The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies 9780190917944, 0190917946

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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

C OM IC BO OK ST U DI E S

The Oxford Handbook of

COMIC BOOK STUDIES Edited by

FREDERICK LUIS ALDAMA

1

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978–0–19–091794–4 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Marquis, Canada

Contents

Contributors ix Our World Republic of Comics: An Introductionxi Frederick Luis Aldama

PA RT I :   W HAT I S A C OM IC ? 1. What Kind of Studies is Comics Studies? Benjamin Woo

3

2. Why There Is No “Language of Comics” Frank Bramlett

16

3. In Box: Rethinking Text in the Digital Age Shiamin Kwa

36

4. What Else is a Comic? Between Bayeux and Beano53 Evan Thomas 5. Reading Spaces: The Politics of Page Layout Katherine Kelp-Stebbins

75

6. Comics as Art David M. Ball

94

7. The Cartoon on the Comics Page: A Phenomenology Christopher Pizzino

115

8. All By Myself: Single-Panel Comics and the Question of Genre Michelle Ann Abate

132

9. Drawing, Redrawing, and Undrawing  Benoît Crucifix

148

vi   contents

PA RT I I :   C OM IC S A S S O C IA L C OM M E N TA RY A N D R E SP ON SE TO S O C IOP OL I T IC A L R E A L I T I E S 10. Bakhtinian Laughter and Recent Political Editorial Cartoons Michael A. Chaney and Sara B. Chaney

165

11. Columbia and the Editorial Cartoon  Nhora Lucía Serrano

190

12. Efficacy of Social Commentary through Cartooning Ally Shwed

203

13. Radical Graphics: Australian Second-Phase Comics  Kevin Patrick

216

14. Self-Regulation and Self-Censorship: Comics Creators in Czechoslovakia and Communist Eastern Bloc Pavel Kořínek 15. This is Who I Am: Hybridity and Materiality in Comics Memoir John Logan Schell

238 256

16. Auto/biographics and Graphic Histories Made for the Classroom: Logicomix and Abina and the Important Men268 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson 17. Ambiguity in Parallel: Visualizing History in Boxers and Saints293 Lan Dong

PA RT I I I :   K E Y I S SU E S I N C OM IC S 18. Irony, Ethics, and Lyric Narrative in Miriam Engelberg’s Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person311 James Phelan 19. Animals in Graphic Narrative José Alaniz

326

20. The Diversionary Art of Zeina Abirached in Le Piano Oriental335 Mark McKinney

contents   vii

21. Disco, Derby, and Drag: The Queer Politics of Marvel’s Dazzler358 Nicholas E. Miller 22. The Replacements: Ethnicity, Gender, and Legacy Heroes in Marvel Comics Jeffrey A. Brown

387

23. Hammer in Hand: Feminist Community Building in Jason Aaron’s Thor402 Susan Kirtley 24. When Feminism Went to Market: Issues in Feminist Anthology Comics of the 1980s and ’90s Rachel R. Miller

419

25. Children in Comics: Between Education and Entertainment, Conformity and Agency Maaheen Ahmed

437

26. I’m Not a kid. I’m a shark!: Identity Fluidity in Noelle Stevenson’s Young-Adult Graphic Novels James J. Donahue

455

PA RT I V:   C OM IC B O OK T R A N S C R E AT ION S 27. Forgetting at the Intersection of Comics and the Multimodal Novel: James Sie’s Still Life Las Vegas473 Torsa Ghosal 28. My Favorite Thing is Monsters: The Socially Engaged Graphic Novel as a Platform for Intersectional Feminism Dan Hassler-Forest

490

29. Paper or Plastic? Mapping the Transmedial Intersections of Comics and Action Figures Daniel F. Yezbick and Jonathan Alexandratos

510

30. Transformative Architectures in Postcolonial Hong Kong Comics Kin Wai Chu

534

31. Adaptation and Racial Representation in Dell/Gold Key TV Tie-ins Andrew J. Kunka

553

viii   contents

32. Candy and Drugs for Dinner: Rat Queens, Genre, and Our Aesthetic Categories Sean Guynes

573

33. Non-Compliants, Brimpers, and She-Romps: Bitch Planet, Sex Criminals, and Their Publics  Henry Jenkins

589

34. Literary Adaptations in Comics and Graphic Novels Jan Baetens

611

PA RT V:   C OM IC B O OK S T U DI E S Y E ST E R DAY, TODAY & TOM OR ROW 35. Comics Studies in America: The Making of a Field of Scholarship? Ian Gordon

631

36. Next Issue: Anticipation and Promise in Comics Studies Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith

642

37. Comics Studies as Interdiscipline Dale Jacobs

656

38. Comics Studies as Practitioner-Scholar  Damian Duffy

671

Index

687

Contributors

Michelle Ann Abate  The Ohio State University Maaheen Ahmed  Ghent University José Alaniz  University of Washington Jonathan Alexandratos  CUNY Start, Queensborough Community College Jan Baetens  University of Leuven David M. Ball  Dickinson College Frank Bramlett  University of Nebraska at Omaha Jeffrey A. Brown  Bowling Green State Michael A. Chaney  Dartmouth College Sara B. Chaney  Dartmouth College Kin Wai Chu  University of Leuven Benoît Crucifix  Université Catholique de Louvain and University of Liège James J. Donahue  SUNY Potsdam Lan Dong  Independent Scholar Damian Duffy  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Randy Duncan  Henderson State University Torsa Ghosal  California State University, Sacramento Ian Gordon  National University of Singapore Sean Guynes  Michigan State University Dan Hassler-Forest  University of Utrecht Dale Jacobs  University of Windsor Henry Jenkins  University of Southern California Katherine Kelp-Stebbins  Palomar College Susan Kirtley  Portland State University

x   contributors Pavel Kořínek  Institute of Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Sciences Andrew J. Kunka  University of South Carolina Sumter Shiamin Kwa  Bryn Mawr College Mark McKinney  Miami University Nicholas E. Miller  Valdosta State University Rachel R. Miller  The Ohio State University Kevin Patrick  Fordham University James Phelan  The Ohio State University Christopher Pizzino  University of Georgia John Logan Schell  North Greenville University Nhora Lucía Serrano  Hamilton College Ally Shwed  Independent Scholar Matthew J. Smith  Radford University Sidonie Smith  University of Michigan Evan B. Thomas  South Dakota School of Mines and Technology Julia Watson  The Ohio State University Benjamin Woo  Carleton University Daniel F. Yezbick  St. Louis Community College at Forest Park

Our World R epublic of Comics: An Introduction Frederick Luis Aldama

There is a reason that comic book studies have rapidly solidified into a field of scholarly study. Comic books have become a part of the global cultural landscape as never before. Since 2005, the graphic novel (the comic book published in a book format) has been the fastest-growing sector in publishing, and comics generally have become the seeds that have inspired the boom in Hollywood blockbusters. Comic book creators the world over come of age within respective national soils but always with an insatiable appetite to learn from others beyond their proximate experience—and to learn from the many other visual and verbal arts. It is a history of global cross-pollination that includes the physical transmigration of artists and their styles and worldviews from one country or region to another. It is a history that increasingly includes the active participation of creators and editors in the publishing and translating of comic books across time, language, and culture. As the editors of the French comic books publisher L’Association (an entity funded partially by the French Ministry of Culture) wrote in their Foreword to in their one-shot, behemoth international anthology (324 authors from 29 different countries), Comix 2000: “Comic Art (in case you haven’t noticed) is a major and universal means of expression and maybe even the most apt communicative medium of our times.” The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies focuses its sights on making visible those creators from around the world who have chosen to use visual and verbal devices to give shape to stories—both fiction and non-fiction—that make up comics from around the world. Each country has developed its own distinctive styles and formats: the FrancoBelgian bande dessinée (or drawn strip), Japanese manga, Italian fumetti, Spanish tebeos, Latin American historietas, German comicbuch, Filipino komiks, Korean manhwa, Chinese lianhuanhua, among others. However, I see too that comics cross national boundaries. But to understand the whole system, one must first understand all of its subsystems. As Mario Bunge writes, “Systematism postulates that every concrete thing and every idea is a system or a component of some system. Therefore, every inquiry into an object (or an idea) ought to include a study of its environment, which in turn requires embedding the study in the system of human knowledge” (286). The Oxford Handbook

xii   Our World Republic of Comics: An Introduction of Comic Book Studies aims to help readers discover comic books as created within ­specific times and places as well as to show how they exist within a world system of ­comics—and culture- and knowledge-making universally. The evolution of this world system of comics has been taking place for some time. Several scholars have linked its incipience to any given moment in history (the Bayeux Tapestry, for instance), when images were deliberately placed in sequence to tell stories. Others identify other, more modern epochs. Indeed, during the period when German intellect Johann Wolfgang von Goethe predicted the Weltliteratur, a global literature that transcended national boundaries, he also remarked on Swiss artist Rodolphe Töpffer’s ability to create kinetic stories from otherwise still panels. Goethe’s wonderment at this “unfreezing” of static, two-dimensional images encouraged Töpffer to overcome his own fears of societal rebuke. With Goethe’s enthusiastic encouragement Töpffer published his sequential images with captions as Histoire de M. Vieux Bois in 1837, a decade after completing the work. (For more on the Goethe/Töpffer connection, see Chris Ware’s “Töpffer in English”. For more on Töpffer as the founding father of comic books, see Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.) Many scholars have tried to peg the origins of the comic book. Was it 18th-century painter and engraver, William Hogarth, with his A Harlot’s Progress (1732), as Thierry Smolderen argues. Or, was it in 1867 with the creation of the British character Alexander “Ally” Sloper for Judy, or two years earlier with German Wilhelm Busch’s Max and Moritz? Was it in 1897, when German émigré, Rudolph Dirk created The Katzenjammer Kids? Filipino José Rizal’s Monkey and Tortoise (1889)? Or, perhaps it crystalized sometime later in the 20th century with the mass production of kashibonya manga in 1920s Japan, or when Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster published Superman (1933)? As editor of this volume, I am less interested in sleuthing out origins than offering a way to understand comics as a global storytelling phenomenon—as “an international language that can cross boundaries and generations,” as Osamu Tezuka states (Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics, 30). All while it has borrowed and transformed shaping devices found in other arts, comics also makes them new and uniquely its own. I see this with its use, for instance, of film devices of framing: from the close up to the middle and long shot as well as bottom-up and top-down angles. Milton Caniff and Hergé were hugely inspired by the “talkies”. And, taken with the dynamic storytelling possibilities opened up with animation, Tezuka increased the number of panels to infuse a kinetic dynamism into his manga. In many ways, film and comics are like close cousins growing up together in the same household. So it’s not surprising that one sees a lot of cross-pollination here—and not only unidirectional. While many comic book author-artists learned from Orson Wells’ extraordinary film talents, Wells was also famously inspired by Milt Caniff ’s Terry and the Pirates. Keep in mind, however, that the global republic of comics draws inspiration from many of the other visual arts such as woodcuts, painting, and photography. Frans Masereel (1889–1972) narratives told through his woodcuts like The Sun (1919) played a big role in Art Spiegelman’s and Lynd Ward’s making of their own comic book styles; see his wordless, wood engraved graphic novels such as The Sun (1919).

Our World Republic of Comics: An Introduction   xiii And one sees this in the verbal and visual-verbal storytelling arts such as the novel and comic book. For instance, there’s our contemporary Latino creator Frank Espinosa, whose Rocketo series (2006– ) is influenced by Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Flash Gordon (1936– ). That is, one sees the world over how comics has actively participated in the shaping of a world storytelling system built out of idiomatic and shared world storytelling mechanisms. * As the scholars in this Handbook attest, comics are made and consumed all over the globe. Because of different histories of publishing, translating, and marketing, some countries like France, Belgium, the US, Japan, and certain Latin American countries are known as the main producers of comics. However, if one looks carefully, there’s nearly no place on the planet that doesn’t have some kind of tradition of comic book making and consuming. A quick glance at the different countries represented in this book testifies to this fact. Denmark, for example, is known for having created important comics like Carla and Vilhelm Hansen’s strip Rasmus Klump (1951), which became a huge worldwide hit. The Philippines produced the significant and still-running, Mga Kabalbalan ni Kenkoy (1929–). The former Yugoslavia created the wonderfully parodic Herlock Sholmes (1957–1972). Many other big and small countries around the globe have produced important comic books. For instance, after World War II, manga began to boom as a national (with publishers in Tokyo and Osaka) then worldwide industry. The extraordinarily talented Osamu Tezuka set the bar high with his dynamic and engaging visual style seen in his 1947 Shin Takarajima (New Treasure Island) and his 1952 Tetsuwan Astro (Astro Boy). The audience only grew larger with the arrival of an edgier, adult-oriented manga style arriving on the scene in the 1960s and 1970s: the gritty, socially, and psychologically relevant gekiga manga. With the Japanese economic boom of the 1980s, manga solidified its foothold as one of the dominant comic book styles read around the world. By the early 2000s, manga already accounted for two-thirds of all graphic-novel sales in U.S.  bookstores. Today one sees its huge influences in the work of Canadian Asian ­creator, Korean French-Canadian, Bryan Lee O’Malley and his Scott Pilgrim series, also with Lea Hernandez and her Southwest-punk comics such as Cathedral Child (1998) and Clockwork Angels (2001). In 20th-century Europe, the Franco-Belgian author Hergé and together with the magazine Spirou (1938– ) put the bandes dessinées on the world stage. Hergé’s cool, clear ink lines used in Tintin (1929–1975) caught the attention of readers—creators-as-readers— the world over. The comics that appeared in Spirou showed the world a different, more exaggerated and elastic style to tell stories. As comics and their authors increasingly move across borders, one sees intensified cross-pollination and regeneration of narrative forms. For instance, while there’s no mistaking the Franco-Belgian entrenched style of bande dessinée established before and after World War II, it too experienced a transformation in later years. The contact of new generations of European creators with other comic book creators and traditions, such as that of the 1970s underground comix scene, led to radical innovations—both in form

xiv   Our World Republic of Comics: An Introduction and content. In France, Ah! Nana (1976–1978) became the first all-female comics quarterly, bringing across the Atlantic the work of U.S.  creators such as Trina Robbins, Sharon Rudah, and M.K. Brown. And, it published its own new set of women creators such as Chantal Montellier. They greatly expanded a content traditionally filled with more staid and safe storylines (think Tintin and Asterix) to confront the full-frontal ­sexism and queerphobic issues faced by women and LGBT communities. In the 1970s, one sees this cross-pollination of an underground sensibility coming from the Americas and spreading across Europe. In 1971 Evert Geradts started the first Dutch underground comic, Tante Leny Presenteert, which published work that sought to focus on politics, sex, drugs, and the music scene. And in Britain one sees the sprouting up of underground comics such as Nasty Tales (1971–1973) and Cozmic Comics (1973–1975). * The shaping of comics from around the world happens when actual creators transplant from origin to host country. During the repressive rule of Mussolini, in the late 1940s Italian comic book creator Hugo Pratt (the “School of Venice”) led a migration of Italian artists to Buenos Aires. Along with others, Pratt worked at the publishing house Editorial Abril, founded in 1941 by Italian Jewish creator César Civita. At Editorial Abril, Pratt worked alongside the famous Argentine creator Héctor Germán Oesterheld (El Eternauta) and helped lead the charge in what became a comics explosion in Argentina that lasted until the 1950s, when the economy collapsed and many Italians returned to Europe. When Pratt returned to Italy he brought back the styles and worldview of Editorial Abril. Notably, turning more and more to the political left (he joined the Montoneros), Héctor Germán Oesterheld revamped his original El Eternauta (1957–1959) with more overt political tones in the late 1960s and early 1970s, likely a leading cause of his disappearance in 1977, followed by his murder. For different reasons—political and personal—creators move from one country to another, all while transforming the comic book scene of both countries. I see this with Chilean-born creator (artist, filmmaker, author) Alejandro Jodorowsky (1929– ) who spent his adult life living in Paris and Mexico City. It was his collaboration with Jean Giraud, known as Moebius, that radically transformed French bandes dessinée into the daring, otherworldly stories seen in works like their sci-fi cosmic epic L’Incal series (1981– )—a comic that dared to use dashed/hatching and that filled its post-apocalyptic storyworld with Mexican symbology and social critique. This style—which came to be known as the Nouveau Réalisme of the early 1980s in France, and was given further expression in the work of Jacques Tardi along with other Latin American transplants, such as Carlos Sampayo and José Muñoz—was characterized by a shifting, subjective vision of the real and an engagement of the social and political in the construction of antiheroic stories set in unstable realties. In my other books, I have discussed the influence of the Nouveau Réalisme on contemporary alternative Latino comics creators in the US, such as Los Bros Hernandez and Wilfred Santiago. The Internet has opened up even further the access to comics and also creators. As Paul Gravett nicely sums up, “The global cross-pollination of influences has a long

Our World Republic of Comics: An Introduction   xv ­ istory, although the speed and spread of its transformation and transnationalisation h have greatly increased in recent years” (Comics Art 9). With advances in communication technology, the world has shrunk. This has meant that creators in places like Japan can and are influenced by those in India and Europe and so on. Many creators transcend all sorts of boundaries in their global collaborative work. For instance, in Multicultural Comics (2010) I discuss how Columbus comic book author, Dara Naraghi, is of U.S.-Iranian ancestry but because of the Internet has been able to work with artists from all over the world, each giving slice-of-life vignettes in Lifelike (2007) their own visually distinctive style, mood, and feel. And let’s not forget that the Internet has allowed creators living in countries outside of the publishing powerhouses like the US and Europe to have gainful employment as full-time creators of comics. I think readily of the late Carlos Trillo (Argentina) known in his home country for his popular El Loco Chávez (1975–1987) and El Negro Blanco (1987–1994), and who also authored comics for U.S. publishers IDW and Dynamite Entertainment, among others. Known in Brazil for their mini-series Sunflower and the Moon (1997), the twinbrother creators Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá also created Casanova (2006– ) for Image Comics and De: Tales (2006) for Dark Horse. The physical and virtual movement of creators and their comics is not a given, however. The global marketplace continues to prove an uneven playing field for many creating in countries outside of the U.S., Europe, and Japan. For this reason, readers and scholars of comics in the U.S. know little of the creators and their exceptional comic book work in regions with robust traditions such as the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, for instance. The global circulation and marketplace for comics tends to favor those written in (or translated into) English. And within this it is often the superhero and manga comic books that tend to receive the kind of publishing push needed to cross national borders. Even René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo’s hugely popular and massively translated Asterix never really received the marketing support necessary for capturing a U.S. audience. So while the inspirations, inceptions, and creations of comics are global, global economics tends to delimit reach. This is to say, as others have said already, that there is an unequal distribution of ­marketing power in the system of capitalism. As I argue elsewhere, while at first blush global capitalism has led to increased permeability of cultural boundaries, once a corporate entity identifies its object of profit, it sweeps to the side other possible cultural objects. With the global distribution and consumption of comics, one sees how capitalism at once opens up and heterogenizes as well as homogenizes; when dollars are made, for instance, with U.S. comics, then the distribution of comics from places like India diminishes. (See Aldama’s Postethnic Narrative Criticism.) The distribution of cultural phenomena such as comics is an increasingly sophisticated global industry that is able to predict what will sell and what will not through carefully determined links between commodity and consumer, creating a desire for the same. One might ask if Kuwaiti Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa’s creation of the Muslim superhero comic, The 99 (2007–2014), whether the superhero genre functions on a national

xvi   Our World Republic of Comics: An Introduction level—with its use of 99 virtues named in the Qurʿan, such as tolerance, wisdom, and courage. Or, one might ask if its generic superhero storyline (all of its creators worked for DC and Marvel) functions on a transnational level, thus diminishing its cultural and religious specificity. For Stefan Meier, The 99 is both different and the same. He writes how its use of the superhero genre allows for the creating of a “new breed of superheroes that embraces the transnational flows in an emerging postnational society, representing young Muslims cosmopolitans whose story and visual depiction reach beyond their creator’s internationalist aspirations” (“Conceiving The Cosmopolitan Muslim Superhero in The 99,” 190). Keep in mind, too, that readers of comics tend to stick to texts that are familiar, in both language and visual grammar. For instance, while an Asterix or a Tintin sold (and sold well) as a book in bookstores in France, this was a rather foreign concept for buyers and readers of comics in the U.S.—at least until the 1990s, when U.S. readers of comics began to find graphic novels sold in bookstores across the country. Moreover, readers of comics have a low tolerance for bad translations. If a translated comic book failed to adequately capture the nuance of the original, readers simply lose interest. For instance, as Jean-Paul Gabilliet writes of the Franco-Belgian comics, they “were never designed with exportation goals uppermost in mind. Their initial popularity derived from their successful inscription in the collective psyche of postwar Western Europe’s children, teenagers, and families, not from their potential as global entertainment fare” (265). That is to say, while comics are a global storytelling phenomenon, they exist and ­circulate in an unequal marketplace. Some, though not all, comics are distributed both within and outside of national borders. Some stories and histories are told to a wide audience, and others are not. * The main way comics move across borders is through translation. While the dominance of this storytelling format with the visuals help—in fact, many authors displaced from one country to another often reveal in interviews how they were able to learn their new host country language through exposure to comics (see Aldama’s Latino Comics By Interview)—they still require a certain amount of translation for non-native readers to get the most out of the comic. And, as Federico Zanettin astutely observes, more than just natural languages are translated. He states, “When a comic is reprinted or republished, either in the same or in a different country/area, other semiotic systems are ‘translated’ besides verbal language” (12). Not only might “reprints” of the same stories be (partially) re-written and re-drawn, but a comic may be reproduced with a different page size and layout, different panels arrangement and reading direction, in color rather than in black and white and vice versa, and different types of “translation” may co-exist at different levels (12). For Zanettin, language is only one of the layers of translation possible when moving a comic across borders. It involves the translation of the visuals to capture the new host’s cultural traditions; it can also be constrained by publisher demands on new formats. For instance, when Watchmen crossed over into the French markets, as Zanettin notes, it “adopted the French album format and published in six  larger-sized volumes, with new ‘classical’ covers, thus changing the graphical

Our World Republic of Comics: An Introduction   xvii ­ roportions, narrative coherence and detailed structural construction of the original p graphic novel” (17). And, when the original relies on the construction of a pun or other poetic figurations such as onomatopoeia through the interaction of a visual and textual ingredient, both necessarily need to be translated when moving the original into a new national readership audience. (See Catherine Dellese’s “Proper Names, Onomastic Puns and Spoonerisms: Some Aspects of the Translation of the Asterix and Tintin Comic Series, with Special Reference to English”). Scholars and serious readers of comics have been increasingly global. There are international comics festivals from Algeria to the Arctic. There are journals such as John A. Lent’s International Journal of Comic Art, as well as books—and book series, including my coedited scholarly series, “World comics and Graphic Nonfiction”, along with my trade-press series, Latinographix. In Transnational Perspectives on Global Narratives, for instance, the editors ask that we “(re)read comics and other forms of graphic narrative as transnational phenomena (reaching, or rather moving, across ­borders) [and] to explore the transnational dynamic that have come to shape contemporary forms of graphic storytelling at the crossroads of cultures” (2). For these editors, comic books translate more readily than other “monomedial forms of literature, ­nonnarrative artworks” (5) and film because of their visual-verbal conjoinment. * The scholarship takes up the mantle from these scholars mentioned above, building on and extending the work on comics from around the world. To this end, I divide the ­volume into five major sections. Section 1: “What is a Comic?” includes scholarship that explores the origins of comics, evolution of form, genre configurations, and histories of their study. I open this section with Benjamin Woo’s chapter, “What Kind of Studies Is Comics Studies?” Woo examines the genealogy of comics studies and explores the theory and method that inform comics studies as well as to propose a dialogic un-disciplining of the field. Frank Bramlett’s chapter, “Why There Is No ‘Language of Comics’ ” follows. After examining the differences between the linguistic system that informs alphabetic language and the visual meaning-making system of comics, Bramlett argues for comics scholars to avoid talking about the language of comics and instead to grow a visual semiotic theory and approach attentive to the comics form. Shiamin Kwa’s “In Box: Rethinking Text in the Digital Age” examines the significance of the speech bubble as a significant device used in giving powerful shape to comics narratives. In a focused analysis of Emile Holmewood’s short comic, “Speech Bubble,” Kwa analyzes the interplay between today’s social media’s text messaging “speech bubble” and the “speech ­bubble” of comics to show how Holmewood asks us to confront our assumptions about reading, meaning-making, and ethics. In the chapter, “What Else Is a Comic? Between Bayeux and Beano,” Evan Thomas analyzes the history of the panel-strip convention alongside several alternative conventions for organizing sequential images: processions, curtains, staircases, calendars, wheels, and decks. For Thomas, these alternative sequential image conventions allow for different affordances not found in the panel-strip convention. Katherine Kelp-Stebbins’s chapter “Reading Spaces: The Politics of Page Layout” examines the cultural practices of

xviii   Our World Republic of Comics: An Introduction reading and spatial navigation in the encounter with the comics page layout. After examining the different theories and approaches to the layout in comics, Kelp-Stebbins shows how some creators use the page layout to create meta-levels of complex spatial navigation that create new forms of expression and meaning. In “Comics as Art” David Ball turns our attention to the one-hundred-plus history of comics existing in art museum spaces. Ball examines how such moves fail to “fully disavow or fully integrate the connections between comics and art, comics as art, in the past century.” Christopher Pizzino’s chapter “The Cartoon on the Comics Page: A Phenomenology” brings a necessary corrective to comics studies to throw light on the relationship of comics to cartoons as well as how they create in reader apprehension, auras of self-referentiality. In “All By Myself: Single-Panel Comics and the Question of Genre” Michelle Abate argues for scholars to consider the non-sequential, single-panel cartoon as not only a significant shaper in the evolution of sequential comics but comics in their own right—as an example of the “medium at its most concentrated, controlled, and efficient.” I end this section with Benoît Crucifix’s “Drawing, Redrawing, and Undrawing.” Crucifix metaphysically reflects on what it means to draw and mechanically redraw comics narrative to analyze how a series of small-press comics redraw the past and in so doing create a “graphic archiveology”. Section 2: “Comics as Social Commentary and Response to Sociopolitical Realities” gathers together scholarship that considers the different ways (negative and positive) that comics strip down and reconstruct the social, political, and cultural building blocks that make up our lived reality. Michael  A.  Chaney and Sara  B.  Chaney’s chapter “Bakhtinian Laughter and Recent Political Editorial Cartoons” launches this section. The Chaneys use Mikhail Bakhtin’s formulation of a tradition of folk comedy that laughs at living reality to analyze how the editorial, single-image cartoons by Doaa El-Adl (Egypt), Xavier Bonilla (Ecuador), and Gado (Tanzania) embrace “crude contact” that troubles and upturns oppressive political structures for “emergent global audiences.” Nhora Lucía Serrano also attends to the editorial cartoon, this time in Columbia. In her chapter “Columbia and the Editorial Cartoon,” she analyzes both 19th-century and ­contemporary editorial cartoons that address Columbia’s sociopolitical ups and downs and how they inform the imagination of nation. Ally Shwed’s chapter, “Efficacy of Social Commentary through Cartooning,” offers a model for understanding (built on formal and historical analyses) as a “spectrum of efficacy” in terms of social commentary and social impact. In the chapter that follows, “Radical Graphics: Australian Second-Phase Comics,” we move away from cartoon to comic book—and geographic space: Australia during the 1970s and 1980s. Kevin Patrick examines how the industry’s shift from commercial to a DIY independent model led to a second phase of comics production that innovated aesthetic forms and transformed mainstream perceptions. Thanks to this change, comics were not just for children, they were also for adults. Pavel Kořínek’s chapter “Self-Regulation and Self-Censorship” attends less to economics and industry shifts and more to sociopolitical constraints in the shaping of innovative comics. As Kořínek notes, the Czechoslovak comics scene of the mid- to late-20th century was marked by various forms of totalitarian censorship

Our World Republic of Comics: An Introduction   xix (directly policed and internalized by some creators). In response, the creators deployed various “self-defensive strategies” in aesthetic choices and storyworld content. The chapters that close this section focus on the various ways that comics use the autobiographical and memoir forms to reconstruct site-specific, widely shared memories that make up the social. In “This is Who I Am”: Hybridity and Materiality in Comics Memoir,” John Logan Schell attends both to the wondrous proliferation of memoirbased comics that shed light on the human condition. He also attends to the formal visual shaping devices used in memoir comics to pull readers into subjectively experienced pasts in visually dynamic ways. For Schell, memoir comics use the visual shaping devices to uniquely stylize otherwise unheard “voices and identities” in ways that present a corrective to mainstream culture’s biased warping of historical account and social memory. In “Auto/biographics and Graphic Histories Made for the Classroom,” Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson analyze the importance of teaching graphic history comics, focusing on Abina and the Important Men and Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth. With the former, they unpack how the visual reconstruction of the 19th-century legal testimony of Abina, enslaved in the Cape Colony region of what is now Ghana, asks readers to engage deeply with the violence of Africa’s colonial history. And, in their analysis of Logicomix, they reveal how the self-reflexive format (how the authors and artists composed the comic) and its triple-layered narrative invite students to pleasurably engage with foundational issues in philosophy and mathematics. I end this section with Lan Dong’s chapter, “Ambiguity in Parallel: Visualizing History in Boxers & Saints.” Dong analyzes how Gene Luen Yang’s infusion of the fictional into the historical in Boxers & Saints offers a powerful corrective to erstwhile biased historical accounts of the Boxer Uprising. For Dong, Yang’s hybrid fictional-historical mode of comics storytelling gives rich nuance to the intersection of politics and religion during a contested period in Chinese history. Section 3: “Key Issues in Comics” gathers scholarship that examines how comic book narratives engage with (critically and uncritically) issues of race, ethnicity, animalism, differently abled, health, gender, and sexuality. I begin this section with James Phelan’s “Irony, Ethics, and Lyric Narrative in Miriam Engelberg’s Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person.” Phelan sets Engelberg’s 2006 memoir within the context of typical breast cancer discourses that either treat the illness as a positive experience leading to self-improvement or that reject this “master narrative” and in so doing establish a “too-limiting alternative master narrative.” Phelan uses a rhetorical approach to examine Engelberg’s use of irony and deployment of a “lyric-narrative progression” to depict the “grim realities” of her experience and to clear a space for healing. José Alaniz turns our attention to animals in comics. In his chapter, “Animals in Graphic Narrative,” Alaniz considers the long history of animals in comics: from Outcault and McCay, to Barks, Crumb, and Woodring. Taking his lead from scholars of animalism, Alaniz examines how the representation of animals in comics without human speech has rendered them “vulnerable to a brand of representational colonialism.” By contrast, more contemporary creators like Grant Morrison and others create more complex anthropomorphic comic-book reconstructions that complexly address the

xx   Our World Republic of Comics: An Introduction e­ thics involved in representing the animal subject. In “A Diversionary Art in Le Piano Oriental by Zeina Abirached” Mark McKinney analyzes Lebanese-French cartoonist Zeina Abirached’s Le piano oriental, analyzing how in form and content she critically ­gestures toward and provides an important corrective to the long history of colonial ­heritage of French-language comics. For McKinney, Le piano oriental clears a nuanced, productive space between cultures and languages. Nick Miller’s chapter “Disco, Derby, and Drag: The Queer Politics of Marvel’s Dazzler” takes us into the world of mainstream superhero comics. Miller uses a queer analytical lens to analyze Marvel’s mutant superhero Alison Blaire as Dazzler, and how her relationship to disco, derby, and drag cultures “destabilizes normative gender categories and embody queerness during historical “periods devoid of explicitly LGBTQ+ content in Marvel Comics.” Jeffrey A. Brown’s “The Replacements: Ethnicity, Gender, and Legacy Heroes in Marvel Comics” also sets his sights to the sociopolitics of mainstream superhero comics, turning our attention to the controversial debates that surrounded Marvel’s introduction of women and nonwhite legacy heroes. For Brown these legacy heroes not only radically redefine superhero readership communities, they reveal the deep-seated toxic masculinity that continues to ­pervade the mainstream comics industry. Susan Kirtley’s chapter “Hammer in Hand: Feminist Community Building in Jason Aaron’s Thor” provides a focused study of one such legacy superhero: Jason Aaron’s Thor, which introduced in 2015 a female Thor as well as a diverse feminist alliance that, through collective social action, vanquishes Odin—the embodiment of toxic patriarchal oppression. Rachel Miller also focuses on creators with a feminist consciousness, but as seen in comics anthologies. In her chapter “When Feminism Went to Market: Issues in Feminist Comics Anthologies in the 1980s and 90s,” Miller sets her analytic sights on Sarah Dyer’s Action Girl Comics. She does so to more broadly examine the material conditions that gave rise to the anthologies as  productive spaces for feminist comics creations and feminist reader community creation. I close this section with chapters that examine comics that reconstruct in complex ways the subjectivities of children and young adults. In “Children in Comics: Between Education and Entertainment, Conformity and Agency,” Maheen Ahmed situates U.S. and British comics from late-19th-century and early-20th-century broader media contexts (e.g. illustrated press and children’s literature publishing) to uncover how ­comics featuring children recreated uneasy tensions between edification and the “agentic, carnivalesque.” She also addresses how within these parameters, these comics at once recreated restrictive, denigrative stereotypes as well as complex affective engagements. James J. Donahue’s chapter “ ‘I’m not a kid. I’m a shark!’: Identity Fluidity in Noelle Stevenson’s Young Adult Graphic Novels” focuses on how Noelle Stevenson uses the graphic novel form to disrupt heteronormative values and to celebrate fluid gender and sexual identifications in ways that empower young women and LGBTQ readers. Donahue’s analysis of content and form demonstrates how Stevenson uses the YA graphic novel form to challenge “normative reading practices, be they literary or social, opening up safe spaces for her readers’ own efforts at coming to terms with their identities.”

Our World Republic of Comics: An Introduction   xxi Section 4: “Comic Book Transcreations” takes us on a journey into the many ways that comics cross-pollinate with a wide variety of other narrative and cultural phenomenon: literature, film, TV, video game, Internet, and even action figures. In the chapter “Forgetting at the Intersection of Comics and the Multimodal Novel” Torsa Ghosal uses insights from cognitive and narrative theory to shed light on how James Sie’s Still Life Las Vegas deploys multimodal narrative forms (novel and comic book) to create “­memoir writing that is founded on forgetting.” Dan Hassler-Forest’s chapter “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: The Socially Engaged Graphic Novel as a Platform for Intersectional Feminism” analyzes Emil Ferris’s graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters and its intertextual engagement with Maus, Fun Home, and Persepolis to underline the importance of intersectional feminism as a way of thinking, writing, and engaging with history. In the chapter “Paper or Plastic? Mapping the Transmedial Intersections of Comics and Action Figures,” Jonathan Alexandratos and Daniel Yezbick use a variety of critical methodologies to analyze the creative and commercial synergy between comic books, toys, and broadcast media/film from 1970 to 2010. For Alexandratos and Yexpick, the interdependence of comics, toys, and animated series, along with the comics packaged with toys, fostered the creation of post-2000 nostalgic wide-ranging retrospective myths. In “Transformative Architectures in Postcolonial Hong Kong Comics” Kin Wai Chu examines Hong Kong cultural identities by analyzing the transmedial influences that shape Siuhak’s parodic Harbor Heroes and its depiction of anthropomorphic robots that speak to current issues and political events. Chu’s analysis of its transmedial influences and forms reveals how the story “embodies multilayered hybridity which also accentuates hybrid Hong Kong cultural identities.” Andrew J. Kunka’s chapter “Adaptation and Racial Representation in Dell/Gold Key TV Tie-ins” examines Dell and Gold Key Comics (1966–1970) and its respective TV show adaptations that feature minority characters, including especially AfricanAmericans. Along the way Kunka explores why comics scholars have ignored these comic books and TV adaptations that innovatively explore social issues such as ­racism. In the chapter “Candy and Drugs for Dinner: Rat Queens, Genre, and Our Aesthetic Categories,” Sean Guynes-Vishniac analyzes the “zany, cute, and interesting” in Rat Queens to shed light on the practices of contemporary media production, genre, and aesthetics performs, reproduces, and critiques gender politics and the fantasy genre. In the chapter “Non-Compliants, Brimpers, and She-Romps: Bitch Planet, Sex Criminals, and Their Publics”, Henry Jenkins analyzes how comics Bitch Planet and Sex Criminals draw on women-in-prison films and sex comedies to in ways that ­provide readers with alternative conceptions of gender and sexuality. Jenkins shows how these comic book “publics” hold the potential to inspire real-world activism. In “Literary Adaptations in Comics and Graphic Novels” Jan Baetens focuses on literary adaptation in comics: an overview of the adaptation policy in the various periods; an analysis that identifies the adaptation of the literary text’s plot; an analysis of comics features that are added to the story and that often dramatically change and literally reframe the initial story; and an analysis of how comics can be seen as literature and

xxii   Our World Republic of Comics: An Introduction why there exists a certain resistance to the idea as well as the practice of literary ­adaptation in comics. Section 5: “Comic Book Studies Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow” closes the volume, bringing together chapters that explore the current debates in the field—with an eye toward future scholarly questions and agendas. This section begins with “Drawing, Redrawing, Undrawing,” where Benoît Crucifix considers how small-press comics hold an ambiguous status, between graphic trace and mechanical reproduction. He analyzes how comics are “redrawn and undrawn” in ways that foreground the questions: what does it mean to draw without drawing? What does it mean to copy and redraw or even to disengage from the very act of drawing? By analyzing the way creators materially engage with the past, literally redrawing from loose, often self-curated archives of comics, Crucifix seeks to formulate a graphic “archiveology.” In “Comics Studies in America: The Making of a Field of Scholarship?” Ian Gordon examines both the tremendous growth of scholarship that’s solidifying a comics studies field, but that is creating “fiefdoms grouped around objects of study like graphic novels, superhero comic books, comic strips and extreme outliers like editorial cartoons.” Gordon also reflects on the fact that there is an absence of graduate programs in comics studies that could create new generations of scholars. In the chapter “Next Issue: Anticipation and Promise in Comics Studies,” Matthew Smith and Randy Duncan look ahead to the possible trajectories of 21st-century comics studies. For Smith and Duncan, today we are seeing the expansion of the field that includes a variety of approaches and methodologies. In the near future, we will see more transnational and multidisciplinary collaborative scholarship. And, like Gordon, while they celebrate the vitality of the field, there is still a need for outreach to educate the wider public about the value of comics. In “Comics Studies as Interdiscipline” Dale Jacobs makes the call for comics studies to become a fully selfreflective and interdisciplinary. He proposes incorporating book history and media studies approaches into comics studies. For Jacobs, book history and media studies demand that scholars be mindful of the commercial publishing contexts of comics, while additionally providing examples of hybrid methodologies that work toward interdisciplinarity in their own right. The volume ends with Damian Duffy’s “Comics Studies as Practitioner-Scholar.” In a chapter that is a comic of its own, Duffy takes us on a journey through his personal history as a practitioner-scholar creating both academic metacomics and nonacademic graphic novels. Along the way we learn how comics inserted themselves into all facets of life, including medicine, science, and the humanities. The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies adds to and solidifies the growing area of scholarship on comic books from around the world. While each contributor brings his or her analytical methodology and expertise to bear on the exploration of world comics, together they help define the comic books studies as a field during this time of great vitality and growth. The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies invites readers on a journey to discover comic books as a storytelling form grown within specific cultures, regions, and nations, and to see how their idiomatic visual and verbal narrative devices create our wondrous world of comics.

Our World Republic of Comics: An Introduction   xxiii

Works Cited Aldama, Frederick Luis. Postethnic Narrative Criticism: Magicorealism in Ana Castillo, Hanif Kureishi, Julie Dash, Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, and Salman Rushdie. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Chiu, Monica. Ed. Drawing New Color Lines: Transnational Asian American Graphic Narratives. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015. Delesse, Catherine. “Proper Names, Onomastic Puns and Spoonerisms: Some Aspects of the Translation of the Astérix and Tintin Comic Series, with Special Reference to English” in Comics in Translation. Ed. Federico Zanettin. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome Publishing, 2008. 251–270. Denson, Shane, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein. Transnational Perspectives on Global Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads. London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of the Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012. Gravett, Paul. Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics. New York: HarperCollins. Mazur, Dan and Alexander Danner. Comics: A Global History, 1968 to the Present. London: Thames & Hudson, 2014. Smolderen, Thierry. The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014. Ware, Chris. “Töpffer in English”. In The Best American Comics Criticism. Ed. Ben Schwartz. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2010. 222–227. Zanettin, Federico. Ed. Comics in Translation. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome Publishing, 2008.

PA RT I

W H AT IS A C OM IC ?

chapter 1

W h at K i n d of St u die s Is Comics St u die s? Benjamin Woo

A paper presented at the 2013 International Comic Arts Forum argued that the time had come for comics studies to take its place as an independent humanities discipline, rather than an area of research within more established fields. The paper presented an intellectual rationale but ultimately pointed to an institutional solution, envisioning (at least as a thought experiment) comic studies as a discipline—and, therefore, a degree program housed in a department with its own faculty lines. It was hardly the first such call, though it came at what seemed like a moment of possibility. Yet this case for capital-C-and-S Comics Studies begged an important question: Where on the ancient and gnarled Tree of Knowledge shall we graft this new branch? The sheltering wings of language and literature departments (particularly departments of English) made much of comics studies’ recent growth and development possible, but the argument that comics are a kind of literature also rendered comics studies a kind of literary studies (Beaty and Woo 29). There are obvious advantages to more holistic approaches that integrate comics’ visual dimension and avoid the pressures toward arguments over quality exerted by more traditional versions of the curriculum or canon. But can we be so sure that comics studies would be a humanities discipline? Perhaps comics’ expressive use of language and images could be better explained by the cognitive and language sciences than by literary studies or art history (Cohn), or perhaps understanding comics requires going beyond the page to research their social contexts and uses (Brienza). Our colleagues who study comics as part of multimodal literacy practices, who use research creation methods, or who support student practitioners in studio art or library science contexts may have yet other models in mind. And of course, there are some creators and fans of the art form who would prefer that academics and theoreticians left well enough alone. All of this is to say that it is not quite clear what kind of studies a new discipline of comics studies would be. “Ever since prehistoric antiquity,” writes Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, “one field of study after another has crossed the divide between what the

4   Benjamin Woo historian might call its prehistory as a science and its history proper” (21). While Kuhn’s book is most famous for its definition of the “paradigm shift,” I am more interested in his account of how new fields of study develop paradigms and thereby become “sciences” or “disciplines” in the first place. This is a crucial moment in our field, a moment of consolidation, institution building, and canon formation—a moment when an Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies is not only thinkable but actually publishable. As the apparatus of a scholarly discipline begins to cohere but before the closure of disciplinarity has been fully achieved, we have a golden opportunity to reflect on the project of academic comics studies. Thus, this chapter does not present a case for formalizing the discipline of comics studies but rather attempts to raise some questions about what disciplinarity could mean for the study of comics. Our field is lively and diverse—surely, one of its strengths—but ensuring that this diversity remains productive and generative requires careful reflection and continual effort. I begin with a short overview of the Kuhnian “prehistory” of comics studies. Then, taking theory as a paradigm’s distinctive product, I examine some theories of page layout. My goal here is not to adjudicate among them but to ascertain how they theorize and what that says about comics studies as a form of inquiry. Finally, I conclude with some considerations about disciplinarity as such. Some comics scholars have pushed back against the very idea of disciplines, arguing that comics studies’ diversity marks it as an inherently antidisciplinary project (Hatfield, “­Anti-Discipline,” “Indiscipline”; Jenkins, “Should We Discipline?”), but there is much to be gained from a dialogic conception of discipline that brings these submerged ­tensions and differences to the fore as the subject of explicit argumentation and debate. Let’s begin this consideration of what comics studies is with a brief examination of what comics studies has been. As Ian Gordon suggests, much of the pathbreaking work on comics has been made obsolete by more recent developments or may simply seem unfashionable to contemporary eyes, yet “a field that does not know and read its own history is impoverished” (129). For my purposes here, a genealogy—in the critical, Foucauldian sense—of academic comics studies is a productive point of departure for imagining its possible futures precisely because the study of comics could have taken a very different shape if the field had come together at a different time, under different circumstances, or with different influences (Jenkins, “Should We Discipline?”). The earliest academic research on comics in the English language was conducted not by humanists but by psychologists, educationalists, and mass communication scholars. Comics were not yet seen as “plausible texts” for literary study (Bordwell; Beaty and Woo). Rather, scholars were largely working within a “social problem” framework, in keeping with much research on emerging media in the early to mid-twentieth century. For instance, although it’s impossible ever to conclusively point to the “first” or “earliest” example of something, the oldest dissertations listed in the ComicsResearch.org bibliography include Florence Heisler’s study of the impact of comic books, radio serials, and movies on children’s educational achievement, IQ, personality, and reading ability,­ ­submitted to New York University’s School of Education in 1944; Etta Karp’s dissertation on the “role preferences” of boys who read crime comics, also completed at NYU a

What Kind of Studies is Comics Studies?   5 ­ ecade later; and W. Paul Blakely’s analysis of comic-book readers following the indusd try “cleanup” of the early 1950s, submitted to the College of Education at the University of Iowa in 1957. The 1950s are, of course, remembered for the anticomics moral panic—­ perhaps tainting psychological and mass communication approaches for many whose introduction to comics came through the generations of fandom that followed it—but there was, in fact, a lively debate throughout the period among scholars and public intellectuals about comic books’ impact on young people, with figures such as sociologist Harvey Zorbaugh and psychiatrist Lauretta Bender on one side and psychiatrist Fredric Wertham famously heading up the other. As Wertham noted at the time, many of the ­procomics experts sat on publishers’ advisory boards (Beaty 141), not only representing at least a perceived conflict of interest but also suggesting an “industrial” or “administrative” version of comics studies that never fully materialized. What if comics studies had been nurtured by the interests of the comic-book publishing industry? What if it found a place as a research area in the social sciences, broadly conceived? Or what if it remained focused on young readers and their interests, rather than seeking to shuck off the medium’s “­bam-pow” associations with children? It is not difficult to imagine that the field could have evolved very differently; rather, the challenge is understanding why this early research had so little impact on the development of comics studies as we know it. Instead, the roots of contemporary comics studies lie in two other traditions of thinking about comics. First, cartoonists themselves have been a rich source of historical information and more or less explicit examples of what John Thornton Caldwell calls “self-theorizing ­discourse.” Indeed, one of the earliest known master’s theses on comics was written by a former Superman artist (Ricca). Creators such as Jules Feiffer and Jim Steranko did much to consolidate the broad historical narratives that inform common-sense understandings of American comic-book publishing, while Mort Walker, Will Eisner, and, perhaps most notably, Scott McCloud developed more or less theoretically informed vocabularies for describing the formal elements that make up comics and how they work together to produce the aesthetic experience of reading. More recently, accomplished cartoonists such as Jessica Abel, Lynda Barry, Ivan Brunetti, Matt Madden, and Nick Sousanis have enriched understandings of the practice of making comics and its relationship with visual literacy and cognition through their respective teaching practices and pedagogical reflections (Jenkins, “Formalist Theory”). A second major tradition of research and writing originates in organized comics fandom and the fan-scholars who used fanzines, amateur press associations, fan conventions, and eventually email listservs and discussion boards as forums for sustained critical discourse on comics.1 At certain moments, the fan press constituted the only venue interested in printing—and, thus, preserving—the knowledge gleaned by readers and creators in essays, bibliographies, and interviews. Similarly, early scholarly conferences such as the Comic Arts Conference and the International Comic Arts Forum piggybacked on conventions and festivals such as the San Diego Comic-Con and the Small Press Expo, respectively. Not to put too fine a point on it, fan-scholars and fan-archivists laid the foundations of comics studies, although they sometimes also introduced biases

6   Benjamin Woo to our received accounts of comics history that we are still trying to rectify, notably by centering US superhero comics and the “Big Two” publishers and marginalizing other comics and the institutions that produced them. That comics scholarship originally came together around creators and fans is con­sist­ ent with Kuhn’s accounts of preparadigmatic inquiry. Kuhn notes that existing craft knowledge and the work of amateur investigators are frequently sources of information in the early stages of a field’s development: In the absence of a paradigm or some candidate for paradigm, all of the facts that could possibly pertain to the development of a given science are likely to seem equally relevant. As a result, early fact-gathering is a far more nearly random activity than the one that subsequent scientific development makes familiar. Furthermore, in the absence of a reason for seeking some particular form of more recondite information, early fact-gathering is usually restricted to the wealth of data that lie ready to hand. (15)

Of course, academic comics scholarship was eventually professionalized—though not without some bumps along the way. In Reinventing Comics, Scott McCloud calls the comics-friendly people working in the press, libraries, museums, and universities the art form’s “moles” (83, 93–94). That seems like an apt description for the first generations of comics scholars in the anglophone academy, who were rarely hired for their expertise in comics but found ways to sneak it into the curriculum nonetheless, thereby breaking paths for the rest of us to follow. And we should also note the continuing ­contributions of impassioned amateurs and those in what we might now call “alt-ac” positions; for example, Bill Blackbeard incorporated himself as a not-for-profit in order to preserve newspaper comic strips that were bound for the scrapheap (Robb 76), while pioneering works on Canadian comic books were written by John Bell, a government archivist. However, the rise of comics studies is attributable not only to the blood, sweat, and tears of generations of comics scholars but also to changing conditions in the academy and society at large. As Richard A. Peterson has argued, the sophisticate of today is a “cultural omnivore,” who demonstrates their superior taste by consuming objects eclectically drawn from across a range of high and low arts. Comics’ rehabilitation as both “literary” graphic novels and transmedia entertainment franchises has translated into a new confidence in their “plausibility” as objects of scholarly attention. With the increasing acceptance of comics as a legitimate field of research, we have also seen concomitant growth in the institutions that support it. Faculty and students can now attend comics studies conferences, join comics studies associations, subscribe to comics studies journals, and ­publish comics studies monographs in any of the several comics studies book series from major academic presses. In Canada, where I live and work, comics scholars have been reasonably successful in funding competitions from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC); as of July 2018, SSHRC had given out nearly $3 million (Canadian) in funding to fifty-two different scholars for sixty-five projects

What Kind of Studies is Comics Studies?   7 l­isting “comics,” “comic strips,” “comic books,” or “graphic novels” as keywords.2 Throughout the anglophone world, at least, many universities and colleges now regularly offer courses on comics, and a small but growing number of institutions have launched degree programs (typically, interdisciplinary minors, for now). It is hard not to see this as a “coming of age” for comics studies. Today’s dynamic field seems almost unspeakably distant from the sense of isolation or condescension reported by those who marked out this territory in a much more hostile institutional environment (see, e.g., the “pioneer’s perspectives” collected in Smith and Duncan’s The Secret Origins of Comics Studies). Challenges still remain, yet, just as literary studies emerged from its own ­predisciplinary ooze in the late nineteenth century (Graff), comics scholarship is now sufficiently developed and institutionalized to contemplate its own disciplinary status. While the establishment of specialized journals, learned societies, and courses once signaled the emergence of a new paradigm, Kuhn notes that “the paraphernalia of ­specialization [have] acquired a prestige of their own” (19). There are powerful incentives (not least from commercial academic publishers; Buranyi) to put the cart before the horse and develop the paraphernalia before the paradigm. The new journals, book series, and conferences may signal an emergent discipline, but do they mask unresolved fractures in the field? One way to explore this question is by looking at how some comics scholars work with theory. Let me set the scene for you. “What Were Comics?” is a SSHRC-funded project to investigate the historical transformation of comic books and comic-book publishing in the United States through a content analysis of a random sample, stratified by year, of American comic books published between 1935 and 2014. It’s 2015, and Bart Beaty, Nick Sousanis, and I are holding our first planning meeting at the University of Calgary. Our task for the day is to write a draft coding protocol, which we’ll test on an arbitrarily chosen comic (Tippy Teen #21) with a group of graduate students in order to troubleshoot the instructions, gauge intercoder reliability, and get a sense of how long it takes to complete. At this stage in the project, we are focusing on material and formal variables that we expect will be relatively easy to train research assistants to code, saving more complex issues such as genre, drawing style, or gender and racial representation for a second stage. As a result, much of our first protocol involves grunt tabulation: How many stories in this comic? How many pages in this story? How many panels on this page? And so on. The work of defining variables and writing instructions is going well until we reach the ­section of the protocol where we want our research assistants to be able to record something about the layout of the pages in our corpus. Our progress comes to a screeching halt. We know from Eisner, McCloud, Thierry Groensteen, and other theorists of the comics form that the spatial arrangement of panels on the page is crucial to how artists convey narrative information to their readers, as well as contributing to the work’s aesthetic qualities more broadly. We have some sense that grids and tiers are important and that we will need to account for overlapping and inset panels. But beyond that, we have difficulty coming up with a satisfactory set of categories for the coders to use. We talk for hours, debating the difference between a layout composed on an underlying grid system

8   Benjamin Woo and one featuring identically sized panels, whether it’s panels or the space between them that actually defines the layout, and how things change when we approach the problem from a readerly or a writerly perspective. But we simply cannot settle on what to count or how to define different kinds of page layouts. Soon we find ourselves pulling books off the shelves in Bart’s office, looking for anything in the literature that can help us figure out how to categorize the layout of a page of comic art. There is no shortage of theories of the comics form, both in English and increasingly available in translation, yet we are unable to glean insights from this extensive body of work that could help us describe how panels are arranged on pages. In light of our inability to derive principles for categorizing comics layouts from some leading theories of formal structure in comics, I want to consider some questions about the role theory plays in comics scholarship. At times, “theory” has been seen as a vexed object (Thompson), at others as the height of intellectual sophistication. Following a paper by Elisabeth Kotzakidou Pace on the epistemic status of music theory, I will ­conceptualize theorizing as the practice of creating a rational structure from our experiences of the world, and theories are simply the output of this practice. Thus, theorizing is integral to all forms of knowing, from the “lay theories” that make up our store of tacit knowledge to formal theories articulated by professional scientists, but that doesn’t mean all ways of knowing are the same. In The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, Ernst Cassirer asserts that every branch of science has its own particular way of “achieving the subsumption of the particular under the universal” (69). In other words, all the sciences—­including the “human” or “cultural” sciences, that is, humanistic inquiry—attempt to relate particular observations, cases, and examples to broader, if not necessarily “universal,” processes, dynamics, and phenomena. In comics studies, then, what makes for a good theory? Consider how four of our colleagues have written about page layout: • In Case, planche, récit, Benoît Peeters defines four “conceptions of the page” based on the relationship between composition and narrative, which may be autonomous or interdependent with either element “dominant.” These four categories do not describe different arrangements of panels but supposedly represent different uses of layout by artists. Like the conventions of so-called realist film editing, conventional layouts “become transparent” (par. 7) through the regular, gridlike character of the panels. Conversely, decorative layouts elevate the composition of the page as an ­aesthetic totality over the breakdown of narrative into sequence. In rhetorical ­layouts, “the dimensions of the panel conform to the action being described” (par. 22) so that narrative drives choices of composition, while the reverse is true of ­productive layouts, in which artists exploit a range of compositional tricks to play with the reader’s expectations of how a graphic narrative usually unfolds. • Thierry Groensteen attempts to refine Peeters’s approach but using a different logic. Rather than trying to determine whether composition and narrative are interdependent or autonomous and then which one is “dominant,” whatever that means, Groensteen poses two questions of a given page: Is the layout “regular or irregular”? Is it “discrete or ostentatious”? (97). This again produces four possible

What Kind of Studies is Comics Studies?   9 combinations, and Groensteen is able to redescribe Peeters’s four conceptions of the page in these terms: conventional layouts are regular and discrete, decorative layouts are regular and ostentatious, rhetorical layouts are irregular and discrete, and productive layouts are irregular and ostentatious. Notably, the classificatory questions remove any consideration of artistic intent or reader reception that may have been implicit in Peeters’s scheme, boiling down the analysis to two questions within which a large number of actual layouts are possible. • For his part, Joseph Witek provides three broad categories. The “highly regular grid” approaches the ordinary sense of the word grid, with the page being divided into equal segments by evenly spaced gutters that run in parallels and perpendiculars. The “offset grid” retains an overall impression of regularity but with some staggering of the gutters. Finally, the “baroque style” adds interest (and sometimes confusion) to an underlying irregular grid through “a variety of flamboyant technical gestures”; at the extreme, the “high baroque style,” which he suspects is more common among comics published in the so-called Golden Age of American comic books may employ “wavy or jagged lines for panel borders, circular, triangular, or other unusually shaped panels, blackout panels, extreme close-ups . . . and extensive use of figures which appear to emerge from within the panels onto the physical page itself so the panel becomes only a notional ‘container’ for the action” (“The Arrow and the Grid” 153–154). • Barbara Postema offers a “taxonomy of layouts” in the second chapter of Narrative Structure in Comics, though she means something slightly different by “layout” from the others. While noting that the number of panels on a page has an impact in terms of the complexity of the formal composition, she in fact describes different ways of connecting images to one another on a page, rather than the totality of their arrangement: panels surrounded by other panels and separated by a gutter; single images on a page; clusters of panels surrounded by “a significant amount of empty page” (35); compositions of relatively few unframed images; panels touching, separated by a line rather than a gutter; and “insets or inserts” (42). Here we have four different ways of theorizing the page from four significant scholars in our field. Each has a degree of prima facie validity and seems quite persuasive on its own merits. They all deserve to be taken seriously. So it is all the more remarkable that we could not operationalize any of them for the “What Were Comics?” coding protocol.3 They didn’t translate into a set of categories that research assistants could be trained to use reliably and that would enable us to track changes in how artists compose comic pages both through time and across types of comics. On reflection, the problem had less to do with the content of the theories we consulted and more with how they were ­constructed. We were apparently asking them to do something different from what they were intended for. Reviewing these examples again, it strikes me that there are two significant things they do. The first thing they do is describe. Some theories explain or predict; others construct their rational structure by telling us what kinds of things we can expect to find in the world. There are a few gestures toward identifying causes here: Peeters relates the “­conventional” use of the page to production workflows that emphasized the modularity of comic art, Witek implies cartoonists must balance visual interest and narrative

10   Benjamin Woo i­ nterest when composing a page, and all the theorists occasionally assert that a certain kind of layout will have such-and-such an effect on the reading experience as they go about enumerating the differences between categories. But notwithstanding these ­casual causal references, the theories we examined are basically descriptive theories. Having named and described a number of objects, the second thing these theories do is typologize. They organize things into a relatively small number of categories—fewer than the variety of layout choices we typically see in published comics and many fewer than the potential compositions available to an artist. The resulting typologies invite us to classify the pages we encounter in our reading, or parts of them, in line with the categories provided. So far, so good—we were looking for a descriptive typology of layouts. Nonetheless, we encountered some problems when we tried to use them to organize our observations. While they provided some vocabulary for talking about certain kinds of pages, the categories they furnished were neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive. That is to say, there are many possible pages that arguably belong under more than one heading or fall entirely outside the proposed systems. The theorists are not unaware of this, of course. Peeters says that the four uses of the page “do not have any absolute value” but “are merely analytical tools that must be modified in light of each new example” (par. 10n5), while Postema points out that her six layouts can be mixed and matched in actual practice. The typologies seem to be conceptualized as mere heuristics, and a classificatory schema that doesn’t actually classify the phenomena in question was of limited use to us. But there are also two important things these theories generally don’t do. First, they don’t engage with other theories. With the notable exception of Groensteen, who is explicitly responding to Peeters, the theories are presented as if they have been ­constructed entirely from first principles. In the works I consulted, at any rate, none of the others justifies the categories they constructed by appealing to a more general theory of composition or reception. This is perhaps only a consequence of a broader tendency for comics scholars not to relate their arguments to prior work in the field, which has been identified by Phillip Troutman, Witek (“Dual Address”), and others, but it is particularly notable here, especially as the field has begun to be more self-conscious about its relationship with canons of academic legitimacy. If quite different theories of comics can be inferred directly from observation of more or less arbitrarily selected examples, then there is no reason to prefer one of these over another—or over one’s own intuitive understandings. Second, these theories don’t establish criteria by which they could be proven wrong. Since Karl Popper, falsifiability has been one key criterion used to distinguish scientific hypotheses and theories from myth and ideology. That is to say, while we may not yet know for sure if some claim is true, we should be able to imagine circumstances under which it could be demonstrated false. Another way to think of this might be, what difference would it make if a “representation of our world of experience” (17) were right or wrong? Is there any way to judge it more or less accurate? If it is impossible to marshal evidence that would refute a statement, if it makes no difference, then that statement is epistemologically empty. None of the theories we looked at is falsifiable, even in this broad sense. The decision about which category a page layout belongs in is largely a

What Kind of Studies is Comics Studies?   11 ­ atter of assertion. If someone disagrees with you about whether a particular layout is m rhetorical or productive, whether deviations from an underlying grid are “flamboyant” enough to be considered baroque, or where to draw the line between “several panels on a page” and “panels surrounded by other panels,” there is no clear way to arbitrate it. Theories of this sort did not provide the kind of link between the particular and the general that we needed for our coding protocol: one that was clear, unambiguous, and, above all, reproducible but also subtle enough that changes in how artists break down a page could be detected in a corpus of more than three thousand comics. But do these theories tell us anything more about the state of comics studies as a body of knowledge or a practice of inquiry? As individuals and as a scholarly community, the question we need to consider is whether accounts of this kind—not, I repeat, these specific explanations but this way of explaining—are sufficient. What, in other words, is comics theory for? We all want to know more about comics and graphic novels, but what counts as knowing? These questions cut to the heart of how we define comics studies. Some of us conceptualize our work as interpretation or criticism, while others seek to discover facts in archives or explain processes by appeal to data. Some of us expect a theory to apply widely, perhaps even universally, while others plumb the depths of a small corpus or a single text. What constitutes a satisfactory theory runs along a rough continuum, from theorization that aspires to formulate universal, causal accounts that can be tested by experimentation and used to predict future outcomes, at one end, to theorization that responds in some irreducible way to an object that is not something to be explained but only an occasion for theoretical discourse, at the other. While some formalist theories of comics rhetorically aspire to universality, Neil Cohn is probably one of the few in our field to seriously pursue nomothetic theorizing on the model of the natural sciences. The other extreme of idiographic theory is more common when comic art serves as a proving ground to “apply” or “demonstrate” some other body of theory, often drawn from the domains of so-called critical or cultural theory. Most of us probably sit somewhere between these two extremes, and perhaps all that means is that it’s not entirely clear exactly what we’re doing. The talk of comics studies as discipline seems to assume, or at least give the impression, that all comics scholarship is broadly the same, that it all has similar goals and working methods. After all, isn’t that what it means to be a discipline? But there is, in fact, a range of backgrounds, traditions, and research interests that comics scholars bring to the field. If comics studies is to become something like a discipline, then we need to make our engagements with method, methodology, and the relationship between theory and observation much more explicit. We must not only model our ­conceptions of comics research but also reflect on the affordances and constraints these models (or paradigms?) necessarily bring with them. There are, broadly speaking, two ways to approach academic disciplines. One—let’s call it  a “theory of knowledge” perspective—takes it on faith that disciplines correspond with real divisions in the world or the mind. It would include the numerous attempts to revise the branches of knowledge in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment (Darnton), as well as more recent attempts to sort university d ­ epartments

12   Benjamin Woo in the scholarship of teaching and learning (Jones; Cresswell and Roskens; Smart et al.). From this perspective, a discipline is identified by a sufficiently distinctive object of study (e.g., “geology is the study of rocks”), philosophical anthropology (e.g., “economists view human beings as maximizing utility through exchange”), or perhaps research practice (e.g., “anthropologists write ethnographies” or “data scientists use algorithms”). By ­contrast, what we might call a “sociology of knowledge” perspective focuses on the institutional realpolitik taking place behind the back of intellectual history. If a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, then a discipline is a field of inquiry with a calendar code and office space. Critical scholars of disciplinarity remind us that disciplines (noun) ­discipline (verb). They have a benign face; the regulatory force of disciplinary norms and institutions is one reason academic departments enjoy as much autonomy as they do, and the evaluative contexts that disciplines furnish make academic careers as we know them possible (Shumway and Messer-Davidow 208, 207). But they also necessarily rule certain ideas outside the bounds of normal science, and this “boundary work” isn’t innocent, particularly where disciplinary gatekeeping intersects with axes of systemic marginalization or oppression (209–211). These two perspectives on disciplinarity aren’t always ­distinct. As Robert Darnton argues, the “figurative system of human knowledge” that famously opens Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie attempted not only to organize the arts and sciences into a coherent structure but also to render certain knowledges and certain knowers illegitimate (209). The challenge is how to reconcile the wholly understandable desire for the trappings of disciplinarity—for institutions that support an ongoing intellectual community, for control over curricula, and for more and less-precarious ­academic jobs—with the reasonable suspicion that taking on those trappings will constrain the field, limiting the directions it takes and the questions it entertains. Or, as Henry Jenkins provocatively asks, “Should the reading of comics be disciplined? What is the price we will have to pay in order to become a coherent academic field and are we willing to pay it?” (“Should We Discipline?” 6). My doctorate and my appointment are both in communication studies, which looks quite a lot like a discipline—certainly in comparison to comics studies at the moment. There are departments and even faculties of communication or media studies at many universities and colleges, attracting large numbers of undergraduate and graduate students; multiple learned societies operating to greater and lesser degrees internationally (Pooley), in addition to national and subfield-specific associations; and too many journals, monographs, edited collections, and textbooks to enumerate. Nonetheless, surveying communication theory as a field, Robert T. Craig found an incoherent grab bag of ideas raided from other disciplines: “Communication scholars seized upon every idea about communication, whatever its provenance, but accomplished little with most of them—entombed them, you might say, after removing them from the disciplinary environments in which they had thrived and were capable of propagating” (“Communication Theory” 122). But, rather than attempting to overcome this “sterile eclecticism” (122) by imposing “some chimerical, unified theory” (123) or following “the red herring of antidisciplinarity” (124), Craig’s remedy was a shift in perspective. From a different point of view, these are not incommensurable

What Kind of Studies is Comics Studies?   13 paradigms talking past one another but a set of traditions and practices in dialogue, and dialogue requires a common language: Productive theoretical arguments most readily occur within an interpretive ­community sustained by a disciplinary matrix, a background of assumptions shared in common. Disciplinarity, however, does not require that diversity and interdisciplinarity be suppressed. To be a discipline means only, at a minimum, that many of us agree that we disagree about certain matters that are consequential in certain ways and therefore worth discussing. (124)

Craig’s communicative conception of communication theory provides a model (a  “constitutive metamodel”) for a version of disciplinarity that remains porous and open to diversity while still providing a framework within which the study of comics can ­continue to develop. When we say that comics studies is a field, we are pointing to an intellectual community of people who have something to say about comics. To be a discipline, comics studies requires a metadiscourse, a backchannel where we can talk about how we talk about ­comics (Craig “How We Talk”). The point is not to suppress or explain away difference but to focus in on the differences that are consequential and the debates that are worth having. Heretofore, our conversations about disciplinarity have largely been focused on the institutional appurtenances thereof—the “paraphernalia” of journals, learned societies, conferences, and, yes, faculty jobs. These are certainly important conversations to have if the achievements of comics scholars over the decades are to be sustained and ­carried forward by future generations. But we can’t neglect other, perhaps more difficult conversations about what comics studies has been, is, and could be.4

Notes 1. By “fan-scholars,” I mean fans who make use of academic knowledges, theories, and modes of discourse as part of their fan practices, rather than “scholar-fans,” who mobilize their fannish experiences as capital within the academy (Hills). 2. These figures come from SSHRC’s public database of awards payments from fiscal year 1998–1999 to 2017–2018, which can be accessed at sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/results-resultats/ award_search-recherche_attributions/index-eng.aspx. 3. Since these conversations, we have also explored Bateman et al.’s and Neil Cohn’s (Pederson and Cohn) approaches to annotating and/or indexing page layouts. 4. As part of the “What Were Comics?” project (Bart Beaty, principal investigator), this work was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. An earlier version was presented at International Comic Arts Forum 2017 in Seattle.

Works Cited Bateman, John, et al. “From Empirical Studies to Visual Narrative Organization: Exploring Page Composition.” Empirical Comics Research: Digital, Multimodal, and Cognitive Methods, edited by Alexander Dunst et al., Routledge, 2018, pp. 127–153.

14   Benjamin Woo Beaty, Bart. Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture. UP of Mississippi, 2005. Beaty, Bart, and Benjamin Woo. The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books. Palgrave MacMillan, 2016. Bell, John, editor. Canuck Comics. Matrix Books, 1986. Bell, John. Invaders from the North: How Canada Conquered the Comic Book Universe. Dundurn, 2006. Blakely, W. Paul. A Study of Seventh Grade Children’s Reading of Comics Books as Related to Certain Other Variables. 1957. University of Iowa, PhD dissertation. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global, search.proquest.com/docview/301916980. Bordwell, David. Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema. Harvard UP, 1989. Brienza, Casey. “Producing Comics Culture: A Sociological Approach to the Study of Comics.” Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics, vol. 1, no. 2, 2010, pp. 105–119. Buranyi, Stephen. “Is the Staggeringly Profitable Business of Scientific Publishing Bad for Science?” The Long Read, Guardian, 27 June 2017, theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/ profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science. Caldwell, John Thornton. Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television. Duke UP, 2008. Cassirer, Ernst. The Logic of the Cultural Sciences: Five Studies, translated by S. G. Lofts. Yale UP, 2000. Cohn, Neil. “Visual Language Theory and the Scientific Study of Comics.” Empirical Comics Research: Digital, Multimodal, and Cognitive Methods, edited by Alexander Dunst et al., Routledge, 2018, pp. 305–328. Craig, Robert T. “Communication Theory as a Field.” Communication Theory, vol. 9, no. 2, 1999, pp. 119–161. Craig, Robert T. “How We Talk about How We Talk: Communication Theory in the Public Interest.” Journal of Communication, vol. 55, 2005, pp. 659–667. Creswell, John  W., and Ronald  W. Roskens. “The Biglan Studies of Differences among Academic Areas.” Review of Higher Education, vol. 4, no. 3, 1981, pp. 1–16. Darnton, Robert. “Philosophers Trim the Tree of Knowledge: The Epistemological Strategy of the Encyclopédie.” The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, Basic Books, 1984, pp. 191–213. Gordon, Ian. “Ideological/Sociological.” The Secret Origins of Comics Studies, edited by Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan, Routledge, 2017, pp. 118–129. Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Rev. ed., U of Chicago P, 2008. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen, UP of Mississippi, 2007. Hatfield, Charles. “Foreword: Comics Studies, the Anti-Discipline.” The Secret Origins of Comics Studies, edited by Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan. Routledge, 2017, pp. xi–xxv. Hatfield, Charles. “Indiscipline, or: The Condition of Comics Studies.” Transatlantica, 2010, journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/4933. Heisler, Florence Anna. Characteristics of Elementary-School Children Who Read Comic Books, Attend the Movies, and Prefer Serial Radio Programs. 1944. New York University, PhD dissertation. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global, search.proquest.com/docview/301836467. Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures. Routledge, 2002. Jenkins, Henry. “Formalist Theory: The Cartoonists.” The Secret Origins of Comics Studies, edited by Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan, Routledge, 2017, pp. 133–149.

What Kind of Studies is Comics Studies?   15 Jenkins, Henry. “Should We Discipline the Reading of Comics?” Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, edited by Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan, Routledge, 2012, pp. 1–14. Jones, Willis A. “Variation among Academic Disciplines: An Update on Analytical Frameworks and Research.” Journal of the Professoriate, vol. 6, 2011, pp. 9–27. Karp, Etta E. Crime Comic Book Role Preferences. 1954. New York University, PhD dissertation. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global, search.proquest.com/docview/302006085. Kotzakidou Pace, Elisabeth. “The Techne of Music Theory and the Epistemic Domain of the (Neo-)Aristotelian Arts of Logos.” What Kind of Theory Is Music Theory? Epistemological Exercises in Music Theory and Analysis, edited by Per F. Broman and Nora A. Engebretsen, Stockholm UP, 2007, pp. 133–186. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed., U of Chicago P, 1970. McCloud, Scott. Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form. Perennial, 2000. Pederson, Kaitlin, and Neil Cohn. “The Changing Pages of Comics: Page Layouts across Eight Decades of American Superhero Comics.” Studies in Comics, vol. 7, 2016, pp. 7–28. Peeters, Benoît. “Four Conceptions of the Page” [excerpt from Case, planche, récit: comment lire une bande dessinée]. ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, translated by Jesse Cohn, vol. 3, no. 3, 2007, www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v3_3/peeters. Peterson, Richard  A. “Understanding Audience Segmentation: From Elite and Mass to Omnivore and Univore.” Poetics, vol. 21, no. 4, 1992, pp. 243–258. Pooley, Jefferson D. “The Four Cultures: Media Studies at the Crossroads.” Social Media and Society, vol. 2, no. 1, 2016, doi:10.1177/2056305116632777. Popper, Karl. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. 1959. Routledge, 2002. Postema, Barbara. Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments. Boydell & Brewer, 2013. Ricca, Brad. “Unassuming Barber Shop: The 1st American Comics Scholar Was a Superman Artist.” The Beat: The News Blog of Comics Culture, 14 Nov. 2014, comicsbeat.com/ unassuming-barber-shop-the-1st-american-comics-scholar-was-a-superman-artist. Robb, Jenny. “The Librarians and Archivists.” The Secret Origins of Comics Studies, edited by Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan, Routledge, 2017, pp. 71–87. Shumway, David  R., and Ellen Messer-Davidow. “Disciplinarity: An Introduction.” Poetics Today, vol. 12, 1999, pp. 201–225. Smart, John C., et al. Academic Disciplines: Holland’s Theory and the Study of College Students and Faculty. Vanderbilt UP, 2000. Smith, Matthew J., and Randy Duncan, editors. The Secret Origins of Comics Studies. Routledge, 2017. Thompson, E. P. “The Poverty of Theory, or: An Orrery of Errors.” 1978. The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press, 2008, pp. 1–210. Troutman, Phillip. “The Discourse of Comics Scholarship: A Rhetorical Analysis of Research Article Introductions.” International Journal of Comic Art, vol. 12, no. 2/3, 2010, pp. 432–444. Witek, Joseph. “American Comics Criticism and the Problem of Dual Address.” International Journal of Comic Art, vol. 10, no. 1, 2008, pp. 218–225. Witek, Joseph. “The Arrow and the Grid.” A Comics Studies Reader, edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, UP of Mississippi, 2009, pp. 149–156.

chapter 2

W h y Th er e Is No “L a nguage of Comics” Frank Bramlett

In the spring of 2018, Google unveiled an advancement in artificial intelligence. It introduced a new program named Google Duplex, which used linguistic speech patterns to demonstrate social interaction between a human and a computer: Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, . . . stood onstage in front of a cheering audience and proudly showed a video in which a new Google program, Google Duplex, made a phone call and scheduled a hair salon appointment. The program performed these tasks well enough that a human at the other end of the call didn’t suspect she was talking to a computer. . . . As Google concedes, the trick to making Google Duplex work was to limit it to “closed domains,” or highly constrained types of data, “which are narrow enough to explore extensively.” Google Duplex can have a human-sounding conversation only “after being deeply trained in such domains.” Open-ended conversation on a wide range of topics is nowhere in sight. (Marcus and Davis)

We should not underestimate this extraordinary development: computers can be programmed to communicate with humans in a manner so closely approximating human speech that the humans may not realize their interlocutor is not human. Even though humans have been writing on computers for many decades, most speech communication between machines and humans has occurred only in science fiction. What Google’s feat shows us is that human language is extraordinarily complex, and despite the extensive resources that tech companies bring to the enterprise, we still only ­communicate orally with our devices using highly restricted types of speech. In any case, we must remember that Google Duplex does not produce speech in the same way a human does. It produces speech based on statistical probabilities and can only succeed in a highly restricted set of circumstances; it produces a simulacrum of speech, and as good as that speech may be, it is not the same as human language.

WHY There Is No “Language of Comics”   17 The role of linguistics in comics studies has grown of late, as more linguists from a v­ ariety of disciplinary approaches are paying more attention to comics and how linguistics might serve as a foundational part of comics studies. Shortly before the publication of the first Superman comic in 1938, scholars were already examining the role of new vocabulary (e.g., slang) and other onomastic concerns in comic strips (Tysell). Those early ­publications are admittedly rare, but now, in the twenty-first century, scholars from many countries are approaching comics scholarship with linguistic frameworks in mind. In his book Comics and Sequential Art, Will Eisner draws a clear parallel between comics and language: When one examines a comic book feature as a whole, the deployment of its unique elements takes on the characteristic of a language. The vocabulary of Sequential Art has been in continuous development in America. . . . Comics communicate in a “language” that relies on a visual experience common to both creator and audience. . . . In its most economical state, comics employ a series of repetitive images and recognizable symbols. When these are used again and again to convey similar ideas, they become a language—a literary form, if you will. And it is this disciplined application that creates the “grammar” of Sequential Art. (7–8)

Here Eisner sets up a comparison between the elements of comics and the elements of language, citing the relationship between comics elements as a grammar. Whether this formulation is meant to be taken literally (comics are language) or metaphorically (comics resemble a linguistic system) is unclear. In any case, Eisner was followed by another famous comics artist, Scott McCloud, who solidifies the definition: “Words, pictures, and other icons are the vocabulary of the language called comics” (McCloud 47; emphasis added). This chapter will explore the oft-repeated claim that comics are a language. As I have argued briefly in other publications, this claim is compelling because there is a noticeable degree of similarity between elements of comics and elements of language: “much [has] been made of the idea of a ‘language of comics’ or ‘grammar of comics’ or ‘vocabulary of comics,’ and while these phrases were helpful metaphors that point to an or­gan­ ized, systematic approach to analysis, they ultimately interfered with a robust understanding of how linguistic science can shed light on comics” (Bramlett, “Comics and Linguistics” 388). I strongly support the use of linguistic theory and analysis in ­comics studies; after all, without an examination of “language in comics”—as opposed to “the language of comics”—we could not remotely achieve a robust theoretical description of comics (Bramlett, “Comics and Linguistics” 380). However, equating comics with language is incorrect on at least two counts. First, it overvalues the discipline of linguistics, especially structural, formalist, and cognitive linguistics, as an explanatory model for comics studies. Second, comics is far more than the concept of language or linguistic system can explain. Scholars must move away from the metaphor of “the ­language of comics” and acknowledge that even though comics can perhaps successfully be categorized as a (visual) semiotic system, they are not language.

