moral hierarchy. Backderf turns Dahmer’s story into a subversion of this common theme; instead of a monstrous killer highlighting the flaws of society, the killer becomes a monster, at least in part due to society’s indifference. The end result is the same, but the implications for our collective purging of guilt are radically different. Calling attention to the times when

A killer rhetoric of alternatives  231 family, friends, educators, and police all failed to intervene in Dahmer’s life spreads blame throughout the hierarchy, and if a single scapegoat cannot be identified, then the vehicle for purifying sensations of guilt shifts from victimage to mortification. Backderf exemplifies the process of mortification for his audience. My Friend Dahmer partially revolves around its author’s own guilty struggle over his somewhat callous and dehumanizing treatment of Dahmer when they were classmates; he hastens early on to assure the reader that he was “genuinely amused” by Dahmer’s antics and that he did not befriend him with malicious intent (Backderf 51). Further, he explains that he never reported his suspicions about Dahmer’s alcohol abuse or troubled family life to an adult because in the counterculture 1970s, it just was not seen as particularly unusual. The graphic narrative stands as Backderf’s act of remorse. Critically, if the function of this text is to serve as a cathartic release for Backderf’s own small role in the way Dahmer’s story unfurled, one is left to question whether there is “any difference between what Backderf and his friends did to Dahmer in high school and what Backderf and Meyers do to him with their book and movie” (Sachs). Certainly, the message about coming to terms with the small ways in which hierarchies encourage us to be unkind is worthwhile to consider in light of stories like Dahmer’s and his victims. However, audiences of both the film and graphic narrative versions of My Friend Dahmer have an additional level of consequence to grapple with. Lawson described My Friend Dahmer as an “exercise [in] seeing how much compassion we are able, or willing, to grant the seemingly compassionless.” Overcoming a long history of social programming to defensively push away our hierarchical involvement in othering wrongdoers requires active will and effort, but as Backderf’s graphic narrative suggests, a more progressive, empathetic society necessitates that kind of work to identify and aid troubled or dangerous individuals. When guilt is assigned across a wide swath of individuals, all are required to acknowledge their participation in wrongdoing to find redemption; however, bonding strongly with the fictional Dahmer presents additional complications. Worryingly, reframing killers holds the potential to bolster the problematic way American media frame largescale public violence. The headline-boosting tendencies of violent crime are so well known in news reporting that media professionals have a witticism specifically tuned to that phenomenon: “if it bleeds, it leads” (Serani 241). The enthusiasm with which an audience clamors for the details of terror should not outweigh the negative impacts of publicizing such acts. Copycat violence might not be as frequent as crime television leads us to believe, but it is real, and journalists and creative writers alike have a responsibility to consider whether their work puts more bodies in danger.

232  Alane Presswood According to the FBI, mass shootings have been occurring in the United States in steadily increasing numbers since the turn of the millennium. Between 2000 and 2017, the Bureau recorded 250 active shooter incidents, including a record high of thirty incidents and 729 casualties in 2017 (“Quick Look”). Towers et al. found that mass shootings and school shootings produce a significant “social contagion” effect, wherein high-profile acts of violence with a firearm spurred more criminals to commit similar acts of violence (7). When a definitive causal link was identified between media reporting and copycat teenage suicides (first in the United States and then multiple other countries), a clamp down on media reporting proved highly effective in reversing that trend (Notredame et al. 134). Yet, national outlets continue to dramatize mass shootings. Reporting on national tragedies, like the Santa Fe High School Shooting in May 2018 or the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in October 2018, focuses on divided attitudes regarding gun control and the state of mental health care. These reports may intend to provide closure to victims and other affected parties, but they may send a clear message to those who are violently inclined. Another complication with the reframing entails how crafting sympathetic perpetrators of crime affects victims. Unfortunately, regardless of how well-intentioned Backderf’s purposes in crafting the graphic novel may be, works that immortalize monstrous figures risk creating further pain for the victims of such criminals. Family members of Dahmer’s victims stated that even just hearing the killer’s name brought back painful associations, and that pain “never really goes away”—especially when works like My Friend Dahmer keep the narrative alive (Helling). My Friend Dahmer was named one of the top-five nonfiction books of 2012 by Time magazine, and at the time of this writing, the movie adaptation of the novel has an 85% “fresh” rating from metacriticism website Rotten Tomatoes. Given the profit he has made on his association with Dahmer, Backderf’s novel could be seen as exploitative or insensitive to victims who have already suffered immensely; research suggests that constant exposure to high-profile mediated accounts keep trauma fresh for families of the killer’s victims and force people connected to the killer to choose either social isolation or reinforced trauma (Wiest). Military veterans Preston Davis and Billy Capshaw came forward with stories of being assaulted by Dahmer during their time together in the military; Davis said that after thirty years of suppressing the memories, hearing Dahmer’s name in the news brought those memories to the surface and pushed him into therapy (Gordon). Weighing the value of the text’s sympathetic reframing against the pain caused to victims presents a precarious moral dilemma for which I do not presume to have any answers. The text remains a skillful rhetorical invocation, probing questions of blame, guilt, and identification. My Friend Dahmer demonstrates graphic narrative’s capacity to portray multiple or alternative points

A killer rhetoric of alternatives  233 of emphasis on an infamous subject. The book deserves a place in the emerging canon of graphic works for its ability to encourage readers to reframe their opinion on an emphatic cultural figure and an established narrative, as well as for demonstrating how graphic narratives do more than entertain. Ultimately, a breakdown of archetypes opens the door to a heightened consideration of the “relation of dreams of violence, of racial or sexual purity, of closure, of death, to our dominant culture and its dreams” (Tithecott 7). No single graphic narrative can erase the trauma from a killing spree that crossed state lines and destroyed dozens of lives, but a skilled representation can stress underexposed elements of a story to illuminate questions of culpability, social regret, and ever-­ evolving understandings of where monsters originate.

Notes 1 Reporters created a consistent image of Dahmer as an inhuman monster via the language they used to describe him across the articles covering his arrest, his trial, and his murder. His crimes were described as gruesome, his actions as “outlandish,” “evil,” or “unbelievable”; to separate him from mainstream society, Dahmer himself was described as “a drugged zoo animal” (Sherrill B1). Rarely did coverage ever include testimony from the criminal himself, and typically personal details were only included when they underscored the idea of Dahmer as a screwed-up, dangerous social outcast (such as the indecent exposure charges against him, the fact that he dropped out of Ohio State University after just one semester, or his military discharge). For a brief but representative sample of the articles that typified the Dahmer coverage, see Booth; Howlett; Sherrill; Atkinson; Terry; ­Rozansky; or Freedland. 2 Backderf’s first serialized comics, The City, began airing in the (now defunct) Cleveland Edition in 1990. At its peak, it featured in over 140 publications. He announced its last strip on May 15, 2014.

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234  Alane Presswood Dahmer, Jeffrey. Interview with Stone Phillips. Dateline NBC, 29 Nov. 1994. “Dahmer Gets Maximum; ‘I Take All the Blame.’” St Louis Post-Dispatch, 18 Feb. 1992, p. 9A. Donovan, Courtney, and Ebru Ustundag. “Graphic Narratives, Trauma and Social Justice.” Studies in Social Justice, vol. 11, no. 2, 2018, pp. 221–237. Dunaway, Finis. “Gas Masks, Pogo, and the Ecological Indian: Earth Day and the Visual Politics of American Environmentalism.” American Quarterly, vol. 60, no.1, 2008, pp. 67–97. doi:10.1353/aq.2008.0008. Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist. W. W. Norton & Company, 2008. Foss, Sonja K., et al. Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric, 3rd edition. Waveland Press, 2002. Freedland, Jonathan. “A Life Dedicated to Violent Death Ends as It Was Lived: In Blood.” The Guardian, 29 Nov. 1994, p. 13. Gordon, James. “‘I Thought about Killing Him, I Thought about Killing Myself’: Male Rape Victims of Jeffrey Dahmer – One of America’s Most Notorious Serial Killers – Reveal why He Stopped Short of Murdering Them.” The Daily Mail, 11 Nov. 2017, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5072949/ Jeffrey-Dahmer-s-surviving-victims-speak.html. Hantke, Steffen. “‘The Kingdom of the Unimaginable:’ The Construction of Social Space and the Fantasy of Privacy in Serial Killer Narratives.” Literature Film Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 3, 1998, p. 178. Helling, Steve. “Jeffrey Dahmer Victim’s Family Member Speaks Decades after Reign of Terror: ‘The Pain Never Goes Away.’” People, https://people.com/ crime/jeffrey-dahmer-victims-family-member-speaks-decades-after-reign-ofterror-the-pain-never-goes-away/. Howlett, D. “Dahmer Pleads Guilty but Insane, Victims’ Families Outraged.” USA Today, 14 Jan. 1992, p. 3A. Kann, Laura et al. “Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance—United States, 2017.” Surveillance Summaries, vol. 67, no. 8, 2018, pp. 1–114, www.cdc.gov/ healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/2017/ss6708.pdf. Lawson, Richard. “My Friend Dahmer Review: A Disturbingly Effective Portrait of a Future Killer.” Vanity Fair, 1 Nov. 2017, www.vanityfair.com/ hollywood/2017/11/my-friend-dahmer-review. Lefevre, Pascal. “Some Medium-Specific Qualities of Graphic Sequences.” SubStance, vol. 40, no.1, 2011, pp. 14–33. doi:10.1353/sub.2011.0007. McCloud, Scott. Making Comics. Harper, 2006. Myers, William Andrew. “Ethical Aliens: The Challenge of Extreme Perpetrators to Humanism.” At the Interface/Probing the Boundaries, vol. 57, 2009, pp. 91–102. Notredame, Charles, Edouard et al. “Why Media Coverage of Suicide May Increase Suicide Rates: An Epistemological Review.” Media and Suicide: International Perspectives on Research, Theory, and Policy, edited by Thomas Niederkrotenthaler and Steven Stack, Routledge, 2017, pp. 133–158. Oates, Joyce Carol. Zombie. HarperCollins, 1995. Pinedo, Isabel Christina. “Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film.” Journal of Film and Video, vol. 48, no. 1/2, 1996, pp. 17–31. “Quick Look: 250 Active Shooter Incidents in the United States from 2000 to 2017.” FBI, www.fbi.gov/about/partnerships/office-of-partner-engagement/ active-shooter-incidents-graphics. Accessed 29 Oct. 2018.