18   Frank Bramlett

What is Language in the First Place? There are many competing definitions of language, and it is not possible to cover all of them in this chapter. In linguistics, most definitions of language address its two major components: the brain-based cognitive abstract system and the socially-based system used for communication in speech, sign language, and writing. Language can be thought of as a cognitive system, a brain-based resource. In an overly simple explanation, people make noises with their mouths and noses, and other people actually understand what is being communicated. Some people use sign language: they use gestures with their hands and arms as well as facial expressions, and other people actually understand what is being communicated. While language is a system of communication, one of its primary usages is to build and maintain social relationships. Thus, we must remember that l­anguage is always founded in specific cultures, nations, and communities of practice, so even though “language” is often discussed as a complex but stable cognitive system, in reality, there is notable variation in how individuals use language and how language is used across groups. Language is a system of arbitrary signs. Nearly all linguistic elements have no direct or motivated relationship to what they refer to. This includes lexical items; the Spanish word oso, the Korean word 곰 (pronounced something like [kom]), and the English word bear all refer to roughly the same idea: a big, furry, four-legged, toothy creature that lives in the woods. Each language community has its own way of naming the same kind of animal. There are some exceptions to this idea that words are arbitrary signs for what they mean. Some words are pronounced in a way that attempts to mimic a sound in nature (­onomatopoeia), and these words are usually considered to be semiarbitrary because their pronunciation and their meaning are motivated by a perceived resemblance to what they refer to. English words such as splash and boom are imitative of sounds in the environment, and speakers can make a wide range of these imitative forms. Comics make free use of these forms and often create novel forms that readers take great delight in. Language is a system that depends on systematic rules for the creation and interpretation of written sentences as well as spoken and signed utterances. These rules are often referred to as grammar and can be defined as two types, deterministic and probabilistic: “Some rules are deterministic, that is, they are rules which always apply. For example, the definite article always comes before the noun (we say the cup, not cup the). Other rules are probabilistic, that is to say, they state what is most likely or least likely to apply in particular circumstances” (Carter and McCarthy 5). Even those rules that are often thought of as deterministic are in some cases probabilistic. When conjugating verbs, English speakers put an s on the end of a verb to signal indicative third-person singular present tense. For many English speakers, this rule is deterministic; however, many English dialects around the world allow for the (optional) deletion of this word ending, sometimes depending on social circumstances and the identities of the addressees. See the discussion of standard languages and dialects below. Language is a complex system that uses symbols to represent other things: each word in a language is a unit that symbolizes something else. In comics—if we exclude the

WHY There Is No “Language of Comics”   19 l­ anguage in comics—the vast majority of elements are not arbitrary; they don’t symbolize something else. A drawing of a cat, whether it looks a lot like a cat or only marginally like a cat, still has a nonarbitrary relationship to the referent cat in the real world or in the world of the comic that readers are asked to imagine. Under normal circumstances, ­artists don’t draw dogs when they mean to draw cats, and dogs can’t substitute for cats unless the comic has a special allowance for it. George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Robert Crumb’s Fritz the Cat, Jim Davis’s Garfield, Patrick McDonnell’s Mooch the Cat, Laura Howell’s Meebo, and even Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’s Lying Cat all look like cats of some sort, even if they are imaginary. The artistic, stylized visual representation of the creature is nevertheless nonarbitrary. In visual semiotics, images are described in terms of their logical and meaningful relationship to the objects they refer to outside the text. It is generally agreed that there are three categories of image: An image is an icon if it bears a similarity or resemblance to what we already know or conceive about an object or person. An image is an index if it is recognizable, not because of any similarity to an object or person, but because we understand the relationship between the image and the concept that it stands for. An image is a symbol when it has no visual or conceptual connection to an object or person. (Harrison 50)

In this framework, the vast majority of images in comics (i.e., the contents of panels) are icons. In contrast, the vast majority of words (words represented in the writing ­system of the comic) are symbols, and this agrees with the linguistic framework, that language is a system of arbitrary symbols. Even if we reject the notion that visual representations in comics are nonarbitrary, we must grapple with how a reader can see a broad range of catlike images and somehow connect them all to the category of cat. Much of this relates to the context in which and for which the comic is produced. In discussing the nature of drawn representations in general, Simon Grennan argues: Semiosis of the array of graphic marks . . . is entirely dependent upon the marks’ relation to material object (paper and ink), perceptual activities, and the actions of makers and users. . . . Relationships within the graphic array and between the graphic array and other organizational principles of environment, resources, actions, and semiosis are recognized as having an aetiological scope that is unique to each drawing. (28)

In short, Grennan argues that comics cannot be equated to a lexicogrammar (a  ­linguistic system consisting of and constituting resources of vocabulary, sentence structure, word formation processes, and phonemes) because of the very nature of the images and the process of interpreting them. Images are produced and interpreted through the contextualized process of depiction (Grennan’s “aetiology”), and while depiction is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is worthwhile to note Grennan’s claim that “the structure of depictions cannot be accounted for, explained, or described as

20   Frank Bramlett s­ ystematic realisations of lexicogrammar, beyond the most general, unsystematic, and largely unspecified concept of iconic resemblance” (40). Irrespective of the extent to which a depiction (a drawn image) is or is not arbitrary, the linguistic form of a word, though, is arbitrary. Returning to the English word cat, the form is pronounced variously as [khat] and [khæt], depending on the dialect of English. The Oxford English Dictionary describes the etymology of cat in detail, crossing several major subfamilies of Indo-European: “The name is common European of unknown ­origin: found in Latin and Greek in 1st–4th centuries, and in the modern languages generally, as far back as records go.” The modern form has its roots in ancient forms in Byzantine Greek, Latin, Old English, Old High German (and other Germanic languages), as well as in Celtic, like Old Irish and Gaelic, and also in Old Slavonic. According to the dictionary, “these forms indicate extensive communication of the word, but do not fix the original source. History points to Egypt as the earliest home of the domestic cat, and the name is generally sought in the same quarter; Martial’s at­trib­ute (69 BCE) might incline us to a Slavonic or Germanic origin.” Even though this example appears to support the claim that the word cat is nonarbitrary because it appears similar in so many European languages (a result of cross-­linguistic borrowing), a look at the word from non-Indo-European languages shows very different forms. In Korean, the word for cat is written as 고양이 (pronounced [go-yang-i]). In Mandarin Chinese, the word for cat is pronounced [mao] (ignoring the required tone for correct pronunciation). In Chinese, then, the word for cat is imitative, derived from the human perception of the sound that cats make. From a linguistic perspective, sound effects are considered semiarbitrary: the linguistic sounds made by the human speaker are considered to reflect the physical properties of the sounds as they occur in nature. While some words for “cat” may be semiarbitrary (as in Chinese), many words for “cat” are entirely arbitrary and do not depend at all on a connection between the l­inguistic form and the referent, which demonstrates the difference between the nature of a linguistic sign and the nature of a depicted representation of the real-world object. The answers to the question “What is language?” are complex, multifaceted, and sometimes at odds with one another, but some general principles can be identified. A language is a system of arbitrary symbols, a brain-based abstract system, a system used for communication.

Types of Language Natural Languages A natural language is one “spoken by a speech community, normally thought of as having evolved along with its speech community, and for which it is not possible to find some ultimate source of creation” (Malmkjær, “Artificial Languages” 38). Natural languages are acquired by children, meaning that they are passed on intergenerationally. Natural

WHY There Is No “Language of Comics”   21 Table 2.1  The Great Vowel Shift in English Geoffrey Chaucer

William Shakespeare

T. S. Eliot

bide

[iy]

[əy]

[ay]

rude

[iw]

[ɨw]

[uw]

house

[uw]

[əw]

[aw]

languages are used by their speakers for communication, but these languages also serve indexical functions, meaning that they play a role in creating and maintaining identities of the communities that use them (see Bucholtz for a useful comparison of speech ­community and community of practice). Natural languages also show change over time, whether from internal linguistic forces or from external social forces. An example of an internal linguistic change in English is the Great Vowel Shift: “[at] the very time when the orthography of Early Modern English was stabilizing, the sound patterns of the language were undergoing remarkable displacement,” particularly the tense vowels. The examples in Table 2.1 are from Mature Middle English, Early Modern English, and Late Modern English, and they show changes in the vowel phoneme, the pronunciation of the word independent of its spelling (Nist 221). What Table 2.1 does not illustrate is that the English vowel system is continuing to change and that vowel differences are one of the most important elements in the differences between, for example, British English varieties and North American English varieties. One other important gap in the table is that it does not account for dialectal variation within national varieties of English or of social varieties of English related to socioeconomic class or to ethnicity. More on dialects is discussed below. Natural languages are portable, meaning that when people move to different ­geographic regions, they take their languages with them. Whether this is a result of colonization/­conquest, immigration for socioeconomic reasons, or displacement due to­ ­natural disasters, diverse speech communities come into contact with one another, meaning that the languages spoken by the communities also come into contact, yielding bilingual ­communities in some cases or the creation of new linguistic codes in others. Natural ­languages may be living, moribund/dying, dead, or in some cases reawakening. (Readers might consult www.ethnologue.com for more information on the status of languages.)

Artificial Languages An artificial language is a linguistic system that has been created, often by just one ­person, usually to serve a narrow range of purposes. Perhaps the most famous artificial language in the European language tradition is Esperanto, created by Ludwick Lazarus Zamenhof in the late nineteenth century to function as a common linguistic system to

22   Frank Bramlett bridge the multilingual environment of Europe (Malmkjær, “Artificial Languages” 40). In this sense, artificial languages are intended to function similarly to a natural language lingua franca, “a language known to, and used for communication between, groups who do not speak each other’s language,” such as Swahili in Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda (Malmkjær, “Bilingualism” 64). There is a range of opinions about the utility or even wisdom of attempting to create a linguistic system as a means of communication, yet the Universal Esperanto Association (based in the Netherlands) claims to have members in 120 countries (“What Is UEA?”). Fiction writers have long been interested in the construction of linguistic codes in order to create the sense of cross-linguistic, cross-cultural, and sometimes alien ­communication. J. R. R. Tolkien may be the most famous example of a writer who ­creates a vast linguistic system for the characters who populate his fictional worlds. In his case, the most complete system he created is known as Quenya, a language spoken by elves in the fictional world of Middle Earth. The language has a robust vocabulary and syntactic system and a highly refined pronunciation system. In comics and ­science-fiction f­ andoms, artificial languages are often referred to as con-langs (short for “­constructed languages”), and these famously include Klingon. Other comics that incorporate ­elements of artificial languages include John Layman and Rob Guillory’s Chew, Vaughan and Staples’s Saga, and Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All-Star Superman. Comics are neither a natural nor an artificial language. If comics were a language, then humans would be able to “speak” them. (See more below on modes such as sign language and writing systems.) However, comics are not used as a natural language or as an artificial language as a system of communication with other humans.

Language Acquisition and Modalities In comics studies—along with literary studies—the writing system is often seen as existing on equal footing with speech, and in some ways, writing is seen as more important than speech. In large part, this research orientation results from the object of study: scholars study texts that are created in the mode of writing, and even when the written text represents speech, the language is captured using a visual system that represents language. However, from a linguistic perspective, speech and writing are not equivalent, though they are in some ways highly overlapping, as will be discussed below. Children go through the process of acquiring languages, and under normal circumstances, children learn to speak their home languages through social interaction with caregivers, siblings, and friends. Children who are born deaf or who are born into deaf families may learn to speak, but they may also learn sign language as their home ­language. All normally developing children acquire their home languages, but they acquire them in the modes of speech or of sign or both:

WHY There Is No “Language of Comics”   23 [C]hildren learn their first languages because human brains are designed for the rapid acquisition of linguistic systems through social interaction. In other words, even though the brain is hardwired for language, without meaningful social relationships, language acquisition cannot take place. Research has long shown that children acquire language in stages, meaning that children learn certain sounds ­earlier than other sounds; e.g. English [m] is almost always acquired before [l] or [w]. Likewise, children progress through stages of syntax, beginning with one-word utterances, progressing to multi-word utterances, and over time exhibit fuller ­control over longer utterances. (Bramlett, “Comics and Linguistics” 386)

The mode that children do not acquire naturally is writing. They must be taught how to read and write, so the mode of writing, although a fully expressive mode of linguistic communication on a par with speech and sign, must be understood on its own terms as a cultural artifact apart from linguistic systems that can be acquired by children through social interaction. If comics were a language, then children would grow up acquiring the skills of ­comprehending and producing comics naturally, without formal instruction, using comics to accomplish communicative needs such as expressing emotion, arguing with playmates, requesting food or toys or blankets, among countless others. Instead, ­children learn how to read comics by relying on their linguistic reading skills and skills with interpreting visual semiotic systems. Of course, even if children can “read” the visuals of the comics, unless they have been taught how to decode the written linguistic symbols, they do not have full access to the array of semiotics on the comics page. The three modes of linguistic expression—speech, sign language, and writing—are, of course, founded in the abstract system of language in the brain, but they are also founded in and shaped by the social circumstances in which we use them. One similarity between speech and sign language is that they are normally unplanned, mainly ­taking place in real time (Carter and McCarthy 168). In writing, there are usually opportunities to plan and hierarchically structure the text. The writer can usually rephrase or edit what is written. In speech and in sign language, utterances are linked together as if in a chain (168). Overall, as Carter and McCarthy explain, spoken language is mostly interactive and face-to-face, where speakers make meaning by referring to shared knowledge or the immediate social context (175). Although rare, there are some comics that attempt to represent all three modes of  communication. One is an occasional comic strip, That Deaf Guy, by Matt Daigle,  sometimes coauthored with Kay Daigle. The strip is lighthearted in its attempts to educate readers about the experiences of deaf people and their families (see Figure 2.1). In this comic strip, the reader sees a wife and a husband sitting at a table in a restaurant, with a server standing by them. In panel 1, the wife and the husband are signing to each other, but the server doesn’t understand what they’re doing. In the second panel, when the wife explains (through both speech and sign language) that her husband is deaf, the server does her best to help them, and in the third panel, she gives them menus in Braille.

24   Frank Bramlett

Figure 2.1  Matt Daigle, That Deaf Guy, February 23, 2010.

Daigle’s gentle humor reminds readers of the complex and overlapping modes of ­language that people encounter in their daily lives. It also demonstrates that in everyday social interaction, speech and sign are the primary modes of linguistic communication, the importance of written communication notwithstanding. Strictly speaking, Daigle’s comic strips show evidence of bilingualism. English is a language, but American Sign Language (ASL) is a language in its own right, independent of spoken/written English. Hearing adults who learn ASL go through the process of learning it just as any adult learns a foreign language. The reason comics cannot be considered a language is that children do not “acquire” comics. Parents or caregivers do not use comics to communicate with their children about meal times, bath times, nap times, or play times. Comics are not language because people do not “speak” comics, nor do they “sign” comics. The closest that comics come to being a language is that they are similar to the mode of writing. Like writing, comics might be ­considered “planned discourse.” It takes time to create even a single comic panel, let alone a comic strip or comic book or graphic memoir. But the comparison stops there—writing is planned discourse, but it is based on an abstract system of arbitrary linguistic forms. Likewise, comics are planned, but they involve far more than a linguistic system.

Standard Languages and Dialects Languages come in many varieties, and an important taxonomy is the notion of stand­ ard languages. The notion of standard encompasses two sometimes competing definitions, one referring to the “best” kind of language (e.g., Standard Edited Portuguese or Standard Edited Hindi) and the other referring to the language of the marketplace, the most common, widely known version of the language. Languages that function on a large scale across a society might be known as national languages, and some countries establish a language or set of languages as official (government-sanctioned) languages. Although national borders are sometimes assumed to represent linguistic borders, it is often the case that they fail to match, with languages expanding beyond borders because of war, trade, natural disaster, or other socially significant events. In other

WHY There Is No “Language of Comics”   25 instances, the linguistic communities may be relatively stable, and instead, it is the political boundaries that change over time. An example of the interrelationship of languages and political boundaries is the area of western Europe where Dutch and French are spoken. Standard Dutch is spoken in the Netherlands and in Belgium, but there are dialectal differences evident based on the geographic area (Meesters 163–164). Of course, in Belgium, some areas are largely Dutch-speaking, and other areas are largely French-speaking. The political border that Belgium shares with France and the political border that Belgium shares with the Netherlands are not equivalent to the linguistic border between French and Dutch. In other areas around the globe, linguistic diversity is even greater, as on the Indian ­subcontinent, where languages from Austro-Asiatic, Dravidian, Indo-European, and Sino-Tibetan families are spoken (Lyovin 115–127). Many languages have recognizable variants spoken by members of different communities. These variants are called dialects, and they are categorized into regional and social varieties. Regional dialects are mostly defined by geography. In the United States, dialect regions are strongly oriented along a north-south dimension, though there is growing evidence that English spoken in the western United States is differentiating from English spoken in the eastern United States. In dialectology, scholars have identified patterns that help differentiate English dialects: “There are five ways in which irregular verbs pattern differently in standard and vernacular dialects of English. For the most part, these different patterns are the result of analogy, but there are also some retentions of patterns that have become obsolete in standard varieties” (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 370–371). The following are two of the patterns:

1. The simple past tense may be expressed with the full past participle form.

Simple past in standard dialect: I went down there. Simple past in other dialects: I had went down there.

2. The past participle form may serve as the simple past.

Simple past in standard dialect: He saw something out there. Simple past in other dialects: He seen something out there. These two patterns show differences between standard dialects and vernacular ­ ialects and are found in a large number of English-speaking communities around d the world. These kinds of patterns are shown in regional dialects but are also found in ­dialects that are based on socioeconomic class status (e.g., working class) or on ­ethnic identity. One reason comics cannot be language is that communities are not defined by a ­particular variety of comics, and the converse of this is also true, that a particular ­variety of comics is not produced by a community that coheres because of regional or social identity. If comics were language, then there would be an identifiable set of ­features (similar to verb patterns) associated with the “dialect” of the comic. While some may argue that “Western” comics and “Eastern” comics could be described as d ­ ifferent

26   Frank Bramlett “­languages,” the fact is that “Western” and “Eastern” comics have far more in common than do “Western” and “Eastern” linguistic systems. A monolingual English speaker who reads a Japanese comic book (manga) has a far greater chance of ­understanding the story of that comic than of understanding any single linguistic utterance spoken or ­written in the Japanese language.

Multilingual Comics and Translations There are many examples of multilingual comics in which two or more languages are displayed via writing systems. Sometimes the different codes are used to set a scene or establish a tone, but then a single language is used for the majority of the comic. La Perdida by Jessica Abel is an excellent example of this. Abel uses a number of typographical and discourse strategies to help the reader understand when English is ­supposed to be considered English and when it is supposed to be considered Spanish (among other combinations). In her web comic Malaak: Angel of Peace, Joumana Medlej uses English as the main language, but she also employs some French and some Arabic, often supplying translations for readers who may need them. If comics were a language, then we would expect to see national varieties of comics on a par with national ­languages. Further, we would expect to see “standardized” comics representing the “best” comics language, such as “Standard Edited British Comics,” and a common “Comics Language of the Marketplace.” A test of this idea—whether comics are language—can be carried out by comparing two versions of the same comic or translations. Translation is the arduous and time-­consuming process of getting the meaning of one text put correctly and appropriately into another language: “translation is the recreation of a text in one language as another text in another language. A translated text . . . will show a high degree of similarity with its source text,” even though “changes are a normal part of the translation process” (Evans 320). Rarely are translations simple word-for-word substitutions; instead, the translator must consider the entirety of the text and make choices that render a similar message in the target language. When comics are translated into other languages, there may be a few changes made to the images, but the panels, the order of panels, and the “content” of the panels is normally stable. It is the linguistic code that changes. Consider Figures 2.2 and 2.3. Figure 2.2 is taken from the English-language version of Ronin by Frank Miller, and Figure 2.3 is taken from the Swedish-language translation. Both of these images are from the first page of the comic book. The dialogue from each of the excerpts is rendered in Table 2.2. Aside from the obvious differences in linguistic codes, careful readers will notice a number of differences between the original English and the translated Swedish: • In panel 1, the priest in English uses two hyphens to indicate a slight pause, but in Swedish, he uses three ellipses. That same choice can be seen in panel 3, after the priest says “It’s” in English and “Så” in Swedish.

WHY There Is No “Language of Comics”   27

Figure 2.2  Excerpt from page 1 of English-language Ronin, by Frank Miller.

Figure 2.3  Excerpt from page 1 of Swedish-language translation of Ronin, by Frank Miller.

28   Frank Bramlett Table 2.2  Comparison of English and Swedish versions of Ronin English dialogue

Swedish dialogue

Samurai:

I don’t mean to question you, my lord. But your enemies are many.

Jag menade inget illa, ers nåd. Men ni har många fiender!

Priest:

MM. Still, why should I fear—with such a valiant, freshly-trained samurai at my side?

MM. Fast vad har jag att frukta. . . med en tapper, vältränad samuraj vid min sida?

I live for the day when I may die in your service, my lord.

Jag lever för dagen jag får dö i er tjänst, ers nåd.

Priest:

Is that all you can think about, boy? It’s —

Är det allt du kan tänka på, pojke? Så . . .

Statue 1:

It’s only right, Lord Ozaki . . .

Så passande, ers Nåd Ozaki . . .

Statue 1:

. . . that words of honor and duty . . .

. . . att ord om ära och plikt . . .

Statue 2:

. . . should be the last from a good little samurai . . .

. . . är det sista en duktig liten samuraj yttrar . . .

Statue 3:

. . . before he dies.

. . . innan han dör!

Panel 1

Panel 2 Samurai: Panel 3

Panel 4

• In panel 1, the English samurai is bolded and italicized, but the Swedish samuraj is bolded, italicized, and enlarged. In most cases, when a word in English is bolded and italicized, the Swedish adds enlargement to the list of typographical features. The exception here is found in panel 3; when the priest says “all” in English but “allt” in Swedish, the “allt” is not italicized or bolded or enlarged. Likewise, there are two important similarities to notice in the speech balloons. In panel 1, the priest says “MM” in both English and Swedish. In panel 4, whenever the statues use ellipses in English, they also use ellipses in Swedish. Clearly, the translator did not think that English and Swedish were different enough to warrant changing those two elements. While much can be said about the linguistic translation of the conversation into Swedish, what is abundantly clear from the two images is that there has been no translation of nonlinguistic elements. That is to say, while the text has been translated, the visuals have not. Comics cannot be a language, because, if they were, then even the visuals would need to be translated. Perhaps the panels would have to look different; perhaps the gutters would need to shift to accommodate systematic differences. Instead, this is strong evidence that comics might be considered a visual semiotic system but not a language.

WHY There Is No “Language of Comics”   29 Another example of translation in comics is called for here. As Evans argues, translation must account for the linguistic aspect of the text, and the scholarship on translation focuses on a range of features: proper names, onomatopoeia, linguistically expressed humor (e.g., puns) (Evans 322). In translating Japanese comics to English, certain ­linguistic choices are made in order to add to the sense of “authenticity” in the translation (324). For example, the right-to-left reading format may be maintained; Japanese onomatopoeia may be maintained with footnotes; and Japanese honorifics may be maintained, keeping word endings such as -san, -kun, and -chan attached to the names, which indicate social relationships based on age and familiarity (322). Figure 2.4 is taken from Afro Samurai by Takashi Okazaki. It comes from one of the fight scenes between the central character, Afro, and an enemy samurai. In these two panels, Afro is rolling across the ground to escape from his enemy, while a figure sits against the wall in the background, uninvolved in the fight. The top panel should be read first, indicating that the action of rolling away moves from right to left. In the top panel, Afro is shown holding his sword (the curved object to the left of the rolling figure). There

Figure 2.4  Japanese and English sound effects in Afro Samurai, by Takashi Okazaki.

30   Frank Bramlett are two additional wavy “haywire” lines extending from Afro’s head toward the right edge of the panel. Those are actually the tail ends of the white headband that Afro is wearing (Bramlett, “Linguistic Codes” 185). The Japanese sound effects are written in katakana, which is often used for loanwords but is also used for sound effects. The sound is pronounced something like [goro]. The first character (the open square) is a syllable pronounced [go] and the ­second is [ro]. The second panel says “goro goro goro goro,” the repetition indicating an ongoing sound, like thunder or big rocks falling. In this instance, the sound effect in Japanese is not translated into English. Instead, the Japanese sound effect is ­maintained, perhaps for authenticity, and an English sound effect is added for the translation. The two linguistic codes exist in the same panel, side by side, resulting in more of a bilingual text than a translated text. To be clear, in Afro Samurai, dialogue in speech balloons is always in English, or, on occasion, a Japanese word is printed using the English alphabet for readability. As a whole, the English-language translation of Afro Samurai reads more like a Western comic: it reads from left to right, and the Japanese sound effects are maintained but English sound effects are found in the same panels rather than in footnotes. In ­contrast, Summit of the Gods by Yumemakura Baku and Jirô Taniguchi is an example of a manga whose right-to-left page order is maintained but whose Japanese language in the speech balloons have been translated into English. In the edition I have, the reader is advised on the “last” page of the book: “This book has been published in its original Japanese format reading from right to left.” In other words, the novice reader may have some difficulty reading from “back to front,” especially since the language in the speech balloons is read from left to right in English style.1

Language as Social Interaction Thus far, it has been shown that comics are not and cannot be a language because children do not acquire comics as a natural communicative system; comics do not exist as a national standard form of communication; comics do not vary systematically as regional dialectal or social dialectal forms. Finally, it is clear that when we say that “comics are translated from one language to another,” what we most often mean is that “the language in comics is translated from one language to another.” One additional argument that comics are not and cannot be a language is that language—whether spoken, signed, or written—is the primary system of communication humans use in social interaction. This section of the chapter catalogs several major theoretical frameworks regarding l­anguage as a vehicle of communication but also as a primary means people use to create and maintain relationships. These multiple lenses are presented in a very condensed fashion, but the concepts in the following subsections are the subjects of a vast amount of scholarship, so readers are encouraged to explore each of them in turn as they pursue their study of comics.

WHY There Is No “Language of Comics”   31

Politeness and Politeness Strategies Speakers use language to recognize a variety of relationships, particularly when those relationships are characterized by degrees of social distance and power dynamics. When trying to use politeness, “a speaker is attempting to create an implicated context . . . that matches the one assumed by the addressee” (Grundy 146). In other words, speakers who try to use appropriate politeness strategies are using “language choice to create a context intended to match the addressee’s notion of how he or she should be addressed” (145). In some cases, using politeness means using terms of address associated with a person’s title (medical doctor, judge in a court of law, university professor), while in other cases, it means joking around with friends by using ritualized insults. Speakers often adjust their use of politeness strategies depending on whether they believe they are participating in an encounter on equal footing with their interlocutor or they believe they are engaging in an unequal encounter. Normally, humans don’t produce comics to show politeness.

Speech Act Theory The central guiding principle of speech act theory is that while utterances communicate meaning, they also perform social action. Utterances, which are produced in specific social contexts by identifiable actors who have intentions, communicate three aspects of meaning. The first is the locution or the nonambiguous denotative meaning of the expression; the second is the illocution, or the performance of an act by uttering a sentence; and the third is the perlocution, or potential effect that the utterance might have (Grundy 51). In context, then, the speaker produces an utterance with the hope or expectation that an interlocutor will respond in a certain way. This is the heart of the idea of speech as social action. One example of a speech act may suffice here (from Grundy 55). A speaker may produce the locution “I’m going on holiday next week,” and the addressee understands the propositional content to be that the speaker will not be at work, may leave town, and may plan to have fun with family or friends. But the addressee must also decode the pragmatic meaning (illocution) and respond in some way (perlocution). If the addressee is an employee of the local newspaper, then the utterance may mean that newspaper delivery should be suspended. If, instead, the speaker is addressing her coworker, then the coworker may understand the meaning to be “You have to work extra next week because I won’t be here.” People engaged in conversation with one another produce utterances that have propositional content (semantic meaning) but also accomplish social action. Speakers can make requests, make apologies, make promises, or offer opinions about the state of political affairs on the city council. But comics do not serve these functions.

32   Frank Bramlett

Conversation The Internet has had a major impact on the types and amount of communication that people engage in. In the twenty-first century, many people write as much in a day as they speak, especially if their jobs require email as a primary communicative means between employees or between businesses. Nevertheless, speech is far faster than any kind of writing, and, as indicated above, when children acquire their home languages, they do so through speech or sign language, not writing. Conversation is a communicative system that depends on interaction, and when interlocutors hold conversations, they typically orient to a common system of turn-­taking and principles of turn construction. Conversations are locally and interactionally managed, meaning that the interlocutors make decisions in situ about who gets to speak and how long turns are (Liddicoat 80–109). While written messages are often planned in advance, conversations rarely are, instead being produced spontaneously and in the moment. Comics are not language because interlocutors do not communicate with each other using comics.

If Comics Aren’t Language, Then What Are They? In the science-fiction comic Trillium by Jeff Lemire, the main characters experience ­dramatic shifts in time and space, and when they eat a plant called trillium, they can communicate in different languages but also in different semiotic systems. Figure 2.5 portrays one of these characters producing visual information using what is normally construed as the physical speech mechanism (lungs, throat, tongue, mouth, and nose). What is so striking about this image is that if comics were a language, then Lemire’s ­fictional representation of speech through images would be a possible reality. Comics are not a language and cannot be a language, but if comics were a language, this image comes very close to depicting a potential communicative event between speakers of “comics.” As Bateman and Wildfeuer point out, linguistic modes (speech, sign language, and writing) are not the same as a semiotic mode, and they develop their framework in line with the sociosemiotic approach for multimodal analysis developed by Gunther Kress and his ­colleagues (Bateman and Wildfeuer 182). Their work examines comics precisely because “comics are a . . . combination of both iconic and conventionalized semiotic material” (190), concluding that “different semiotic modes will in general have their ­discourse semantics filled in differently with, at the very least, differing repertoires of discourse ­relations” (205). In other words, they argue that their theoretical framework of a discourse-semantic approach will allow them to analyze any medium or genre—­ including film—so long as they identify enough specific and distinctive characteristics of each category.

WHY There Is No “Language of Comics”   33

Figure 2.5  Nika speaks using a visual semiotic system in Trillium, by Jeff Lemire.

Comics are a visual semiotic system, relying on an incalculably rich set of visual and linguistic resources. In this respect, scholars such as Groensteen may take issue with the idea that the semiotic system consists of “a mixture of text and images,” arguing for the primacy of the visual (3). There is much to be said for Groensteen’s approach, because, if for no other reason, when comics are translated from one language to another, it is ­primarily the linguistic codes that are translated, not the visual codes, translations of manga notwithstanding. While Groensteen makes the claim that we should not try to base a theoretical framework of comics on the “signifying units” of comics, it is necessarily the case that visual elements in comics do in fact signify, and those meanings and relations must be accounted for. Scholars such as Bateman and his colleagues are beginning to draw on “discourse semantics” for ways of understanding how these “signifying units” function to create the comic as a whole. Further, other scholars continue to resist the notion that comics can be equated to a lexicogrammatical system. Grennan extends the idea of “discourse” or “context” and attempts to account for the process and outcome of the act of drawing—the act of depicting—including creators, narrative, and audiences. (It should be noted here that Grennan does indeed engage in significant “translation” of  visual elements of comics.) Other scholars combine principles of corpus ­linguistics and multimodality research to show systematicity in comic-book layouts

34   Frank Bramlett regarding ­panels, tiers, and pages. In particular, this kind of research demonstrates “how functionally-motivated communicative decisions may be related predictively to a restricted space of layout compositional strategies when those layout compositional strategies are described at an appropriate level of abstraction” (Veloso et al.). In other words, some scholars are indeed finding important patterns in the “signifying units” of comics. Serious considerations of language from a linguistic standpoint demonstrate that comics cannot be a language. To be sure, nearly all comics contain language, and the study of comics often addresses the language in comics. Further, there are similarities between comics and linguistic systems, but these similarities, as tempting as they are, do not hold up under scrutiny and remain, at best, similarities. The metaphor of “comics as a language” is powerful and very common, but comics studies must evolve away from this metaphor because it unnecessarily limits our vision of what comics are. While no definition is perfect, the idea of “comics as a language” is flawed. The attempts at defining ­comics will doubtless continue, and while linguistics can contribute to this effort, it should not be allowed to dominate the discussion of what comics may be. These theoretical approaches go a long way toward creating a robust understanding of comics, and there is much yet to be done. As a linguist, I am happy to see that more scholarship than ever before incorporates aspects of linguistic theory and analysis to strengthen our grasp of what comics are, but it is important not to rely on any one theoretical framework as an explanation for comics in toto because the risk of oversimplification is simply too great.

Note 1. I would like to express my gratitude to Andréa Gilroy, David Brothers, and Taylor Crouch for their advice on translating Japanese sound effects. Any errors are mine.

Works Cited Abel, Jessica. La Perdida. Pantheon, 2006. Baku, Yumemakura, and Jiro Taniguchi. The Summit of the Gods. English ed., translated by Kumar Sivasubramanian, Fanfare/Ponent Mon, 2009. Bateman, John, and Janina Wildfeuer. “A Multimodal Discourse Theory of Visual Narrative.” Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 74, 2014, pp. 180–208. Bramlett, Frank. “Comics and Linguistics.” The Routledge Companion to Comics, edited by Frank Bramlett et al., Routledge, 2016, pp. 380–389. Bramlett, Frank.“Linguistic Codes and Character Identity in Afro Samurai.” Linguistics and the Study of Comics, edited by Frank Bramlett, Palgrave, 2012, pp. 183–209. Bucholtz, Mary. “ ‘Why Be Normal?’: Language and Identity Practices in a Community of Nerd Girls.” Language in Society, vol. 28, 1999, pp. 203–223. Carter, Ronald, and Michael McCarthy. Cambridge Grammar of English. Cambridge UP, 2006. Daigle, Matt. That Deaf Guy. www.thatdeafguy.com. Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Expanded edition: print and computer. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1985.

WHY There Is No “Language of Comics”   35 Evans, Jonathan. “Comics and Translation.” The Routledge Companion to Comics, edited by Frank Bramlett et al., Routledge, 2016, pp. 319–327. Grennan, Simon. A Narrative Theory of Drawing. Palgrave, 2017. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nyugen, University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Grundy, Peter. Doing Pragmatics. 2nd ed., Hodder Arnold, 2000. Harrison, Claire. “Visual Social Semiotics: Understanding How Still Images Make Meaning.” Technical Communication, vol. 50, no. 1, 2003, pp. 46–60. Layman, John, and Rob Guillory. Chew. Image Comics, 2013–2015. Lemire, Jeff. Trillium. DC Comics, 2014. Liddicoat, Anthony. An Introduction to Conversation Analysis. Continuum, 2011. Lyovin, Anatole V. An Introduction to the Languages of the World. Oxford UP, 1997. Malmkjær, Kirsten. “Artificial Languages.” The Linguistics Encyclopedia, edited by Kirsten Malmkjær, Routledge, 1991, pp. 38–42. Malmkjær, Kirsten. “Bilingualism and Multilingualism.” The Linguistics Encyclopedia, edited by Kirsten Malmkjær, Routledge, 1991, pp. 57–65. Marcus, Gary, and Ernest Davis. “A.I. Is Harder Than You Think.” New York Times, 18 May 2018, p. A21. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Harper Perennial, 1994. Medlej, Joumana. Malaak: Angel of Peace. www.malaakonline.com. Meesters, Gert. “To and Fro Dutch Dutch: Diachronic Language Variation in Flemish Comics.” Linguistics and the Study of Comics, edited by Frank Bramlett, Palgrave, 2012, pp. 163–182. Miller, Frank. Ronin. 1983, 1984. DC Comics, 1987. Miller, Frank. Ronin. 1983. Swedish translation by Eddie Wingeståhl, DC Comics, 1992. Morrison, Grant, and Frank Quitely. All-Star Superman. DC Comics, 2011. Nist, John. A Structural History of English. St. Martin’s Press, 1966. Okazaki, Takashi. Afro Samurai, vol. 1. Translated by Greg Moore, Tor/Seven Seas, 2008. Tysell, Helen. “The English of the Comic Cartoons.” American Speech, vol. 10, 1935, pp. 43–55. Vaughan, Brian, and Fiona Staples. Saga. Image Comics, 2015–2017. Veloso, Francisco Osvanilson, et al. “Page Design as a Medium of Communication: A CorpusBased Analysis of Visual Style in Comics and Graphic Novels.” Language and Communication, forthcoming. “What Is UEA?” Universal Esperanto Association, www.uea.org. Wolfram, Walt, and Natalie Schilling-Estes. American English. 2nd ed., Blackwell, 2006.

Dictionaries Consulted Minjung’s English-Korean and Korean-English Dictionary. 5th ed., Minjungseorim, 1992. The Oxford Chinese Dictionary. Oxford UP, 2010. The Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford UP, www.oed.com. The University of Chicago Spanish Dictionary. 5th ed., Pocket Books, 2002.

chapter 3

I n Box Rethinking Text in the Digital Age Shiamin Kwa

They have rounded corners, like a cartouche, and their color corresponds to where they have been formatted: justified along the left side or along the right. Those on the left have a little tail that extends from the lower left corner to the left margin and signify “from”; those on the right have a little tail that extends from the lower right corner to the right margin and signify “to.” They are speech bubbles, or speech balloons, and they may have become ubiquitous through their rigorous refinement and codification in the evolution of comic books over the past century (Origins of the Kid), but they have now reached an even more highly recognizable and insistent pitch with their wholesale adoption into the vocabulary of messaging, or “chat.” Digital conversation is not only the dominant digital experience for many people but perhaps increasingly their dominant means of communication. Though these conversations take place all over the world and in a variety of national languages, the language of the speech balloon remains consistent. The comics speech balloon gradually evolved into its recognizable conventions, and these conventions were picked up and adapted for use in a variety of chatting platforms. The semiotic elegance and visual economy of the speech bubble make it the ideal vehicle for conveying the back and forth of conversation. “Time” is measured as a vertical scroll, as consecutive messages appear beneath each other; and “speaker” is measured on a horizontal axis. This convention stays consistent whether in the use of a personal text-­message exchange or for the sometime real-person, sometime bot-chat-simulacrum exchange of the customer-service website chat. Just as with comics, in which a whole group’s conversation can be recorded with no confusion about who is saying what and, most times at least, in what order, the scrolling chat window becomes a clean record of a conversation between two parties, with the additional helpful supplement of color-coding for attribution. There is no confusion about who is saying what. What is at stake, it turns out, is how to sort out the “who” that is doing the saying. As the messaging phenomenon has grown into its domination of our modes of conversation, our traditional understanding of communication as

Rethinking Text in the Digital Age   37 something occurring between persons fades in proportion. In an age of “conversational commerce,” where the use of “chat, messaging, or other natural language interfaces (i.e., voice) to interact with people, brands, or services and bots” (Messina) feels wholly normal, how does this phenomenon change the relationship between sender and receiver? This precise situation, in which “computer-driven bots will become more human-feeling, to the point where the user can’t detect the difference, and will interact with either human agent or computer bot in roughly the same interaction paradigm” (Messina), is the focus of the comics work of Emile Holmewood, or BloodBros. From a short comic about an ATM that slowly evolves to anticipate the needs and desires of its customers, to a comic about an author whose identity is atomized through the blurred identity of social-media avatars, pseudonyms, and book-jacket biographies, among other things, Holmewood wields a flat visual affect to interrogate themes of dissociation, social confusion, and an ambient anxiety regarding the inevitability of misunderstanding. This chapter analyzes his short comic, “Speech Bubble,” which situates the text-messaging speech bubble against the comics-language speech bubble. The interplay of these bubbles and the way they expose our assumptions about reading and making meaning emphasize how the act of reading is an ethical process. In Holmewood’s comic, a text conversation is conducted between a character whom we see, Trissa, and another whose person is unseen until the final panels, Melz, whose existence we know of only through cryptic, but plausibly legible, replies in a text-­message exchange. It is only on the last page that the reader discovers that Trissa has been receiving messages originating from the haphazard pecking of a group of homicidal chickens that may have murdered Melz. The comic highlights the comical, but also stunning, status of communication in this age, one in which adequation, in this case between a chicken’s random pecking and a teenager’s equally inscrutable text messages, can constitute a fatal error. Of course, Trissa is never aware that she is writing to a chicken. Holmewood presents a gallinaceous version of philosopher John Searle’s famous “Chinese Room” thought experiment, in which he imagines himself in a room from which he issues computer-generated strings of Chinese characters to fool someone outside the room into thinking that he understands Chinese. The conclusion he reaches is that human minds cannot be conceived of as computational systems. In the case of this reading of “Speech Bubble,” the more relevant philosophical questions that pertain have less to do with the way we characterize the “mind” responsible for the output than with the role of the interpreter of those missives. Searle later addressed this issue, writing: “The problem with the concept of “infor­ mation processing” is that information processing is typically in the mind of an observer. . . . The reason we cannot analyze consciousness in terms of information ­processing and symbolic manipulation is that consciousness is intrinsic to the biology of nervous systems, but information processing and symbol manipulation are observerrelative (Searle 34). The folly at the heart of “Speech Bubble” supplies the suggestion of the recuperative power of better preparedness on the part of the observer. Creating a heightened commitment to reading awareness, so to speak, might allow us a distancing remove from the phatic image and “message-intensification which has . . . assigned a

38   Shiamin Kwa ­ rimordial role to the techniques of visual and oral communication” (Virilio 14). The p comics-reading process serves as a heuristic, a way of learning through parsing and understanding narratives that identify our desire to make sense out of nonsense and, in the case of “Speech Bubble,” the inscrutable dialogue of a text conversation. This chapter focuses on this observer-relative state of information processing, because the experience of reading “Speech Bubble” most directly mirrors Trissa’s and, in turn, our contemporary reading experience. Holmewood asks us how we can and should be ­better readers than Trissa if we, too, have treated her responses to “Melz’s” texts as plausible interpretations of those texts. His comic endorses a scheme where the reader’s absolute power as interpreter and creator of meaning of a text is celebrated, while also emphasizing the equally crucial understanding of the importance of responsible reading. We need a reading that is careful, deliberate, and self-aware regarding our particular situatedness, a situatedness that reminds us of our constant vulnerability to sometimes ­getting things very, very wrong.

Reading the Speech Bubble This focus on the reader’s responsibility in the generation of meaning has been well argued in the definition of the comics form. Scott McCloud articulates this most persuasively in his canonical Understanding Comics: “Between such automatic electronic ­closure and the simple closure of everyday life—there lies a medium of communication and expression which uses closure like no other . . . a medium where the audience is a willing and conscious collaborator and closure is the agent of change, time and motion” (McCloud 65). The comics form, in McCloud’s opinion, is constructed in such a way that the reader is expected to do much of the work of drawing conclusions based on careful scrutiny of the information in panels and their arrangement, teasing meaning from a combination of these codes and, indeed, from the information that is left out. Closure, then, describes the reader’s active creation of meaning from seeing two images in sequence and deducing the meaning of how the former has led to the latter, akin to the “Kuleshov effect” in film (Barr). The visual codes, their placement on the page, their relationship to text, and the relationship between these variables are just some of the codes a reader is required to hold in suspension and give equal weight to as he or she reads. The extent to which the codes work together underscores the critical value of ­considering these complex functions with care and rigor, “identifying these codes and creating an understanding of how they signify” (Postema xvi). The form itself encourages a carefulness of pacing inscribed on the page: “One of the important effects of the ‘time’ of comics, then, is slowed-down reading and looking. Comics subvert what ­cartoonist Will Eisner, speaking disparagingly of film, names its “rhythm of acquisition [as a] direct challenge to static print” (Eisner 3). The diegetic horizon of each page, made up of what are essentially boxes of time, lends graphic narratives a representational

Rethinking Text in the Digital Age   39 mode capable of taking up complex political and historical issues with an explicit, ­formal degree of self-awareness” (Chute 9). Wolfgang Iser wrote: textual structures and structured acts of comprehension are . . . the two poles in the act of communication, whose success will depend on the degree in which the text establishes itself as a correlative in the reader’s consciousness. This “transfer” of text to reader is often regarded as being brought about solely by the text. Any successful transfer however—though initiated by the text—depends on the extent to which this text can activate the individual reader’s faculties of perceiving and processing. Although the text may well incorporate the social norms and values of its possible readers, its function is not merely to present such data, but, in fact, to use them in order to secure its uptake. In other words, it offers guidance as to what is to be ­produced, and therefore cannot itself be the product. (107)

While all aesthetic objects invite and deserve this kind of balanced and careful s­ crutiny based on a simultaneous consideration of multiple levels, comics is unique in its formal emphasis on the epistemic value of reading what is not there. McCloud ­concludes: “No other artform gives so much to its audience while asking so much from them as well . . . what happens between these panels is a kind of magic only ­comics can create” (92). Comics do indeed perform a kind of invisible magic between ­panels— showing as much with what is not there as with what is and, crucially, identifying the reader’s essential role in the process of creating meaning by treating it as what Barthes called a “writerly” text (5). How we tell that we are, in fact, c­ ommunicating with whom we think we are communicating—let alone what that interlocutor’s intentions are—is a problem that emphasizes the reader’s role in the construction of meaning when ­confronted with what is not there. How do we recognize that we are communicating with a human? How do we recognize that we are communicating with the person whose claims about their identity are largely based on what that person tells us? This chapter focuses on aspects of the reader’s assumptions that are deduced from the physical structure of the medium. Modes of reading with respect to text have, for the last century, at least, been less affected by the placement of text on a page, of arrangement and size, and of factors such as page turns. That is to say, a reader of a text-only printed book—short stories, novels, and the like, with exceptions for some poetry—thinks that he or she is reading the same “text” whether in enlarged print, whether in hardcover or paperback form, whether the margins are wider, or whether the text is printed on coarse or fine paper, accounting, of course, for certain shifts in reading experience. The comic, however, requires an alertness to form that uses shifts in arrangements, size, layer, and so on, in its making of meaning. Just as quotation marks in a text suggest to a reader that the sentences enclosed within them indicate a speaker, so, too, does the speech bubble, or balloon: “no balloons exist that do not refer, and cannot be attributed, to a known or supposed speaker. The relationship between the speaker and the enunciation that is uttered is so strong that one can speak

40   Shiamin Kwa of a sort of functional binomial. This bipolar structure is one of the fecund schemes that organizes the reading of comics” (Groensteen 75). Even when the speaker cannot be seen, however, as when “the character is invisible, situated off-screen, or hidden by an element that has been turned into a screen (a wall, vegetation, mist, etc.), out of view. . . . [t]he balloon is then indicative of his presence, and is his appendage, pointing toward him like an arrow, exert[ing] a truly signaling function” (Groensteen 77). This indication of person is the assumption by which Holmewood’s comic gains its momentum and its ironic force. Using the assumptions that attach to the speech ­bubble form, and by focusing our attention to the way even ­perspective is an act of imaginative collaboration by a reader in defiance of the flat surface of a page, “Speech Bubble” exposes assumptions as it gently (roughly? Isn’t that, too, a matter of perspective?) mocks them. When we reach the final page of Holmewood’s comic, we are able to perform an act of revision of the meaning of what we have just read, but we are left to wonder, is there anything we could have done to prevent misunderstanding from the beginning? As meaningless as the text messages appear now that their sender is identified, our initial response, like Trissa’s, is to make meaning from it. “Speech Bubble” thus brings the question of the reader’s responsibility, and the importance of the reader’s acts of ­interpretation and predictive acumen, to the foreground in a comics setting. This comic expertly delivers a punchline that comments on the graphic narrative form but also on larger philosophical questions in the study of language, mind, consciousness, and semantics. It does this by wielding those aspects of the form that are ­medium-­defining: the use of perspective, the suggestion of space and layer, and the faith in and desire for closure. Holmewood’s choice of the speech bubble is a canny one; with its stealth and precision, it mimics how quickly our ideas of speech and its relation to the speaker, or the speaker’s intentionality, have been challenged and recalibrated in this age. Our ability to read intentionality is changed by the increasingly common fact that exchanges occur without face-to-face communication, as described despairingly by Virilio: “the bulk of what I see is, in fact and in principle, no longer within my reach . . . the logistics of perception in fact destroy what earlier modes of representation preserved of this original” (7). In the absence of interpersonal interaction, what are the kinds of behaviors, as readers and writers, that we can adopt in order to achieve greater clarity of communication? Taking McCloud’s point that comics ask much from their readers, “Speech Bubble” suggests that if messaging systems are going to borrow the visual codes of the comics system, they had better also adopt the commitment to careful reading that comes with it. Readers must apply that readiness of interpretation, that willingness to weigh and deliberate between the potential meanings available, that we have learned to do from reading comics. That is to say, comics do not merely lend systems of conveying information; we borrow the means without borrowing the interpretive practice at our own peril. Comics language offers us a way to read c­ ritically and responsibly at the surface of a text that balances the physical form of a ­message with the content it conveys.

Rethinking Text in the Digital Age   41

Reading “Speech Bubble” Thierry Groensteen’s analysis of the speech bubble and, in particular, its physical in­sist­ ence, identifies it as a characteristic that contributes to our understanding of the comics structure: “When comics are in color the balloons are most often presented in white. . . . The whiteness of the balloon, which is that of the paper, attests to its indifference to the illusionist conventions that govern the image” (70). This identification of the word with the paper of the page sets it in a different “zone” from the image: it designates an opposition between the “textual zone” and “image zone.” Indeed, the image, to the degree that it relies on the perspectival code and practices the staging of the planes, creates the illusion of three-dimensionality. The text, on the other hand, frees itself from this mimetic transcendence, respecting and confirming the bi-dimensional materiality of the writing surface. When the panel is cut into two zones, one asserts a flatness that is betrayed by the other in the production of the illusion of depth. In this sense, it is legitimate to assert that the cohabitation of the drawing and the balloon creates a tension, since the three-dimensional space constructed by the cartoonist is contradicted by the presence within it of this piece that is added, a stranger to the representative illusion. (69)

Holmewood’s “Speech Bubble” builds its humor on such oppositions, while con­sist­ ently showing that distinctions between surface and depth are more complicated than binomial distinctions. Indeed, seemingly antipodal terms such as surface and depth are repeatedly challenged in Holmewood’s comic. In reading, whether printed words, text messages, or the graphic narrative, the conceptual notions of closeness and distance that we attach to those words are coded by visual markers that we interpret; this is a process that follows the construction of depth in the drawing, by the artful arrangement of straight and curved lines crowded together at the surface of the picture plane. The comics page reminds us of the systems of signs that we contend with on a daily basis, and the misunderstanding at the heart of “Speech Bubble” strikes in the reader a sense of w ­ onder that we are able to understand anything at all. The comic is titled “Speech Bubble,” but its four pages are nearly silent and devoid of speech, if speech is understood primarily as an utterance. There are sounds in the comic, but we are meant to understand them as barely audible—the “pop” of a bubblegum ­bubble bursting, the escaped noises from behind muffling headphones. And yet the comic is also extremely text-heavy. Indeed, letters and numbers are all over the page, to the extent that they sometimes block other letters from being read. Sometimes the ­letters are read for meaning, in the sense that they form words; sometimes they are read for meaning, in the sense that they form a uniform resource locator, also known as a Web address, that identifies a location on a computer network and how it can be retrieved. There are, ­however, bubbles all over each page. A few of them are pink bubbles formed by chewing gum, and one is the recent explosion of a bubble—little lines

42   Shiamin Kwa e­manating around the ­onomatopoetic “POP” of the chewing gum—but the most ­prominent bubbles are the obstinately contrarian speech bubbles, which make claims to speech while remaining inaudible. This is the speech bubble as adopted for text ­messaging on the mobile device, a borrowing that simultaneously copies and defies the logic of conventional comics l­ anguage. Holmewood takes the speech bubble appropriation and returns it to its source, the graphic narrative, making a comedy that is intrinsic to the form: with visual puns like bubbles that don’t speak or vertical bars that are not gutters, the comic proliferates with a hyperactive commentary that shows how much what we accept as our everyday experience of reality is, in fact, based on an everyday experience, and acceptance, of illusion. Holmewood’s comics style presents the flat, ironic style that he displays with limpid precision as a graphic artist, animator, and illustrator. His panels actively challenge the viewer to perceive them at the level of their materiality, understanding them in a way that reduces both word and drawing to informational codes of equivalent signs. As Groensteen notes: “If the image was understood, not in its reference but in its strict materiality, as a group of lines or signs inscribed on a support plane, the solution to ­continuity between the drawing and the balloon would reflect on nothing more than on the nature of signs (analogic here, there digital) and there would be no place to imply that such signs conceal or recover any others” (70). The images are constructed of groups of lines and signs within panels that mirror the shapes of the panels themselves. Thus, the panel at the top of the page shows the conversation of the smartphone screen directly above four small panels arranged in the shape of a square of approximately the same size (Figure 3.1), suggesting how units of action—expanded cheek, expanding bubble—are like units of conversation. This grammar of the square deliberately causes a sense of visual confusion with the bottom panel on the page, which stretches across the width of the page but contains within it another “window” defined by the open doors of the subway and outlined at the top and side “margins” by the same transparent white of the comics page and, as it happens, the comics gutters. The viewer may be able to quickly gloss this as a subway with doors open, but the process required to reach that gloss is complex and suggests a series of layers of depth implied by Trissa’s head and body, the train platform, the train carriage, the space revealed by the open door, the visible closed doors on the opposite side of the carriage, and the “audible” sound of the chewing gum that we have seen in the previous panel now no longer visible either to us or to anyone who faces Trissa. Instead, it is a “pop” that we “hear” through reading. This technique of presenting gutters within the panel is repeated on page 2 of the comic (Figure 3.2) with the image that Melz texts to Trissa of a chicken; it, too, is framed with a thin white gutter around it, and yet the play on gutters as a visually legible and therefore almost invisible code is investigated again with the panel at the bottom of the page. The yellow vertical pole of the subway line, introduced at the bottom of page 1 and then again next to the head of the man with the chicken hat, reappears at the bottom panel of the second page exactly aligned in the center of the panel so that its dimensions precisely continue the line of the gutter that separates the previous three rows of panels on the page. In practice, nothing changes about the way we read this bottom panel as

Rethinking Text in the Digital Age   43

Figure 3.1  BloodBros, “Speech Bubble,” page 1. Originally published in Kus! (Latvia: Kuš Komiksi, 2017), page 91. Image courtesy of Emile Holmewood. © Emile Holmewood.

44   Shiamin Kwa

Figure 3.2  BloodBros, “Speech Bubble,” page 2. Originally published in Kus! (Latvia: Kuš Komiksi, 2017), page 92. Image courtesy of Emile Holmewood. © Emile Holmewood.

Rethinking Text in the Digital Age   45 either two panels showing Trissa on the left and the man sitting opposite her on the right or one single panel showing the two simultaneously viewed from the side. The only potential difference would be a perceptual shift in our understanding of the direction in which the pink-shirted commuter is facing. We assume that this person is not actually standing directly between the two seated people, because we have previously seen an unobstructed view of the man with the chicken hat at the top of the page. The yellow ­vertical “gutter,” then, implies a depth that pushes the two seated figures to the “front,” while the pole on the left, the standing figure, and the pole on the right represent items that stretch further and deeper into the space of the train car. We become better able to construe where those poles might be placed when we reach the top of page 3 and see each of these figures from the other’s perspective (Figure 3.3) and note whether the pole appears on their left or right. None of this is obvious from the picture itself; in fact, it is only the active work of the viewer that makes spatial sense of the images shown. And it is not just the similarity of internal boundaries (the pole in the subway) to extradiegetic boundaries (the white gutters that separate panels) that Holmewood plays with. He shows how subtly the relationship between panels can be expressed through the slightest manipulations. In the two center pages of the four-page comic, three virtually identical panels show the young man who sits across from Trissa. The panel at the top of page 2 and the panel at the top of page 3 sit directly next to each other, like the “find the differences” pictures in the pages of a child’s activity book. The second panel does not follow sequentially from the first: in fact, seven panels intervene (more if we start counting panels within those panels). Yet the placement of the panels is unavoidable. The reader notes the slight changes in the impassive faces and Orphan Annie empty circles of these faces; the pursing of the lips, the faint indentations of dimples, Trissa’s reaction registered by the diagonal hatch lines under each eye. These subtle shifts are telling. The third version of “chicken hat” is a photograph that Trissa has secretly taken of the man seated across from her. More of his body is cropped out of the panel, the whole panel appears smaller, and the color contrast is just slightly more faded. Yet, because of the speech bubble that hovers above this green-outlined panel, the reader immediately identifies it as a photograph rather than a continued action in Trissa’s diegetic reality. The ease with which the reader identifies this as a photograph in the virtual world of the text message is hardly worth noting. Hardly noticeable, too, is the visual similarity between the white cloud in the background of the photograph of a chicken sent from Melz’s phone (Figure 3.2), to the thought bubble coming from Trissa’s head that says “why’s she not replying?!” (Figure 3.3). Trissa’s thought bubble is also separate from the diegesis of “Speech Bubble” and transparently white, like the page it is printed on; it occurs not at the level of the ­conversation taking place on the phone screen but on some other plane. For us, it is, as Groensteen would put it, in the “zone of opacity within the ‘transparent plane’ ” (70) of the comics panel. And yet the thought cloud of that opaque zone and the “actual” photographed cloud of the text message are visually equivalent. Such things remain there, just as much at the surface of each panel as the objects on which the reader chooses to train his or her focus.

46   Shiamin Kwa

Figure 3.3  BloodBros, “Speech Bubble,” page 3. Originally published in Kus! (Latvia: Kuš Komiksi, 2017), page 93. Image courtesy of Emile Holmewood. © Emile Holmewood.

Rethinking Text in the Digital Age   47 What these kinds of visual echoes do, especially when they occur in different spatial and narrative contexts, is highlight this reading complexity, as well as our aptitude for reading complex webs of signs. They also are there, of course, when we make decisions about the points that we think are important, the points around which we form meaning. The illusions and assignations of depth and the attention to some things in favor of others all point to conventions applied by the reader. The comics reader, just like the reader of chat messages, skims across the surface of the page not because of inattention or lack of care but because most of the time, his or her assumptions with reading are correct, and even if those initial assumptions are incorrect, the reader can almost instantaneously revise his or her reading. Add to these the many times words are misspelled, autocorrected, or abbreviated with regularly used acronyms, and the willingness to read quickly and the willingness to accept errors that may require revision are correspondingly heightened. Thus it is that the most complex visual moments in “Speech Bubble” take place within the actual speech bubbles of Trissa and Melz’s text conversation, which make up a large proportion of these panels. The reader’s eventual realization that Trissa has been having a one-sided conversation may come before Trissa comes to that conclusion, assuming that she ever does, but this reader, at least, wonders if even that has not been rather a bit late.

On Reading and Being Close Trissa’s mouth moves, but words don’t ever come out of it. Even when bubbles literally do come out of it, words never do, unless we count that paradoxically wordless “pop” sound that is translated to an onomatopoetic word on the comic page. Many words do indeed come from the direction of Trissa, though, and she is their source as far as we can guess—the arrows tell us so, anyway. But the words that come out in speech bubbles are unheard; this, in itself, is not surprising given the conventions of the text conversation. What might be surprising is that they are unlikely to have been seen by Melz at all. The first and only text from Melz that we see on page 1 reads, “miamgmt,” which Trissa immediately corrects: “nah its [sic] yeezy” (Figure 3.1). The lack of capitalization, the idiomatic “nah,” and the use of “its” instead of “it’s” are all the kinds of conventions that we have learned to read “through” with text (and other communications in general) as a shorthand. This is also true of the perpetual acronyms and abbreviations. In Melz’s text, then, we readily accept the names of potential entertainers—is Melz asking whether it is M.I.A. or the band MGMT? The reader only too readily accepts Melz’s “reply” as inconsequential and not of any concern and begins to read the seven seemingly meaningless letters bundled together as a possibly meaning-making response to Trissa. This is made significantly easier when considering the three messages that Trissa has sent prior to Melz’s reply. The first is equally illegible as a series of letters, numbers, and punctuation. Yet even though we cannot “read” it, we know that we are not supposed to. We as readers recognize the physical likeness of a URL or Web address to a music-streaming service.

48   Shiamin Kwa We know that reading those letters is not what Melz is supposed to do; she simply has to touch that link to activate a series of steps on her own phone that will open a link to a track. Text messages are more than rebuslike; sometimes they require us to read acronyms (“OMG”), and sometimes they require us to read icons, or emojis, rebuslike, as with the shape of a heart instead of the word “love” (Figure 3.1) or a blank staring face with a flat line for a mouth to perform one’s affectless response. The problem with the way acronyms have asserted themselves into our vocabularies and our reading competencies is hardly just that they have made us all too comfortable with reading, saying, and writing down nonsensical things and applying a meaning to them. It is also the case that we now find ourselves willing to read meaning into ­mistakes, because we are now also used to discovering neologisms and new acronyms and shorthand. All reading can be thought of as a form of problem solving, but the acronym that presents itself as a riddle to be solved is a problem of a very special kind. Consider this scene from part 4, chapter 13, of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. It is a crucial moment of understanding between Levin and Kitty. Kitty has previously humiliated Levin by rejecting his proposal of marriage, but he now senses the possibility of a shift in her feeling. He tentatively takes up a piece of chalk at the table where she sits and writes on its green cloth cover: “There,” he said, and wrote the following letters,—W, y, a: i, c, n, b; d, y, m, t, o, n? These letters stood for: When you answered: it can not be; did you mean then, or never? It was quite unlikely that she would be able to make out this complicated sentence; but he looked at her with an expression as if his life depended on her understanding what those letters meant. She glanced seriously at him and then, leaning her puckered forehead on her hand, began reading. Occasionally she looked up at him, her look asking him: “Is it what I think?” “I have understood,” she said with a blush. (362)

The sentences composed of first letters become longer and more complex, but each time, they are understood completely, interrupted only by exchanged looks and brief verbal assurances of “I understand.” The two young people reconcile and express their mutual love, the man proposes, and the woman accepts; this all happens through the abbreviated language of the acronym. While the words are abbreviated to their first ­letters, this has the effect of making the process of understanding the totality of what they represent—the series of words that compose a sentence—a laborious and nearly impossible task. The acronym in Anna Karenina is thus a notative system that works by the logic of the metonym, where the part, in this case the first letter, represents the whole. The fact that meaning depends on the deep understanding of the recipient in order to ensure that the intended message is received thus suggests metonyms of all kinds, where the intended meaning lies in an arrangement of understanding between two people. This moment between Kitty and Levin grazes aspects of reading that are at odds with the reading experience of the reader of Tolstoy’s book: readers who hold the book

Rethinking Text in the Digital Age   49 Anna Karenina in their hands and read that scene alone and in silence do not have Leo Tolstoy sitting across from them, eagerly waiting to acknowledge their understanding. Kitty and Levin are reading these first letters of each word together, so that the scene can be read as somehow testifying “to a fantasy of literature in which a text might somehow overcome the distances between individuals. By presenting reading as a means of fostering intimacy while maintaining the privacy of personal response, scenes of ­people reading together offer insights into the nature of collective experience and the way that we might turn to literature to help us negotiate the precariousness of human relations” (McDowell 351). How similar, then, are these two experiences that we call reading: the solitary reader alone with the complete text of Anna Karenina in his or her hands and Kitty sitting directly across the table from someone composing the text in real time directly on a table before, and for, her eyes alone? And where does this air of mutual understanding actually reside? It is possible, for example, that the writer and the reader are simply experiencing a coincidence of meaning where attributed meaning and the received meaning are mutually satisfying. These questions of reading, in real time, and alone or accompanied, underscore the transactional nature of the processes that adhere to reading. How is it that Kitty can read “When you answered” for “W y a”? How much of her reading ability is dependent on the readability of Levin’s text, and how much is dependent on her own skills of interpretation? Vladimir Nabokov, in his lectures on Russian literature, dismisses the young lovers’ meeting of the minds: “All this is a little far fetched. Although, no doubt, love may work wonders and bridge the abyss between minds and present cases of tender telepathy—still such detailed thought-reading, even in Russian, is not quite convincing” (163). And yet the fact that we want to be convinced, and that we readily accept that the read words were the intended words based simply on a nod of affirmation, tells us something about what we fervently want when we look at something. Reading is treated as a transparent process, such that two people looking at the same words would understand and thus experience them in the same way. The scene between Kitty and Levin has its obverse in a belief in “being there” created by shared reading. John Keats contrived to lessen the distance between himself and his brother in America by suggesting that they read a passage from Shakespeare at the same time on the same day so that they might “be as near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room” (Keats 176; also in Paterson 126; and in McDowell 351). The act of reading, even between two who are divided by the Atlantic Ocean, can make two separated bodies feel as if they are in the same room. So from Kitty and Levin, we see the shared understanding acquired in the same room; from Keats and his brother, we imagine a sense of a shared room through a belief in a shared understanding. “Speech Bubble” asks us a different question: what do we do when the two inter­ locutors are neither there in the same space nor, apparently, capable of fully understanding each other? At the top of page 2, Trissa gets a new text response: “hsyiaw j syk” (Figure 3.2). The clustering of consonants and the number of letters seem daunting, but Trissa’s response broadcasts a willingness to read the text as Kitty might have, with each

50   Shiamin Kwa letter signifying a word. Just as “idk” signifies “I don’t know” and “ttyl” signifies “talk to you later,” “hsyiaw” must mean something, too. Trissa interprets it as “haven’t seen you in a while?!” and the reader tries to fill in the rest: “just so you know.” Similarly, Trissa’s response of “harsh bae!” to the next message “idgaf ” helps us read Melz’s text. None of Melz’s responses presents any kind of visible sentence structure, and yet the responses seem plausible. Can we really blame her for not having very much to say in response to Trissa’s solipsisms anyway? Again, we are returned to Searle’s “Chinese Room” thought problem. While Searle focuses almost exclusively on the computing brain inside the “Chinese Room,” little is said about the (Chinese-reading) person outside receiving these missives and declaring them to be correct Chinese. What Trissa’s hermeneutical readings of Melz’s texts show is the extent to which a reader who plans and expects to be reading something will work to find these texts understandable. And so it is that Trissa, completing an act of closure in more ways than one, reads meaning into the empty space that is Melz’s place in their chat exchange: she reads the lack of communication as an act that deserves a “blocking.” Again, Holmewood shows how layers of surface are rendered for the eye to process. In the final panel of the third page (Figure 3.3), we see Trissa’s thumb pressing “block” on a window that obscures the text conversation beneath it, some of which is also blocked by the (unseen by Trissa and anyone within the comic) borders of the panel frame. Between the layer of the comics frames and that of the depicted phone screen is the untethered onomatopoetic “hmmf,” also surrounded by emanata the way “POP” had been in the earlier panel, also occupying an aural space diegetically and a physical space extradiegetically. It is only on the final page (Figure 3.4) that the reader sees things from Melz’s point of view, if only she were still alive to have one. Instead, the first panel shows what would have been Melz’s view of that text conversation we have been reading along with Trissa, as it appears behind the cracked screen of Melz’s cell phone. The screen is blue because its glass reflects the same blue sky that we have seen in the windows of previous panels and the blues that we see now from behind the bodies of chickens calmly pecking away at the ground, and the phone screen, that lie in front of them. And of course, there is the paler blue of the outstretched arm, which we reluctantly identify as Melz’s; quite blue now, actually, the hand is curled stiffly so that it happens to point upward and to the left at the panel above. Occluded slightly by the margin of the panel, the sign is still legible: “Danger! Do not feed the chickens!” We can read it and understand its significance in the one-sided drama that has transpired. We can also interpret this: it turns out that the drama between the girls, and the drama of the comic “Speech Bubble,” is that it follows from the mistake of not reading signs. The comic begins with a Web address, a link to the song that Trissa listens to. But before that panel, there was the title panel, which playfully gives the details such as the title and the author on the screen of a smartphone, complete with autocorrecting ­suggestions. The system where letters are now only as likely to be words as they are to be other kinds of codes such as Web addresses and acronymic sentences is what Lydia Liu describes as a state of having become a “shared code of inscription” (31) of a postphonetic world. In “Speech Bubble,” we get a glimpse of how much the conversations that we

Rethinking Text in the Digital Age   51

Figure 3.4  BloodBros, “Speech Bubble,” page 4. Originally published in Kus! (Latvia: Kuš Komiksi, 2017), page 94. Image courtesy of Emile Holmewood. © Emile Holmewood.

52   Shiamin Kwa may believe are mutually sustained and constructed may be just symptoms of our own, to be generous, naivety or, to be slightly less generous, narcissism. The point Holmewood might be making is less about Trissa’s consistent errors in reading; she is, after all, fully committed to drawing meaning from the messages she receives. Things took their downturn before “Speech Bubble” even began. If we want to point blame anywhere, it should be at the one who failed to read the signs entirely, and quite literally. We stumble through signs real and imagined all the time, and we treat them as if they contain meaning for us. We ignore them at our peril, because the rest, as they say, is silence.

Works Cited Barr, Charles. “Hitchcock and Early Filmmakers.” A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, edited by Thomas Leitch and Leland Poague, Blackwell, 2012, pp. 48–66. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Hill and Wang, 1974. Chute, Hillary L. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. Columbia UP, 2010. Eisner, Will. Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative. New York: Norton, 2008. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen, UP of Mississippi, 2009. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Johns Hopkins UP, 1980. Keats, John. Letters of John Keats. Edited by Robert Gittings, Oxford UP, 1970. Liu, Lydia  H. The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious. U of Chicago P, 2011. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Harper Collins, 1993. McDowell, S. “Reading Together.” Essays in Criticism, vol. 64, no. 4, 2014, pp. 351–372. Messina, Chris. “2016 Will Be the Year of Conversational Commerce.” Chris Messina, 19 Jan. 2016, https://medium.com/chris-messina/2016-will-be-the-year-of-conversationalcommerce-1586e85e3991#.z5j7cwz2z. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Russian Literature. 1st ed., Mariner, 2002. Origins of the Kid: Contemporary Illustrations. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA04/wood/ykid/ illustrated.htm. Paterson, Alexandra. “ ‘Delighted Stares’: Keats’s Mediated Reading.” Pockets of Change: Adaptation and Cultural Transition, edited by Jane Stadler et al., Lexington, 2011, pp. 123–133. Postema, Barbara. Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments. RIT, 2013. Searle, John R. Consciousness and Language. Cambridge UP, 2002. Tolstoy, Leo Nikolayevich. Anna Karenina. W. W. Norton, 1995. Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine. Translated by Julie Rose, later printing ed., Indiana UP, 1994.

chapter 4

W h at El se Is a Comic? Between Bayeux and Beano Evan Thomas

Consider the following framework to be used for a comic strip:

Normally, this framework would be filled with four images and possibly some words or other symbols. Many scholars who study comics are interested in the ways people can make meaning of these frames, images, and words. As an anglophone comics reader, I have been trained to read this in a Z pattern, which is to say that I infer narrative from such a structure by treating the upper-left panel as first in a sequence, followed by the upper-right, lower-left, and lastly lower-right. 1

2

3

4

Non-anglophonic cultures (e.g., Japanese) have other rules for making meaning of such a framework: different senses of order, different senses of importance, and so on. The global perspective has revealed that the culturally contextual processes which imbue four panels with meaning are specific and situated, which is to say that the framework of comics is not self-apparent or universal. The field of comics has come to understand the “strip,” by which I mean the deliberate sequencing of images, to be a matter of convention. But what about the panels themselves? Are panels essential, as elemental as the geometry of rectangles, or are they also a convention akin to the strip? Why is it that the

54   Evan Thomas frames themselves are treated as natural, elemental, and ideologically invisible? Even in the most celebrated works of comics culture, in moments of intercultural comparison, this panel-strip convention escapes notice. Consider the sequence in Understanding Comics in which Scott McCloud discusses a pre-Columbian image text, the Codex Zuche-Nuttall: at the conclusion of his explication, McCloud interpolates a set of panel-like divisions into the image (10–19; see Figure 4.1). This quiet, understated alteration to the text represents the climax of McCloud’s argument that premodern image texts are compatible with contemporary comics. But that argument relies on the tacit acceptance that a comic proper has panels in a strip. The panel and strip make the image legible as a comic. Why is this panelstrip convention the link between contemporary comics and their deep past? The black frame often escapes notice because comics are often compared synchronically—which is to say, across the world from the same time—but not diachronically, which would compare comics throughout time. A provisional comparison to sequential images from the deep past reveals that other cultures have not used black frames to

Figure 4.1  From Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics, 1993.

What Else Is a Comic? Between Bayeux and Beano   55 distinguish specific narrative moments: the Bayeaux Tapestry has no frames, and ­neither does Trajan’s Column. The Bayeaux Tapestry and Trajan’s Column, furthermore, are from the same Latin-based European cultures as those that would later ­generate Asterix or Heavy Metal. Somewhere between 1066 and 1966, something ­happened to make the black frame a completely obvious and overlooked aspect of sequential images. Something happened in the deep past of comics, at the edges of what has been identified as a comic. Comics studies, as a field, is moving toward comparing comics across cultures, but the field still rarely makes comparisons across time. Fortunately, that current inclination for integration should cut the Gordian knot that has tied up comics history: namely, nationalist history. David Kunzle identifies a fissure in comics history between an “arch-American” claim on the origins of comics and the rival claim of Europeans who, in Kunzle’s view, “knew better” (Father x). The “Americanist” view emphasizes the importance of comics in cheap print circulation, such as Richard F. Outcault’s Yellow Kid. This is the view championed by Coulton Waugh in The Comics; it is irreconcilable with the view advanced by Ernst Gombrich in Art, Perception, and Reality. In this rival view, which I will identify as “Swiss,” comics properly began with the loose cartooning artist Rodolphe Töpffer in the 1830s. Töpffer’s claim to fame can sometimes be diminished by comparison to William Hogarth, who was creating images in narrative sequence prior to Töpffer. Consider this the “English” view. “English” scholars treat Hogarth as a serious challenger to Töpffer, whereas others treat pre-1800 artists as imperfect predecessors who were simply grasping at an art yet to come. Fortunately, conflicts generated by the comparative intercultural approach to comics may be resolved by a comparative historical approach to comics. Past attempts to de-nationalize comics—which is to say, attempts to ameliorate the American, Swiss, and English approaches—have been rejected as de-historicizing ­comics. For example, Pierre Couperie has argued that if comics can be defined as “a  story . . . constituted by handmade images from one or several artists . . . fixed images . . . multiple (contrary to the cartoon), and juxtaposed (in difference from illustration and engraved novels . . .),” then “this definition applies equally well to Trajan’s Column and the Bayeux tapestry” (Couperie 11, qtd. in Groensteen “The System of Comics” 14). If the Bayeaux Tapestry, Trajan’s Column, or even cave paintings, may be considered comics, then it might seem that comics can spring fully formed out of any mind at any time and in any place. This is treated, as in Couperie, as beyond the pale. As Hannah Miodrag has characterized this claim, “Some critics go so far as to include such artifacts as the Bayeux Tapestry and cave paintings under the banner of comics,” but “Despite efforts to argue otherwise, there is simply no traceable lineage from today’s Beano back to medieval stained glass windows” (3). Indeed, a “traceable lineage” of ­comics leading up to Beano should help reveal important formative factors that brought us to comics as we recognize them today. And furthermore, the attempts by Couperie and Miodrag to rule out early ancestors should provoke more than a summary conclusion. What precisely is the point of departure between Bayeux and Beano? The search for this fulcrum moment might be able to reconcile the American, Swiss, and global views on the origins of comics.

56   Evan Thomas The halfway point between Bayeux and Beano, and the best time to investigate the connection, is the mid-fifteenth century, the age in which Johannes Gutenberg stands at the earliest terminus in a continuous tradition of movable type. This is roughly the period in which Kunzle identified “book-blocks,” such as the Biblia Pauperum, as early predecessors to comics (The History 11). While Kunzle appears to be unique in his ­appreciation of early print comics, there is a broader archive of post-letterpress prints that merit further investigation. These prints have come to public awareness in the past twenty years thanks to the groundbreaking art-historical research of Antony Griffiths, Sheila O’Connell, and Malcolm Jones. The prints from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England give witness to, but do not necessarily prove, something that could be a “traceable lineage” of comics between the book-block Biblia Pauperum and Hogarth’s prints. Every one of these examples uses the panel-strip convention, albeit in different articulations. The single most extensive source for early modern panel strips in the English ­language is The Triumphs of Gods revenge against the Crying and Execrable Sinne of Murther (Wing R1308A; ESTC R22320; see Figure 4.2). This 1653 text includes twenty-nine illustrations that use the panel-strip convention in left-to-right, top-to-bottom reading order. These strips typically depict true-crime stories, though all of them end in godly vengeance against the sinful persons. An early but definitive example of panel strips from the early modern press is the 1590 publication A true discourse. Declaring the damnable life and death of one Stubbe Peeter (Pollard and Redgrave 23375; see Figure 4.3). Stubbe Peeter unmistakably uses the panelstrip convention to depict the life and death of a German werewolf. Over eight panels, a man turns into a wolf, attacks another man, is hunted and captured, is tried, and then is tortured and mutilated along with his daughter. All of this is depicted in two strips of four frames each, read in the Z pattern described earlier. Thus, it’s highly suggestive of contemporary comics. The panel-strip convention is also visible in another print that relies on a collage of sources, Divine examples of God’s Severe Judgments upon Sabbath-Breakers (ESTC R222971; see Figure 4.4). The straightforward set of panels depicts four scenes in which people suffer death for violating the sabbath, in the form of stoning, drowning, and two fires. This brief inventory is intended to be inculpatory, not exculpatory: these examples of early modern English prints are suggestive that there is yet more to be investigated between Beano and the Bayeaux Tapestry. But the particular circumstances of their ­creation suggest that the early period of print is not accidentally but substantially important for understanding the origins of the panel-strip convention. Namely, the emergence of print brought about a higher degree of coordination among publishers, craftsmen, and divergent printing processes. That locus of coordination is, in effect, the emergent genre of sequential images. At minimum, this emergent print genre was commonly interwoven with other publi­ cations, indicating that publishers were willing to commit some capital to gamble on this new genre. Archivists with the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) note that Severe Judgments is based on a play by Henry Burton, A divine tragedie lately acted, as well as

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Figure 4.2  The Triumphs of Gods revenge against the Crying and Execrable Sinne of Murther, 1653.

Thomas Beard’s The theatre of Gods judgements and Lewis Bayly’s The practise of pietie. This set of sources hints at the speculative investment required to bring together the labor and capital required to produce a comic in the early modern period. Like many other sequential images from the early modern period, Stubbe Peeter happens to have been bound together with a larger book that relates the narrative alphabetically. The print that contains the sequential image is “tipped in,” which means that before the entire octavo was bound, the leaves from the letterpress were combined with a leaf that was pressed separately. This indicates at least three things. First, the alphabetical text and the narrative image of Stubbe Peeter must have been, by physical necessity, ­produced at separate times, with a separate arrangement of printing materials, and ­possibly by separate persons. Second, both the alphabetical text and the narrative image share a common conceit, probably composed around the same time based on an earlier folk tale. Third, the alphabetical text and the narrative image serve to mutually reinforce

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Figure 4.3  A true discourse. Declaring the damnable life and death of one Stubbe Peeter, 1590.

each other: the panel-strip convention might not have been immediately legible to a contemporary audience without the accompanying text to make it legible. In sum, then, a tipped-in sequential image reveals a broad-based collaboration among publishers, printers, and readers to generate an image legible as narrative. If prints like Severe Judgments and Stubbe Peeter reveal a degree of coordination among print craftsmen, Triumphs is exceedingly deliberate. One of the most unique qualities of Triumphs is that each illustration is printed on the same leaf as the alphabetical text. The illustrations are from a copperplate and leave behind the characteristic ­rectilinear smudge around the edges. It would follow, then, that leaves containing the images were produced on an intaglio press and then transferred to a letterpress, where the same leaves were impressed a second time with the alphabetical text of Triumphs. This is obviously a process more complex than a single monk doodling in the margins of a manuscript: it is one in which the panel-strip convention must have been a shared vision understood by every agent in the printing circuit. Indeed, a mass medium such as print changes the very nature of what is marginal. An idiosyncratic mark made by a scribe is unique to one book; it does not proliferate itself. An idiosyncratic mark on the printing press is evinced in hundreds of books. Even idiosyncrasies become standardized. One of the effects of the post-Gutenberg printing tradition was standardizing graphical idiosyncrasies with the epiphenomenon of fixity. Elizabeth Eisenstein championed the idea, as in The Printing Revolution, that the press induced a degree of fixity upon visual culture, initially as a way of producing standardized star charts for widespread observational collaboration, later as a source of comparison among biologists (Acheson 127–144). Pattern books such as A schole-house, for the needle

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Figure 4.4  Divine examples of God’s Severe Judgments upon Sabbath-Breakers, 1671.

(Pollard and Redgrave 21826.4) provided increased regularity and standardization as a direct result of print; the printed illustration became a centralized, organizing agent coordinating attention from the filigree on a hem to the perigee of the heavens. So the evolution of the black frame around an image might have been an option for printers to highlight images; after that, a black frame around an image was an inevitability. So the basic unit of the panel, and subsequently the strip, may have been heightened and accentuated by the characteristics of copperplate engraving. The same “smudge” left around the intaglio images of Triumphs provides insight into the origins of the black frame, the core concept undergirding the panel-strip convention. One of the main differences between book-blocks such as the Biblia Pauperum and prints such as Severe Judgments is that the former had been printed from woodblocks, the latter from copperplate intaglio. Printed on the letterpress, images were impressed from a wooden block whose inked surface would have been raised above the nonprinted

60   Evan Thomas surface. Later, and in contrast with the letterpress process, images were impressed from an engraving on a plate of copper. Copperplate images were pressed separately on an intaglio press with the inked surface below the nonprinted surface. Under the high ­pressure of intaglio printing, the plate reflexes somewhat, and some ink tends to ­accumulate on the edges, leaving a characteristic outline of the plate around the image. Indeed, one of the easiest methods for discerning copperplate images from fine woodcuts is to look for such a black frame surrounding the image, which would indicate the intaglio press. Seen from this perspective, the development of the black frame is the ­natural evolution of a technological “bug” into a “feature.” The more challenging issue in the deep history of comics is to provide a method for understanding how an accident of print, a black frame with no more inherent meaning than a smudge, might have been transformed into a panel for organizing images in sequence. The panel-strip sequence developed alongside auxiliary visual tropes, some of which constitute alternative schemas for organizing sequential images. The panel strip is a convention that coordinates work. At a less formal and more practical level, a printed combination of word and image required a coordinated deployment of labor and capital. A word and an image were produced by distinctly different tradesmen in the early print period: a word came from the writers, editors, compositors, and pressmen of the letterpress; a woodblock image came from someone skilled in carving, typically concentrated in the Low Countries, or a copperplate engraving came from ­specialized engravers. It is unlikely that many individuals prior to William Blake had a special interest in single-handedly pursuing each craft simultaneously. Rather, the coordinated publication of word and image required a deliberate plan centered on a specific vision for the collaboration, probably developed by a publisher. Furthermore, any endeavor to include images in a publication required the investment of some amount of capital. Unlike a single piece of type, which can be reconfigured into a voluminous number of words, a single image has much more limited value as durable stock. A unique image must have been purchased with the expectation that its limited press run would be profitable, or else it must have been purchased with the expectation that it could be reapplied to new contexts or traded to another publisher. To simplify, then, the material conditions of print required more explicit planning about the integration of word and image; furthermore, the mass distribution of comics facilitated a heightened degree of formal coordination. In the missing middle of comics history—between Bayeux and Beano—the pivotal effect of print on the comics form is worth investigating. On the route to organizing comics into panels and strips, there was a period in which comics relied on emblematic structures. At first, those supplemented the development of panels and strips, and then those same emblematic structures offered dramatically different conceptions of how to conceptualize sequential image. The traceable lineage of comics hinges on the development of the sequential image as a kind of coordinating principle—something that draws together labor and capital toward a single hybrid genre. But the resemblance of the black frame in an intaglio smudge should not imply that the panel-strip convention was a natural or inevitable development. Instead, there were at least six alternative methods for arranging sequential

What Else Is a Comic? Between Bayeux and Beano   61 images in the early period of print. Some methods abjured the use of panels; others rejected strips; all bring new types of meaning to the representation of sequential image.

Processions The most straightforward alternative to the panel-strip convention is the procession, a represented march of characters representing topics, as would follow a funeral or high ceremony. The procession contains something of the strip format, albeit without the hard boundaries of the panel. The most famous processional image from the period is the funeral procession for Philip Sidney (Pollard and Redgrave 1524; see Figure 4.5). There is at best only a loose narrative logic to Sidney’s procession, which has a sense of sequence conferred by the arrangement of the banners, standards, and pennons carried around Sidney’s coffin. More deliberately structured images were often partnered with satirical verse, such as The Fvnerall of the Netherlands Peace by Claes Jansz (see Figure 4.6) or The Fvneral Obseqves of Sr. All-in-New-Fashions. In both cases, the verse is keyed to items in the illustration and provides a discursive order to their depiction. Processional images such as Marcus Gheeraerts’s Procession of the Knights of the Garter (National Portrait Gallery D31855) have been described by art historians as “narrative rather than emblematic” (Armitage 305). This may be a basic affordance of sequential image text.

Figure 4.5  Funeral Procession for Sir Philip Sidney, 1587.

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Figure 4.6  The Fvnerall of the Netherlands Peace, 1621.

While the order of the funeral procession is linear and clear, the meaning derived from the sequence requires emblematic or lyric elaboration. This interoperation of image and text challenges some of the more essentialist views about panels in sequence. Specifically, a common inference about the Kuleshov effect is that meaning emerges ­naturally from the juxtaposition of images, as if to say that narrative bursts Athena-like from the mere juxtaposition of two images. These processional images challenge the false parthenogenesis of the panel-strip convention and pose alternatives that are thick, dense, and challenging in spite of their linearity. In a phrase, it is not enough to be a strip.

Curtains Whereas the procession represents strips without panels, the convention of the curtain can represent panels without strips. The curtain appears, at first, to be a rudimentary approximation of the panel. Curtains can impose boundaries to vision from within the diegesis of an image. But this same narratological affordance gives curtains a stronger narrative component than the black frame, meaning that the curtain often implicates characters as narrators in the narrative of each frame. Thomas Robinson’s The Anatomie of the English Nunnery at Lisbon (see Figure 4.7) is made up of panels, not in strips and not entirely constituted by the black frame. Rather, the third panel is surrounded by a curtain, which is parted by a narrator figure to expose the sexual misconduct of a nun and her confessor. The effect of this is a kind of metaleptic

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Figure 4.7  The Anatomie of the English Nunnery at Lisbon, 1623.

64   Evan Thomas disruption; that is, the narrator is leaping into the action of the story that he is also relating. The contrivance of curtains also appears in Triumphs of God’s revenge as well as later prints discussing the Eikon Basilike, namely, the Eikon E Piste and the Eikon Alethine. These later two examples make the metaleptic intrusion of the author more explicit and more disturbing, as the king’s words are revealed to be the forgery of another. In both the Anatomie and the Eikon illustrations, the curtain is a framing device that represents the narrative image as something to be theatrically unveiled; this is a sense of narrative presentation that is entirely concealed in the panel-strip convention. What is lost in the panel-strip convention is this sense of metaleptic play; frames are merely rectangles, not anything to be thrust aside, unveiled, or revealed.

Staircase Another alternative to the panel-strip convention uses neither strips nor frames but a structuring metaphor that implies both continuity and change: a staircase. This convention appears most commonly in narrative images about the “Ages of Man,” a trope in which the multiple stages of life are compared to steps up and back down a small scaffold (see Figure 4.8). Some variations of this trope comment on the rise and decline of man’s sexual capabilities (Jones 33). In this trope, and especially in the sexualized variant, the characters representing different stages freely comment on characters in other stages. Commentary across stages is significant as another kind of metaleptic disruption, as the characters represented in this narrative image also comment on the later or earlier parts of the narrative image. In one example of this trope, found at West Stowe Manor House in Suffolk (Jones 34), the young man ravishes a young woman, saying, “Thus do I all day,” and the older man to his right remarks, “Thus did I when I might.” This kind of commentary across narrative moments is uncommon in the panel-strip convention, where such narratorial interplay is rarely achieved.

Calendars Perhaps one of the most famous examples of an image text from early modern England would be The Shepheardes Calender, a 1579 print attributed to Edmund Spenser (see Figure 4.9). The Calender presents Spenser’s poetry in something like the emblematic format that Spenser had practiced in translating the Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings, an emblem book by the same printer, Henry Bynneman. In both the emblem book and the Calender, images are set apart in black frames and in chronological order. This is something like the panel-strip convention, although it would be slightly inaccurate to describe the chronological sequence of images in the Calender as a narrative. Unlike the disjointed emblems in Worldlings, the image texts of Shepheardes Calender follow the astrological cycle as the various passions conducted by the planets affect the

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Figure 4.8  The Ages of Man, ca. 1630.

humors of the characters. Both the calendrical arrangement of Spenser’s poems and the astrological composition that links characters and cosmos can be traced to the broader tradition of early modern English almanacs. The most common calendrical illustration from Spenser’s sources suggests something unfamiliar about the early modern English sense of time. Specifically, that illustration is called Zodiac Man (or elsewhere “planet man” or “vein man”), and Ruth Samson Luborsky has noted close to one hundred separate publications of this stock image between 1536 and 1603 (Luborsky and Ingram app. 4). Zodiac Man is the most common

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Figure 4.9  The Shepheardes Calender, 1579.

secular image from early modern England presses, and he represents narrative time in a form quite unlike the panel-strip format. In Zodiac Man, the twelve signs of the zodiac are depicted through their influence on the human anatomy. Aries, figured as the ram, is always above the head of Zodiac Man, Pisces is always near his feet, and so on, according to “late medieval medical doctrine” (Bober 2). In short, Zodiac Man offers a template for how images can be represented through time in reference to parts of the human body, rather than through a set of disembodied panels and strips. The predominance of prints of Zodiac Man should further show that this was the most common exemplar of chronological image in early modernity, rather than the panels in sequence that Spenser uses. What Zodiac Man represents in contrast with the panel-strip convention is a sense of narrative image that is embodied with ­macrocosmic significance; this is beyond the ambition of possibly every contemporary ­comics creator, with the exception of Alan Moore’s Jerusalem.

Wheels Another almanac print, by John Kyngston, reproduces a cyclical arrangement of images in a wheel, but in this almanac, the information is a form of atlas. The Flye (Bodleian Broxb. 95.70, cited in Bosanquet) is described by Luborsky as depicting, on the inner circles of the wheel, “the daily retardation of the age of the moon” and, on the outer ­circles, various rebuses to represent havens along the coast (Luborsky and Ingram app. 4). Eustace  F.  Bosanquet speculates that the rebuses correspond to the eastern English

What Else Is a Comic? Between Bayeux and Beano   67 and northern French coast and that The Flye would be pasted on the wheel of the boat as an at-hand guide for navigation (159). The Flye, then, depicts images in sequence—but not narrative sequence and not chronological, either. At first, it seems that The Flye is a very primitive kind of atlas for people left out of the Ortelian revolution in mapping. But The Flye is a worker’s tool for thinking with images. It enables a quick comparison between tide levels and salient parts of the coastline. Narrative images always possess this kind of spreadsheet-like capacity for cross-reference—even the panel-strip convention is arranged like a spreadsheet—but the sailors of early modern England actually took advantage of the comic as a database. Volvelles are the more recognized variety of printed wheels from this period; they are designed to revolve around a single point and interface with another page to produce concordances, often for the purposes of predicting something. Rosemary Freeman described the volvelle in one emblem book as having “the same appeal as a Fortuneteller at a party” (144), whereas more recently, Whitney Trettien has described volvelles as combinatory technologies. That is, like an algorithm, a volvelle is capable of taking a given input and automatically producing an output. In the case of George Wither’s A ­collection of Emblemes, the emblematic image texts scattered throughout the book were assigned as “lotteries.” The emblematic volvelle presents something like the opposite of the use of the wheel in The Flye: whereas The Flye organizes a database for workers, Wither’s volvelle randomizes “lotteries” for the kinds of people who would consult “a Fortune-teller at a party.” Then again, in the case of Wither’s volvelle, the randomization is simply simulated. The other kinds of combinatory effects described by Trettien are often as concrete as cutting and dealing a deck of cards.

Decks Wenceslaus Hollar’s A Pack of Knaves (see Figure 4.10) is a large singleton of satirical images, printed with frames, apparently to be cut into and used as playing cards. The individual images convey a social typology of early modern London, ranging from “The Nere Be Good” (ne’er-be-good) to “The Sleeploue” (sleep-love). It is also, in the uncut form that Malcolm Jones located in the Royal Collection at Windsor, something that very closely resembles the panel-strip convention: each card is made up of an image ­surrounded by a simple black frame and a few rhymes of social satire. It is an image text, albeit one without sequence. Like Wither’s Emblemes, this is an image text designed to be randomized; unlike Wither’s Emblemes, A Pack of Knaves is an image text that celebrates the random associations and encounters between these many types—like a chance encounter between a prince and a pauper in a blind alley. This randomization and recombination are another affordance lost in the ascension of the panel-frame sequence; no comic fans or creators would dream of clipping

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Figure 4.10  A Pack of Knaves, ca. 1640.

What Else Is a Comic? Between Bayeux and Beano   69 apart and reassembling their comics. It is an exercise worthy of Tristan Tzara, Dada avant la lettre. That is, nevertheless, precisely what the users of the Pack of Knaves must have done. The use of decks to “order” sequential images is a complete rebellion against anything that we would recognize as a strip; so is the use of wheels and volvelles to order sequences. Processions and stairs have linearity but not panels. Calendars and curtains have panels but not linearity. Perhaps counterintuitively, the panel-strip convention developed in a broader print ecosystem that sequenced images with methods that could be cyclical, nonlinear, metaleptic, and even randomized. And critically, these were ­systems that used emblematic devices as structuring metaphors for sequential image, not as oblique references. It is vital to recognize that the early print period produced conventional panel strips alongside complex narrative images structured as calendars, decks, and so on. Both coexisted in a period well before Hogarth. Indeed, Hogarth’s distance from current comics conventions does not necessarily mean that every artifact earlier than Hogarth must be even more distant from contemporary comics—quite the opposite, as in the case of Triumphs of Gods revenge or Severe Judgments. Hogarth has been represented as a kind of mountain on the horizon of comics studies: he poses as a point of demarcation of the visible present from the invisible past, between Bayeux and Beano. But just because one mountain obscures the west does not mean that the west is made up of mountains or that mountains get more extreme farther west; horizons do not actually constitute the limits of the world. The inscrutability of Hogarth’s images—with their allusive richness and complexity— can easily be taken to mean that such characteristics will become more extreme prior to Hogarth. Hogarth seems to pose a terminus post quem, to some, such as Thierry Smolderen, because of the emblematic inscrutability of his images. Rake’s Progress, for instance, generates the satirical tone of comics from a page jam-packed with referents. Smolderen treats the work of Hogarth in the 1730s as a terminus, but he also notes that “Hogarth’s series demand genuine interpretive effort, even detective work, on the part of a reader. They are intended to be read, but they depend on a conception of reading, an ability that has little in common with today’s comics” (8). Indeed, Hogarth’s compositions certainly draw on a tradition of interpreting images emblematically: a vise (as appears three times in Rakewell’s family crest) is never a tool for clamping an object but is rather a figure of the pinching, tight-fisted quality of the Rake’s father as well as a pun on the vice of miserliness. Smolderen begins his history of comics with Hogarth, perhaps because it seems that Hogarth and later creators had to gradually shake off the overstuffed baggage of medieval iconography to create more dynamic, realist narratives. The emphasis on Hogarth, which appears throughout the “English” view of comics history, implies that if Hogarth represents something only barely recognizable as comics, then it would seem (by inference) that whatever came before Hogarth would be even less recognizable as a comic. To recapitulate the argument on early alternatives to panel strips, emblematic visual tropes were allied with, not impediments to, the development of the panel-strip

70   Evan Thomas c­ onvention. Instead of being an impediment to the creation of narrative comics, visual tropes and iconography provided organizational scaffolding in the diffuse printing process. As seen in the curtains, decks, and wheels of early sequential images, such metaphors and tropes have provided rich and profound narrative order to images. These tropes deployed a set of stable meanings that made legible the images—prior to Hogarth—that deployed the panel-strip convention. Indeed, Hogarth sequences his prints in Rake’s Progress without use of panels or strips, but that does not mean that they were not available conventions at the time. This is exactly the opposite of the case. As a matter of fact, Hogarth’s predecessors made much more use of the panel-strip sequence and much more sparing use of emblematic styles of reading. The Unlucky Citizen, printed by Anne Johnson for Francis Kirkman in 1673 (see Figure 4.11), presents a direct precursor to Rake’s Progress. In Unlucky Citizen as in Rake’s Progress, a sequence of images depicts the titular unlucky citizen accepting loans, moving into debtor’s prison, and being shoved head first into the “Horn of Surety-Ship.” This process is delineated in panels along a vertical strip, a convention that preceded Rake’s Progress by a minimum of sixty years. The Unlucky Citizen employs a simpler, less emblematic narrative sequence that nevertheless relies on a single trope in order to facilitate meaning making. The Unlucky Citizen uses another vertical strip to simultaneously depict the lucky citizen. That strip, side by side with the unlucky citizen’s, depicts the lucky citizen prospering, offering loans, and ultimately stuffing the unlucky citizen into the “Horn of Surety-Ship.” The two sequences converge on this emblematic image, breaking down the division between the two sequences. In a contemporary comic, this approach might be legible to sophisticated readers of narrative image, but it’s impossible to say how effectively early modern audiences might have parsed this arrangement. A single emblematic trope—in this case, the Horn of Surety-Ship—provides some insight into a more common process for organizing the network of readers and printers involved with such prints. The Horn of Surety-Ship from The Unlucky Citizen has a broader circulation in early modern prints. One of the tropes used in The Unlucky Citizen also appears in a thematically similar print, The Prodigall Son Sifted (see Figure 4.12). The Prodigall Sifted (British Museum 1870,1008.2897) is not derived from The Unlucky Citizen but rather from an existing Dutch motif (a connection first noted by Jones 195). The illustration in Overton’s publication is strikingly similar to one in Adriaen van Venne’s Hauwelyck, and the same trope would continue to be influential throughout Robert Walton’s republication of the same in the 1740s . Even though the illustration is relatively simple, it does a heroic amount of coordination within the printing trade, so much so that it was found to be indispensable on either side of the channel, over a span of sixty years. Indeed, the coordinating powers of print are rarely more evident than in the emergence of extremely similar comics, or proto-comics, in England and the Low Countries. The Prodigall Sifted depicts a narrative even closer to Hogarth’s. This light social satire represents a prodigal son who faces retributive oversight by his parents. And it is indeed organized in two “strips” of panels along either side of a larger emblematic image. The strips depict the descent into villainy based on lasciviousness and addiction. The left strip, composed of four panels, shows the prodigal son descend from “Courting his Miss” to

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Figure 4.11  The Unlucky Citizen, 1673.

“Duellers” to “Prison House” and ultimately “Gallows.” The right strip, also in four panels, shows the prodigal son fall due to “Tauerne,” then “Drunken siknes” and “Gameing house,” followed by “Shurityship.” The prodigal’s downfall—from either women or wine—is obviously a straightforward narrative depicted in panels and strips. Any attempt to dismiss The Prodigall Sifted as an early comic would have to rely on the large central image. The Prodigall Sifted provides something like an early, or primitive, example of the panel-strip convention. Specifically, there is a straightforward visual narrative displayed in strips along either side of the image, yet the image is largely organized around a nonnarrative emblem that reveals the usefulness of visual tropes that organize the combined labor and capital of printmakers around a shared vision and theme. The Prodigall Sifted endures across cultures and across centuries because of the reliance of early modern printmakers on a singular organizing vision of what a print is or might be about. Beyond The Prodigall Sifted, there are other early prints that demonstrate the continuity of Hogarth’s visual tropes with early comics, including early comics that use the panelstrip format as well as those that were purely emblematic (e.g., A Looking-Glass for Lascivious Young Men: or the Prodigal Son SIFTED). Such prints demonstrate two vital truths about the origins of comics: first, that Hogarth built on an existing tradition of visual narratives and sequential images; second, that Hogarth’s own techniques for sequence bear little relevance to the sequential metaphors and conventions that ­preceded him.

72   Evan Thomas

Figure 4.12  The Prodigall Son Sifted, 1679.

If there is a traceable lineage from Hogarth to early print images, there might also be a traceable lineage back from other founding figures in the Swiss and American traditions. In each case, there may be reasonable objections, such as Smolderen’s concern that Hogarth represents an extremely emblematic tradition of comics, but at minimum, these objections will significantly deepen our appreciation of what is characteristic of comics, while also extending serious consideration to early examples. But perhaps more important, Hogarth represents a transformative moment in which the black frame superseded all rival conventions for organizing sequential image. The rich, emblematic, almost hieroglyphic blend of iconology in every Hogarth print should rather recall the early modern print culture of sequential image. If early modern print culture did produce alternatives to the panel-strip convention, then the most important implication may be that the distinction between comics form and content is no longer as natural as it might have seemed. That is, the panel-strip convention can no longer be treated as a disembodied, geometric form if it might stem from the working practices of early modern printers. The frame of a comic is simply an extremely streamlined version of those rich, allusive icons cluttering a Hogarth print: curtains and steps and calendars and wheels and decks and so on. Finally, if there is a rich culture of sequential image in the early period of print, then this decenters some of the pole stars in the firmament of comics studies. Hogarth, Töpffer, and Outcault may no longer be treated with Jupiterian authority, but neither are English, Swiss, or American claims to comics supremacy. These myths must be replaced with a tentative constellation of sources, which themselves reveal something about their own history. And there are even further constellations yet to be discovered.

What Else Is a Comic? Between Bayeux and Beano   73

Works Cited Acheson, Katherine. “Gesner, Topsell, and the Purposes of Pictures in Early Modern Natural Histories.” Printed Images in Early Modern Britain, edited by Michael Hunter, Ashgate Press, 2010, pp. 127–144. Anonymous. Divine examples of God’s Severe Judgments upon Sabbath-Breakers. 1671. Wing D1720bA. Early English Books Online, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.882003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:64551177. Anonymous. A Looking-Glass for Lascivious Young Men: or the Prodigal Son SIFTED. ­1689–1692. ESTC R234282. English Broadside Ballad Archive, https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/­ ballad/20696/citation. Anonymous. Eikon alethine. 1649. Wing E267. Early English Books Online, http://gateway. proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation: 99871500. Anonymous. Eikon e piste. 1649. Wing E314. Early English Books Online, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation: 99862472. Anonymous. The Prodigall Sifted. 1677. British Museum 1870,1008.2897, http://www. britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1 496911&partId=1. Anonymous. A true discourse. Declaring the damnable life and death of one Stubbe Peeter. 22 June 1590. Pollard and Redgrave 23375. Early English Books Online, http://gateway.proquest. com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:99837541. Armitage, David. “The Procession Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I: A Note on a Tradition.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 53, 1990, pp. 301–307. Bober, Harry. “The Zodiacal Miniature of the Très Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry: Its Sources and Meaning.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 11, 1948, pp. 1–34, www.jstor.org/stable/750460. Bosanquet, Eustace F. “The Flye, 1569.” The Library, vol. S4-18, no. 2, Oxford University Press, 1937, doi:10.1093/library/s4-XVIII.2.195. Couperie, Pierre. “Antecedents and Definition of the Comic Strip.” Graphis, no. 159, 1973, pp. 8–13. De Bry, Theodor. Sequitur celebritas & pompa funeris. 1588. STC 15224. Early English Books Online. 30 September 2018. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003& res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:99836901. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge UP, 1980. Eisenstein, Elizabeth  L. “An Unacknowledged Revolution Revisited.” American Historical Review, vol. 107, no. 1, 2002, pp. 87–105. ESTC (English Short Title Catalogue, 1473–1800). British Library, http://estc.bl.uk/F/?func= file&file_name=login-bl-estc. Freeman, Rosemary. English Emblem Books. Chatto & Windus, 1948. Gheeraerts, Marcus. Procession of the Knights of the Garter. 1576. NPG D31855. National Portrait Gallery, https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw126809/Processionof-the-Knights-of-the-Garter. Gombrich, E. H. Art, Perception, and Reality. Johns Hopkins UP, 2011. Gombrich, E.  H. “Moment and Movement in Art.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 27, 1964, pp. 293–306. Griffiths, Antony. The Print in Stuart Britain. British Museum Press, 1998. Groensteen, Thierry. Comics and Narration. UP of Mississippi, 2013.

74   Evan Thomas Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Translated by Nick Nguyen, edited by Bart Beatty, UP of Mississippi, 2007. Hogarth, William. The Rake’s Progress. 1735. ESTC T154210. Hollar, Wenceslaus. A Pack of Knaves. 1636–1644. British Museum 1878,1012.346–362, ­http:/www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx? objectId=3323649&partId=1&people=131587&peoA=131587-2-23&page=1. Jansz, Claes. “Treves endt The Fvnerall of the Netherlands Peace.” 1621. Pollard and Redgrave 24268.3. Early English Books Online, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39. 88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:33143379. Jones, Malcolm. The Print in Early Modern England: An Historical Oversight. Yale UP, 2010. Kirkman, Francis. The Unlucky Citizen. 1673. Wing K638. Early English Books Online, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id= xri:eebo:citation:18209040. Kunzle, David. Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer. UP of Mississippi, 2007. Kunzle, David. The History of the Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825. U of California P, 1973. Luborsky, Ruth Samson, and Elizabeth Morley Ingram. A Guide to English Illustrated Books, 1536–1603. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1999. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. Harper Perennial, 1994. Miodrag, Hannah. Comics and Language. UP of Mississippi, 2013. O’Connell, Sheila. The Popular Print in England: 1550–1850. British Museum Press, 1999. Pollard, A.  W., and G.  R.  Redgrave. A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–1640. 1928. Bibliographical Society, 1976, 1986, 1991. Included in ESTC. Reynolds, John. The Triumphs of Gods revenge against the Crying and Execrable Sin of Murther. 1656. Wing R1308A. Early English Books Online, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl? ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:124064258. Robinson, Thomas. The Anatomie of the English Nunnery at Lisbon in Portugall. 1630. Pollard and Redgrave 21125. Early English Books Online, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl? ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:99851215. Smolderen, Thierry. The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay. UP of Mississippi, 2014. Spenser, Edmund. The Shepheardes Calender. 1579. Pollard and Redgrave 23089. Early English Books Online, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_ id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:99846639. Trettien, Whitney Anne. Computers, Cut-ups and Combinatory Volvelles: An Archaeology of Text-Generating Mechanisms. 2009. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, PhD dissertation. Van der Noot, Jan. A theatre wherein be represented as wel the miseries & calamities that follow the voluptuous worldlings. 1569. Pollard and Redgrave 18602. Early English Books Online, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id= xri:eebo:citation:99845766. Waugh, Coulton. The Comics. Macmillan, 1947. Wing, Donald Goddard. A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad 1641–1700. 1945–1951. Modern Language Association, 1988. Included in ESTC. Wither, George. A collection of Emblemes. 1635. Early English Books Online, http://gateway. proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation: 99853790.

chapter 5

R ea di ng Space s The Politics of Page Layout Katherine Kelp-Stebbins

What would it mean to conceive of comics as navigated spaces? The question of how to define comics has become its own self-sustaining engine in academic discourse on the medium. Rather than taking part in the fray regarding whether comics are expressly or even predominantly a narrative form (Hayman and Pratt; Meskin; Kunzle; Miller) or questioning whether it is images (Beronä 19; Kunzle; Groensteen System),1 or words (Harvey 75) or their combination (Chute 452; Carrier) that identifies a work of comics, this chapter will address the medial specificity of spatial navigation in comics. Such an approach takes an almost parallax view to the media-ontological definitions espoused, challenged, refuted, and reworked by so many comics theorists. These investigations into the ontic/aesthetic definitions of comics are not only intrinsically constraining in their need to exclude, but they also tend toward cultural hegemony, whereby differences between US comics, bande dessinée, manga, fumetti, and all of their concomitant histories, material substrates, publishing methods, and distribution networks are flattened under the guise of a single immutable description.2 Instead of defining comics according to what such a work is, this chapter explores a definitional matrix in keeping with the proposal from comics scholar Joseph Witek that “ ‘comicsness’ might usefully be reconceptualized from being an immutable attribute of texts to being considered as a historically contingent and evolving set of reading protocols that are applied to texts” (149). Considering comics from the ­perspective of protocols or cultural techniques entails considering what types of operations and distinctions comics articulate and, in turn, how users—both artists and readers alike—activate and mobilize these technical possibilities into emergent forms of expression and meaning. To reimagine comics according to reading and spatial navigation is also a way to avoid what Aaron Meskin calls the trap of formalism: “its failure to take into account the historical contexts in which works of art are produced” (374). Focusing on the diversity of modes by which comics both serve as and utilize

76   Katherine Kelp-Stebbins spatial navigation according to design—how they may be representations of space and spaces of representation simultaneously—leads directly to a more culturally and historically situated study. At any moment in time, a variety of aesthetic, commercial, technological, and narrative conditions delimit and (re)define the spaces of comics, while comics, in turn, delimit and redefine space. The patterns of signification that occur in a daily newspaper strip published in the late twentieth century in the United States will diverge in relevant ways from those of a page in a graphic novel such as Persepolis circulating through a number of geographically imbricated print economies in the twenty-first century. As visual theorist Johanna Drucker states about graphic navigation devices such as particulars of page layout: They are elements that often pass unnoticed, rendered invisible by familiarity or by the inconsequential role they are usually assigned. Calling these features back into visibility is preliminary to addressing the way they engineer narrative experience and encode ideological values. (123)

This chapter will revisit a number of theories of page layout in order to diagram how spatial orientation has been studied and offer close readings in order to insist on the political situation of such studies. While the books I address—Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi, and Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’ Red: A Haida Manga—may seem expressly political in their subject matter, all comics are engaged in a political process as technologies of vision. Although forms such as the strip and the grid may appear normal to some readers, their normalization is neither ahistorical nor inevitable, and their technicity serves a disciplinary function. Every comic is involved in the creation and articulation of regimes of the visible and the readable, the utterable and the invisible; such regimes ­necessarily frame a political sensibility and play a role in the formation of certain reading communities in space and time. Thus, I advocate for the necessity of understanding comics as both cultural products and cultural agents that, in their spatial structures, formatting, and appearance, embody what Adrienne Rich termed the politics of location, in that they locate different readers in a diverse set of reading practices informed by lived experience and learned behavior. The page, I argue, is the space in comics where readers locate themselves politically and where, due to cultural and aesthetic conventions, readers may be dislocated and transformed by their navigation of the page as a form of processing visual information. The page in this formulation is a broad concept that can even be extended to semipaginal units such as strips or webcomics. Broadly, the scope of attention to the page accounts not only for the page of a comic book, album, graphic novel, or manga but also for the historical trajectories of such instantiations. While it may seem intentionally obtuse to focus on the page as a way to theorize any paginal or nonpaginal layout in comics, Witek’s definition once again proves useful, in that a page may well be but one historically contingent parameter of comics, and yet it is precisely for this reason that its

Reading Spaces: The Politics of Page Layout   77 reading practices merit attention. Studying the page as a labile module is furthermore a prerequisite for the project of examining reading as an always-already politicized technique.

Sequence versus Space Recognizing and theorizing the politics inherent in the space of the page marks a shift away from studies that focus on the sequential reading of comics as the predominant reading modality. Although sequence—as in the sequential succession of panels, images, and words—is a central component of the technicity of comics, a singular focus on sequence often obscures the ways in which comics, as Charles Hatfield states, “exploit format as a signifier in itself; more specifically, that comics involve a tension between the experience of reading in sequence and the format or shape of the object being read” (52). European theorists have heretofore published on the study of page layout in comics and graphic narrative writ large in much greater depth than US theorists, for at least two ­reasons. First, European scholars have theorized nearly every formal or semiotic aspect of comics in more depth than their US counterparts.3 Second, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, with its definition of comics as “sequential,” has functioned as a, if not the, foundational text for US comics studies. A number of translations of Franco-Belgian comics scholarship, especially those undertaken by Bart Beaty, Nick Nguyen, and Ann Miller, have expanded and continue to expand anglophone comics studies with more scholarship on how mise-en-page (layout) functions in relation to découpage (breakdown) or the relation of panels to one another. But, as Belgian comics scholar Thierry Groensteen notes in his book Comics and Narration, “It is striking to see that McCloud, in Understanding Comics, takes scant interest in the page as a unit whose format is perfectly suited to the capacity of the human eye” (74).4 Groensteen calls McCloud’s inattention to the page “the  major blind spot of his theory” (74). Similar critiques have been launched by anglophone comics theorists and authors. A decade before Comics and Narration was originally published in French, New Zealand-based comics artist Dylan Horrocks also criticized McCloud’s “polemic” for the way “it presents only one way of reading an infinitely complex landscape, thereby suppressing other possible readings” (Horrocks). In her 2013 study, Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form, British scholar Hannah Miodrag draws from Horrocks to critique the constraints of McCloud’s focus on sequentiality and linearity (66). As these authors confirm, insistence on the spatial component of the comics page does not discount the function of the sequence between panels; rather, it compels attention to the interplay between temporal and spatial reading models. However, except for Miodrag and Hatfield, very few analyses of the page have approached the formal complexity of those made by francophone scholars such as Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle, Benoît Peeters, Pascal Lefèvre, and Groensteen.

78   Katherine Kelp-Stebbins

Fundamental Studies of Page Layout Fresnault-Deruelle’s essay, which extends a point made by semiotician Gérard Genette,5 established the concept of the dual modes of comics reading “Du linéaire au tabulaire” or “From Linear to Tabular.” As Fresnault-Deruelle describes, the comic strip is often thought of in “metonymic” relation to the comics page; however, the distinct reading protocols instantiated by both formats entail a conflict between temporal and spatial dimensions, so that the linear and tabular reading practices are “bound up in a dialectic of continuity versus discontinuity” (121, cf. Baetens and Frey 105). Hatfield describes this dialectic as the tension between sequence and surface or “between the concept of ‘breaking down’ a story into constituent images and the concept of laying out those images together on an unbroken surface” (48). Whenever a reader opens a comic book or even a newspaper in which a comic strip appears, she will be aware of both the surface of the page as its own readable space and the sequence of panels, with their linear trajectory, as a concomitant reading space. While Fresnault-Deruelle tracks the historical schism between the daily strips of comics and the rise of comic books, wherein “the pages are tabular systems in which the panels are not always integrated into a logical continuum” (134), Hatfield cites the tension of reading the sequence of panels in a linear manner and the space of the comic in a tabular manner as one of the primary tensions contributing to the “otherness of comics reading” (32). Expanding on this tension, Peeters outlines an entire taxonomy of page layout in his book Case, planche, récit, the relevant chapter of which was translated into English as “Four Conceptions of the Page.” After outlining the interplay between découpage and mise-en-page (Case 39), Peeters schematizes four types of pages dependent on the preponderance of linearity or tabularity: (1) A conventional or regular page is “divided into a certain number of lines of the same height (often four), themselves divided into a certain number of panels (from two to five),” creating “the conditions for a regular reading (from left to right and from top to bottom), very close to that of a page of writing” (“Four Conceptions” par. 6). (2) A decorative page oppositely privileges the tabular at the expense of the linear, and the page serves primarily as “an independent unit, whose aesthetic organization trumps any other concern” (par. 12). Alternatively, a page layout may be (3) rhetorical, where: “the panel and the page are no longer autonomous elements; they are subordinated to a narrative which their primary function is to serve” (par. 19), or (4) productive, where “it is the organization of the page which seems to ­dictate the narrative” (par. 30). Peeters’s schema has been analyzed, critiqued, and reworked by a number of theorists, especially Groensteen, whose book The System of Comics is a major work of semiologic comics analysis. Groensteen formulates his system of comics (originally bande dessinée) as a way to account for the radical heterogeneity of objects that may be called comics and to schematize a conceptual framework within which to denote the function of such objects (19). His aim, “to produce a complete description of the materiality of the page”

Reading Spaces: The Politics of Page Layout   79 and “to understand how the reader approaches comics and how the medium achieves meaning” (“A Few Words” 90), stands in clear opposition to overly constraining definitions of comics or to analytic approaches that focus solely on linear sequence of reading. Instead, Groensteen draws from Fresnault-Deruelle and Peeters, among others, and extends these conceptual models in order to describe the varied spatial relationships of a panel of comics—from the relationship of the word balloon to other visuals to the relationship between a panel and its placement on a page—and the interactions between these relationships, that is, how multiple panels relate to one another as well as to the space of the page or the material substrate, and so on. Using the term arthrology in order to describe all of these potential relationships (System 21), Groensteen begins from the spatial organization of the page. He argues that while most theorists view this spatiotopical aspect of comics as secondary to narrative, in reality, a comic always begins with a mental form that is primarily spatial: “From the moment of sketching the first panel of a comic, the author has always already taken, as for the behavior of engaging with the medium, some large strategic options (evidently modifiable by what follows), which concern the distribution of spaces and the occupation of places” (21). Pursuant to the spatio-topia, is restrained arthrology, the relations articulated through linear sequences of panels. These two functions correspond roughly to Fresnault-Deruelle’s linear and tabular dimensions, and Groensteen contends that his system in these two modes is analogous to Peeters’s (Groensteen, System 103). However, Groensteen goes on to describe a third level of relationships: general arthrology, the translinear network of panels. As Groensteen explains, general arthrology is the braiding that takes account of nonlinear links within the work as a whole. As such, “braiding deploys itself simultaneously in two dimensions, requiring them to collaborate with each other: synchronically, that of the co-presence of panels on the surface of the same page; and diachronically, that of the reading, which recognizes in each new term of a series a recollection or an echo of an anterior term” (System 147). Thus, the reader of comics does not simply navigate the space of the page and the sequence; some panels will, in Groensteen’s terms, become places with multiple layers of meaning networked among their layout on the page, their role in the sequence of panels, and their connection to other panels or ideas within a work of comics.

The Location of Space While all of the preceding theories of page layout function as necessary correctives to a single-minded focus on sequence, they necessitate further contextualization. Although Groensteen contends that the artist will have a concept of the space of the comic in mind at the onset of the work, Lefèvre argues in “The Importance of Being ‘Published’ ” that the artist of comics or graphic novels is rarely the sole arbiter of page layout. Difference in  markets or publishing concerns will often inform the space of the page and the

80   Katherine Kelp-Stebbins ­ ublication, and these parameters may shift over time. Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey concur p that “the relationship between image and ‘level’ (strip/page/book) is never fixed and definitive . . . most graphic novels are not published in one single format but instead have an editorial trajectory that engenders shifting relationships between the unit (the image or the panel) and the whole (strip/page/book)” (106). Thus, page layout is a contingent and shifting product of a number of forces at once. Far from a stable site of composition, any page of comics must be located in relation to its production or reproduction: One need only consider the differences between a strip published in a daily newspaper, surrounded by other strips of different comics, and a collection of strips of a single comic published in an anthology. Beyond the production of the page as a material or formal function, one must also locate the page as a cultural product. Lefèvre and Witek, among others, have published on shifting cultural practices and trends in the page layouts of comics in terms of historical and cultural situations. While Lefèvre charts the trend toward layout standardization in Belgian comics from the 1880s to 1929 in his essay “The Conquest of Space,” Witek’s essay “The Arrow and the Grid” focuses on US comics. Lefèvre tracks the shifting conventions of panel arrangement in the most popular graphic narrative publishing formats in Belgium. Examining the numbering of panels and the employment of directional arrows as two now-obsolete “traces” of the systematic—and changeable—development of comics-reading methodology, Witek plumbs decades of US comics history for salient evidence of shifting reading modalities and constructs an argument that such shifts indicate the misplacement of theoretical attention in a static definition of comics. Instead, Witek asserts, “any given attempt to define some unchanging essence of comics may well find itself undone as reading ­conventions and textual practices continue to revise each other” (155). Lefèvre and Witek both provocatively realign epistemological inquiry into page layout by focusing on its contingency. Further, they avoid teleological assertions about the development of comics: Lefèvre charts the move toward and then away from standardization of page layout (252), while Witek shows how traces of paginal conventions may be transmuted into new forms. These culturally and historically situated studies qualify the more general approaches to page layout by charting the shifting expectations, possibilities, and constraints of comics reading over time and space. As such, they are attuned to the aspects of layout that are often overlooked and suggest that navigating a page is a deictic process: while a reader may take for granted the navigability of a particular comics page, this reading is itself predicated on the location of the reader. It is in considering this context—the location of the reader—that the question of politics becomes relevant. In the act of reading, a reader confronts a comic’s page not merely as a space for panels and images but rather as what Groensteen calls a space for place, a site for relations and therefore for politics: As it is articulated to several of its likenesses by a relation that comes under the jurisdiction of braiding, the panel is enriched with resonances that have an effect of transcending the functionality of the site that it occupies, to confer the quality of the place. What is a place other than a habituated space that we can cross, visit, invest in, a space where relations are made and unmade? (System 148)

Reading Spaces: The Politics of Page Layout   81 Yet, as Groensteen himself suggests, not all places are lived (habité, which the translators render as “habituated”) by the same inhabitants in the same ways or at the same times. And although Groensteen contends that tressage resolves (résoute) the tension between the synchronic tabular reading of the page and the diachronic, irreversible linear reading of the narrative (System 147), his own description of the making and unmaking of relations within the space of the page and the networked places it supports and consists of allows for the possibility of irresolvable tensions or displacements. As the following examples demonstrate, although these semiotic frameworks for understanding comics go a long way toward investing the page with meaningful potential, they are predicated on the stability of the location of the reading experience.

Fun Home: Home on the Grid Bechdel’s Fun Home provides an ideal model of an unstable location in terms of page layout and the relations between pages. Bechdel uses the spatial distribution of the ­comics page to establish new vantages on desire and domestic fiction and to subvert the ­normalcy of the grid. In particular, the narrative sequence on pages 220–221 (Figure 5.1) highlights the circumstantial location of page layout.

Figure 5.1 Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Houghton-Mifflin, 2006). Pages 220–221 feature “regular” panel structure, an anomaly in Bechdel’s books.

82   Katherine Kelp-Stebbins This pivotal scene in the book is the only time the two main characters, Bruce and daughter Alison, discuss their sexuality together. However, this two-page spread is unique not only to the book’s narrative but also to its form, in that these are the only pages that follow “normal” gridding, with twelve panels evenly distributed across the page. As Peeters and Groensteen assert, the comics page is (almost without exception) a rectangular space, divided by orthogonal gridding (quadrillage) into stripological regular units. Peeters describes a comics page gridded into identically shaped panels as “­conventional” (Case 41), but Groensteen uses “regular” to describe this layout, as it is “not so banal” (System 95). Thus, pages 220–221 of Fun Home locate the reader, in terms of narrative and/or sequence, according to a standardized manner associated with regularity, but the sequence’s irregularity relative to the book as a whole dislocates the reader from the conventions of all preceding and subsequent pages. Tellingly, in their book The Graphic Novel, Baetens and Frey use pages 220–221 of Fun Home to argue for Groensteen’s reimagining of Peeters’s paginal nominations according to the interplay among reader, author, and page. Proposing an approach that “makes room for the interpretive input of the reader as well as the underlying strategy of the artist” (127), Baetens and Frey observe that the sequence of twenty-four rectangular panels featuring a large black strip in the upper quadrant of the images on pages 220–221 immediately precedes a page showing the characters Bruce and Alison going to a movie, which is also ­surrounded by a black strip. This coincidence, they argue, leads the reader to question whether pages 220–221 are meant to be interpreted as “real or invented” (127). Baetens and Frey’s interpretation demonstrates the insufficiency of analyzing page layout in a vacuum that does not also account for a page’s context—in this case, the following page. However, in order to interpret these pages in consideration of the politics of page layout, one must extend the context of the page to include its position among other cultural products. Bechdel’s two-page regular quadrillage not only must be contextualized in relation to other pages of the book, but it must also be analyzed in relation to the grid itself as a cultural technique that serves to make comics legible by dividing available space linearly. While most theorists take the regularity of the grid as a given, it is itself encoded with values and beliefs, not the least of which involves the division of space and time. Media theorist Bernhard Siegert has highlighted how the grid as a cultural technique combines an imaging process with ontological, operational, and epistemic potential (97). The grid presupposes the orderability and knowability of all space, and as such, it has served as the technical underpinning for imperial expansion, as demonstrated by Yahgulanaas’s subversion of the grid described below. A grid orders a person in her place because it is a mode of placing order on space. However, Bechdel’s play with spatial composition frustrates and reorients expectations of ordered space. Fun Home does not follow “regular” quadrillage; rather, Bechdel’s page layouts vacillate throughout the text in terms of the mise-en-page, in regard to both size of panel and shape. The majority of Bechdel’s pages feature either four or five panels, although panel distinctions can be tricky to delineate based on Bechdel’s use of panel borders for narrative or textual fragments. The placement and relative size of panels as

Reading Spaces: The Politics of Page Layout   83 well as text lead to a great variety among layouts. While 4.5 is the median panel count for Fun Home—except for pages 220–221—pages range from one to nine panels. Similarly, although many pages share the same number of panels, rarely are the layouts of these panels repeated, and never on successive pages. Thus, the driving scene between Bruce and Alison on pages 220–221 functions as a simultaneous aberrance of regularity within the text, as well as an irregularity that marks the grid as itself a queer or dislocated practice. In this two-page spread, each page is segmented into a regular three-by-four or twelve-panel unified grid. The regularity of this format recalls Fresnault-Deruelle’s qualification of the stripological as the familiar, that which also speaks to the family, as it offers the “daily ration of idealized family life” (Fresnault-Deruelle 123). Just as comics, in a linear, stripological fashion, symbolize a form of “idealized family life,” the conversation between Alison and Bruce in this passage represents the closest the two come to an honest father-child bonding. Likewise, the breakup of the page into twenty-four ­regular panels mirrors a standardized temporality that the rest of the book subverts. Rather than a day’s worth of hours, this section extends a passage of minutes into twenty-four separate spatial nodes. Because the grid of panels on pages 220–221 is syntagmatically structured according to the stripological, it simultaneously evokes the familiar while twisting it or refusing to accord with the “conventional” or “regular” format of the familiar. The narrative content of these pages is the moment when the father-daughter relationship is both the most “normal” and yet also the most abnormal, because the father reveals candidly what kept him from being a “normal” father. The format on pages 220–221 has implications that resonate across the rest of Fun Home and extend into its sequel Are You My Mother? as well. In this unique spread, Bechdel uses a conventional format to manage space in a way that is unconventional, pursuantly recalibrating what may be considered a normal navigation of the space of the page. Her use of the grid reveals the contingency and contextual aspect of how we come to know space as “regular” or “conventional.” Although the stripological grid may have been established as conventional for comics, in the space of Fun Home, it is decidedly irregular. Most saliently, the grid, with its Cartesian basis, asserts the linearity, separability, and graphability of space and time. Even as comics theorists associate the grid with the tabular place along which a linear reading inheres, the grid’s own linearity is ­frequently overlooked. In Fun Home, the grid’s deployment in twenty-four sections ­suggests the spatiality of time or the artificiality of time-space separations. The irregularity of the stripological grid in Bechdel’s work demonstrates a political approach to page layout in which Bechdel challenges comics conventions as correlates to what Judith Halberstam has called “reproductive temporality,” or the logic of the normal, in which inheritance in the form of “values, wealth, goods, and morals are passed through family ties from one generation to the next” (5). For Halberstam, “queer time” is a response to the normativization of reproductive longevity: “Queer uses of time and space develop . . . according to other logics of location, movement, and identification” (1). The logic behind the “conventional” layout is undone by its unconventional use within the context of the book.

84   Katherine Kelp-Stebbins

Baddawi: Weaving between the Lines From re-marking the region of the gridded pages within the context of the book, the politics of page layout may also re-mark the geopolitical situation of page elements and reader alike, as in Baddawi. Unlike Fun Home, which began as a book, Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi began as a series of webcomics on her blog. Their collection in a limited book, as opposed to an ongoing blog, suggests a certain narrative structure. For Abdelrazaq, “the main challenge” when turning Baddawi from a webcomic to a book was “taking isolated anecdotes from the blog and weaving a larger storyline out of them” (correspondence with author). In this case, tressage, or how a reader of Baddawi weaves meaning from linear and tabular readings in order to invest panels with greater depth, is complicated by the tension between the scrolled, steadily updated webcomic narrative and the contained print narrative. The rhythm and sense of narrative cohesion will shift depending on the location of reading, whether a reader traverses a screen or a print page. This tension is further exacerbated by paginal orientation. As Abdelrazaq explains, “on the webcomic, the layout for a lot of the stories was conceptualized as a continually vertical layout (to be read by scrolling down the page) which changed to horizontally and two-by-two” (correspondence with author). Depending on location, different reading modalities will be engaged, and the interplay between linearity and tabularity will shift. Because Baddawi is no ­longer available on Abdelrazaq’s blog, two distinct reading experiences—one free, d ­ igital, and vertical, the other salable, print, and horizontal—are instantiated at different points in time. “The Cluster Bombs” story on pages 62–64 of the book begins with two seemingly distinct strips of vertical panels: one strip shows a woman baking, the other depicts the main character, Abdelrazaq’s father, Ahmad, watching as fighter jets come into view above his refugee camp, Baddawi. While these strips already refute what so many theorists identify as the “normal” reading practice of zigzagging,6 which Neil Cohn refers to as the “Z-Path,” their narrative resolution shifts depending on whether one is reading the book or the blog. Online, scrolling may preclude a reader from ­witnessing the cluster bombs dropped by the planes on the same screen as the incipit of the story. The book presents these sections in the same two-page spread, so that a tabular reading has already associated the left-hand column of the woman baking on page 62 with the large panel of bombs falling and exploding at the bottom of 63. Between and to the sides of the two vertical columns of panels on page 62 are patterns that, due to their seemingly nonnarrative role, may be interpreted according to Peeters’s concept of a decorative page layout. These patterns are traditional Palestinian designs used in tatreez, and their placement on the page suggests the whole page as one embroidery scrolling downward as it is woven. However, the placement of patterns shifts throughout the work, making its location and its meaning less stable than one may assume. Further, because the verticality of the patterns on this page follows the twin ­trajectory of panels, the page itself may be far more rhetorical in terms of directing a reader’s eyes to follow the motion that the bombs themselves will make in the next

Reading Spaces: The Politics of Page Layout   85 s­ ection; conversely, in blog form, the patterns rhetorically move the reader according to the ­layout on the screen. In the print layout, where a reader can see the planes dropping the bombs in the same tabular expanse as the patterns on the page prior, the design seems to resemble the dropping of bombs surrounding the characters, and the central pattern looks not unlike the jets themselves, moving downward and upward, uniting the proleptic victim of the bombing and the witness. Groensteen describes the “story shuttle” that weaves or braids together the spatiotopical and linear levels of reading. Such a shuttling also exists beyond the text in terms of the reader’s own knowledge system and how it shuttles between the comic and any contextual information that a reader may possess. Just as Fun Home shows that the ­context of the page cannot be overlooked when interpreting the layout, Baddawi demonstrates the importance of context in terms of cultural knowledge. Aside from differences in the location of a digital or a print reader, Baddawi stages a number of differential literacies dependent on cultural contexts. At least two culturally locative elements of Baddawi—its intertextual references to the comics of Naji al-Ali and the reproduction of tatreez—function to situate the reader narratively and simultaneously allow for a reader’s own cultural dislocation or disorientation in relation to the work. Baddawi was published in the United States by Just World Books, in a format that includes a preface and a note “About the Patterns.” The book also contains a glossary and photographs of Ahmad. All of these paratextual components seem designed to orient a non-Palestinian reader to understand both references within the content of the work, as well as the authenticity of the events depicted. Abdelrazaq states that her earlier works, like Baddawi, “catered a lot to a Western audience, who [she] hoped would walk away with an understanding of Palestinian issues, and empathy for the Palestinian struggle” (­correspondence with author). These addenda do supply a reader unfamiliar with ­certain historical or cultural terms with more information in order to locate the visual and narrative information of Baddawi. Yet they also function to make readers aware of subtexts or intertexts they may not have realized they were missing. The preface introduces the setting of the story and explains the relevance of famous Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali and his character Handala. Because this preface is inside the book, it is possible for a reader unfamiliar with Handala to completely overlook the clear reference that the cover of Baddawi makes to this cartoon character: The image of Ahmad on the cover is positioned in the familiar Handala pose, with his back to the reader and “his hands clasped behind him” (Abdelrazaq 11). On the other hand, readers with varying degrees of foreknowledge may alternatively recognize Handala, especially in the context of a book named Baddawi with Palestinian patterns surrounding the boy on the cover, or they may question this possible correlation. Informed readers may make assumptions about Ahmad, who is, like Handala, a Palestinian refugee. Readers’ cultural knowledge will determine their navigation of the book, perhaps even whether they open it at all, as all readings of comics vacillate between cultural situations and visual deciphering. Moreover, a panel such as the top of 41, where Ahmad watches an assassination of Palestinian resistance leaders, seems to directly echo similar renderings of Handala as

86   Katherine Kelp-Stebbins “a witness, in Arabic shahid, to decades of Palestinian dispossession, bitterness, anger, ­defiance and resistance” (Masalha 128). The political contextualization that informs the interpretive potential of such a panel leads one to sincerely doubt assertions like those of McCloud that pictures are “received information . . . the message is instantaneous” (49). Shuttling between levels of situated and abstract knowledges is as much a component of reading comics as shuttling between the mise-en-page and découpage. The reading does not only take place between panels and pages, but it also relies on paratextual and culturally located elements. A reader familiar with Handala will be more inclined to associate elements of Abdelrazaq’s book with al-Ali’s work.7 Similarly, the short note on the patterns following the preface tells readers that they will see a variety of “geometric, floral, and sometimes ‘pixelated’-looking patterns integrated into the illustrations” (Abdelrazaq 13), representing tatreez. As asserted above, these patterns function in ways both narrative and structural. As analyzed by Alex Mangles in the LA Review of Books, the tatreez sometimes weaves elements of the page together and elsewhere seems to protect the panels from the gutter or extradiegetic space. On the first splash page in the story titled “Chess,” a black-and-white chessboard, resembling a floor pattern or the chessboard itself, works as ground and background for the image of Ahmad playing chess against an opponent. As the perspective shifts, the chessboard pattern transmutes into another pattern resembling both chain-link fence and keffiyeh patterns (83). Because the page also involves the threat of air strikes and the resultant captivity of the chess players, the shift from board to textile/fence has ramifications for both linear and tabular readings. Narratively, the chessboard’s deconstruction refers to the location of the games during air strikes and the characters’ captivity; looking at the composition as a whole, the chessboard background and its transmutation bring the whole page into an ordered symmetry that at once parallels the symmetry of the next splash page, which depicts Hafez al-Assad and Ariel Sharon stoking hostilities, while also contrasting with the confused juxtaposition of images of war and play on the following page. As the narration claims, “chess may have just been another war game . . . but at least it was logical” (84). Mangles states that within the book, she began to see tatreez patterns in a number of figurative images, “the way a tree trunk wraps around a frame, the shapes of rockets and tanks emerging against the serenity of the sea, the repeated pattern of the sun rising and setting, often giving hope against a desperate scene” (Mangles par. 7). A reader may indeed note the visual echoes of the tatreez throughout Baddawi and interpret it as Mangles does: It is a reminder . . . that Abdelrazaq’s cartooning is a form of bequeathed needlework—a conscious reformulating of her heritage that reflects and reverberates along gendered lines, using embroidery to identify herself as part of a women’s lineage of recording and archiving through craftwork. (par. 7)

It is also possible for a reader to comprehend the tatreez as its own locational network, one that links Baddawi to places that a reader may or may not be able to read in the

Reading Spaces: The Politics of Page Layout   87 ­ atterns. Palestinian embroidery is locative in that patterns designate places of origin in p ways both figurative and material. Images in the weaving often refer to markers such as flora or fauna or even topographic and celestial features that constellate a location. Thus, readers may even recognize in Baddawi where they are not reading from, due to either a lack of knowledge or a physical dislocation from the place of the pattern. Abdelrazaq explains this use of embroidery as a way to “create a Palestinian visual language” and to “Palestinian-ize certain images, or to try and communicate ‘this thing is Palestinian’ ” (correspondence with author). Clearly, as attested to by Mangles’s review, readers may use the patterns as a way to orient themselves to the story and to navigate the spaces of the page as the embroidery stitches panels together. Alternatively, as noted, readers may find themselves dislocated by the patterns, for, as Abdelrazaq herself contends, tatreez is often taken as a universal symbol of Palestine, but it is not practiced everywhere, nor is it executed identically everywhere it is produced. For Abdelrazaq, this was a tension in her own book, wanting to accurately narrate her father’s experience while at the same time “trying to represent it through clichéd and overused symbols and iconographies that weren’t necessarily relevant to my family's immediate experience.” The tension led to “a lot of flattening of the complexity and diversity of Palestinian culture” (correspondence with author). Thus, the markers meant to locate and orient a reader in space and time produce constantly differential results, entailing that readers must be aware of their own cultural location and knowledge in order to understand the tatreez and the figure of Handala in terms of the significance both within and beyond the book.

Red: A Haida Deconstruction of the Book As Bechdel subverts the grid’s normative function through its location in Fun Home and Abdelrazaq implicates the cultural location of a reader of the layouts in Baddawi, Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’s book Red: A Haida Manga undermines the cultural location of the book as a commodity object. Red represents a new hybrid genre that Yahgulanaas developed, and it narrates a Haida story through manga-style graphic ­discourse. Although the book has been referred to as both a graphic novel and a comic, Yahgulanaas states that he chose manga specifically due to its association with Pacific culture and because “it is not part of the settler tradition of North America” (qtd. in Levell 97). The use of the culturally syncretic approach is subversive at a number of ­levels: most evidently, Red’s page design features no orthogonal gridding and acts as a rebuke to colonial knowledge systems and falsehoods about the emptiness of indigenous land.8 As Yahgulanaas has stated in talks and in his short piece “In the Gutter,” the whiteness of the gutter suggests a vacuum or void of space-time in between the moments of the panels. Using the Haida formline instead ­provides “a more honest way of looking at, depicting the world, by filling up the time-space dividers and not pretending they’re white, empty vacant spaces” (“Michael Yahgulanaas”), as colonizers did through the concept of “terra nulius” [sic] (qtd. in Harrison 51).

88   Katherine Kelp-Stebbins Reciprocally, Red is a book that instructs and guides its reader to deconstruct it as a book, dislocating its value as commodity object. At the levels of both the page and the book, Red deconstructs the political and ideological values involved in navigating the spaces of comics. Nicola Levell describes Yahgulanaas’s works of Haida manga as “a kind of transpacific fusion that transculturates Haida formlines, ideas and oral histories with manga, the Japanese genre of cartoon and comic illustration” (94). Although packaged as a graphic novel, Yahgulanaas’s transcultural book complicates layout practices considered conventional in global comics. Analyzed using Peeters’s categorization, Red’s formlines, which Yahgulanaas instead calls “framelines,”9 entail that every page in the book is “­decorative”; —that is, the story is drawn to accommodate these arching black patterns. However, the framelines in Red supersede decorative function because they divide every page into panels, and they indicate and structure the totalized image formed when all of the pages of Red are rearranged as a tableau (Figure 5.2). Red, like Baddawi, was originally laid out in a nonbook form before it was published. As part of a Haida artwork, Red’s formlines produce an image of three interlocking ­figures (Spiers 42), yet as part of a manga, the formlines designate the differences between panels that allow a narrative to take place, making the pages irresolvably decorative and productive dependent on the cultural product by which one is assessing the work. As Miriam Spiers states, “Red reveals the importance of the formline to not only Haida tradition but to narrative understanding as well” (46). Red’s characters even interact with the formlines, further complicating the question of their role as decorative, extradiegetic, or diegetic element. For example, on page 1, Jaada, Red’s sister, grasps a formline that stands in for the side of her boat visible on the same page. On page 14 and elsewhere, characters use formlines to climb, hold, or lean against; on pages 81 and 102, the lines become essential items in the narrative, a section of a mechanical whale and a great bow, respectively. Spiers contends, “Rather than the binary way in which ­Euro-American culture often views the world, Red’s organic formline erases

Figure 5.2  Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Red: A Haida Manga, in its tableau, mural form. Used with kind permission from the artist.

Reading Spaces: The Politics of Page Layout   89 compartmentalization” (46), and Yahgulanaas has stated that he uses framelines to demonstrate other ways of seeing and to break viewers out of traditional boxes using new “space and time lines” (“Michael Yahgulanaas”). In theory, Red’s cultural location is clearly indexed through the syncretic subtitle and the style of panel layout. In practice, Red challenges the settler logic of spatial distribution. Reviewing Red for Multiversity Comics, Michelle White states: “The curved panel borders make determining the order of events difficult; they also blend into the art itself, making it hard to see where one panel ends and the other begins.” White’s difficulty in reading Red exposes spatial navigation as a learned process. Drucker notes that when our reading conventions become overly familiar, we fail to recognize both their rhetorical and their ideological dimensions, as well as the processes by which we came to learn them (125), and Yahgulanaas states that the framelines provide a challenge or a surprise for the reader at the same time as they force a reader “to reflect on the connection of external elements” to that which is within the panel (correspondence with author). Thus, as a new genre, Haida manga, with its curving space and time lines, may seem more difficult for some readers, but this difficulty draws attention to the formal, disciplinary, and political conditions that underscore reading comics as a cultural practice. Brenna Clarke Gray explains that Yahgulanaas’s use of formlines fills in the “gutter” of the comics page and “deconstructs the very concept of the comic border in order to redefine nationhood in an Indigenous context and underscore the imposed colonial border’s impact” (172). The disorientation that a reader unfamiliar with conventions of Haida art may feel when navigating Red also indexes the context and location of the work. Furthermore, Red makes the reader aware of a different type of cultural location, that of the book as a commodity object. Red multiplies the linear and tabular dimensions through its double construction as art object and book. Red is on the one hand a full mural, which one may read according to Haida cultural analysis. On the other hand, Red is sold as a book, with pages that are oriented according to the tradition of the codex. Each page has its own linear framework, but the note at the conclusion of the book ­specifically instructs the reader to “rip the pages out of their bindings . . . and using the pages from two copies of this book . . . reconstruct this work of art” (109). Once they are fully replaced in their order as the Haida “complex of images,” the relationship of linear to tabular shifts again. As Yahgulanaas contends, the double reading of Red “will defy your ability to experience story as a simple progression of events” (109). Moreover, I would argue that the double materiality defies a reader’s ability to experience a book as a simple object. Gray contends that the mural form of the comic, which has been exhibited in ­museums, can be recreated by “any reader with two copies of the comic, disrupting the ­border between the accessible art of comics and the refined viewing space of a fine art gallery” (182). In point of fact, a reader cannot recreate the same work of art despite its peripatetic or remediated installations. The mural, as a museum installation, recalls all of the Benjaminian discussions of aura, but perhaps most important, it is not a book. The book Red is necessarily a form that circulates outside of the museum space, as

90   Katherine Kelp-Stebbins ­ ortable copy. As Hillary Chute notes, “the medium of comics was marked from the p beginning by its commodity status” (455), and the high-art/low-art divide is intrinsic to the North American cultural history of these objects. Rather, the challenge that Red poses to ­borders seems to be especially leveled at the book as a commodity object. For the reader to recreate the nonmuseal version of Red, she must purchase two books. The ­linear ­containment of the narrative is then denied by its doubling. With two Reds, where does the story begin or end? What’s more, the stability of the codex as a navigational device is threatened by its deconstruction into nonbook form. In order to create the Haida tableau, a reader irrevocably changes how the story takes space. A new module of tabularity materializes through the destruction of the previous module. Red’s proposition serves to fundamentally displace the stability of comics as a commodity form and to provide a challenge to the consumer of manga and comics. The long association of comics and collecting leads to an aporia: the reader cannot possess both the manga and the Haida mural as commodity objects at the same time; he or she can only possess their virtual duplication. Red thus reasserts the materiality of layout: the page is not merely an insignificant vessel, it is a physical space of construction, navigation, contention, and negotiation.

Politicizing Art . . . of the Page Fun Home, Baddawi, and Red affirm the exigence of studying the space of the page as a meaningful and signifying component of comics. Since the “spatial turn” in cultural studies, the need for a materialist analysis of media has been evident in areas such as comics theory. The second step in such an analysis necessitates extending this study beyond the space of the page in order to locate the page in the space-time of its reading and to imagine other layouts, other breakdowns, and other ways of reading that may not always already be deemed “conventional.” For his system of comics, Groensteen says he imagines “the competent reader, someone who is sufficiently familiar with the language of comics” (System 95), an assertion with neocolonial implications for knowledge in its assumption that the language of comics, as described by certain white male European and North American practitioners, is universal. Who, in this formulation, is fit to judge competency? Are all competent readers the same always and everywhere? Or do these three books and countless others suggest the possibility of radically different readers and readings according to a politics of location? If, as Rich asserts, one of the prerequisites for ethical engagement with our media objects is awareness of the places we are reading from and the conditions we have taken for granted, then it is important to approach the comics page as a technical and artistic space that is neither conventional nor culturally regular but is rather ­subject to the transcultural twists and spatial turns of diverse political communities.

Reading Spaces: The Politics of Page Layout   91

Notes 1. Thierry Groensteen similarly enumerates a roster of contradictory definitions and avows, “So great is the diversity of what has been claimed as comics, or what is claimed today under diverse latitudes, that it has become almost impossible to retain any definitive criteria that is universally held to be true” (System 14). 2. For a concise explanation of differences between image-text forms, see Fusanosuke. 3. See Miller and Beaty 10–11. 4. McCloud’s singular focus on sequence may well stem from his desire to position himself as a direct inheritor of Will Eisner’s mantle as comics practitioner-theorist (Groensteen “Definitions,” 105). Eisner’s book Comics and Sequential Art provides McCloud with the starting point for his own definition of comics. Such a focus may also represent a direct rebuttal to the greatest bugbear of American comics, Fredric Wertham, who claimed that reading comics, because it involved merely gazing at pictures as opposed to true literacy, would lead to “linear dyslexia” (in Hatfield 34). 5. For Genette, certain forms—the photonovel or bande dessinée—necessitate a sequential or “successive” or “diachroni[c]” reading at the same time as a “global” or “synchroni[c]” view (77). 6. As in Eisner’s statement, “This, ideally, is the normal flow of the reader’s eye” [emphasis added] (41). 7. Given the format of al-Ali’s comics, which were most frequently rectangular one-panel political cartoons with a horizontal orientation, one may be tempted to read a formal ­correlation into some of Abdelrazaq’s paginal compositions, especially as they predominantly utilize the entire width of the page, appearing in key locations to mirror the shape of al-Ali’s rectangular cartoons. Yet the shape of the page as a full composition also reflects the standard screen size, recalling Baddawi’s digital origins and leading to further tensions in the shuttling between linear, tabular, and cultural reading frameworks. 8. As Judith Ostrowitz writes, “Yahgulanaas is engaged with the illumination of spaces that have previously been considered empty, both in a physical sense and metaphorically. On one level, he connects his peopling of these voids with a denial of the European legend that North America was ‘an empty space’ when it was first encountered, because the realities of the so-called savages that inhabited this continent were ‘uncivilized’ and therefore negligible” (84). 9. “Formlines suggest an all knowing ability. We see the form suggesting full understanding of the object. i use the term frameline—it suggests a way into something else—a door/window/entrance” (correspondence with author).

Works Cited Abdelrazaq, Leila. Baddawi. Just World Books, 2015. Baetens, Jan, and Hugo Frey. The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. Cambridge UP, 2015. Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Houghton-Mifflin, 2006. Beronä, David A. “Pictures Speak in Comics without Words: Pictorial Principles in the Work of Milt Gross, Hendrik Dorgathen, Eric Drooker and Peter Kuper.” The Language of Comics:

92   Katherine Kelp-Stebbins Word and Image, edited by Robin Varnum and Christina Gibbons, UP Mississippi, 2001, pp. 19–39. Carrier, David. The Aesthetics of Comics. Penn State UP, 2000. Chute, Hillary. “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.” PMLA, vol. 123, no. 2, 2008, pp. 452–465. Cohn, Neil. “Navigating Comics: An Empirical and Theoretical Approach to Strategies of Reading Comic Page Layouts.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 4, 2013, https://www.frontiersin. org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00186/full. Drucker, Johanna. “Graphic Devices: Narration and Navigation.” Narrative, vol. 16, no. 2, 2008, pp. 121–139. Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Poorhouse Press, 1985. Fresnault-Deruelle, Pierre. “From Linear to Tabular.” The French Comics Theory Reader, edited by Ann Miller and Bart Beaty, Leuven UP, 2014, pp. 121–138. Genette, Gérard. Figures III. Seuil, 1972. Gray, Brenna Clarke. “Border Studies in the Gutter: Canadian Comics and Structural Borders.” Canadian Literature, vol. 228/229, 2016, pp. 170–187. Groensteen, Thierry. Comics and Narration. Translated by Ann Miller, UP Mississippi, 2013. Groensteen, Thierry. “Definitions.” The French Comics Theory Reader, edited by Ann Miller and Bart Beaty, Leuven UP, 2014, pp. 93–114. Groensteen, Thierry. “A Few Words about The System of Comics and More . . .” European Comic Art, vol. 1, no. 1, 2008, pp. 87–93. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen, UP Mississippi, 2007. Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York UP, 2005. Harrison, Richard. “Seeing and Nothingness: Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Haida Manga, and a Critique of the Gutter.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, vol. 43, no. 1, 2016, pp. 51–74. Harvey, R. C. “Comedy at the Juncture of Word and Image: The Emergence of the Modern Magazine Gag Cartoon Reveals the Vital Blend.” The Language of Comics: Word and Image, edited by Robin Varnum and Christina Gibbons, UP Mississippi, 2001, pp. 75–96. Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. UP Mississippi, 2005. Hayman, Greg, and Henry John Pratt. “What Are Comics?” A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts, edited by David Goldblatt and Lee Brown, Pearson Education, 2005, pp. 419–424. Horrocks, Dylan. “Inventing Comics: Scott McCloud’s Definition of Comics.” Hicksville, 2001, http://www.hicksville.co.nz/Inventing%20Comics.htm. Kunzle, David. The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825. U of California P, 1973. Lefèvre, Pascal. “The Conquest of Space: Evolution of Panel Arrangements and Page Layouts in Early Comics Published in Belgium (1880–1929).” European Comic Art, vol. 2, no. 2, 2009, pp. 227–252. Lefèvre, Pascal. “The Importance of Being ‘Published’: A Comparative Study of Different Comics Formats.” Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics, edited by Anne Magnussen and Hans-Christian Christiansen, Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000, pp. 91–105. Levell, Nicola. “Site-Specificity and Dislocation: Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas and his Haida Meddling.” Journal of Material Culture, vol. 18, no. 2, 2013, pp. 93–116.

Reading Spaces: The Politics of Page Layout   93 Mangles, Alex. “Stitching Out Life in a Graphic Memoir.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 8 June 2015, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/stitching-out-a-life-in-graphic-memoir-baddawi/#!. Masalha, Nur. “Naji al-Ali, Edward Said and Civil Liberation Theology in Palestine: Contextual, Indigenous and Decolonising Methodologies.” Holy Land Studies, vol. 11, no. 2, 2012, pp. 109–134. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Kitchen Sink Press, 1993. Meskin, Aaron. “Defining Comics?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 65, no. 4, 2007, pp. 369–379. “Michael Yahgulanaas—Red: A Haida Manga.” YouTube, 14 Oct. 2010, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=dBbLiEqUZ-g. Miller, Ann, and Bart Beaty. “General Introduction.” The French Comics Theory Reader, edited by Ann Miller and Bart Beaty, Leuven UP, 2014, pp. 9–14. Miodrag, Hannah. Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form. UP Mississippi, 2013. Natsume Fusanosuke. “Pictotext and Panels: Commonalities and Differences in Manga, Comics, and BD.” Translated by Jessica Bauwens-Sugimoto, Comics Worlds and the World of Comics: Towards Scholarship on a Global Scale, edited by Jaqueline Berndt, International Manga Research Center, Kyoto Seika University, 2010, pp. 37–51. Ostrowitz, Judith. “Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas: It Looks Like Manga.” Objects of Exchange: Social and Material Transformation on the Late Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast, edited by Aaron Glass, Yale UP, 2011, pp. 79–88. Peeters, Benoît Case, planche, récit: Lire la bande dessinée. Casterman, 1998. Peeters, Benoît. “Four Conceptions of the Page.” Translated by Jesse Cohn, ImageText, vol. 3, no. 3, 2007, http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v3_3/peeters. Rich, Adrienne. “Notes toward a Politics of Location.” Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985, W. W. Norton, 1994, pp. 210–231. Siegert, Bernhard. Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Fordham UP, 2015. Spiers, Miriam Brown. “Creating a Haida Manga: The Formline of Social Responsibility in Red.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, vol. 26, no. 3, 2014, pp. 41–61. White, Michelle. “Red: A Haida Manga.” Multiversity Comics, 23 Aug. 2016, http://www .­multiversitycomics.com/reviews/red-a-haida-manga. Witek, Joseph. “The Arrow and the Grid.” A Comics Studies Reader, edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, UP Mississippi, 2009, pp. 149–156. Yahgulanaas, Michael Nicoll. Red: A Haida Manga. Douglas & McIntyre, 2010.

chapter 6

Com ics as A rt David M. Ball

The history of comics as art might justifiably be regarded as a short and undistinguished one. Although much ink has been spilled trying to delineate the medium, comics’ seriality, reproducibility, and disposability have often remained the defining features of ­comics for scholars, contravening the auratic singularity usually accorded the works displayed in a museum or purchased in a gallery. Comics artists themselves, marching under the banner of “cartoonists” for precisely the term’s low-cultural resonances, have often been the very ones to most forcefully make claims for comics’ distance from high art. Many of those creators, first drawn to the Sunday funnies at the outset of comics’ modern history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, did so because other lucrative avenues, whether in galleries or on the pages of illustrated magazines, were closed off to them by way of racial, ethnic, and religious biases in the art and publishing worlds. More recently, underground cartoonists such as Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman delighted in comics’ visual and semiotic genealogy in caricature in order to upend cultural pieties of taste, morality, and propriety—all of which were seen to be embodied in the museum. Even in this current era of comics’ new-found respectability, many of the most visible and celebrated practitioners and definers of the medium, such as Ivan Brunetti in his Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, find its foundations not in an artistic notion of craft or a literary ideal of narrative but in the unpretentious ­keystone of the doodle, simple and unassuming, however semiotically persuasive. The “ongoing symbolic exclusion of comics from the domain of consecrated art,” Bart Beaty argues in Comics Versus Art, is “a modernist legacy that persists even in these postmodern times” (7). His is a Bourdieuian reading of comics as a field of cultural production enmeshed in a network of cultural hierarchies, in which comics finds itself perpetually at the bottom. Carter Ratcliff, writing in Art International as late as 1971, a full decade after Roy Lichtenstein began incorporating comics into his compositions, could still aver: “Comic strips, like consumer products which differ only in the images provided for them in packaging and advertising, are identical from the point of view of a concern with ­perception and conscious meaning” (53). Bernard Denvir, in the same year and ­publication, sniffed:

Comics as Art   95 A decade or so ago [an exhibition of comics art] would have been regarded as an exercise in social anthropology, but now media have become so free of judgment values, and categories of experience have become so interrelated, that by implication this must be regarded as an aesthetic rather than a behavioural demonstration. . . . Essentially urban in outlook and feeling, often sadistic, not only in their storyline, but in the actual manipulation of their imagery, comic strips have for more than a century expressed the longings, the resentments, the fears and the ambitions of the verbally unsophisticated . . . they have expressed an attitude rather than an ideology; always their aesthetic and social assumptions have been implicit rather than overtly expressed. (45)

In such estimations, no volume of awards or recognitions, prizes or critical acclaim, could bridge the long-standing and historical high/low divide between art and ­comics.1 And if Ratcliff ’s and Denver’s voices feel antiquated now, if these walls could  be said to be coming down, it is as a marked departure from an otherwise ­long-­standing division. Yet it is precisely this vexed relationship between comics and art that offers such a rich canvas for considering the intertwined histories of both in the past 130 years. A deep dive into the modern underpinnings of the medium—and here I show my biases toward a focus on US newspapers in the 1890s and after and my blindness most explicitly toward fascinating parallel histories on the European continent and in Japan—reveals a rich intermingling of modernist art and the medium of the comics, even in its most narrowly defined iterations.2 As a governing figure for these connections, it bears remembering that the very etymology of cartoon is the French carton, a “drawing on stout paper, made as a design for a painting of the same size,” often literally the underdrawing for a finished work of art.3 The doodle, as the substrate of comics writ large, literally lies underneath the conventionally austere work of art. Indeed, much as the history of modernist US authors is also a history of journalists, so, too, is the history of modernist US artists also a history of cartoonists. Rebecca Zurier’s Picturing the City makes an early, compelling case for seeing the art of the Ashcan School during the first modern ferment of newspaper comics as bound up in its artists’ cartooning, and we are beginning to see sustained work emerging that links comics and modernism more broadly.4 Scholars routinely disregard modern comics’ emergence alongside film and animation as a technology of vision that radically disrupted the way artists, authors, and audiences recorded their world. Thus, at the turn of the twentieth century, when comics were taking the forms they most closely resemble today, they were being composed by many of the same vanguard artists who were transforming the visual arts. So, to cite just a single example of the possibilities of seeing comics as an inextricable part of the artistic disruptions of the last 130 years, consider the creative collaborations of Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso. Much has been made of the influence of African masks and Iberian sculpture (Figure  6.1) on the completion of Picasso’s ­celebrated 1905–1906 portrait of Stein (Figure 6.2), a bridging of putatively high and low culture that vivified a particularly modern way of seeing and knowing a newly turbulent world. Yet, as related in Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Picasso

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Figure 6.1 Iberian sculpture, head of a man, limestone. Musée d’Archéologie Nationale, St-Germain-en-Laye, France. https://musee-archeologienationale.fr/phototheque/oeuvres/sculptureiberique-tete-masculine_sculpture-technique_calcaire-d6c5a99a-8026-4377-9dae-049d426de5bf.

and Stein imported the Sunday funnies from America to Paris throughout these years and lovingly passed their pages from one to the other. Indeed, Stein namechecks Rudolph Dirks’s The Katzenjammer Kids specifically in the Autobiography. Dirks himself was an example of both an accomplished cartoonist and a modernist painter—The Katzenjammer Kids had been running in Hearst syndicate papers for seven years by the time of the painting of Stein’s portrait, and Dirks would go on to appear in the transformative Armory Show of 1913. Yet in looking closely at Ma Katzenjammer as she appeared in the newspapers Stein and Picasso were reading and sharing, it is difficult not to see this as an inside joke between the two based on Stein’s resemblance to Ma Katzenjammer (Figure 6.3). How might we have to rewrite some of our histories of comics and art, comics as art, if we were to read the mask dropped over Stein’s face as deriving from the Sunday ­funnies as much as from the primitivist wellsprings of African masks and Iberian sculpture?5 Might we also have to alloy Stein’s clipped syntax to the comics page or more fully understand the long careers of cartoonist-artists such as George Luks, Dirks’s ­fellow Ashcan artist and cartoonist in the rival Pulitzer papers, and Lyonel Feininger, trailblazing early cartoonist in The Kin-Der-Kids and Wee Willie Winkie’s

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Figure 6.2  Detail of Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, 1905–1906. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/488221?searchField=All&sortBy =relevance&ft=stein+picasso&offset=0&rpp=20&pos=1.