A killer rhetoric of alternatives  235 Rozansky, Michael L. “Horrendous Crimes Put Him in Spotlight in His Torture Chamber Apartment.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, 29 Nov. 1994, p. A12. Sachs, Ben. “My Friend Dahmer is a Portrait of the Mass Murderer as a Young Man.” The Chicago Reader, 14 Nov. 2017, www.chicagoreader. com / Bleader/archives/2017/11/14/my-friend-dahmer-is-a-portrait-ofthe-mass-murderer-as-a-young-man. Santaulària, Isabel. “‘The Great Good Place’ No More? Integrating and Dismantling Oppositional Discourse in Some Recent Examples of Serial Killer Fiction.” Atlantis: Revista De La Asociación Española De Estudios Ingleses Y Norteamericanos, vol. 29, no.1, 2007, pp. 55–67. Serani, Deborah. “If It Bleeds, It Leads: The Clinical Implications of Fear-Based Programming in News Media.” Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 240–250. doi:10.3200/PSYC.24.4.240–250. Sherrill, Martha. “City in the Grip of Fear & Fascination; After the Grisly Murders, Milwaukeeans Talk, Pray – and Wonder.” The Washington Post, 7 Aug. 1991, p. B1. Terry, Don. “Jeffrey Dahmer, Multiple Killer, is Bludgeoned to Death in Prison.” The New York Times, 29 Nov. 1994, p. A1 (late edition). Tithecott, Richard. Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer. U of Wisconsin P, 1997. Towers, Sherry. “Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings.” PLoS ONE, vol. 10, no. 7, 2015, pp. 1–13. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0117259. Tudor, Andrew. “Why Horror? The Peculiar Pleasures of a Popular Genre.” Cultural Studies, vol. 11, no. 3, 1997, pp. 443–463. doi:10.1080/095023897335691. Twichell, James. Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror. U of ­I llinois P, 1985. Wiest, Julie B. “Casting Cultural Monsters: Representations of Serial Killers in U.S. and U.K. News Media.” Howard Journal of Communications, vol. 27, no. 4, 2016, pp. 327–347. doi:10.1080/10646175.2016.1202876. Williams, Ian. “Autography as Auto-Therapy: Psychic Pain and the Graphic Memoir.” Journal of Medical Humanities, vol. 32, no. 4, 2011, pp. 353–366. doi:10.1007/s10912-011-9158-0. Wright, Alexa. Monstrosity: The Human Monster in Visual Culture. I.B. Tauris, 2013.

15 The contextualization of the Palestinian experience in Joe Sacco’s comics journalism Chad Tew

Although graphic narratives are often adapted from other works, in the case of Joe Sacco, the graphic text was based on his own journalistic reporting for his original series of nine comics and adapted into book form in 1996. The project developed from his reportage in the Israeli Occupied Territories, where he was on the ground between 1991 and 1992 (Palestine ix). Sacco followed this work later with a separate but related book, Footnotes in Gaza where he tied together current events with oral interviews and archival research. Between 2002 and 2003, he investigated the massacres of November 1956 in the town Khan Younis and in nearby Rafah while violence erupted anew in Gaza (Footnotes ix–xi). Besides these accounts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Sacco has reported on the Bosnian War in other monographs, including Safe Area Goražde in 2000, The Fixer in 2003, and War’s End in 2005. Sacco calls what he does “comics journalism” to eschew the more widespread term “graphic novel” and to emphasize the possibility of comics as a technology that can further journalism. Sacco writes, “As a comic book artist–(I am loathe to use the unfortunate marketing term ‘graphic novelist’)--I think I have since written more fully rounded works of non-fiction, but, for me, Palestine retains a sort of propulsive vitality” (Palestine ix). Hillary Chute has made the argument that experimental, non-fiction works such as Sacco’s are better captured by the more precise term graphic narrative (453). Sacco’s work emerged at a time when both comics and journalism were seeing great changes. Art Spiegelman’s Maus in 1986 “opened up a space” of possibilities for rendering non-­ fiction in comics while Sacco was working on his comic series that would later become Palestine (Sacco and Mitchell 53). Such advances allowed Sacco and others of his generation to experiment with non-fiction for a new audience within the larger graphic narrative community. Journalism underwent significant changes both during and after Sacco’s transition from the journalism profession to comics. First, the journalism industry had moved toward corporate ownership, and large conglomerates were created by acquisitions and mergers. Ben Bagdikian charted changes in the ownership of news organizations after the 1970s and documented how news media were becoming increasingly more concentrated

Contextualization of the Palestinian experience  237 in the control of larger companies. Those companies were media-focused and had cross-platform holdings. Second, changes to both public policy and audience expectations about news values, as well as emerging news formats on cable television, introduced alternatives to an earlier style of objective journalism. By the mid-1980s, the Reagan-era Federal Communications Commission used the widespread availability of cable television and its increased channel capacity to officially end the Fairness Doctrine. This policy had maintained expectations about objective journalism in broadcast news and public affairs and had privileged the public’s interests above those of commerce. The emerging news formats were outside of what had been considered straight news (Downie and Kaiser). Perhaps the most consequential changes in journalism were technological as the Internet altered the long-term stability of the journalism business model, the day-to-day routines and practices of journalism, and the way journalists deliver news to audiences (Downie and Kaiser; Downie and Schudson). This changing landscape, for example, prompted news editor Leonard Downie Jr. and historian Michael Schudson in a 2009 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review to propose ideas that would support and sustain independent, accountability journalism. Journalism as a discipline was undertaking historical changes. Sacco has been able to both stake a claim to journalism by his training and intent, and at the same time work independently from many of the larger forces shaping journalism. By transitioning from a print journalism career to comics, Sacco avoided the changes that were impacting journalism and obtained the freedom to explore alternatives. For instance, Sacco was able to work outside the corporate structure. His contract with book publishing company Fantagraphics allowed him to work with a small publisher with distribution agreements. Sacco also benefited from changes in audience expectations about objectivity and news formats. In addition, Sacco did not follow in the tradition of opinion cartoons, but he approached comics in a more autobiographical style. Yet he did not completely abandon journalism. He worked as an independent freelancer while reporting the news that would form the content of Palestine. Even though Sacco worked in print and was not communicating through digital technology, he also benefited from the changing atmosphere that computers and the Internet had introduced. Sacco introduced his first works in comics journalism during a moment when there was increasing receptiveness toward experimentation. It is this possibility that I will focus on in this chapter. Sacco says in his introductory essay, “Some Reflections on Palestine,” that he left print journalism for the pursuit of comics “not out of skepticism” but out of a “lifelong passion” for comics (ix). He also has expressed in an interview that a “compulsion” drove him to focus on the lives of the oppressed or suffering and to bring their issues to comics through his journalism. While he rejects being an “objective journalist” and criticizes

238  Chad Tew journalism for not getting at the truth, he does not reject journalism or his professional training (Sacco and Mitchell 54). My primary focus in this chapter is on the book Palestine, because it is his best-known work, and it is where he first realized through graphic narrative form how he could achieve a better journalism. This chapter will explore how Sacco challenged professional journalism by using the comics form to contextualize his journalistic reportage in a manner that altered institutionalized relationships between journalists and audience, as well as text and audience reception of journalism. Several academic studies of Sacco have explored his different ethical stance toward the lives and humanity of his Palestinian subjects. Although one might say Sacco violated the norm of institutional journalism by not distancing himself from both his sources and his work to be objective, Sacco does hold on to many of the ideals of journalism. Others have argued that Sacco’s ethical approach is “virtuous” (Good) and “mature” (Rosenblatt and Lunsford 70). For Howard Good, Sacco’s comics journalism is implemented with character and a moral conscience that are guides for him to approach his subjects differently, but Sacco offers an approach that can also enrich long-standing journalism values. Rosenblatt and Lunsford also argue that Sacco is self-consciously using comics to challenge typical normative expectations and conventions of journalism. While I agree with both arguments, I do believe there is something else here that can show why Sacco’s comics journalism is so different from institutional professional journalism, and this, I argue, is that his use of comics provides a context for his subjects that is qualitatively different from the context provided by the institution of journalism. The publication of a special edition of Palestine in 2007 provided his audience with more access to the original reporting materials, as well as more information about the process Sacco used to transform them into a graphic narrative. They are also evidence of a process of contextualization through which Sacco addresses his audience in a manner that conveyed a greater understanding of his Palestinian subjects and their lives under occupation.

Contextualization Charles S. Peirce’s introduction to signs has been a classic starting point from which to analyze context. Roman Jakobson, for example, drew upon Peirce in explanation of references (or for Peirce, index). Context in Jakobson’s model of communication served primarily in a referential function, or how the message in the vehicle of a text pointed to some other signs for consideration, meaning, or interpretation by the audience. In Jakobson’s view, when the artist emphasized expression in the message—as in rendering an idea using the strength of the comics form to show that idea in a heightened or unique way—context may take a back seat to this kind of poetic delivery of the message. But when the

Contextualization of the Palestinian experience  239 artist gives information by emphasizing something of interest in a culture, situation, or text, the referential function may be privileged over the poetic (Jakobson 81–82). The view of the referent as a pointer to some context that could be knowable by all parties is both a basic assumption of successful communication and a pact between the communicator and audience for understanding. According to Peirce, the reference function remained valid in the message even if communication of it was not successful. Peirce saw the reference and its referent in the message as being independent of correct or incorrect interpretation by communicants ­(9–10). The referential function is one of primary importance for journalists as they gather and communicate information to the audience. Another aspect of Peirce’s sign and a view of context has been developed around the symbol. According to Peirce, the symbol exists to be interpreted independently from the interpretation. An example would be the Mona Lisa, which is rich with interpretations about what her expression possibly could mean. Giuseppe Montovani’s model of communication employs the symbolic universe to show how shared understandings of participants work in decisions. He explains the situated action—an action taken in a specific context based on shared meanings—as it is interpreted by a community drawing upon a set of overlapping interpretations. His tri-level model of “social context” acknowledges different levels at which context is conveyed and interpreted. Montovani sets higher-level factors in culture on the top level, the more action-oriented factors in situations in the middle level, and the direct factors that come into play when humans interact with a text or technology for a specific purpose on the lower level (55–58). The contextual references in Montovani’s image of context can be fluid, but each level is going to have its independent logic in generating contextual meaning (56). His model is useful as it depicts the process by which people in a community understand and experience their world. The symbolic context was an important aspect of Joe Sacco’s reporting. Over many encounters, Sacco connected with cultural guides who interpreted and explained the Palestinian situation from an insider’s perspective. Sacco then conveyed what he had learned from them about symbolic material through the lens of an outsider, and he targeted his work to an audience that largely shared his cultural perspective. The multiple voices of Palestinians are the source for the rich context in his work. For example, Brigid Maher has shown how Sacco’s use of translators and translated reported interviews appeared as a process in his comics. Maher shows how carefully Sacco illustrated and preserved in his comics the rendering of speech, and she suggests that the message of trauma was heightened by the relationships Sacco depicts. This is a good example of how more than meaning is involved in context. While the understanding of both references and symbols is an important part of getting at meaning, understanding the construction of the text, the

240  Chad Tew purpose of the encounter, and the construction of the “text-artifact” (Bauman and Briggs 72–74; Silverstein and Urban 2) of the graphic narrative can give us a deeper understanding of meaning, relationships, and the processes involved. An approach to this type of contextualization, which draws on the work of Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs, Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, along with other scholars primarily from anthropology and linguistics, accounts for the separate processes that are involved in the construction of texts. While the reference and symbol are important for context, neither say Bauman and Briggs can capture the relative process of indexicality by which “form, function and meaning” are constructed and communicated along with context (72). Silverstein and Urban’s anthology contains examples of those who have examined the process of isolating observed experiences as a text and constructing new text-artifacts from them, as well as the processes that shift relationships between the processes, the artifact, and context (14–16). According to Bauman and Briggs, an important part of the process occurs during decontextualization, where a journalist pulls reported material from its original surroundings and circumstances. The author is left with the remnants of the original situation and the context, or its entextualization, and begins to shape an account of it by selection and movement to notes, sketches, recordings, memory, and so on. That material is carried to another form, such as a news story or comic by the author, and audiences respond to this recontextualized form of the message in the text-artifact (Bauman and Briggs). Drawing upon their framework, we can begin to use some of the material that Sacco has provided in the special edition; the ancillaries include notes, photos, outtakes in the forms of deleted panels, as well as his account and description of his method. These materials reveal the process by which Sacco took material from his original reporting of events and interactions from their original context, and how he shaped them into a final published text-artifact as a graphic narrative in its recontextualized form.