World and later foundational member of the Bauhaus School faculty?6 To trace all of these leads just within these few decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth ­centuries would require a full monograph. It would have to include the novels in woodcuts of Lynd Ward, representations of race in serial art from the Yellow Kid to Krazy Kat to the serial art of Jacob Lawrence, and the wide-scale appropriations of modernist strategies by contemporary graphic novelists.7 With this deep imbrication of comics and art from the earliest decades in mind— amid the modernist move away from representation and narrative and toward abstraction, well before the more recognized postmodern incorporation of comics in artists such as Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol—I’d like to make a parallel and more precise claim in this chapter about the physical, juxtaposed display of comics and art in museum and gallery settings. Such displays, I argue, were (and in many cases still are) a curatorial containment strategy that perpetually fails. To pursue this claim is at the same time to assert that comics’ entrance into the art world, rather than a function of a postmodern turn and its contemporary reckoning, has been ongoing since the 1890s. Alongside these impulses, comics artists’ most vociferous disavowals of the prestige of high art have come from those most likely to be incorporated into its cultural strategies, and I’m

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Figure 6.3  Detail of Rudolph Dirks, “Mama Katzenjammer Makes a New Year’s Resolution; and Promptly Breaks It,” The Katzenjammer Kids, December 29, 1901. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, Ohio State University, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. https://library.osu.edu/dc/concern/generic_works/cn69m6368

thinking here of those artists most widely embraced by museums and galleries today: Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware.8 I write this with the knowledge that a very timely edited collection titled Comic Art in Museums is in production, edited by Kim Munson and forthcoming from the University Press of Mississippi, which will undoubtedly shape the critical conversation on these questions moving forward.9 Rather than a definitive history, then, I offer three telling examples that I think chart the ways in which museums and galleries have been unable to either fully disavow or fully integrate the connections between comics and art, comics as art, in the past century. Instead of seeing “a large degree of containment in the way comics are conceptualized by the art world,” as Beaty does (10), I regard comics’ seeming late entrance into museum

Comics as Art   99 and gallery spaces, even their halting contemporary acceptance, as the culmination of dialectical processes that started from comics’ modern beginnings and then extended modernist preoccupations into postmodernist contexts.10 One compelling beginning for this story, among many possible starting points, is the Armory Show of 1913, one of the first exhibitions, and certainly the largest, of modern art in the United States at that time. Not only were US cartoonist-painters such as Dirks, Luks, George Bellows, and John Sloan featured meaningfully, but the show’s most widely discussed painting has important relays with work in comics more broadly. Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (Figure 6.4) was a sensation, igniting public debate and launching countless imitations. As familiar as its innovations have become to us, it is important to remember that it demanded a new form of seeing for many viewers, strategies that were limned through the language of serial images and by the responses of newspaper cartoonists. The influence of the visual impact of Eadweard Muybridge’s and Étienne-Jules Marey’s serial photography in the simultaneity of ­comics’ maturity as a medium, modern art’s diremption of figure and ground, and film’s inauguration are all registered immediately in Duchamp’s canvas. Comics artists realized this as well, and the image was soon parodied, often lovingly, on the cartoon pages of New York newspapers and later around the country. Reprints of late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century comics such as Sunday Press’s Society Is Nix (Maresca) have amply demonstrated comics’ anarchic and bold experimentation in these early decades, often in advance of the Armory Show. And scholarly works such as Jared Gardner’s indispensable Projections have demonstrated how in these early decades contemporary audiences of both film and comics were sophisticated viewers of modernist narrative and visual strategies. So we needn’t trace Duchamp’s early cartoons at the Académie Julian or his signature “R. Mutt” stemming from a self-professed homage to Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff four years later on his urinal-cum-fountain to begin to see the role comics played at the Armory. As the research of Peter Sattler and the exhibition catalog for the 2013 “Armory Show at 100” have demonstrated, cartoons were the medium in which the public first digested the impact of Duchamp’s work.11 The most widely read cartoonists by 1913 already evinced a knowing regard of modernist art, not the least because the roles of ­artist and cartoonist so interpenetrated each other during the time. Whether it was through a contest to identify the painting’s figure via a newspaper write-in competition, a representation of a crowded subway passage (Figure 6.5), a futurist representation of a home run, or a winking acknowledgment of the gendered divide between high and ­popular culture positing quilting as a modernist art, New York cartoonists’ responses to Duchamp were those of recognition for no other reason than that his techniques were aligned with their own.12 There are literally dozens of these examples in 1913 newspapers alone, and a cartoon such as Frank King’s “A Few Futurist Fantasies” (Figure 6.6) not only resonated with ongoing work in the medium but also reemerged in fascinating moments in the works of King as well as many other of the early twentieth century’s most ambitious creators (Figure 6.7).

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Figure 6.4  Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912. Philadelphia Museum of Art. https://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/51449.html?mulR=1060936706|1.

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Figure 6.5  J.  F.  Griswold, “The Rude Descending a Staircase (Rush Hour at the Subway).” New York Evening Sun, March 20, 1913.

If comics and art can be seen as being in conversation with each other from the start, perhaps the most discussed exhibition among attempts to consider the histories of the two together was Kirk Varnedoe’s debut as chief curator of painting and sculpture at the

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Figure 6.6  Frank King, “A Few Futurist Fancies.” Chicago Tribune, March 16, 1913.

Museum of Modern Art in New York: 1990’s “High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture.” Coming more than fifty years after the museum’s first simultaneous display of art and comics—Alfred Barr’s 1937 exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism,” with its dialectical incorporation and distancing of Walt Disney, James Thurber, and Rube Goldberg astride more recognized works in the permanent collection—“High and Low” extended the museum’s simultaneous interest in and ambivalence toward comics as a recognized art form. The show was hardly a critical success. Derided by some as an unseemly pairing of modern art with broad concepts of caricature, comics, and advertising, it was equally lambasted by comics artists as a subordination and marginalization of the role of comics in the connections it purported to trace.13 This cleaving (in both senses of that suggestive contronym) of the terms in the ­exhibition’s title is replicated by the text that greeted visitors at the entrance of the ­exhibition itself: Modern art liberated, as no art has before, the private imagination of the artist. Yet again and again, modern artists of all kinds have turned for inspiration to the public life around them, and have adopted motifs and styles from commerce, entertainment and the languages of the streets. This exhibition explores inspirations, influences, and shared vocabularies that painters and sculptors have found within four areas of exchange. Part I, on this floor, treats Advertising, including newspapers, billboards, shop windows, and catalogues, up to about 1968. Part II, on the lower level, deals with Graffiti, Caricature, and Comics, and concludes with a separate ­section of contemporary art.14

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Figure 6.7  Frank King, Gasoline Alley. Boston Herald, May 10, 1931.

The exhibition wall promises the intersection of high and low, private and public, but deploys a language of division and separation, one that presumes a containment and quite literal subordination of the very “public life” it seeks to explore. Comics here are swept under the banner of commerce and entertainment as opposed to the ­precincts of the “private imagination” reserved for the fine arts, providing inspiration and influence but not occupying a shared stage. Varnedoe’s extraordinarily ambitious agenda to account for the popular underpinnings of modern art undoes some of this very work in its own organizational strategy and rhetorical framing. And in so doing, the exhibition extends the containment of comics begun by Barr and other ­gatekeepers of artistic

104   David M. Ball s­ tandards of excellence, often in the very moment it seeks to complicate such distinctions in the first place.15 This ambivalence is evident on the walls of the museum as well. As is often the case with the display of comics art, original art or the comics themselves were often removed from the dominant sight lines of the exhibition, tucked away in alcoves or placed protectively in vitrines. On one hand, this is a simple function of scale: the Lichtenstein canvases included in the show purposefully dwarf the comic books from which he lifted his images (Figure 6.8).16 Yet the subordination encoded in the exhibition description here appears on the exhibition walls; comics in “High and Low,” in the words of Michael Kimmelman, “seem hardly more than captions below the paintings and sculptures they purportedly influenced, as if the curators wanted at all costs to avoid the impression of equating high and low” (qtd. in Munson, “Beyond High and Low” 287). Concomitantly, by virtue of their being torn from their original context in reproduction, in primarily being seen as opposed to being read, such displays of both original comics art and selected pages from complete comics might not be seen as comics properly speaking at all. It could thus be argued that every instance of comics in the museum is a profoundly violent act of decontextualization to the medium; comics’ diminishment in spaces such as MoMA would be a natural outgrowth of this very decontextualization, despite even the best intentions of the exhibition’s curators.17

Figure 6.8  Installation view, “High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture.” October 7, 1990–January 15, 1991. Photographic Archive, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, IN1559.50. Photograph by Mali Olatunji. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1764? installation_image_index=49.

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Figure 6.9  Installation view, “High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture.” October 7, 1990–January 15, 1991. Photographic Archive. Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, IN1559.44. Photograph by Mali Olatunji. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1764? installation_image_index=43.

Yet in other portions of the exhibition and its accompanying catalog, a more equitable correlation of comics and art is achieved. Herriman is given substantial wall space, standing in commensurate juxtaposition and framing with Feininger’s 1910 Uprising (Figure 6.9). Varnedoe and Gopnik’s exhibition catalog likewise instructs us: “In his comic strips . . . Feininger found his own language for the first time. [This language] was fully achieved for the first time in his comics, and quickly rebounded into his paintings” (167). Visually and rhetorically, comics here are no longer subordinate to the fine arts but commensurate and co-constitutive as cultural praxes. It is in moments like these in which the catalog’s avowal that “the comic strip is in many ways not a precursor to modern art but another kind of modern art, and shares many of the same motives, forms, and dreams” (153) truly bears fruit, where the barrier rhetoric that ­frequently divides comics and art in museum and gallery spaces begins to productively erode. A compelling bookend to these considerations of comics and art is the 2013 Ad Reinhardt exhibition at the David Zwirner Gallery, exactly one hundred years after the debut of the Armory Show.18 Reinhardt might as well be the spokesperson for the antithesis to the vision I’ve put forward of comics as imbricated in the history of modern art. Reinhardt, most famous for his cruciform black paintings that he focused on almost exclusively from 1953 to his death in 1967, described his work as a “free, unmanipulated and unmanipulatable, useless, unmarketable, irreducible, unphotographable, unreproducible, inexplicable icon” (Art as Art 83). Not our working definition of comics, by any means. As the only member of the first generation of New York School painters to begin

106   David M. Ball as an abstract artist and never deviate from abstraction in his work on canvas, Reinhardt is a much less likely figure for his connection to comics as, say, Philip Guston, who in his return to representation and figurative legibility has served as a signal influence on ­contemporary creators in comics.19 Reinhardt was insistent on the necessity of a strict divide between high art and popular culture, which he regarded again and again in his writings as a mortal peril to the aspirations of an untrammeled art. If anything, Reinhardt’s works have come to be viewed as the epitome of an “art for art’s sake” ethos— not least so by Reinhardt himself—as, in the words of Barbara Rose, the “last indigestible manifestations of the traditional avant-garde,” works so shocking to a mass audience that they continued to be defaced when placed on exhibition in front of a putatively uncomprehending public (in Reinhardt, Art as Art xii). We might hear echoes of the ­cultural misrecognition that accompanied Duchamp’s nude here, Reinhardt standing as the terminal point of a modernist, avant-garde trajectory. How, then, to square this analogous barrier rhetoric against expression, verbal and ­visual, in Reinhardt’s “last paintings” with the fact that Reinhardt was a practicing, and I’d even venture to say, along with Robert Storr, a bravura cartoonist?20 Reinhardt’s earliest extant work is entirely made up of cartoons he did in grade school and college, which evince both a sharp visual wit and a thorough study of the formal and generic conventions of newspaper strips. First in college and then for the WPA, he did design and illustration work, and subsequently, most crucially for my reading here, he began a series of comics instructing readers in how to perceive advances in modern art and abstraction. Perhaps most famously, he signified on Barr’s famous 1936 flow chart of modernism’s sinuous genealogy in his slapstick “How to Look at Modern Art in America” a decade later (Figure 6.10). On the surface, the Zwirner gallery holds Reinhardt’s black paintings, oracular and austere, in their own nave, silently separate from the riotous excesses of the cartoons. The gallery’s two separate rooms seem premised on a clean division between the magazine comics and the black canvases (Figures 6.11 and 6.12). We might be tempted to read the cartoons thus as either a stage through which Reinhardt passed on the path toward his last paintings or a purged representational impulse that could then be held separate from the canvases. Yet I would point toward a chronology Reinhardt wrote of his life as part of his 1966 solo exhibition of 120 paintings at the Jewish Museum, which would serve as his final major retrospective during his life. There Reinhardt placed comics at the center of his own life story, well after the moment in which he putatively has abandoned the medium: 1915 Gets crayons for birthday, copies “funnies,” Moon Mullins, Krazy Kat, and Barney Google. . . . 1944 Is first artist to use collage in daily newspaper (after Max Ernst).. . . 1946 Attacks E. E. Cummings for comments on Krazy Kat. . . . 1950 Makes cartoon called “Abstraction Crowned at the Whitney.” . . . 1956 Makes last cartoon, a mandala. . . . (Art as Art 5–8)

Reinhardt is certainly not a reliable narrator here: Moon Mullins and Barney Google both postdate 1915, and the intimation that the two-year-old Reinhardt could copy Herriman

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Figure 6.10  Ad Reinhardt, “How to Look at Modern Art in America.” P.M., June 2, 1946.

strains credulity. So, too, I’d argue, does the notion that Reinhardt safely abandoned ­comics at the inception of his long, final black period in 1956, returning, to cite one example, to his tree of modern art for ARTnews in 1961. So while Cummings sins by offering a rendition of Krazy that “makes it all simple and clear as a crystal,” those capital sins of expression and representation, the very representational impulse of Reinhardt’s comics, continue to exert a force over even Reinhardt’s last accounts of his own artistic practice. So to briefly do a reading of Reinhardt’s signature gag (Figure 6.13), the accusatory abstract painting that responds to an uncomprehending viewer, “What do you represent?”—a gag Reinhardt would repeat and revise throughout his comics oeuvre, nailed to his genealogical tree of modern art or peeking out from the margins of his other compositions—the joke works precisely because the putatively inert, meaningless, antirepresentational object becomes anthropomorphized. Reinhardt has no choice but to rely on expression here, in the indication of speech, the caricatural face and feet given the canvas, even the use of serial images themselves, to give movement to his ideas. Rather than a betrayal of his notions of “art as art,” however, the expression comics allow might well be viewed as the animating impulse behind even his most austerely abstract

108   David M. Ball

Figure 6.11  Installation view, “Ad Reinhardt,” November 7–December 18, 2013. David Zwirner Gallery. https://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/ad-reinhardt#/installation-views.

Figure 6.12  Installation view, “Ad Reinhardt,” November 7–December 18, 2013. David Zwirner Gallery. https://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/ad-reinhardt#/installation-views.

works. The black paintings’ cruciform shape resembles nothing so much as the panel structure of a comics page composition, as revealed in Reinhardt’s sketches of these paintings (Figure 6.14). And it was these sketches that stood in a chancel leading the exhibition goer’s sight line from the comics to the black paintings in the Zwirner gallery (Figure  6.12).

Comics as Art   109

Figure 6.13  Detail of Ad Reinhardt, “How to Look at a Cubist Painting.” P.M., January 27, 1946.

Reinhardt’s comics, writing, and painting alike rely on the creative constraints and ­generative devices of anaphora and repetition, the constitutive seriality of comics as form, represented even in those moments when the black paintings are exhibited alongside one another or, in perhaps the gesture that most visibly bridges Reinhardt’s comics and canvases, the exhibition in 1966 of his 75 Personal Sketches of Paintings (Figure 6.15). Comics here are literally the underpainting of the canvases—the carton, if you will— the expressive substrate on which abstraction is applied to the canvas. We might see that relationship as either interred or foundational; artists, cartoonists, and curators alike have done both. Yet acknowledging such links between comics and the fine arts in their joint exhibition history, even in the most unlikeliest of places, offers us an opportunity to reconsider and, in so doing, enrich both.

110   David M. Ball

Figure 6.14  Ad Reinhardt, sketches of black cruciform paintings, ca. 1966.

Figure 6.15  Ad Reinhardt, 75 Personal Sketches of Paintings, 1966.

Comics as Art   111

Notes 1. For the most renowned of these dismissals, see Greenberg. 2. My focus on post-1890 cartoons and comics in the United States is one set of blinders to limn a more branching and vast field of inquiry. Comics histories typically reach back at least until Rodolphe Töpffer and the first half of the nineteenth century in Europe, and the fascinating parallels on the continent and in Japan remain just two of the most visible comics cultures established globally. 3. Oxford English Dictionary. 4. Among the crucial studies in this regard, see Gardner, Roeder, and the essays collected in the special section on “Comics and Modernism” in the Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 39, no. 2, 2016. 5. Varnedoe and Gopnik sidle up to this argument, if seemingly unable to make it forthrightly: “we know that Picasso adored the early comics—especially The Katzenjammer Kids and Swinnerton’s Little Jimmy—and though there may be some relation between the simplified outline drawing of Synthetic Cubism and the style of the early comics, we need not insist upon a formal affinity in order to detect the affinity of spirit” (167). 6. For an engaging account of Feininger and an excellent example of the vexed display of ­comics alongside the plastic arts in his solo exhibition at the Whitney, see Haskell. 7. For Ward, see Ball, “Lynd Ward’s Modernist ‘Novels in Woodcuts.’ ” For the Yellow Kid, see Ball, “From Immigrants to Privateers.” For a groundbreaking biography and history of George Herriman’s contributions to the medium, see Tisserand. For Lawrence’s engagement with, and resemblance to, comics in his serial art, see Hills. 8. The partial list of exhibitions includes Crumb shows at the Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany (2004), Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (2005), David Zwirner (2007), the Frye Art Museum (2008), Musée d’Art Moderne (2012), and the Seattle Art Museum (2016, as comics’ sole emissary alongside graphic masters Dürer, Rembrandt, Hogarth, Goya, and Picasso), among others; Spiegelman’s work in MoMA (1991–1992) and in the internationally touring Co-Mix retrospective (2013–2015); Chris Ware first at the Whitney Biennial (2002) and later at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2006), Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery (2007), and Art Institute Chicago (2014), among others. All three anchor the canonbuilding Masters of American Comics (Carlin et al.), an exhibition ­critiqued for its exclusion of women and cartoonists of color, omissions that similarly afflict this account. Recent solo exhibitions from artists such as Alison Bechdel and Roz Chast and the Library of Congress’s Drawn to Purpose: American Women Illustrators and Cartoonists (Kennedy) follow the corrective work of Trina Robbins’s Pretty in Ink in opening up museums and gallery to underrepresented artists. The dominant exhibition history of comics in no way accords with the diversity of its contemporary creators. Much work remains to be done. 9. In anticipation of the book’s publication, Munson’s extant work remains the most meaningful scholarly contribution to the study of comics in the museum. See Munson, “Beyond High and Low” and “The Galleries.” 10. I make this argument with the knowledge that the very division between comics and art made here might be productively troubled, from stained glass and the stations of the cross, to the serial art of William Hogarth and Thomas Cole, through ukiyo-e and the phantasmagoria of Takashi Murakami. 11. Sattler’s work remains in manuscript, but his encyclopedic knowledge of comics of this era and the sophistication of their narrative and aesthetic techniques deeply informs my understanding of this period. For an example of these insights, see Sattler, “Ballet Méchanique.”. For an analysis of cartoonists’ responses to the Armory Show, see Kushner et al.

112   David M. Ball 12. See Kushner et al. for these and further examples. 13. The most famous of these disavowals can be found in Spiegelman’s scathing comics review of the exhibition, “High Art Lowdown.” 14. October 7, 1990–January 15, 1991. Photographic Archive, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, IN1559.2. Photograph by Mali Olatunji. https://www.moma.org/calendar/ exhibitions/1764?installation_image_index=1. 15. Such work, of course, is not confined to MoMA. Critiquing an exhibition of comics at the downtown branch of the Whitney in 1983, David Deitcher ran his article under the header “A recent exhibition devoted to the complex, often antagonistic relation between comic strips and modem art submitted the comics to a paradigm of excellence derived from a fine-art tradition, thereby reinforcing rather than reducing the familiar distinction between high and popular culture” (101). For a description of this exhibition, see Munson, “Beyond High and Low.” 16. Art historians have likewise argued convincingly that Lichtenstein’s appropriation of comics reinforces the cultural division between putatively high and low art in his canvases. For one example of this argument, see “Lichtenstein’s Borrowed Spots” in Whiting, or as Art Spiegelman has wryly noted in multiple contexts: Lichtenstein did as much for comics as Andy Warhol did for soup. 17. Put another way, in the words of Michael D. Picone, “This underscores the dilemma facing comic art, suspended as it is between the worlds of visual art and textual art, which follow opposing paths to legitimacy, commoditization and greatness. A work of visual art can be declared great (that is, collectable and museum worthy) and commoditized (that is, be assigned a high monetary value) only when it exists in the form of a unique or limitededition piece, usually of suitably large dimension for display, whereas for any work of textual art to be declared great, it must first be commoditized through mass production in small format” (44–45). The very scale of the modern museum, designed to display the towering canvases favored by abstract expressionists, could be said to disadvantage the exhibition of comics art as well. For these reasons, comics, when they are displayed, are  frequently displayed in comics-specific, often creator-specific, sites such as the Charles M. Schulz Museum, the Ghibli Museum, and the Hergé Museum. As a consequence, these institutions rarely exhibit comics alongside the plastic arts, deferring this comparative work to conventional museums and galleries and their relative distance from the concerns of cartoonists. For a thoughtful history of such institutions, see Munson, “The Galleries.” Andrei Molotiu mounts a compelling defense for the value of displaying original comics art in museums and galleries: “Touches of pro-white and of blue pencil, ghostly pentimenti of erased penciling, marginal notations, brushstrokes that reveal their speed and their directionality, penstrokes that seem to be in relief due to the thickness of the ink deposited—all these marks emphasize not only the inescapable presence of the artwork (a presence, which, given the shift of attention I am here proposing, can be felt as strongly as the impasto brushwork in a painting by Van Gogh or the chisel marks in a late, unfinished Michelangelo), but also the comics-creating process” (37). 18. To make such a leap is to pass over important exhibitions in the history of comics’ dialogue with the art museum. See particularly Carlin and Wagstaff, Wagstaff, and Marcoci. 19. Guston, consequently, was prominently featured in “High and Low.” 20. See Storr’s essay in the published collection of Reinhardt’s art comics, How to Look. Scholars such as Thomas Hess have been keen to keep significant distance between the comics and the late paintings: “The relationship of Reinhardt’s comics and satires to his

Comics as Art   113 painting is slight—apart from the obvious link to his collages of the 1940s. It could be said that as he took more and more out of his art in the 1950s, he put more and more into his satires. It was as if, while painting, he had a thirst for words and images, for immensely complicated iconologies, for direct communication in vulgar jokes, scholarly asides, ­erudite games of wit, Til Eulenspiegel pranks. As the paintings became more and more spare, the appetite for verbal complications increased. On the other hand, as his satires (and essays, lectures, conversations) became more and more fluent, erudite, poetic, noisy—jumbling shrill voices and pullulating images—he would turn to his paintings for calm and serene contemplation, leaving only the slightest jingle of a hue or a line in their voids. You could say that while he purified his paintings, he complicated his ­language” (47).

Works Cited Ball, David M. “From Immigrants to Privateers: The Curious Case of Hogan’s Alley and the Yellow Kid.” Immigration and Comics: Graphic Spaces of Remembrance, Transaction, and Mimesis, edited by Nhora Lucia Serrano, Routledge, forthcoming. Ball, David M. “Lynd Ward’s Modernist ‘Novels in Woodcuts’: Graphic Narratives Lost between Art History and Literature.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 39, no. 2, 2016, pp. 126–143. Barr, Alfred, editor. Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. Museum of Modern Art, 1936. Beaty, Bart. Comics versus Art. U of Toronto P, 2012. Brunetti, Ivan. Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice. Yale UP, 2011. Carlin, John, et al., editors. Masters of American Comics. Yale UP, 2005. Carlin, John, and Sheena Wagstaff. The Comic Art Show. Whitney Museum of American Art, 1983. Deitcher, David. “Comic Connoisseurs.” Art in America, vol. 72, 1984, pp. 100–107. Denvir, Bernard. “London Letter.” Art International, vol. 15, 1971, pp. 42–45. Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford UP, 2012. Greenberg, Clement. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Pollack and After: The Critical Debate, edited by Francis Frascina, Routledge, 2000, pp. 48–59. Haskell, Barbara. Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World. Yale UP, 2011. Hess, Thomas. “The Art Comics of Ad Reinhardt.” Artforum, vol. 12, no. 8, 1974, pp. 46–51. Hills, Patricia. Painting Harlem Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence. U of California P, 2010. Kennedy, Martha H., Drawn to Purpose: American Women Illustrators and Cartoonists. UP of Mississippi, 2018. Kushner, Marilyn S., et al. The Armory Show at 100: Modernism and Revolution. New York Historical Society, 2013. Marcoci, Roxana. Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making. Museum of Modern Art, 2013. Maresca, Peter, editor. Society Is Nix. Sunday Press, 2013. Molotiu, Andrei. “Permanent Ink: Comic Book and Comic Strip Original Art as Aesthetic Object.” International Journal of Comic Art, vol. 9, no. 2, 2007, pp. 24–42. Munson, Kim. “Beyond High and Low: How Comics and Museums Learned to Co-Exist.” International Journal of Comic Art, vol. 11, no. 2, 2009, pp. 283–298. Munson, Kim. Comic Art in Museums. UP of Mississippi, forthcoming.

114   David M. Ball Munson, Kim. “The Galleries.” The Secret Origins of Comics Studies, edited by Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan, Routledge, 2017, pp. 226–245. Picone, Michael D. “Comic Art in Museums and Museums in Comic Art.” European Comic Art, vol. 6, no. 2, 2013, pp. 40–68. Ratcliff, Carter. “New York Letter.” Art International, vol. 15, 1971, pp.50–54. Reinhardt, Ad. Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt. Edited by Barbara Rose. U of California P, 1991. Reinhardt, Ad. How to Look: Art Comics. Introduction by Robert Storr. Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2013. Robbins, Trina. Pretty in Ink: North American Women Cartoonists 1896–2010. Fantagraphics, 2013. Roeder, Katherine. Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay. UP of Mississippi, 2014. Sattler, Peter R. “Ballet Méchanique: The Art of George Herriman.” Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry, vol. 8, no. 2, 1992, pp. 133–153. Spiegelman, Art. “High Art Lowdown.” Artforum International, vol. 28, no. 4, 1990, p. 115. Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Harcourt Brace, 1933. Tisserand, Michael. Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White. Harper, 2016. Varnedoe, Kirk, and Adam Gopnik. High and Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture. Museum of Modern Art, 1990. Wagstaff, Sheena. Comic Iconoclasm. Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1988. Whiting, Cécile. A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture. Cambridge UP, 1997. Zurier, Rebecca. Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School. U of California P, 2006.

chapter 7

The Ca rtoon on th e Com ics Page A Phenomenology Christopher Pizzino

We commonly assume that areas of academic research are defined by the questions they pursue; the ubiquitous phrase field of inquiry expresses this assumption precisely. Of course, a field can also be shaped by what it does not question, including what it deems unworthy of curiosity within its own territory. The concern of this chapter is one such neglected question in comics studies: what is the relationship of the cartoon, as a kind of image, to comics as such? Following typical usage, the word cartoon here refers to images drawn in iconic fashion and encompasses a range of possibilities, from simplified, non-realistic renderings of real-world entities, such as Tintin and Archie, to figures like the Schmoo or Bone that, in the phrasing of E.H. Gombrich, offer “the illusion of life without any illusion of reality” (336). Gombrich notes the possibility of an affinity between cartoons and comics when discussing the relationship between comic strips by Rodolphe Töppfer and his pamphlet on physiognomy; in the latter, Töppfer showed that one “can evolve a pictorial language without any reference to nature, without learning to draw from a model” (339). For Gombrich, this basic theory of cartooning naturally sorts with the fact that Töppfer “invented the picture story, the comic strip” (336). A cursory glance at comics history post-Töppfer likewise suggests that the cartoon is linked to the medium’s popularity. While comics can be drawn in any fashion, iconic modes, especially for figures, are ­frequently dominant.1 At present, however, scholarly discussions of comics are largely incurious about this fact and usually ignore it. This lack of attention is not surprising; in the context of comics theory, the cartoon’s relationship to comics—if one bothers to notice it at all—seems uncontroversial, even uninteresting. In English-language comics studies, the cartoon’s place has been most clearly indicated by the work of Scott McCloud. One of the best-known passages in his landmark study Understanding Comics argues at length that cartoon figures encourage

116   Christopher Pizzino reader identification; McCloud asserts that “when you look at a photo or realistic ­drawing of a face . . . you see it as the face of another,” but “when you enter the world of the cartoon . . . you see yourself ” (36). It is easy to believe strong identification happens at the cultural level of fan attachment to cartoon characters, but McCloud goes further, arguing for spontaneous mental attachment in the act of comics reading. Two studies using EEG have provided some corroboration on this point, suggesting that readers do indeed reflexively identify with iconic figures more than with those drawn in realistic fashion (Choi et al.; Kendall et al.).2 Yet neither McCloud nor other scholars have established what, specifically, readers’ attachment to cartoons might have to do with comics as medium or form. And aside from this issue of identification pursued by McCloud and thus far tentatively confirmed by others, comics studies has rarely been curious about the relationship of the cartoon to comics. Indeed, McCloud himself keeps discussion of the cartoon quite separate from his ­definition of comics as such. His most compact formulation, which describes comics as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence,” lays down basic formal parameters—comics are made of images consecutively configured—but does not ­mention the way such images might be rendered (McCloud 9). When he discusses the ubiquity and power of the cartoon, McCloud notes broadly that “since viewer-identification is a specialty of cartooning, cartoons have historically held an advantage in breaking into world popular culture,” an observation that, like the rest of his discussion of cartoons, ultimately does not target comics in particular, since comics, advertising, and animated film can all draw on this “specialty” (42). Nor have other scholarly definitions of comics, before or after McCloud, given attention to the cartoon, prominent though it might be in comics readers’ experience. Again, such omission is not a surprise. Mentioning the cartoon in a formal definition of comics could easily look frivolous; at worst, it could be judged the kind of error that even beginning scholars of the arts know to avoid, mistaking a matter of form for a question of style. And thus, aside from McCloud’s now-familiar ideas, we seem barred from exploring one of the most obvious things one can observe about comics: while they can be drawn in any fashion, their appeal and meaningfulness for readers often seem strongly tied to iconic figures. The way forward is to explore the cartoon’s specific and powerful—though by no means exclusive—phenomenological relation to comics. Phenomenology, as discussed here, refers to philosophy of sense perception as pursued most famously in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. We are not concerned with how cartoons can be fitted into conventional schema of drawing, or into art history (which is Gombrich’s concern), but with how they exist in relation to the embodied experience of reading comics. The relation of cartoons to comics reading, it turns out, is actually not a matter of style, as the term is usually understood; however surprising this might be, the cartoon is no mere content of comics form like any other. The sections that follow explore interrelated aspects of the cartoon, as an entity on the page of a comic book before the eyes, and in the hands, of readers. Specific examples are not introduced until most of these aspects have been discussed. Several have been partly addressed by other scholars, whose observations are integrated into this larger account.

The Cartoon on the Comics Page: A Phenomenology   117 All aspects are not easily distinguished from one another; in a given comics reader’s experience, they may be indissoluble. They are separated here so that each can be expressed more clearly, but this segmentation is also, unfortunately, distortion of a kind, since each point is best understood in close relation to others. Cross-references, though inelegant, will be necessary as discussion proceeds. In the course of this discussion, two provisional conclusions should become clear. First, the cartoon as we encounter it on the comics page takes on qualities distinct from cartoons in other places, such as animated film and nonnarrative commercial contexts. I do not, of course, deny any overlap among usages of the cartoon in general or of particular iconic characters (many globally familiar cartoons have appeared in a variety of media); yet the cartoon on the comics page is a distinct phenomenological entity. Second, we must take fuller account of the way cartoons differ from pictorial norms in other, more respected visual media. Relative to the qualities we expect images to have in fine-arts traditions, several features of the cartoon can look perverse, which is possibly among the reasons comics have often been judged culturally delinquent and unqualified for equitable relations with older arts—or, implicitly, with literature, though this topic is less thoroughly addressed here.

Line: Creatorship and Otherness Comics scholars have understood the lines that make a cartoon both as a record of bodily movement and as an expression of creative sensibility. Jared Gardner describes the line of the comics artist as the “trace of the hand” and as a kind of “graphic enunciation” (the latter phrase is openly indebted to French comics theory).3 Gardner ultimately suggests that line is comparable to voice, “not the metaphorical ‘voice’ of narrative but the human voice of oral storytelling, of song, or performance” (66). Some aspects of Gardner’s comparison can easily be validated by experience; just as it is possible to distinguish similar but not identical human voices through moderate exposure, so comics reading teaches one easily to identify various cartoonists’ lines, even if they initially look alike. To understand a cartoonist’s marks as a “voiceprint,” Gardner suggests, is to understand more fully the line’s distinctive stylistic and narrative power in the context of comics (68). While acknowledging that “the implied author who presents herself to us through her choice of line is not identical to the author who signs the work,” Gardner insists on the “unique” and “idiosyncratic” quality of the comics creator’s line, which “brings us back to the embodied author” (66). For Gardner, the line vectors attention and meaning inexorably, if inexactly, toward the site of creation and to the body and the agency of the creator. But the comparison of line to voice could also herald another, more ­complex meaning. I need hardly insist that several avenues of research in a range of disciplines, from linguistics to psychoanalysis, have shown that voice is not the guarantee of a locatable speaker with a stable relationship to a listener; indeed, it can be a

118   Christopher Pizzino source of uncertainty and otherness. The line, not surprisingly, offers its own complex­ ities, somewhat different from those raised by voice. These complexities are ably expressed by Scott Marratto, in dialogue with MerleauPonty’s essay “Eye and Mind.” In that essay, speaking of the relation of line to the visible world, Merleau-Ponty insists that “there are no lines visible in themselves. . . . They are always between or behind whatever we fix our eyes upon,” and that visible phenomena “ ‘form themselves’ from themselves, and come into the visible as if from a pre-spatial world behind the scenes” (Merleau-Ponty 372). For Merleau-Ponty, the act of drawing does not “trace” form but rather discloses it, indirectly, as an always-existing aspect of the visible. Extending this line of thinking, Marratto claims that the “formative potency” of the line “is not straightforwardly attributable to the agency of a subject,” that is, of the line’s creator (Marratto 121). Rather, the line in the context of art reveals “the emergence of sense within the visible, not as a function of a power of judgment, representation or synthesis, attributable to an agentive subject, but as a function of an invisible potency emergent within the sphere of appearance itself ” (121). This “sphere of appearance,” implies Marratto, encompasses self and other, intentional creative action and general form-giving process. The cartoon certainly furthers this implication, perhaps even more powerfully than a realistic drawing does. To return to Gombrich’s phrasing, the cartoon’s power is “the illusion of life without any illusion of reality” (336). This power, it should be noted, is not possessed only by practiced experts (as with technical drawing) or the unusually gifted. As an activity, cartooning is non-specialized and widespread. It emerges from a formgiving impulse that the cartoonist does not invent, and need not hone to achieve basic effectiveness. Almost from the first, cartooning can be recognized as such, despite—or, if we extend Marratto’s line of thinking, because—it does not resemble reality. However, to return to Gardner’s concerns, the particular qualities of a given cartoonist’s line also do not need long practice to manifest themselves. In a beginner’s course on cartooning and comics making, each student’s line becomes distinguishable from all others (if it was not already) within the first few class meetings. The line of the cartoon thus manifests the “voiceprint” Gardner discusses even as it emerges out of an abundance inherent to visibility. If Marratto’s extension of Merleau-Ponty’s reasoning is valid—and can be further extended to iconic, nonrealistic figures—then the cartoonist’s line is always more than, and other to, its specific characteristics. However sensitively it may register its creative source, the cartoon is imbued with a form-shaping sense apart from a specific origin. For Marratto, the same might ultimately be said of any drawing; the artist’s line is always “an affirmation of a ceaseless generativity at the heart of the visible” that is elided by a focus on the mark maker as creative source (124). But in the case of the cartoon, the “generativity” Marratto discusses, emerging from “a pre-spatial world behind the scenes” (Merleau-Ponty 372), has no indexical connection to the observable world as rendered in more realistic drawing, even as it is bound to the specific qualities of a given cartoonist’s line, including its evident relationship to an embodied creator. The cartoon is undoubtedly the cartoonist’s “voice,” as Gardner insists, even as it partakes of the

The Cartoon on the Comics Page: A Phenomenology   119 broader “invisible potency” that Marratto describes. In this paradox—which makes the cartoonist’s line at once highly distinct and generally expressive of the power of line as such, without any reliance on observable reality either way—we have the first indication of an entity whose additional aspects must be specified.

Shape: Iconicity as Specificity Art historians have an elaborate array of terms and concepts for distinguishing one painter or painting from another. The terms used to describe the work of cartoonists are, by contrast, fewer and less precise. And while painting is generally conceived as an evolving, multifarious art open to new categories of artistic strength (Clement Greenberg’s discussions of modernism alone indicate this), cartooning is less easily subdivided by any critical vocabulary. Lynn Johnston’s soft, humane line probably calls for terms different from those appropriate for the jagged, punk line of Dianne DiMassa, but a far larger conceptual toolbox is needed to distinguish Nicolas Poussin from Johannes Vermeer, or Vermeer from Thomas Gainsborough. It would seem that iconic images, of whatever kind and drawn by whatever hand, can be grouped more closely together—at least as regards critical description—than realistic images (or, as Greenberg’s criticism reminds us, than modernist painting). This observation might appear merely tautological; as McCloud clearly indicates, ­relative similarities among iconic images are intrinsic to their all being iconic (29–31). However, as the foregoing discussion of courses on comics making indicated, this apparent commonality does not have the effect of making different iconic cartoons resemble one another. On the contrary, the cartoon demonstrates that stark iconicity is no barrier to a high degree of distinctiveness. The work of most well-known and widely read iconic cartoonists does not in any sense form a school or style. Many notable examples do not greatly resemble anything that came before them; nor, often, do they have any obvious descendants. This fact is, of course, complicated by the existence of highly recognizable cartoon figures that have been drawn by more than one hand—and, in the case of some ubiquitous corporate properties, have been drawn by hundreds. In the latter case, specifically in serialized comic books, additional complications arise concerning production method, such as the relationship among the penciller, inker, and colorist in producing an iconic effect. Moreover, various renderings of such figures are not particularly iconic at all; some occasionally veer toward realism. Thus, the relationship between the kind of iconicity discussed here and a broader kind that we might find in a given example of, say, Spider-Man requires further discussion. Confining our scope for the moment, we can see that iconic cartooning defies expectations by allowing for a high degree of distinction precisely where we would not expect to find it, in widely familiar figures composed of seemingly simple shapes. The art critic unschooled in the appreciation of cartoons but attempting to take them seriously for the

120   Christopher Pizzino first time will thus face an unpleasant and paradoxical challenge: entering a realm one has conceived of as limited and discovering that one’s own perception of that realm is, in fact, provincial.

Construction: Visible Parts, Indivisible Whole The science of vision teaches us that while some aspects of visual perception can vary a great deal from one person to another, other aspects typically do not. In this latter category is perception of part-whole relations. We have a capacity to see that whole entities, which we identify as such, are made up of parts. Further, which elements are perceived as parts—the leg of a chair, the brow of a face, the branches of a tree—vary little from one person to another. In other words, humans possessing the faculty of sight tend to see the same parts of the same wholes (Palmer 348–361). If this is the case for complex objects of perception, then certainly it ought to be true for a cartoon figure, all parts of which are perceptible at one glance. One ought to be able to break the figure apart, perceptually speaking, and attain a distinct sense of each of the lines and/or visual segments that constitute it. However, an experiential test of this proposition—I have conducted many such tests in the classroom—is likely to produce a different result from what vision science would lead us to expect. Presented with one of the world’s most ubiquitous comic-strip characters (perhaps especially if that character is most well known through drawings from a single hand), many readers have difficulty focusing on its parts. Rationally, this makes no sense; one should easily be able to focus on Charlie Brown’s right ear as a separate line—in any frontal view of the character, usually a curve resembling a capital C—and tell oneself, “This is a C-shaped pen line.” But the fact of the ear’s visibility, as a mark with a specific shape and delimitation relative to the other marks around it, seems contradicted by a strong sense that it is radically subordinated to—in effect, is an indivisible part of—the whole figure. Whatever causes this effect, it obviously has nothing to do with the realism afforded by painting techniques. The C-shaped line in question does not “look like” an ear any more than Charlie Brown “looks like” a boy. Yet there are cartoons whose parts feel as ­radically indissoluble to sense perception as the best trompe l’oeil paintings appear three-dimensional. It is difficult to say how and why some cartoons achieve this indissolubility, so that the eye seems to insist on seeing the figure as a whole. Yet the effect is common enough in reader experience to earn it a central place in our experience of cartoons—as central as perspectival and illusionistic effects are to representational painting. Notably, some cartoons seem to produce this effect far less strongly than others. Indeed, some iterations of a familiar character—for instance, continuations of a comic strip by a hand we feel is inferior to that of the earlier artist—can seem almost the opposite of a good rendering of the same character and come apart before our eyes. The effect I am describing is therefore not guaranteed by the general design of the figure; apparently,

The Cartoon on the Comics Page: A Phenomenology   121 the cartoonist must achieve it, one iteration at a time, by some unspecified technique for integrating clearly identifiable parts into seemingly self-evident wholes. Again, this technique has no relation to the realistic; in fact, a strong cartoon may strike us as somehow more ideally iconic and more distant from any notion of realism. To speak of a “strong” cartoon is, perhaps, weakly nonspecific. It is only a way of denoting an iconic figure that resists perception of its parts as separable from the whole. Cartoonists have often tried to say how and why some cartoons strike them as authentic, alive, or truthful (and why others strike them as inferior, inauthentic, etc.). The qualities they are attempting to describe, and to achieve, seem to have a paradoxical aspect that echoes what we see in line as such. While each part of a strong cartoon is perfectly visible (unlike illusionistic painting techniques), the coherence of the parts is curiously invisible, or at least highly resistant to perception and articulation. The effect of this coherence is as immediate as its cause is difficult to describe, which sorts well with stereotypes about the immediate, fetishistic appeal of mass culture, making the cartoon appear less fit for traditional models of artistic taste and cultivation.

Character: Signifier as Referent In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes eloquently describes the close relation of photographs to the realities of which they are visual records: “Show your photographs to someone—he will immediately show you his: ‘Look, this is my brother, this is me as a child,’ etc.; the Photograph is never anything but an antiphon of ‘Look,’ ‘See,’ ‘Here it is.’ . . . It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself ” (5). This tendency to conflate photographs with what they record enables a wearisome joke that the scholar of images can play on unwary students: if they identify a photograph they are shown as “a tiger,” one can pedantically declare that it is an image of a tiger. The simplest way to express one of the most unusual qualities of the cartoon is to note that it cannot be used for this stale witticism. An instance of Bill Watterson’s Hobbes is not an image of Hobbes in any ordinary sense of the word image; it is Hobbes. Semiotics typically distinguishes among signifier (in the case of an image, what is presented to the viewer, say, a photograph of a tiger), signified (all the meanings associated with tigers), and referent (the reality to which signified and signifier both are linked, actual tigers). But in the case of an iconic cartoon character, signifier and referent are one and the same. There is no Hobbes existing separate from the lines that form the character in Watterson’s strip, which amounts to saying that the only place we can find the referent for Hobbes is in the visual signifier itself. This fact is complicated, but by no means undone, by a character’s existence in other media, including film, television, drama, ­collectible toys, and so on. (The case of a Watterson character is thus, admittedly, a ­con­ven­ient one, since the creator has remained averse to licensing his work.) It may be argued that this idea about cartoons invents a referent where none exists and that Hobbes is merely a signifier, tied to a range of signified meanings, without any referent (except, at a great distance, tigers, or perhaps stuffed animals). Thus, one would

122   Christopher Pizzino have to argue that the referent of the word cartoon is a kind of signifier and nothing else. But this argument would have to ignore the various facets of the cartoon established in the foregoing discussion. When we consider the particular qualities of the cartoonist’s line on the page, the nearly indissoluble relation among the cartoon’s parts, and the powerfully distinctive quality of the iconic cartoon as a whole, we are accounting for more than a style of signification. We are, rather, describing a perceptually identifiable object with a material form and identifiable phenomenological characteristics. These characteristics are such that Hobbes, while certainly a signifier with a host of meanings attached, is also a referent—and, as indicated in the two previous sections, a highly ­distinctive one while also being highly iconic. This feature of the cartoon suggests the roots of what Hillary Chute, in Disaster Drawn, observes while discussing “the force, or force field, of the mark and line” in the context of comics: “The distilled register of the cartoon and the drawn line creates an enveloping, idiosyncratic world of expression” (168). The “enveloping” quality of this “world of expression” and the “force field” sustaining it may well derive in part from the self-validating characteristics of the cartoon, the power of which is expressed in a declaration (with much older roots) often uttered by E. C. Segar’s Popeye: “I yam what I yam an’ tha’s all what I yam” This might explain why, in the world of cartooning, we accept violations of the rules of linear time and of physics so readily. Perhaps it is no wonder that so many famous cartoon characters do not age, and that so many can fly. Whether or not the ubiquity of the ageless child and the superhero in comics derives from a collapse of signifier into referent, it is clear that, for cartoons, the entire category of “character” is inseparable from the phenomenology of comics reading. Readers familiar with Disaster Drawn will know that Chute’s discussion, one of the fullest accounts of the hand-drawn line in comics, is about graphic nonfiction, specifically works that bear witness to injustice and atrocity. The final quote above concludes thus: “idiosyncratic world of expression that can be powerful for witness” (168; emphasis added). Linking comics to weighty historical concerns obviously raises new questions about the relation between fictional and nonfictional cartoon figures (the latter, of course, do have referents outside themselves). But perhaps such questions would not feel urgent—nor would iconically rendered works of witness such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis be controversial—if the cartoon did not contain a potentially perverse self-referentiality that makes the relation of cartoon characters to the world outside their “force field” troubling from the start.

Value: Aura through Reproduction Aside from sketch work, iconic images properly “native” to the fine arts are relatively rare, and well-known cases of cartoonish images originating in painting (e.g., Paul Klee) seem not to encourage new traditions. There is, however, a tradition of putting cartoons from the world of comics on canvas, and one can easily identify instances of this p ­ ractice.

The Cartoon on the Comics Page: A Phenomenology   123 Even without narrative and generic references points indicated in the images themselves (often present in the canvases of Roy Lichtenstein), one is instantly aware of a different quality of line and a different kind of coherence, several aspects of which are discussed above. But another aspect of what we sense is a difference between two kinds of aura: that which is most common to the work of art as traditionally conceived and that which belongs to the cartoon on the comics page. The former kind is most famously expressed by Walter Benjamin in his discussion of technical reproduction’s effect on any original artwork: “The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated . . . that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art” (221). The artwork becomes less itself, less radiant with its own particularity, the more it is reproduced. We could ­easily argue that an original cartoon fresh from the hand of its maker possesses an aura like that of any other drawing and that this aura is likewise subject to diminution by reproduction. But this argument would ignore the bare fact that the cartoon is drawn, from the first, for duplication. From a technical standpoint, it tends to make fewer demands on technologies of reproduction. Unlike oil painting, the cartoon’s physical layering is minimal, and its schematic qualities seem more amenable to a variety of print media. These technical realities underlie a printed comic’s capacity to convey its maker’s bodily marking process and sensibility so strongly; likewise, the cartoon’s construction, shape, and other qualities (discussed above) seem to arrive intact in a reproduction, whatever changes in size or minor distortions caused by print quality may alter it from the original. In short, the cartoon seems ideally suited to the process of production-­­forreproduction; its fitness for duplication can rightly be seen as its own kind of aura. As Chute succinctly puts it, “Comics is a form invested in the auratic but an auratic that is divorced from fixed notions of the authentic” (“Comics Form” 112). This kind of aura is less texturally dense, perhaps, than that usually associated with the work of art as Benjamin understands it, but it is all the more durable for its simplicity and all the more distinctive for its perverse joining of the intimately bodily to the frankly mechanical, and commercial.

Relation: Hyper-Exteriority and Hyper-Interiority The uncanny self-referentiality of the cartoon, together with its persistent retention of its central qualities, even in reproduction (see the previous section), give it a distinctive presence before the eye. If we grasp this fact while glancing back to our starting point in McCloud’s identification theory, we can see the potential strangeness of the ­hyper-­exteriority of the cartoon as visual entity, given that it seems to evoke the hyper-­interiority of our

124   Christopher Pizzino relation to it. The cartoon’s assemblage of indissoluble lines resonates internally—even reflexively, as McCloud insists and as EEG studies have tentatively confirmed—in a manner that, as with other aspects of the cartoon, makes it susceptible to standard critiques of mass culture. The cartoon, one might argue, is commercial imagery at its most invasive: endlessly reproducible and ever ready to claim a place in our hearts. But to a critic advocating such critical suspicion, the truly disturbing thing about the cartoon must be its implication that mass production is actually compatible with rich appreciation of artistic craft and deeply meaningful relation to works of art. The ­cartoon-phobic critic would, I assume, be most scandalized by the fact that comics fans are capable of discriminating, often fastidious attention to a cartoonist’s work while, at the same time, their relation to the figures the cartoonist draws is passionately fetishistic. The cartoon invites critical apprehension even as we seize upon it libidinously. Admittedly, more realistically rendered comics figures done by illustrators with greater debts to fine-arts traditions can prompt this dynamic as well. But few sectors of comics fandom consistently desire strict photorealism; the gravitational pull of the ­cartoon, both for the eye and in affective relation to the self, is too strong. Even the most densely material expressions of comics fandom testify to this force. The desire to dress up as Catwoman is less an attempt to make the character real (much less realistic) than it is a wish to make one’s internal attachment to an exterior image visible. Comicsbased cosplay is thus like any other attachment to cartoons; it expresses a tendency to seal oneself to an icon. And further—to return to the point that an opponent of mass culture might find most scandalous—one can, without any self-contradiction, discuss the qualities of various cartoonists’ renderings of Catwoman while dressed as Catwoman.

Perspective: Between Planar Grid and Curved Surface I first saw Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (see Figure 7.1) as a reproduction in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. Berger claims that this sixteenth-century work demonstrates how strongly the representational capacities of oil painting can make images on canvas evoke their material counterparts and also can diminish their capacity to signify anything else (89–91). The final proof of this diminution, Berger argues, is that Holbein felt it necessary to render the painting’s memento mori element, a human skull, from a radically off-angle perspective. Facing the painting in person, one must walk to one’s left, nearly to the wall on which the painting hangs, crouch down, and crane one’s neck upward before the skull comes into proper perspective. “If the skull had been painted like the rest,” Berger argues, “its metaphysical implication would have disappeared” (91). For the comics scholar, the strongly divergent viewing angles offered by The Ambassadors teaches a more secular lesson: any effect achieved by the painter’s canvas relies on an “ideal” relation, frontal and fairly precisely measured—which the comics page, close to the eye and forever altering slightly in the reader’s grasp, cannot provide.4

The Cartoon on the Comics Page: A Phenomenology   125

Figure 7.1  Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors, 1533. This painting contrasts a wealth of sensory detail, presented in typical linear perspective, with the memento mori positioned at bottom center, which can only be perceived clearly from a skewed low angle. National Gallery, London. © Phaidon, 2011.

Of course, as my initial encounter with The Ambassadors inadvertently suggests, the same could be said for any painting reproduced in a bound book, which attaches the work—originally rendered on the flat plane of a canvass—to the curved surface of the page. What should strike us about the cartoon in this regard is its visual resilience, as both signifier and referent, on the curved surface that was its intended destination from the start (see the earlier section on value). We can test this resilience by noting, for instance, that if a similarly distorted image of Aaron McGruder’s Huey Freeman were to occupy the place of Holbein’s skull, he would be much easier to identify; most readers of The Boondocks would quickly recognize him without adopting the “proper”

126   Christopher Pizzino off-angle ­position. The relative simplicity of the cartoon figure, together with the strong coherence of its parts into a whole (as discussed in the section on construction), assists the eye in identifying it from multiple angles, in accounting for distortions, and in adjusting to the constant perspectival shifts required to scan and turn the pages of a comic book (or, for The Boondocks, a newspaper page or a printed collection of strips). Comics makers can, if they wish, activate our awareness of the cartoon’s visual affordances by putting a comics grid into self-reflexive relation with the curved surface of its medium. Take an example from Tintin in America in which the titular protagonist gets the better of an opponent by climbing out the window of a building and then reentering at another window behind him (see Figure 7.2). One large panel that shows Tintin making his way along the outside of the building depicts the protagonist from above, quite unlike Hergé’s typical presentation at the level of the action. In this unusual panel, the windows below Tintin recede in a slightly warped perspective so that the building seems slightly concave, rhyming uncannily with the curved surface of the page—which, in ordinary reading conditions, is not viewed frontally, but always askew. Yet Tintin ­himself, suspended at this vertiginous meeting of odd angle and curved surface, seems scarcely distorted at all; his form utters a sort of hic est vita quite the opposite of Holbein’s skull. This example merely amplifies our awareness of two constant and interrelated phenomena: the dynamic relation to embodied perception that the printed comic book possesses as a material object and the stabilizing and animating effect of the cartoon in this precise context.

Sequence: Variation as Validation Tom Gunning observes that Töpffer’s “drawings introduced an almost electric sense of the human body that was not only plastic and flexible but nearly vibrating with the urge to action or the surprise of reaction” (41). Gunning rightly emphasizes the vibratory quality of a strong cartoon line and its capacity to suggest that a character is alive and thus might change in various ways. While such changes can happen in a single panel, which need not record only one moment in fictive time, they are most marked when, from one panel to another and another, we can see change take place.5 How, then, do we easily recognize the same character as undergoing change? The answer— foreshadowed in most of the foregoing sections—is that the manifold coherence of an iconic character holds it securely in common with other renderings of the same character. This fact is at least one basis for our reflexive knowledge that any given rendering of Charles Schulz’s Peppermint Patty is Peppermint Patty (see Figure 7.3). Each one, in whatever pose and framing, in whatever narrative situation, can be the same indissoluble signifier/referent combination (see the earlier section on character) as all others.

The Cartoon on the Comics Page: A Phenomenology   127

Figure 7.2  Hergé, Tintin in America, 1945, page 10. The steep angle of panel 4 self-reflexively activates our sense of the relationship between the plane of the grid and the curved surface of the page, while the instant recognizability of the protagonist testifies to his visual reliance in this unstable context. © Little, Brown, 1979.

128   Christopher Pizzino

Figure 7.3  Charles Schulz, Peanuts, September 13,  1977. Each iteration of Peppermint Patty strengthens our sense of the figure’s presence, coherence, and meaning. © Fantagraphics, 2010.

When any such cartoon appears multiple times in a strip or sequence, one gets the sense not of moving from one “representation” to another but of a reiteration of substance. Here is Peppermint Patty, and here she is again; the eye seems to pass from presence to presence. Moreover, repeated and varied iteration can magnify a cartoon character’s aura; the existence and coherence of Peppermint Patty increase as she reappears, never visually identical yet even more herself. In a given case, this magnification of aura through varied repetition may be impossible to separate from the increase in what a cartoon character signifies as her story unfolds, as her characteristics become more known, and as the ideas she represents expand. When a character is drawn by new hands and/or has her storyline altered, as happens so frequently to characters owned by corporations, more complications arise. However, in a simple instance such as Schulz’s Peanuts, we find a phenomenon that can still be at work, to one degree or another, in these more complex examples. The fact that there is a substantive and coherent Peppermint Patty even though—or because—there are many, none precisely identical to any other, still indicates something about the relationship of the iconic cartoon to comics. Here we must broach the question of iconic solidarity, to use a term from Thierry Groensteen. This term does not, in Groensteen’s usage, have anything to do the content of comics panels, or with how the content is drawn. Iconic solidarity refers only to the fact that a comic is recognizable as such because its panels are spatio-topically linked (by, most obviously, their appearance together on the page) (System 16–20). Strictly speaking, such iconic solidarity can exist even if each panel is drawn by different hands, without any consistency in rendering; in a recent elaboration of his theory of comics, Groensteen insists: “The operations of breakdown and layout are sufficient in themselves to make comics a fully functioning language” (“Art” 89). If this is the case, then the cartoon, as merely one of the contents of a panel, can play no significant role in comics form. Yet in this same discussion, Groensteen also makes the suggestion that content has an irreducible role to play, claiming that comics, on account of its sequential and discontinuous nature, is, by its very essence, founded upon repetition of the same elements. . . . From one panel to the next, the

The Cartoon on the Comics Page: A Phenomenology   129 same characters, the same background elements, are frequently repeated in order to ensure narrative continuity. This repetition is banal and ordinary, and is entirely governed by the imperatives of breakdown. (“Art,” 92)

The final claim here—that breakdown “governs” the repeated appearance of visual elements—seems intended to make clear that iconic solidarity allows for, but is not ­constituted by, the repeated appearance of any element. Yet how does this sort with the preceding claim that the form “is, by its very essence, founded upon repetition of the same elements”? At minimum, it would seem that the spatio-topia of comics possesses coherence (which may not be precisely the same thing as “iconic solidarity”) through the reappearance of certain contents. What Groensteen means to argue, it seems, is that the meaning of the usual c­ ontents of a comic, such as characters and their settings, depends entirely on the repetition that the form allows. But a clear, if inadvertent, implication of being “founded on repetition of the same elements” is that repeated content can supply something comics form needs in order to be form, to be recognizable and readable. I point this out not to catch Groensteen in some logical error but simply to appreciate the degree to which the question of repeated content may be irrepressible in comics theory. And if this is so, then any kind of comics content that seems to organize reader attention, to command a sense of presence, and to gain force from repetition has potential claim to a vital relation with comics as such. Perhaps, then, investigations of comics form cannot afford completely to disavow an iconic solidarity (here I abuse the term) with Peppermint Patty. Despite the fact that comics theory, in a quite understandable pursuit of form, has ­little use for any particular content, we must confront the possibility that sequence, as the common structuring element of comics, can have a symbiotic, and unusually powerful, relation to the cartoon. Indeed, the term sequence would seem to change its meaning, to at least some degree, when what is being sequenced is a cartoon figure: present to the eye, experientially indivisible, specific in its abstraction, sufficient as its own referent, strongly attached to the reader, well adapted to the page, and gaining strength as it appears again and again, so that it is singular precisely in its plurality. In such a case, it seems likely that the cartoon makes a decisive contribution not merely to the content of sequence but also to its form. From the point of view of most classical theories of art, such a confusion of form and content, like other facets of the cartoon on the comics page, is potentially disruptive, even scandalous. It is thus understandable that it has not been explored in comics studies, which seeks the legitimization of the medium. Yet this goal has consistently raised a problem: when we describe comics in terms more amenable to the fine arts and literature, do we distort one of the things that can make the medium vital in itself? In the case of the cartoon’s relation to comics, the answer is clearly yes. Comics studies, unlike comics fandom, has refused to dress itself in cartoons. A logical choice, certainly, but not without its price.

130   Christopher Pizzino

Notes 1. Famous characters existing in multiple media—and drawn, on the comics page, in a very wide range of styles, from photorealistic to highly iconic—are an obvious complicating factor here. 2. It should be noted that two of the three authors of the 2008 EEG study, together with a third researcher, have since published further research that is less conclusive on the subject of cartoons’ capacity to induce reader identification; see Lee et al. 3. For his engagement with French theory, particularly with Jan Baetens and Phillipe Marion, see Gardner 62–66. See also Baetens. 4. On the subject of body position and perspective in painting, see Goodman 10–19. 5. Both the term fictive time and my assertion concerning the temporal flux that can occur in a single panel are wholly indebted to Neil Cohn; see in particular 131–134.

Works Cited Baetens, Jan. “Revealing Traces: A New Theory of Graphic Enunciation.” The Language of Comics: Word and Image, edited by Robin Varnum and Christina  T.  Gibbons, U of Mississippi P, 2001, 145–155. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. 1980. Translated by Richard Howard, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981. Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” 1936. Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, edited by Hannah Arendt, Schocken, 1969, pp. 83–109. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin, 1972. Choi, Yeojeong, et al. “EEG Source Localization during Empathy of Iconic and Realistic Cartoon Characters.” Organization for Human Brain Mapping, 15–19 June 2008, Melbourne. Chute, Hillary. “Comics Form and Narrating Lives.” Profession, 2011, pp. 107–117. Chute, Hillary. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Harvard UP, 2016. Cohn, Neil. “The Limits of Time and Transitions: Challenges to Theories of Sequential Image Comprehension.” Studies in Comics, vol. 1, no. 1, 2010, pp. 127–147. Gardner, Jared. “Storylines.” SubStance, vol. 40, no. 1, 2011, pp. 53–69. Gombrich, Ernst Hans. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Princeton UP, 1960. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art. Hackett, 1976. Groensteen, Thierry. “The Art of Braiding: A Clarification.” European Comic Art, vol. 9, no. 1, 2016, pp. 88–98. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. 1999. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen, U of Mississippi P, 2007. Gunning, Tom. “The Art of Succession: Reading, Writing and Watching Comics.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 40, no. 3, 2014, pp. 36–51. Hergé. Tintin in America. 1945. Translated by Michael Turner and Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper, Little, Brown, 1979. Kendall, L.  N., et al. “Iconic Faces Are Not Real Faces: Enhanced Emotion Detection and Altered Neural Processing as Faces Become More Iconic.” Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, vol. 1, no. 19, 2016, cognitiveresearchjournal.springeropen.com/­ articles/10.1186/s41235-016-0021-8.

The Cartoon on the Comics Page: A Phenomenology   131 Lee, Yong-il, et al. “Character Drawing Style in Cartoons on Empathy Induction: An ­Eye-Tracking and EEG Study.” PeerJ, 2017, peerj.com/articles/3988. Marratto, Scott. “Blind Narcissism: Derrida, Klee, and Merleau-Ponty on the Line.” Phenomenology and Arts, edited by Licia Carlson and Peter R. Costello, Lexington Books, 2016, pp. 119–133. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperCollins, 1993. McGruder, Aaron. The Boondocks. 1996–2006, Universal Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind.” 1964. Translated by Michael Smith, The MerleauPonty Reader, edited by Leonard Lawlor and Ted Toadvine, Northwestern UP, 2007, pp. 351–378. Palmer, Stephen E. Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology. MIT Press, 1999. Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. 2000–2003. Translated by Mattias Ripa, Pantheon, 2007. Schulz, Charles. Untitled strip, 13 Sept. 1977. The Complete Peanuts 1977–1978, edited by Gary Groth, Fantagraphics, 2010, p. 111. Segar, E. C. Thimble Theatre. 1919–1938, King Features. Spiegelman, Art. Maus. 1980–1991. Pantheon, 1987, 1991.

chapter 8

A ll By M yself Single-Panel Comics and the Question of Genre Michelle Ann Abate

Will Eisner, in his groundbreaking 1985 book about comics, coined a now-famous term to describe the genre: “sequential art.” In its most elemental form, he explained, comics are a series of images placed in a particular order to create a specific literary, artistic, or narratological effect. “The task is to arrange the sequence of events [or pictures] so as to bridge the gaps in action,” Eisner wrote. In so doing, “the reader may fill in the intervening events” and thereby help generate meaning (46). In the decades since Eisner released Comics and Sequential Art, his viewpoint has been refined, but the core concept has remained the same. Scott McCloud, in the opening pages of Understanding Comics (1993), for example, offers the following definition of the medium: “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence” (9). In the chapters that follow, McCloud examines what he sees as the essential components of comics, many of which are directly predicated on, or strongly connected to, this basic understanding. From the centrality of the gutter to the various relationships that can exist between panels, the Eisnerian view that comics are sequential art forms the underlying premise of his analysis. The work of both Eisner and McCloud has been tremendously influential. Few would dispute that Comics and Sequential Art and Understanding Comics are foundational texts, essential reading for anyone interested in the field. Each book presents core concepts, describes key components, and provides necessary vocabulary. For this reason, they are frequently cited by critics and commonly used in classrooms—especially Understanding Comics. That said, the basic definition initially proposed by Eisner and then reaffirmed and popularized by McCloud is not without its problems. As Jean-Paul Gabilliet pointed out, “If one concentrates on sequentiality—the visual juxtaposition of pictures—one excludes all comics that rely on single panels or images” (xiii). Generally speaking, this practice has been the norm in the field. Titles that consist of a single image have ­routinely

Single-Panel Comics and the Question of Genre   133 been regarded as outside the genre. As McCloud has said on the subject, “Single panels might be classified as ‘comic art’ in the sense that they derive part of their visual vocabulary from comics” (20; emphasis in original). However, he—along with many others— does not consider them comics, because they lack what is regarded as an essential component: multiple panels. In the words of McCloud once again: “I say they’re no more comics than [a] still [frame] of Humphrey Bogart is film!” (21; emphasis in original). Given that a foundational feature of comics is that they are sequential art and that ­single-panel titles do not contain panels in a sequence, works of this nature cannot be included in the category. This chapter challenges such widely accepted beliefs. In the pages that follow, I offer not simply a defense of, but what might even be called a manifesto for, single-panel ­comics being regarded as comics. Titles belonging to this category have played an important role in the origins, evolution, and popularization of the genre in the United States. They have embodied some of the most successful and acclaimed works in the ­history of the medium. In many respects, sequential art as we know it (and especially as we love it) would not be the same without comics that consist of only one panel. Accordingly, this chapter moves single-panel comics back into the genre where they belong. Single-panel comics are not simply comics; they are often examples of the medium at its most ­concentrated, controlled, and efficient.

Party of One: Single-Panel Comics in US Comics History For all of the antipathy toward single-panel comics, such titles have played both a ­consistent and a significant role in the history of cartoon art in the United States. Many of the most culturally influential and commercially successful comics have been ones that are comprised of only one panel. The commercial history of comics in the United States begins with a title that ­commonly appeared as one large image: Richard F. Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley. Making its debut in the Sunday supplement of the New York World newspaper in 1895, the comic featured a large cast of ragamuffin kids living in an urban tenement who were led by a mischievous little imp named Mickey Dugan—better known by his nickname, the “Yellow Kid.” The impact that Hogan’s Alley in general and the Yellow Kid in particular had on not only American comics but American society as a whole is difficult to overestimate. Although Outcault’s strip ran for only three years, it would shape national print, popular, and material culture for generations. Hogan’s Alley is commonly credited with being “the first comic strip,” and the Yellow Kid is identified as “the first commercial ­success of a comic strip character” (Robinson 18, 21). Outcault’s protagonist appeared on “billboards, buttons, cigarette packs, cigars, cracker tins, ladies’ fans, matchbooks,

134   Michelle Ann Abate postcards, chewing gum cards, toys, whiskey and many other products” (Wallace). For this reason, histories of mainstream print comics in the United States commonly use Hogan’s Alley as their starting point. While Outcault’s strip was occasionally divided into panels, it routinely appeared as one large scene. (See Figures 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3.) A generation later, another title made its debut that would also exert a strong influence: Little Lulu. Drawn by Marjorie Henderson Buell, the wordless single-panel comic first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post on February 23, 1935, and was an immediate sensation. (See Figure  8.4.) Readers young and old, male and female, urban and rural adored the title character’s irreverence. The gag comic became a regular ­feature in the Saturday Evening Post, appearing in each weekly issue until December 30, 1944. The history of Little Lulu does not end there, however. The character gave rise to a branding, licensing, and merchandising empire. As Tom Heintjes notes, Buell “was one of the first American cartoonists to retain copyright to and licensing control of her characters” (par. 2). As a result, Little Lulu starred in dozens of animated television shows, movie shorts, and feature-length films. Additionally, she was featured on toys, dolls, clothes, dishes, stationery, bedding, games, cosmetics, glassware, hosiery, cleaning supplies, furniture, candy, and jewelry (Shutt 39). The ubiquity of these objects remains evident today: “it can be difficult to avoid her ­smiling face while strolling through any toy show (or even flea market) in the country” (Shutt 32).

Figure 8.1  Hogan’s Alley, by Richard F. Outcault, March 15, 1896.

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Figure 8.2  Hogan’s Alley, by Richard F. Outcault, November 10, 1895.

Figure 8.3  Hogan’s Alley, by Richard F. Outcault, January 5, 1896.

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Figure 8.4  Little Lulu, by Marjorie Henderson Buell, Saturday Evening Post, December 4, 1943.

Little Lulu likewise remained a fixture in American print culture. From the end of World War II until the end of the 1960s, she appeared in a syndicated strip that ran in hundreds of newspapers across the country (Shutt 38–39). Similarly, starting in 1948 and extending through 1984, the character delighted untold numbers of children through her popular comic-book series. While both the newspaper strip and the comic books featured multipanel stories, Little Lulu’s initial appearance, longtime ­residence, and massive success was as a one-panel gag. The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a variety of single-panel comics in national newspapers. From The Family Circus (1960–present) and Ziggy (1968–present) to Heathcliff (1973­–present) and Marmaduke (1994–2015), this era can be seen as a heyday of this form in many ways.1 All four of these strips were hugely successful, enjoying long print runs. Bil Keane’s The Family Circus, for example, “is the most widely syndicated cartoon panel in the world, appearing in 1,500 newspapers” (Vartanian). Meanwhile, collections of the strip have sold more than 13 million copies to date

Single-Panel Comics and the Question of Genre   137 (McNary). Ziggy is just as popular. The single-panel comic created by cartoonist Tom Wilson has been a fixture in newspapers throughout the United States since the early 1970s. Generation after generation has enjoyed following the daily disappointments— and occasional triumphs—of Wilson’s short, bald, and pantsless protagonist. Additionally, more than a dozen books have been published containing collections or commentary about the strip (Markstein, “Ziggy”). Finally, the character’s likeness has appeared on toys, plush dolls, calendars, greeting cards, housewares, collectibles, ­sta­tion­ery, and cookware. As a result, the Ziggy character is recognizable even to individuals who have never read the comic. Of the many successful single-panel comics that appeared in the closing decades of the twentieth century, however, one stood out: Gary Larson’s The Far Side. Making its debut on January 1, 1980, the strip featured an ever-changing array of both human and anthropomorphized animal characters to offer quirky observations about the amusing, absurd, illogical, and just plain bizarre aspects of daily life along with cosmic existence. Over the next fifteen years, The Far Side would become one of the most celebrated comics in US newspaper history. As Don Markstein has written, “Larson’s cows, mad scientists, ­disgusting insects, amoebae, ducks, etc. became known to millions—as did Larson’s rather unusual style of humor.” By the time the strip ended on January 1, 1995—when Larson retired from cartooning to pursue other interests—The Far Side was running in more than 1,900 newspapers, it had been collected in nearly two dozen books, and it had been translated into seventeen languages (Markstein, “The Far Side”). Larson’s comics have appeared on calendars, T-shirts, posters, and greeting cards, “to say nothing of refrigerator doors and bulletin boards all over the world” (Markstein, “The Far Side”). The Far Side was as much lauded by critics as it was beloved by readers. Larson received the Newspaper Panel Cartoon Award from the National Cartoonists Society in 1985 and then again in 1988. Additionally, he was the recipient of the group’s highest honor, the Rueben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year, not once but twice, in 1990 and 1994. Nevin Martell identifies The Far Side, along with contemporaries Bloom County/Outland and Calvin and Hobbes, as “the last Golden Age of American newspaper comics” (99). The tradition of single-panel comics continues in the twenty-first century. A variety of well-known Web-based titles, such as Aunty Acid, Web Donuts, and Tastes Like Chicken, are comprised of just one panel. Moreover, these comics are exceedingly popular. Aunty Acid’s official Facebook page, for example, reveals that fans of the strip—who call themselves, appropriately enough, “Acid Heads”—now number “11 million strong.” Additionally, a variety of previous single-panel comics, such as Love Is, have experienced a renaissance on the Web. Originally created by Kim Casali in the 1960s and 1970s as notes to her husband, the comics were collected and posted online beginning in 2007. The site became so popular that new comics in the style of the originals were created by Casali’s son, Stefano, working in conjunction with cartoonist Bill Asprey (“About”). New versions of the comic can “be seen in newspapers worldwide” (“About”). As even this brief overview demonstrates, single-panel comics have not simply been a fixture in the medium, they have occupied its forefront. In examples ranging from Hogan’s Alley, Little Lulu, and The Family Circus to Ziggy, The Far Side, and Aunty Acid,

138   Michelle Ann Abate titles of this nature have been commercially successful as well as critically acclaimed. Given both the numbers and the notoriety that single-panel comics have enjoyed, the odds are good that for most fans of the medium, at least one of their favorite strips over the years has belonged to this category.

Single and Fabulous: One-Panel Comics as Comics In spite of the long history and strong presence of single-panel comics in the United States, they have routinely been excluded from the medium. As McCloud has said about titles of this nature: “They are cartoons. . . and there is a long-standing relationship between comics and cartoons—but they are not the same thing” (21; emphasis in original). To further underscore this point, he includes an image of himself as a character from The Family Circus. Below the drawing is a line of Keane-esque dialogue: “Mommy, why ain’t I juxtaposed?” (20). Meanwhile, an exposition box above this illustration offers the following commentary: “Single panels like this one are often lumped in with comics, yet there’s no such thing as a sequence of one.” (See Figure 8.5.) For McCloud—as for

Figure 8.5  Panel from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, p. 20.

Single-Panel Comics and the Question of Genre   139 Eisner before him and an array of critics since—the most basic feature of comics is that they are sequential art; they are comprised of multiple panels. I wish to challenge—and even contradict—this long-standing critical consensus. I contend that single-panel comics are not only comics; they are examples of the form at its most condensed, compact, and efficient in many ways. Single-panel comics have only one frame in which to accomplish everything they seek convey. Whether it’s telling a story, making an observation, or presenting a joke, these works need to perform all of their aesthetic, literary, and narratological tasks within the confines of a single frame. As a result, every facet of the panel must serve this purpose. From the artistic style of the drawing and the composition of the image to the specific visual details and the use of written text (if any), no feature can be overlooked, squandered, or held in reserve. In so doing, single-panel comics put tremendous pressure both on the individual cartoonist and on the medium of comics as a whole. They give the artist one opportunity (and only one opportunity) to achieve their goal. In this way, single-panel comics are exceedingly demanding and brutally unforgiving. There is little, if any, room for error—or even ­simple oversight. On the contrary, each feature must be first marshaled, then actualized. A Little Lulu gag panel that was originally published on December 4, 1943, embodies a poignant case in point. (See Figure 8.6.) Every facet of the comic is employed to

Figure 8.6  Little Lulu, by Marjorie Henderson Buell, Saturday Evening Post, February 23, 1935.