Sacco as comics artist and character Sacco uses context throughout Palestine to immerse his readers into the Palestinian perspective in order to convey the impact that occupation had on Palestinians. One of the strategies he uses to achieve this immersion is to encourage readers to identify with an outsider who is learning from them. In Palestine, Sacco creates a character; we can call him “Joe the journalist,” who is a representation of himself as he was reporting. As the main character, “Joe the journalist” learns about what has happened to the Palestinians, and he better understands their situation as he continues to report. Sacco the comics artist modeled through his character “Joe the journalist” and for his readers a process that he, himself, went

Contextualization of the Palestinian experience  241 through to understand the Palestinian situation. This strategy is a good example of contextualization because it shows how his original reporting was recontextualized for this didactic function. In his introduction, Sacco describes his own intellectual journey so that readers can learn about the overall historical and structural situation behind the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Sacco acknowledges in his introduction that as an American, he grew up and learned only the Israeli point of view, a perspective that was supported by American politics, journalism, and media. He also provides an example going back to the comics he made in high school. In these comics, he used Yasser Arafat as a character in a comic called “Meet the Asshole.” Sacco credits his reading of Christopher Hitchens, Edward Said, and Noam Chomsky for provoking a rethinking of the schema “Israel as an innocent”/Arabs as “terrorists” (Palestine viii–ix). Palestine results from Sacco’s personal struggle with history and societal institutions that support his earlier received schema, which prevented him from seeing the other side. Just as we have one central character to hold all the sequences in the book together, “Joe the journalist” also comes to embody a character searching for the truth about what is not known or understood. Sacco said in his introduction that he decided to focus on giving readers the alternative Palestinian perspective throughout most of Palestine and to explain what the conflict had done to their lives: The more serious criticism of Palestine has been that it tells only one side of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. That is a correct assessment of the book, but it doesn’t move me. My contention was and remains that the Israeli government’s point of view is very well represented in the mainstream American media and is trumpeted loudly, even competitively, by almost every person holding an important elected office in the United States. Palestine was an effort to show something of the Palestinian experience … … My idea was not to present an objective book but an honest one. (Palestine ix) As a professional journalist, Sacco was taught to be fair and balanced, but Sacco the comics journalist is making a different move by filling in the void. Since the Israeli perspective has largely been present in the mainstream media, Sacco makes present what has previously been ­absent. Sacco the comics journalist insinuates the work itself as an intervention by presenting oppression through a series of vignettes about his interactions with Palestinians and by offering their multiple voices to express what life is like under occupation. As his character “Joe the journalist” reports, he learns how Palestinians interpret their situations, rich with associations and symbols, and how interpretation is central to the experience of oppression. The character of Joe continually learns more

242  Chad Tew about their oppression as he reports. As a whole, those stories present a schema from which readers can make sense of referents through the eyes of the oppressed and can learn to apply the schema elsewhere to other situations and decisions. Sacco’s Palestine wrestles with controversy in the stories he chooses to tell but also the way in which he fashions them for comics. Readers are going to be exposed to a text that attempts to show through the comics medium what Sacco means by “an honest” work. This case is ripe for an exploration of how Sacco communicates his intentions through the contextualization of the Palestinian people.

Comics journalism and journalism The institutional framework of journalism guides Sacco’s process throughout his reporting and creative process. While Sacco’s work has its main focus in the graphic narrative, he also stakes a claim to journalism. Sacco was trained as a journalist at the University of Oregon, and he worked professionally in print journalism (Palestine viii–ix). He says he left journalism to work in comics in order to find a career more personally fulfilling. While in the field reporting for Palestine, he took up the methods of journalism and sold some of his work freelance, and these reporting materials were then used by Sacco to create his graphic narrative to blend his intent and training. His relationship with Fantagraphics Books, which published his original nine comics and then his comics adapted into book form, allowed Sacco to remove himself from the institution of professional journalism and to have his work published and marketed as comics journalism through the growing graphic novel markets. Even as he became more independent from journalism, Sacco’s comics journalism shows him negotiating between his leanings toward journalism and the creative outlet of the graphic narrative. Journalists, like ethnographers, both intend to capture rich context while at the same time decontextualizing information as they record, interpret, and shape their presentation from its entextualization. Thus, they present the material in a new recontextualized form. One important way in which journalism works is to make its process invisible as a move to maximize its own authority. This practice is regulated through institutional journalism with its shared knowledge, history, ethical codes, procedures, and standards that shape professionalism and, in turn, shape performances of journalism. As a result of adopting the role of journalist in the field and creating his character in the text, Sacco relies on what he knows from his training and his work as a journalist to transform facts and events into a recontextualized comics-journalism text. In his reporting in Palestine, Sacco simultaneously works with the creative outlet of comics while submitting to the institution of ­journalism—and each informs and regulates the final text.

Contextualization of the Palestinian experience  243 Sacco’s self-reflexivity about journalism is apparent throughout Palestine when his character “Joe the journalist” is shown at work. In the sequence “A Thousand Words,” Sacco shows journalism’s role in creating and shaping both protests and its participants by imposing on them expectations, even as journalists record the event under the guise of detachment (Palestine 53–58). In the special edition, Sacco provides both a photo from the original event and his first attempt at an opening panel (Palestine xxiii, xxvii). As the story begins, Sacco shows his character “Joe the journalist” and his Japanese photojournalist colleague, Saburo, working as freelancers as they report on the event. Sacco pulls out the trappings of the job (i.e., setting the camera’s F-stops and collecting basic elements of the lead paragraph). The goal of the freelancer is to gather the information in a way that can be sold to news services and outlets. The ironic recap of the event in his character’s words shows both that protests about expulsion orders recur regularly and that all the actors are going through the same motions each time: Ah, yes, the outrage of the month … 12 Palestinians … ordered deported by Defense Minister Arens … they’re not charged with anything, mind you, but between you and me and the Israelis that makes them even more suspect--”terror chieftains,” according to ‘The Jerusalem Post’…besides four Jewish settlers have been killed in the past three months and someone’s gotta pay! (Palestine 54) In this short summary, “Joe the journalist” is letting us into the secret that everybody knows: the repeatability of this situation and the framing of the expelled Palestinians. “Joe the journalist” raises the “Israeli as innocent victims” / Palestinians as “terrorist” frame and models a reversal. Sacco first shows a panel of the Palestinian protest march. The second panel shows how Israeli police arrive and respond aggressively toward protesters. The original photo that Sacco took that day is worked into the lower, right-hand side of the panel to show police bearing clubs and pushing down a woman. Sacco again questions the frame by including evidence that the Israeli police are the aggressors. But in the third panel, Sacco shows both protesters and police performing—­ perhaps for the journalists—as the chants are in English and not Arabic and one soldier in a prominent position is smiling. This raises the suspicion for “Joe the journalist” that they may be performing the protest for the media. This scene is interrupted by one woman who “wakes me up” with screams of anger. Sacco the comics artist leaves the action ambiguous: did she wake his consciousness with her authentic burst of anger—“Dogs! Dogs!”—or was she just loud (“man, she’s got pipes”) and wake him from his routine. The event is ended by the authorities at that point.

244  Chad Tew This scene leaves journalists wondering what freelance work they can sell from this one event. In reality, Joe Sacco attempted to sell a photo of police standing over a woman forced to the ground, which he shows in his photo outtakes in the special edition (Palestine xxiii) and has worked into the panel on page 55. In the comics, the character Saleh introduces Joe to his editor so that Joe can sell him the photo. While doing this, Saleh shares with “Joe the journalist” that he is “bored” with the Intifada because “there are no good pictures anymore.” For Saleh, the protests are about good visuals and bad visuals. An editor cynically asks Joe, “You the guy with pictures of ‘violence’?” and the man uses the motions of a quote (54–55). And in the final panel, we learn that “Joe the journalist” was not able to sell his photo. Because he was not in the best position to capture the violence, he did not have a “good visual.” What had made the sale promising at first was its promise of violence. With no compelling photo of violence, there is no sale, and the day ends for the freelancer unsuccessfully. By contrasting his own reporting process—as well as the institutional appetite of journalists and editors for violence in order to get compelling, commercially appealing shots—Sacco is also critiquing journalism. By showing how journalists are able to shape the performance of protesting through “Joe the journalist,” Sacco critiques the role and responsibility of journalism in presenting its news audience with information about the Intifada. Sacco shows how those making the news decisions reinforce the frames of violence and the innocent/ terrorist. The self-reflexive critique questions how the truth can be communicated when aesthetic and framing concerns drive news decisions. Essentially, the news values in the institution of journalism regulate actors and ensure that the established frame remains publishable. In objective journalism, journalists use third-person voice to distance themselves as a technique to artificially remove themselves from the story. Even in television journalism, the journalist remains a detached narrator. The rationale for distancing is to place a greater emphasis on information by focusing on the facts and events rather than a point of view. This technique allows an audience to process those facts for themselves. As Mark Singer points out, Sacco is not entirely abandoning this technique. Singer shows that Sacco does distance himself at particularly violent points where Palestinians seem to be hurting their own case, such as in a scene that describes what Palestinians do to Palestinian collaborators. Singer explains that Sacco “selectively absents himself and his opinions to achieve, however fleetingly, the putative objectivity and distance of traditional journalism” (71). For the most part, Sacco takes a different strategy in Palestine by being involved. The character of “Joe the journalist,” as opposed to comics journalist, is front and center as a framing device. In most cases, he is interviewing or observing Palestinians, and we see his work from his perspective. We as audience are exposed to multiple Palestinian voices throughout his comics with him