140   Michelle Ann Abate construct the scenario—and convey the joke. From the overall layout of the composition to the specific details included in the drawing, no feature is superfluous, no ­element is squandered, and no aspect is unnecessary. The nighttable that holds a stoppered bottle and a tall glass with a spoon sitting in it reveals that the title character is not simply sleeping but ill in bed. Likewise, the voluminous loops of barbed wire blocking the entrance to her room and the toy artillery pieces she has lined up behind them demonstrate the fortifications that the young girl has constructed. Finally, the two adult figures—a balding older man in a dark suit who is carrying a valise marked “M.D.” accompanied by a middle-aged woman—show both what the young girl is defending herself against and how readers are intended to react to these actions. There is no image, feature, or even line in this comic that is not needed, or not necessary. On the contrary, every single facet is used in the service of the comic’s message. In so doing, the gag panel is not simply effective but exceedingly efficient. Indeed, while many of Buell’s Little Lulu comics contain text and even dialogue, this one is wordless. Other than the initials on the man’s case to convey that he is a doctor, this panel is devoid of writing. In one respect, the wordlessness of the panel puts added pressure on the image to convey the meaning. After all, Buell does not have speech balloons or exposition boxes to help make her point. However, I would contend that this panel is wordless because no words are warranted. The images in the panel are employed so adroitly that textual elements are not needed. Although single-panel comics are rigid and unforgiving, they are also—for this exact reason—exceedingly efficient. These items make visible the semiotic workings, visual mechanics, and aesthetic operations that are at play in every comics panel, whether sequential or stand-alone. Since they consist of just one panel, however, they do so in a highly concentrated manner. Of course, the content of single-panel comics may not always be the most lofty or sophisticated. Many titles of this nature present a simple gag (Little Lulu), offer a quirky observation (The Far Side), or depict a mundane slice of life (The Family Circus). Even though the subject matter of single-panel comics may not be the most complex or well wrought, the method for presenting this material needs to be. The way single-panel comics represent the medium at its most compact, elemental, and efficient is not limited to Buell’s Little Lulu. This phenomenon can be found throughout many other single-panel comics, including those that are not held in the same esteem as Buell’s work. Take Ziggy, for instance. Wilson’s series about the ­foibles, failures, and follies of his title character is not considered groundbreaking from the standpoint of its aesthetic style or its subject matter. On the contrary, the comic is seen as quotidian at best and a mere vehicle for licensing and merchandising at worst (Markstein, “Ziggy”). However, Ziggy routinely demonstrates the multifaceted operations of single-panel comics. The panel that appeared on March 26, 1987, offers an illuminating example. (See Figure 8.7.) Akin to the Little Lulu example, every feature of the image is used in service of the gag. From the half-opened window shade showing the sun rising, which conveys that it is morning, to the smiles on the slippers, which

Single-Panel Comics and the Question of Genre   141

Figure 8.7  Ziggy, by Tom Wilson, March 26, 1987.

reveal their delight about the events that have transpired overnight, each e­ lement works toward the same common purpose. No aspect is extraneous, no feature is ­fallow. Analogous close readings can be conducted for panels from The Far Side (see Figures 8.8, 8.9, and 8.10) as well as The Family Circus (see Figures 8.11, 8.12, and 8.13). Tracing the mechanics and unpacking the operations of single-panel comics not only changes our perception about the aesthetic, visual, and semiotic processes at work in these materials, but they also invite us to rethink the notion of sequentiality in the medium. As discussed above, this concept is arguably the most important to the genre; it is widely regarded as not simply a core trait but a prerequisite quality. That said, views of comics as sequential art have been predicated on understandings of the word sequence to denote the presence of multiple panels. Comics that consist of only one frame do not appear in a sequence, and the absence of this element has formed the basis for their exclusion from the genre. While single-panel comics do not possess a sequence between panels, they can be seen as doing so within the panel. These works deliberately and carefully direct the reader’s attention around the image. They guide the viewer’s eye to what they should examine first, second, and third in order to follow the story, get the joke, or understand the observation. Moreover, this process routinely goes far beyond the

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Figure 8.8  The Far Side, by Gary Larson, November 24, 1986.

­ ialogic relationship that exists between the text and the image; it also commonly d encompasses elements within the image itself. Both the Little Lulu and Ziggy panels that I discussed earlier have clear, conscious, and unmistakable sequentiality. These images do not simply invite but require readers to move their eyes around the composition to examine various elements, ponder their relationship to one another, and thereby help to construct the overall scenario. What details should they view and, even more importantly, in what order? Examining these features in relation to one another, in the context of one another, and in a sequence with one another is necessary for understanding what these features mean, why they matter, and how they help us to comprehend the comic as a whole. While readers do not need to fill in the gaps that occur between panels, they do need to make inferences, connections, and deductions about ones that are present within this single panel. Moreover, this proc­ ess represents in miniature what happens within every panel of every comic—from ones that are confined to just one frame to those that span book length. In so doing, single-panel comics prompt us to reconsider the notion of sequentiality. Works of this nature broaden this concept from one that had been confined to interpanel to one that can also encompass intrapanel. Sequentiality is a defining feature of what the genre of comics is from an aesthetic standpoint as well as how it functions from

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Figure 8.9  The Far Side, by Gary Larson, April 18, 1990.

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Figure 8.10  The Far Side, by Gary Larson, original publication date unknown.

a semiotic one. However, this quality exists in more places and involves more processes than has been previously discussed—or even considered. In a well-known episode from the popular HBO series Sex and the City, protagonist Carrie Bradshaw offers a proud new proclamation about heterosexual women who are

Figure 8.11  The Family Circus, by Bil Keane, December 12, 1974.

Figure 8.12  The Family Circus, by Bil Keane, November 30, 1987.

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Figure 8.13  The Family Circus, by Bil Keane, November 25, 1987.

not in romantic relationships. She deems these figures “Single and Fabulous!” “Being single used to mean that nobody wanted you,” Carrie explains in one of her signature voice-overs, “Now it means you’re pretty sexy and you’re taking your time deciding how you want your life to be and who you want to spend it with.” For centuries in the United States, heterosexual women who were not married or who did not have boyfriends had been pitied, both by society and also often by themselves. In the closing years of the twentieth century, however, attitudes about these individuals were changing; single women were being seen in far more positive ways. In the same way that Carrie Bradshaw declares that nonmarried women are “Single and Fabulous!” this exact observation can also be made about one-panel comics. Whereas works of this nature have long been derided and dismissed, the time has come for these views to change. Single-panel comics are not only comics, but they are examples of the medium at its most concentrated, compact, and concise. Furthermore, far from existing outside the realm of sequential art, these materials shed new light on its key concept and core process. To evoke Sex and the City once again, by broadening our view of comics to include single-panel titles, what had formerly been seen as a ­pitiable party of one reveal themselves to be the formidable power of one.

Single-Panel Comics and the Question of Genre   147

Note 1. It should be noted that nearly all of these titles included editions of the comic that contained more than one panel. On Sundays, for example, Heathcliff appeared as a multipanel comic. Marmaduke, Ziggy, and The Family Circus often did as well. Finally, on occasion, the daily versions of these titles broke their single-panel format into more than one frame. That said, these titles are commonly considered and even primarily remembered as single-panel ones.

Works Cited Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. 1985. W. W. Norton, 2008. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comics Books. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. U of Mississippi P, 2010. Heintjes, Tom. “Marge and Lulu: The Art of the Deal.” Hogan’s Alley, May 22, 2012. Web. Markstein, Don. “The Far Side.” Don Markstein’s Toonpedia, n.d. http://www.toonopedia.com/ farside.htm. Markstein, Don. “Ziggy.” Don Markstein’s Toonpedia, n.d. http://www.toonopedia.com/ziggy. htm. Martell, Nevin. Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip. Bloomsbury, 2009. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperPerennial, 1993. McNary, Dave. “Fox, Walden Set Writers for ‘Family Circus’ Film.” Variety, October 18, 2012. http://variety.com/2012/film/news/fox-walden-set-writers-for-family-circus-film-1118060972. Shutt, Craig. “Little Lulu, Big Media Star.” Hogan’s Alley, vol. 15, 2007, pp. 32–43. Vartanian, Hrat. “World’s Most Syndicated Cartoonist Dies.” Hyperallergic, November 10, 2011. https://hyperallergic.com/40229/family-circus-cartoonist-dies.

chapter 9

Dr aw i ng, R edr aw i ng, a n d U n dr aw i ng Benoît Crucifix

In his comics poetry book BrickBrickBrick, Mark Laliberte assembles a set of bricks, redrawn and recomposed from the backgrounds of comics history. The book is a collection of single panels filled with bricks as drawn by an impressively wide variety of ­cartoonists. The square panels condense a graphic element that is often glanced over as mere backdrop and blows it up as a peculiar index of its artist’s style. Emerging from intense research and rereading with particular attention, the building of these various brick walls follows a strange drawing process: part scanning, part digital reworking, part original copying. Each comics poem is, in a way, testament to the individuality of graphic style. The collection demonstrates the many different ways of drawing such a seemingly simple background detail, which becomes an index of personal drawing styles attributed to a range of comics creators. Yet this auteurist reading of brick style is made possible by Laliberte’s graphic intervention, which unifies those brick poems and makes each panel similar enough for allowing their stylistic differences to become blatant (see Figure 9.1). A striking example of “poetry by other means” (Perloff), BrickBrickBrick exposes the ­literal bricks of comic-book architecture and complicates what it means to draw comics. A well-practiced collagist, Laliberte describes his creative process as one of “drawing without drawing.1 The phrase resonates loudly with the comics at the heart of this chapter, in which drawing never seems to start off from a blank page. Comics, redrawn and undrawn, that foreground the questions: What does it mean to draw without drawing? What does it mean to copy and redraw or even to disengage from the very act of drawing? Laliberte’s BrickBrickBrick immediately foregrounds some of the tensions that run through such questions. It adopts an auteurist approach, echoing fans’ construction of individual genius in the industry (sometimes resulting from quasi-forensic investi­ gation of graphic details), only to undercut the same rhetoric of originality by its very reliance on an ambiguous citationality.2 Laliberte assumes a tactical role as curator,

Drawing, Redrawing, and Undrawing    149

Figure 9.1  Double page from Mark Laliberte’s BrickBrickBrick, 2010. © Mark Laliberte.

compiler, sampler, intersecting with everyday acts of digital culture at odds with traditional visions of authorship as original genius. By reading through a short and necessarily perfunctory selection of contemporary small-press comics from both Europe and North America, I want to suggest that comics studies, now well into an age of digital reproducibility, needs to engage with ‘unoriginal’ approaches to comics drawing that challenge the way the discipline has tended to ­conceptualize graphic storytelling. Such works call attention to the material circulation of comics images. Small-press comics, with their independent, small-scale means of ­production and distribution, afford a larger room for experimentation. Staying under the radar, they also have a bit more leeway to reuse copyrighted material. Both in its zine and online formats, the small press offers a thriving space, in the interstice between ­creators and readers, for practices of redrawing and undrawing that foreground the medium- and culture-specific stakes of citationality. Building on Jared Gardner’s discussions of the line and the archive in comics, this chapter works toward elaborating a kind of graphic “archiveology,” analyzing the way creators materially engage with the past, literally redrawing from loose, often selfcurated archives of comics.3 Such a graphic archiveology should help us to further understand the place of appropriation within the contemporary graphic novel in the context of remix without replicating an all-too-easy rhetoric that, as Margie Borschke has convincingly argued, tends to reduce the term to digital practices of copying while “obfuscating the long histories of copies and copying” (39).

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Drawing Drawing has been sitting awkwardly on the comics theory shelf. Attention to drawing and graphic style was only sparse in formal and semiotic approaches to comics, more readily invested in mapping out page structures and layouts and accounting for the medium-specific ways readers navigate comics.4 The emphasis on the “spatio-topia” of comics reading has kept drawing in the background; it is telling that Thierry Groensteen’s System of Comics only turns to the specificities of “narrative drawing” in its very last pages (161–164). Philippe Marion’s Traces en cases advanced the term “graphiation” to designate the visual and nearly physical presence of the narrator in the graphic marks of the drawings.5 This prospect has been successfully taken up by various scholars, and attention to the materiality of comics drawing is clearly gaining momentum in comics studies, as signaled by Simon Grennan’s A Theory of Narrative Drawing. From a focus on comics as “invisible art” (McCloud) privileging relationships between panels, scholars such as Gardner with his work on “storylines” direct our attention to what is inside the panels, always strikingly visible but hiding in plain sight.6 Indeed, Gardner places the narrative work of the drawn line within the larger historical context of an early modernist media ecology of comics. Following Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of media history, as expressed in his classic essay “The Storyteller,” Gardner argues that comics explores a way of telling stories that does not erase the hand of the storyteller: In comics alone the promise of Benjamin’s looked-for “moving script” continued to develop throughout the twentieth century. Here the act of inscription remains always visible, and the story of its making remains central to the narrative work of the graphic narrative form in a way we haven’t begun to theorize because, in short, we have been trained to not see it. (“Storylines” 56–57)

Gardner’s article goes a long way in restoring our attention to the visible work of c­ omics. What makes comics “unique” in this framework is the way they allow us to bring the embodied efficacy of storytelling into the context of mechanical reproduction. And so, if the “line compels a physical, bodily encounter with an imagined scene of embodied enunciation,” it is also one that is “necessarily effaced in print” (“Storylines” 66). The print reproduction of comics is, then, ambiguous, as it simultaneously erases the graphic marks as actual traces while also always indexing the act of drawing.7 The erasure implied by the mediation of the act of drawing is, however, less visible than the graphic mark. Looking at storylines as mediated performances of drawing should also invite us to look at their graphic afterlives, at what practices of copying and reproducing imply for a medium that is “at once voice and writing, orality and print, performance and text” ( “Storylines” 67). This means paying attention to the circulation and mobility of drawn images, underwriting a complementary way of reading comics as a “moving script.”

Drawing, Redrawing, and Undrawing    151 Benjamin’s call for a “moving script” was rooted in his belief that the newspaper and film were challenging writing out of the book, exposing it to “the brutal heteronomies of economic chaos,” but also providing it with new opportunities for exploring “the graphic regions of its new eccentric figurativeness” and “tak[ing] possession of an adequate material content”—a situation that, Benjamin found, could potentially return writing to its “public life” (42–43). Given this situation, it is surprising, as Gardner notes, that Benjamin did not consider comics, a form that was then publicly experimenting with graphic storytelling within the newspaper. This missed encounter between Benjamin and comics further guides the larger historical narrative that Gardner sketches in his Projections, which subtly argues that comics, over the course of their history, anticipated twenty-first-century storytelling in various ways. Key to that argument is Gardner’s analysis of comics by Chris Ware, Seth, and Ben Katchor and their “tales of collectors, the compulsive combers of archives, warehouses, and dumpsters,” that populate the graphic novel (Projections 172). Gardner finds a similarity between contemporary ­cartoonists’ fascination with the messy archives of popular ephemera and the very ­formal structure of comics as itself archive-like, particularly suited to the digital “database logic” of new media.8 There is room for pushing this idea further by looking at comics that are materially drawn from self-curated archives, books that similarly result from practices of collecting but that materially transform the assembled material through acts of redrawing and undrawing old comics. These transformations of the comics archive follow a radical change in cultural memory; as Abigail De Kosnik aptly remarks, “Memory has gone rogue . . .: where it used to mean the record of cultural production, memory is now the basis of a great deal of cultural production” (3). This affects different media, and, where De Kosnik focuses on transmedia corpuses and specifically fan productions, Catherine Russell has sketched the lines of an “archiveology” of remix film practices, invoking Benjamin’s thinking to identify an emergent “practice of collecting images and compiling them in new and surprising ways” (9). Such practices of appropriation and remix tie back to another reading of Benjamin’s “moving script” that emphasizes its mobile dimension and takes its root in the Arcades Project, an object essentially composed of quotes and other “movable passages” that, according to Marjorie Perloff, directly point to a contemporary poetics of “unoriginal genius” (43). In this light, Benjamin’s call for a moving script is seen to “anticipate in an uncanny way the turn writing would take in the twenty-first century, now that the Internet has made copyists, recyclers, transcribers, collators, and reframers of us all” (Perloff 49). Yet text does not “move” in the same way as comics images do. As Hillary Chute concisely worded it, comics is a “site-specific” form; it is not easily reflowed, and this necessarily bears on how one copies in comics. Taking these cues, the examples I survey here will help us along the way toward a “graphic archiveology” as a medium-specific approach to questions of citationality in comics and graphic novels that involves a deep relationship—at times a tense one—to the act of drawing.

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Redrawing Drawing is indeed at the center of what Benjamin Woo aptly terms the “occupational imaginary of comics work” (189). Aspiring cartoonists are quickly led to imagine drawing comics as a complex but rigidly segmented process: scriptwriting, thumbnailing, laying out, sketching, penciling, inking, coloring, and so forth. This is part of an “iterative principle” that, according to Benoît Peeters (113), is fundamental to the labor of comics. As if translating the semiotic grammar of comic books onto the level of its ­cultural production, this sequential method is moreover one that allows for the segmentation of its making: each stage is separated as a different task and assigned to the differently specialized members of the collaborative team (or, more frequently today, outsourced to a global cast of precarious creative workers). Mainstream publishers in the United States quickly developed “house styles” that would further institutionalize this process and school its readers into it.9 The Official Marvel Comics Try-Out Book ­contributes to developing an occupational imaginary that introduces aspiring cartoonists to this fragmentation of the creative process, providing material for the reader to learn how to draw in such a context. This involves, for instance, inking in the nonrepro blue penciling by John S. Romita reproduced in the book, “simulat[ing] the actual working conditions of professional Marvel Comics inkers face” (Shooter 9). This very book, however, was also given a different purpose and meaning by alternative comics artist Charles Burns, whose story “Naked Snack” is directly drawn onto Romita’s penciling from The Official Marvel Comics Try-Out Book (Figure 9.2). Rather than starting from a blank page, Burns uses another artifact to draw on, one that plays up tensions about graphic style and authorship. Instead of learning the Marvel method, Burns uses a process page meant to discipline creators as a way of contrasting it with his own signature style, strongly based on his idiosyncratic inking technique, and contaminating the male superhero type with horror tropes. While Burns certainly exhibits his crisp mastership of black-and-white and the incisive precision of his brush, his appropriation of a tryout book also returns to the process of learning through redrawing. In doing so, it shows the tactical possibilities offered by creators and readers alike to bend the assumptions of a house style, highlighting the subjectivity that necessarily seeps into the process.10 This gesture is typical of Burns’s vernacular practice of “swiping,” the term in comics lore for copying panels from other cartoonists. Reading Burns’s public swipe files, we are forced to attend to the circulation of images in comics through redrawing and the generative and narrative potential of such diligent acts of copying.11 In similar ways, Burns’s “Naked Snack,” in Michel de Certeau’s vocabulary, sides with “tactics” rather than “strategies”: “strategies are able to produce, tabulate, and impose these spaces, when those operations take place, whereas tactics can only use, manipulate, and divert spaces” (de Certeau 29–30). The way de Certeau describes the gridding of the spaces of everyday life echoes the grid of comic-book pages and the segmentation of the Marvel method: using the tryout book to different ends, “Naked Snack” traffics in a

Drawing, Redrawing, and Undrawing    153

Figure 9.2  Left: Panel with penciling by John S. Romita from The Official Marvel Comics TryOut Book, edited by Jim Shooter, 1983). © Marvel. Right: Panel from Charles Burns’s “Naked Snack,” Buzz #2, 1991, page 9. © Charles Burns.

t­ actical appropriation of that space, repurposed within the covers of an underground comic book. Such tactical redrawing is common in comics culture, as part of the long-held tradition of swiping, and there are more examples of extensive redrawn works in North American alternative comics. In The Half Men, Kevin Huizenga has copied an entire issue of the 1960s Dell comic Kona; while the page layout and text remain unchanged (save for small changes and relettering), Sam Glanzman’s realist style is reinterpreted in Huizenga’s more cartoony style. In similar ways, Ron Regé Jr.’s Diana consists of several weeks’ worth of Wonder Woman comic strips from the 1940s, originally drawn by H.  G.  Peter and redrawn in Regé’s typical “cute brut” style. In both cases, and even though the performative act of redrawing matters in and of itself, these works can be seen as introducing new readers to old, forgotten comics; it is a labor-intensive way for cartoonists to share neglected works they find worthy of literally redrawing into the present. Robert Sikoryak is another famously conscientious imitator whose copies lean closer visually to their sources but often replace their textual elements with inserts from other references. Sikoryak repeatedly mashes up written texts of different types with redrawn pages from all periods of comics history. “Good Ol’ Gregor Brown,” for instance, one of his first mash-ups, crosses Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis with Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. Juxtaposed in word and image, the modernist angst of Kafka’s canonical novella and the mellow melancholia of Peanuts reflect on each other. It was originally published

154   Benoît Crucifix in 1990 in Raw, where Sikoryak earned his first stripes as a staff member and which offered a context prone to remix experiments, such as Mark Newgarden’s “Love’s Savage Fury,” mashing up Nancy and Joe Bazooka, or Art Spiegelman’s “The Malpractice Suite,” extending on panels cut out from “Rex Morgan M.D.” comic strips.12 Sikoryak’s more recent work, such as his graphic-novel version of the iTunes Terms and Conditions ­contract, follows the same strategy by refitting the full text of the legal document into the speech bubbles of various pages from all periods of comics history. The copied pages are precisely redrawn in the cartoonists’ styles with, as the only alteration, the integration of a recurring Steve Jobs figure as a main character. Before being published by Drawn & Quarterly, the pages of Sikoryak’s Terms and Conditions were posted on a regular basis through a dedicated Tumblr, where readers could suggest potential pages, co-constructing the archive that Sikoryak ultimately appropriates. This dynamic is perhaps proper to the Tumblr microblogging platform as its “structure and its users deemphasize the question of origin or authorship,” situating its “authorial locus” not in “the act of creation” but in “the act of curation” (Cho 45–46). In a similar vein, the “Redrawn” Tumblr, curated by Charles Forsman and Melissa Mendes, calls its followers to “Pick a random page of comic. Redraw it. Post it here.”13 Such tactics are typical of the digital-media ecology; in fact, they are such an important part of the “practice of everyday (media) life,” as Lev Manovich argues (“Practice” 319), that c­ ultural industries have integrated the tactical modes of bricolage and customization as part of their strategies—as Tumblr and other social-media platforms demonstrate. Remix and mash-up might be part of the cultural lives of comics in the digital age, but they still remain on the periphery of comics studies.14 Redrawing forces attention to the circulation of old images, to an embodied and affective engagement with the archive of comics history. Yet part of the digital economy of comics also tends to underline acts of copying that put the author’s hand at further remove.

Undrawing Dan Walsh’s Garfield Minus Garfield is an example of this remix ecology; this Tumblr microblog collects appropriations of Garfield strips that erase its title character in order to offer a different reading of the human character.15 The project perfectly illustrates the way comics memory has similarly gone rogue, following De Kosnik’s paradigm: “many digital works begin as acts of memory, with a user remembering a loved (or hated) mass culture text and isolating, then manipulating, revising, and reworking specific elements of that text” (4).16 Repurposed as such, Jim Davis’s gag strip suddenly becomes a kind of typical alternative comic, as Garfield Minus Garfield “reveal[s] angst, loneliness and bleakness in strips that were originally intended to be funny” (Schneider 48). Its digital materiality, however, is very different from the typical alternative comic with its emphasis on singular autography and graphic style as a direct expression of its authors’ subjectivity. This practice of graphic archiveology uses existing comics not through redrawing

Drawing, Redrawing, and Undrawing    155 but through reproduction and manipulation, disengaging from the act of drawing as making a trace that otherwise remains so important to comics culture. Rather, a work such as Garfield Minus Garfield falls under the paradigm of what conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith terms “uncreative writing,” which regroups acts of “moving information,” “signify[ing] both the act of pushing language around as well as the act of being emotionally moved by that process” (1). While redrawing already is one way of “pushing” images around in comics, acts of undrawing displace the material act of drawing in itself and rely on transformative processes, tapping into sundry archives of comics. A direct extension of rogue archiving, Samplerman’s remixes tap into online repositories of public-domain comic books such as the Digital Comic Museum to create digital collages. Contrasting with the private and preservationist dimensions of comic-book culture and its obsession with “mint” conditions, the open-sourced digital formats of comic-book scans, such as CBR or CBZ, directly allow, if not call for, such appropriations.17 In transforming scans made available by fan archivists, Samplerman’s work draws attention to the circulation of comic books in digital contexts. Indeed, the visual aesthetics of his collages play up repetition effects that are not available in traditional print collage, limited by the relative scarcity of materials to cut from. Many of Samplerman’s collages use mirror effects, duplication, and layering that foreground the particular affordances of digital image-editing software (Figure 9.3). By keeping the aesthetics of comic-book scans, with their faded colors and newsprint backgrounds, these collages play up the recognition of familiar images against their distortion. Samplerman’s work alternates between absurd but narrative-driven collages, unfolding over several pages and integrating speech bubbles, and single-page collages, prioritizing abstract ­layouts that defamiliarize the conventional structure of the comics page. Very different from high-art appropriations of comics, Samplerman’s collages are more directly aligned with the remix aesthetics of digital cultural production. Yet this way of “undrawing” comics is not necessarily based on a digital context only. Pascal Matthey’s 978, for instance, is a book-long abstract comic following a regular six-panel grid that is strictly made of collaged fragments gleaned from comics magazines. The fragments are repurposed into a flux of changing patterns, some recognizable, others less so. The comprehensive process of drawing by physically cutting out and assembling fragments, while it displays a materiality of its own and demonstrates masterful craft, displaces the act of drawing. As Pedro Moura argues in a detailed close reading of 978, in this case, “collage is not a means to an end; it is an invitation to an ongoing process, and even a questioning of the classical forms of comics-making” (“Comics, Scissors”). Matthey’s 978 is, tellingly, radically different from his pencil-drawn autobiographical comics, and the author’s name, also tellingly, is not featured on the cover, which only indicates the first three digits of its own ISBN code. Published as a forty-eight-page cardboard album, the typical format for the French comics market, 978 raises key issues about the circulation of comics, their materiality, and their physical status as trash. In a market saturated with overproduction, where unsold items are regularly sent to the grinder, the sheer act of making a book of such fragments become significant—“context is the new content” (Goldsmith 3).

156   Benoît Crucifix

Figure 9.3  Page from Samplerman’s Miscosmocs Comics, 2017. © Samplerman/Yvan Guillo.

Following Goldsmith’s call for “uncreative writing,” Ilan Manouach’s works push ­conceptual approaches to comics that radically displace acts of drawing, where undrawing holds an ambiguous relationship to traditional notions of authorship. Manouach’s often collaborative projects involve unsigned détournements of various works, with ­limited and precise material intervention through tactical publication. His first works ­consisted of “erasurist” practices, removing or covering parts of existing comics. This archival tactic has also been deployed to great effect by Jochen Gerner, who, in various projects, has covered old Tintin albums or war pocket comic books with black ink, obscuring their parts as a way of revealing specific fragments or details. Using black ink, Gerner draws “out of ” the material copies, which, in a way, allows his own graphic style to remain timidly visible. Manouach’s erasurist projects are rather impinged on removing and shifting. Riki fermier is a reprinted version of the French edition of the Danish comic Petzi fermier where all characters, apart from Riki, have been digitally erased. More controversial, Manouach’s Katz revisited Art Spiegelman’s Maus by redrawing every animal character as a cat, effectively blurring the ethnic animal metaphor that plays such an important role in Spiegelman’s graphic novel. By messing with the issue that was most central to the critical reception of Maus, Manouach and his peers rekindled a debate, perhaps not so much on the pertinence of the metaphor in itself as on the

Drawing, Redrawing, and Undrawing    157 canonization of a work like Maus. After a copyright-infringement suit by its French publisher, Katz and all its all physical and digital copies were led to destruction. Where Riki fermier and Katz implied visible acts of undrawing, Manouach’s other projects adopt an even more concretist attention to comics materiality in itself. Noirs is a similar détournement of a classic album by Peyo, Les Schtroumpfs noirs, in which the Smurfs turn black when bitten by a special fly that makes them go violent and invasive. In order to interrogate this shady ethnic undertone, Manouach has reprinted the entire album using only the color blue. The making of the comic album is thus limited to the single intervention in the printing parameters: instead of following the traditional fourcolor printing, the CMYK layers are fully merged into one cyan layer. Moura notes the implications of that change for the way we conceive of the authorship of the work, which appears depersonalized and rather foregrounds “the expressivity of the very materiality of the album’s four-colour printing” (Moura, “Les Schtroumpfs noirs”). Instead of laying bare the human agency in the graphic trace, Noirs foregrounds the importance of matter and materiality in shaping our understanding of comics. Manouach’s latest work, Blanco, further develops that concept by removing drawing completely. It is a completely blank forty-eight-page book, produced following the mass production of Franco-Belgian comics albums but remaining “unprinted.” Blanco in French means “dummy,” the print jargon for the blank prototype used by printers as a mock-up for what the book will look and feel like, whether the binding will work ­correctly, and so on. In the case of traditional comics albums, however, it is not necessary to make a dummy, since the format is so heavily institutionalized. The forty-eightpage album in color with cardboard covers has become such a standard that it has become, in a way, invisible. With Blanco, Manouach thus puts on the market an odd ghostlike object that reflexively calls our attention to the invisibility of material formats in comics culture. It is a piece directly in line with the various conceptually blank objects that Craig Dworkin describes as “paratexts without a text” (59). Even though Blanco is blank and displays none of the common features of comics besides its sheer material ­format, we directly recognize it as a comic precisely because that format is so strongly embedded in French comics culture. By being blank, its sheer circulation draws attention to the various economic paratexts that frame the cultural lives of any comic. Blanco is a radical example of the idea that “context is the new content,” and its circulation imbues the work with new significations. A brilliant example is a photograph of a table in a bookstore displaying Blanco alongside the French edition of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics using the subtitle The Invisible Art as its main title (Figure 9.4). This creative appropriation of the book pinpoints how McCloud’s focus on the invisible is narrowly limited to the gutter between two panels, missing in many dimensions of comics that are either too visible for us to see or made invisible by long habits and social conventions. Blanco thus becomes a sounding board for the sheer material processes of production and reception to become signifying elements through their circulation and appropriation by distributors, sellers, users, and readers. Acts of undrawing create works that problematize reading; they do not rely on ­conventional ways of reading and interpreting comics, especially in the emphasis

158   Benoît Crucifix

Figure 9.4 Bookstore table displaying copies of Ilan Manouach’s Blanco alongside Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics; photograph taken in 2018, photographer unknown, available online at du9.org, https://www.du9.org/chronique/blanco/.

on  comics as literacy. Leaning closer to various ways of “undoing art” (Caws and Delville), undrawing offers an extreme form of self-reflexivity that goes beyond ­processes of rewriting to emphasize the materiality of comics. Undrawing departs from existing artifacts to revisit and transform them in a way that makes the appropriated fragments always visible, even if this process might come down to a bare format. Context thus takes a renewed importance in such “uncreative” works that thrive on remixing. Accordingly, it is key never to lose sight of cultural specificities. If I argued at the beginning of this chapter that it matters to see remix in medium-specific terms by understanding remix in comics as situated practices of redrawing and undrawing, it is just as important that “moving” comics images involves cultural specificities. While the examples I selected bear no pretension to being exhaustive, they hint at a rift between North American and European cultures of comics, one attached to redrawing, the other more inclined to undraw. There certainly are counterexamples, and tactical acts of redrawing also matter in European comics, such as in Olivier Josso Hamel’s Au travail, which revisits different  images gleaned from his childhood comics readings.18 Yet the uneven cultural ­legitimization of comics in Europe and in the United States seems to make for different

Drawing, Redrawing, and Undrawing    159 ways of producing and consuming comics. As Christopher Pizzino argues, the conflicted history of comics as “delinquent reading” has impacted the cultural memory of the medium, and struggles against the normative narrative of maturation and development remain visible in contemporary comics. If this is allegedly stronger in U.S. comics culture than in the “postlegitimate” world of European comics, we can note how practices of redrawing and undrawing replay Pizzino’s thinking on “the self-opposed tactics of autoclasm,” designating a way for creators to “picture the disenfranchisement that, to one degree or another, comes with the very act of making comics” (4–5). If autoclasm is “present when an image effects a kind of self-breaking” (48), acts of undrawing—so closely connected to destructive gestures—are deeply autoclastic: they simultaneously express a deep archival attachment to old comics and an undoing of their historical ­context. Undrawing seeps into the strange tension that inhabits comics as a mass-­reproduced artifact that keeps the hand of its maker visible; it disrupts the relationship between drawing and storytelling to refocus attention on the social and political economy of the drawn image. The autoclastic dynamic of undrawing is thus also found in the self-breaking of comics making, displacing traditional practices of drawing. If “comics authorship, which needs to be untangled from a vast web of competing interests, is often situated in-between the two idealized extremes of confessional autobiography and impersonal genre writing” (Ahmed 11), undrawn comics seep into this in-between, assuming impersonality as a kind of “unoriginal genius.”19

Notes 1. Correspondence with author, February 2018. 2. Think, for instance, of the drive to identify Carl Barks, “the good duck artist,” thanks to his “distinct visual signature” (Beaty 80). This auteurist drive in fan discourses have further contributed to mold comics scholarship. 3. The second part of the phrase is borrowed from Russell’s coinage in Archiveology. 4. There are too many excellent accounts of the form to list them all, but the work of Jan Baetens, Pierre Fresnault-Desruelle, Thierry Groensteen, Charles Hatfield, Benoît Peeters, and Barbara Postema have been paramount in the field. For an overview, see the “Understanding Panel and Page Layouts” chapter of The Graphic Novel: An Introduction (Baetens and Frey 103–133) as well as The French Comics Theory Reader (Miller and Beaty 115–202). 5. For an English introduction to the theory of graphiation, see Baetens. 6. It should be noted that Scott McCloud does pay attention to drawing and comes up with a triangular spectrum to assess graphic style in relationship to its functionality and referentiality. 7. As Grennan suggests, it is important to distinguish between trace and index when describing the “visible mark” (15). 8. Manovich has written about the database logic as a cultural form opposed to the linear logic of traditional narrative in The Language of New Media (225). 9. On the history of the production process in American comic books, see Gabilliet’s 111–133.

160   Benoît Crucifix 10. For more on embodied subjective position in acts of redrawing, see Simon Grennan’s drawing demonstrations (161–248). 11. For a close reading of Burns’s swipe files and a larger reflection on what swiping means in contemporary comics culture, see Crucifix, “Cut-Up and Redrawn.” 12. One could also think of Art Spiegelman’s “The Malpractice Suite,” published in 1976 in Arcade. 13. Available at http://redrawncomics.tumblr.com. 14. A few exceptions aside; see, for instance, Kannenberg on mash-ups of Peanuts, including ones posted on fan art platforms such as DeviantArt. 15. First launched in 2008, Garfield Minus Garfield is an ongoing publication available at http://garfieldminusgarfield.net. 16. It should nonetheless be noted that Tumblr, as a profit-driven enterprise, does not in itself fit into the stricter definition of “rogue archives,” with its related activist fan production that De Kosnik gives priority to in her work. On “rogue” comics memory, see also the introduction to Ahmed and Crucifix. 17. This difference in format matters, contrasting with the way PDF “supports structured hierarchies of authors and readers” (Gitelman 133). On the work of comic book scanners, see Wershler et al. 18. For a close reading of Hamel’s redrawing of “memorable panels,” see Crucifix, “Rethinking.” A very different case and one that seems more strategic than tactical is Blutch’s Variations, a large book in which the author redraws in his own style single pages by different cartoonists. 19. Many thanks to Maaheen Ahmed and Pedro Moura for their kind and generous comments.

Works Cited Ahmed, Maaheen. “Comics and Authorship: An Introduction.” Authorship, vol. 6, no. 2, 2017, pp. 1–13, doi:10.21825/aj.v6i2.7702. Ahmed, Maaheen, and Benoît Crucifix, editors. Comics Memory: Archives and Styles. Palgrave, 2018. Baetens, Jan. “Revealing Traces. A New Theory of Graphic Enunciation.” The Language of Comics: Word and Image, edited by Robin Varnum and Christina  T.  Gibbons, UP of Mississippi, 2001, pp. 145–155. Baetens, Jan, and Hugo Frey. The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. Cambridge UP, 2015. Beaty, Bart. Comics versus Art. Toronto UP, 2012. Benjamin, Walter. One-Way Street. Edited by Michael William Jennings, translated by E. F. N. Jephcott, Harvard UP, 2016. Blutch. Variations. Dargaud, 2017. Borschke, Margie. This Is Not a Remix: Piracy, Authenticity and Popular Music. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Brienza, Casey, and Paddy Johnston. “Introduction: Understanding Comics Work.” Cultures of Comics Work, edited by Casey Brienza and Paddy Johnston, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 1–17. Burns, Charles. “Naked Snack.” Buzz, no. 2, 1991, pp. 5–10. Caws, Mary Ann, and Michel Delville. Undoing Art. Quodlibet, 2017.

Drawing, Redrawing, and Undrawing    161 Cho, Alexander. “Queer Reverb: Tumblr, Affect, Time.” Networked Affect, edited by Susanna Paasonen et al., MIT Press, 2015, pp. 43–58. Chute, Hillary  L. “Secret Labor.” Poetry, August 2013, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ poetrymagazine/articles/70022/secret-labor. Crucifix, Benoît. “Cut-Up and Redrawn: Reading Charles Burns’ Swipe Files.” Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, vol. 1, no. 3, 2017, pp. 309–333. Crucifix, Benoît. “Rethinking the ‘Memorable Panel’ from Pierre Sterckx to Olivier Josso Hamel.” European Comic Art, vol. 10, no. 2, 2017, pp. 24–47, doi:10.3167/eca.2017.100203. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. U of California P, 2013. De Kosnik, Abigail. Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. MIT Press, 2016. Dworkin, Craig Douglas. No Medium. MIT Press, 2015. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen, UP of Mississippi, 2010. Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford UP, 2012. Gardner, Jared. “Storylines.” SubStance, vol. 40, no. 1, 2011, pp. 53–69. Gitelman, Lisa. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Duke UP, 2014. Goldsmith, Kenneth. Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. Columbia UP, 2011. Grennan, Simon. A Theory of Narrative Drawing. Palgrave, 2017. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Translated by Nick Nguyen and Bart Beaty, UP of Mississippi, 2009. Huizenga, Kevin. The Half Men. Self-published, 2013. Kannenberg, Gene Jr. “Chips Off the Ol’ Blockhead: Evidence of Influence in Peanuts Parodies.” The Comics of Charles Schulz: The Good Grief of Modern Life, edited by Jared Gardner and Ian Gordon, UP of Mississippi, 2017, pp. 197–212. Josso Hamel, Olivier. Au travail, tome 1. L’Association, 2012. Laliberte, Mark. BrickBrickBrick. BookThug, 2010. Manouach, Ilan. Katz. La Cinquième Couche, 2011. Manouach, Ilan. Riki fermier. La Cinquième Couche, 2015. Manouach, Ilan. Noirs. La Cinquième Couche, 2015. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. MIT Press, 2001. Manovich, Lev. “The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Consumption to Mass Cultural Production?” Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, 2009, pp. 319–331. Marion, Philippe. Traces en cases: Travail graphique, figuration narrative et participation du lecteur. Academia, 1993. Matthey, Pascal. 978. La Cinquième Couche, 2014. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Harper, 1994. Miller, Ann, and Bart Beaty, editors. French Comics Theory Reader. Leuven UP, 2014. Moura, Pedro. “Comics, Scissors, Paper: The Bandes Collées of Pascal Matthey and Diceindustries.” Abstraction and Comics/Bande Dessinée et Abstraction, edited by Aarnoud Rommens et al., Presses Universitaires de Liège/La Cinquième Couche, 2019, 572–597. Manouach, Ilan. Blanco. La Cinquième Couche, 2018. Moura, Pedro. “Les Schtroumpfs noirs.” du9—L’autre bande dessinée, April 2014, https://www. du9.org/en/chronique/les-schtroumpfs-noirs-2. Newgarden, Mark. “Love’s Savage Fury.” Raw, vol. 1, no. 8, 1986, pp. 39–42.

162   Benoît Crucifix Peeters, Benoît. “Between Writing and Image: A Scriptwriter’s Way of Working.” European Comic Art, vol. 3, no. 1, 2010, pp. 105–115. Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. U of Chicago P, 2012. Pizzino, Christopher. Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature. U of Texas P, 2016. Regé, Ron Jr. Diana. Self-published, 2014. Russell, Catherine. Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices. Duke UP, 2018. Samplerman. Miscosmocs Comics. Le Dernier Cri, 2017. Schneider, Greice. What Happens When Nothing Happens: Boredom and Everyday Life in Contemporary Comics. Leuven UP, 2016. Shooter, Jim, editor. The Official Marvel Comics Try-Out Book. Marvel, 1983. Sikoryak, Robert. “Good Ol’ Gregor Brown.” Raw, vol. 2, no. 2, 1990, pp. 178–179. Sikoryak, Robert. Terms and Conditions: The Graphic Novel. Drawn & Quarterly, 2017. Spiegelman, Art. “The Malpractice Suite.” Arcade, no. 6, 1976, pp. 12–13. Stewart, Garrett. Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art. U of Chicago P, 2011. Walsh, Dan. Garfield Minus Garfield. 2008, http://garfieldminusgarfield.net. Wershler, Darren, et al. “A Network Archaeology of Unauthorized Comic Book Scans.” Amodern, no. 2, 2013, http://amodern.net/article/a-network-archaeology-of-unauthorizedcomic-book-scans/. Woo, Benjamin. “To the Studio! Comic Book Artists: The Next Generation and the Occupational Imaginary of Comics Work.” Cultures of Comics Work, edited by Casey Brienza and Paddy Johnston, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 189–202.

pa rt I I

C OM IC S A S S O C I A L C OM M E N TA RY A N D R E SP ONSE TO S O C IOP OL I T IC A L REALITIES

chapter 10

Ba k hti n i a n L aughter a n d R ecen t Politica l Editor i a l Ca rtoons Michael A. Chaney and Sara B. Chaney

Flashpoints for thinking about visual satire and global political humor may be found in the theories of dialogism posited by Russian formalist Mikhail Bakhtin and indirectly elaborated in recent editorial cartoons by Doaa El-Adl of Egypt, Xavier Bonilla (“Bonil”) of Ecuador, and Godfrey Mwampembwa (“Gado”) of Tanzania. These international ­artists use visual satire and social media to participate in a form of comedy that Bakhtin theorizes to be the counterforce to the epic and its generic presumption of an absolute distance from the past, along with the epic’s valorization of great men and its solemnity toward nationalist traditions. By contrast, European folk culture, according to Bakhtin, developed a contrary mode in comedy of “laughing at living reality,” which, as in editorial political cartoons, revolves around the excoriation of authoritarianism, corruption, and injustice mainly through caricature and travesty. Editorial political cartoons are visual repositories of metaphor that produce and reflect contemporaneity both within and beyond nation-state boundaries. Ulrich Keller notes how the flowery tone of nineteenth-century American newspapers informs and mutually invests editorial cartooning traditions: “through narrative framing, editorial comment, and the increasingly flowery political language itself, rhetorical metaphor invaded the newspapers” (4). The metaphorical nature of the editorial cartoon, then, shapes rather than merely reflects political discourse by figuring politics for public consumption.1 In so doing, the editorial cartoon provides readers with a means of experiencing the political present. As Larry Bush reminds us, an editorial cartoon is “a political cartoon that is drawn contemporary to the issue that it examines” (63). And although we would depart from his use of the term skimmer when denoting readers of comics as it prioritizes print literacy, we adopt Bush’s definitional stricture for understanding political editorial cartoons as having a proximate temporal relation to the events or attitudes they convey, so that “the turnaround time between the artist having finished his product and its publication in a newspaper is often less than one day” (63).

166   Michael A. Chaney and Sara B. Chaney Bakhtinian notions of laughter provide an apt lens for analyzing single-image comics, more so than the traditional multipanel comic strips, because of the single-image ­cartoon’s emphasis on time. By intimating sequences of cause or consequence without directly showing them, single-image editorial comics induce viewers to read narratively backward from the moment captured as well as forward. To fully comprehend such texts, reader-viewers must make adjustments to the image shown to see beyond the depicted figures, balloons, and spaces as well as beyond the depicted ideologies (and their temporalities) in order to get the full joke. The consideration of other times, near futures and recent pasts, is often perquisite to laughter, and this unsettling quality is ­precisely what gives comedy revolutionary potential. In the process of production and reception, both the editorial cartoon and the time-scape produced by it demonstrate an inherently radical openness similar to the one Bakhtin discovers in “novelization.” We begin with Bakhtin’s emphasis on the novel as a way of exploiting the same sensitivities that his theories show for conceptualizing temporality within humorous genres and forms. Comics and graphic novels have been found carnivalesque, dialogic, and chronotopic by many who use Bakhtin’s concepts to make claims about the intermedial singularity of the comic form—what Annalisa Di Liddo summarizes as the “fusion and dynamic relationship that occurs between spatial and temporal dimensions of the comic” (63).2 For Bakhtin, the novel is not just a narrative form but a cultural device within which authors and readers collaboratively experience and invent contemporaneity. As with present-day editorial cartoons, the novel (the new) invents the now through its openness to parody, adumbrating the unfinished present with hues drawn from humor’s palette of unsettling social arrangements (role reversals, mimicry, hybridity, de-crowning of the high, valorization of the vulgar). In representing a time-scape that is always present, though porous, plural, and unfolding, the editorial cartoons we discuss in this chapter deliver contemporaneity to an emergent global audience of visual readers on the “plane of laughter” (Bakhtin 23). On this plane, epic distance is obliterated in favor of “crude contact” (23) with political power objectified, plastic, and embodied. Under the sign of comedy, heads of state and international crises are brought intensely close so as to undergo de-crowning. Just as contemporaneity itself is the primary concern of comedy for Bakhtin, so, too, shall we seek to glimpse the myriad contemporaries that editorial cartooning affords its reader-viewers.

Gado’s Doodled Humanity Laughs at Epic Corruption to Produce Contemporaneity Although he is Tanzanian, comic artist Godfrey Mwampembwa has been drawing comics about the politics of Kenya and central Africa under the pen name Gado since the 1990s, winning awards for his ability to meet conflict with wit (Kenyan Cartoonist of the Year in 1999, an International Editorial Cartoon award in 2016). In addition to

Bakhtinian Laughter and Political Editorial Cartoons   167 his ongoing syndication across multiple African national newspaper and media systems, Gado uses social media deftly to compound the international reach of his ­cartooning. Gado’s cartoons are antiepical and participatory. They bring the great men of history close, subjecting them to the knowing gaze and guffaws of a common reader.3 The designs of many of Gado’s comics present at least two spatial and temporal planes in order to contrast them. The cartoon in Figure 10.1 segments the comic, fracturing international politics so that even the layout sets up the content to be dialogical. In the black-and-white background, beyond the spectacular mechanisms of shaking hands, are two recognizable figures. Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un appear as mischievous infants; the remnants of a recent food fight are strewn about beneath their tiny feet dangling from high chairs. Overturned bowls, spills, broken glass, rubble, food scraps, and even what appears to be a cabbage or a tomato stabbed with cutlery visualize the chaos. Thus, the comic portrays its risible world leaders in two ways at once. On the surface or in the public eye, they are showmen trafficking in false hand gestures (i.e., political messages) of international friendship and harmony, while offstage, they are rambunctious babies indulging in behaviors that cause the very messes in need of repair. There are two dimensions to the political spectacle of US–North Korea international relations at the current time. The first, in color, encodes an artificial ruse more than a contemporary reality, which accords more with the secondary dimension, in black-and-white, of a political actuality that only the comic enables us to see. As a whole, the comic associates political rhetoric with a false-handedness. Hands function as masks within this rhetoric

Figure 10.1  Gado, food fight with Trump and Kim.

168   Michael A. Chaney and Sara B. Chaney of doubles and contrasts. Here they are prosthetic distractions for offstage political ­decisions that culminate in a scene resembling an international food riot. The stains littering the comic’s lower areas do more than signal waste on an abstract scale. They also help make the leaders’ bodies symbolically legible, making their bodies bodily. Kim and Trump are shown to be susceptible not only to the piercing sting of ­satire but also to injuries linked to shooting or stabbing victims. Visually, the comic p ­ erforms Scott McCloud’s notion of closure by including the pierced fruit in the background as another mischievous thing to do with one’s hands besides slinging food; and in this way, the comic uses contrast to compare the leaders’ sacrilegious privilege to the roguish squandering of food by babies oblivious to the material consequences of their actions. The debris of the nether regions of this comic is rhetorically sapient, then, standing in for political double-dealing while pointing to the destruction the two leave in their wake. But Gado’s world is not entirely fallen. A doodle in the rubbish gathers from Gado’s loose strokes the semblance of eyes. It seems to look upon the mess in surprise and thus to mirror or to model the average viewer’s response. The larger message of the doodle is optimistic. Even amid the visual chaos of a post-Trump-Kim food-fight apocalypse, the cartoonist’s pen creates habitable terrain for endangered human responses. This comic attempts to capture an international view of the political at a moment of absurdity. At the same time, it “reflects more deeply, more essentially, more sensitively and rapidly, reality itself in the process of its unfolding,” as Bakhtin (7) would argue of the nineteenth-century novel, because it includes an added layer of narrative framing, in which the whole unfolds before another presence. Although minimal in form, marginally positioned, and conventionally mute, Gado’s doodle of the unformed person celebrates the inchoate citizen who brings the mighty and the corrupt to heel by witnessing and responding to their passing. Indeed, despite its ribaldry, this comic provides for optic review a “new world still in the making” similar to the one that Bakhtin ascribes to novels. This is so on a basic level in that the comic pictures two current world leaders whose ongoing affinities and differences remain perilously unsettled. More complexly, the comic operates in and helps to construct a uniquely international context. It conjoins at least three discernible national perspectives on multiple transnational social-media platforms owned or managed by Gado—all publishing the same comic on the same day. Thus, the comic uses its wordless structure and the affordance of a global audience and publishing context to create an international political rhetoric of a shared contemporaneous moment. That this moment spans national reading audiences renders the very concept of nationalism ineffectual as a category of reception. The comic is like the novel in the sense described by Bakhtin, in that both effectuate “radical change . . . in the temporal coordinates of the literary image” (11). Moreover, both this comic and Bakhtin’s concept of the novel may be seen as opening up a “new zone” within the image or its functioning for “maximal ­contact with the present (with contemporary reality) in all its openendedness” (11). Seen through a Bakhtinian lens, Gado’s comic permits representation as well as ­political participation through its symbolization of figures, concepts, issues, and events readily associated with contemporaneity, as from the vanguard edge of an ephemeral, exagger-

Bakhtinian Laughter and Political Editorial Cartoons   169 ated view. According to Bakhtin, contemporaneity is not only the dominant subject of comic discourse but also its primary effect or product, not merely “the c­ ommon people’s creative culture of laughter” (20) but also a way of thinking about the self in relationship to time, “[t]he present, contemporary life as such, ‘I myself ’ and ‘my ­contemporaries,’ ‘my time”—all these were originally the objects of ambivalent laughter, at the same time cheerful and annihilating” (21). Thus, from a Bakhtinian perspective, the food-fight comic manages for the reader a new relationship to “my time,” for as Bakhtin puts it, “to portray an event on the same time-and-value plane as oneself and one’s c­ ontemporaries (and an event that is therefore based on personal experience and thought) is to undertake a radical revolution, and to step out of the world of epic into the world of the novel” (14). That temporality of novelization is also on display in Gado’s comic. Gado creates “my time” in his editorial cartoons by embedding a signatorial character into his comics who stands in for the everyday observer of politics. Occasionally vocalizing the comic’s critical punchline but more often crowned by diacritical lines to indicate a reaction, this marginal figure emotes powerfully, but it is never more than a mark, its face an abstraction. Rose Marie Beck suggests a connection between what we are calling the doodle person and the African trickster: Gado “often includes a small hare in his cartoons who comments on sensitive issues in his place” (519). Noting the prevalent ­representation of hares as trickster figures in East Africa, we might speculate along with Beck that the hare (or what we are calling the doodle person) represents the trickster tradition in African oratory. This mark reserves a place for the individual rather than the  individual-as-type within the usual terrain of national and global actors of the ­editorial cartoon. Of course, the space of the individual in the comic may also be underwritten by the iconographic power of social-media practices insofar as the mark serves as a reaction icon. Like a thumbs-up emoticon or a heart, the doodle indicates an intended emotional response and may be used to signal and thus elicit the same response in the readerviewer. And whereas most editorial cartoons make humans into ridiculous objects, Gado’s ridiculous-looking object is usually the only figure within the domain of the comic who is acting in a manner anticipated to be most like that of the reader-viewer on the other side of the comic screen. One could go so far as to say that the figure represents Gado himself, since it complements the signature in size and relative style. Despite its many unique formal attributes, the doodle seems to possess a singular purpose within the visual rhetoric of most Gado comics. In his presentation of political contemporaneity, Gado uses this signatorial figure to make global politics intimate and legible. His commentary on Trump and Kim throughout June 2018 offers further ­evidence of Gado’s Bakhtinian embodying of concepts, which not only celebrates the metaphorizing powers of the cartoonist but does so according to an implied temporality of sequence that, in effect, subjects the timelessness of grandiosity to the ravages of passing time that plague the mortal and the ordinary. Gado’s comic for June 17, 2018, “Trump and Kim: The Morning After” (Figure 10.2) imagines the two world leaders in no more domesticating a scene of grandiosity than the bedroom. The thong draped over Trump’s bedside table sports an inverted triangle, symbol of gay pride.

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Figure 10.2  Gado, “Trump and Kim: The Morning After.”

Once again, Gado’s doodle person appears at the bottom, situated beneath the wreckage from the night’s exploits. Its eyes are wide open, staring at them in disbelief. The white of the eye in this version of the doodle is more recognizably emotive than in other comics, perhaps because of the subject matter of homosexuality (taboo to many of Gado’s reader-viewers) or perhaps because of the extreme perspective from which the doodle looks. The mirrored inversion of the speech bubbles may be a subtextual joke about homosexuality as mirror, the two men having similarly protuberant breasts, vacant eyes, empty hand gestures, and even the same expostulation. The comic also calls for us to notice the differences, not just in there being two highlighted regions below the blanket to indicate Trump’s knees and only one for Kim’s but also in the slightly different meanings of the two phrases in conversational English. “Now what?!” may more readily indicate situations of boredom to be resolved by a suggestion of action along with the presumption of agency for undertaking such action by hearers of the utterance, while “What now?!” calls for a response or a reaction to a series of potentially calamitous events or even banal events recontextualized using the term as if in comparison with real calamity, as a cognate phrase of “What next?!” As with the earlier cartoon of June 12, in which the two appear as post-food-fight infants, they have again engaged in actions taking place offstage, increasing the readerviewer’s Menippean relish for the comic’s revisualization of global power. We encounter them after their more explosive collisions have taken place, and the caricaturist’s image is an inherently queer space for them to occupy as a result. It sustains an ecology ripened

Bakhtinian Laughter and Political Editorial Cartoons   171 by transgressive variation and hyperbole. Through the carefully prepared window of the global comic, potentates undergo metaphorization yet again, so that the ultimate joke may be about the cartoonist, in whose capable hands the leaders transmogrify into rambunctious infants and then homosexual lovers. “Now what?!” is a fittingly promiscuous index, prodding reaction to the series of transmogrifications in Gado’s comics, while at the same time voicing mass surprise at the excesses of militaristic state leaders. Once again, as in the comic from June 12, this cartoon visualizes two political timescapes in accordance with an organization that divides the scene into upper and lower domains. The upper plays fun house for power and politics. The lower is home to rubble and remains. Among the most articulate of what remains, Gado’s signatorial figure presumably views these upper and lower domains simultaneously, becoming a marker of synthesizing vision and radical laughter, which in most cases entails simply responding emotionally (dialogically) to an otherwise emotionally insensitive (monologic) political discourse. Whether lampooning leaders on an international or national stage, Gado uses the cartoonist’s weapons of visual metaphor to make a laughable and therefore graspable object of the present. Indeed, although many of his techniques and subjects are neither original nor unique, Gado’s comics forcefully represent a vision of the political present from a unique point of view, as the passing object at which his barely visible but eternal everyman gasps. For another version of Gado’s instantiation of this figure, let us turn to “The Cleaning Lady,” which was posted to social media on June 20, 2018 (Figure 10.3). This cartoon is a critique of the 2018 Kenyan budget, featuring two political leaders riding on top of an oversized pig labeled “Corruption.” The mounting pile of waste is very similar to the ­discarded food in the comic of Trump and Kim—gluttony and waste stain the leader as an obscene consumer who has effectively eaten and evacuated the world. We see in this political cartoon a language of position in which leaders inhabit the upper sphere of the image (the high chair, bed, or pig), dropping rubble-like excrement onto regular folk below. The kerchiefed cleaning lady stares as if just awakened to how she and the reader she encodes are left to clean up after profligate leaders. As in Gado’s other comics, we are called to notice disparity. We could paraphrase the budget official’s speech bubble to essentially say, “We have allocated meager resources to solve an enormous problem.” This disparity between the scale and nature of the problem and the proposed solution is rendered aptly through the comic’s vocabulary of grotesque metamorphosis. Meanwhile, Gado’s signatorial figure looks on from the lower right-hand corner. Several exclamation points appear above its head, a productively open-ended emotional response. This nonrepresentational sketch of a not-yet-person who displays an evolving form and affect looks upon events and actions from a domain contiguous with but ­disconnected from them. In this sense, the signatorial figure is a witness not merely to politics but to history; its prehuman but humane affect stands in for a range of emotional responses anticipated from reader-viewers across the globe, whose collective reactions to world events make it possible for something knowable as the now to become what Bakhtin terms “my time”—a revolutionary condition in which the events of politics

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Figure 10.3  Gado, “The Cleaning Lady.”

exist on the same plane as oneself and one’s contemporaries. The doodled figure gestures toward this revolution, proclaiming the evolving self as presence in and perhaps unacknowledged shaper of political reality. From a Bakhtinian perspective, the unfolding present of Gado’s comics is often located temporally at a moment just after power has been abused through the transgressions of the leader. Thus, the politically “obscene” is often located in the past, albeit a very recent one. We find the leaders pictured at the moment subsequent to their violations, a moment when the evidence of that transgression is still viewable. A connection between seeing and time inheres. Political wrongdoing we can see has to have already happened to be visible—it has to have already revealed itself to the public, in other words, to be seen and mocked. Recentness and immediacy are imperative. In Bakhtin’s terms, Gado is involved in a “radical change . . . in the temporal coordinates of the literary image.” Because the “literary image” in Gado’s comics encompasses not just drawings but concepts and beliefs, it remains open to as yet unknowable social and political realities while invariably approaching a dismal present with an interruptive zeal for capturing the most august figureheads of the authorized “now,” as if through unauthorized snapshots taken from deliberately unphotogenic angles. Scarcely more than a sketch, Gado’s marginal onlooker, in effect, contributes to the cartoonist’s emphasis on the scatological excesses of a degraded political present while tying this project of classification and accusatory labeling to the ordinary observer lost in the shadowy sweep of epic history. Rhetorically, this figure functions as both superadded signature and emoticonic cue, triggering reader-viewers to effectuate dialogue

Bakhtinian Laughter and Political Editorial Cartoons   173 with contemporaneity and thus to abolish (if only momentarily) the epic distance with which the official present of government leaders meets that of the lowly person, whose space-time within the logic of Gado comics breaks out from the fringes to emotionally speak back to their times.

Doaa El-Adl’s Woman as the Individual of the Comic’s Inquiry into Danger and Threat When Doaa El-Adl was presented with a Cartooning for Peace award in 2014 by former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, it was not her first time in the international limelight. Since the start of her cartoon publishing career in 2007, El-Adl has been presented with Egypt’s Journalist’s Syndicate Distinction in Caricature (2009) and the 41st Forte de Marmi Prize for Political Satire (2013). Based in Cairo and working for the private newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm, El-Adl made headlines in December 2012 when one of her many comics critical of President Mohammed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood–backed regime was brought up on blasphemy charges for its depiction of Adam, a prophet within Islam. While most Egyptian political cartoonists stage political happenings within a local setting, such as “the ahwa, or street café” as Jonathan Guyer has shown (213), El-Adl opts for a vision of the political so local that it rests on the ordinary person. Her everyman may share traits with Gado’s trickster doodle in confronting mythically superior forces of political contemporaneity, but hers is a woman, defiant and central, never positioned at the margin. More significantly, El-Adl poses the figure of her ordinary individual as the one who “laughs at living reality” in Bakhtin’s dialogical sense, so as to participate in the shared if irreverent construction of a volatile political present. However, though many of her comics are readable as funny to a wide range of audiences, El-Adl’s woman provokes less through humor than with illustration traditions related to the fairy tale, the grotesque, modernist pop art, and surrealism. Rather than laughter in the everyday sense, then, El-Adl’s woman is drawn to make reader-viewers inquire into the nature and scope of the dangers besetting women across the globe. Many of El-Adl’s cartoons convene their inquiries wordlessly and are commonly buttressed along the margins by a combination of Arabic and English writing (captions, character speech, and signatures). Through these and other primarily visual means, El-Adl’s drawings pose questions about women to global contemporaneity, questions about women’s injurers and abusers, their vulnerability and endurance. As the 2017 publication of her 50 Cartoons and More on Women attests, El-Adl makes images that are intended to be pedagogical and didactic for a range of women. Extensive analysis is not needed to note a feminist agenda. Some of her comics are visual jokes and rhetorically accusatory, revealing how men in Egyptian society benefit from the subjugation of women. Others exploit and repurpose the iconic force of the female figure to

174   Michael A. Chaney and Sara B. Chaney present visual parables of empowerment to a female viewer. Nearly all employ ­contrast— as, for example, when men and male bodies loom over women who are dwarfed in ­comparison—to succinctly draw attention to gender disparity (see Figure 10.4). El-Adl is also known for her arch references to symbols that carry particular religious and political significance in a Middle Eastern context, in which veiling is required or expected of most women. It is worth noting that El-Adl frequently draws female characters with loose, flowing hair and revealing dresses, as if to both address and flout cultural prohibitions that would incriminate women’s exposed hair and liken it to wanton sexuality and punishable impropriety. Instead, El-Adl’s comics show a man’s beard transforming into a hand that claps over a woman’s mouth and men wearing a woman’s hair as faux mustaches. These comics draw attention to the double standards that connect women’s hair to sexual shame, while at the same time endowing male facial hair with a nearly sacred social power and rewarding men for their exploitation of women as sexual ornaments and consumable objects. El-Adl’s example raises questions about the historical and present role of women in Middle Eastern comics. Although rare among political cartooning of the past, women appear regularly in contemporary Egyptian cartoons. A recent study of post-Mubarak Egyptian political cartoons printed in a wide range of newspapers (variously owned by independents as well as religious and government authorities) points out that cartoons customarily recruit the image of a woman as a ubiquitous symbol for the country as a

Figure 10.4  Looming male body in a Doaa el-Adl cartoon.

Bakhtinian Laughter and Political Editorial Cartoons   175 whole: “a portrayal of the so-called ‘mother of the world,’ or the country that gave birth to the world’s civilization. . . . Usually, this metaphor is depicted as a middle-aged Egyptian woman with a black veil, who wears a traditional galabeya dress” (Elmaghraby 14). Such a pattern of gendered figuration would seem to echo Ayhan Akman’s assertion regarding post-1970s Middle Eastern comics (particularly in Turkey) being preoccupied with a modernist binary as “characters become interchangeable units of a larger whole: They belong to a generic identity category situated in a binary matrix whose telos is ­pre-determined by the way the matrix itself is structured” (126). Despite their widespread symbolization of women, contemporary Egyptian comics do not commonly raise issues of gender politics for public dialogue.4 This highlights El-Adl’s commitment to prioritize women—“in my own caricature, a woman is an active participant, a dynamic entity” (Rifaat). El-Adl is among a relatively small but powerful group of female cartoonists in Egypt who are challenging a previously male-dominated field (Nasser). To best understand the challenge faced by El-Adl and other female Egyptian cartoonists as critics of gender relations in Egyptian society, we note the paucity of such commentary in both Egypt’s history of caricature and cartooning and the scholarship that contends with it. Though Egyptian cartoonists have been lampooning corrupt leaders— and, by extension, the “patriarchal authoritarianism” they represent (Høigilt 111)–since the flourishing of satirical newspapers such as Rose El-Youssef in the 1920s, scholarship provides little evidence of a robust discussion of gender in Egypt’s cartooning history. Egypt’s recent political cartooning renaissance notwithstanding (Guyer), conversations about gender and sexual politics in Egypt seem to have received a mixed reception. Women in El-Adl’s comics configure deterritorialized archetypes of the individual situated in a global visual territory that swells with approaching hostility. The looming threats are linked to local gender politics but not confined by them. El-Adl’s inquiry into the danger that confronts women emerges from a global market of ideas in which transnational visual and political vocabularies commingle. El-Adl frequently uses global political frames to situate her visual commentaries on women’s rights. For example, in her comic in celebration of the “Me Too” movement (Figure 10.5), she pictures Little Red Riding Hood at the center of a mob of Big Bad Wolves. The obvious difference in the characterization of the wolf from the original fairy tale appears as a multiplication that begs the question of there being other possible multiplications in El-Adl’s version, a supposition reinforced by the caption (simply “Me Too” on the Cartoon Movement website) and the viral quality with which the “Me Too” movement has spread. Just as there are many wolves, there are many Little Red Riding Hoods on the other side of the comic screen of sympathy and affiliation. The original fairy-tale endings are also multiple, including a cautionary ending in which the dilatory girl is eaten by the wolf and a more cheerful one in which a savior comes along, either a lumberjack or a huntsman. Depending on the version, this salvific figure either prevents the wolf from eating the girl or extricates her from its belly afterward. El-Adl’s use of replication to overwhelm stable boundaries in the comic rescripts Little Red Riding Hood as a global parable of gendered threat. The female is a single individual imperiled by an anonymous

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Figure 10.5  Doaa El-Adl’s Little Red Riding Hood and the “Me Too” movement.

and dangerous mass. There is a clear tension between the one and the many in this comic. A similar tension inheres in the “Me Too” movement, as with most movements of digitally mediated political community. In referring to a digital, transnational space of affiliation and exchange, the replication of bodies and threats infuses the image with an urgency that contributes to its contemporaneity effects. The difference between the one and the many is reinforced by their positioning. While Little Red Riding Hood stares out at the viewer with a gaze that evinces agency and intention, the surrounding wolves have closed eyes. They are haphazardly positioned in relationship to her as well. Some face her with clear and menacing intention, as others face away, as if unaware of her presence. What is the effect of this ambiguity in their positioning? The wolves do not need to face Little Red Riding Hood in order to threaten her. Their threat is essential to their being and divorced from their intention. The spatial rhetoric of the comic also differs from that of the original fairy tale, alerting us that this “Little Red” exists in a new geography defined by a sea of crowding blue, and it is this tension in particular that signals a loss of stable boundaries. The original text of Little Red Riding Hood is about movement down paths, across borders, into and out of alien bodies. The Grimms’ heroine is punished for a boundary transgression. Had she kept to her path, she would have avoided disaster. El-Adl’s revision shows us how the wolves have come to populate nearly all the space there is. No correct path is possible within the image, thereby forestalling any moral. In a true Bakhtinian sense, an open-endedness surrounds El-Adl’s woman: her future is undecided. As drawn, the imminent future promises fatal contact with the wolves, but

Bakhtinian Laughter and Political Editorial Cartoons   177 the moment itself is importantly prior to the drama it forecasts. As is typical of the form, the temporal structure of this editorial cartoon is a mousetrap set at a moment of optimal tension. What is shown telegraphs what is to happen, and it is this happening that is the joke or the point. Likewise, El-Adl’s Little Red Riding Hood is depicted in a contemporaneity that is at once frozen and contingent. The same structure of impending catastrophe organizes another comic based on the famous Japanese print of Kanagawa villagers on a small boat before a tidal wave. In this comic adaptation of another iconic myth, El-Adl inscribes a “Me Too” consciousness onto the more iconic visual narrative of courage amid inexorable devastation (Figure 10.6). We can imagine the wave colliding with the single woman on the boat, the primary variation El-Adl plays on the famous Japanese print—Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa—as happening in an imminent future measured in seconds, if not minutes. Just as the wolves in the other comic consume livable terrain, so, too, does this image signify menace as a unified, overwhelming hazard or, more significantly, as a position or a telos (a crash course) with hazard or peril. Such a direction toward conflict has a temporality, and it is this quality of being “once upon a time”—of having existed perhaps at a moment once, and only once, before an impending conflict—that lends fairy tales and this comic their resonance and, for Western readers, at least, a semblance of universality. The frozenness of the snapshot allows us to discern the temporal possibilities nipping at the narrative edges. To fast-forward one imaginary second beyond the one depicted is to face predatory forces that, like time, thicken space, looping the heroine fantastically into an instantaneous series of lupine violations. In showing her international audience what sexual danger looks like for her, El-Adl draws a comparison and elucidates a difference in the magnitude of the threat. On the website Cartoon Movement, the caption accompanying the comic reads, “Against sexual terrorism on Egyptian Female Protesters,” while within the comic, another banner posted on the mast of the boat repeats the header ­caption for the post: “My soul will never be defeated!!” El-Adl’s merger of woman with internationally recognizable icon allows her to make of her female figures deterritorialized archetypes that are not tethered to any single region or hemisphere. A cartoon made in celebration of Press Freedom Day acquires the post-text caption that reads, “Dance of Freedom” (Figure 10.7). The cartoon pictures a ballerina in a standard pose of classical ballet, one leg lifted. A glance at her feathered white tunic and long black gloves suggests her to be a hybrid of Odette and Odile, the white and dark swans from Swan Lake. The ballerina’s legs are drawn as black fountain pens with golden nibs. A broken shackle dangles from her metamorphosed limbs. The dancer’s sharp and ­powerfully drawn legs-as-pens evoke clichés of freedom of speech, such as “The pen is mightier than the sword.” Yet the deviations in El-Adl’s deployment of cliché are perhaps more obvious at first glance than the cliché itself. As in her other comics, El-Adl departs from cliché by inquiring into the different scope or degree faced by her subjects. Here the dancer’s freedom is symbolized so as to open the image to dialogue and reinterpretation. The moment captured in this image offers us no way of mapping the causal relationship

178   Michael A. Chaney and Sara B. Chaney

Figure 10.6  Doaa El-Adl’s Kanagawa.

between the dance and the dancer’s unshackling. Is she unshackled because she dances, or is she only able to dance because she has been unshackled by some other force (a lumberjack savior)? How we answer this question determines the future we imagine into being for the artist-writer and for El-Adl herself. Hence the temporality implied by the image presses the reader to ask how freedom occurs, through what causal chain of events it becomes possible, and what the female body in motion might have to do with it. This cartoon also arrests a moment of double metamorphosis. Beyond the metaphor, there is also a physiognomic morphing of the body into tool that courts the grotesque. In an international context, such imagery would likely evoke what is already thought to be grotesque about ballet’s restriction, its disciplining of the body’s natural softness in linear rearrangements. Through this association, El-Adl forges together two visual and political vocabularies—one that refers to Western feminist body politics and another that figures the pen as weapon in violent contest against actual weaponry (i.e., political realities). This merger is uniquely possible within the frame of her comics, which leverage the iconicity of female cartoon figures in the service of what cannot or does not remain merely a regionally or culturally specific feminist expression. Circulating legibly as international memes, El-Adl’s women illustrate individuals in epic or archetypical action, facing proliferating and mounting risks. As individuals, they

Bakhtinian Laughter and Political Editorial Cartoons   179

Figure 10.7  Doaa El-Adl, “Dance of Freedom” for Press Freedom Day.

represent the fluidity of a contemporary moment that is essentially open to intervention. By locating women as prime agents of change, El-Adl offers a radical provocation not only to her times but also to the usual subject of temporality. Ultimately, Bakhtin’s “my time” becomes “woman’s time” in El-Adl’s continuous present.

Bonil’s Marked Figureheads as Crowned Sacrifices and De-Crowned Statuary Xavier Bonilla, known as Bonil, is a political cartoonist from Ecuador whose recent career exemplifies the high stakes of caricature. For the newspaper El Universo, Bonil has published comics critical of local, national, and global politics for more than twenty years. Highly lauded, he is perhaps best known internationally for facing defamation charges from the Ecuadorian government on behalf of President Rafael Correa for a comic accusing Correa’s officers of raiding the home of journalist Fernando Villavicencio.5 As with El-Adl, Bonil’s trials have made him a cause célèbre for freedomof-the-press activists around the world.6

180   Michael A. Chaney and Sara B. Chaney Bonil’s editorial cartoons follow the conventions of political caricature by focusing on the leader’s body as a site of visual travesty while addressing themes common to Latin American comics and graphic narrative. On the one hand, Bonil’s comics are in ­dialogue with political iconography that entwines the body of the leader with that of the nation. On the other hand, Bonil’s representation of the political body is best understood with Latin American comics and graphic narrative in mind, a context in which “deterritorialization and cultural hybridity” are also “key characteristics” (Espinoza 6). Bearing in mind that deterritorialization is “the dislocation of contemporary national cultures” and “the loss of ‘natural relation’ between cultural aspects of a country and their social and geographical territories” (García Canclini, qtd. in Espinoza 6), we note that Bonil’s rendition of the leader’s body may also express political anxieties around deterritorialization. This is particularly the case when Bonil draws President Correa of Ecuador with a palm tree protruding from his forehead, making explicit the connection between the leader’s body and the land (see Figure 10.8). A sign of disfigurement and monstrosity, the tree on the head is as much a visual compromise of the leader’s humanity and his right to lead as the strings pulled by Russian ruler Vladimir Putin. Insofar as the tree is perceived as a disfigurement, it evacuates the leader of sympathy, as indicated by Jason Bate’s observations on “facial disfigurement [which] has the potential to erase the character of the person underneath in the eyes of the spectator” (197). In a comic from June 2018 (Figure 10.9 this comic is referring to the image now marked as fig.  10.10) about Correa’s involvement in the kidnapping of

Figure 10.8  Bonil, President Correa of Ecuador with a palm tree.

Bakhtinian Laughter and Political Editorial Cartoons   181

Figure 10.9  Zapiro depiction of President Zuma of South Africa with a showerhead, from October 5, 2009.

Fernando Balda, Bonil depicts Correa as a giant, his palm-crowned head breaking the top border of the image as he cringes away from a tiny figure labeled “Agente Chicaiza,” a reference to operative agent Raul Chicaiza, whose testimony led to investigation of Correa. Through the instantaneous language of spacing, size, and bodily proportion, Bonil makes much of the disparity between these political actors and suggests the absurdity of any claims to parity between them. The president’s exaggerated size is made even more grotesque by his apparent fear. Thus, through the cartoonist’s lens, the leader’s enlarged body, like the outgrowth on his head, is a tumescent exteriorization of ­bodily presence that undermines political authority. Moreover, Bonil’s palm tree is a familiar flourish of visual rhetoric for those recalling the controversies stirred by South African cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro (Zapiro) with his depictions of South African President Jacob Zuma with a showerhead ­protruding from his forehead ( this should be Figure 10.9 Figure 10.10). The faucet is a reference to Zuma’s rape trial testimony in 2006, during which he testified to showering after having unprotected intercourse with a woman whom he knew had HIV in order to protect himself from the disease. Symbol, metonym, and index, the showerhead on Zuma’s forehead compromises his political and personal dignity. Tellingly, Zapiro reprises his shower head comic in the ZA News on January 17, 2017 in a new comic, “Golden Shower Head,” featuring Zuma and Trump wearing a black and white and a golden showerhead respectively. As Trump enjoys a plentiful golden shower, Zuma looks on in horror and embarrassment. This re-presentation of the showerhead

182   Michael A. Chaney and Sara B. Chaney

Figure 10.10  Another Bonil comic of Correa with a palm tree, posted to Twitter on June 28, 2018.

reveals its powers of symbolic consolidation as it signals iniquity and perversion as would any specific caricatures, while mounting a more general critique of the comparative sins of world leaders. No matter how desecrating, the palm tree distinguishes Correa. It helps to make him a recurrent character in Bonil’s comics and thus affirms him as worthy of not only attention but also instant recognition. When only the leader is visually marked, such distinctions that are also disfigurements may have the opposite intended effect of humanizing the leader. One may think of the character of Simba from Disney’s The Lion King as being humanized in the same way. Both are marked by an exclusivity. Simba is the only character with a choice and, by extension, a conscience. Though clearly fallen and marked as ludicrous, the head of a nation who wears an abominable outgrowth on his crown presents the soothing possibility of a truth-telling politician, one who divulges his political sins with as much zeal as Pinocchio’s growing nose. Such a politician would be utopic within political discourse; unlike the dissolute, duplicitous politician of reality, the ­surreal world of the comics provides reader-viewers with a political figurehead who has been literally stamped with an ugly truth that he is unwilling to admit. And yet to apply the paradox of Simba’s exclusivity, or that of Hester Prynne, who in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is forced to wear as exterior label her inner iniquity like an embroidered name tag, Bonil’s marked politician appears time and again not just as the fool but also as the only one in the cartoon world with an interior. The marked leader has a past. That he has made bad choices attests to this. His crowning

Bakhtinian Laughter and Political Editorial Cartoons   183 deformity is a condemnation of wrongdoing. Bonil’s palm-tree-headed politician is utopic, then, for positing an ideal of coextensivity between the inner or hidden self and one’s outer appearance. This utopic vision also accords with retributive justice. As the vehicle of that justice, the cartoonist inscribes or literally “characters” the leader in a manner not unlike the Judeo-Christian myth of the mark of Cain from Genesis.7 Through visual desecration, the palmed head celebrates political and moral coextensivity, profaning the head to indirectly champion the crown it supplants. We should add here that our qualifications regarding the humanizing features of the palm are wholly secondary to its primary function, formalistically, to demark and to desecrate. Nevertheless, as a device, the palm-tree head expresses a high degree of ­formal efficiency as a visual symbol. It satisfies all three of the conditions necessary for viewers to recognize and “get” a political cartoon, as theorized in a study by Bal et al.: “These are sympathy (the audience must identify with the satirical target), gap (a ­perceivable gap between image and reality that the audience must fill and differentiation (where caricatures must possess unique physical or ideological attributes)” (qtd. in Chen et al. 133). That the palm tree meets the standard for all three suggests the force of such a mark within the iconic vocabulary of political cartooning. Although Bonil’s comics deliver gifts to viewers of perspective—of political complexities simplified—there is apparently a price to pay for glimpsing the political through lenses that favor distance and distortion. For example, while the villainous leader is so clearly marked in Bonil’s comics as to wear his obloquy on his head as if placed there by divine omen, such obvious marking does little to erode the leader’s ongoing ability in political reality to compel others to follow, leaving the cartoonist’s label on a par with other empty political signifiers, as just another among many, taking rhetorical aim with exaggeration but leaving its mark intact. Even as the palm tree makes the head of the leader inane, it risks naturalizing that figure’s right to leadership. At once a marker of visual travesty as well as a visual echo of the iconic nimbus or halo of Western art, Bonil’s palm tree designates the head of a great and singular person, an eligible candidate for a crown. Here again, Bakhtin’s theoretical stress on temporality forces us to take note of the fact that Bonil’s figurehead is marked with a tree, a symbol of ongoing, natural life, visually synonymous with the region, its climate, tourism, and so on. This is the equivalent of Bakhtin’s concept of “living” reality, which folk comedy affords its adherents to laugh at and therefore to feel themselves living in a temporality of the moment, sharing it on a stage of political contemporaneity with unworthy potentates. That Correa’s head recurs in the popular press with a tree compounds the effect of the comic’s production of living reality, wherein the leader becomes a verdant site for intellectual production in spite of his flaws. Bonil’s trenchant political desecrations are often framed by an elevated perspective ­ istance that provides and just as often satirizes the possibility of there being any objective d from politics. In so doing, Bonil’s comics initiate what Bakhtin calls “uncrowning, that is, the removal of an object from the distanced plane” (23). They relocate the leader to the “plane of laughter,” in which “one can disrespectfully walk around whole objects” (23).

184   Michael A. Chaney and Sara B. Chaney On the plane of laughter created by the comic, epic distance is destroyed in favor of a dialogic structure that requires the reader to participate in the unfolding contemporaneity of the comic. The comic’s dialogue often takes the form of an exchange, as when subjects seem to be offering something to the viewer or someone else in the comic. The resulting emphasis on exchange or offering in the composition thus carries over to resonate with the underlying propositional and dialogical structure of the comic. In Bonil’s comics, an upraised hand may vary in size within a single view to show perspective, while a pitcher of water held above the desperate reach of a dying man intensifies the anguish of his thirst. These and other devices visually ramify themes of offering and ­sacrifice, counterbalanced by the terse logics of Bonil’s punchlines. In a number of his comics, Bonil uses literal and metaphorical statues to allegorize the temporal characteristics that coalign politics with comics statues. As an icon of state narrative and a monument of public memory, the statue becomes in Bonil’s iconic vocabulary a way of marking and mocking memorialization over time. After receiving death threats from ISIS for another comic about the vandalism of statues in March 2015, Bonil continues to exploit the symbolics of statuary in a recent and prescient editorial cartoon about the removal of a statue of Nestor Kirchner, the corrupt ex-president of Argentina, from the UNASUR building in Ecuador. On July 8, 2018, Bonil posted a comic to his Twitter feed with a caption that can be roughly translated as “The UNASUR building will now house a university. And the statue of Kirchner?” (see Figure 10.11).

Figure 10.11  Bonil’s comic of Nestor Kirchner statue.

Bakhtinian Laughter and Political Editorial Cartoons   185 Within the comic, birds hover over the statue’s absurdly enlarged head and hands. One speech bubble from their many beaks asks, “And now what do we do with this statue?” The comic responds to Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno’s speech on July 5, 2018, in which he offered the UNASUR headquarters to the Intercultural University of the Amawtay Wasi Nationalities and Indigenous Peoples. Moreno’s gesture was understood by most as a response to the ongoing infighting and lack of progress within UNASUR, an intergovernmental regional coalition founded in 2008. The statue of Kirchner, the ex-president of Argentina and secretary-general of UNASUR, stands as a ready signal of governmental corruption and the absurdity of historical and political change. In a context in which the same politician who is considered iconic enough to warrant memorialization in statuary is discredited and revealed as corrupt just a few years later, the comic statue declares the impossibility of an epic past. Bonil’s version of the Kirchner statue, made grotesque and clownish by his enlarged head and hands, brings recent history close for inspection and mockery at a moment when the government itself is choosing to repurpose the UNASUR building, itself a gesture toward the new and a break from the past. One might say that the comic invites readers to insert themselves into this moment of historical change and repurposing by taking part in the birds’ deliberation. What’s to become of the statue? This very question would be addressed by the government of Ecuador in August 2018, when it voted to remove the statue from the UNASUR headquarters. Deliberations about statues are deeply political because, as Maureen Reed contends, “looking at statues is always a process of looking at a manifestation of who has (or seeks) control over resources and public space” (34). Statues are physical manifestations of political history’s many power grabs, both successful and not. In an unfolding narrative of political change, Bonil opens up the historical malleability of the head of state, using images of statues to pose the role as a kind of absurdity. Bonil’s visual play with statues and statuary extends beyond literal reference when he draws other leaders in poses and placements reminiscent of public sculpture. For example, in a comic of Trump and Kim posted to his social media on June 12, 2018, and ­captioned “#trumpkimsummit,” Bonilla draws a tiny Kim pedestaled on the infamous red button of nuclear annihilation. Kim is pictured with his hands clasped behind his back and his face cast upward, as if in contemplation. The pose is frozen in a way that is s­ uggestive of statuary, perhaps to poke fun at Kim’s well-known interest in self-memorialization. In turn, Trump, ponderously large and sporting conspicuously tiny hands, stands over Kim with his finger hovering on a smaller red button. His elongated red tie extends beneath Kim’s pedestal, making the nuclear standoff a grim punchline in a series of slapstick mishaps not directly visualized but implied by the comic’s temporal references. In Bakhtinian terms, Bonil brings the ridiculous statues of politics into the current of the contemporary moment by prompting the reader to imagine what will happen if Trump pushes his button or, worse yet, attempts to pull his tie free. Because the joke is future-facing, reminding us how time itself will ­buffoon the potential statue that Kim and Trump are trying to become, the comic itself acts as

186   Michael A. Chaney and Sara B. Chaney antistatuary, ­undermining epic abstractions of statehood. The very complexity that makes every editorial cartoon, for Larry Bush, “a sophisticated rebus” (65) helps Bonil deliver what he calls “a form of social reprisal against those who exercise disproportionate power” (Pashley). Bonil’s comic art punishes those who seek the crown or an epic form of memorialization in the absence of public support by carrying them, via the editorial cartoon, onto the plane of laughter. There all hierarchies and prohibitions are rescinded; in their place is a riotous encounter with the comic body of politics. His comics, along with El-Adl’s and Gado’s, exemplify Martha Banta’s contention that caricature “does actual social work of a kind theorists can only gloss” by testing “the efficacy of the thought-force that theory contemplates within its realm of discourse” (14). These comics achieve this work by instigating a shift in the readers’ perception of politics and their own relation to it. They allow for an experience of “my time” and bring hitherto distant happenings of the political sphere close, revealing them as products of ordinary human action. Gado’s editorial cartoons label political waste in terms of an excremental consciousness whose ruins, deposits, and piles populate his distortive scrutinizing. These ­cartoons possess attributes similar to those Bakhtin ascribes to low humor: solemn concepts are given bodies and humiliating backsides to shame them with. The same impulse organizes Gado’s comics as luminaries undergo shameful classification in the center as a doodled figure looks on from tattered outskirts. This figure inserts a radical openness into the editorial cartoon according to a Bakhtinian notion of “my time,” disrupting the typical spatial and temporal coordinates of a genre usually concerned with epic characters and events (politicians, bills, budgets, etc.). A sign of self-­presence, Gado’s doodled witness of history moves from the offstage or obscene blank areas of the comic to impose a temporality of human reaction onto the infamies of political incompetence and, far worse, dramatize global news. El-Adl’s cartoons deterritorialize archetypes of gendered struggle and crisis within an international space of reception. Her centralization of women finds support in a style that parlays concepts about bodies into visual ones. Exaggerated bodies in El-Adl’s comics enact a dialogical conversation about the contemporary threats women face across the globe, while s­ imilarly subjecting men’s symbolic bodies to the whims of the cartoonist’s imagination. Temporality remains crucial in her cartoons as Bakhtin’s “my time” becomes “woman’s time” in her illustrations. Bonil’s disfigurement of the abstract body of ­politics suggests a satirical sensibility that both desecrates and elevates its objects. He marks the head of the leader in order to “uncrown” him, in Bakhtinian terms. Through his play with ­disfigurement and statuary, Bonil laughs at the leader’s failed, epic aspirations and absurd self-memorializations. All three cartoonists demonstrate a fluid appreciation for laughing at living reality, that revolutionary practice Bakhtin theorizes to be constitutive of comedy and of low humor, which remain open to chaos in all its forms, from the unfinished and unknown terrain of the not-yet and the now to the stretched and ­distended bodies of those normally enshrined and kept at an epic d ­ istance from the vulgar in history’s margins.

Bakhtinian Laughter and Political Editorial Cartoons   187

Notes 1. For more on American editorial cartoons, see Northrop. 2. Notable Bakhtinian-based analyses of comics temporality would include Stephan Packard, who argues that the chronotope works within the greater transmedial storyworld to limit the free play of open signification, and Harriet Earle, who studies the comic’s thickening of time in representations of trauma. For other Bakhtinian analyses of comics and graphic novels, see Eyre; Hudson; Meneses. 3. When viewing Gado in cultural context, we are mindful of Massimo Repetti’s caution that “ ‘African comics’ as a homogenous entity probably does not exist” (16). The many traditions of comics in Africa are, according to Repetti, “divided, shattered, and multiple” (18). With this multiplicity in mind, scholars investigate African comic art under regional, national, or linguistic parameters. Nonetheless, Repetti identifies conditions of production and r­ eception unique to an African context, which he terms the “African Wave.” One distinct condition for the reception of political comics in Africa may be the degree to which legacies of political authoritarianism have attempted to suppress political cartooning and limit cartoonist’s rights (Eko). This legacy has made editorial cartooning a dangerous practice for many comic artists, as comics are at the center of many contemporary debates about constitutional law and freedom of expression, particularly in the notorious case of South African cartoonist Zapiro’s controversial representation of ex-president Jacob Zuma (Hammett). 4. For more on Egypt’s new generation of female cartoonists, see Nasser. In a recent categorical analysis of political cartoons in Egypt and their impact on the fall of the Mubarak regime, Rania Saleh reviews 2,734 Egyptian cartoons published between January 2010 and February 2011 and categorizes them according to topic. Within the comic categories that address domestic and social issues, Saleh mentions no explicit reference to gender or ­sexuality, suggesting that the topic may be overshadowed by other political and economic concerns (Saleh 496). 5. El Universo has been sanctioned by Correa’s government for its support and printing of Bonil’s cartoons, most infamously in 2014, when Bonil was ordered “to publish a correction of a cartoon published in the newspaper on Dec. 28 depicting a recent police search at the house of Fernando Villavicencio, a journalist, former oil-union leader and current adviser of opposition legislator Clever Jimenez” (Alvaro). For a thorough review of Latin American comics, prominent creators, traditions, and an overview of aesthetic and historical ­contexts, see Merino. 6. For more on the Bonil-Delgado affair, in which Bonil’s comic was litigated against successfully as racist in its depiction of Delgado, an Afro-Ecuadorian, see de la Torre and Sanchez. 7. R. W. L Moberly claims that while no verifiable meaning for the mark may be known, “most general biblical readers today think in terms of some kind of mark on Cain’s forehead” (12).

Works Cited Akman, Ayhan. “From Cultural Schizophrenia to Modernist Binarism: Cartoons and Identities in Turkey (1930–1975).” Political Cartoons in the Middle East, edited by Fatma Muge Gocek, Markus Wiener Publishers, 1998, pp. 83–132. Alvaro, Mercedes. “Ecuador Fines Leading Newspaper over Cartoon; Government Fines El Universo over Xavier Bonilla Cartoon.” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 2014, p. XX.

188   Michael A. Chaney and Sara B. Chaney Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by Michael Holquist, U of Texas P, 1981. Banta, Martha. Barbaric Intercourse: Caricature and the Culture of Conduct, 1841–1936. U of Chicago P, 2003. Bate, Jason. “Disrupting Our Sense of the Past: Medical Photographs That Push Interpreters to the Limits of the Historical Analysis.” Approaching Facial Difference: Past and Present, edited by Patricia Skinner and Emily Cock. Bloomsbury, 2018, pp. 192–218. Beck, Rose Marie. “Popular Media for HIV/AIDS Prevention? Comparing Two Comics: Kingo and the Sara Communication Initiative.” Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 44, no. 4, 2006, pp. 513–541. Bush, Larry. “More Than Words: Rhetorical Constructs in American Political Cartoons.” Studies in American Humor, vol. 3, no. 27, 2013, pp. 63–91. Chen, K.  W., et al.“Towards a Discipline of Political Cartoon Studies: Mapping the Field.” Satire and Politics, edited by J. Milner Davis, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 125–162. Di Liddo, Annalisa. Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel. UP of Mississippi, 2009. Earle, Harriet E. H. Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War. UP of Mississippi, 2017. Eko, Lyombe. “It’s a Political Jungle Out There: How Four African Newspaper Cartoons Dehumanized and ‘Deterritorialized’ African Political Leaders in the Post-Cold War Era.” International Communication Gazette, vol. 69, no. 3, 2007, pp. 219–238. Elmaghraby, Sara S. “Cartoons and the Egyptian Transition: A Qualitative Analysis of Egyptian Newspapers.” Global Media Journal, vol. 4, no. 1, 2014, pp. 1–20. Espinoza, Mauricio. “Neoliberalism in the Gutter: Latin American Comics and Society since the 1990s.” Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, vol. 42, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–20. Eyre, Pauline. “Deafened by Laughter: Reading David Lodge’s Deaf Sentence as a Carnivalesque Dismodernist Text.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2012, pp. 17–34. García Canclini, Néstor. Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad. Grijalbo, 1989. Guyer, Jonathan. “Translating Egypt’s Political Cartoons.” Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution, edited by Mona Baker, Routledge, 2015, pp. 208–220. Hammett, Daniel. “Zapiro and Zuma: A Symptom of an Emerging Constitutional Crisis in South Africa?” Political Geography, vol. 29, no. 2, 2010, pp. 88–96. Høigilt, Jacob. “Egyptian Comics and the Challenge to Patriarchal Authoritarianism.” International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 49, no. 1, 2017, pp. 111–131. Hudson, Rick. “The Derelict Fairground: A Bakhtinian Analysis of the Graphic Novel Medium.” CEA Critic, vol. 72, no. 3, 2010, pp. 35–49. Keller, Ulrich. “The Iconic Turn in American Political Culture: Speech Performance for the Gilded-Age Picture Press.” Word & Image, vol. 29, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1–39. Meneses, Juan. “A Bakhtinian Approach to Two Graphic Novels: The Individual in Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Chester Brown’s Louis Riel.” International Journal of Comic Art, vol. 10, no. 2, 2008, pp. 598–606. Merino, Ana. “Comics in Latin America.” The Routledge Companion to Comics, edited by Frank Bramlett et al., Routledge, 2016, pp. 70–78. Moberly, R. W. L. “The Mark of Cain: Revealed at Last?” Harvard Theological Review, vol. 100, no. 1, 2007, pp. 11–28. Nasser, Aisha. “A Generation of Resistance.” International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 20, no. 4, 2016, pp. 377–394.

Bakhtinian Laughter and Political Editorial Cartoons   189 Northrop, Sandy. American Political Cartoons: From 1754 to 2010. Routledge, 2017. Packard, Stephan. “Closing the Open Signification: Forms of Transmedial Storyworlds and Chronotopoi in Comics.” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, 2015, pp. 55–74. Pashley, Alex. Interview with Bonil. Vice News, 17 Feb. 2015. Reed, Maureen. “How Sacagawea Became a Pioneer Mother: Statues, Ethnicity, and Controversy in Portland and Santa Fe.” Public Memory, Race, and Ethnicity, edited by G. Mitchell Reyes, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010, pp. 33–49. Repetti, Massimo. “African Wave: Specificity and Cosmopolitanism in African Comics.” African Arts, vol. 40, no. 2, 2007, pp. 16–35. Rifaat, Sara Amr. “Award Winning Caricaturist, Doaa El-Adl, Recognized as One of the Most Influential Women of 2016.” What Women Want, 1 Feb. 2017, http://whatwomenwant-mag. com/2017/02/01/award-winning-caricaturist-doaa-el-adl-recognized-as-one-of-the-mostinfluential-women-of-2016. Saleh, Rania. “ ‘Let Them Entertain Themselves’: The Fall of the Mubarak Regime Seen through Egyptian Political Cartoons.” Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 54, no. 3, 2018, pp. 494–520.

chapter 11

Colum bi a a n d th e Editor i a l Ca rtoon Nhora Lucía Serrano

A Klee drawing named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. . . . This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. —Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History IX Hail Columbia, happy land! Hail, ye heroes, heav’n-born band, Who fought and bled in freedom’s cause, Who fought and bled in freedom’s cause, And when the storm of war was gone Enjoy’d the peace your valor won. Ceremonial entrance march for the Vice President of the United States

Not since the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the versatile Columbia reigned supreme as the national political symbol for the United States in editorial cartoons has a fictional female figure ardently represented a country at a sociopolitical impasse. At the dawn of the 2020s in the United States, Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) has unintentionally proffered such a national political symbol for social critics and political cartoonists alike: the subjugated ­red-cloaked handmaid. In September 2018, amid US federal judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, a group of silent female protesters clad in full-length, fire-brick-red

Columbia and the Editorial Cartoon    191 robes and white bonnets could be seen inside the vaulted halls of the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C. As TV’s CNN reported, “their austere silhouettes evok[ed] the dystopian persecution portrayed in the novel-turned-Emmy-award-­winning Hulu drama.”1 Likewise, R. J. Matson, editorial cartoonist with Roll Call, ­captured the heightened anxiety at stake for women’s rights with Kavanuagh’s nomination in his September 5, 2018, editorial cartoon “The Handmaid’s Senators” (see  Figure  11.1). In Matson’s ­cartoon, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) are depicted as Atwoodian handmaids who are seemingly taking a quiet stroll alone in the Senate gallery with the US Supreme Court in the background. To highlight the impact that these confirmation hearings and Kavanaugh’s candidacy have on the country, Matson reveals the senators’ imagined surreptitious discourse in the caption: “Judge Kavanaugh assures me that Roe v. Wade is settled law . . .” Because of the verb assures, the ellipsis delivers an emotionally packed and speculative punchline implying dread, hesitation, and powerlessness via its absence of words and juxtaposition with the senators’ garments; put simply, these senators are legislative handmaids who are at once maternal protectors and pawns of the classical agora milieu. Readers of Matson’s “The Handmaid’s Senators” are not meant to laugh but rather, because of the ellipsis, to pause and reflect on the past and present history in an inaudible screech similar to the figure in Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893) (Eggum). Matson’s rousing editorial cartoon thus leaves

Figure 11.1  R.  J.  Matson, “The Handmaid’s Senators.” Online digital editorial cartoon, first appearance September 5, 2018. Cagle cartoons, https://www.cagle.com/r-j-matson/2018/09/ the-handmaids-senators.

192   Nhora Lucía Serrano c­ omics readers in a state of heightened anticipation for the yet to be seen and written future of women in the nation.2 Like many other cartoonists before him—including early American editorial ­cartoonists Thomas Nast and Joseph Keppler, Matson is not alone in recognizing that national political symbols have been archetypically gendered feminine when depicting a country on the brink of a political transmutation or signaling a social crisis. The adoption of allegorical feminine symbols for the United States stretches back to the early 1700s and the era of the British colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America, when the figure of Columbia, a New Latin toponym, was first mentioned in a 1738 weekly issue from Edward Cave’s The Gentleman’s Magazine.3 As the first to identify a periodical as a magazine, Cave was an English printer, editor, and publisher who included the infamous Dr. Samuel Johnson among his frequent ­contributors to The Gentleman’s Magazine (Jost). It was Johnson, actually, who introduced readers in England and abroad to the historic-poetic name of Columbia in the June 1738 volume. Johnson coined the name of Columbia while covertly discussing the debates of the British Parliament in coded and distorted literary terms that also referred to a popular novel of the time, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Rendered in language as an ineffective pawn of England that has “very little contributed,” early on Columbia was a clever political sobriquet, a linguistic disguise made in jest for the c­ onquered lands out west. Yet Columbia’s name was not derived from the land as were those of her European counterparts—Britannia for Britain and Italia Turrita for Italy. She was actually named for a conquistador, the famed Italian Renaissance explorer Christopher Columbus, who sailed the ocean blue in 1492 on behalf of the Catholic monarchs of Spain. Much like Atwood’s handmaid, her most contemporary iteration, the very existence of Columbia was thus already garbed in political history and satire, as well as objectified and subjugated by patriarchal rule. In other words, before Columbia even appeared in early editorial cartoons in the United States, her indigenous identity and selfhood were already suppressed and erased, but her gender purposefully remained intact so she could serve in a variety of maternal and objectified roles. Put simply, she was always a malleable instrument of sociopolitical critique, not the steadfast critic with agency or her own opinion; from her inception, she was a literary handmaiden who engendered and mediated debates of justice and policy in a form always already not native to herself. Shortly after the American Revolution, the popularity of Columbia’s allegorical name gained traction in the public’s eyes as the young, independent nation developed. In 1784, New York City’s King’s College was renamed Columbia College (renamed in 1896 Columbia University) (Matthews 19),4 and in 1791, the land designated to house the seat of the new government was named the Territory of Columbia (with the Organic Act of 1801, it was organized under the now formal title of the District of Columbia). With the nation’s propensity to name many a new street, building, and city after her, Columbia’s name inundated the cultural lexicon and signaled that the young and resourceful United States now had a sense of its own history; the name was implanted directly onto the land and its neoclassical architecture. At the end of the 1700s, Columbia thus became synonymous with a young nation seeking a constitutional and republican ideal of citizenship

Columbia and the Editorial Cartoon    193 in which the government, not a monarchy, represented the people. During this American neoclassical period, Columbia was no longer Johnson’s “Lilliputian,” a mere nom de plume for a chastised and belittled America, but rather, with the nation’s independence, she had evolved to a nom de guerre, a symbolic banner under which politicians and urban planners alike could laud their political power and self-reliance. In fact, in the same cultural vein as her revolutionary French counterpart, Marianne, this more resilient Columbia was a personification of a representative democracy that arose from the ashes of war and political upheaval (Reynolds xii; Eger 1). In the 1800s, when Columbia is first rendered visually in early political editorial cartoons, her physiognomy naturally evoked this historical aesthetic sensibility of the 1700s and the revolutionary spirit of the era. One of Columbia’s most popular and earliest illustrators was the renowned “Father of the American Cartoon,” German-American Thomas Nast (Halloran 289). Considered the visual creator of both cultural and political figures alike that are still in circulation today—the plump, bearded Santa Claus; the elephant as the political symbol for the Republican Party—Nast clearly understood how to draw a feminine nom de guerre to mediate, document, and influence sociopolitical change (Hess and Kaplan 102). From 1859 to 1860 and from 1862 to 1886, Nast drew political cartoons for Harper’s Weekly, an American political magazine in New York City (Dewey 19). An ardent supporter of President Abraham Lincoln in his 1864 reelection5 and of the idea of a free republic, it is no surprise that in the latter nineteenth century, Nast’s editorial cartoons favored the political stances originally associated with Lincoln: the enfranchisement of AfricanAmerican men and their descendants. In particular, in the aftermath of the Civil War, with President Andrew Jackson’s quest for a speedy recovery leading the tides of public discussion, Nast needed an all-encompassing rallying call to remind his Northern readers instantaneously of the reasons for the Civil War (Burstein 2). In essence, Nast needed an immediately recognizable national political symbol to represent freedom, the nation’s history before the war, and the hope for progress. It is in this light that Columbia was the perfect visual vehicle for Nast’s editorial cartoons, to sway public opinion on a single page read by all. Put simply, Nast not only editorialized his political stance via a personified Columbia, but he also inadvertently established this national political figure as a feminine template that later cartoonists would imitate and tweak within their own cultural and temporal contexts in order to speak directly to the public. In the August 5, 1865, issue of Harper’s Weekly, a few months after the assassination of President Lincoln, Nast commented on the unnecessarily hurried restoration of the American South without regard to ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment in the Southern states by depicting Columbia as both the nation’s arbitrator and its defender.6 In this issue, Nast drew a very feminine and neoclassical Columbia in two separate but sequential pages located directly in the center of the issue. In these full-page illustrations, entitled “Pardon” and “Franchise,” Nast illustrates Columbia as a Roman goddess and judge, dressed in a toga and with long, wavy hair spilling out from underneath the laurel wreath that sits atop her head (see Figure 11.2). Equally, in these two illustrations, Columbia is herself surrounded by traditional American symbolism: the eagle emblem on her throne

194   Nhora Lucía Serrano

Figure 11.2  Thomas Nast, “Pardon/Franchise.” Columbia: “Shall I trust these men, and not this man?” Centerfold illustrations from Harper’s Weekly, August 5, 1865.

and on the architectural pillars and the stars on the throne’s armrest and on the carpet. Columbia is majestic and represents, without a doubt, the nation in all of its classical imagery, history, and glory. By the titles given to each illustration, as well as the individual captions below them—“Shall I trust these men” and “and not this man?”—the two portraits of Columbia are meant to be read as a two–panel narrative wherein she is positioned as first the conscience of a nation under reconstruction and then the protector of Lincoln’s ideals of liberty for all. In the first illustration, Columbia is seated on a resplendent throne above a crowd of petitioners. She is somber, with a downtrodden expression; she listens to the crowd of men as she rests her head in her hand. At the front of the crowd of presumably Southern men, bowing directly in front of Columbia, is Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Given their postures, Columbia is clearly the judge, while General Lee is the supplicant. With the title of “Pardon,” and the caption of “Shall I trust these men,” the depicted Southerners are in all likelihood asking for Columbia’s forgiveness and a lenient punishment for their crimes against the nation. In the second illustration, however, Columbia stands on the stage next to an African-American Union soldier with an amputated leg, while placing her right hand on his shoulder and with her other hand outstretched to point beyond the illustration’s frame. The arc of the outstretched arm, in fact, mimics the arc of the American flag behind Columbia, suggesting that she is visually in unison with the nation. Columbia also glances toward the offstage audience, beseeching empathic

Columbia and the Editorial Cartoon    195 attention. With the title of “Franchise” and the caption “and not this man?” Nast unabashedly reminds the Harper’s Weekly readers that the enfranchisement of AfricanAmerican men was a promise, not a military tactic to end the war; it must be upheld. Together, these two illustrations recount Columbia’s quandary: as the symbol for a ­war-torn nation that needs to unify and heal quickly after the divisive Civil War, whom does she trust, and whom does she protect? Are not all men created equal? The answer to the caption’s rhetorical question lies in the interactive juxtaposition of the text directly below each illustration, that is, in reading the words and images together as good editorial cartoons often demand of their readers. If she “trust[s] these men,” the Southern Confederates who seek the immediate restoration of their rights and privileges as American citizens, does Columbia “not [trust] this man,” the one who fought for the nation? With this interplay of words and images, Nast puts a face to and reminds readers of the Thirteenth Amendment and that it has not been ratified in all of the Southern states; for Nast, the war cannot have been for naught. In other words, if Columbia is quick to forgive the Confederates without regard for all soldiers, she may very likely put this depicted Union soldier in peril of enslavement once more. And so Columbia and the nation are at a sociopolitical standoff in these two illustrations: how can Columbia restore civil rights to the Confederates but not grant the same rights to the disabled African-American Union veteran who has fought for his freedom and that of the nation? Much like a sentence that ends on an ellipsis, Columbia’s query is posed not to herself—she is not contemplative—but to the intended readers of Harper’s Weekly, the true arbitrators of justice and citizens of the United States. However, with the realistic depiction of an amputated leg, the physical price paid for fighting in this war, Columbia not only speaks directly to the public, but she is also imploring them. In fact, over the twopage spread, Columbia elicits empathy and asks the readers to turn to their own ­conscience and not further injure this soldier. Nast is thus clearly manipulating his readers to side with and listen to the beseeching Columbia. With a complete interrogative sentence as a caption, which is at once separated and united by a grammatical comma ­conveniently underneath the two illustrations, the readers are thus (and hopefully) moved to action. Put simply, Nast can sway his readership because he is a skilled editorial cartoonist who knows how to employ the art of visual rhetoric wherein the captions and illustrations together buttress the sociopolitical commentary through the mouthpiece of Columbia. Equally, in the skilled and artistic hands of Nast, Columbia has firmly morphed into the nation’s symbolic protector; however, given that she depends on the readers to leap into action, she remains in essence a supplicant herself, a handmaid who possesses empathy and can mediate as a representative but cannot enact on her own volition. At the end of the nineteenth century, Columbia continued to be a popular figure in editorial cartoons that represented the nation in moments of change, but now she also stood watch over the highs and lows associated with rapid growth (Schwarz 286; Shrock 61; White 733). In particular, the dawn of the nineteenth century saw an economic boom, rapid industrial and labor production, and technological advances such as the First

196   Nhora Lucía Serrano Transcontinental Railroad; it was seemingly a new era of prosperity and advancement that Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner would term the “Gilded Age” (Twain and Warner 292; Morris 225). Yet underneath this shiny veneer of American industrial optimism was an era ­consumed by class tension, labor union disputes, and cultural miscommunication ­further punctuated by the influx of European immigration (Wilsher xi). With the rise of industrialization nationwide, and especially in the Midwest, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair was the country’s attempt to put on a grandiose performance, to disguise the ills and apprehension the country felt upon entering a new century, especially the city of Chicago (Wilcox and Hinsley xv; Schuyler 5; Smith and Selzer 20). With extreme new levels of poverty, excessive labor abuses, and the mistreatment of many immigrants, ­editorial cartoonist and Austrian immigrant Joseph Keppler would turn to Columbia, with visual subtlety, for his humor magazine Puck. Keppler’s aim with Columbia was to gild the lily as well as disclose the social inequalities bubbling underneath the nation’s patriotic surface (Kahn 11). Or, to phrase it differently, Keppler would transform the inquisitive and public Columbia from Nast’s passive judge and arbitrator into a more active transatlantic ambassador, whose main task was to promote the nation in superlative terms while simultaneously hiding its blemishes. This modern version of Columbia was so self-aware of the country’s imperfections and contradictions that she turned to her counterpart, Lady Chicago, for the task at hand: celebration and entertainment. In fact, in the issues drawn and published at the 1893 World’s Fair, Columbia was not the local hostess, but rather, it was a personified Chicago, who would try to conceal the brick and mortar peeking through the fabricated gilded White City with a grand gesture befitting a proper society lady of the late nineteenth century. Lady Chicago would not want her international guests to see the cracks in the wall. Put simply, on the local stage, Columbia would step aside so that Lady Chicago, as a diluted, more subdued and ­provincial version of her, could do the political bidding of concealing and revealing the Midwestern city to the world. Yet Columbia and Lady Chicago were two sides of the same gilded feminine coin: arbitrator and facilitator, guest and hostess, nation and city. In fact, this sisterhood relationship between Columbia and Lady Chicago indirectly foreshadows the inherent duality within Atwood’s twentieth-century handmaid, who had at once a public and private persona. It is also equally important to remember that in 1893, the World’s Fair in Chicago was held to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s 1492 transatlantic ­voyage and, by extension, the complicated and panoramic history of immigration in the United States. Coming to be known as the Columbian Exposition, an epithet that draws from Columbia’s own etymology, it also served as a showcase for a fully rebuilt and vibrant Chicago just two decades removed from its devastating fire. On an international front, the Chicago World’s Fair was part of the era of public exhibition and display that naturally obligated Columbia to be present in her full formal finery, much like Britannia across the Atlantic. With impressive predecessors such as the 1851 Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London and the 1889 Parisian Exposition Universelle that bestowed the Eiffel Tower to the world, it is no surprise that industrialization was the guiding

Columbia and the Editorial Cartoon    197 e­ conomic lens for the Chicago World’s Fair and that a properly gilded Lady Chicago, not Columbia, stood watch over and greeted guests at the local events.7 Leading up to the Columbian Exposition, editorial cartoons in periodicals such as Judge and Puck captured a new role for Columbia, a symbolic mistress of ceremonies who would welcome with open arms the international public, much like the sixty-fivefoot-high gilded statue of “The Republic” that greeted fair visitors in front of the Court of Honor (Smith and Selzer 22). Like the city of Chicago, Columbia was, in essence, on display and required to play a silent hostess for a monumental celebration that would honor the nation on an international platform (Dewey 13). As the grandes dames of the 1893 World’s Fair, an almost six-months affair, Columbia and Lady Chicago both ­captured the nation’s attention as feminine symbols for all women and cities to imitate and emulate at the dawn of the new century.8 Among the many cartoonists of the time who documented this historic moment of Chicago’s rebirth as a major city were Keppler, Victor Gillam, James Albert Wales, Louis Dalrymple, and Louis  M.  Glackens, all ­cartoonists for either Puck (humor) or Judge (satire), the two most popular magazines of the time. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, while a charming but stilted Columbia, typical of the Gilded Age, represented a nation in a moment of a majestic change, there was a ­proliferation of other, more popular and current feminine national political symbols of the time, such as the Statue of Liberty and Lady Justice. Their gradual appearance, as icons in their own right, was not a transformation or replacement for Columbia per se but rather spoke to the need for more feminine symbolic figures to be spokespeople for a modern generation and the rising modern city. Together they opened the pathway that Nast’s somber and beseeching Columbia could not, an opportunity for women to be the center of public attention and the ability for Matson’s handmaid, for example, to editorialize. In a manner of speaking, then, as a trait of the impending modernity along with the rise of the urban city, Columbia’s popularity and rich visual history engendered other feminine symbols that were able, in turn, to address more provincial and distinct concerns of the nation that a lauded and singular Columbia could not. One unique and provincial example was how Lady Chicago came to full life during the 1893 World’s Fair. Unlike Columbia, this Midwestern lady, along with the city, still retained aspects of the indigenous origins in the proper name: Chicago was derived from the Miami-Illinois word shikaawa, a word for onion. Yet much like Columbia, the city of Chicago was named by and because of an outsider; French explorer Robert de La Salle’s French phonetic spelling for this so-called new wild garlic gave the land its name, not the local natives.9 And so, at the turn of the twentieth century, Columbia and Lady Chicago shared a kinship with each other from their origin stories to their roles as protectors and hostesses. At the advent of the 1893 World’s Fair, the seeming performative conflation, confusion, and even separation of Columbia from Lady Chicago thus can be seen as part of this Gilded Age tradition of visual documentation, adaptation, and concealment. Keppler was the most popular and successful cartoonist to juxtapose Columbia with her younger and modern iteration, Lady Chicago, during the entire run of the actual

198   Nhora Lucía Serrano World’s Fair for the purpose of gilding the lily and embellishing the nation on an international stage. After all, as cultural mediators and documentarians, these two feminine personifications were in the expert hands of the founder and editor of Puck, the first ­successful humor magazine at the turn of the century in the United States. Columbia and Lady Chicago were part of a periodical meant for entertainment as well as critique. Appearing in one of the first magazines to be successful with full-color lithography and to include illustrated advertisements, Puck’s cartoons often shone a jocular spotlight on business and elected officials in the age of industrialization. In addition to graphic parodies and biting critiques, Puck also proffered an amusing lens through which to view the social events of the day by documenting various festivities, salon gatherings, and artistic openings in the major coastal cities of the East. First published in St. Louis, Puck was originally a sixteen-page German-language periodical measuring 10 by 13.5 inches, with front and back covers in color lithography and a center double-page spread. Shortly after moving Puck’s offices and printing press to New York City in 1876, Keppler ceased publishing in his native tongue. Puck became a popular English-language magazine with its own building on the corner of Houston and Lafayette Streets. Still hanging over the building’s entrance today is the impish figure of Puck wearing a top hat and holding a hand mirror as he admires his stylish figure—the magazine’s namesake and mascot, drawn from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who appeared on every cover exclaiming, “What fools these mortals be!” For a period of six months in 1893, Keppler temporarily moved his entire operation to Chicago, inside the grounds of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. The Chicago World’s Fair Puck—twenty-six issues published from May to October 1893— was more portable and compact; each issue contained twelve pages. Every week, Puck commented on an assortment of goings-on at popular fair locations, including the Street in Cairo, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, the Ferris Wheel, and the Palace of Fine Arts. Puck’s operations were in a building fortuitously situated between the Women’s Building and the Children’s Exhibit and near the entrance to the Midway Plaisance. It is thus no surprise that a majority of the twenty-six issues, including the double-page spreads and the advertisements, directly addressed the female visitor and reader by including a variety of stories, anecdotes, cartoons, and representations of women at the fair. It is also no surprise that Columbia and Lady Chicago were fashionable ladies whom female readers could imitate in style as well as demeanor and sentiment. Put simply, it was the first time Columbia, via Lady Chicago, could speak directly to women as well as men. While Puck often depicted the authoritative and majestic figure of Columbia as someone one step removed from the general public who dealt with questions of the nation and government, it rendered the city of Chicago in more provincial and humanizing terms, as a fashionable lady accessible to all and the source of inspiration and reverence for the daily woman. In a manner of speaking, Lady Chicago was Columbia’s conduit to women readership while still being objectified and ogled by men. For example, in the

Columbia and the Editorial Cartoon    199 very first issue, dated May 1, 1893, in the center double-page spread drawn by C. J. Taylor, Chicago is seen as a high-society hostess dressed in red, who is to be feted and regaled at a social function in honor of the fair’s opening. Men toast her, the belle of the ball, and by association the city of Chicago, for this great and profitable event; she is wooed and desired. Lady Chicago is thus at the mercy of the male gaze and is obligated to entertain the men, but she is nonetheless hosting a successful gilded society affair, the envy of folks around the world. In another center spread, from the June 12, 1893 issue, drawn by Keppler himself, Lady Chicago is dressed in white and red and standing between the entrance to the fairgrounds and the city of Chicago; her stance with outstretched arms symbolizes that she is a beacon welcoming the city’s laborers and immigrants to the fair. While her gestures seem to convey an attitude of international inclusivity for the fair, this issue actually makes a subtle critique about the social status of attendees; the illustration reveals that the city’s laborers and immigrants entered the fairgrounds through a side entrance, not the main one. Lady Chicago holds her gilded pose much like the actual statue of “The Republic,” but she also points to the dark pathway where the true denizens of Chicago come from, the tarnish underneath the glimmer that the world was not supposed to know. In a later issue, from July 10, 1893, the center spread continues this brazen attitude of Lady Chicago by depicting her holding a US flag and coincidentally resembling the patriotic Columbia in costume. While this Lady Chicago greets and celebrates the ­military men in the foreground who are visiting the fair, she is also pointing out the pomp and circumstance of the fair without depicting a single immigrant in the crowd of men. In fact, the caption clearly states that it is Lady Chicago who is singing the praises of Columbia during some type of formal parade and assembly. Lady Chicago is thus the stand-in for Columbia, not her replacement, because Columbia is a gilded sculpture to behold, who has been all but silenced throughout this fair. In fact, Columbia has been made into an effigy for and at the fair, not necessarily an attendee. All in all, these gendered representations of a lively Lady Chicago and a statuesque Columbia (and at times in absentia) were not new to the visitors to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Harriet Monroe’s commemorative “Columbian Ode,” in which the fair city of Chicago is greeted by Columbia, was performed at the fair’s dedication ceremonies in October 1892. In fact, the souvenir edition of Monroe’s ode was designed by William H. Bradley and depicts a feminine Columbia. Puck and its vibrant images thus must be understood as part of a Gilded Age tradition of graphic satire and a visual document of the era of modernity—and women—on the rise. At the turn of the twentieth century, however, Columbia gradually began to fade away even more from the visual vernacular and became relegated to the status of a classical statue that must be admired as a relic from a historical past in a museum. Moreover, due to the rise of industrialization, government rather than the nation became the centerpiece for political satires in later editorial cartoons. By the mid-twentieth century, ­consequently, Columbia no longer was needed, because Uncle Sam, the new popular national symbol for the government, had supplanted her in popularity when it came to

200   Nhora Lucía Serrano political cartoons and propaganda posters. He did not speak or welcome requests from the public; he commanded the nation to his actions and to war (Gladstone). In addition, by the mid-twentieth century, if there was a statue to animate in order to talk directly to and with the nation, cartoonists instead turned to the real-life metal figure of the Statue of Liberty rather than Columbia. Nonetheless, the visual genealogy of Columbia’s ­history had already laid the foundation for contemporary feminine national symbols such as the Statue of Liberty to seek out opportunities to speak outright and engage in true dialogue. It also set up Columbia as a colonized symbol trapped in her own etymology, who searches for creative and visual means to break free of the male gaze, patriarchal policies, and the seeming restraint of a single-panel editorial cartoon. In spite of her origin story and vexed history, Columbia, like many of her modern feminine iterations, does come alive in editorial cartoons more so than a comic strip or a war poster, because this comics medium possesses a unique visual rhetoric and dynamic interplay between text and image that demand a dialogue with the reader in order for the inscribed commentary to be delivered and effective. Essentially, the figure of Columbia in an editorial cartoon has been waiting for the moment when her physical gestures can truly influence policy change and not just enforce or change the tides of the status quo, that is, break down the comic frame like Winsor McCay’s Little Sammy Sneeze. Put simply, the figure of Columbia is much like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history who looks at the past eerily unfold before her floating eyes and warns the future of her already implicit erasure and silence. It is a warning that is unfortunately not heeded in US politics today. Until that day when the present-day politicians learn from the past, when Columbia (i.e., the nation’s women) is permitted to speak on her own, and when the public listens, editorial cartoons must continue to challenge their readers with their complicated and engaging narrative that demands careful attention and swift action. In fact, from the early days of illustration and editorial cartoons, this medium has always expected more of its readers. In the case of Columbia and the variously related feminine national ­symbols, editorial cartoons have portrayed these fictional females as empathic maternal figures, supplicants, and objectified spokespersons who could be architects of change and progress. The modern-day Columbia is thus Atwood’s handmaid, and vice versa. Moreover, today’s Columbia, in all her permutations, will thus always speak through outstretched arms and gestures, because her role in editorials cartoons continues, and necessarily so: to protect and guide the nation when it is in crisis and to reveal the hypocrisy underneath its gilded exterior persona. And so the legacy of Columbia for comics studies today is that she will always remain the perfect vehicle for critique in singlepanel editorial cartoons, as well as part of its crucial visual history, because of her gender. As one of the first national political figures, Columbia is without a doubt a feminine template that later cartoonists would imitate and tweak within their own cultural and temporal contexts. As an editorial figure in cartoons, Columbia has always been the sociopolitical handmaid, who protects underrepresented people and facilitates ­commentary to be delivered to the public. Yet the question remains, as it can only be posed in editorial cartoons: are we listening and taking proper action?

Columbia and the Editorial Cartoon    201

Notes 1. The novel has struck an all-too-familiar chord because of its very prescient and alarming plot: a near-future New England in which a totalitarian state has overthrown the US ­government and where women are subjugated under patriarchal rule. See Murray. 2. Atwood’s novel has been and continues to be an alluring tableau from which to draw—­ figuratively and literally—a satire about the sociopolitical plight of women and their reproductive rights. 3. “[T]heir Conquests and Acquisitions in Columbia, (which is the Lilliputian Name for the Country that answers our America,) have very little contributed to the Power of thos Nations, which have, to obtain them, broke thro’ all the Ties of human Nature” (Cave). 4. See also Columbia University’s website, which states: “Samuel Johnson held the first classes in a new schoolhouse adjoining Trinity Church, located on what is now lower Broadway in Manhattan. . . . The college reopened in 1784 with a new name—Columbia—that embodied the patriotic fervor that had inspired the nation’s quest for independence. The revitalized institution was recognizable as the descendant of its colonial ancestor, thanks to its inclination toward Anglicanism and the needs of an urban population, but there were important differences: Columbia College reflected the legacy of the Revolution in the greater ­economic, denominational, and geographic diversity of its new students and leaders.” 5. In September 1864, Lincoln ran for reelection against Democratic candidate George B. McClellan. While McClellan’s platform espoused him as being the “peace candidate,” Harper’s Weekly published one of Nast’s cartoons on September 3, 1864, titled “Compromise with the South—Dedicated to the Chicago Convention,” in which he ­lambasted McClellan and suggested that he was a Southern sympathizer. Given the popularity and widespread appreciation of this cartoon, many saw Lincoln’s successful reelection as due in some part to Nast and his editorial cartoon. 6. These are two prints on one sheet, measuring 42 by 58 centimeters. Nast’s illustrations are wood engravings (Jarman, 158). 7. My work on Keppler’s Puck stems from research conducted during a 2017 NEH Summer Institute fellowship at the Newberry Library. I am thankful to Liesl Olson for her kind feedback in early discussions which would develop into this section of the chapter and for the Newberry Library’s “Making Modernism” Web exhibition that resulted from the ­summer NEH. See Serrano. 8. While the Chicago World’s Fair began on October 21, 1892, the fairgrounds were opened to the public on May 1, 1893. The fair concluded on October 30, 1893. 9. In his 1679 memoir, La Salle noted the name to be “Checagou” (Swenson).

Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. 1985. Anchor, 1998. Burstein, Andrew. “The Formative Frontier: The Early Years of Andrew Jackson. (President) (Biography).” Yale Review, vol. 91, no. 1, 2003, pp. 1–35. Cave, Edward. The Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 8, June 1738, p. 285. Columbia University. “History,” https://www.columbia.edu/content/history. Dewey, Donald. The Art of Ill Will: The Story of American Political Cartoons. New York UP, 2007.

202   Nhora Lucía Serrano Eger, Elizabeth. Women, Writing, and the Public Sphere: 1700–1830. Cambridge UP, 2001. Eggum, Arne., et al. Munch: At the Munch Museum, Oslo. Scala Books, 1998. Gardner, Jared. The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture. U of Illinois P, 2012. Gladstone, Doug. “Uncle Sam.” History Magazine, vol. 17, no. 2, 2015, p. 17. Halloran, Fiona Deans. Thomas Nast: The Father of Modern Political Cartoons. U of North Carolina P, 2018. Hess, Stephen, and Milton Kaplan. The Ungentlemanly Art: A History of American Political Cartoons. Macmillan, 1968. Jarman, Baird. “The Graphic Art of Thomas Nast: Politics and Propriety in Postbellum Publishing.” American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism, vol. 20, no. 2, 2010, pp. 156–189. Jost, Jacob Sider. “The ‘Gentleman’s Magazine,’ Samuel Johnson, and the Symbolic Economy of Eighteenth-Century Poetry.” Review of English Studies, vol. 66, no. 277, 2015, pp. 915–935. Kahn, Michael A., et al. What Fools These Mortals Be! The Story of Puck: America’s First and Most Influential Magazine of Color Political Cartoons. IDW, 2014. Matson, R.  J. “The Handmaid’s Senators.” Cagle Cartoons, 5 Sept. 2018, https://www.cagle. com/r-j-matson/2018/09/the-handmaids-senators. Matthews, Branderet al.,. A History of Columbia University: 1754–1904. London, England: Macmillan Company, 1904. Morris, Christopher D. “Hermeneutic Delusion in Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s The Gilded Age.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 66, no. 2, 2011, pp. 219–243. Murray, Kelly. “A Silent Protest with a Very Loud Message: Stop Kavanaugh.” CNN, 5 Sept. 2018. Nast, Thomas. “Pardon/Franchise.” Harper’s Weekly, 5 Aug. 1865, pp. 488–489. Reynolds, Sian. Women, State and Revolution: Essays on Power and Gender in Europe since 1789. U of Massachusetts P, 1987. Schuyler, David. “Frederick Law Olmsted and the World’s Columbian Exposition.” Journal of Planning History, vol. 15, no. 1, 2016, pp. 3–28. Schwarz, Daniel R. “The ‘Gilded Age’: Reading the Novel, John Wiley, 2011, pp. 283–298. Serrano, Nhora Lucía. “Puck at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.” Making Modernism: Literature and Culture in 20th Century Chicago 1893–1955, Newberry Library, 2018, https://publications.newberry.org/digital/making-modernism/index. Shrock, Joel. The Gilded Age. Greenwood Press, 2004. Smith, Michael Glover, and Adam Selzer. “The Columbian Exposition.” Flickering Empire, edited by Michael Glover Smith and Adam Selzer Columbia UP, 2015, pp. 19–27. Swenson, John  F. “Chicagoua/Chicago: The Origin, Meaning, and Etymology of a Place Name.” Illinois Historical Journal, vol. 84, no. 4, 1991, pp. 235–248. Twain, Mark, and Charles Dudley Warner. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. Harper, 1901. White, Richard. The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896. Oxford UP, 2017. Wilcox, David R., and Curtis M. Hinsley. Coming of Age in Chicago: The 1893 World’s Fair and the Coalescence of American Anthropology. U of Nebraska P, 2016. Wilsher, Daniel. Immigration Detention: Law, History, Politics. Cambridge UP, 2011.

chapter 12

Efficacy of Soci a l Com m en ta ry through Ca rtoon i ng Ally Shwed

Comics, as a medium, are dynamic and somewhat mysterious to, if not misunderstood by, the art world and scholars at large. Take the disagreement over nomenclature, what makes something a comic versus a graphic novel. Scott McCloud devoted an entire chapter to discussing this “great debate” in his international bestseller Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Although certain industry standards exist, most serve simply to increase readability rather than to create a set of fixed rules (for example, the typefaces that become customary comic-book fonts instead of your Times New Romans). Like the art world in general, the comics and cartooning industry does not provide a handbook for identifying what makes a comic, nor does it clearly define a cartoon’s goal or purpose. It welcomes the breaking of rules for creativity’s sake and allows for development with very few boundaries. It follows that labeling subcategories of comics would be an equally mercurial task. History has inadvertently provided one definition-by-example of the more traditional single-panel newspaper editorial or political cartoon; but narrowing our description as such leads a modern-day scholar to the fatal conclusion that print is dead and thus so is cartooning. Due to the lack of formality and the breadth of creativity that are inherent to the comics medium (compared with a discipline such as journalism, something that ­literally follows a style guide), we can explore the many different means through which a cartoonist can express social commentary. True, there are no set structural guidelines for someone who wants to pursue comics as a means of social commentary, nor has it ever been fully calculated what the effect such cartoons can or should have in terms of sociopolitics. But from Benjamin Franklin’s ubiquitous “Join or Die” snake cartoon to the long-form comics journalism of Joe Sacco and Matt Bors, we can expound on the dynamic options cartoonists have in developing and disseminating social and political commentary.

204   Ally Shwed Often, when such subjects arise, it comes down to a question of the cartoon’s efficacy in achieving a purpose, begging questions such as whether cartoons trivialize the views they hold or if they feed their audience’s political drive or the big question that aesthetics has been asking of all art since its inception: Do we need this discipline at all? As a society, do we need social commentary through comics? One starting point for this discussion—and it can only be a discussion, for trying to definitively say what cartoons should or should not do is ineffectual, in the same way that taking McCloud’s “juxtaposed images in a deliberate sequence” to be an absolute is somewhat unnecessarily limiting— can be the power of image-text interdependence on which comics and cartooning are built. Through this concept, we can at least seek patterns to gain a better, albeit fluid, understanding of the medium, its purpose, and its boundless potential, for the sake of readers’ recognition of a cartoon’s value and for creators’ justification in devoting time, energy, and effort to their sequential creations. Image-text interdependence is the relationship between pictures and words in relaying information to the viewer/reader. The concept is that in conveying a given narrative, the two elements will strike a balance to result in a greater whole or at least present the information in a way unique to what can be done with each element separately. A common example of this is the picture books we read as children; here we see how image and text combine to tell a story for readers of a younger age who might not have a vocabulary full enough to read a book solely consisting of text. The pictures aid the reader in building the story, with words bolstering the overall comprehension. But the concept extends beyond the notion that image-text interdependence serves only young readers; the interplay of elements can build any number of literary elements—setting, mood, character, dialogue—and can, arguably, increase the comprehension of a narrative in its entirety at all reading levels (Martinez and Harmon 323). Nowhere is this concept more fully utilized than in the comics medium. Whether it be word balloons representing dialogue in a panel sequence or a caption beneath a ­single-panel editorial, comics depend on this melding of image and text to be what they are. Of importance to such interdependence, however, is that there is no set ratio for how much of each element is needed for the narrative to be fully communicated. Comics can range from text-heavy tomes with the inclusion of prose (e.g., Watchmen) to being completely silent except for key textual interludes (e.g., Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye #11). This is yet another aspect of comics’ fluidity, and it falls upon the artist to decide how best to convey the information at hand. It follows that this is also the case for editorial cartoons, in which text can serve as caption, descriptor, dialogue, or sound effect in harmony with the foundational image. It is with these elements at the artist’s disposal that he or she can begin to tackle the task of making social or political commentary through the medium; but inherent in this concept of interdependence is the seed of why cartoons can be such a powerful tool to convey sociopolitical information to the reader. An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way. —Charles Bukowski, writer

Efficacy of social Commentary through Cartooning   205 Thomas Nast is often referred to as the “Father of the American Cartoon” (“Historic Elephant and Donkey”). This nineteenth-century cartoonist famously waged a pictorial assault on William M. Tweed, politician and “boss” of the Democratic political machine that was Tammany Hall. In addition to affecting the outcome of every presidential election from 1864 to 1884 (Boime 43), Nast’s art is credited with helping to bring down the Tammany Hall organization. By portraying Boss Tweed as a corpulent character with an oversized presence over other men, sometimes with money bags in place of a head, Nast exposed Tweed as an overly influential but unscrupulous politician. The cartoons elicited the following statement from Tweed: “I don’t care so much what the papers write about me—my constituents can’t read; but damn it, they can see pictures” (Navasky 43). Centuries earlier, Martin Luther even utilized the visual form to convey ideas about the Protestant Reformation to his illiterate followers. These examples illustrate one of the most basic roles that comics can play in social commentary by exemplifying the power of image-text interdependence. Whether for the illiterate or not, pictures can transcend both language and intelligence and, as a result, can be an even stronger purveyor of emotion than words alone. Psychologist Randall P. Harrison writes that the format of the cartoon may be “uniquely powerful because it follows a fundamental psychological proc­ess, a mode of information handling which is observed widely in perception and memory” (29). Consider again those picture books we read when going through ­language acquisition as children or, more specifically relevant to the editorial cartoon, how neuroscientists have discovered that the brain reacts more quickly to caricatures than to photos of real faces (Navasky 24). It is not surprising, therefore, that upon being visually criticized by cartoonists Charles Philipon and Honoré Daumier in the 1830s, French king Louis Philippe I exclaimed, “Whereas a pamphlet is no more than a violation of opinion, a caricature amounts to an act of violence” (73). The power of the image tends not to get disputed. How often have we heard some variation of the Chinese proverb (or the English idiom or the Ivan Turgenev bastardization) that a picture is worth a thousand words? We should have no reason, then, to dispute the power of the cartoon and its capacity for melding image and text for the sake of a greater whole. In dissecting this power, we find that visual media such as comics and cartoons have the potential to take a complicated issue and present it in a way that is, if not less complicated, more palatable for the reader to comprehend. Surely, few citizens alive during the French Revolution could spout textbook explanations of the political event; but after seeing “The Plum-pudding in Danger:—or—State Epicures taking un Petit Souper” (1805), a cartoon by British artist James Gillray in which William Pitt the Younger and Napoleon Bonaparte carve up the world like a dessert, most would have at least a basic understanding of the revolution’s sociopolitical impact. Otherwise, Napoleon probably would not have declared that Gillray “did more than all the armies of Europe to bring me down” (30). Editorial cartoons and comics of this nature tend to be defined by their use of ­emotional symbolism and irony, if not exaggeration and distortion (e.g., caricature) as well, proving that image-text interdependence extends beyond picture books but ­utilizes the same theories behind why they are functional. A cartoon’s images can act as

206   Ally Shwed a  sort of shorthand. Take the Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey as ­examples. These icons, popularized by Nast, immediately convey the complex entity that is the United States’ two-party system, to say nothing of the fact that they have ­functioned as such since the nineteenth century and are embraced in the twenty-first ­century by those same parties they had come to represent. A cartoon in which either animal appears needs no background explanation but can get straight to the deeper message—a shorter bridge over the gap between the issue at hand and an analysis of it. The successful editorial cartoonist is doing the initial legwork for his or her readers, ­taking a complex political issue and synthesizing it through images. Take as another example the American cartoonist Herbert “Herblock” Block, whose career spanned nine decades and led to his earning the Presidential Medal of Freedom, three Pulitzer Prizes, and a fourth shared Pulitzer for Public Service on Watergate. In addition to his cartoons attacking the Nixon administration, Herblock coined the term McCarthyism in 1950, in a cartoon published in the Washington Post. It is worth mentioning that the cartoon featured the GOP e­ lephant, yet another example of cartooning’s lasting impact on the sociopolitical and cultural landscape. Convenience makes the instinct to struggle against apathy disappear, which is why comics are more important than ever because they insist on contemplation. —Art Spiegelman, cartoonist

We can see the extent of cartooning’s power illustrated through some of the landmark moments in the history of cartooning, beyond what Daumier, Nast, and Gillray were accomplishing in editorial cartooning’s early days. Examples extend throughout time and geography, and the following chronological compilation is by no means exhaustive but merely a sampling of the breadth of cartooning’s power and influence. Let us start with some of the anticartoon bills proposed to American legislatures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as New York Senator Timothy Ellsworth’s Anti-Cartoon Bill of 1897; Works’ and Bulla’s Anti-Cartoon Bill in California, 1899; or Pennsylvania’s Salus-Grady libel law of 1903. Or take the 1998 Delaware Supreme Court case that confirmed an editorial cartoon published in the Wilmington News Journal was protected expression under the First Amendment. Such legal formalities must imply some level of power held within the cartoonist’s pen. In the Netherlands in 1917, painter and cartoonist Louis Raemaekers was well known for his anti-German stance illustrated in the Amsterdam newspaper De Telegraaf during World War I. His portrayals of the Germans as barbarians and Kaiser Wilhelm II as a friend of Satan led not only to the confiscation of his work but also to the Dutch minister of foreign affairs, John Loudon, formally requesting that Raemaekers avoid creating “anything that tends towards insulting the German Kaiser and the German army” (De  Ranitz 101). Raemaekers eventually left the Netherlands for England, where he ­continued on to have a successful career drawing for the Daily Mail, among other things; but rumor has it that the German government offered a reward of 12,000 guilders for Raemaekers, dead or alive.

Efficacy of social Commentary through Cartooning   207 That same year and into the next, in the United States, cartoonist Arthur Henry “Art” Young was tried twice under the Espionage Act. Young was best known for his socialist cartoons, including contributions to the left-wing monthly magazine The Masses. In 1917, he, along with writer Max Eastman, journalist John Reed, and editors Floyd Dell and Merrill Rogers, was charged by the federal government with conspiring to obstruct enlistment. The cartoon by Young that came into question was titled “Having Their Fling,” in which an editor, a capitalist, a politician, and a minister are dancing to the tune of Satan and his band of war weapons. Young explained that it was an illustration of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s supposed quote, “War is hell.” The trial ended in a hung jury. Later in 1918, the case was retried, but again the jury was unable to convict or acquit. The second trial did become notable, however, for the fact that Young napped through much of the proceedings. In an attempt to avoid a contempt of court charge, Young’s attorneys gave him a pencil and a pad of paper on which to sketch; he quickly completed a self-portrait, “Art Young on Trial for His Life,” which would appear in another socialist monthly, The Liberator, that same year. In 1923, we see the launching of Der Stürmer, a weekly German newspaper published by prominent Nazi Party member Julius Streicher. While Der Stürmer was not an ­official publication of the Nazis, it was strongly anti-Semitic (as well as anti-Catholic, anti-­Communist, and sexually explicit) and played a significant role as Nazi propaganda. The paper was known for its caricatures, racist in nature and full of exaggerated, vulgar ­stereotypes, the majority of which were drawn by Philipp “Fips” Rupprecht. Most of the paper’s readers were young people and from the lower classes of German society, arguably the most vulnerable to persuasion. It stayed in circulation through the end of World War II and proved a lucrative million-dollar business for Streicher. What is probably most significant, however, is that after the war ended, Streicher was included in the indictment of major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. He was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death in 1946. Of the twenty-four defendants indicted in total, Streicher was the only editor among the politicians, diplomats, economists, and military leaders. The Nuremberg tribunal wrote the following: “The crime of Streicher is that he made [the extermination of millions of Jews] possible, which . . . never would have been had it not been for him and those like him. . . . In its extent Streicher’s crime is probably greater and more far-reaching than that of any of the other defendants” (“Nuremberg Trials”). In 1964, the Greek daily newspaper I Avgi published “St. George Triumphant and the  Prophet Iliou,” a cartoon by Chrysanthos Menti Bostantzoglou, who went by the pen  name Bost. In it, Bost depicted the then-newly-elected prime minister George Papandreou as Saint George, confronted by the prophet Elijah, played by Ilias Iliou, the parliamentary leader of the United Democratic Left. (Iliou happens to be the Greek word for Elijah.) The prophet Iliou is there to remind Saint George of what he should be doing now that he has been elected as prime minister. Later that year, Bost made an oil painting of the cartoon and gave it to Iliou as a present, but three years later, a military junta seized power in Greece, resulting in the arrest of Iliou and the confiscation of the painting. It was the first (and seemingly only) time an editorial cartoon was taken as a political prisoner.

208   Ally Shwed In 1973 and 1976, respectively, Yusuf Nasser, publisher of the Palestinian newspaper Al Fajr, and Héctor Germán Oesterheld, Argentinian comic-book author, disappeared. Nasser allowed the publication of a cartoon showing the mayor of Hebron with a house slipper in his mouth. Oesterheld’s work depicted Argentina’s military leaders as extraterrestrials. Neither Nasser nor Oesterheld was seen or heard from again. Naji al-Ali, the Palestinian cartoonist, created the character Handala in 1969. A barefoot ten-year-old boy in tattered clothes, whom al-Ali drew in his cartoons turned from the viewer with his hands clasped behind his back, came to be a symbol of identity and defiance for Palestinians as well as a reflection of al-Ali’s allegiance to the poor. Through his cartoons, al-Ali analyzed the governmental relationships between the United States, Israel, and the Arab regimes in light of Palestine and its people. In 1987, outside the London office of Kuwaiti newspaper al-Qabas (for which he drew), al-Ali was fatally shot in the head. In 2005, after news spread of a writer’s difficulties in finding an artist to illustrate his children’s book about the Qurʿan and the Islamic prophet Muhammad, the Danish newspaper Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten put out a call for artists who would be willing to draw Muhammad—an experiment to gauge self-censorship and the threat professional illustrators felt in interpreting such material. What followed was a controversy that pitted free speech against religious tradition, as it is considered blasphemous to visually portray the Prophet. Twelve drawings were submitted to the paper, two of which did not directly show Muhammad; culture editor Flemming Rose curated the piece, which ran in September of that year under the title “Muhammeds ansigt” (“The Face of Muhammad”). Rose wrote an accompanying text that explained: Modern, secular society is rejected by some Muslims. They demand a special position, insisting on special consideration of their own religious feelings. It is incompatible with contemporary democracy and freedom of speech, where one must be ready to put up with insults, mockery and ridicule. It is certainly not always attractive and nice to look at, and it does not mean that religious feelings should be made fun of at any price, but that is of minor importance in the present context. . . . [W]e are on our way to a slippery slope where no one can tell how the self-censorship will end. That is why Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten has invited members of the Danish editorial cartoonists union to draw Muhammad as they see him.

Immediately, the piece received criticism: newspaper sellers refused to distribute that specific issue of JP, and soon complaints, threats, and protests arose both locally and internationally, including petitions from Danish imams asking for a meeting with the Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen. But the cartoons were also reprinted in newspapers around the world, further deepening the controversy. The protests escalated into violence, with more than a hundred people reportedly killed. Rasmussen described the controversy as Denmark’s worst international relations incident since World War II (Buch-Andersen). In 2006, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo republished the Danish Muhammad cartoons, along with its own front-page drawing of Muhammad, saying,

Efficacy of social Commentary through Cartooning   209 “It’s hard to be loved by imbeciles.” After a failed attempt by Muslim groups to sue the periodical for racial insults, Charlie Hebdo published, in 2011, an issue with the Prophet as “editor-in-chief.” The comment on the front page this time read, “100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter.” The next day, the magazine’s Paris offices were burned in an apparent arson attack. Charlie Hebdo continued to publish cartoons of Muhammad, including the Prophet in a wheelchair, the Prophet naked, and a sixty-five-page special-edition illustrated biography of the Prophet. In 2015, the magazine’s new Paris offices were attacked by armed gunmen, resulting in the deaths of twelve people. A week later, Charlie Hebdo published 3 million copies of an issue showing the Prophet holding a sign that read, “Je Suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”). These examples do not just mark a historical timeline of editorial cartooning, but they elucidate the range of impact cartoons can have. From a scholarly perspective, they help us to understand why the field of editorial cartooning continues to persist and adapt. Decade after decade, these instances show the intent behind a cartoon’s creation and what happens when it gets unleashed for the public to read. They display the extent to which a cartoon can have an influence on a single person or an entire country, thus proving how valuable a cartoon can be in initiating conversation, illustrating viewpoints, and, in some instances, effecting action. I guess, though, in the end, the question of whether or not we can save ourselves ­ultimately comes down to the viability of human consciousness itself, and whether it perceives the world or if it merely perceives its own perceptions about the world. — Mr. Fish, cartoonist

Let us jump back for a moment to the United Kingdom during World War II. New Zealand cartoonist David Low (who moved to London in 1919) became famous for his cartoon portrayals of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin in the London Evening Standard. German studies scholar W. A. Coupe says this about Low’s cartoons and a theory about their purpose: [Their] tendency is to represent serious political problems in humorous allegorical guise and to invite us to laugh at our political predicaments, thereby in a way ­robbing them of their reality, or at least cocooning us from the horror in a web of ­gallows’ humour. Low’s hatred of fascism is beyond doubt, yet the cartoons of the Thirties, in which he so often showed Hitler as a ludicrous, posturing and vain little fellow attended by a distinctly slow-witted, bruiser-like Mussolini, certainly did not strike alarm and despondency into his readers. (92)

It is generally acknowledged that cartoons and comics, and arguably art in general, can act as an “escape” for their audience. So we then question whether Low was shielding his readers from the true horrors of Nazi Germany by ridiculing Hitler as he did. Were Low’s Hit and Muss characters (later reduced to a single composite character, Muzzler) more a form of comedic entertainment than a call for alarm? This introduces

210   Ally Shwed us to what British-Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell calls the Satire Paradox. By introducing laughter into the equation of social or political commentary, the message is at risk of getting diluted or undermined. Gladwell uses the example of American comedian Tina Fey and her portrayal of politician Sarah Palin on TV’s Saturday Night Live in the lead-up to the 2008 US presidential elections. Gladwell admits that Fey’s portrayal makes her a comedic genius, but he also acknowledges that this might be the problem: instead of holding Palin to scrutiny as an unqualified candidate for vice president of the United States, Fey’s Palin made the audience laugh, and only laugh. Although still a form of satire, it was what Gladwell refers to as toothless satire. Satire is complicated, Gladwell reflects: “It’s not like straightforward speech that’s easy to decode; it requires interpretation. That’s what draws you in, that’s where the humor lies”. So for editorial cartoons, the artist needs to consider how to convey his or her ­message to elicit proper interpretation. In 2003, American cartoonist Michael Ramirez drew a cartoon depicting a man labeled “politics” pointing a gun at US President George W. Bush’s head against the backdrop of an Iraqi city. It was a parody of the 1969 Pulitzer-winning photograph by Eddie Adams, in which a Vietnamese general was executing a Viet Cong prisoner at point-blank range. “President Bush is the target, metaphorically speaking, of a political assassination because of sixteen words that he uttered in the State of the Union,” Ramirez commented to the Los Angeles Times, the paper that originally published the cartoon. “The image, from the Vietnam era, is a very disturbing image. The political attack on the president, based strictly on sheer political motivation, is also very disturbing” (“Cartoon in Times”). Although the depiction is one of violence toward the president, it was precisely the opposite for which Ramirez was advocating, a tactic of which satire often makes use. However, after its publication, some readers thought Ramirez was actually calling for Bush’s assassination, to the extent that a Secret Service agent arrived at the Times offices to question the cartoonist. As the paper reported, the cartoon was “construed as a threat against the president.” Social scientist Heather LaMarre tells Gladwell that this is referred to as motivated cognition or biased perception—essentially, you see what you want to see when you read a cartoon or watch a comedic sketch. Your prior biases will inform the interpretation. The argument can be made that these are simply instances of bad cartooning; if you subscribe to the aesthetic theories of Leo Tolstoy, who in his 1897 book What Is Art? argued that art is not art unless the viewer is made to feel the same emotion as the ­creator, then you might agree. But it is difficult to wholly accept such theories when you look at, for example, the sociological impact of Low’s cartoons. His work was powerful enough to cause Germany’s minister of propaganda, Josef Goebbels—surely someone who did not hold the same biases or emotions as Low—to complain to the British ­foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, about how British cartoons, particularly Low’s, were damaging Anglo-German relations. Halifax remarked on the “frenzy” caused by such cartoons: “As soon as a copy of the Evening Standard arrives, it is pounced upon for Low’s cartoon, and if it is of Hitler, as it generally is, telephones buzz, tempers rise, fevers mount, and the whole governmental system of Germany is in uproar” (Benson 38). In time, the Evening Standard was banned in both Germany and Italy, and Low’s name was

Efficacy of social Commentary through Cartooning   211 supposedly added to the Black Book, or Sonderfahndungsliste  G.B. (“Great Britain Special Search List”), the record of British residents who were to be arrested after an invasion of the United Kingdom. Hitler also retaliated by publishing, with the help of his one-time confidante Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, Hitler in the World’s Cartoons: Fact ­versus Ink, in which anti-Nazi cartoons were reprinted alongside a textual refutation. The book failed to make a splash; the irony should not be lost that Hitler’s text did little to defuse the cartoons. If that is not proof positive, consider that even Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s World War II comic character Captain America, who famously punched Hitler in the face on the cover of Captain America Comics #1, caused enough of an uproar that Fiorello La Guardia, then New York mayor, personally contacted the ­creators to give them his support (Cronin 135–136). Given these strong reactions from prominent political figures, it is hard to argue against the potential power of comics and cartoons. However, it is that descriptor, potential, that gives us pause and allows us to take something away from observations such as Coupe’s and LaMarre’s (and even Tolstoy’s): while an effective cartoon should hold the power to cause an intellectual response, the creator can only do so much to elicit action and change from the reader. To build upon aesthetic theory, we can look to David Hume, who claimed in Of the Standard of Taste that a way of judging good or bad art is how well it attains its purpose. And so perhaps it needs to be discussed: what is the purpose of an editorial cartoon? Conceivably, the answer has variable factors and degrees. Bill Mauldin, another World War II–era cartoonist, once stated: “We’ve got [the reader’s] mind on the matter—what he does about it next is his own business” (Brinkman 724). Worth noting is that his Willie and Joe cartoons won him the Pulitzer Prize twice, as well as the Army’s Legion of Merit; but this again raises the question of whether being an outlet for readers (in this case, fellow soldiers) is enough. Does it have to come down to a difference between the reader changing his opinion, the reader taking action, or the reader simply taking stock of the message underlying the cartoon? We can look to some other examples and viewpoints for empirical consideration. Scholars Michael A. DeSousa and Martin J. Medhurst describe the cartoon as “a repository of potent visual symbolism, a reflection of changing social conventions, and a barometer of measuring fluctuations in the political climate” (43). That powerful definition speaks to the merit of the medium’s image-text interdependence, but it implies that while all the resources are there, it is still up to the reader to utilize them. VC Rogers, the cartoonist behind the long-running series Peripheral Visions (which ran in North Carolina’s Indy Week from 1997 through 2018), has stated, “I’ve made people who agree with me smile, and I’ve [happily] pissed off the people who didn’t agree with me” (Cavna). Even the title of his series suggests he is not writing the facts but merely sharing an opinion for consideration; yet his simple reflection on his audience’s reactions do at least imply that, a reaction. Other members of the industry seem to be of the same opinion: Clifford  K.  Berryman, a Pulitzer-winning cartoonist who worked for both the Washington Post (1891–1907) and the Washington Star (1907–949) reflected that a ­cartoon can reach more average people than a regular news article can (Brinkman 724). Hugh Haynie, whose work appeared in the Louisville Courier-Journal from 1958 through

212   Ally Shwed 1996, has gone on record as saying that when his cartoons are successful, he can get his readers to start thinking about something they have previously avoided or not thought about (Brinkman 724). And Jerelle Kraus, former art director of the New York Times, agrees that material on the opinion-editorial page is there to stimulate thought, but she takes it one step further in saying that “nearly any notion is palatable when rendered in prose. When the same notion is pictured, however, the record shows that Op-Ed editors see it as a far greater threat” (Kraus 248). It seems the cartoonist’s job is to load a figurative cannon and hand a match to the reader; once that match is in the reader’s hands, it is up to him or her to light it and set it to the fuse. Much like the balance of image and text that a comic must strike, a cartoonist must find the right way to blend craft and intent to execute an effective cartoon—to encourage the reader to light the match. The “successful” cartoon will do what it can to ­promote a reading beyond face value (like Ramirez not actually implying the assassination of Bush) and curate readers’ attention in a way that leaves them something to which they can respond (like the Danish Muhammads dredging up the conversation about censorship and religion). Furthering the fluid discussion in lieu of the rigid definition, an effective cartoon does not have to change opinions, but the cartoonist must build his or her opinion or message through the world of the cartoon and have the reader enter into it. While being a call to action, it does not necessarily have to elicit the action. Rather, it can work on a spectrum, from the reader thinking about a topic he or she had not before considered, to the reader reconsidering a topic on which he or she already held an opinion, to the reader fully changing a stance, and to the reader taking action. Not every ­cartoon need cause a person of Hitler’s status to publish a book in counterargument, but every cartoon should at least invite a contemplative reading— the lighting of the match. A final note that must be addressed, considering the area of effectiveness, is the notion held by so many that print, and all of its offspring and symbiotes, is dead. In terms of editorial cartoons, many writers and scholars acknowledge that their efficacy thrived in the past, when there was not an easy way to access information and there were fewer mediabased distractions, such as television, radio, and the Internet, but that given the current state of affairs, it is almost irrelevant to discuss the effectiveness of cartoons, because soon they will no longer even exist. An often-cited article from 1954 by Henry Ladd Smith in the Saturday Review marks “The Rise and Fall of the Political Cartoon.” Ladd Smith briefly recounts the history of the traditional, single-panel editorial cartoon, through its “golden age” in the first quarter of the twentieth century up to the 1950s. “Only a generation or so ago almost every self-respecting daily newspaper had its own political cartoonist,” Ladd Smith states. But after the 1920s, he laments, “A powerful art form was on the decline.” It must be conceded that Ladd Smith was correct about newspaper-based cartoonists losing that specific identity: a 2011 report by the Herb Block Foundation titled “The Golden Age for Editorial Cartoonists at the Nation’s Newspaper Is Over” cited that US newspapers employed fewer than forty staff cartoonists, c­ ompared with around two thousand counted in the beginning of the twentieth century. As dim as that statistic sounds, it does not account for the other means by which cartoonists are

Efficacy of social Commentary through Cartooning   213 disseminating their art—again, reflective of the dynamism that is at the heart of the medium. The study does go on to share suggestions for how cartoonists can adapt to new technology and states that, while scary, the changes can be exciting. For example, in 2013, cartoonist Matt Bors founded The Nib, a web-based publication focused on political cartoons, along with comics journalism, essays, and other nonfiction content. In a bit of irony, in 2018, The Nib launched a crowdfunding campaign through Kickstarter to publish a quarterly print magazine; it reached its funding goal of $50,000 in one day and doubled that amount in a little more than a week. Perhaps this is confirmation of what the Herb Block study optimistically concluded, that we are just now entering a golden age of journalism and media. In addition to websites like The Nib, cartoonists have social-media outlets such as Instagram and Twitter through which to share their work, as well as personal blogs and portfolio sites. And even staff editorialists are still making an impact. Take the case of Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Rob Rogers. After twenty-five years cartooning for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Rogers was fired because of his less-than-flattering portrayals of US President Donald Trump. His editor, John Robinson Block, was a Trump ­supporter and wanted to take the paper in a direction that more closely supported Trump’s positions, according to the Post-Gazette’s former editorial page editor Tom Waseleski. “Even if the publisher had strong disagreements with [Rogers] about Trump, he should have kept him on. The publisher certainly had other ways to push his views in the paper” (qtd. in Grove). But Block, fearing the impact Rogers’s cartoons could have on his viewers, chose to let him go. If that is not example enough of a cartoon’s potential efficacy, what followed in the journalism community shows the impact: reports on the incident appeared everywhere from the Daily Beast to Al Jazeera. The Nib allowed Rogers himself to respond to the experience in a long-form comic. And social media exploded with support for the artist, which encouraged him to open a page on the subscription content service Patreon. Fans were able to financially support Rogers directly through his Patreon website, and Rogers was able to continue creating cartoons without risk of an oppressive editor killing them. Perhaps this is not a bad measure of power, either. The editorial cartoon predates the newspaper industry. In the United States, for example, until the Civil War, cartoons were more regularly seen in other media, such as magazines, because of the width in which newspaper columns were set. As times changed and media evolved, so did the cartoonists and their methods of dissemination. Gillray’s cartoons were shown in the windows of the print shop he patronized, Nast’s art was reproduced in Harper’s Bazaar magazine, Herblock appeared in the newspapers Chicago Daily News and the Washington Post, and the cartoons of Ann Telnaes were disseminated in the Washington Post (both in print and online), on The Nib, and on Twitter. So if one’s argument is that the decline of the newspaper industry marks the decline of editorial cartooning, one merely need look at history to see a contradiction to Ladd Smith’s 1954 theory. As Mark Potts, a former newspaper reporter and editor, shared with the Herb Block Foundation during its study, “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.”