Contextualization of the Palestinian experience  245 in the scene as a “witness,” a point of view that frames the scene, conveys what he has been told, or shows us what he has photographed or noted. As we observed in the sequence “A Thousand Words,” Sacco uses his character to make explicit points about the institution of journalism and the way it works: I’m telling someone’s story that is factual, that I got from an interview and also trying to add something to it, which is something you can do, I think, with the medium of comics. I’ll try to make a point that I feel this guy’s life is being contained and being depressed. I’m not an objective journalist, so I feel free to use the art form to do this. (ImageTexT 9) However, process is not the only way that journalism and comics interact. In many of the scenes that get Sacco’s most poetic attention—where the comic form is front and center—journalism is backgrounded to show a heightened situation. The erasure of perspective in journalism is also meant to control emotion and so it is of interest that Sacco uses the emotions of “Joe the journalist” in ways that we would never experience in journalism. Highlighting the comics form, Sacco’s technique involves using a single frame to show the passage of time with a character who delivers successive responses in the same frame. These scenes are offered in situational context to show strong emotion to interaction. In the first instance, “Joe the journalist” takes a tour of the Cave of Machpelah with an older Palestinian tour guide in the sequence, “Hebron.” The guide walks Joe through a series of tourist points, and we see them repeated five times in the same frame. The guide provides a succession of names of historic exhibits. Joe reacts with questions and expressions of being overwhelmed. We see Joe, patient as he begins the tour, become increasingly sweaty as he continues. The sites are mentioned but not explained, and Joe only seems to have questions. In this scene, “Joe the journalist” is overwhelmed by the symbols of importance, and he learns nothing of their historical context. The tour is interrupted when the Palestinian guide is heckled by Israeli settlers. After the guard intervenes, both the settler and the guide continue as if nothing had happened (38–39). Another example of how the journalistic perspective is reduced occurs in the sequence, “Through Other Eyes,” when Joe guides the Tel Aviv woman Paula through an Arab market. She is hesitant and suspicious about the Arab reception to her as a Jewish person. Joe attempts to reassure her that she will be fine. But his belief is challenged in the next panel, chocked full of faces, with eight pullouts of Joe’s face in a state of paranoia and still more of him in the crowd with Paula. In the same frame, we see his repetitive questioning of everything and anything around him. Although the two are never in any danger, the response is

246  Chad Tew internal, and Joe is the only one who expresses paranoid thoughts (258). Both of these scenes adopt the technique of repetition of emotional content across a single frame to mark space and time in a way that does not happen in other media (McCloud 100). In both instances, Sacco chooses to emphasize the poetic expression that fully uses the medium of comics and delivers the emotions of the journalists in situations that involve potential conflict in the daily lives of Israelis and Palestinians. Even as a comics artist, Sacco recounts moments of decision over whether to be performative and fully expressive as a comics artist or to pull back and present the situation in a more clear cut, informational approach (Palestine xxviii–xxix). For example, in the torture scene from pages 200–201, Sacco had produced a panel that he discarded later for a toned-down version, and he included his first attempt in his “outtakes” in the 2007 special edition of Palestine (xxix). In his first discarded take, he drew the torture victim on one panel with the image of a close-up on the pained teenager’s screaming face, but his face is repeated over and over again in a visual array that is shaped like a widely opened cylinder. What Sacco eventually opted for in the final version was close-up images of the teenager’s scream isolated in five separate frames with the words: “I couldn’t count how many times I was beaten … Blood was coming from my mouth and nose … They broke a tooth” (201). Sacco’s work is different from the typical print story where the journalist is hidden behind an impersonal and detached third-person voice. Sacco preserves his interactions in the text with himself depicted as a character, an agent or point of perspective, who observes, listens, or interacts with his Palestinian sources. In this way, Sacco’s character of the journalist in the story resembles the approach of journalists working in the aural or visual broadcast journalism. Unlike print journalism, the visual media of comics and TV are able to convey emotion in a more direct manner as one can see in the scene where he shows the raw anger of the protesters in contrast to the systematic work of the journalists. Even if we take into account that Sacco is doing something similar to visual broadcast journalism by having the reporter be part of the document, he is not following balance conventions of including both sides of the Palestinian-­ Israeli conflict. While publishing Palestine outside of journalism may have freed it from the institutions of professional journalism, Sacco’s book has still provoked evaluation based on journalistic norms, as evidence from the questions about its bias. The work of comics journalism, itself, fits into the debate around shared knowledge about what journalism should be.

Refugee camps Additional evidence for the contribution of the comics art form to journalism and our understanding of reported news involves how Sacco

Contextualization of the Palestinian experience  247 approaches reports about the refugee camps in the pages of Palestine. At times, the poetic expression of the comics artist plays a bigger role in conveying the narrative than the role of Sacco as journalist. At other points, Sacco gives his journalist side more attention to convey information that contextualizes the comics. Sacco specifically mentions this in relation to the opening sequence of “Refugeeland” in the special edition of Palestine. He writes, Palestine is probably too wordy in places, and occasionally the words are too earnest. In what I consider to be its most successful sequences, I let the visual atmosphere take over from the words, even if that meant dropping telling the facts and figures--no matter how painful that was to my inner journalist. (Palestine xxii) Another way contextualization has an impact on our understanding comes from how life in the refugee camps is depicted. Sacco’s Palestine is comprised of vignettes, and these multiple sequences of life in the refugee camps by those in the camps give readers an impression of the oppression experienced. We get a variety of ways to experience the refugee camps from Sacco. In his most performative mode, Sacco employs his skills as a comics artist to show us his experience of what life is like under occupation without adding additional context of information. In his most contextual mode, Sacco gives us essential information to move the story forward. He also presents information from which to evaluate the state of oppression that Palestinians experience. Sacco uses a number of techniques that allow us to expand our knowledge of Palestinian history and culture, as well as a situational context involving his interactions with refugees and their customs and practices to show the impact on relationships. The multiple voices of Palestinians throughout the work provide us with layers of experiential information. His visual storytelling mode heightens our awareness of the spatial and temporal qualities of oppression. We see illustrations that relate to the oppressive aspects of living in squalid conditions. All of these techniques provide the reader with an immersive experience of refugee camps. The sequence “Refugeeland” in Chapter 6 begins with his observation of a refugee camp visualized (145), and it sets up another sequence of panels that Sacco selected in the special edition to highlight his performative use of the comics. In this sequence, “Joe the journalist” takes a tour of the Jabalia refugee camp guided by a United Nations officer in a van. The guide presents Sacco with many facts about the camps. From this experience, Sacco decontextualizes his experiences by writing them in his journal to preserve in his memory the factual, emotional, and visual details from his observation. Sacco kept a notebook while he was in the Occupied Territories in 1991–1992, and in them he recorded these situations for later reference. In addition, he often supplemented

248  Chad Tew his notes with photographs or sketches that would prompt his visual memory (Palestine x). Sacco later describes the details in his notebook as feeling like he was in a “bubble” looking out at the streets with poor drainage and mud, the crowded camps and people observing him, and an Israeli patrol on the streets (Palestine xxii). Our experience of the text is guided by the form and the way Sacco shapes experience in the text. Sacco recontextualizes his experience and notes for rendering them into comics form. The notebook becomes the basis for his script of the scene and his drawings, where he says he primarily frames the passing street scenes from himself in silhouette at the left side of the frame as he looks out of the van window at the refugee camp. Such entextualization privileges showing over telling: The comics form ends up being the dominant textual form, or text-artifact, that becomes its own version of the reality that audiences will use to interpret the facts, situations, and context of the experienced. In this case, the audience is shown a sequence of frames juxtaposed so as to show people Joe’s experience of the camps from inside of his bubble looking out. The comics audience uses Joe’s experience to get an impression of the main character stuck into silence by the state of the Palestinian crowding and low-quality physical space, where they must live their daily lives. Sacco’s performative presentation of the tour of the Jabalia refugee camp stands in sharp contrast to an earlier context-heavy presentation of a visit to another refugee camp, called Balata, in Chapter 2. When Sacco turned his notes into a sequence called “Remind Me,” which is about a visit to a refugee camp, he adopts a different strategy than seen in any other part of the book whereby he uses only a few visual panels to rely primarily on text to deliver information (41–50). His trip to Balata comes early in the book, and the contexts of his social encounters are detailed so as to establish characters who recur elsewhere. At the camp, Joe and Saburo meet some Palestinians, who will tell them about life in the camp. A friend of Saburo’s named Jabril translates and acts as a guide for Sacco. We learn more about Jabril from two situations involving popular culture. For example, the sequence’s title, “Remind Me,” is named after “Fakaroumi,” a rather lengthy sad song of longing by the renowned Egyptian female singer, Oum Koulsoum. Sacco relates his impression of Koulsoum to the non-Arab as someone who looks like Roy Orbison “on a bad day,” but he delights in the aesthetics of her voice. By using this exaggerated comic strategy, Sacco decontextualizes Koulsoum, and he conveys her importance as a popular Arab singer of an emotionally powerful song. Her song is used to tell the story of Jabril’s romantic longing and the restrictions on travel imposed by him when he was accused by Israel of attending a terrorist training camp. This is not the only social interaction in the chapter framed by cultural knowledge of popular culture. Later, Sacco relaxes with some men during the evening with a Chuck Norris video of the movie Delta Force, and he

Contextualization of the Palestinian experience  249 watches how they react in his presence as a stranger in their country, where the Americans are presented as the heroic good guys and Palestinians as weak, cowardly, bad guys. The situational context frames their reaction as the men in the room are the ones who are accused of associating with terrorists and share the nationality of the bad guys in the movie. For “Joe the journalist,” his relationships with the men now shape his awareness. He has a different reaction watching the story with the men as he can no longer see the film as just a good guys vs. bad guys film but one that also shows the men around him being framed in negative terms. The relationships “Joe the journalist” establishes in the book become part of the learning process as he learns about their oppression. The images do not propel the story forward in this sketch; instead, the information presented in the text holds it all together and links the camp with history. The text refers to Israeli-Palestinian history and culture, the situation on the ground, and the way the text presents the story in order to evoke interpretation. Whereas in the performative Jabilia sequence, Sacco does not want to leave the United Nations Reliefs and Works Agency (UNRWA) van, in Balata, he interacts with people on the streets, visits with men, and tours a school. The character “Joe the journalist” is shown building relationships with Palestinians, who will appear again in later sequences. In terms of what Sacco observed at the camps, the two tours share the commonality of mud, schools, and security; each camp is crowded and has poor sewage. This early sequence is where Sacco the comics artist provides the most background and focus on people’s lives. The context that is pointed to visually in this example is multifold. We are shown children gathering around the journalists, men holding green cards and red cards, Palestinians fleeing from an armed Red Beret soldier, men talking to other people, and soldiers arriving before “Joe the journalist” leaves the refugee camp, in addition to portraits of Israeli leaders, celebrities, a UNRWA clinic, a journey to meet a member of Fateh. But Sacco uses the section to connect his present with the events of 1948. He writes, “Do we need to talk about 1948?” after pointing out that some of the Palestinians in Balata have been in the refugee camp since around the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (Palestine 41–42). He then gives a lengthy stretch of text for comics where he presents readers with historical context and little in the way of visual support. The account is supported by portraits of Prime Ministers David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir whose views on the removal of Palestinians and their lack of claim to a homeland are presented. Sacco builds tension at this point in the graphic narrative by pointing out that the refugees have no place to go. He writes, “Back to what? Close to 400 Palestinian villages were razed by the Israelis during and after the ‘48 war” (42). In this sequence, he provides information to support the hopelessness of their situation, the historical background for their refugee status, the cultural oppression of using identity cards, and harsh daily conditions in which Palestinians must endure.