214   Ally Shwed To say that editorial cartooning is waning because print is dead is to diminish the role of the cartoonist. He or she does not exist solely to bolster the views a newspaper is already promulgating or to add color or humor to a section full of opinions already. Cartoonists, in their purest form, are trying to lend their voice to a world too confusing or overburdened with war, corruption, a loss of values, death—fill in the blank—for the sake of their own understanding and, when disseminated, to act as a conduit for others, to help the readers have a clearer sense of what is going on in the world or at the very least hear one opinion or thought other than their own. As we continuously learn throughout history (take the 2016 US presidential election or the 2016 UK Brexit vote), lines of communication are something the world needs much more of in the twenty-first century and beyond. If a newspaper is no longer willing to print one’s anti-Trump sentiment, then the strong among cartoonists must find a new outlet, institution, or source of support. The other option is following the “dying breed” rhetoric and withering away— but hundreds of years of history err on the side of that probably not happening. Furthermore, people should not dupe themselves into thinking that cartoons have to be the solution to any given social problem they choose to take on, nor should readers think that simply subscribing to The Nib newsletter or following Mike Luckovich on Twitter is doing their civic duty. If social plights were that easy to solve, the world would have fewer problems of which to speak. But the comics medium can be one of many weapons in an arsenal of attack against the woes, ills, and missteps of modern society, empowering readers to be brave enough to think about specific issues and maybe take some action. The task at hand for cartoonists is not necessarily to change humanity, but it certainly is to know it.

Works Cited Benson, Timothy. “Low and the Dictators.” History Today, vol. 51, no. 3, 2001, p. 38. Boime, Albert. “Thomas Nast and French Art.” American Art Journal, vol. 4, no. 1, 1972, pp. 43–65. Brinkman, Del. “Do Editorial Cartoons and Editorials Change Opinions?” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, vol. 45, no. 4, 1968, pp. 724–725. Buch-Andersen, Thomas. “Denmark Row: The Power of Cartoons,” BBC News, 3 Oct. 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5392786.stm. Bukowski, Charles. Notes of a Dirty Old Man. City Light, 1969. “Cartoon in Times Prompts Inquiry by Secret Service.” Los Angeles Times, 22 July 2003, http:/articles.latimes.com/2003/jul/22/local/me-ramirez22. Cavna, Michael. “He’s Drawn 1,000 Political Cartoons over 21 Years—but Now He’s Part of a Vanishing Breed.” Washington Post, 31 Jan. 2018, http://washingtonpost.com/news/comicriffs/wp/2018/01/31/hes-drawn-1000-political-cartoons-over-21-years-but-now-hes-partof-a-vanishing-breed. Coupe, W.  A. “Observations on a Theory of Political Caricature.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 11, no. 1, 1969, pp. 79–95. Cronin, Brian. Was Superman a Spy? And Other Comic Book Legends Revealed. Plume, 2009.

Efficacy of social Commentary through Cartooning   215 De Ranitz, Ariane. Louis Raemaekers: Armed with Pen and Pencil. Foundation Raemaekers, 2014. DeSousa, Michael  A., and Martin  J.  Medhurst. “The Editorial Cartoon as Visual Rhetoric: Rethinking Boss Tweed.” Journal of Visual Verbal Languaging, vol. 2, no. 2, 1982, pp. 43–52. Gladwell, Malcolm. “The Satire Paradox.” Revisionist History, 18 Aug. 2016, http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/10-the-satire-paradox. Grove, Lloyd. “Rob Rogers, Fired for His ‘Angry’ Trump Cartoons, Fires Back.” Daily Beast, 20 June 2018, http://thedailybeast.com/rob-rogers-fired-for-his-angry-trump-cartoons-firesback. Harrison, Randall P. “Cartoon Communication: Research, Appreciation, and Training.” Journal of Visual Verbal Languaging, vol. 2, no. 1, 1982, pp. 29–34. Herb Block Foundation. The Golden Age for Editorial Cartoonists at the Nation’s Newspapers Is Over. December 2011, http://herbblockfoundation.org/editorial-cartooning/report-editorialcartooning. “The Historic Elephant and Donkey; It Was Thomas Nast ‘Father of the American Cartoon,’ Who Brought Them into Politics.” New York Times, 2 Aug. 1908. Kraus, Jerelle. All the Art That’s Fit to Print (and Some That Wasn’t): Inside the New York Times Op-Ed Page. Columbia University Press, 2012. Ladd Smith, Henry. “The Rise and Fall of the Political Cartoon.” Saturday Review, 29 May 1954. Martinez, Miriam, and Janis  M.  Harmon. “Picture/Text Relationships: An Investigation of Literary Elements in Picturebooks.” Literacy Research and Instruction, vol. 51, no. 4, 2012, pp. 323–343. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. William Morrow, 1994. Mr. Fish. Warning! Graphic Content: Political Cartoons, Comix, and the Uncensored Artistic Mind. USC Annenberg Press, 2015. Navasky, Victor S. The Art of Controversy. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. “Nuremberg Trials.” Library of Congress, Military Legal Resources, http://www.loc.gov/rr/ frd/Military_Law/Nuremberg_trials.html. Paine, Albert B. Th. Nast, His Period and His Pictures. Pyne Press, 1974. Rose, Flemming. “Muhammeds ansigt.” Jyllands-Posten, 29 Sept. 2005, https://jyllands-posten. dk/indland/ECE4769352/Muhammeds-ansigt. Tolstoy, Leo. What Is Art? Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhansky. Penguin, 1995.

chapter 13

R a dica l Gr a phics Australian Second-Phase Comics Kevin Patrick

Inkspots was an entirely different kind of Australian comic magazine, one that declared its bold direction from its very first issue in 1980, which presented a startling and eclectic array of stories, the likes of which had never before been published in an Australian comic book. These included Andrew Strathie and Daryl Lindquist’s surreal visual narrative “The Colleague” (3–14), which stood alongside Philip Bentley and Colin Paraskevas’s “Siegfried,” a graphic adaptation of Richard Wagner’s operatic drama (55–73), together with Bentley’s historical vignette “Entangled,” which crackled with erotic intensity, due largely to Chris Johnston’s sensual artwork (45–54) (see Figure 13.1). The debut issue’s editorial further spelled out the magazine’s creative vision and its hopes for the future development of the comics medium: [We believe] that the graphic story is a legitimate art form, in its own right . . . and that its future lies with intelligently produced publications aimed at a mature audience. . . . In Australia, [Inkspots] takes on a more important role being, to the best of our knowledge, the first big production alternative [comic magazine] to come from our shores. That’s hardly a great state of affairs and even worse, if you consider that we don’t even have an extant commercial comics industry (Bentley et al. 2)

Sadly, Inkspots failed to attract a significant audience, despite securing newsstand ­distribution in Australia, as well being sold through specialty comics shops in Britain and the United States. Whatever its creative merits, the magazine’s constantly changing format and prolonged gaps between issues undoubtedly made it difficult for Inkspots to cultivate a large and dependable readership. Yet in many ways, Inkspots embodied the adventurous creativity that was the hallmark of so many new, independently published Australian comics that briefly flourished and then disappeared throughout the 1970s and 1980s. They represented a seismic break with the remaining vestiges of Australia’s commercial comics industry, which had

Radical Graphics: Australian Second-Phase Comics   217

Figure 13.1 “Entangled,” Inkspots, no. 1, 1980.

for decades focused exclusively on publishing licensed reprints of American comics for the domestic market. These “alternative” comics represented the second phase in Australian comics history, providing outlets for a new generational cohort of Australian writers and artists, many of whom were unfamiliar with the medium and its history but were nonetheless excited by its potential for creative self-expression. Inkspots’ brief and  spasmodic existence also highlighted the economic challenges that bedeviled self-­published Australian comics throughout this period. This chapter records the hectic evolution of Australia’s self-styled “alternative” comics scene throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and briefly discuss key works by notable comics creators who first came to prominence during this time. It contextualizes this second phase of Australian comics history by tracing its aesthetic roots back to local underground comix of the early 1970s, while considering how the growth of organized comics fandom facilitated the emergence of “new wave” Australian comics during the early to mid-1980s. This chapter argues that these comics’ radical sensibilities were largely expressed in aesthetic rather than political terms, even though this was often enough to provoke official censure and public condemnation. Nevertheless, it will be argued that these comics extended the creative parameters of comics in new and exciting ways, which challenged prevailing social attitudes about the medium’s cultural status and paved the way for the popular and critical acceptance of Australian graphic novels in the mid-2000s.

218   Kevin Patrick

Australian Academic Studies of Comics, 1950–1970 The emergence of “alternative” comics in Australia can only be understood by tracing the evolution of Australia’s comic-book industry and acknowledging how changing cultural and economic conditions influenced their development throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The explosive postwar growth of Australia’s comic-book industry led to a brief but intense period of academic inquiry into comic books and their readers, which reflected ongoing public controversies about the medium’s perceived effect on children’s moral and intellectual development. Charting the industry’s economic ­contraction from the mid-1950s onward, along with the attendant decline of academic interest in comics, furnishes us with telling indicators of the medium’s diminished status, both as a form of mass entertainment and as a phenomenon worthy of scholarly examination. This historical account, however brief, allows us to better understand the cultural significance of “alternative” comics in Australia and to contextualize this present study of their development against the spasmodic growth of comics studies in Australia. Since the mid-1930s, comic strips were primarily associated with Australian ­children’s periodicals, such as Kookaburra (ca. 1931–1932), Fatty Finn’s Weekly (1934), and The Comet (ca. 1936–1937), which were themselves modeled on British “children’s papers,” such as Gem and Magnet. The first recognizably modern comic books ­published in Australia—The Adventures of Buck Rogers (1936) and The Phantom (1938)—were compilations of syndicated American newspaper comic strips. Even though these newspaper serials were originally intended for an adult readership, the Australian comic-magazine editions were marketed toward younger readers and thus reinforced the impression that comic books were meant entirely for juvenile audiences (Patrick, “Cultural Economy” 163). Domestic publishers’ initial reliance on imported American comic strips also foreshadowed the United States’ eventual economic and cultural dominance of Australia’s comic-book industry. This was only briefly forestalled by the outbreak of World War II, when the Australian government enforced import licensing restrictions on nonessential goods in order to maintain currency reserves needed for the looming war effort (Butlin 115­–122). These restrictions led to bans on imported American comic magazines (“Magazines and Comics” 11), as well as syndicated comic-strip artwork intended for publication within Australia (“American Magazines” 2). Frank Johnson Publications was one of several enterprising Sydney publishers that took advantage of these favorable market conditions by commissioning Australian-drawn comic books. The company began churning out “cheap, disposable, but lively comic books” on a weekly basis (Doyle 12). Despite their sometimes variable quality, these early Australian comics were snapped up by a captive audience hungry for escapist reading matter (Ryan 161).

Radical Graphics: Australian Second-Phase Comics   219 It did not take long for American comics to reassert their dominance of the Australian market. Following the end of the war, American feature syndicates bypassed the ban on imported comic magazines by selling print-ready artwork (at artificially low prices) to Australian publishers, who assembled and printed them under license for the domestic market. The removal of wartime embargoes on the launch of new, ongoing periodicals, coupled with the end of newsprint rationing, led to the explosive growth of Australian comic-book production. The number of comic books available to Australian readers leaped from 90 titles in 1949 (“Comics” 71), to 174 titles in 1954, most of which were reprints of American publications (Bartlett 8). By 1952, estimated industry sales revenues had climbed to 2.4 million Australian pounds (Fitzpatrick 50), while the total number of comic-book sales had reached 60 million copies that same year (Connell et al., Growing Up 155). Such figures were nothing short of astonishing, given that Australia’s population had not yet reached 9 million people by 1952. The seismic popularity of comic books among Australian children was widely reported by the press, which recorded mounting public concern about the undesirable content of these American-style comics (“Are ‘Comic’ Books Harmful” 2). These newer types of American comics, with their increased emphasis on violent action and sexual titillation, were clearly aimed at an older readership and challenged the public perception that comics were an essentially humorous medium intended for children. The earliest Australian academic studies of children and comic books also received considerable press coverage. Child psychologist Elwyn Morey (University of Western Australia) surveyed 455 Perth schoolchildren about their comic-book-reading habits and preferences (“Sixty Comics a Week” 6). In 1954, Ezra Wyeth (University of Melbourne) conducted a qualitative survey of four hundred comic books available to children, which he roundly condemned for encouraging “immorality, cruelty, and other undesirable traits” (“What Is in Comics?” 4). W. F. Connell (University of Sydney) undertook a sociological survey of Sydney adolescents in 1951, which examined their use of mass media (including ­comics) as a means to understand the attitudes and behaviors of teenage boys and girls (Connell et al., Growing Up 155–172). Several state governments throughout Australia passed new legislation or amended existing obscenity laws, which severely curtailed the sale and distribution of “objectionable” literature, such as comics and men’s magazines (Iliffe 134–139). This legislative crackdown, combined with competition from the launch of television broadcasting in 1956 (Campbell and Keogh 111–112) and the readmittance of imported American comic books in 1960 (“Comics Business” 5–6), dealt the local comics industry a succession of economic blows, from which it never truly recovered. These developments effectively neutralized the social threat once posed by comic books, while their declining popularity among younger readers meant they no longer warranted further scholarly investigation. This was confirmed in Connell’s subsequent 1970 survey of Sydney adolescents’ leisure habits, which recorded a dramatic decline in comic-book reading among teenagers (Connell et al., 12 to 20 175). Comic books, as one critic later observed, no longer ­figured in Australians’ everyday “practical consciousness” (Possamai 118).

220   Kevin Patrick

Reconstructing Australian Comics History Contemporaneous academic studies of comic books in the 1950s took place against a backdrop of public anxiety over nascent social trends in postwar Australia, such as the perceived “Americanization” of Australian culture (White) and the formation of a ­distinctive youth subculture, characterized by the consumption of subversive cultural forms, such as rock-and- roll music and “teen” genre films (Irving et al. 37). It was not until the 1980s, when researchers, working across such disciplines as history, media and communications, and cultural studies, began focusing on popular culture that comics became the subject of renewed academic scrutiny in Australia. The anticomics campaigns of the 1950s were the focus of exemplary research by John Docker, Augustine Brannigan, and Mark Finnane, each of whom situated the comics controversy within the broader narrative of Cold War–era politics. But comic books themselves only received sporadic attention from social commentators and academic researchers. For example, Patricia Edgar and Hilary McPhee’s feminist critique of media representations of Australian women only briefly discussed the portrayal of women in romance comics (19). Barry Andrews wrote an insightful essay about the celebrated comic strip, Ginger Meggs, which arguably stands as the first sustained critical analysis of an Australian comic-strip character. Despite the breadth of topics covered in the landmark 1979 study, Australian Popular Culture, coeditor David Walker observed that “there remains a wealth of magazine stories, serials, comics [and] cartoons . . . which also merit analysis” (13). Yet for many years thereafter, few had taken up Walker’s suggestion. John Foster was a notable exception, being one of the few Australian academics to ­consistently analyze how locally drawn comics reflected social change within Australian society (“Truth, Justice”; “Slow Death”) and record their depiction of the Australian landscape and its people (“Image”). The continued absence of comic books from subsequent academic studies of Australian popular culture remains puzzling (Possamai 110), especially as Foster himself noted that even by the mid-1990s, comic books and juvenile magazines still remained an integral part of Australian children’s literary diet (Foster et al. 187–188). The history of both Australian comics and Australia’s comic-book industry has been largely recorded by comic-book fans and amateur historians. John Ryan wrote Panel by Panel, which remains, in many respects, the definitive history of Australian comic books from the early 1900s to the late 1970s. Ryan’s  1979 book was the product of years of research, some of which first appeared in fan publications, commencing with his own— and Australia’s first—comic fanzine, Down Under, in 1964 (see Figure 13.2). While one reviewer sniffed that “Ryan was no academic” and that his book lacked sufficient “social and cultural context” (Andrews, “Reviews” 133), Panel by Panel nevertheless furnished academic researchers with the first historical account of Australian

Radical Graphics: Australian Second-Phase Comics   221

Figure 13.2  Down Under, 1964.

comics, identifying the major publishers, creative personnel, and popular series that shaped Australia’s postwar comics industry. Panel by Panel paved the way for further, semischolarly collections about Australian comics and their creators, which offered piecemeal accounts of the nascent revival of Australian comics that occurred throughout the 1980s and 1990s (Rae; Hale). Yet in the decades since Ryan’s death in 1979, it has largely been left to comic-book fans and collectors to document the history of Australian comics in fanzines, self-published monographs, bibliographies, and, since the mid-1990s, websites, blogs, message forums, and other online outlets (Patrick, “(Fan) Scholars” 28–37). My own research on Australian comics has drawn heavily from this body of literature, which only highlights the t­ ensions and synergies that exist between those whom Matt Hills labels “fan-scholars,” or fans who undertake academic-style analysis of their chosen medium, on the one hand, and “scholar-fans,” or those academics who declare their own fan interests in their ­chosen field of study, on the other (11–21). No doubt, many academics who identify themselves as part of the broader comics studies discipline (including this author) have undergone a similar transition from “fan-scholar” to “scholar-fan.” But this need not be an impediment to rigorous scholarly research. Instead, Henry Jenkins argues that this allows

222   Kevin Patrick a­ cademics to combine their understanding of relevant theoretical frameworks and scholarly literature with “[firsthand] access to the particular knowledge and traditions’ of [fan communities]” (5). This present study of Australia’s “new wave” comics of the 1970s and 1980s draws on my firsthand (fan) knowledge of these works and their creators, but it addresses the criticisms leveled against the granular focus of fan scholarship by situating them within a broader historical context.

Comix Go Underground Australia does not have a recognizably “national” comic art aesthetic, to the extent that Hergé’s ligne claire (clear line) artwork on Tintin helped define the visual style of FrancoBelgian comics or Osamu Tezuka’s frenetic artwork distilled the energy of Japanese comics. This is not a deliberately provocative statement that seeks to diminish the work of countless outstanding Australian comics creators. Rather, it is an acknowledgment that Australia, through sharing a common language with Great Britain and the United States, has arguably been more susceptible to Anglo-American cultural influences than other, non-English-speaking nations. This was certainly evident throughout the 1940s and 1950s, when Australian comic-book writers, illustrators, and publishers successfully emulated the vast range of American superhero, cowboy, and crime comics that proved popular with Australian audiences (Patrick, “Cultural Economy” 167–168). This same process of emulation and adaptation was also evident in the evolution of Australian “underground comix” throughout the 1960s and 1970s, which frequently took their visual cues from British satire magazines and American underground comix. Whatever creative debt they might have owed to their foreign counterparts, Australian underground comix were vitally concerned with challenging the nation’s conservative political orthodoxies and social mores. Canvassing such broad topics as censorship, drug reform, sexual politics, and Australia’s escalating involvement in the Vietnam War, local underground comix overturned any doubts about the medium’s capacity to address controversial topics, albeit in a subversive manner. Leading the way was Oz, a controversial Sydney magazine whose founding editors— Richard Neville, Martin Sharp, and Richard Walsh—promptly faced criminal charges for distributing an obscene publication in 1963. The magazine’s news stories and satirical commentary were augmented by Walsh’s bold cover designs, inventive page layouts, and psychedelic cartoons. In many ways, Oz embodied the visual spontaneity that would be the hallmark of Australian underground comix for years to come. But as Peter Just points out, Oz was chiefly prized by its readers for its news and editorial commentary more than anything else: “The [comix] were popular with the readers, but always took second place to the written material” (33). Pat Woolley migrated from California to Melbourne in 1970, where she became a driving force in Australia’s underground comix scene. She purchased a small offset printing press and collaborated with local cartoonist Bob Daly to produce Cobber Comix

Radical Graphics: Australian Second-Phase Comics   223 (1971)—possibly the first Australian “underground comix” title made up entirely of comics stories. Woolley set up her own company, Tomato Press, and published more Australian “comix” including Pharoah Phunnies (1972) and Poindexter (1973), in addition to printing posters, leaflets, and other literature for progressive social and political organizations. Tomato Press relocated to Sydney in 1972, only to cease operations four years later. By this time, however, Woolley had set up her next publishing venture, Wild & Woolley, which produced The Wild & Woolley Comix Book, a landmark collection of Australian underground comix from the 1960s and ’70s (Woolley). Rats was a satirical magazine that took pride in its selection of “unusual and bizarre” editorial content (“DO NOT LIMIT YOUR THINKING!” was the advice given to ­prospective contributors). Launched by editor Piotr J. Olszewski in 1972, Rats juggled news stories with fumetti-styled photo comics, essays, cartoons, and short stories. In this regard, it was not dissimilar to Oz magazine, but Rats devoted considerably more space to comics, making it a showcase for some of the best Australian comix artists of the era. Neil McLean’s Disneyesque fable “Animal Crackers” pilloried the macho ­violence of Melbourne’s “Sharps” youth gang culture, while Jon Puckridge reimagined the second coming of Jesus Christ as a slickly orchestrated corporate media campaign (see Figure 13.3).

Figure 13.3  “Earth Revisited,” Rats, no. 4, 1973.

224   Kevin Patrick But the magazine’s well-intentioned satire sometimes jeopardized its very existence. Rats relied to a large degree on suburban convenience stores (known as milk bars) for distribution. However, Andre Dziatlek’s single-page cartoon “Alf Biggett, Wog Spotter” reportedly angered some shopkeepers, who took exception to the use of the word wog—a derogatory term commonly used against Greek and Italian migrants—and threatened to stop selling the magazine (Pinder 37). Such threats mattered little in the end, as Rats ceased publication with its tenth issue in 1973, thus achieving a degree of longevity rarely enjoyed by other comparable magazines. Australian underground comix faded from view just as the youth counterculture that had helped foster their existence gradually dissipated by the early 1970s. Given their brief life span, it is difficult to gauge their historical influence on Australian ­comics. One critic suggested that there was “little widespread knowledge of their existence” at the time and that they were chiefly read and enjoyed by the artists themselves (Just 33). Woolley, however, believes that their minor cultural status reflected a unique combination of Australian tastes and social conditions that were far removed from American society: I think underground comics are peculiarly American in style and tone. . . . The humor and sexual connotations of American [underground comix]—really what made them interesting—were part of American life. . . . Australian readers’ tastes were for comics within existing social, satirical, political magazines [which commented] on society. . . . [Australian] artists had something to say about life, [but] their work was appreciated within magazines. . . . [Underground comix] did not take off on [their] own. (qtd. in Just 35)

Nevertheless, Australian underground comix provided local cartoonists with a ­ latform for uninhibited social commentary and satire and proved beyond doubt the p medium’s capacity for addressing serious themes and ideas in visually radical ways.

Alternative Comics and Comics Fandom Australia’s “new wave” comics of the 1980s differed from their underground antecedents in two key respects. On an aesthetic level, they were not explicitly concerned with social or political commentary and were more interested in providing a forum for works that spanned everything from self-consciously experimental graphic narratives to scatological humor, introspective “slice of life” stories, and much more besides. In generational terms, many (but by no means all) of the writers and artists who contributed to these “new wave” comics were comic-book “fans,” some of whom were active in Australian comics fandom, which was steadily gathering momentum throughout the late 1970s and  early 1980s. The informal network of retail comic-book stores, fan magazines (“­fanzines”), and conventions provided “alternative” comics with publicity outlets and

Radical Graphics: Australian Second-Phase Comics   225 distribution channels that were crucial to their survival. Paradoxically, while these new Australian publications strove to advance the idea that comics were a legitimate form of artistic expression, they were dependent on a clandestine comic-book subculture that was largely indifferent to their creative ambitions. Inkspots was, in practical terms, at least, very much a product of this environment. Bentley, Gates, and Paraskevas—the three principal figures behind Inkspots—were themselves comic-book fans and had begun collaborating on various comics stories in the mid-1970s. In 1977, they formed Minotaur Imports, a comics mail-order business, which evolved into Minotaur Books, the first comic-book shop in Melbourne, and became a creative and social hub for local comics fans and aspiring comics artists. Inkspots drew its creative inspirations from an eclectic range of (chiefly American) sources, including science-fiction/horror underground comix (Slow Death), selected mainstream comics (Swamp Thing), and independently published comics anthologies (Star*Reach)—each of which, in its own way, occupied the more experimental reaches of 1970s American comics culture (Bentley, “My Life IV” 20). However, Bentley argued that few comparable American comics anthologies at that time would have carried such a diverse range of stories as appeared in Inkspots’ first issue. This was, he later acknowledged, “something that was both a strength and a weakness for us” (19). Also making its debut in 1980 was Outcast, billed as “the adult fantasy and sci-fi magazine.” Outcast bore a superficial similarity to Inkspots, but it was the product of an altogether different publishing environment, being commissioned by Angus & Robertson, one of Australia’s largest (and oldest) book-publishing companies. Outcast was a glossy, full-color magazine, featuring a mixture of illustrated science-fiction stories and self-contained comic strips. It was clearly modeled after the American science-fiction/ fantasy magazine Heavy Metal (1977), which was itself based on the French publication Metal Hurlant (1975). Despite its sophisticated production values, Outcast did not ­generate sufficiently high sales, and was canceled after its first issue. Trevor Weekes, a ­former contributor, described Outcast as an “adventurous move,” but one that was “misguided” in terms of its projected audience. “I think Australia was a hard market at the time,” he said, “and is still not an easy market to release comics into” (qtd. in Bentley “Word Balloons”). Australian readers, whether comics fans or otherwise, were clearly not ready to embrace “adult” comics to the same degree as American or European audiences. Both Inkspots and Outcast were formally launched at Comicon II, which was held at Melbourne’s Sheraton Hotel in 1980, an occurrence that would have been almost unthinkable just a few years before. Yet it was an indicator of how far Australian comics fandom had developed in such a relatively short period of time and foreshadowed the important role these events would play in raising public awareness about Australian comics. The roots of Australian comics fandom can be traced back to the 1960s. John Ryan continued writing about Australian comics in his newest “comiczine,” Boomerang, while several Australian science-fiction fanzines, including Gary Mason’s New Forerunner (1969–1978) and Noel Kerr’s Somerset Gazette (1970–1971), frequently covered Australian comics (Stone, “Down Under” 40–41). The Australian Comic ­

226   Kevin Patrick Collector, launched by twins John and Steve Corneille in 1976, would become a key source of news and reviews about American and Australian comics. There was a growing sense within the local comics industry that fans represented an active and potentially lucrative market. This was borne out by Melbourne publisher Newton Comics’ decision to hire John Corneille to edit its licensed Australian reprints of Marvel Comics titles in 1975 (Thomas). Melbourne comics retailer Joe Italiano took up the editorship of The Australian Comic Collector in 1979 and (in collaboration with Moris Sztajer), staged Australia’s first comic-book convention, Comicon, in Melbourne that same year (Bentley, “My Life III” 16–18). The growth of Australian comics fandom reflected the changing demographic profile and consumer preferences of local comic-book audiences during the 1980s. Children still read comics, of course, but their tastes were markedly different from those of the older cohort of fans who grew up reading imported American superhero comics during the 1960s and ’70s. For instance, a 1984 survey of Sydney high school students found they overwhelmingly preferred reading newspaper comic strips (e.g., Garfield), humor magazines (e.g., Australian Mad), and translated Franco-Belgian comic albums (such as Tintin and Asterix), which were widely available in school and public libraries. The ­survey concluded that superhero/adventure comics “were not particularly popular” among students (Hunt 42–43). The same could not be said of Australian comics fandom, which was chiefly defined by its collective celebration of (American) superhero comics. To their credit, local comic fanzines began publishing reviews of new Australian comics, thus demonstrating some level of public support for new and emerging creators and their work. But as fanzine editor Italiano pointed out, “if you want your [fanzine] to sell, you must appeal to . . . the typical [Australian] fan [who] only wants Marvel or DC Comics . . . and that is it.” Fox Comics had its roots in Australian comics fandom, but it pursued a creative vision that was largely at odds with local fans’ avowed preference for superhero comics. David Vodicka had coproduced The Fox Comic Collector fanzine with Lazarus and Mitchell Dobelsky throughout 1981–1984. Vodicka subsequently launched Fox Comics in April 1984, which was released as a photocopied, black-and-white, digest-sized comic. (Just as web offset printing presses put affordable printing within reach of underground comix publishers in the 1970s, photocopiers were a cheap printing alternative for low-run fanzines and self-published comics in the 1980s.) In many respects, Fox Comics embodied the creative ethos of the British “small press” comics movement that flourished during this period. This informal artistic affiliation became more ­pronounced once Fox Comics began featuring work by Ed Pinsent and Phil Elliot, both of whom were strongly associated with Escape Magazine, Britain’s leading smallpress comics anthology. Fox Comics was, in its own words, designed to be a showcase for “new and existing talent in the field of graphic/comic art” (Vodicka). It featured several Inkspots alumni, including Fil Barlow and Martine Trengove, whose work appeared alongside contributions from such newcomers as Ian Eddy (a prolific mini-comix artist), and “The Big Simp,” whose sexually explicit, scatological cartoons polarized readers. With each

Radical Graphics: Australian Second-Phase Comics   227

Figure 13.4  “All Men Are Bastards,” Fox Comics, no. 26, 1990.

s­ uccessive issue, this eclectic mélange of styles gradually gave way to a more clearly defined, almost curatorial selection of stories. “All Men Are Bastards,” Stuart and Tony Thorne’s bittersweet tribute to their late aunt and uncle, was, in some respects, an almost “typical” Fox Comics story (see Figure 13.4). It reflected the magazine’s predilection for work by artists “who don’t draw superheroes, or science-fiction fantasies” but whose work “has its roots in everyday real life” (“Editorial”). Fox Comics began promoting itself as “Australia’s international comics magazine” and included more work from overseas cartoonists, including Eddie Campbell (UK), Daniel Clowes (US), and Dylan Horrocks (New Zealand). In 1989, Fox Comics secured a jointpublishing deal with Fantagraphics Books (US), but its ambitious plans were cut short when the copublished series was canceled after just four issues in 1990. Yet throughout its short, tumultuous existence, Fox Comics provided an international forum for Australian writers and artists and arguably did more than any other Australian comic in broadening “people’s opinions of what comics can be about” (“Editorial”).

228   Kevin Patrick

Pushing Genre Boundaries Radical comics were not solely the product of Australia’s youth counterculture, nor were they always found at the experimental fringes of Australian comics fandom. Sometimes they were hiding in plain sight, sold at newsstands to an eager readership, where they often—but not always—escaped the punitive glare of state censors and other guardians of public morals. These comics were “radical” not in any avant-garde sense but rather because their capacity to shock and titillate audiences with their uninhibited displays of sex and violence challenged long-held beliefs that comics were intended solely for ­children. And just as they had once caused public outcry in Britain and America in the 1950s, a new wave of Australian horror comics published in the 1970s and ’80s would earn official reprisals from state authorities and become embroiled in public debates about media violence. Gerald Carr was no stranger to controversy when he launched his own horror comic, Vampire, in 1975. Carr, who previously lettered dialogue balloons for the Australian edition of Walt Disney Comics, first came to the public’s notice as the artist on Fabula, a raunchy serial that appeared in Broadside. This fortnightly magazine, edited by student union activist (and future Member of Parliament) Pete Steedman, was published by the proprietors of The Age, Melbourne’s traditionally conservative broadsheet newspaper. Steedman envisaged Fabula as the Australian equivalent of Barbarella, the erotic ­science-fiction comic created by Jean-Claude Forest, whose exploits would be set not in outer space but in the hothouse of federal Australian politics. The character Fabula was plucked from the typing pool by the prime minister’s office to help the government repel myriad threats, domestic and foreign, to “the Australian way of life.” Carr rendered her as a curvaceous blonde, armed with a bullwhip and clad in a skimpy costume that barely concealed her statuesque figure, which shocked and excited readers in equal ­measure. Fabula’s adventures, inspired by political gossip shared with Steedman from high-­ranking government sources, provided a satirical commentary on the conservative ­government led then by Prime Minister John Gorton and was thus in keeping with Broadside’s image as an irreverent but intelligent current-affairs magazine (“Broadside”). Following the closure of Broadside in 1969, Carr published his own mail-order “comic-zine,” Wart’s Epic (1970), which contained an eclectic mixture of single-panel cartoons, illustrated stories, and experimental comic strips. He produced the sciencefiction serial Space in Time for Rats magazine during 1972–1973 and published an Australian edition of the groundbreaking American science-fiction/fantasy anthology Star*Reach, in 1974. Carr remains an important transitional figure in this otherwise fallow period in Australian comics history, testing the economic viability of self-published comics that would become the standard publishing model for most Australian comics that subsequently appeared throughout the 1980s. Yet Carr has never entirely shed the loose, unstructured narrative style that characterized his earliest work for the alternative press, even when pursuing explicitly commercial projects.

Radical Graphics: Australian Second-Phase Comics   229 Horror-themed entertainments have been historically subject to the harshest legislative measures imposed by Australian authorities. These have ranged from seizures of American “pulp fiction” magazines such as Weird Tales by customs officials in the late 1930s to local radio networks’ voluntary prohibition of dramatic serials featuring supernatural or horror themes and culminated in the chief censor’s decision to ban the exhibition of all new horror films in Australia—a ban that was only gradually lifted in the late 1960s (Patrick, “A Design” 144–145). Australia’s largest remaining comic-magazine ­publishers—K. G. Murray, Newton Comics, and Page Publications—responded to the growing public demand for horror entertainment by acquiring the local publication rights to dozens of “adult” American horror magazines, including Monsters Unleased (1975), Scream (1976), and Vampirella (1974), to name but a few. Carr entered the now-booming horror comics market with his own magazine, Vampire, which featured enough bloodletting, nudity, and sex to warrant the frontcover disclaimer “Rated M for the Mature Comic Fan”—a tactic that cleverly deflected concerns that such a comic could be sold to minors, while alerting adult readers to the promise of illicit thrills within. Nor would they have been disappointed by the magazine’s contents; Carr’s account of the historical roots of the Dracula legend frequently emphasized Vlad the Impaler’s sexual prowess, as in “Count Seducer.” Vampire emulated to a large degree the “sex vampire” film cycle instigated by Hammer Films’ Countess Dracula (1970) and Lust for a Vampire (1971). This trend did not go unnoticed by the Literature Board of Review, which had been established by the Queensland government in 1954 to prohibit the sale and distribution of “objectionable” literature—such as comic books and men’s magazines—within that notoriously conservative state. The board commenced banning dozens of locally printed horror comics in 1978, but some publishers sidestepped bans on their preexisting series by simply changing the titles of all their horror comics with each subsequent issue. Carr ceased publishing Vampire after it, too, was banned from sale in Queensland in July 1979, as the loss of this key market undoubtedly jeopardized the magazine’s commercial viability. Phantastique was an altogether different type of horror comic. Whereas Carr’s Vampire magazine dealt primarily with the vampires, werewolves, and zombies that had been the hallmark of horror cinema since the 1930s and ’40s, Phantastique was a product of the new era of “splatter movies,” where supernatural monsters gave way to murderous psychopaths who became the popular antagonists in films such as Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980). The comic’s creative director, Steve Carter, went so far as to declare that Phantastique was “a splatter movie on paper” (“Blood” 46). Some of the comic’s stories, however, did trade on the old-fashioned “twist endings” famously employed by EC Comics’ infamous horror titles of the 1950s, such as Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror. “Landfall” depicts extraterrestrials visiting Earth thousands of years ago, where they are worshipped as gods by an Aboriginal tribe living in the shadow of Uluru (Ayers Rock) in central Australia. Realizing that an infant Aboriginal boy has stowed away on their spacecraft, the aliens return to Earth centuries later, where they aim to abduct a young female, in the hopes that they can breed humans in captivity on their home planet. They kidnap an infant girl from a caravan park near

230   Kevin Patrick

Figure 13.5 “Landfall,” Phantastique, no. 1, 1986.

Uluru in present-day Australia—inadvertently sparking the real-life search for Azaria Chamberlain, the baby girl who mysteriously vanished from her parents’ outback ­camping site in 1980 (Stafford) (see Figure 13.5). “The Beast down the Hall” was more in keeping with the explicit tone of Phantastique. The story tells of a newlywed bride who is incapable of having sex with her husband, for she is still traumatized by childhood memories of being raped by a dragon in her bedroom. When her sexually frustrated husband embarks on an affair with her sister, the bride is visited once more by the dragon who terrorized her as a child. This time, ­however, she stabs the “dragon” to death. Only then does she discover that it was her ­loving brother who had been raping her in her sleep for all these years (de Vries). Stories such as these suggested that true horror existed not in the realm of make-believe monsters but in the everyday world of suburban family life. Phantastique was remarkable not just for the level of carnage and gore found in each issue but also for the unprecedented level of financial support it received from federal and state government agencies. However, the magazine’s external funding came not from traditional arts-funding bodies but from the federal government’s New Enterprise Incentive Scheme and the New South Wales Office of Small Business. According to the magazine’s art director, Des Waterman, this support was guided by commercial rather than cultural criteria: The Office of Small Business “knew what we were going to produce, but they weren’t interested in the product. They’re only interested in bringing export dollars into the country” (“Last Rites”). But Phantastique found itself at odds with the increasingly conservative moral ­climate of the 1980s, which saw women’s rights organizations and conservative Christian groups alike calling on state and federal governments to prohibit the sale and distribution of violent and sexually explicit films on videocassettes (“Video Censorship” 38). In March

Radical Graphics: Australian Second-Phase Comics   231 1986, Phantastique found itself under attack from Sydney talkback radio hosts and ­condemned on the floor of the New South Wales Parliament for its excessive violence (Patrick, “A Design” 154–155). The government was eventually compelled to release a statement indicating that publications such as Phantastique would not in future receive any funding from the Office of Small Business (“Comic to Reduce Violence”). Phantastique remained defiant in the face of such concerted opposition; editor James Kronol justified the comic’s portrayal of graphic violence on the grounds that it was, after all, “a horror magazine.” But Phantastique could not overcome such concerted political and public opposition and ceased publication by the end of 1986. Its uncompromising vision and staunch commitment to artistic freedom proved too much for those who felt there was no place in society for such provocative and disturbing acts of selfexpression—least of all within the pages of a comic book.

Radical (Re)education Ryan observed that comics, unlike schoolbooks, did not have to be thrust upon reluctant readers. Their proven popularity with young people, together with the medium’s intrinsic visual appeal, he argued, provided educators with the perfect opportunity to exploit “comics’ ability to communicate” (144). Yet given their controversial history, it is perhaps surprising to learn that some Australian educators have shared Ryan’s belief in comic books’ pedagogic potential. Australian Visual Education launched the Pictorial Social Studies series in 1958, a multivolume series of proto-graphic novels that retold key episodes from Australian history in comic-book narratives. These handsomely printed volumes, illustrated by Australia’s leading comic artists of the postwar era, were sold as classroom sets, complete with a Revision Guide and Index specially prepared for teachers (Patrick, “In Search” 59–60). Falcon Comics was a series of remedial texts published for school-age readers by the Macmillan Company of Australia throughout 1975–1978. These humorous adventure stories featured explanatory footnotes and phonetic spellings of key words throughout, to assist students’ reading and comprehension skills. But whereas Pictorial Social Studies downplayed the use of comic-book narrative devices, such as speech balloons and sound effects, Falcon Comics made full use of the medium’s visual storytelling dynamics to engage readers’ attention. Ironically, many of the series’ featured artists, such as Rick Amor, Neil Curtis, Colin Stevens, and Peter Dickie, were drawn from the ranks of Australia’s underground comix scene (Stone, “Falcon Comics”). But others have recognized comics’ potential to empower young readers in quite ­different ways, by conveying knowledge and information that allow them to challenge ­conventional wisdom and equip them with skills they need to survive in the world beyond the classroom. Comics can impart powerful lessons to young people, but their messages are not always welcome, especially when they might subvert authority or call existing power relations into question.

232   Kevin Patrick Australia: Lucky for Some was not the type of history textbook one would normally expect to find in most Australian schools or public libraries. It was written and illustrated by Jim Cane, a history teacher who managed to “survive” twelve years of schooling without learning anything about Australian history (Cane nn.). The title is a playful twist on Donald Horne’s acerbic critique of Australian society, The Lucky Country (1964), and just as Horne challenged readers’ perceptions of Australia, so, too, does Cane ask students to question common assertions about Australia’s historical progress. This “comic book history of Australia” canvasses a wide range of controversial subjects, including the discriminatory “White Australia” immigration policy, sectarian conflict, the trade union movement, and the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s, to name but a few topics (see Figure 13.6). Cane’s tongue-in-cheek narration and his clear, accessible artwork are used to good effect when he needs to distill the complexities and controversies of Australian history in ways that can be easily absorbed by young readers. But whereas the Pictorial Social Studies series of the 1950s presents the story of Australia as a tale of unalloyed triumph and progress, Australia: Lucky for Some shines a light into the darker recesses of the “Lucky Country” and instead reveals a nation riven by conflict and inequality. One of Australia’s most successful educational comics was frequently mired in ­controversy. Streetwize Comics was launched in 1984 as a joint initiative between the Redfern Legal Centre, New South Wales Legal Aid, and the Youth Advocacy Service of

Figure 13.6  Australia, Lucky for Some, 1986.

Radical Graphics: Australian Second-Phase Comics   233 the Marrickville Legal Centre. The comic was designed to provide young people with information about their legal rights and responsibilities, and it canvassed such topics as homelessness, unemployment, workplace discrimination, and sexual health. Streetwize Comics was distributed to schools, youth centers, employment agencies, and public libraries, with special editions listing contact details for relevant youth services in different states throughout Australia. The overriding goal of Streetwize Comics was to provide marginalized groups with “credible [and] nonjudgmental” information that allowed individuals to make “informed choices . . . [about] important issues which affect their lives” (Van de Ven). Streetwize Communications was frequently commissioned by government departments, community organizations, and advocacy groups to produce comics on specific topics. The backstory to Workwize, a comic about workplace health and safety, demonstrates how a process of collaboration and consultation with key participants guided the organization’s production strategy. Writers and artists worked alongside trade union members, representatives from the Workcover Authority, and young people to develop stories that contained accurate information about safe work practices, which took place in recognizable settings, such as hair salons, supermarkets, and automotive repair shops. Draft versions of all stories were circulated to participants for further comments and suggestions before the final versions were produced (Iverson 60). Streetwize Comics strove for more inclusive representations of Australian youth, with many of the stories featuring equal ratios of male and female protagonists, often from non-English-speaking backgrounds or of Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander descent. They are, John Foster observes, frequently powerless and placed in situations “which result in the appropriate types of conflict, so that educational points can be made” (“Truth, Justice” 64). Streetwize Comics often uses these stories to present readers with a range of lifestyle choices and provide them with information about the potential consequences arising from the choices they make, especially where sex or drug use is concerned. This approach, according to Kurt Iverson, proved more effective than simply lecturing young people about “the evils of their ways” (60). Any mention of sex and drugs in comic books, no matter how discreet or well intentioned, is bound to be deemed controversial by some sectors of society. What particularly troubled some commentators was Streetwize Comics’ seemingly deliberate “reversal of the values and attitudes of mainstream Australian society” (Foster, “Truth, Justice” 64). One conservative politician criticized the federal government for funding Streetwize Comics, which he denounced as “pop pornography” that glorified drug use. More disturbing, he argued, was the comics’ portrayal of police as “brutal savages, children bashers, bullies, stand-over merchants and ignorant fools” (“Comics Support Drugs”). Foster observes that in many stories, the villains are “male authority figures,” such as fathers, police officers, schoolteachers, and employers. “The white Englishspeaking male hero has almost become a rarity in Streetwize Comics” (“Truth, Justice”  64). This, perhaps, was the most radical lesson that Streetwize Comics taught the ­millions of young Australians who saw themselves and recognized their own life experiences in each successive issue.

234   Kevin Patrick The myriad fanzines, underground comix, and “small press” comics documented in this historical survey have long since disappeared, and many of their creators have either moved on to more lucrative fields (such as commercial illustration) or abandoned comics altogether. Few of these publications—with the possible exception of Streetwize Comics—were seen beyond the small, discerning audience that supported their efforts to expand the artistic parameters of a storytelling medium historically defined as juvenile ephemera. Barely noticed even by diehard comics fans in its day, this unique body of graphic literature has all but vanished from Australia’s collective cultural memory—if it ever registered at all. Yet this remarkable phase in Australian comics history should be not only remembered but celebrated for its bold experimentation and restless creativity. While undeniably influenced by, and readily identified with, contemporaneous trends in American, British, and European comix/comics, these “radical” comics nevertheless reflected the political anxieties, social mores, and cultural preoccupations of Australian society throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Just as important, they are the byproduct of a unique subculture that sought, in its own way, to reclaim the sometimes hostile public discourse about comics and their readers. Denied access to the commercial infrastructure that supported mainstream comics publishers, these “new wave” comics relied on newer, cheaper printing methods as their chief means of production. They also took advantage of the alternative promotional and distribution channels available to them through a growing network of dedicated retail outlets, fanzines, and conventions that catered exclusively to comic-book fans. Paradoxically, these experimental Australian comics were dependent on the apparatus of a fan community that was largely indifferent to their creative aspirations. The “radical” dimension of these newer forms of Australian comics and proto-graphic novels expressed itself in different ways. Underground comix and satirical magazines broadly endorsed the radical politics of the youth counterculture and frequently challenged the conservative tenets that had underpinned Australian public life for decades. Mainstream genre comics capitalized on parallel trends in motion pictures by emphasizing sex and violence to unprecedented degrees, which tested the tolerance of the ­general public and state censorship bodies. “Small press” comics explored the narrative possibilities of the medium through visual experimentation, as well as creating spaces for thoughtful and mature stories, rooted in everyday experience, that defied easy categorization. And educational comics sought to empower disenfranchised youth by equipping them with the knowledge and insights they needed to negotiate the complexities of life at home, at school, or in the workplace. Taken together, this diverse and eclectic body of graphic literature redefined Australian comics in new, exciting, and occasionally controversial ways, which helped transform the cultural status of a formerly despised and marginalized medium. This, perhaps more than anything else, remains the enduring legacy of this radical phase in Australian comics history.

Radical Graphics: Australian Second-Phase Comics   235

Works Cited “American Magazines Import Ban.” Courier-Mail (Brisbane), 12 Apr. 1940, p. 2. Andrews, B. “Reviews.” Australian Literary Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, 1981, p. 133. Andrews, Barry. “Ginger Meggs: His Story.” Nellie Melba, Ginger Meggs and Friends: Essays in Australian Cultural History, edited by Susan Dermody et al., Kibble Books, 1982, pp. 210–233. “Are ‘Comic’ Books Harmful to Minds of Young Readers?” Sydney Morning Herald, 28 Dec. 1948, p. 2. Bartlett, Norman. “Culture and Comics.” Meanjin, vol. 13, no. 1, 1954, pp. 5–18. Bentley, Philip. “My Life in Comics, Part III: The Development of Comics Fandom in Australia to 1989.” Word Balloons, no. 4, 2007, 15–19. Bentley, Philip. “My Life in Comics, Part IV: Inkspots—The Early Years, 1975–1980.” Word Balloons, no. 5, 2007, pp. 17–20. Bentley, Philip. “Word Balloons 14, April 2012.” Fragments from a Second Shore, 4 May 2012, secondshore.blogspot.com/2012/05/word-balloons-14-april-2012.html. Bentley, Philip, et al. “Editorial.” Inkspots #1, 1980, p. 2. Bentley, Philip, and Chris Johnston. “Entangled.” Inkspots #1, 1980, pp. 45–54. Bentley, Philip, and Colin Paraskevas. “Siegfried.” Inkspots #1, 1980, pp. 55–73. “Blood and Comic Cuts.” People (Australia), 13 Oct. 1986, p. 46. Brannigan, Augustine. “Crimes from Comics: Social and Political Determinants of Reform of the Victoria Obscenity Law 1938–1954.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, vol. 19, no. 1, 1986, pp. 23–42. “Broadside—A Fab Production.” Little Darwin, 9 Mar. 2011, littledarwin.blogspot.com/2011/03/ broadside-fab-production.html. Butlin, S. J. War Economy, 1939–1942, Australian War Memorial, 1955. Campbell, W.  J., and Rosemary Keogh. Television and the Australian Adolescent: A Sydney Survey, Angus & Robertson, 1962. Cane, Jim. Australia: Lucky for Some. Hyland House, 1986. Carr, Gerald. “Count Seducer.” Vampire, no. 6, 1979, pp. 8–18. “Comic to Reduce Violence.” Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 25 Mar. 1986, p. 5. “Comics.” Current Affairs Bulletin (Australia), vol. 5, no. 5, 1949, pp. 70–83. “The Comics Business.” Observer (Australia), vol. 3, no. 25, pp. 5–6. “Comics Support Drugs: Liberal.” Canberra Times, 21 Nov. 1986, p. 14. Connell, W.  F., et al. Growing Up in an Australian City: A Study of Adolescents in Sydney. Australian Council for Educational Research, 1957. Connell, W. F., et al. 12 to 20: Studies of City Youth. Hicks Smith & Son, 1975. De Vries, David. “The Beast down the Hall.” Phantastique, no. 4, 1986, pp. 31–36. Docker, John. “Culture, Society and the Communist Party.” Australia’s First Cold War 1945–1953, Vol. 1: Society, Communism and Culture, edited by Ann Curthoys and John Merritt, George Allen & Unwin Australia, 1984, pp. 183–212. Doyle, Peter. “Pulp Confidential.” Pulp Confidential: Quick & Dirty Publishing from the 40s and 50s, State Library of New South Wales, 2015, pp. 1–16. Edgar, Patricia, and Hilary McPhee. Media She. William Heinemann Australia, 1974. “Editorial.” Fox Comics, no. 13, 1986, p. 45. Finnane, Mark. “Censorship and the Child: Explaining the Comics Campaign.” Australian Historical Studies, vol. 23, no. 92, 1989, pp. 220–240.

236   Kevin Patrick Fitzpatrick, Brian. The Australian Commonwealth: A Picture of the Community, 1901–1955, F. W. Cheshire, 1956. Foster, John. “The Image of Australia and Australians in Locally-Produced Comics.” Papers, vol. 1, no. 1, 1990, pp. 11–23. Foster, John. “The Slow Death of a Monochromatic World: The Social History of Australia as Seen through Its Children’s Comic Books.” Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 33, no. 1, 1999, pp. 139–152. Foster, John. “Truth, Justice and the Australian Way.” Westerly, vol. 37, no. 4, 1992, pp. 55–66. Foster, John, et al. Australian Children’s Literature: An Exploration of Genre and Theme. Charles Sturt University, 1995. Hale, Stuart. “Contemporary Comics.” Bonzer: Australian Comics 1900s–1990s, edited by Annette Shiell, Elgua Media, 1998, pp. 95–109. Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures. Routledge, 2002. Horne, Donald. The Lucky Country: Australia in the Sixties. Penguin Books, 1964. Hunt, Frances. “Year 7 Reading Preferences in Three Sydney Schools.” Orana: Journal of School and Children’s Librarianship, vol. 22, no. 1, 1984, pp. 39–46. Iliffe, J.  A. “The Australian ‘Obscene Publications’ Legislation of 1953-1955.” Sydney Law Review, vol. 2, no. 2, 1956, pp. 134–139. Irving, Terry, et al. Youth in Australia: Policy Administration and Politics—A History since World War II. Macmillan Education Australia, 1995. Italiano. Joe. “Feedback.” Australian Comic Collector, vol. 5, no. 2, 1982, p. 9. Iverson, Kurt. “The Real-Life Adventures of Streetwize Comics.” Overland, no. 151, 1998, pp. 59–62. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Routledge, 1992. Just, Peter. “Whatever Happened to the Revolution?” Australian Comic Collector, no. 4, 1983, pp. 32–35. Kronol, James. “Editorial.” Phantastique, no. 3, 1986, p. 2. “Last Rites for Phantastique.” Comic Hotline, vol. 1, no. 1, 1986, p. 9. “Magazines and Comics: Big Import Bans.” Argus (Melbourne), 12 Apr. 1940, p. 11. McLean, Neil. “Animal Crackers.” The Wild & Woolley Comix Book: Australian Underground Comix, edited by Pat Woolley, Wild & Woolley, 1977, nn. Patrick, Kevin. “The Cultural Economy of the Australian Comic Book Industry, 1950–1985.” Sold by the Millions: Australia’s Bestsellers, edited by Toni Johnson-Woods and Amit Sarwal, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012, pp. 162–181. Patrick, Kevin. “A Design for Depravity: Horror Comics and the Challenge of Censorship in Australia, 1950–1986.” Script & Print, vol. 35, no. 3, 2011, pp. 133–156. Patrick, Kevin. “(Fan) Scholars and Superheroes: The Role and Status of Comics Fandom Research in Australian Media History.” Media International Australia, no. 155, 2015, pp. 28–37. Patrick, Kevin. “In Search of the Great Australian (Graphic) Novel.” Australasian Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 1, no. 1, 2011, pp. 51–66. Pinder, Phil, editor. Down Underground Comix. Penguin Books Australia, 1983. Possamai, Adam. “The Social Construction of Comic Books as a (Non) Recognised Form of Art in Australia.” Form/Work, no. 6, 2003, pp. 109–121. Puckridge, Jon. “Earth Revisited, or Son of God Meets Earthman.” Down Underground Comix, edited by Phil Pinder, Penguin Books Australia, 1983, pp. 91–94.

Radical Graphics: Australian Second-Phase Comics   237 Rae, Richard. “The Comic Book Industry in Australia.” Comics in Australia and New Zealand: The Collections, the Collectors, the Creators, edited by Toby Burrows and Grant Stone, Haworth Press, 1994, pp. 5–24. Ryan, John. Panel by Panel: A History of Australian Comics. Cassell Australia, 1979. “Sixty Comics a Week: A Shock in Perth.” West Australian, 30 Aug. 1952, p. 6. Stafford, Chris. “Landfall.” Phantastique, no. 1, 1986, pp. 7–10. Stone, Grant. “Down Under with the Comiczines.” Australian Comic Collector, no. 3, 1983, pp. 39–43. Stone, Grant. “Falcon Comics: A Remedy for Reluctant Readers.” Australian Comic Collector, vol. 5, no. 2, 1982, pp. 42–45. Strathie, Andrew, and Daryl Lindquist. “The Colleague.” Inkspots #1, 1980, pp. 3–14. Thomas, Robert. “Harken to Thee, Faithful Ones.” Melbourne Observer (Australia), 17 Sept. 2003, pp. 11–12, 14. Thorne, Stuart, and Tony Thorne. “All Men Are Bastards.” Fox Comics, no. 26, 1990, pp. 3–8. Van de Ven, Anne-Marie. Streetwize Communications Archive, Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences, collection.maas.museum/object/366524. “Video Censorship.” Legal Service Bulletin, vol. 10, no. 1, 1985, p. 38. Vodicka, David. “Editorial.” Fox Comics, no. 1, 1984, p. 2. Walker, David. “Introduction.” Australian Popular Culture, edited by Peter Spearitt and David Walker, George Allen & Unwin, 1979, pp. 1–16. “What Is in Comics?” Argus (Melbourne), 7 Aug. 1954, p. 3. White, Richard. “Combatting Cultural Aggression: Australian Opposition to Americanisation.” Meanjin, vol. 39, no. 3, Oct. 1980, pp. 275–289. Woolley, Pat, editor. The Wild & Woolley Comix Book: Australian Underground Comix. Wild & Woolley, 1977.

chapter 14

Self-R egu l ation a n d Self- Censorship Comics Creators in Czechoslovakia and Communist Eastern Bloc Pavel Kořínek

There is hardly a comics series as well known in the Czech Republic as The Fast Arrows (Rychlé šípy). For many generations, this series in a way epitomized what ­comics are (and what they can do), and its fame remains strong today. In 2018, Czech ­comics fans and sympathizers celebrated the eightieth anniversary of the series, and the yearlong celebrations took various shapes and forms. A new anthology of short comics homages by more than forty contemporary comics creators was published (together with some academic papers on subject); the largest Czech publishing house, Albatros, finalized a long-sought deal, acquired the publishing rights, and announced the forthcoming publication of a new and improved collected edition (in several ­volumes). The Fast Arrows was prominently presented at the annual Prague book fair, Bookworld (which even for this occasion selected comics as its main “focus on” topic), and there were various exhibitions and events around the country. These celebrations were also widely reported by the general media, and as was repeatedly stated in the ­television segments and magazine articles, the history of The Fast Arrows, with its ­several publication rigmaroles, bannings and resurrections, offered an interesting mirror image to the rigmaroles and ups and downs of the Czechoslovak Republic (the predecessor of the Czech Republic, established in 1993), which celebrated its centenary in 2018. As Czech comics historian Martin Foret states in his study on the genre phenomenon of “club comics,” formed in direct connection to the success of The Fast Arrows, “Rychlé šípy became a litmus test of sorts for Czech comics—when they were freely published, either as new episodes or as re-editions, this also marked a relatively good period for Czech comics as a whole (and even for Czech society); when they were not, comics could not flourish” (Foret 108).1

Self-Regulation and Self-Censorship    239 The Fast Arrows series was introduced on December 17, 1938, on the pages of The Young Herald (Mladý hlasatel), a popular youth weekly magazine of the late 1930s, and earned a nearly immediate success (see Figure  14.1). Penned by Jaroslav Foglar (1907–1999), at that time an editor of the magazine and an emerging leading figure of Czechoslovak young-adult/boy-scout literature, and drawn by Jan Fischer (1907–1960), a gifted and educated cartoonist and comics artist, this series was somehow predestined to prevail and endure. The Fast Arrows comics depicted the everyday adventures of a self-established club of five boys between ten and fifteen years of age, on weekdays living in a city, at weekends traveling to the countryside. Thrilling episodic adventures of this club were thickly sprinkled with didactic exempla, therefore reaching Foglar’s “stance of choice”: he hoped that his texts and comics would educate while they entertained. The popularity of the series (with a new page-long episode emerging every week on the back cover of The Young Herald) substantially helped the magazine, which in 1940 reached a circulation of 180,000 copies (at that time, there were around 7.5 million ­people living in the country), and gave birth to the phenomenon of “Readers’ Clubs of The Young Herald.” These clubs of young people modeled after The Fast Arrows example were organized by the editorial staff of the magazine (including Foglar himself), and the magazine published rules and recommendations for their activities. After the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, which occurred shortly before World War II, on March 15, 1939, followed by the establishment of the Nazi-controlled Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, there was a break in activities of the official and traditional youth organizations (Sokol, Orel, Junák/Czech Scouts), and after the beginning of World War II, several of these organizations were straightforwardly banned. At that time, the ­magazine-affiliated “Readers’ Clubs of The Young Herald” constituted nearly the only substitution and alternative, and this fact led to the great increase in members. As evidenced by archival sources, in May 1941, no fewer than 24,600 clubs were registered with the magazine. At the same time, the heroes of The Fast Arrows went transmedia: they became protagonists of a serialized novel (also published in The Young Herald to enhance the impact) and a series of audio recordings available on vinyl records.2 It tells you something about the history of Central Europe in the twentieth century when you consider the fact that this hugely popular series was banned not once or twice but three times: first in 1941, then seven years later in 1948, and finally in 1971. To look at the—slightly differing—reasons for these bans, studying these acts of censorship could offer us an opportunity to improve our understanding of how the restrictive practices of the twentieth century were involved in establishing and developing local (Czech and Slovak) comics variant (or shape of tradition, if you prefer). Following the “new censorship” debate and notions of the constitutive and formative roles of censorship,3 the institution of censorship (as well as much more elusive actions of self-censorship) will be considered here not only as a strict repressive agent of oppression and control (of “silencing,” of “banning”) but more widely as a major participant in the evolution (or reshaping) of local comics tradition. The first ban on Foglar and Fischer’s comics series took place as a part of aggressive Nazi politics, aiming for tighter control over the society of the Protectorate. A large

240   Pavel Kořínek

Figure 14.1  The inaugural episode of The Fast Arrows (written by Jaroslav Foglar, art by Jan Fischer). Mladý hlasatel, vol. 4, no. 7, 1938, p. 16.

Self-Regulation and Self-Censorship    241 ­ ortion of Czech-language periodicals was forcibly terminated, and with this termi­ p nation, The Fast Arrows, along with nearly all other comics and picture serials active at that time, was discontinued. It can be argued that the nearly total exclusion of comics, which followed in the years 1942–1945, was not a result of a deliberate decision but merely a side product of wider societal, political, and cultural persecution of Czech culture. The banning in 1948, just four months after the February coup d’état, in which ­communists seized control of Czechoslovakia, was an utterly different case. This time, ­comics were considered vermin, and the new (or “improved”) authorities decided that it had to be eradicated immediately. According to these ideologues of forthcoming Stalinist utopia, comics, which were described as “imperialistic trash” or “necrophile monstrosities” (Drda 5), had no place in the brighter future of communist Czechoslovakia. The Fast Arrows series, which renewed publication soon after World War II ended in 1945, was more popular than ever, and therefore in the censors’ view, it was of crucial importance to stop it as soon as possible. At the same time, renewed “Readers’ Clubs” were perceived as a threat to the coveted hegemony of the state-­controlled youth organizations (modeled after the Soviet example).

Join the Cause—Join the Czech Youth Union The creators of this comic, Foglar and Fischer, supported by the editors of the magazine in which new episodes were being published,4 did not want to go without a fight. The description of their attempts to rescue The Fast Arrows can serve as a catalog of sorts, which offers us interesting insight into the defensive self-censorship reasoning. For two months or so, Foglar and Fischer were vigorously trying to find a way to be allowed to continue with the series, even in a tamed, (self-)censored form, ostensibly better suited for the new order. In the end, they failed, even though they tried different strategies over time. As documented in the memoirs of Karel Bureš (1909–2000), Foglar’s editorial ­colleague, the creators were forced by the external authorities of the powerful Czech Youth Union to implement several thematic and topical changes (Bureš 274). And at the same time, they were influenced by internal notions of required defensive compromise. The creators were informed that the protagonists of The Fast Arrows series should undergo official acceptance into the state-organized Czech Youth Union and therefore in a s­ ymbolic way confirm and internalize the ideological aims of that organization (and postcoup political representation as well). The Fast Arrows, acting as a model club for thousands of young boys and girls throughout Czechoslovakia, with their ­self-­organized, ideological (didactic), but not overtly political (socialist or communist) approach, were perceived as extremely dangerous. Foglar and his collaborators from the magazine originally opposed the idea of joining, but after some deliberations, they

242   Pavel Kořínek agreed, hoping that if their protagonists accepted the embrace of the increasingly ­pervasive Czech Youth Union, it would offer them a chance of survival. Archival research in Foglar’s literary estate allows us to pinpoint precisely the moment of implementation of this defensive strategy.5 For the penultimate episode of The Fast Arrows in June 1948, originally a funny episode depicting a street race of homemade amphibious race cars, there are two typewritten versions of the manuscript still in ex­ist­ ence. In the earlier one, the writer followed the established and quite rigid dramatic structure of the episodic plot in its twelve-panel prescription (employing the traditional four-by-three composition grid): the first panel row was dedicated to the episode’s exposition and the rising action (establishment of conflict and its intensification), the second row was where the climax took place, the third row contained the falling action (which is a part of the plot that follows after the climax, the part in which the presented conflict is resolved), and the last row offered the location of a resolution (as usual in The Fast Arrows comics series, it also contained the didactic explication and moral). The latter version of the manuscript (which moved to production and was subsequently, as a finalized episode, published in the magazine) shattered this structure and introduced major changes in the third and fourth panel rows. This reworking, prepared in haste by Foglar himself, happened for obvious reasons; these changes had been applied because the writer had felt the immediate need to introduce a new, ideologically more fitting heading. The latter version of the manuscript contains a prescription for condensation of the original panel breakdown. In the ninth panel, the caption states: “Then came the ­summer holidays, and the Fast Arrows decided to join the Youth Construction Program, to do national service on a youth construction site. They received their detailed instructions from the local branch of the Youth Union.” The Fast Arrows, who used to be an independent group of friends, ruled only by their good manners and answering only to their kind and honest hearts as well as their home magazine (and serving therefore as a model of sorts for tens of thousands of readers), were immediately absorbed into the hegemonic state-controlled youth organization. The old times of lighthearted races with self-constructed vehicles were over; it was time to join the cause. To accept was nevertheless just the first step. The Fast Arrows club attempted to actively engage in the ­construction of a better future. Joining the republic-wide action of its time, these five boys participated in the “youth construction program.”

Distrust the Balloons These content-related, partly forced, partly defensively motivated shifts were accompanied by significant changes in the formal specifics of the series. The Fast Arrows comics had to lose their speech balloons; in an enormously telling, anachronic gesture, the ­creators were compelled to “downgrade” the formal specifics from the fully evolved dynamic “comics” to the evolutionarily earlier form of the “captioned series” (see Figure 14.2). At the end of the 1930s, the overwhelming success of The Fast Arrows

Self-Regulation and Self-Censorship    243

Figure 14.2  The Fast Arrows as a captioned series (written by Jaroslav Foglar, art by Jan Fischer). Vpřed, vol. 3, no. 44, 1948, p. 12.

244   Pavel Kořínek helped to promote comics with speech balloons as a predominant mode of sequential pictorial narration in Czech youth periodicals, and this formal preference prevailed during the years of the Protectorate and after the end of World War II, even though the speech balloon was still more or less considered something foreign, a markedly Western, “American” device (and was therefore from time to time the target of nationalist and ideological critique). In the minds and texts of the more spirited critics, the speech ­balloon took the shape of an even more sinister device, a wholly negative formal aberration that aimed to ruin the Czech young and defenseless, and The Fast Arrows series was in their eyes its leading promoter. In 1947, one such critic called The Fast Arrows series “the smudged kitsch” (Stejskal 180), and the use of speech balloons was commonly declared to serve as a sign of the aesthetic as well as didactic inferiority of The Fast Arrows and others like it—and of their dangerous and harming nature. The favoring of the captioned series, which can be easily located in most of the relevant, comics-related critical texts published between 1945 and 1948, grew from earlier discussions of the formal schism in Czechoslovak comics. As in other continental European comics traditions, comics in Czech and Slovak lands were in the first few decades of the twentieth century oscillating between two major distinctive types: one being in accordance with local Central European tradition of humor and anecdotal series by Wilhelm Busch and his followers and the other drawing from a more progressive American development of the comic strip at the turn of the century. The first type (in comics studies, usually called “text comics” or “captioned series”) employed prose or verse captions underneath the panels, while the second mode of sequential narration (“comics” in the narrower sense of the word) relied on the use of speech balloons in the panels. For various reasons, the Czechoslovakian critics of children’s literature—which was at the time the only branch of criticism in which comics or picture serials were at least briefly noticed and considered—tended to favor the more traditional captioned kind of serials. The speech balloon was often considered a cheap gimmick, a strange, feeble-minded, “foreign” element that somehow devalued the already unappreciated works of sequential art. On the other hand, the common use of verse in captioned series seemed to elevate these works to the vicinity of poetry for children, with its higher ­recognition and cultural acceptance. For these reasons, it was much easier for the ­captioned series to gain cultural legitimization. When printing foreign comics, it was a common practice in the 1930s and the early 1940s to erase the balloons from the panels and as compensation to add simple rhymes underneath the pictures. Foglar and Fischer were very well aware of the importance of the use of speech ­balloons in the success of their comics series, as can be documented by a short opinionbased essay, “Jak se dívám na obrázkový seriál” (or “How I See the Comics”), written by Foglar in 1969 for the scholarly magazine Golden May (Zlatý máj) and dedicated to the study of children’s literature. “I remember how the ‘experts’ from the then-directorate of the Czech Young Union . . . forbade me to use the text balloons in my script prescriptions for the artist. According to these orders, as formulated by these ‘experts,’ the text had to be printed underneath the pictures. Because of this command, the overall impact force of our comic series was substantially reduced, but they paid no attention to it, as they

Self-Regulation and Self-Censorship    245 paid at the time no attention to many other, and even much more important things as well” (Foglar 281). The last three episodes, dated to the end of June and the beginning of July 1948, were therefore realized in the somehow more rigid formal type of captioned series. But there was no hope for The Fast Arrows series; it was too popular. Foglar ­himself was seen as dangerously influential (since he was accepted by the magazine’s readers as a natural authority and a model to follow), and the series, as the core text of the “Readers’ Clubs” concept, posed a threat to state-controlled youth organizations. The Fast Arrows had to be stopped—for the second time in a decade. When narrating the story of the Czech (and Czechoslovak) comics tradition, it is dangerously easy to fall for some simplifications and stereotypical explications. At the break of the 1940s and 1950s, in those darkest times of then-Stalinist Czechoslovakia, comics were a target of communist authorities (as documented above by the strong words of Jan Drda, a pro-regime novelist and prominent ideologue of that era), and subsequently, nearly all comics series ceased publication. Nevertheless, there always were some exceptions, and one exception had a lot to do with the then-discontinued series by Foglar and Fischer. A few months after the end of The Fast Arrows, a new series about a similarly formed group of friends was introduced on the pages of the newly renamed Junáks Forward magazine. When the communist authorities took control of the Junák/ Czech Scout organization, they rebranded the original Forward magazine to signal a new beginning but at the same time to announce the apparent continuity. This continuity was nonetheless just a spurious one, since the major figures of the original editorial board (Foglar, Bureš, and others) left—or were forced to leave—during the summer of 1948 (and the original principles of the Junák movement were being distorted and reshaped to serve the communist needs). The Sparklings (Jiskrovci) captioned series focused on the adventures of a school poetry club (two dozen episodes later, they became members of the Pioneer movement, established in 1949) and offered a wholly conformist variant of the club-comics genre— strong connections with the original club comics of the magazine were immediately ­recognizable to the readers, and this interpretative reading of The Sparklings as the ­substitute Fast Arrows was even strengthened by the fact that the new series was drawn by the same artist, Fischer. Both its content and its form were in accordance with ­communist notions of what was acceptable. The Sparklings captioned series, this sedated, tamed version of comics (which were at the same time denounced throughout the Czechoslovak press), served as a useful ideological tool, a propagandistic substitution, appealing to readers for the preferred cause, which is why it was allowed to exist (at least for a while, until 1950, when even this series was discontinued). (See Figure 14.3.) These telling, ideology-filled transformations—from comics to captioned series, from independent, self-established clubs of friends to poetry clubs organized in the state-controlled Pioneer movement—did not escape the notice of contemporary ­comics readers, future Czechoslovak comics creators among them. The idea that the ­captioned series was somehow safer, easier to defend, and that it was more likely to be able to be published when employing this mode of presentation, was noted and memorized for the future use.

246   Pavel Kořínek

Figure 14.3  The Sparklings (writer unknown, art by Jan Fischer). Vpřed, vol. 5, no. 2, 1949, p. 16.

Self-Regulation and Self-Censorship    247 When outlining the history of Czechoslovak comics, we tend to see the end of the 1940s and the majority of the 1950s as a dark age of sorts, a period when comics were nearly nonexistent, because they were strictly restricted, to a degree even straightforwardly banned. Censorship—and the communist ideological control in general—of that time is for that reason usually interpreted as a destructive negative force. This understanding of these direct acts (as well as indirect notions) of censorship may be ­correct and valid in many ways. On the other hand, when one aims to formulate the local specifics of Czechoslovak (or Eastern European) comics production, it seems more useful to consider this phenomenon in a more nuanced way. The authorities of communist Czechoslovakia sought to ban comics, but with this restrictive act, they also somehow, even if not intentionally, demarcated the formal, structural, and thematic borders of the acceptable. In subsequent decades, Czechoslovak creators of ­comics attempted to identify these borders and preferred to realize their comics ­projects near these borders but on the safe side of them.

Meek and Submissive Comics of 1948–1989 Except for the short break of just a few years at the end of the 1960s, when the political thaw and the events of the Prague Spring allowed the creators and publishers of comics and captioned series to operate more freely—significantly, that was also the time when The Fast Arrows returned for its last hurrah, once again with speech balloons—the Czechoslovak comics of 1948–1989 were always tightly regulated, controlled, and from time to time directly censored. The approach of the official authorities changed over the years: in the 1950s, it had been almost impossible to find a publishing platform for a comics series; in the 1970s, there was an abundance of comics in Czechoslovak youth periodicals, but these comics were meticulously tamed and selected. Comics for the adult audience were nearly nonexistent, and comics for kids and teenagers had to follow the party line and had to comply with the ideologically determined ideas of what was appropriate, suitable, and beneficial for society (and for the “healthy” development of socialist youth), according to the authorities. For some creators, these conditions proved too binding, and they decided (or, in several cases, were forced) to pursue a different career path. A few others chose to take their chances in the hazardous field of unofficial publications (not exactly samizdat, since there were nearly no antisystem underground comics at that time). The rest of the writers and artists tried to come to terms with the restrictions and attempted to accommodate their comics to the “approved” line. In the annals of Czechoslovak comics of the twentieth century, several examples of direct bans on specific comics titles (or creators) can be located, as illustrated by the case of The Fast Arrows. But in nearly all these cases, there were some related (even if not so popular) alternatives available. The Sparklings was just the first in a long line of Fast Arrows substitutes; when the series was banned for the last time in 1971, there were already two other “club comics” in print in Czechoslovak periodicals,6 and this

248   Pavel Kořínek s­omehow  lessened the impact (or filled the gap). Creators of these variants, these ­surrogate comics series aimed at the same readers (audience), tried to keep away from the dangerous waters. Thus came self-censorship, compromise, compliance, and self-control. Creators of these comics tried to find safe ground and not make the official authorities angry (just to draw their attention was considered undesirable), and so they aimed to follow the presumed rules and recommendations, to stay on the safe side of the border. The problem was that in the Czechoslovak context of that era, the definition of that border was not exact, was nowhere to be found, was not drawn on any map. The border between acceptable and unacceptable was not delineated in any reliable way. The instability of the border presented a fundamental problem and forced many creators to be even more careful and to conform with communist state ideology. If one knows exactly where the border lies, one can plan one’s steps to happen in its closest vicinity. The absence of exactly formulated rules denies this option. Kája Saudek (1935–2015), arguably the most gifted Czechoslovak comics artist of the twentieth century, had his fair share of dealings with censoring authorities. His actionbased, dynamic, and altogether Western style, which was rooted in his love for Milton Caniff, Al Capp, and all the American mainstream comics he could get his hands on, was in direct conflict with the notions of appropriateness perceived by the Czechoslovak ideological, aesthetic, and didactic critique of the 1960s–1980s. At the beginning of the 1970s, Saudek started several series for various newspapers and magazines, but nearly all were canceled before their time by the corresponding editorial offices or some other controlling authority. In the mid-1970s, he found himself in quite a difficult situation, working on various short-term projects for Czechoslovak television and producing nonsequential single images for various periodicals, just to earn the necessary income. Comics were always his biggest love, and in his last-resort attempt to be allowed to publish them, he was willing to compromise as never before. As leading Czech comics historian Tomáš Prokůpek wrote in his monograph chapter on this “king of Czech comics,” “His attempt to remain in the world of comics finally resulted in the desperate idea to convert some episodes from the propagandistic television series 30 případů majora Zemana [Thirty Cases of Major Zeman], which deliberately distorted various historical events from the time period after the communist coup, into a comic form . . . Later Saudek repeatedly announced that he was ashamed of this work and that he had only accepted the job for financial reasons” (Prokůpek, “Dreams” 292). With this series, prepared for the official magazine of the Pioneer movement, The Pioneer’s Path (Pionýrská stezka), Saudek (together with writer Jaroslav Weigel) was ­betting on the power of nearly absolute ideological conformity. (See Figure 14.4.) He hoped that if he opted for the openly propagandistic theme—in this case, ideologically charged stories about a police investigator who always stood on the “right side of ­history”—if he subordinated himself to the ideological content as ensured by the totalitarian state, he would have been allowed to publish a modern-looking piece of comics. This bet seemed safe for two years, even though there was a strict approval procedure in place: according to the artist’s biographer, Pavel Nosek, Saudek had to submit all the ­prepared episodes to the press section of the federal Ministry of the Interior (Nosek 17). But then—for some unknown and unforeseeable reason—the border moved.

Self-Regulation and Self-Censorship    249

Figure 14.4  30 Cases of Major Zeman, “Fox Hunting” (written by Jaroslav Weigel, art by Kája Saudek). Pionýrská stezka, vol. 7, no. 10, 1977, unpaginated insert.

In December 1978, Major Zeman ceased publication. In total, five comics adaptations of television episodes were prepared, but only four were published in the magazine at that time. Even though the series chose to follow the party line on the content level, the Western-looking form was suddenly perceived as unfitting for the monthly magazine of the Czech Pioneer organization. For Prokůpek, the reasons behind this sudden change of officials’ minds had a lot to do with Saudek’s style and his tendency to fill his works with subversive ironic details and commentaries (Prokůpek, “Dreams” 294), even though in the case of Major Zeman, the frequency of these was extremely reduced in comparison with the artist’s earlier works. while for Vít Schmarc, a literary historian

250   Pavel Kořínek and a specialist in the ideology of socialist realism in the Czechoslovak literature of 1948–1989, these comics adaptations were simply “too escapist,” too close to the action genre: “An ideology that aspires to be accepted as reality by its subjects will hardly be willing to serve as a mere spectacle” (Schmarc 210). It is hard to decide which of these explanations is, in fact, closer to the truth—and it easily could have been both, to a degree. If there is something to be learned from the 30 Cases of Major Zeman example, it is probably that no one was safe during that era; no matter how far comics creators were willing to go, they never knew for sure whether they would be able to avoid the destructive wrath of unpredictable and fickle censorship.