250  Chad Tew

Context and immersion Performance and context combine in Joe Sacco’s Palestine to illustrate the strength of comics journalism. Sacco uses the medium of comics to be fully expressive. As we have seen, in moments of heightened emotion or tension, Sacco is able to balance the comics art with journalistic demands for accuracy and information. His comics journalism is a constant set of negotiations between artistic expression and the professional principles of journalism. By being more transparent about the reporting behind Palestine, Sacco is able to examine the role of journalism in reporting the conflict and behind the scenes of daily reporting. Through contextualization of the Palestinian experience, Sacco uses the discipline of journalism to render Palestinians as fully embodied. By presenting multiple voices, Sacco shows the various kinds of oppression Palestinians face. By using context to set up the story, he provides us with information about the conditions inside refugee camps. The main advantage, however, is that he is able to frame the information and context through the eyes of his character who learns about the impact of oppression. In this way, the comics journalist models for readers how he, himself, learned about this oppression while reporting. All of the various sequences then provide a point of view with information, multiple voices, and awareness of frames that can be immersive for readers. Sacco’s comic journalism is praised for his passion, humaneness, and sense of fairness for presenting the Palestinian case. These character qualities are an important part of virtue journalism and are an important reason why he is praised. Sacco’s comics journalism is immersive enough for readers to apply knowledge learned to new situations and experiences about the conflict. The history of book and reader reception studies over the past decades have shown us that the act of writing and reading has continually changed throughout history. Not only who reads but what, where, and when we read as well as how we read and why we read what we read. In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud writes, Comic readers are also conditioned by other media and the ‘real time’ of everyday life to expect a very linear progression. Just a straight line from point A to point B. But is it necessary? / For now, these questions are the territory of games and strange little experiments. / But viewer participation is on the verge of becoming an enormous issue in other media. (106) Joe Sacco’s comics journalism rendered his reporting through his artistic use of the comics form at a historical moment when literature and journalism were examining the cultural practices of narrative contemporaneously with other media and advances in digital technology. By ­creating a new relationship between the comics-journalism text, performance

Contextualization of the Palestinian experience  251 and the context in which journalism could be conveyed in comics form, Sacco experimented with news and how it might connect to its readership. With the comics form, Sacco has increased his audience’s presence and the immersive qualities of narrative that are suggestive of a cultural awareness about immersion in digital narratives taking root in the 1990s. These experimentations provide a path for others to follow in terms of creating other formats to help readers understand the news and to realize the impact such stories convey.

Works Cited Aarset, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. John Hopkins UP, 1997. Bagdikian, Ben. The Media Monopoly, 3rd edition. Beacon Press, 1990. Bauman, Richard, and Charles L. Briggs. “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life.” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 19, 1990, pp. 59–88. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2155959. Chute, Hillary. “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.” PMLA, vol. 123, no. 2, 2008, pp. 452–465. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25501865. Downie Jr., Leonard, and Robert G. Kaiser. The News about the News: American Journalism in Peril. Vintage Books, 2002. Downie Jr., Leonard, and Michael Schudson. “The Reconstruction of American Journalism.” Columbia Journalism Review, vol. 48, no. 4, Nov. 2009, pp. 28–51. EBSCOhost, login.libproxy.usi.edu/login?url=http://search.­ebscohost. com / log in.aspx?direc t=tr ue&db =uf h& A N = 45160890&site = ehostlive&scope=site. Good, Howard. “‘Just a Cartoonist’: The Virtuous Journalism of Joe Sacco.” Ethics and Entertainment: Essays on Media Culture and Media Morality, edited by Howard Good and Sandra L. Borden, McFarland, 2010, pp. 195–211. Jakobson, Roman. The Framework of Language. Michigan Studies in the Humanities, U of Michigan P, 1980. Laurel, Brenda. Computers as Theatre. Addison-Wesley, 1993. Maher, Brigid. “Graphic Representations of Language, Translation, and Culture in Joe Sacco’s Comics Journalism.” The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World, edited by Daniel Worden, UP of Mississippi, 2015, pp. 222–228. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. MIT Press, 2002. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperPerennial, 1993. Moore, Alan, and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen. DC Comics, 1987. Montovani, Guiseppe. New Communication Environments: From Everyday to Virtual. Taylor & Francis, 1996. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. MIT Press, 2000. Pekar, Harvey. American Splendor. Ballantine Books, 2003. Peirce, Charles S. “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs.” Semiotics: An ­Introductory Anthology, edited by Robert E. Innis, Indiana UP, 1985, pp. 4–23.

252  Chad Tew Pulitzer. Special Awards and Citations. The Pulitzer Prizes, 2019, www.­pulitzer. org/prize- winners-by-category/260. Accessed 15 Feb. 2019. Rosenblatt, Adam, and Andrea A. Lunsford. “Critique, Caricature, and Compulsion in Joe Sacco’s Comics Journalism.” The Rise of the American Comics Artist Creators and Contexts, edited by Paul Williams and James Lyons, UP of Mississippi, 2010, pp. 68–87. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality. John Hopkins UP, 2001. Sacco, Joe. Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–1995. Fantagraphics Books, 2000. ———. Notes from a Defeatist. Fantagraphics Books, 2003. ———. The Fixer. Drawn & Quarterly Books, 2003. ———. War’s End. Drawn & Quarterly Books, 2005. ———. Palestine: The Special Edition. Fantagraphics Books, 2007. ———. “Joe Sacco: Presentation from 2002 UF Comics Conference.” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2004. Dept of English, University of Florida. Accessed 15 Feb. 2019, www.english.ufl.edu/­imagetext/ archives/v1_1/sacco/index.shtml. Sacco, Joe, and W.J.T. Mitchell. “Public Conversation: May 19, 2012 Introduced by Jim Chandler.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 40, no. 3, 2014, pp. 53–70. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/677330. Silverstein, Michael, and Greg Urban. Natural Histories of Discourse. U of Chicago P, 1996. Singer, Marc. “Views from Nowhere: Journalistic Detachment in Palestine.” The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World, edited by Daniel Worden, UP of Mississippi, 2015, pp. 67–81. Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. Pantheon Books, 1986. Weiner, Stephen. “How the Graphic Novel Changed American Comics.” The Rise of the American Comics Artist Creators and Contexts, edited by Paul Williams and James Lyons, UP of Mississippi, 2010, pp. 3–13.

Index

Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables and italic page numbers refer to figures. Abe (character) 21–32 Abercrombie, Nicholas 135, 136 A-Bomb (character) 112 Abrams ComicArts 131n1 acid attack 183 adaptation, theories of 20, 147 adaptations: accuracy of 139; audience response to 12; of Austen’s works 133–4, 136–46; fidelity of 138–9, 140–1; perils of 133–4; status of 144; of text novels 118–19, 122–4, 126; see also graphic novels A-Force (Marvel) 39 African American heroes 54, 56, 58–9 AfterShock Comics 188 Aldama, Fredrick Luis 37 Ali, Barish 227 Alonso, Axel 35 America series (Marvel) 10, 35–6, 38, 39–40, 49 anachronism 93–4 Angelica, Sticks (character) 203; and Canadian nature myths 204–12 anorexia 80–1; see also eating disorders Ant-Man (character) 105 Anzaldúa, Gloria 43–5 Aqualad (character) 109 Araña 35 Are You My Mother? (Bechdel) 68, 155–6; color palette 156–7; graphic style of 156–7; hybrid signifiers in 166–8; subversive gutter performativity in 166–7, 167 “Asha, Now” (Guha) 177–8 Asian Americans 90–1, 99 asterisked footnotes 163–5

asterisked gutter notes 162–3 Atwood, Margaret 206 audience engagement 6–7, 9, 12, 136; with graphic narratives 143–5, 147–8; see also reader engagement audience members: inactive 136; interactive 136; knowing 135, 136, 139, 141, 142; knowing 135, 136, 138–9, 141, 142, 144–5, 146; proactive 136; unknowing 135, 136, 137, 142 audience response 135–42 audience type 135–42 augmented reality (AR) 174, 179, 181, 183 August, Timothy 92 Austen, Jane: adaptations of 133–4; as “crossover artist” 143 Austin, J.L. 7–8 autobiography 68–69, 71, 78, 83 autographers 223 Avengers, The 104, 105–6 Avengers Assemble 107 Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes 108 Bachelard, Gaston 55 Backderf, John “Derf” 13, 219, 224–6, 231 Baetens, Jan 157 Bacon, Wallace 7, 131, 131n3, 140 Bagdikian, Ben 236 Barthes, Roland 203 Bartscht, Ludmilla 172, 174 Batgirl (character) 113, 114 Batiste, Stephanie 120 Batman (character) 104, 106, 110

254 Index Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice (film) 50n4 Bauman, Richard 240 Baym, Nina 210 Beaty, Bart 2 Bechdel, Alison 12, 68, 154–6; use of hybrid signifiers by 166–8 Bell, Elizabeth 7, 13 Bennett, Donna 204–5 Bennett, Marguerite 12, 188, 189, 199–200 Benshoff, Harry 195 Bertonasco, Larissa 172, 174 Bertram, Harry (character) 191–2, 196 Bertram, Lady (character) 189, 191–4, 196–9 Best We Could Do, The (Bui) 88–9; color palette 97; and familial cartography 96–9 Bhabha, Homi K. 8 Big Barda (character) 114 biography 92, 203, 227 bipolar disorder 70, 74–8 Blackfire (character) 113–14 blank pages 26, 32, 179 Blippar App 181 body horror 191–5 Boelcskevy, Mary Anne 122 Borderlands theory 43–8 Bordo, Susan 190 Bradley, Nicholas 202 Brain Drain (film) 113 Bramlett, Frank 179 Breen, Robert 140, 146 Briggs, Charles 240 Brooks, Peter 190 Brown, E.K. 204 Brown, Jeffrey 103 Bui, Thi 88, 96–9, 100, 101 bullying 228, 229 Burke, Kenneth 219–20, 225–6 Bustos (character) 115 Butler, Nancy 133, 139–40, 144, 148n1, 148n6 Butler, Octavia 11, 118, 122, 130 Byron, Glennis 190 Caddy, Scott 134 Canada: and the myth of the goose 205; representation of in film 205; sensual 213; see also identity, Canadian

Canby, Victor 56 capitalism 103, 209, 217n8 Capshaw, Billy 232 Captain America (Black character) 113 Captain America (character) 48 Captain Marvel (character) 105, 114, 115 Caputi, Jane 194 Carleton, Sean 130 Carr, Snapper (character) 111 cartography 94–5, 96; familial 96–9; see also maps Cartoon Network 113 Casey, Joe 39 Catholicism 45–6 Cavell, Richard 209 Chamber Theatre 140, 146 Chandler, Raymond 55 Chaney, Michael A. 173 characters: African American 113; female 35, 37, 39–40, 113, 187–8; Latinx 35–49, 39–41; LGBTQ 35, 37, 39–40, 45, 48; MuslimAmerican 113; superhero 37; transgender 37 chauvinism 177 Chavez, America (character) 35, 37, 39–40, 39, 41, 44, 50n5; Borderlands identity of 43–8; cultural hybridity of 48–9; see also Miss America Chavez Guerrillas 42, 47 Chomsky, Noam 241 Chong, Sylvia Shin Huey 91–2, 94 Choueiti, Marc 36 Chute, Hillary 1, 2, 19, 25, 187, 222, 236 Civil War II (Marvel) 39, 114 Cixous, Hélène 154, 165, 169 Classics Illustrated 143 Clueless (film) 137 Cocca, Carolyn 187, 188, 200 code-switching 38, 39, 45 Coger, Leslie Irene 6 colonialism 91; capitalist 202 color palette: in Are You My Mother? 156–7; in Austen adaptations 145; in The Best We Could Do 97; in Fun Home 156–7; in Kindred 120, 121, 123, 125, 127; in Lighter Than My Shadow 79, 83n1; in Marbles 83n1; in Persepolis 1 and Persepolis

Index   255 2 157; in the Priya series 183; in Psychiatric Tales 83n1; in Shaft 59; in White Donkey 24–5, 30, 32 Columbus, Chris 133 comics 2; classical works in 143; crossover issues 104; female-led titles 113; and the gothic genre 191; hybridity of 48–9; importance in cultural construction 173; independent 188; liminality in 13; as process 6–9; as product 5–6; reasons for reading 173; as reflection of culture 187; superhero 35–49; see also graphic narratives comics journalism 13, 237–8, 242–6, 250–1 comics scholarship 3 Comics Studies 2–3, 9, 13 communication 32, 75, 92, 173; Burke’s work on 220; Jakobson’s model of 238–9; Montovani’s model of 239; nonverbal 127; visual 169 communitas 13 Confederation Poets 204–5 Conquergood, Dwight 1, 5–6, 8–9, 11 conscientization 130 context: analysis of 238–9; civic 158; use of comics for 238; cultural 134, 220; historical 98, 245, 249; and immersion 250–1; Indian 183; in journalism 242, 251; processes of 240; Sacco’s use of 13, 240, 245, 247–51; situational 245 247, 249; social 220, 239; symbolic 239 contextualization 98, 110, 238–42, 247, 250; see also decontextualization Corazón, Anya (character) 35 Corgog, Martha 139 Cotton Comes to Harlem (Himes) 56 creator-audience relationship 7 Creed, Barbara 193 Critical Refugee Studies 89, 90 Cunningham, Darryl 11, 70, 71–4, 79, 82–3, 83n1 Cutter, Martha 119, 129 Dahmer, Jeffrey 219; media portrayal of 223, 233n1; portrayal of in graphic novel 223–33; as victim of circumstance 224; as victim of bullying 228, 229

Danziger-Russell, Jacqueline 187, 188 Dark Knight (character) 106 Davenport-Hines, R.P.T. 196 Davis, Preston 232 Davis, Rocio 100 DC Comics 35, 37 DC Superhero Girls 114 DC Superhero Girls (dolls) 113–14, 115 Deadpool (character) 229 decontextualization 240, 242, 247–8 DeForge, Michael: as author 12, 202–3, 213, 214; as character 208 DeKeseredy, Walter 107 depression 31, 72, 74, 75, 76–7 Devineni, Ram 172, 174, 179 dialogue: in Austen’s works 144; crossing panels 147; with God 162; overlapping 76; thought bubbles, 173 dialogue balloons 76, 164, 165 dialogue bubbles 162–3, 167 digital narratives 251 di Liddo, Lisa Annalisa 3–4 Donovan, Courtney 75, 223 Douglass, Frederick 125 Downie, Leonard Jr. 237 Dowry Prohibition Act 176 dowry system 175 Dragotta, Nick 39 Drawing the Line (Kuriyan, Bertonasco, and Bartscht) 172, 174–9, 184 dreams 27 Duffy, Damian 118, 122–3, 129, 130, 131n1 Duncan, Randy 2–3, 173 Easton, Lee 103 eating disorders 70, 78–82 Ebert, Roger 56 Eco, Umberto 103 écriture feminine 154–5, 165, 169 Edwards, Justin D. 209 Eisner, Will 2, 184, 228–9 Ekman, Paul 127 Elise (character) 199 embedments 137–8 embodied cognition 6, 68 embodiment: by Austen fans 139; of black masculinity 56; of death drive 206; of difference 43; of ethnic traits 10; of experience 129; of the

256 Index gothic 196; in graphic narratives 1, 6, 7; of imagery 93; of Latinx identity 35, 37, 46; of lucha libre culture 42; of memory 92; and mental illness 76; of modes of control 125; of nature 213, 214; of Palestinians 250; of pan-Latinidad 39; physical 61, 119; stereotypical 10; of urban society 207; of U.S. national symbolism 40; of Vietnam 88, 95, 97; of zombie traits 230 Emet Comics 188 Emma (Austen) 134 Emma (graphic novel adaptation) 134, 137, 142; illustrations by Lee 140, 141–2, 145–6, 148n6; text by Butler 140, 144, 148n6 empathetic engagement 119; see also reader engagement empathy 68–9, 72, 83, 88–9, 119, 124, 128, 130, 172; ambassadorial 130; narrative 130; parallel 129; strategic 130 empire-making 89, 99–100, 101, 101n1 Empire Studies 89 Espiritu, Yến Lê 89, 90, 100 ethnography 3, 5, 242 Eugene, Nicole 69 Evely, Bilquis 10, 56, 59 eyes, close-ups of 23–4, 29, 31 Facebook 172 Fairness Doctrine 237 Falcon (character) 106 family histories 11 Fantagraphics Books 237, 242 Fantastic Four 48, 115 Fawaz, Ramzi 200 Federal Communications Commission 237 feminism 3, 155, 156, 166, 175, 202, 211; New 181 feminist scholarship 187, 202 Film Studies 2 Finkel, David 22, 32 Fixer, The (Sacco) 236 Flash (character) 109 flashbacks 27, 59, 60–64, 66, 155 Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco) 236 Forney, Ellen 70, 74–8, 79, 82–3, 83n1 Foss, Sonja K. 220

Francis, Consuela 47–8 Frank, Arthur W. 31, 70–1 Franklin, Dana (character) 118–119, 121–131 Freire, Paulo 130 Freud, Sigmund 157 Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Bechdel) 68, 155; color palette 156–7; graphic style of 156–7; hybrid signifiers in 166 Galactus (character) 111, 112 Gardner, Jared 2 gender discrimination 181 gender inequity 172–3, 179, 183 gender sensitivity 12, 171, 173 gestures 82, 120, 126, 128, 222, 228 Gillen, Kieron 39 Gilman, Sander 21 Gilmore, Leigh 179 God/Truth voice 154 Goldman, Dan 183 Goliath (character) 105–6 gothic genre 12, 189–90; and body horror/transformation 191–5; gender roles in 190; and the graphic novel 199–200; monsters in 221; plot structure 190 Gothic Studies 189 graphic medicine 27 graphic memoirs 68–9, 75, 78, 92, 154; and mental illness 82–3; Vietnamese 11, 8–9 graphic narratives 100–1; ability to elicit empathy 69–70; aesthetic impact of 7; alternative/ multiple points of view in 232–3; autobiographical 223; Canadian 12–13; effecting transformation and change 13; ethical impact of 7; for gender sensitization in India 174–9; genre considerations 222–3; importance in cultural construction 173; Indian 12; international developments 1; Palestinian 13; and performance 3–4; and Performance Studies 4–6; and performativity 8–9; and political change 1, 7, 9; popular scrutiny of 143; and social change 1, 7, 9, 12; and trauma 223; use in classrooms 1–2; see also color palette; comics scholarship; graphic novels; graphic style

Index   257 graphic novels: adaptations from Austen’s novels, 133–4, 136–46; adapting from text novels 118–19, 122–4, 126; audience reactions to adaptations 12; augmented reality in 181; as comics journalism 236, 242; as cultural artefacts 89, 187; gender depictions in 188–9; gendered performativity in 154; and the gothic genre 199–200; history of 119; hybridity of 36, 48–9, 78–82; independent publishers of 188; kinetic function of 9; mimetic function of 9; monstrous figures in 222, 232; poietic function of 9; polymorphic literacy of 165; and reader engagement 7, 68, 119, 127–31; representation of space in 54–5, 59, 63, 64, 66, 75, 154; serial comics adapted as 19–20; see also adaptations; graphic narratives; graphic style; gutter space; individual graphic novels by name graphic style: in Are You My Mother? 156–7; in Fun Home 156–7; in Kindred 121–7; in My Friend Dahmer 225–8, 228; panel arrangement 146–7; panel transitions 48; in Persepolis 1 and Persepolis 2 157; photographic realism 121; see also gutter space Green, Katie 70, 78–83, 83n1 Green Arrow (character) 109 Guha, Hemavathy 177–8 guilt 219, 231–2; collective 221, 230; in gothic writing 189; rhetorical functions of 220–3; stages of 230–1; survivor’s 18; in White Donkey 23–4, 26, 30 Gunjal, Samidha 178 Gutiérrez, Peter 142 gutters 48–9, 71 gutter space 13, 25, 48–9, 71, 119, 126, 154, 173, 177, 179, 193; in Are You My Mother? 158, 161, 163; asterisked footnotes 163–5; asterisked gutter notes 162–3; Bechdel’s use of 157–63, 165; in Fun Home 158, 159–63, 159; invisible (double-page bleeds) 160–1; invisible (single-page bleeds) 161–3; in My Friend Dahmer 227; in Persepolis 1 158,

159–64; in Persepolis 2 158, 163–5; in the Priya series 183; Satrapi’s use of 157–64, 165; shape-shifting 159–60; used to convey transgression 157–65, 158 Hag (character) 197–9 Haggerty, George 195 Halberstam, Jack 211 Hanawalt, Lisa: cartoonist 217n10; graphic novel character 203, 212–13, 214, 217n10 Hantke, Steffen 222 Haraway, Donna 202 Hargreaves, Jennifer 210 Harley Quinn (character) 113, 114 Harrison, Richard 103 Hayes, Isaac 56 Heckerling, Amy 137 Heflin, Tanya 69, 70 Herman, David 2, 82, 119–20 heroes: African American 54, 56, 58–9; female 105, 110–13 Hero of the Year (film) 113 hero’s journey 156, 211 heteronormativity 47, 103, 155, 156, 194–6, 200, 211, 214 heterosexuality 45, 46, 189, 197 Himes, Chester 56 Hindu mythology 179, 180, 181, 183–4 Hitchens, Christopher 241 HIV/AIDS 21 homophobia 155, 157 homosexuality 155, 156–7 homosocial bonding 103–4 Hong, Mai-Linh 88 Honor Girl (Thrash) 68 Huffman, Brandie L. 119, 128 Hulk (character) 106, 107–8, 110, 111, 112–13, 115 Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H. 108, 111 Huls, Alexander 188 human rights 183 Hutcheon, Linda 20, 133, 134–5, 136, 142, 143, 147 hybridity: cultural 49; of the graphic novel 36, 48–9, 78; of the hero 48–9; queer ethnic 43–48, 49; textual-visual 19–20, 36, 165

258 Index “An Ideal Girl” (Menon) 176–7 identity: American 40, 209; Borderlands 43–8; Canadian 13, 202–3, 204, 205, 207–9, 212, 214, 216; diasporic 88; ethnic 36, 48; formation of 192; hybrid 36; Latinx 35, 36–7, 42, 47; and mental illness 70; national 40, 216; panethnic 49; post-Latinx 41; queer 47, 48; rebuilding 215; regional 43; social 35; socially constructed 160; Vietnamese 99 identity politics 155, 190 imagery: cartographic 98; free-floating 161; geographic 98–9 immigrants 11, 40, 43, 47 imperialism 88, 91, 93 independent publishers, 188 indexicality, 240 India: gender-based violence in 171–2, 174; gender sensitization in 174–9 Injustice Gang 111 InSEXts series (Bennett and Kristantina) 12, 188–9, 194, 200; body transformation in 191–5; and the female voice 191; and lesbian sexuality 196–7; use of body horror and body transformation 190–5 Intergalactic Games (film) 113–14 intertextuality 169, 183 intervisuality 169 In the Shadow of No Towers (Spiegelman) 223 Iraq War veterans 18, 19 Iron Knight 106 Iron Man (Black female character) 113 Iron Man (character) 106, 107–8, 110 irony 2, 24, 28, 29, 60, 123, 159, 169, 164, 194, 243 Islamic Revolution 156 Ivison, Douglas 209

Jones, D.G. 211 Jones, Laura 71 Jones, Rick (character) 105 journalism 236–7; and comics journalism 242–6; objective 237; see also comics journalism Justice League 109, 110, 111 Justice League of America #143 111 Juvenile Justice Act (India) 172

Jackson, Shannon 9–10 Jacobs, Harriet 122 Jakobson, Roman 238 Janeites 12, 134 Jasper, Danny M. 119, 128 Jennings, John 118, 119, 120–1, 122–3, 129, 130, 131, 131n1 Joe the journalist (character) 240–1, 243–5, 247, 249 Johnson, Dan 119, 128

Lafayette, Luna (character) 115 Lashley, Kathrine 129 Latinx characters 10, 35, 39–41, 49–50n1, 50n4 Latinx Studies 36 Leblanc, Phillipe 79 Lee, Janet K. 140, 141–2, 145, 148n6 Lefebvre, Henri 55 Lefèvre, Pascal 120, 125, 223 Legends of Atlantis (film) 114

Kannan, Harini 175–6, 175 Kanter, Albert 143 Kaplan, Amy 212 Karras, Ruth 106 Katana (character) 113 Keen, Suzanne 88–9, 127, 129, 130 Kertzer, Jonathan 202 Khanduri, Ritu 172 Kid Flash (character) 109 Kindred (Butler) 11, 118, 129 Kindred (graphic novel adaptation) 118–19, 129, 130; color palette 120, 121, 123, 125, 127; cover art 120; expressing feelings in 127–8; graphic style in 121–7; pacing in 130; panel arrangement 123–4; and reader engagement 130–1; worldmaking in 119–21 kineograph 25–6 kinesis 1, 8, 9, 12–13 King Orin (Aquaman; character) 109 Kirsch, Stephen 103 Klay, Phil 31–2 Kollwitz, Käthe 120 Koulsoum, Oum 248 Koyama Press 188 Kree-Skrull War series, The 105, 115 Kristantina, Ariela 12, 188, 189, 199–200 Kroetsch, Robert 202 Kuriyan, Priya 172, 174 Kyler, Carolyn 68

Index   259 lesbianism: in comics characters 37, 46; in the gothic genre 195–9; in InSEXts 12, 188–9, 191, 193, 196–7, 199–200; Latinx 35, 36, 37, 40, 43, 44, 45–6 LGBTQ characters 35, 37, 39–40, 45, 48; chosen families of 47; see also lesbianism Lie, Crystal Lin 80–1 Lighter Than My Shadow (Green) 70, 78–82, 83n1; color palette 79, 83n1; symbolism of the shadow 81 liminality: in America 40, 45; of geographic space 96; of graphic memoirs 100; of outsiders 229; in Shaft 61–2 Line Webtoon 188 Lipsitz, George 55 literacy: broadening of the category 173; use of graphic novel to increase 142, 148n5; low levels of 181; New Literacy 173; polymorphic 165; visual 173 Littlejohn, Bruce 204 Living Lightning (character) 45 Lizzie Bennett Diaries, The 137 Longhurst, Brian 135, 136 Lopate, Phillip 71 Lorde, Audre 191 Low, Jennifer 110 Lowe, Lisa 89, 101 lucha libre culture 42–3 Lymon, Frankie 62 Lyndon, Donald 55 McCloud, Scott 2, 3, 6, 7, 36, 48, 118, 121, 141, 146, 147, 227, 250 McDonald, Mary 106–7 McGrath, Charles 187 McKelvie, Jaime 39 McNally, Girl (character) 203, 208–9, 212–13 Maher, Brigid 239 male domination 160 Man of Steel (film) 50n4 maps 94–5, 96, 97–9; see also cartography Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me (Forney) 70, 74–8; color palette 83n1 Mareena (character) 114 Mariah (character) 189, 191–4, 196–9, 200

Marine Corps 19, 26–7 marriage 92, 140–1, 156; arranged 175–6, 181; in India 175–6, 181; in the Victorian era 191–2, 197, 198 Marshall, Elizabeth 179 Martian Manhunter (character) 110 Martin, Elaine 1 Marvel Comics 37; superhero 35 Marvel Mystery Comics #8 104 Marvel Rising Secret Warrior Dolls 115 Marxism 156 masculinity 103; alternative 113–16; in female heroes 110–13; idealized 113, 115; medieval 106; proving 106–7; and sport culture 106–7; and violence 104–8; violent 116 Maus (Spiegelman) 68, 83n1, 223, 236 memory: embodied 92–3; living 94; and space 55, 58, 64–6; in Vietnamerica 92–6 Menon, Soumya 176 mental health 28; see also mental illness mental illness 11, 21–2, 26–9, 27–8, 68; anorexia 80–1; antisocial personality disorder 83n2; bipolar disorder 70, 74–8, 78; and creativity 75; depression 31, 72, 74, 75, 76–7; eating disorders 70, 78–82; and graphic narrative 82–3; in graphic novels 70–1; literary treatments of 77–8; representations of 69; schizophrenia 74; self-harm 72–3 Messner, Michael 107 Meyers, Marc 219 mimesis 1, 8, 9, 10–11 Miss America (character) 10, 35–6, 38; see also Chavez, America (character) Mitchell, Elvis 56 Mitchell, W.J.T. 154 monsters: in America 45; autonomy of 194; as characters 112; Dahmer as 219–20, 226, 229–30; lesbians as 12, 194, 200; origin of 233; serial killers as 222; as social scapegoats 221–2 Montclare (character) 115 Montovani, Giuseppe 239 Moon Girl 114

260 Index Moon Girl (character) 115 Moore, Alan 4 Morales, Miles (character) 35, 50n4 mortification 219–20, 221; and victimage 230–3 mothers and grandmothers: in America 39, 40, 42, 44, 45, 46, 50n7; in Are You My Mother? 155–6, 161, 163, 166–8; in Drawing the Line 176–8; in Fun Home 155, 160, 162; in InSEXts 191, 197; in Kindred 124, 127; in Marbles 76; in Sticks Angelica 212; in Vietnamerica 93, 97, 98 Ms. Martian (character) 110–11 Ms. Marvel (character) 113, 114–15 Ms. Marvel (Muslim-American character) 113 My Friend Dahmer (Backderf) 13, 219–20; graphic style in 225–8; visual images in 225–6 My Friend Dahmer (film) 219 narratives: colonizing 88; multigenerational 96; and the production of empathy 88–9; resistant 88; see also graphic narratives narrative voice 137, 139, 140, 147 nature: as Canadian national identity 202, 203–4; as dangerous 206–7; see also nature myths nature myths 12–13, 202, 203–12, 216; American 211; Canadian 216n3; Canadian identity as communal 207–9; as Canadian national identity 205; city as not Canadian 209–10; men conquer nature and women represent nature 210–12; nature as dangerous 206–7; nature as truest symbol of Canada 204–5; new vision of 212–14 negative space 160 neurobiology 27 neuropsychology 21 New Feminism 181; see also feminism New Literacy 173; see also literacy Nguyen, Catherine 100 Nguyen, Mimi 90, 93 Nirbhaya 12, 171, 174, 184n1 Oates, Joyce Carol 230 object relations theory 155 O’Brien, Tim 19

Olczak, Paul 103 other and othering 21, 195, 197–8, 222, 230–1 Otter-With-Mushroom (character) 206, 213–14 Palestine (Sacco) 236, 237–8; contextualization in 238–40, 247; Joe the journalist in 240–2, 243–4; “outtakes” edition 246; representation of refugee camps 246–9 Palmer, Paulina 195 Pandey, Awindra Pratap 171 Pandey, Geeta 181 panel arrangement 146–7 panel transitions 48 panethnicity 36, 38–9, 49 Pan-Latinidad 38–9 patriarchy 47, 113, 162, 174, 176, 181, 183, 189, 190–6, 198, 211 Patsy Walker, a.k.a. Hellcat! (Marvel) 39 Patternist series 118 Patternmaster 121 Pearce, Jon 204 Peirce, Charles S. 238–9 Pelias, Ronald J. 136 Percora, Norma 103 performance 96, 135–6, 140, 143, 146; and audience engagement 136; and comics 1, 3, 6–7, 13; and context 250–1; and function 5, 8; and the graphic narrative 3–4, 13, 147–8; heroic 104; of journalism 242; masculine 104, 106, 107–8; as mode of inquiry 6–7; and performativity 7; as process 6–10; as product 4–6; of protesting 244; of reading 166; and transformation 7; of violence 104 Performance Studies 1, 3, 4, 13, 131n3, 134, 146–8; and audience engagement 7; and the graphic narrative 4–6; perspective of 7 performativity: Derrida and Butler’s approach to 8; gendered 154, 157, 165, 169; of the graphic novel/ narrative 3–4, 8–9, 165; gutter 157– 8, 165–6, 167; of the hybrid signifier 168; impact of 8; and performance 7; traditional 165; transmedia 3; visual-verbal 157, 165 Persepolis 2 (Satrapi) 155, 156; color palette 157; graphic style 157; hybrid signifiers in 168–9

Index   261 Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood/ Persepolis I (Satrapi) 68, 83n1, 155, 156; color palette 157; graphic style 157; hybrid signifiers in 168 personification 94–5 Petrus, Hugo 139–40, 141, 144, 145–6, 148n1 phallogocentrism 155 Phillips, Nickie 103 photographic realism 121 Pieer, Katherine 36 poiesis 1, 8, 9, 11–12 Poison Ivy (character) 113 Polk, James 204 Polk, Kenneth 106 Popoca, Manny 188 positive apophenia 23 postcolonialism 95, 99 Post-Deployment Health Assessment 29, 30, 31 posthumanism 202 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 18–19; literary treatments of 32; in The White Donkey 19–26 pratextuality 183 Pratt, Henry John 120 Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act 175–6 Pride and Prejudice (Austen) 134 Pride and Prejudice (graphic novel adaptation) 134, 142; illustrations by Petrus 139–40, 141, 144, 145–6; text by Butler 139–40, 144, 148n1, 148n6 Pride and Prejudice (Keira Knightly film) 137 Priya and the Lost Girls (Devineni) 179, 183 Priya series (Devineni) 172, 174, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184 Priya’s Mirror (Devineni) 179, 181, 182, 183 Priya’s Shakti (Devineni) 179, 180 Prodigy (character) 47 propaganda, wartime 27 Psychiatric Tales: Eleven Graphic Stories About Mental Illness (Cunningham) 70, 71–4; color palette 83n1 psychoanalysis 157 Punter, David 190 Purves, Maria 196 queerness 45, 46–7 queer theory 211

Quesada, Joe 35 Quicksilver (character) 105, 106 Quinn, Harley (character) 113, 114 Quinones, Joe 35, 39, 49 racism 57, 58, 60, 103, 176 Radcliffe, Ann 190 Raddatz, Martha 32 radical feminism 156; see also feminism Rattapallax Studio 183 reader engagement 9, 82; and the graphic novel format 7, 68, 119, 127–31; in the Priya series 183; see also audience engagement reader identification 118 reader response theory 148n5 “Redeployment” (Klay) 31–2 Red Hulk (character) 112 Red Tornado (character) 111 Reeder (character) 115 refugee camps 246–9 refugee geography 90, 95 refugees 11, 91–2, 92, 96, 98, 100, 101; agency of 96 Rex Cinema Massacre 160 Reyes, Xavier Aldana 193 rhetoric of distance 154, 161, 164, 165; between image and word 165–9 Rice, Carla 193–4 Riesman, Abraham 98, 100 Rivera, Gabby 35, 39, 40–1 Robin (character) 109, 110 Romanticism 210 Rorschach (character) 229 Rosenblatt, Louise 7 Sacco, Joe 13, 236–8; as character 240–4; as comics artist 240–2, 245–6, 250–1; as Joe the journalist 240–1, 243–5, 247, 249; journal notes 247–8; reporting on refugee camps 246–9; use of comics journalism 242–6 Safe Area Goražde (Sacco) 236 Said, Edward 241 Santa Ana, Jeffrey 95, 96 Santaulària, Isabel 230 Santos, Miguel (character) 45 Satrapi, Marjane 12, 68, 154–5; use of hybrid signifiers 168–9 Savage She-Hulk #6 110 scapegoating 220–1 Scarlet Witch (character) 105

262 Index schizophrenia 74 Schudson, Michael 237 Schwartz, Martin 107 Scott, Darieck 200 Scrofano, Diane 69, 78 self-harm 72–3 Sense and Sensibility (Austen) 134 Sense and Sensibility (graphic novel adaptation) 134, 137 sequencing, ironic 28 serial killers 222 Settoducato, Elizabeth 110 sexism 110, 155, 175 sexual harassment 178, 184n3 sexuality 36, 45, 49, 64, 187, 194; female 189, 190, 191, 195, 196, 200; in gothic genre 195; lesbian 195–6, 198; transgressive 160–1, 195; see also heterosexuality; homosexuality Shaft (film) 56 Shaft (graphic novel), color palette 59 Shaft (Tidyman) 55 Shaft, John (character) 54–6; as boxer 57–61; in Harlem 62–4, 66; in New York 61–2, 65–6; in Vietnam 63, 66 Shaft, John II (character) 54, 56 Shaft: A Complicated Man (Walker & Evely) 10, 56 She-Hulk (character) 110, 111–13 Silverstein, Michael 240 Singer, Mark 244 Singh, Bhavana 176 Singh, Jyoti, 171 Singh, Reshu 176 Skaar (character) 108, 112 skin color 175–6 slave narratives 118, 129 Smith, Matthew 2–3, 173 Smith, Sidonie 71 Smith, Stacy L. 36 social activism 173 social construction 1, 7, 9, 21 social context 220, 239 social issues 172–3, 188 social justice 42, 119, 154, 174; and fiction 128–30 social media, protests on 172 Soja, Edward 55 “Someday...” (Gunjal) 178 Soper, Ella 202 space: cultural implications of 55; gendered 110; in the graphic

narrative 54–5, 59, 63, 64, 66, 75, 154; liminal 7, 8, 9; and memory 55, 58, 64–6; negative 160; neoimperial 100; political dimension of 55; as possession 65; in Shaft 57–66; see also gutter space speech-act theory 7–8 Speedy (character) 109 Spider-Girl 35 Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse 50n4 Spiegelman, Art 68, 223, 236 Spierenburg, Pieter 106 Stafford, Barbara Marie 154 Starfire (character) 113 stereotypes: African American 56; Canadian 202, 213, 217n11; ethnic 37; gender 37; of HIV/ AIDS 21; Latinx 35–6, 38, 41, 45, 46, 50n4; masculine 27, 46, 103, 160; of masculinity 103; of Middle Eastern people 155; queer 35; of superheroes 42; and visual imagery 21; of women 42 Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero (DeForge) 12, 202–3; and Canadian nature myths 204–12, 205, 214–16; father’s re-election poster 206; Sticks’s gravestone 215 story world, portrayal of 141–2 Strachey, James 157 Strine, Mary 4, 7–8 Strobl, Staci 103 subjectivity/ies 71, 79, 88, 154; diasporic 96; diasporic Vietnamese 90; transnational 92–3 SubStance 2 suicide 73, 75, 79, 232 suicide awareness 26–31 Superboy (character) 110 Supergirl (character) 113, 114 superheroes 11, 48; Indian 179–83 Superhero Girls show 113–14 Super Hero Squad Show 106 Superman (character) 48, 104, 110, 111 Super Skrull (character) 115 Super-Villain High (film) 113 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song (Van Peebles) 56 symbolic context 239 Teen Brigade 39 Terminal Lance (Uriarte) 19

Index   263 Terrax (character) 112 text-artifacts 240 text balloons see dialogue balloons text bubbles see dialogue bubbles textual fields 133 Thapan, Meenakshi 177 “That’s Not Fair” (Kannan) 175 theory of adaptation 20, 147 “The Photo” (Singh) 176 Thing, The (character) 106 Thor (character) 107–8, 115 Thor (female character) 113 thought bubbles 173 Thrash, Maggie 68 Tidyman, Ernest 10, 55–6 time travel 11, 118, 121, 125, 129 Tintin 48 Tithecott, Richard 226 Tran, GB 88, 92–6, 101 trauma 21, 23–4; in graphic narratives 223; graphic representations of 33; psychological 32; response to 25–6; theorization of 78; and war 88 Trauma Studies 18 traumatic events 26; see also trauma Trudeau, Gary 18 Turner, Victor 8 Twitter 172 Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man 35 Ultimates (Marvel) 39, 49, 50n2 universal response 136 Urban, Greg 240 Uriarte, Maximilian 10, 18, 19, 22, 26–33 Ustundag, Ebru 223 utterances 8 Van Gogh, Vincent 75 VanOosting, James 136 Van Peebles, Melvin 56 Varughese, Emma Dawson 173 vengeance, in Shaft 66 Vengeance series (Marvel) 39 Versaci, Rocco 27 veteran suicide 26–31 victimage 220–1 Vietnamerica (Tran) 88–9; and visual memory 92–6 Vietnamese Americans 100 Vietnamese diaspora 88, 93–5, 96, 97, 99, 100 Vietnam War 90, 91, 92, 98–9, 101

violence: copycat 231–2; duels 11, 104, 106–12; family 103, 104, 108, 112, 115; gender-based 171–2, 174, 183, 184; in graphic narrative 124–5; honor contests 106–7, 109, 115; institutionalized 103; inter-hero 103–5, 106, 108–9, 110, 114; in Kindred 120, 125–6; and masculinity 104–8, 115–16; pictures of 244; ritualistic 110, 111; storytelling 227; as team-building 108, 111–12, 114; unreported 177; against women 171–2, 174, 177, 179, 183, 184 virgin/whore duality 46 Vision (character) 105 visual analysis 91 visual culture 89, 91, 119 Visual Culture Studies 89 Vitanza, Victor 154 Vohra, Paromita 173, 183 Walker, David F. 10, 54, 56 Walpole, Horace 189 Walter, Natasha 181 Wang, Chih-Ming 100 Wanzo, Rebecca 40 war comics 25, 27 war narratives 19 War’s End (Sacco) 236 War Studies 18 Watchmen 229 Watson, Julia 71 West Coast Avengers series 49 WEvolve global initiative 183 What’s App 172 White Donkey, The (Uriarte) 10, 18, 19; color palette 24–5, 30, 32; and post-traumatic stress disorder 19–26 white space 20, 21, 25, 26, 32 Wiest, Julie B. 221 Williams, Ian 21, 222 Winnicott, Donald Woods 155, 157 women: and the comics industry 187–8; body types of 42, 46; of color 42; depictions of 24, 35, 37; and the female body 190–1; in the gothic genre 189–91, 196; as heroes 105, 110–13; identification of with nature 210–12; sexist containment of 155; in the Victorian era 189–90, 200, 210; violence against 171–2, 174, 177, 179, 183, 184; and the virgin/whore duality 46; see also sexuality, female

264 Index Wonder Woman (character) 111, 113 Wood, Robin 194 woodcut illustrations 72 Woolf, Virginia 155, 157 wordless art 120–3 World Bank 183 World’s Finest Comics (1941) 104 World Trade Center 65 Wright, Alexa 222

X’Andria (character) 47 X-Men 47, 104, 113 Yaffe, Deborah 143 Young Avengers 39, 50n2 Young Justice 108, 109, 110 Young Justice series 109 zombies 221, 230 Zunshine, Lisa 137–8