Some Other Self-Censoring Strategies To accept the rigid formal mode of captioned series and to implement ideologically ­convenient content were just two of the many different defensive strategies developed and attempted by Czechoslovak comics writers and artists during the forty years of the ­communist regime. Regarding form, wordless comic strips were nearly as popular as ­captioned series in the Czechoslovak press, since their wordlessness also counted as “balloonlessness.” The argument that comics were damaging the reading skills of Czechoslovak youth was sometimes deflected by establishing a hybrid format that combined illustrated prose with comics segments. This way, editors and other personnel at magazines for preschool or entry-level schoolchildren could argue that these comicsprose hybrids were there to initiate the love of the written word. As far as content went, to ideologically conform to the party line was a no-brainer, but over the years, several creators took different approaches: it was possible to implement the significant topoi of Western popular culture if you presented those—hypertextually, to borrow from Gérard Genette—under the mask of parody. This masking as parody was in no way unique to comics, and it happened in other media forms as well (e.g., cinema) and allowed for otherwise ideologically unacceptable and unpresentable works to be made available to the audience. Employing this strategy, Czech comics ­creators had a chance to address genres such as spy or gangster thriller or even horror. This was the case for the 1972 Lips Tullian series by Weigel and Saudek, which made use of narrative devices and formulas (to use John G. Cawelti’s terminology) from outlaw stories, presenting them in a lightweight fashion. Initially, this parodical mask seemed to work, and it confused the authorities for fifty episodes, but at the end of the year, another forced discontinuation took place. Hints to the ideological reasoning behind this ban can be identified in the short critique of this series published under the telling title “Opravdu parodie?” (“A parody, really?”) in Red Law (Rudé právo), the official newspaper of the Communist Party: “Two or three steps remain, before the vengeance on the good taste of the reader is complete. It is all meant as a parody. But does not this parody, in the end, stand for something from which we try to save our readers?” (M.C. 5).

Self-Regulation and Self-Censorship    251 Finally, it was also extremely common for comics creators of that time to shield themselves against damning criticism by employing comics to prepare retellings of various classical, approved works of literature. These adaptations of canonical works belonging to “high” or “genre” canon, these “second-degree” comics (once again invoking Genettian descriptors), were considered more likely to survive under the censor’s eye. When the medium of comics itself was in danger of being marked as a harmful “kitsch,” it helped its creative proponents substantially if they could build on the high level of ­cultural acceptance of the original literary texts. These comics adaptations of literary texts usually drew their inspiration from the national literary tradition, as well as from the international (especially continental) canon of classic adventure stories (among others, novels by Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Henryk Sienkiewicz were adapted by Czechoslovak comics writers and artists in the 1970s and 1980s). All of these defensive attitudes, under the genuine or alleged risk of censorship and persecution, also fundamentally contributed to the genre system of Czechoslovak ­comics. Since the charged, slapstick, or adventurous stories of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Bonzo, or Popeye, known from numerous translations published in the late 1930s and mid-1940s, were considered damaging, trashy pulp, Czechoslovak funny-animals comics tended to prefer everyday narratives to thrilling adventures. In the years following, everyday funny animals, ideologically tamed boys’ (and Pioneers) clubs, and ­adaptation-based classic adventures were—as can be easily confirmed by the overall statistics—the most common genres of comics in communist Czechoslovakia (as they were in the immediate years after the Velvet Revolution, since there always is some inertia in effect). On the narrative level of serial composition, Czechoslovak ideological authorities of that period openly expressed their dislike of continuous seriality and of never-ending, open-ended series;7 local creators learned their lesson and responded accordingly. Because of all these (real or imagined) rules and recommendations, the Czechoslovak comics of the 1950s–1980s were usually finite, episodic, aimed at children, and with nearly no dynamic action. Nothing thrilling, just innocent, conformist, and tamed little funnies. If captioned, better still.

A Call for More Nuanced Interpretation In the global history of comics, there are several well-known examples of nearly fieldwide self-censorship. Especially at the end of the 1940s and through the 1950s, comics were regarded as enemies of law, order, and proper development of precious young ones, and this happened not only in the Eastern bloc but in the West as well. As John A. Lent claims in the “Comic Books” entry he wrote for the monumental four-volume Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, in the early 1950s, there were anticomics campaigns active in the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, and

252   Pavel Kořínek Sweden and also in various Asian countries (Lent 556). In democratic countries, these campaigns usually led to the establishment of some rules and conditions, some variant of predescribed supervision. In the United States, as well as in Germany and the Philippines (Lent 557), this supervision was self-regulative. The effect of these “comic codes of authority” on comics production was tangible and immediate, and contemporary comics scholars generally agree that these self-censoring rulebooks had quite a negative impact on the further evolution of national comics of the mainstream variety. As Mila Bongco argues in her introduction to Reading Comics, “The industry’s ­self-­censorship proved fatal to the medium’s growth and development. In complying with the Code’s insistence on ‘good’ always vanquishing ‘evil,’ for example, comics tended toward the representation of oversimplified conflicts that led to thematic and generic stagnation. In part, the strict restrictions of the Comics Code did not allow comics the creative freedom enjoyed by the other media, and the comic books that flooded the ­market were trapped in the trifling problems and conflicts in a universe of costumed superheroes or ‘funny’ talking animals” (Bongco 4). It is not hard to understand Bongco’s sentiment—there is no doubt that the Comics Code Authority (formed in 1954 by the Comics Magazine Association of America) ­distorted a natural development of the comics form in the United States and for many years to come presented an evolutionary obstruction. However, it is also possible to glimpse in Bongco’s words some preexisting preference that appears slightly problematic. There seems to be a hint of preconception regarding the funny-animals comics, and there seems to be some unaddressed axiological certainty. It should not be enough just to state the obvious. Scholars may consider the censorship and self-censoring practices as wholly unfortunate, utterly distorting, but to talk about “fatal” repercussions to the comics medium as a whole seems overly reductive and simplistic. The story of Comics Code Authority and stories of censorship and self-censoring strategies in the totalitarian Eastern bloc should serve as warnings, but they should also inspire us to the more complex reading of their effects on the field of comics in general, as well as on its various areas, genres, and subcategories. One of the largest tasks for contemporary European comics historiography is to try to come up with an appropriate methodology for researching and then writing a truly comparative history of European (or, if one does not want to aim so high, Central and Eastern European) comics. For the tumultuous twentieth century, it may prove viable to root this methodology in the transformations of relations between comics and ideological systems with their institutions and practices. These restrictive and prescriptive rules, as well as their impact on the respective comics scene, played a key role in shaping local traditions of sequential pictorial narration. For forty years of totalitarian rule in the Eastern bloc, these Czechoslovak, Polish, Hungarian, or German (GDR) traditions were somehow cut off from the development of Western comics (or if not absolutely cut off, these traditions were receiving a distorted, partial image of what was happening behind the Iron Curtain), but that does not mean that these scenes stood alone. A similar political situation in all these countries led to similar responses toward comics. As one would presume, there were some local differences, but the fundamental

Self-Regulation and Self-Censorship    253 setting, with its changing and unclear combination of direct, forced censorship and ­self-censoring practices, as well as a general chronology that went from strict banning to regimentation, was almost the same. Throughout the region, the 1950s were a period of strict prohibition (with some propagandistic exceptions). As Polish comics historian Adam Rusek wrote: “It soon turned out that the picture stories did not fit the cultural policy chosen by the new, Communist authorities. At first, their publishing was reviled in the name of opposing rubbish, then they were regarded as a symbol of American pop culture. At the time, ‘American imperialism’ was the favourite target of the propaganda machine. This does not mean picture stories disappeared altogether from newspapers: some of them prevailed, although after 1949 (the beginning of Stalinism in Poland) they were significantly scarcer, and the ones which survived took on the character of propaganda” (112). For these four decades in question, comics were to a large degree exiled to the kids’ magazines, but since there was a strong interaction between editorial staffs of these magazines throughout the Eastern bloc, further experiences were exchanged, and ideas were disseminated. Socialist comics were spreading, and with them, so were the strategies of survival. In subsequent decades, throughout the region, local comics ­creators tried to outfox the ideological watchmen. And frequently, they were building on the experiences of someone before them, here or there. Some of the above-mentioned strategies took place region-wide: captioned series were especially popular in the German Democratic Republic8 and in Hungary, where— under the creative guidance of Tibor Cs. Horváth—comic adaptations of literary texts became extremely productive. Defensive arguments prepared for these adaptations by their proponents in 1955 were similar as well: “The argument the duo [Horváth and artist Sándor Gugi] used to convince the editorials was that comics as literary adaptation in Hungary, as opposed to the banned American adventure or horror stories, could be a tool of educating young readers into appreciating quality literature without violent ­content and in line with ‘Socialist moral’ ” (Szűts-Novák 22). Ideologically conforming comics stories—not unlike those about Major Zeman—were produced in Poland in large numbers, and these Polish comics about policemen and Russian agents constituted a specific subgenre, which was then—to a different degree—varied throughout the Eastern bloc. Among the most prominent examples of this genre, Kapitan Kloss from 1971 was also an adaptation of a television series, and this nineteen-issue comic-book title was made available to Czechoslovak readers in translation before the end of that year. It is indisputable that Weigel and Saudek knew these comics very well before they (with some editorial help) came up with their own adaptation of the pro-regime television series. If we want to better understand the local comics traditions of Central and Eastern Europe, we are obliged to raise our eyes and look abroad, over the border to neighboring countries. Only by studying these sometimes valiant but also sometimes pandering, if not straightforwardly cowardly, acts of compliance, compromise, and subversion, we can repay our debt to previous generations of comics creators, aficionados, and scholars. After all, we are the lucky generation—since in most cases, we are on the safe side of the border, and we do not have to get dirty with the regime to be able to do what we love.

254   Pavel Kořínek

Notes 1. This quoted study also offers the one and only detailed introduction to the history of The Fast Arrows and “club comics” available in English. For an overview of the history of comics in the Czech and Czechoslovak context, see Prokůpek, “Czech Comics”; and Alaniz 100–103. 2. In subsequent decades, it expanded even further: there was a nine-part television series (1969) as well as a feature-film adaptation (1993), several theater plays (2000, 2006, 2015), and other related products and merchandise (card game, table-top game, etc.). The ­fictitious world of The Fast Arrows is also arguably one of the most common sources for fan-fiction production activities (in the context of Czech comics). 3. As argued and analyzed over the years in studies and books by Michel Foucault, Sue Curry Jansen, Annette Kuhn, Roger Darnton, Michael Holquist, Michael Wögerbauer et al. and others. 4. Because of Czechoslovak postwar laws regarding the periodic press, it was extremely difficult to revive a magazine that was published during the Protectorate era. The Young Herald was therefore replaced by a new weekly called Forward (Vpřed). Nevertheless, the circle of contributors as well as the overall conception remained all but unchanged. 5. I presented the results of this research in the chapter “ ‘Jako posledně, žádné textové bubliny’: Komentovaný seriál jako zkrocený komiks,” written for a collective monograph on censorship in modern Czech culture from 1749 to 2014 (Wögerbauer et al. 1083–1095). 6. For a detailed discussion of these club comics variants in English, see Foret 115–118. 7. When reviewing Bzum the Bumblebee (Čmelák Bzum), a captioned series by Ondřej Sekora composed of merely nineteen-page-long episodes, Golden May critic René Ditmar did not hesitate to use the words “prolonged ad nauseam” (280). 8. For an overview of generations of GDR comics creators and for many examples of ­captioned series from this tradition, see Scholz.

Works Cited Alaniz, José. “Eastern/Central European Comics.” The Routledge Companion to Comics, edited by Frank Bramlett, Roy T. Cook, and Aaron Meskin, Routledge, 2017, pp. 98–105. Bongco, Mila. Reading Comics: Language, Culture, and the Concept of the Superhero in Comic Books. Routledge, 2000. Bureš, Karel. V týmu s Jestřábem. Příběh redaktora legendárních časopisů. Toužimský & Moravec, 2009. Ditmar, René. “Nad loňskými ročníky Ohníčku a Pionýra.” Zlatý máj, vol. 1, no. 6, 1957, pp. 279–281. Drda, Jan. “Horká půda. IX. Kultura a její boj.” Literární noviny, vol. 3, no. 48, 1954, p. 5. Foglar, Jaroslav. “Jak se dívám na obrázkový seriál.” Zlatý máj, vol. 13, no. 3, 1969, pp. 280–281. Foret, Martin. “Young Gentlemen’s Clubs.” Signals from the Unknown: Czech Comics 1922–2012, edited by Pavel Kořínek and Tomáš Prokůpek, Arbor Vitae, 2012, pp. 98–127. Lent, John  A. “Comic Books.” Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, edited by Derek Jones, Routledge, 2001. M.C. [initials of unknown author]. “Opravdu parodie?” Rudé právo 10 Nov. 10 1972, p. 5.

Self-Regulation and Self-Censorship    255 Nosek, Pavel. Kája Saudek—Comics. Zlatý Kůň, 1995. Prokůpek, Tomáš. “Czech Comics.” International Journal of Comic Art, vol. 5, no. 2, 2003, pp. 312–338. Prokůpek, Tomáš.“Dreams under the Hooves of Totalitarianism.” Signals from the Unknown: Czech Comics 1922–2012, edited by Pavel Kořínek and Tomáš Prokůpek, Arbor Vitae, 2012, pp. 254–299. Rusek, Adam. “Komiks w PRL/Comics in the Polish People’s Republic.” Teraz Komiks!/Comics Now! edited by Artur Wabik, Museum Narodowe w Krakowie, 2018, pp. 110–183. Schmarc, Vít. “Unreliable Lines of History.” Signals from the Unknown: Czech Comics 1922–2012, edited by Pavel Kořínek and Tomáš Prokůpek, Arbor Vitae, 2012, pp. 192–215. Scholz, Michael F. “Comicszeichner in der SBZ/DDR: Eine Generationenübersicht.” Deutsche Comicforschung 2014, edited by Eckart Sackmann, Comicplus, 2014, pp. 66–78. Stejskal, Václav. “Ještě jednou Vpřed.” Štěpnice, vol. 1, nos. 5–6 (1946), pp. 180–181. Szűts-Novák, Rita. “Comics as Literary Adaptation between 1957 and 1975.” Kép-regénytörténet: A kilencedik müveszet ikonjai magyarországon, edited by Eszter Szép, Országos Széchényi Könyvtár, 2018, pp. 21–28. Wögerbauer, Michael, et al. V obecném zájmu: Cenzura a sociální regulace literatury v moderní české kultuře 1749–2014. Academia–Ústav pro českou literaturu AV ČR, 2014.

chapter 15

This Is W ho I A m Hybridity and Materiality in Comics Memoir John Logan Schell

It is refreshing to note that as comics studies in general expands, its niches and subcategories can be explored on their own terms. Instead of studying comics as a whole, scholars may examine genres such as memoir and expand a growing body of works devoted to them. Although relatively new in the scope of literature, the movements that began with underground pieces such as Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary by Justin Green, Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, and Robert Crumb’s Zap Comix have already given rise to internationally acclaimed bestsellers such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. And as the body of comics memoir increases, so, too, does the variety of subject matter. From quotidian experience to stories of war, loss, and mental illness, comics now address profound aspects of the human condition. The genre is also being mapped out in more depth, with scholars such as Andrew Kunka examining the precursors to memoir (“Cranky Bosses”). But it is not enough to note how broad in scope memoir is in the medium; it is critical to analyze how these stories are told. As a visual medium, the form of comics shares a strong bond with content; therefore, as Frederick Luis Aldama states, “when we do teach and analyze these, we should attend to more than their alphabetic shaping devices. We should put the focus on the color schemes, perspectives, postures, shapes, font type, and other visual shaping devices that geometrize the story” (3). Although it is important to be cognizant of thematic elements informing biographical graphic narratives, due scrutiny must also be given to the techniques and styles used by creators that are specific to comics. Memoir in comics creates a space for experiencing the past in a visually dynamic way that both reflects and rejects literal or factual reality, instead supplanting it with a kind of subjectivity that embodies personal truths, truths that also aid in the creation of identity. Paul John Eakin writes that “the adaptive purpose of self-narrative, whether neurobiological or literary, would be the maintenance of stability in the human individual through the creation of a sense of identity” (4). Memoir is a creation, or recreation, of

Hybridity and Materiality in Comics Memoir   257 the self in the past, but there is more to it than mere cataloging of facts about occu­ rrences, and memoir in comics offers a unique space for interacting with autobiographical remembering. Specifically, comics memoir provides the means to repicture one’s memories and the opportunity to both take authorial control of history and to relinquish power to one’s audience. Through their hybridity and materiality, comics reveal the fictionality of autobiography in a stylized manner that still connects to personal experience in a way that perhaps goes beyond realism. In addition, through their ­transgressive nature, comics synergize with voices and identities that move counter to mainstream culture, giving voice to the voiceless. Initially, it may seem as if memoir and comics would not mix well. Jared Gardner refers to the conundrum facing creators: “Why tell these difficult stories in a form that is still today, despite the accomplishments of several generations of serious comics storytellers, associated with the cultural gutter? Why tell one’s most personal story in a form that invites disbelief, distance, and laughter?” (12). Comics eschew the veneer of verisimilitude that supposedly infuses photography, film, and prose with veracity, opting instead to generate a world purely created by the author and thereby incapable of genuine realism. However, there are some striking similarities between the two that make them a natural pair. Comics is an art of tensions, as Charles Hatfield tells us, a hybrid text that breaks down the binaries of word and image (133). Likewise, memoir also is an art form of tensions between the remembrance of the past and storytelling. Satrapi states that there is an element of fiction in almost all storytelling, even documentaries (“Persepolis—Exclusive”). Once the present becomes the past, any recollection of it involves some recreation of it by human hands, problematizing the notion of objective truth in autobiography. Eakin acknowledges the contradictory nature of personal narrative when he asks, “Why do we buy into autobiography’s retrospective illusion, the ‘­ you-are-there’ narratives . . . that mask the autobiographical act unfolding in the ­present?” (5). Bart Beaty also recognizes how current theories completely undermine the unified concept of the autobiographical author, calling the entire exercise into question (227). Memoir, then, is not merely the recollection of what has happened in the past; it is a product of the author, an artifact created and colored by the identity and ­consciousness of its creator. Nevertheless, creators retelling their memories with comics face unique challenges when it comes to engendering credibility with readers. Kunka notes, “With comics, then, the autobiographical pact is more challenging and problematic. The reader’s acceptance of certain conventions related to comics may stand in contradiction to the autobiographical pact” (Autobiographical Comics, 63). In deciding to tell their life stories in comics, creators may find themselves swimming against a current of prejudices against the medium and its suitability in conveying biographical truth. The very medium itself is problematic for those expecting factual representations of history due to the reality that comics, by nature, must amend and create a storyworld on the page that, as Kunka relates, is unrealistic: “authors create composite characters and compress timelines in order to streamline narratives. These are common conventions of autobiography in general” (Autobiographical Comics, 67). Although the notion of truth may be

258   John Logan Schell one that is often called into question after postmodernism, a measure of truth is still vital to the concept of memoir. Comics complicate truth creation even more than usual through their recreation of past events in a selective, subjective, and artistically temporal space. Therefore, Kunka recognizes that the “critical consensus among scholars of autobiographical comics states that the ‘truth’ autobiographical comics tells is not tied to the veracity of images and scenes depicted in the comic” (“Cranky Bosses” 45). Instead, he notes, “we end up with a kind of hierarchy of truth, where some lies are justified if they help the creators achieve a more personal truth about themselves” (Autobiographical Comics, 69). It is here that comics truly shine, revealing the inner truth experienced by the individual. Observing that they are not a subordinate form or a mere facsimile of the physical world, Julia Round describes comics as superseding reality: “By overtly denying the concept of the original and existing in such multiple forms, the comic becomes a postmodern artefact that instead evokes the hyperreal through its excess of style” (317). It is here where comics distinctly make their mark on memoir. The recollection of events in any memoir is not a pure recapturing of reality; it is crafted through words and imagery, metaphor and narrative, or an “analytic texture, an emotional experiential accuracy” (Chute 191). As Hillary Chute realizes, “The authors revisit their pasts, retrace events, and literally repicture them” (2). We imagine ourselves within our life stories, and we color our recollections with a larger-than-life flavoring. Our very act of seeing and describing is a kind of fiction, filled with heroes, villains, and story plots. David Small’s Stitches provides a powerful paradigm for how comics, through their reimagining of reality, actually strike deeper chords within the human experience than literal realism is capable of rendering. In one memorable sequence, Small finds himself alone in a hospital, looking at dead fetuses in an empty laboratory. Suddenly, one of them climbs out of its jar and gives chase to Small, who is so frightened that he leaves his shoes behind (38–43). Clearly, this moment of a child’s imagination getting the better of him did not physically occur, but he clearly thought, at the time, that the threat was real, real enough to cause inconvenience to his family with the loss of his shoes. Merely stating that he imagined the fetus chasing him does little to impart the reality of what he imagined and felt, but picturing it graphically allows for this recreated memory to attain an impact exclusive to the medium of comics. Small does not vary his art style, so the diegetic world presented feels consistent, unlike a film’s dream sequence. Since everything is ­colored by the perspective of the creator in comics, the lines between reality and fiction take on aspects of each other, allowing for deeper truths to be made manifest. Scott McCloud concurs with this sentiment: “Fiction and nonfiction bleed into one another easily in comics,” citing the fact that Maus was listed as fiction when it first hit the New York Times bestseller list (Reinventing 40). Comics allow for a version of memoir that goes beyond the real and can accurately depict how humans perceive their lives, embodying personal truths in a way that other artistic methods cannot. Gardner recognizes this quality: “The losses and glosses of memory and subjectivity are foregrounded in graphic memoir in a way they never can be in traditional autobiography” (6). Through the gaps provided by gutters

Hybridity and Materiality in Comics Memoir   259 on the page, authors may represent memories in the way they are perceived: cloudy, with certain aspects emphasized while others fade into the periphery. As we will later see, the f­ ormat of the comics page invites readers to participate in memory recreation, thus creating, according to McCloud, “bonds [that] are far different than the ones forged in cinema and prose. The partnership between creator and reader in comics is far more intimate and active than cinema, while comics’ symbolic static images may cut straight to the heart without the continual mediation of prose’s authorial voice” (Reinventing 39). Comics provide the means for a truly singular method of redrawing and redressing history.

Reclaiming Not only is the truth expressed through a comics memoir unique through its visual style; it also serves an important function in creating a place for dealing with the trials, tears, and, ultimately, triumphs of the human condition. For some, such as Lila Quintero Weaver, recreating the past through art is an act that allows for a measure of safety: “I could be 100 percent who I was and not worry about presenting myself. When creating art, I entered a space of safety and security” (qtd. in Aldama, Latinx 260). In Satrapi’s view, retelling the past allows her to preserve the memory of those who should not be forgotten, to provide a place where she may impart her perception of Iran and its people (“Persepolis—Exclusive”). Alberto Ledesma sees cartooning his experience as being “able to communicate complex moments much more efficiently and effectively, compared to long essays. I have been able to explore a wider spectrum of my undocumented experience” (105). In any case, recreating one’s own past through comics is an especially involved act, one that plumbs the depth of the self in order to portray it visually on the page. Chute states, “Graphic narratives that bear witness to authors’ own traumas and to those of others materially retrace inscriptional effacement; they reconstruct and repeat in order to counteract” (173). Memoir in comics is not meant for wallowing or pity; instead, it serves to help engender empathy and change in the reader. Gardner writes, “The function of testimony, both traditional and secular, is to create common bonds of understanding and humanity” (9). In Regards from Serbia, Aleksandar Zograf portrays himself screaming, “I draw comics so that you can see things through my eyes . . . Try to imagine what it would be like if you were born as Aleksandar Zograf!! I could be you and you could be me!” (35). By choosing to represent the past both visually and verbally, comics creators extend a hand to readers, calling them to understand the events depicted. Through their unique depiction of reality, comics are a revolutionary space for those who have been on the receiving end of history’s oppressive wheel, allowing them to arrest control over their own stories and recreate them. J. Spencer Clark observes, “The ability of graphic novels to portray interaction through dialogue and nonverbal responses among actors actually personalizes the actors and problematizes the

260   John Logan Schell ­ istorical events” (503). History goes from the factual to the deeply personal in comics. h Whether it’s Spiegelman’s portrayal of the Holocaust in Maus or Ledesma’s cathartic reconciliation with his undocumented status in Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer, the ­subjective portrayal of the past can become an act of resistance, recasting social and ­cultural realities on the comics page in ways that encourage rethinking them so that a better future may be realized.

Hybridity If modern thought sees the creation of the past through memoir as precarious, then comics are an organic partner, comfortable as they are existing in an unstable state between text and image and simultaneously offering up interdependent panels that work together to create meaning but still function as units on their own. Chute writes that through “its hybrid and spatial form, comics lends itself to expressing stories, especially narratives of development, that present and underscore hybrid subjectivities” (5). Therefore, it follows that comics would be a suitable means to convey complex, intersectional ideas that pertain to individual identity and history. In addition, comics also hybridize storytelling in the mind of the reader. Round observes that “we may define comics narratology as based on an open half-narrative that relies on the reader both to interpret the panel contents and fill in the gutters. The panel itself is a hybrid signifier that represents a varying amount of story time” (323). So comics is a medium that u ­ tilizes the concept of hybridity in a multiple of ways. It combines text and image, time and space, and a confluence of intersecting styles. In other words, it synergizes organically with the requirements of memoir. Gardner acknowledges that by blending the facts of the past with a clearly fictional manner of telling, comics draw attention to and celebrate the instability of memory: “Indeed, the hybrid term could be said to apply to all autobiography, but it is the graphic memoir that foregrounds in its very form the ways in which the power of memory must always share the act of self-representation with the devices of fiction” (6). Comics memoir occupies a space between the tension of reality and surreality, where the truth is judged more by emotional authenticity than by mirrored empiricism. Hybridity in comics memoir complicates the typical top-down relationship between the creator and the reader, and it allows for authors to complicate themselves, revealing their own intersecting identities in a manner unique to the medium. Citing Laura Mulvey, Chute explains how readers are necessary in “constructing meaning over and through the space of the gutter,” participating in the creation of meaning (9). The result is a decentralizing of the power invested in the author, sharing the creation of the story with the reader. Both McCloud and Will Eisner discuss how important it is for readers to fill in the gaps of the gutters between panels with their own experiences and knowledge (Scott, Understanding Comics 63; Eisner, Graphic Storytelling 49). Chute states that “we may read this hybridity as a challenge to the structure of

Hybridity and Materiality in Comics Memoir   261 binary classification that opposes a set of terms, privileging one” (10). Round writes, “Each reader fills in the gutter in his/her own way—although similar, no two interpretations can ever be identical. This process applies to all comics and the gutter is often the site of major events. The reader works alongside the creators as a kind of contributory author, both by interpreting the panel content, and by filling in the gaps” (317). Marginalized creators wrest control of the past from oppressive forces but do not hold power over it for themselves. Comics is therefore an art form that resists narrative ­control and encourages more democratic interpretations. A decentralizing of authorial power can be witnessed in Ezequiel García’s Growing Up in Public, which tells of the author’s experiences in Buenos Aires as he begins his life in both art and love. Although García is certainly the narrator of the story, the visuals on the page often take the focus away from him personally and instead place it on his environment. Entire pages are devoted to replicating the architecture of Buenos Aires in fine detail; one important moment entails a local protest regarding Citibank’s changing of an old theater facade. Music from Argentina permeates the work, flowing from one panel to another, weaving itself throughout the pages, and intermingling in panel borders, suggesting that culture connects the past, present, and future. In addition, García also undermines the primacy of his story through the portrayal of his fellow Argentinians. Some authors would treat passers-by as mere set dressing, barely noticing them. García, however, gives them depth, placing their conversations right next to his own, in some cases forcing the reader to discern for themselves which dialogue balloons require ­concentration. So even though this is a personal memoir, Growing Up in Public is also a tale about Buenos Aires and its people. García’s identity is caught up in the mixtures that create Argentinian culture. According to Mauricio Espinoza, stylistic choices like the ones García makes are an example of contemporary Latin American identity blending different elements to create something new that still retains a connection to the past: “Hybridity, and in some cases hyper-hybridity—including the fusing of various cultural influences, genres, digital and non-digital formats, new ways of combining images and text, traditional and new themes, intertextual and hypertextual strategies, etc.—marks this contemporary, deterritorialized graphic narrative production” (6). It is in this blended space that García is able to share with his audience not only his culture but the very act of storytelling as well. The hybrid nature of comics also provides unique opportunities to examine identity through the blending of text and dialogue. In March, a comics memoir of civil-rights activist John Lewis, one particular panel shows a young Lewis, silhouetted in black, reading a particular passage of the Bible that he finds striking. As he reads, the words “Behold the lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world” are literally written across his body (27). This depiction shows how scripture embodies itself in Lewis, becoming a profound aspect of his character. In blending word and image in the artistic depiction of his physical body, the creators of March reveal how Lewis does not regard his memories as just physical moments from the past. Rather, they are facets of his selfhood and are permeated with symbolic significance.

262   John Logan Schell Combining text and image is not always a cleanly cohesive affair; at times, it is the t­ ension or disagreement between them that shows personal complexity. In the retelling of her family’s flight from Vietnam and their subsequent lives in America, Thi Bui explores tensions both internal and external in her graphic memoir The Best We Could Do. As she ponders her position with her past identity and her family, Bui wonders, “if I bridged the gap between the past and the present . . . I could fill the void between my parents and me. And that if I could see Viêt 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” (37). As she shares her purpose, Bui depicts herself with a hole inside her body in the shape of the country from which she and her family fled. Although her words on the page speak to a kind of healing and reconciliation, the visuals on the page reveal her fragmented self, tinted in a red that symbolizes both blood sacrificed during the ­communist revolution in Vietnam and perhaps the Communist Party itself. The tension reflected on the page between the words and the text reflects Gardner’s discussion of memoir’s function in dealing with trauma: “Narrating life and its traumas makes the past continuous with the present, bleeding its wounds into our daily life. This is not the failure of a proper externalization or ‘working-through’ of the past, but is in fact the desired (the only desirable) goal of the blending of fact and fiction, image and text, a blending that allows the present to be productively continuous with the past” (18). Similarly, Bui’s ­recollections fit well within Chute’s focus on how memoir gives authors of marginalized identities, specifically women, a voice as they recreate their past traumas (2). Again, comics, through their ­tensions of forms, naturally provide a space for experiencing the past in a manner that immediately captures the multivalence of identity. Hybridity in comics memoir involves not only text and image but also the combination of elements atypical to the medium. As a transgressive art form, comics also provide a space for the collaging of disparate elements: photographs, doodles, prose, and reproduced artifacts. In some works, this blending can reflect one’s hybrid identity. Such is the case with Ledesma in Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer, in which he declares, “I have embraced my cartooning as I have my undocumented past. This is who I am” (9). His work, a hybrid comics memoir made up of prose chapters and loosely connected ­cartoon vignettes, is certainly transgressive, stretching the definitions often set for the medium by McCloud and Thierry Groensteen for connected images in sequence. The book is deliberately pastiche, with the chapter introduction pages made to look as if they were drawn on graph paper. Ledesma states in his introduction that his work is meant as a kind of therapy that helps him work out his complex identity as an undocumented migrant from Mexico (1). The style of the work itself reflects his hybrid identity; as a comic, it flouts the rules typically set for telling a graphic narrative, just as Ledesma’s identity as undocumented defies the US government. And just as he is a blend of identities as a Latin American and an academic, his work blends his migrant background with American cultural mainstays. One cartoon depicts Superman working as a migrant worker, his uniform patched and ragged like those of many workers today (46). Another image depicts the hero being apprehended by a border-patrol agent who looks like Lex Luthor (34). Ledesma works through his hybrid identity as someone who seemingly

Hybridity and Materiality in Comics Memoir   263 does not belong in the country where he lives by deliberately blending artistic elements that also supposedly do not belong together. Similar stylistic choices can be seen in Regards from Serbia by Zograf, who uses a fluid, varying style to demonstrate the insanity and hypocrisy of the NATO campaign in Serbia in 1999. He writes, “Yeah, a state of confusion and disorientation . . . it’s in everybody’s head here,” as he depicts a cavalcade of jarringly bizarre human figures drawn in conflicting art styles with inconsistent proportions. Even the panel borders Zograf uses are uneven, marked by strange symbols that convey the notion that even moments in time are not safe from fragmentation. Zograf ’s distorted, grotesque style evokes Robert Crumb, so much so that he even imitates the great comix artist in a dream sequence (176). Like Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer, Regards from Serbia is a hybrid work, blending cartoon vignettes with non-comics elements such as a photograph from bombed areas and a propaganda leaflet dropped by NATO. And like Ledesma’s conflicted selfhood, Zograf ’s fragmented identity is the result of external forces. The inherent insanity of an international mission that ostensibly tries to spread peace through bombs throws the entire work and the identity of the author into flux. Both Ledesma and Zograf utilize disparate elements, using text and image to reconcile who they are in the face of those who would silence them. The tensions inherent in comics also allow for a deeply personal interrogation of the self. Marbles, by Ellen Forney, also uses a widely varying and transgressive style to communicate mental instability, but with a much more personal angle. Archiving artistic pieces like a scrapbook, Forney engages in an act similar to that described by Chute in her analysis of Bechdel’s influential memoir, Fun Home: “Alison Bechdel, a preserver but also a reanimator of archives, inhabits a form, comics, that demands the crafted arrangements of objects in space in order to propose the difference her very body suggests: ­repetition as regeneration” (217). Similarly, Marbles acts as a kind of scrapbook, detailing Forney’s struggles with her bipolar mental disorder. Like Zograf and Ledesma, Forney blends a collage of different elements: photographs of her journals, imitation drawings of famous artwork by Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh, and her own varying style. One of the most interesting aspects of her work is her exploration of self. In Chute’s analysis of Persepolis, she examines how “the author, reaching back, engages the work of memory that requires a conversation between versions of self ” (144). A prime example of this principle is utilized by Forney, which is especially significant considering the nature of her illness. Marbles catalogs extreme highs followed by cataclysmic lows. In Forney’s experience, her depressive moods are her worst enemy; she is her own worst critic, with her depressive side pitted against both her manic self and the balanced self she seeks to achieve. Eventually, at the resolution of the story, Forney depicts a conversation between her balanced self and her bipolar binary selves: “Believe, younger self, everything will work out,” she says, talking to her own past from her ­present (234). In this instance, comics provides the perfect space for Forney to explore the multiplicity of self. Her inner conflicts between different versions of herself are ­perfectly represented as disparate identities on the page, uniquely representing the ­concept of intersectionality in identity, multiple selves within one body.

264   John Logan Schell

Materiality In addition to the hybridity of comics, the materiality of the comics page accommodates memoir in fascinating ways, allowing for complex, artistic messaging that goes beyond the written text present or even the imagery. Any study of comics should pay special note to the construction of the pages within, not just the actions depicted or the words spoken. As Chute states, “The way that time is shaped spatially on a page of comics— through panel size, panel shape, panel placement, and the concomitant pace and rhythm the page gestures at establishing—is essential to understanding how comics works” (7). Of primary significance is the unit of meaning conveyed by the singular panel. In comics, however, panels are not independent but interdependent entities: “Panels can be considered as interdependent fragments of a global form” (Groensteen 30). This interdependence is due to the dual nature of images in comics, for, as Hatfield relates, “A ­single image within such a cluster typically functions in two ways at once: as a ‘moment’ in an imagined sequence of events, and as a graphic element in an atemporal design. . . . Most longform comics maintain a tug-of-war between these different functions, encouraging a near-simultaneous apprehension of the single image as both momentum-sequence and design element” (139). Fully interpreting comics thus requires a layered reading, appreciating the interrelationships between the image and the sequence. This reality regarding the material duality of comics has intriguing implications as it applies to the appreciation of memoir. As Round explains, “The reader is thereby given multiple perspectives and situated both within and without the story; effecting a postmodern conception of narrative identity as multiple and even contradictory” (328). So comics have elements at their disposal in the manner of their presentation, in whole and in part, that can reinforce or complicate the content of the work, thereby providing a creative space for recontextualizing past events. Small’s Stitches, of course, is a singular example of giving voice to the voiceless, for it embodies the concept in a tangible manner. Small, whose voice was literally taken from him for a time through a throat operation to rid him of cancer, takes command of his life and his story through his imaginative art. In one particular scene, Small dives into a blank page, imaginatively showing that “[b]y rupturing the plane and partially disappearing through it, the character we soon come to identify as David reveals the liberty that depthless graphic media has on the constraints of space that usually rules physical bodies” (Small 62; Orbán 175). Art is not just an escape for Small in the past; it is a means to portray the past and regain control over it, to recreate memories in his own voice. Satrapi’s seminal work Persepolis is a fascinating example of how comics can creatively reimagine the past through the presentation of events from a future perspective. Although Satrapi’s straightforward, black-and-white style lacks embellishment, certain choices add deeper meaning. In one particularly poignant scene, Satrapi’s parents celebrate the overthrow of the shah of Iran. Satrapi’s mother is relieved “Now that the devil has left!” (43). But although the historical shah is indeed gone, a snakelike devil still lurks, emerging ominously from the panel border of this particular frame. As comic-book

Hybridity and Materiality in Comics Memoir   265 frames are meant to be moments of time represented spatially on the page, Satrapi’s ­portrayal of the panel border foreshadowing the future bears special significance, with the trials of the future lurking just out of view of the past. Reviewing memories through the lens of the future permits Satrapi to subtly comment on the irony of celebrating the fall of one tyrant when the fundamental Islamic revolution is just around the corner. Without additional commentary or narration, Satrapi reveals how easy it is for the movements of history to escape notice in the moment. It is comics that empowers this effect. Hostage, by Guy Delisle, provides another unique example of how comics can materially depict events through reinforcement. Delisle recounts the narrative of Christophe André, who was working as a humanitarian in the Caucasus when he was kidnapped and held hostage for months. The pages are almost entirely colored in a dull gray, and the majority of the panels are tight, geometric, and repetitive. Each of these artistic choices reinforces the emotional weight of the narrative. By repeating similar-looking panels over and over, Delisle is able to materially replicate the monotony and boredom experienced by Christophe. The sheer weight of the experience is itself a physical weight, as the story is more than four hundred pages long, with each successive panel reiterating the trauma of being kidnapped. And when Christophe finally emerges at the end of his ordeal a free man, the narrative ends with a full-page panel image depicting an open countryside, a stark contrast to the claustrophobic, repetitive representations of blank rooms and confined closets (432). Recreating the past graphically therefore allows Delisle to portray Christophe’s trauma in a manner that has innate, personal meaning and that concurrently imparts a physical presence to readers. A similar effect can be witnessed in Joe Sacco’s Palestine as he depicts the imprisonment of a Palestinian man named Ghassan by the Israeli police. Gradually, over the course of the story, the rectangular panels begin to shrink in size, even as they simultaneously multiply the indignities Ghassan is made to suffer. Like the cell he is imprisoned in, Ghassan feels enclosed; but as readers, we see a growing number of repeated injustices done to him all at once due to the dual nature of the comics page. Sacco also presents moments where the materiality of the page is at odds with what is being depicted. Even as he permanently memorializes in visual form a desperate Palestinian who wants to escape the country, Sacco states that he promptly forgot about him forever (28). But the page will not let us forget. Even more so than film, the comics page stares at us, a material artifact that dares us to look away from what is happening even as it permanently etches itself on our minds. The selectivity of images allows for particular moments to be emphasized in a manner that other mediums cannot fully replicate. In some instances, it is the hybrid approach of comics mixing disparate elements together that simulates materiality, in some cases giving marginalized peoples a voice when they have been deliberately silenced. Weaver’s Darkroom is a piece that embraces hybrid identity through her status as an immigrant from Argentina growing up in civil-rights-era Alabama. Her unique placement gives her a blended perspective on race relations, but it is her presentation of events in comics through the metaphor of photography and film that expresses the story of both herself and black Americans. Although Eisner cautions against emulating film techniques in comics due to their impact on readability (73), Weaver

266   John Logan Schell embraces a notion of film and photography, deliberately patterning pages on film and ­photography reels. In fact, the capturing of memories on film plays a central role in one of the central events in Darkroom: a peaceful protest of black Americans attacked by violent whites. By showing blank photography reels, Weaver represents how there is no footage of that event and how black Americans struggled to be heard against those who silenced them (25). In this sense, Darkroom represents a tangible way for Weaver to give voice to those who were oppressed. There may be no physical evidence, but Weaver is able to create a ­testimony through her redrawing of the past. Derek Royal observes, “Graphic narrative, in allowing the reader to ‘mask’ him- or herself in its non-mimetic figuration, invites empathy with the nondescript ‘Other’ on the comic page, thereby encouraging the reader to connect to other experiences and other communities that might otherwise have been unfamiliar” (10). Comics do not only encourage readers to connect with the unfamiliar, but they also provide a link to the oppressed, creating a material space for them. Just as Weaver’s approach provides the means of creating a presence for marginalized people where there was none, her use of the photography metaphor also allows for the redressing of wrongs in a manner that uniquely fits comics. In another example, Weaver repeats a close-up of an angry white face in panels like a film reel, a technique possessing dual significance (26). By showing the same face over and over, she implies, through the sequence of comics, that racial hatred is not a moment frozen in time but a historical one repeated continuously. On the other hand, the image also reveals a multiplicity of racial hatred as a whole, one giant interconnected act of oppression. As the field of comics studies continues to expand and mature, it is crucial for all involved to proclaim the unique aspects of the medium as they pertain to the redrawing of history. Not merely a prose subordinate, comics memoir stands as its own method of relating memory that reflects personal truths in a manner that other mediums cannot completely reproduce. Aldama’s sentiments are worth echoing: “we need to take our pleasure in the study of comics on their own terms” (2). Through the hybrid nature of comics and their materiality, the imaginative space provided on the page can capture the way creators perceived moments in the past and how they want those moments to be portrayed in the future. The physical artifact of a comic is a creation unifying both fact and fiction, meaning that power can be given to those who historically have been ­powerless. But comics do not stop at merely giving power from one absolute source to another; they disseminate control through the manner in which comics storytelling is resolved: in the mind of the individual reader.

Works Cited Aldama, Frederick Luis. Latinx Comic Book Storytelling: An Odyssey by Interview. San Diego State UP, 2016. Aldama, Frederick Luis. “ReDrawing of Narrative Boundaries: An Introduction.” Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 1–6, doi:10.4148/2334-4415.1965. Beaty, Bart. “Autobiography as Authenticity.” A Comics Studies Reader, edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, UP of Mississippi, 2009, pp. 226–235.

Hybridity and Materiality in Comics Memoir   267 Bui, Thi. The Best We Could Do. Abrams ComicArts, 2017. Chute, Hillary. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. Columbia UP, 2010. Clark, J.  Spencer. “Encounters with Historical Agency: The Value of Nonfiction Graphic Novels in the Classroom.” History Teacher, vol. 46, no. 4, 2013, pp. 489–508. www.jstor.org/ stable/43264152. Delisle, Guy. Hostage. Translated by Helge Dascher, Drawn & Quarterly, 2017. Eakin, Paul John. “Living Autobiographically.” Biography, vol. 28, no. 1, 2005, pp. 1–14. Eisner, Will. Graphic Storytelling. Poorhouse, 1996. Espinoza, Mauricio. “Neoliberalism in the Gutter: Latin American Comics and Society since the 1990s.” Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 1–18, doi:10.4148/ 2334-4415.1974. Forney, Ellen. Marbles: Mania Depression, Michelangelo, & Me. Gotham, 2012. García, Ezequiel. Growing Up in Public. Fantagraphics, 2016. Gardner, Jared. “Autography’s Biography, 1972–2007.” Biography, vol. 31, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–26. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen, UP of Mississippi, 2007. Hatfield, Charles. “An Art of Tensions.” A Comics Studies Reader, edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, UP of Mississippi, 2009, pp. 132–148. Kunka, Andrew J. Autobiographical Comics. Bloomsbury, 2018, Kindle ed. Kunka, Andrew J. “Cranky Bosses, Rebellious Characters, and Suicidal Artists: Scribbly, Inkie, and Pre-Underground Autobiographical Comics.” Comics Studies Here and Now, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, Taylor & Francis, 2018, pp. 44–56. Ledesma, Alberto. Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer. Ohio State UP, 2017. Lewis, John, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell. March: Book One. Top Shelf Productions, 2013. McCloud, Scott. Reinventing Comics. Paradox, 2000. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperCollins, 1993. Orbán, Katalin. “A Language of Scratches and Stitches: The Graphic Novel between Hyperreading and Print.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 40, no. 3, 2014, pp. 169–181. Round, Julia. “Visual Perspective and Narrative Voice in Comics: Redefining Literary Terminology.” International Journal of Comic Art, vol. 9, no. 2, 2007, pp. 316–329, http://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/10507/1/Redefining_lit_terminology_pdf.pdf. Royal, Derek Parker. “Introduction: Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Narrative.” MELUS, vol. 32, no. 3, 2007, pp. 7–22, www.jstor.org/stable/30029789. Sacco, Joe. Palestine. Fantagraphics, 2004. Satrapi, Marjane. The Complete Persepolis. Translated by Anjali Singh, Pantheon, 2004. Satrapi, Marjane. “Persepolis—Exclusive: Marjane Satrapi.” 19 Sept. 2010, https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=v9onZpQix_w&t=61s. Small, David. Stitches. Norton, 2017. Weaver, Lila Quintero. Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White. U of Alabama P, 2012, Kindle ed. Zograf, Aleksandar. Regards from Serbia. Top Shelf Productions, 2007.

chapter 16

Au to/biogr a phics a n d Gr a phic Histor ie s M a de for th e Cl assroom Logicomix and Abina and the Important Men Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson

Introduction: Comics in the Classroom Comics, as cartoons, have long been used around the world to impart information on signboards and as an aid in learning to read, and as far back as the 1920s, as Carol L. Tilley and Robert  C.  Weiner observe, they were recognized as “valuable tools for helping ­students understand social and political events” (358). But John Walsh notes that the classroom use of comics has also had a contentious history, since comics versions of classic literary texts were suspect for teaching literature. “Tintin and Spider-Man, yes; Les Miserables and Hamlet, no,” he writes. “When Albert Kanter created Classic Comics (later Classics Illustrated) in 1941, his strip versions of Ivanhoe and Don Quixote were held at arm’s-length by parents and teachers, who were appalled to think their young charges might learn anything from colour-panel trash” (par. 1). Although that debate long raged, by the early twenty-first century, comics have become an established presence in college humanities and social science classrooms and are recognized as a significant, aesthetically complex literary mode grappling with compelling cultural issues. Several comics with “canonical” status are, by genre, graphic memoirs, often termed “autographics,” in Gillian Whitlock’s coinage. After Art Spiegelman’s Maus II won international recognition and a Pulitzer Prize (1992), a canon of the “Big Three” graphic memoirs emerged, also including Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis volumes, which are regularly taught in literature, cultural studies, history, and

Logicomix and Abina and the Important Men   269 creative arts courses. Indeed, as Candida Rifkind asserts, “graphic life narratives have become as central to comics studies as superhero comics,” and those embedding firstperson testimony make up an important subfield (“Review” 430). While some autographics used in the classroom focus on individual stories of coming of age, illness, or disability, many explicitly situate their stories at what Spiegelman called “the fault line where World History and Personal History collide” (introduction). That is, testimony—pivotal for human rights struggles—and the Bildungsroman or comingof-age story are joined, as the narratives in the “Big Three” suggest. Even when a historical focus dominates, it may be implicitly connected to personal stories of origin that probe a catastrophic history and its resulting trauma. For example, Barefoot Gen, by Keiji Nakazawa, was a breakthrough comic, linking the personal story of Gen Nakaoka, its protagonist, to the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and its shattering effects on survivors, as well as atrocities by Japanese troops, some disputed. Published as a serial manga and in book form since 1975, initially with the title I Saw It, it has been translated into many languages and sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. Similarly to Maus, Barefoot Gen is used in classes to convey the traumatic impact of witnessing collective disaster, an experience shared by Nakazawa. In such comics, the line between the autobiographical and the biographical is often blurred, leading theorists to insert a slash and call the form “auto/biographics,” drawn from “auto/biography,” the title of A/B, one journal in the field. For example, Lauren Redniss’s Radioactive: A Tale of Love and Fallout (2010) uses more than a hundred color collages as well as diary citations and a biographical narrative to link the histories of Marie and Pierre Curie and their dedication to each other with a cultural history of ­uranium and the shocking effects of its deployment in twentieth-century warfare. Similarly, in the twin volumes Boxers and Saints (2013) of Gene Luen Yang, one character, Little Bao, becomes a leader of the Boxer Rebellion; the other, Four-Girl/Vibiana, converts to Catholicism and aspires to become another Joan of Arc. The pairing enables Yang to explore conflicts and contradictions at a decisive moment in Chinese history. Yang’s 2006 widely used graphic memoir, American Born Chinese, consists of three tales—those of the Monkey King, second-generation child of immigrants Jin Wang, and white boy Danny—whose identities are ultimately conflated and fused to express the complexity of Chinese-American identity in ways that allude to Yang’s own story. Another example is long-time US congressman John Lewis’s three-volume March (2013–2016), a history of the American civil rights movement as narrated through the story of one of its leaders. March, developed collaboratively with Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell, is aimed particularly at secondary-school and introductory college classrooms and dramatizes the struggle of the 1960s Freedom Riders. The narrative moves from Lewis’s experience of segregation as a child in the South to his role, as head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in the confrontation with police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge (Alabama) in 1963 that left him seriously wounded but ultimately resulted in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As Michael A. Chaney suggests, the effect of Lewis’ autographic style of retelling episodes from his young rural life is to give readers lessons in how to imagine the historical past differently.

270   Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson Clearly, as these examples suggest, locating personal stories at their intersection with large historical movements provides productive and provocative content for humanities and social science courses, as well as generating the publication of books on teaching comics in the classroom, notably Scott McCloud’s analysis in comic form, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993). Many anthologies on comics pedagogy offer essays theorizing how comics may be productively introduced in the classroom and gather assignments enabling their incorporation. The essays in Matthew L. Miller’s Class, Please Open Your Comics (2015) explore best practices with comics in a range of different academic settings, such as reading and composition, interdisciplinary, and theory courses and twelve sample assignments for projects. While many of the essays focus on the “Big Three,” Qiana Whitted’s discussion of Jeremy Love’s Bayou analyzes its visualization of racist violence in 1930s Mississippi as formative of modern African American culture. A  number of other anthologies focus on how to teach comics in the classroom. Stephen E. Tabachnick’s extensive collection, Teaching the Graphic Novel (2009), includes several helpful essays on defining terminology for the comics page, visuality, and modes of the graphic novel, though only Nathalie op de Beeck’s essay on Lynda Barry’s “Autobiofictionalography” explicitly addresses the complexity of autographical genres. Lan Dong’s collection, Teaching Comics and Graphic Narratives: Essays on Theory, Strategy and Practice (2012), considers the use of graphic novels in multidisciplinary courses. There are also numerous online resources. For example, the Comics in Education website announces its focus “to encourage teachers to research, explore, and share the rich history and tradition of visual narrative with their students” and offers a useful handout on the history and structure of the genre and the vocabulary of visual media. In recent years, some artists have begun conceptualizing graphic narratives that are for use in the classroom, either implicitly or explicitly; indeed, some are being specifically composed for it. What are the implications of tailoring comics to particular courses and disciplines? This chapter explores the design, form, presentation, and ethics of two examples of auto/biographic comics that address different audiences in and beyond the humanities and social sciences. Abina and the Important Men, the first comic in the Oxford Graphic History Series, incorporates a nineteenth-century slave woman’s legal testimony as the fulcrum for classes on colonial African history. It includes historical materials and postcolonial critiques that incorporate “history from below” into historiography. Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth embeds the quest of the young Bertrand Russell for the first principles of mathematics within a biographical narrative incorporating autobiographical writings by the older pacifist Russell, who protested fascism and nuclear war. Not explicitly designed for courses but requiring conversancy with philosophy, Logicomix interweaves that double narrative with the authors’ metacritique of modernity as a standpoint from which students can engage critically with foundational issues. In these comics, entwining intellectual and historical content with the conventions and aesthetics of autographics raises questions about how comics form may be changed, or translated, for didactic purposes in the classroom. To contextualize such comics, we first set out four issues pertinent to the pedagogical use of auto/biographics.

Logicomix and Abina and the Important Men   271

Auto/biographics and the Learning Objectives of Disciplines Decision-making about course content is driven by disciplinary imperatives including debates about subfields, theoretical frameworks, methodologies, norms, and questions of evidence. Consequently, a graphic narrative composed for a particular disciplinary—or interdisciplinary—classroom and addressed to “students” of that field is often generated by the collaboration of several persons (authors and artists) with varied interests and expertise whose collective purpose is to advance disciplinary knowledge. Thus, the story as a textual object is produced through multiple conversations about archival materials, visual styles, and story forms that focus on how best to invite students and teachers of a particular discipline or subdiscipline to make an identification with it. In order to attract students to relevant disciplinary issues, auto/biographical narratives for classroom use may adapt material from archives of letters, testimony, or diaries in shaping individual histories to disciplinary modes of knowledge production. Stories based on the experiences of a historical figure and incorporating that figure’s own writing and self-referential “voice” are shaped to solicit in students a sense of intimate exchange, as a response to the felt experience of another’s life amid powerful historical forces. This is true for graphic narratives that take up significant historical figures, incorporating autobiographical fragments into a biographical framework, and for those telling stories of marginalized and forgotten people whose lives may be exemplary of larger struggles. Such lives and actions may be implicated in catastrophic historical events or illuminate large social transformations that inform disciplinary interest in such formations as identity, power, violence, and trauma. As Hillary  L.  Chute observes in Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form, “the doubled, multiply layered form of comics has become the site of so much wrestling with history” (34). Auto/biographic comics composed for the classroom extend that concept to wrestling with the histories of disciplinary knowledge formation and with disciplinary foundations. In teaching such works, we must attend to not only what kinds of autobiographically inflected archival material are incorporated but also how and to what ends disciplinary interests and aims drive the multimodal ­representation of historical subjects of catastrophic historical events or large-scale formations of oppression.

Central Features of Auto/biographics A fundamental tenet of life narrative theory is that, in attending to biographical and autobiographical forms and voices, we distinguish the narrating “I”—the author/­ producer of the comic—from the visual signature of the graphic artist (where two or more collaborators are involved), as well as from the past narrated “I” whose assembled life may be recounted through letters, journals, an autobiography, or archival fragments. Scholars focused on autobiographical self-presentation attend to the incorporation,

272   Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson deployment, and mediation of first-person narratives in comics for classroom use. For acts of autobiographical presentation are not transparent forms of communicative exchange or primarily documents of historical information, and the autobiographical subject is not a transparent locus of some abstract truth. As Joan W. Scott theorizes, “experience is at once always already an interpretation and is in need of interpretation” (37). Specifically for comics, autographics probe the relationship of narrated and narrating “I’s” as the mode engages with a wide range of personal content through which it addresses its audiences differently and requires different reading strategies from those of graphic novels.1 Yet in many disciplinary contexts across the humanities, arts, and social sciences, questions about the nature of the autobiographical are bypassed in syllabi or classroom discussions. Students may struggle to engage with autographical memoirs because they—and even their instructors—lack a conceptual vocabulary to describe processes of autobiographical narration, the relationship of past [narrated] and present [narrating] “I’s,” and issues in linking the story told to the biographical history of the author. Furthermore, scholarship on using comics in the classroom, as the above collections suggest, often subsumes autographics under “graphic novel,” thereby blurring their ­distinctive properties or treating them as metafiction. We find it helpful to raise questions about the status of the autobiographical in comics made, explicitly or implicitly, for classroom use, such as: Where does the comic incorporate autobiographical materials? How are those materials framed? What kind of subjectivity is ascribed to the protagonist(s) in the autographic? What disciplinary norms do these materials address or imply? Is there a mix of autobiographical and biographical material, such that the comic should be called an auto/biographic? How do the authors and artists foreground metaquestions about the making of the comic?

The Formal Features of Visual/Textual Interfaces, or Visual Literacy While some disciplines, such as art history, media studies, and fields of ethnic, gender, and race studies emphasize exploring the aesthetics and politics of visual representation and expect their students to develop expertise in visuality, other disciplines do not emphasize it as a focus of inquiry, leaving their students underprepared for engaging the graphic complexities of comics. Yet a signature feature of comics is the nuanced relationship of image and text in the coproduction of meaning, with gutters as contested spaces of indeterminacy. As Chute observes, the comics form is “always calling attention to the relationship of part to whole, to the self-conscious build-up of information that may or may not coalesce in meaning. For if comics is a form about presence, it is also stippled with erasure—in the interruption provided by the ambiguous spaces of the ­gutter, its spaces of pause” (Disaster Drawn 17). Further, the impact of a comic relies on how its verbal elements intersect, coincide with, or contest the unfolding story in

Logicomix and Abina and the Important Men   273 images. As Nick Sousanis observes in the award-winning Unflattening (2015), comics “unflatten” knowledge by presenting it visually as an unfolding revelation of new worlds through “the fifth dimension,” “ruts,” “vectors,” and other tactics, as his chapter titles suggest. That is, comics are, as Paul Gravett states, “fundamentally subversive . . . requiring our brains to build connections between words and pictures, and also between ­panels, not merely one panel after another in sequence, but in networks across each page and through an entire book” (par. 5). Finally, as fundamentally a visual medium, comics figure bodies more directly, materially, and sensuously than do written texts. As G.  Thomas Couser notes, “the main advantage of the graphic medium . . . [is] that it admits embodiment into the narrative in new ways, both literally and metaphorically” (348). That is, in comics, bodies are made to eloquently “speak” their embodied sub­ jectivity. Using c­ omics in the classroom, then, both makes demands on students and enhances their ­visual literacy.

The Ethics of Auto/Biographical Reading When comics featuring autobiographical materials are used in the classroom, intriguing ethical questions arise. Elisabeth El Refaie explores how autographics solicit acts of reader affiliation, distinguishing between two concepts: identification, “patterns of attachment that are ‘constructed around commonalities imagined, felt, recognized, asserted, or imposed’ ”; and empathy, “the phenomenon of feeling with another ­person” (182). Of course, these forms are intertwined in graphic memoirs, as she notes, as they depend on readers’ engagement in constructing meaning. In Ethics in the Gutter, Kate Polak multiplies the sites of ethics in graphic narratives to include protagonist action in the comic, the narrative voice of the comic, the author and drawer of the comic, and reader response, which may or may not lead to identification or empathy (16–20). For Polak, the gutter, replete with absences, gaps, stuttering, stillness, implied movement, and more (35–38), may advance, forestall, or confound meaning, suspending the desire for knowability. This impossibility of certainty in autobiographical comics makes it a disruptive and self-reflexive form. But when a comic is ­composed for use in the classroom and incorporates autobiographical materials or fragments in its story, what happens to the ethics of identification and empathy? To what extent might it stimulate and limit the reader-viewer’s identification or kindle a sentimental identification? To what extent might an invitation to empathy run ­counter to the ­disciplinary project? How might the disruptive energy of the gutters undermine disciplinary imperatives? In sum, what ethics of representation informs claims to enfranchise forgotten historical subjects, and to what ends? For Rifkind, the power of comics narrating refugees’ ­stories lies in how they intervene in regimes of othering and representations that redress prevailing biases (“Refugee Comics” 649). Reanimating a historical subject through ­textual/visual interfaces and through the contrapuntal dynamic of frames and gutters indeed multiplies the perspectives and scales through which that subject is figured and

274   Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson disrupts readers’ fantasy of seamless knowing. Yet if a comic is primarily biographical in its focus on another’s life story, its visual representation of the protagonist’s imagined subjectivity and agency may expose assumptions about the other as knowable and intelligible that are mobilized for disciplinary ends. And the call to empathy may be qualified by the desire to perform what Sidonie Smith refers to as “rescue reading” (631), which assumes that readers can offer recognition as a form of restoration to a witness of historical events who has suffered traumatically. Furthermore, what of an auto/biographic’s ending and the knowledge it produces? Chute observes that “the graphic narrative is a contemporary form [whose] expansive visual-verbal grammar can offer a space for ethical representation without problematic closure” (“Shadow” 356). That is, the endings of powerful graphic memoirs may resist a coherent final message and suspend certainty. Factors contributing to this openness are the syncopation of frames and gutters; tensions between, and different trajectories of, the visual and textual stories; and metanarrative incursions, such as introducing the artist’s hand or voice within the frame but outside the story. In these ways, a comic may resist interpretative closure. As Andrew J. Kunka asks, “Does the very nature of comics as mediated texts that combine words and drawings effectively undermine their truth-telling ability?” (7). While we have argued that truth-telling, as a subjective and often ambiguous feature of all autobiographical texts, may raise ethical issues, that effect is heightened by the tension between image and text and the open-endedness of many comics. As we turn to our examples, these theoretical and ethical issues inform our discussion of auto/biographics for classroom use.

Explicitly Pedagogical Comics: Abina and the Important Men The award-winning Abina and the Important Men is a graphic narrative developed ­specifically for high school and college classrooms by historian Trevor  R.  Getz and South African artist Liz Clarke. It was originally published in 2012, expanded and altered in 2016, and is now used in more than three hundred courses in colonial history and African and global cultural studies. To aid instructors, the book’s website (http://www. abina.org) includes background information about the book, the author, and the artist, as well as materials and reference to a website with a PowerPoint presentation. Abina is the first of several volumes in Oxford University Press’s Graphic History Series, which is explicitly targeted for classroom use.2 These graphic histories focus on the stages of a climactic event, dramatizing the clash of dominant authorities and local, often indigenous, underdogs. An omniscient narrator usually relates the historical and biographical events, while the underdogs’ voices are imagined and autobiographical fragments of their lives often incorporated in the comic. Typically, these forgotten historical figures

Logicomix and Abina and the Important Men   275 did not prevail in the struggles of their times but arguably can be revived to create new historical insights. Getz, a university historian with expertise in anglophone West African colonial ­history, discovered in an archive of Cape Coast Superior Court the 1876 record of the oral testimony of Abina Mansah, an “ordinary,” uneducated Asante woman living in the British Protectorate of the Gold Coast (now part of Ghana). Although, as Getz notes, the region was “technically” independent, its reigning chiefs remained subordinate to British colonial administrators (133). Young Abina had been captured by the Asante during the 1873–1874 war between the British and the Asante Confederation and transported by a trader to a town called Saltpond. Yaw Awoah, in her eyes her common-­law husband, was a trader who exchanged her, apparently for money paid by a wealthy African chief, Quamina Eddoo. Abina then lived on Eddoo’s palm oil plantation, where she served his sister. The motivation for her escape was the prospect of marriage that Eddoo told her he had arranged for her with Tando, one of his household servants. Abina sought refuge in Cape Coast, one of three small coastal areas designated “The Colony,” and, with the support of the court interpreter, James Davis, brought civil suit against Eddoo for wrongful enslavement. Abina claimed that despite the abolition of slavery in the protectorate, the trader Yaw Awoah had sold her into slavery to Eddoo and that she had been treated as a slave by his sister, promised as a bride to one of his servants “against [her] will,” and threatened with flogging (13). Her suit sought her freedom and charged Eddoo with slave trafficking, charges that transformed the chief into a “de­fend­ ant.” Impressed by the rare court record of a slave woman’s transcribed testimony ­witnessing to her demand for “freedom” from “slavery,” Getz collaborated with Clarke to present Abina’s suit, as described in her testimony and the court record, in comic form as what they term a “graphic history.” As the historian affirms, “a voice like hers cannot be silenced forever” (79). Altogether, the second edition of Abina has five parts plus appendices, of which the comic narrative of Part I is the first and longest. Part II is the transcription of the original court proceedings of Abina’s suit and the decision of 1876, which went against the young woman. In the comic, Abina’s voice is presented in dialogue bubbles, foregrounding her transcribed words in order to “give voice” to an indigenous woman representative of those whose voices were silenced in dominant historical treatments of women, slaves, and “ordinary people” in the British African colonies. This juxtaposition of the autographic rendering of an archival document with its ­primary source displays how a source may be “translated” into a multimodal medium. In both the comic’s and the transcription’s versions of the historical record, students encounter the voices of multiple legal professionals and witnesses who appeared in the courtroom. In addition to Abina’s voice, these are: James Davis, court interpreter and prosecutor; William “Aja” Melton, the court magistrate; James Hutton Brew, legal counsel for defendant Eddoo; Eccoah Coom, Eddoo’s sister; Adjuah N’Yamiwhah, a friend of Abina; and Yaw Awoah, Abina’s common-law husband and trader, a witness for the defense. While it is impossible to know to what extent these voices were literally transcribed, or embellished, by the original court recorder, they present the making of

276   Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson ­ istory as a dialogue of multiple, contesting voices. Abina’s compelling narrative of her h experience as a woman without freedom is repeatedly challenged by the British magistrates and colonial officers, turning her testimony into a rhetorical contest in which the biases and manipulations of the “winners” who wrote colonial history prevail. Because the embodied experiences of “ordinary people” have been overwritten by dominant historical treatments, an auto/biographic, as a secondary source based on primary archival sources, cannot be a stand-alone text. In Part III, “Historical Context,” Getz supplies a new methodology to animate the life and imagined subjectivity of these obscure subjects, with Abina’s testimony as a pre-text for assembling materials and information that provide “pathways” to approaching social history. This multipart scholarly assemblage, characterized as a “forum on the past,” exposes students to historiographical method by showing how different kinds of evidence from varied sources can produce historical knowledge (157). In brief entries and maps, Getz reconstructs Gold Coast social, cultural, and institutional history in the colonial period and the social relations that emerged after the official abolition of slavery in Britain in 1833. Thus, firstperson testimony in the comic is embedded in the material, economic, and political realities of the Ghanaian protectorate in 1876. In Part IV, “Reading Guide,” Getz provocatively asks, “Whose story is this?” and ­discusses theoretical issues, including what is involved in constructing “A Staircase of Voices” and signaling “Silences,” which confronted the author and the artist in conceptualizing a comic for teaching colonial history and historiography (136). To explore the complex issue of comics’ “truths” in establishing historical authenticity, Getz and Clarke gather engravings, photographs, and sources on household details such as clothing and gathering places that inform the visual dimension of the comic. Part V, “Engaging Abina,” consists of three essays by anglophone African historians. Those in the second edition redress analytical gaps in the first edition’s theoretical essays by framing postcolonial critiques to debate whether Abina should be understood as a “slave” and what impact gender dynamics had on her situation and her legal suit. While these latter sections focus on historical accuracy and Abina’s slave status, they also raise issues about how visual representation can translate a young woman’s “silenced” voice (139–140). Abina’s mixture of comics storytelling with several kinds of scholarly discourse thus exemplifies an important trend in comics pedagogy: “I”-witness narration and biographical profile are embedded within critical commentary, debates on disciplinary practice, and accompanying historical maps, a timeline, photographs of documents and engravings, preliminary sketches of characters, a glossary, and “Reading Questions” for different educational levels. These are assembled as a textbook in which the comic becomes a vehicle for capturing student interest and generating empathy for the unsuccessful protagonist. As such, Abina is pedagogically innovative both in joining comics to first-person witnessing and postcolonial historical analysis and in creating multiple scholarly pathways that invite students to engage the comic and its interpretation and make history come intimately alive.

Logicomix and Abina and the Important Men   277 There is also an appendix of “Preliminary Sketches,” in which Getz and Clarke elab­ orate on issues involved in finding an adequate figural representation and visual grammar for projecting Abina as the protagonist in dynamic relation to other figures in the story and providing adequate social and historical context for nineteenth-century life in Cape Colony. The historian and the artist discuss how they purposefully developed graphic techniques to communicate Abina’s felt and lived experience and assign her some agency, central to a comics protagonist. And they elaborate on color palette, scale and perspective, and the organization of frames and gutters to juxtapose characters’ thoughts and speech with historical information in remediating primary source materials for an explicitly didactic purpose. Let us turn to how Abina unfolds. Its first page is narrated by the omniscient voice of the historian, who contextualizes time, place, and historical events in boxes of text set at the tops or bottoms of frames. A hand-drawn map of the British protectorate and the Colony establishes locations; a concise history summarizes the recent war between the British and the Asante chiefs and the shift from trade in slaves and gold to palm oil after the abolition of slavery establishes economic and political context. By the last frame on the page, students are situated in the narrative present of Cape Colony. The second page continues the voice-over of the historian as he describes the emergence of a pliant labor source, with boxes visualizing anonymous young women captives. In the bottom two frames, the comic focuses on one such woman and the action that initiates Abina’s flight from “enslavement” and “forced marriage” (see Figure 16.1). With the third page, readers enter Abina’s inner world through thought bubbles that suggest her resistance, although her motivation for leaving, which generated the testimony, cannot be known. Thereafter, in Chapters 1 and 2, “the important men”—chiefs, interpreters, magistrates, lawyers—are introduced as African power brokers and agents of colonial law and bureaucracy. These opening chapters establish a color palette that distinguishes visually between domestic and institutional locations. The lived quality of households and streets is ­rendered in a warm palette of ochre, tan, and light orange and echoed in flashbacks imagining Abina’s past experience. By contrast, the institutional setting of the colonial courtroom and the homes or offices of the important men are usually rendered in a gray, green, and brown palette suggestive of a somber patriarchy. In comics mode, the courtroom becomes a dramatic battleground, animating testimony as felt experience and capturing the tension of exchanges in ways that a recorded court document cannot ­convey. The multiple versions of events transcribed from the court testimony dramatize disputes around the truthfulness of differing testimonies in a visual language that emphasizes their clashes, illuminating how these interpretations derive from the conflicting positions of actors in the British colonial hierarchy. Clarke uses perspective and scale to project the affects of testifying before important men, who are typically drawn looming over Abina, assertive and at times angry, with large faces that convey power and authority. For instance, lawyer Brew’s gestures are magisterial, his stature elevated by the scale of close-ups. Abina is often drawn in the witness chair in a diminutive posture,

278   Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson

Figure 16.1 From Abina and the Important Men, by Trevor R. Getz and Liz Clarke. © 2016 by Oxford University Press.

sometimes in a small box wedged between two panels of lawyer Brew, which intensifies the affect of constrained interrogation (Figure 16.2). In counterpoint to this visual powerlessness, Clarke at other moments intersperses images that project Abina’s resistant subjectivity externalized as frustration and in­sist­ ence. At one point, her fingers are drawn forcefully clutching her clenched fist as she claims the integrity of truth telling. In one full-page frame, Clarke draws Abina as breaking free of the constraining witness chair with fists clenched, declaring, “Therefore I knew I was a slave, and so I decided I would come here and complain” (Figure 16.3). From this low angle, the monumentalized figure of Abina projects courage in asserting her convictions. Yet the arc of the comic ends with Abina’s defeat. The final frames ­conveying the judgment of the magistrate present Abina as an abject figure, weeping and despondent: “It was never just about being safe. It was about being heard . . . [but] I might as well have kept silent” (77). In the last frame of her story, Abina is reduced metonymically to a left arm and a part of a dress disappearing behind the door to her lawyer’s house, an image of being erased from history. Abina’s disappearance is not, however, the end of the comic. Its concluding pages reproduce a powerful autographical trope in a dramatic leap from Abina’s story to the second narrative of the historian’s storytelling, as the figure of “Getz” seeks an alternative means to release her from oblivion. As he begins to speak, he shifts from an

Logicomix and Abina and the Important Men   279

Figure 16.2 From Abina and the Important Men, by Trevor R. Getz and Liz Clarke. © 2016 by Oxford University Press.

om­nis­cient scholarly voice to first-person narration, asserting that “history is an act of silencing . . . those without power” (78). Pictured as a scholar at his desk, he sees the drawn figure of Abina emerging from the original written court case and ponders how to bring her voice back. The final full-page image of the comic juxtaposes the recorded court testimony held by his drawn hand, a superimposed image of Abina’s smiling face emerging from it, and a smaller image, layered on it, of a schoolboy sitting at his desk reading the comic open to page 37 (Figure 16.4).3 As viewers, our point of view is triangulated: the figure of the student is an implicit double for current students, who are invited to participate in decolonizing history and the figure of the historian reanimating the colonial archive invites readers to join in an act of restorative justice for history’s silenced voices. Abina suggests the kind of intervention that auto/biographics can make when no direct record exists of the lived experience of “ordinary people.” The blending of Abina’s testimony with her visualized and imagined life story (with flashbacks prior to her court testimony and a projection of her voicing into the futurity of the twenty-first century) presents a kind of oral history as agentic subjectivity that can shape a collective auto/ biographical record typifying the experience of preliterate women in colonial West

280   Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson

Figure 16.3 From Abina and the Important Men, by Trevor R. Getz and Liz Clarke. © 2016 by Oxford University Press.

Africa. For Getz, the comic generates a mode of collective authenticity through which “two of the main approaches to the study of the past in the discipline today—social ­history and cultural history” can be pursued (153). And comics, with their textual and visual investment in protagonists as rebellious agents in fundamental struggles with powerful forces, are mobilized as a form for energizing disciplinary studies and intervening in their politics. Assuredly, the motivation behind composing this blend of graphic history and autobiographical testimony is admirable and its design appealingly multimedial. In bringing the forgotten testimony of a young woman refusing to be treated “as a slave” to the attention of students through vivid graphics and a compassionate treatment of her imagined life experience, it ascribes to Abina an intelligence and depth of feeling that accord her agency and counteract the impression of her powerlessness before the authorities. In its explicit critique of colonial versions of history, the comic reanimates for contemporary classrooms the contest of witnesses that defeated Abina the first time, while portraying the asymmetrical power relations between agents of colonial domination and indigenous people that defeated her. Moreover, Getz honors the interactive nature of scholarly inquiry. After the first ­edition was published, he sought responses from both student and faculty audiences, as

Logicomix and Abina and the Important Men   281

Figure 16.4 From Abina and the Important Men, by Trevor R. Getz and Liz Clarke. © 2016 by Oxford University Press.

well as on the comic’s website, in order to develop an app adding voices to the comic’s images to enhance classroom use, as William Fenton notes.4 And he responded to their critique that the essays in the first edition of Abina insufficiently treated the gendered dynamics, identities, forms of agency, and discourses of its historical moment by replacing them with other critical essays more attentive to these concerns. In exposing the backstory of the composition of the comic both Getz and Clarke revealed their concern with and strategies for confronting, if not entirely resolving, the ethical issues involved in the “duty to produce a history of Ghanaians that would be recognizable and useful by Ghanaians today” (153) as a restorative imperative. Still, certain issues remain about composing comics for the classroom. First, it may be an unavoidable irony that the comic’s final page inserts “Getz” as the contemporary historian producing new knowledge about her—yet another “important man.” Second, the project puts in question the limit to which subjectivity may be conferred on and ascribed to the historical Abina by extrapolating her lived experience from fragments of courtroom testimony and reconstructing a version of her in the comic. It remains questionable to what extent embodying and giving voice to Abina as a historical other who is ascribed subjectivity, interiority, and agency in the service of pedagogical practice and knowledge formation can be verified and validated. This story of

282   Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson an unknown nineteenth-century African woman’s struggle for freedom through the colonial legal system is admittedly one historian’s choice to present an imagined “life” in a multimodal genre for students unresponsive to textbooks. Third, as a comic about a historically oppressed indigenous woman projected as a form of “symbolic reparation,” Abina subordinates the definitive features of comics—tension, disjunction, and subversion—to a pedagogical need for coherent stories that furthers disciplinary aims. As provocative as the graphics and supporting materials of Abina are in facilitating conversations about colonialism and slavery, its didactic purpose and elaborate textual apparatus may guide students’ interpretations at the cost of constraining ­comics’ raw energy.

Comics Implicitly for Classroom Use: Logicomix A different kind of graphic narrative for consideration in introductory college mathematics, literature, history, or philosophy courses is Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, text by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou, visuals by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna, which was published to great acclaim.5 Often called a graphic novel by reviewers, Logicomix is, in our view, best understood as a multimodal auto/ biographic on the life of British mathematician and thinker Bertrand Russell woven together with an autobiographical metastory about the making of the comic. That is, it heightens the role of the authors and artists by foregrounding the story of the text’s creation, a frequent feature of what is called “relational auto/biography.”6 Logicomix frames its biographical chronicle of Russell with his autobiographical reflections in 1939 on his earlier life, creating a double narrative. And it adds a third dimension in the authors’/ artists’ metastory, providing readers with a contemporary standpoint for engaging a narrative debate about “the historical desire to make the world totally understandable by reason” (Walsh par. 10). By entwining the biography and the autobiography of another with the authors’ own autobiographical reflections, it invites students to apply their own experiential histories in reading others’ stories, particularly those of “great men and women.” Doxiadis and Papadimitriou state their intent in the introductory pages of Logicomix. They want to create not a “Logic for Dummies” or “a kind of textbook or a treatise” (12) but “a story” in which its heroes are all logicians” (13) who, in their “search of great goals,” become “tortured . . . superheroes” (22) driven as much by passion as reason. In turning logicians into popular-culture heroes, they transform intellectuals struggling for new knowledge not only into supermen scribbling equations but also figures tragically blind to the consequences of their ambition. The first section of Logicomix, “Overture,” with its operatic overtones, focuses particularly on the story of how and why its scriptwriter, Doxiadis, developed the comic and

Logicomix and Abina and the Important Men   283 engaged his coauthor, Papadimitriou. Although both authors are Greek, they live in the United States. Doxiadis has studied mathematics and its interactions with narrative, as well as film and theater; Papadimitriou is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. The husband-and-wife team of artists, Papadatos and Di Donna, work in cartooning and animation and reside in Athens.7 Their frame narrative on creating the comic is situated in Athens as the “home” of Western philosophy, where its quest for the origins and principles of knowledge was formalized. Yet Logicomix asserts that it is, and aims only to be, a comic: “[I]t’s just what 99.9% of comic books are, an honest-to-God, real . . . yarn, simply a . . . story!” (13). Nonetheless, it includes a scholarly afterword, “Logicomix and Reality,” on how the authors had to “select, reduce, simplify, interpret and, very often, invent” its reconstruction of Russell’s life and his encounters with other philosophers, “deviations from fact” that in their view do not detract from the “great adventure of ideas” that the comic seeks to portray (315–316). Additionally, Logicomix includes a “Notebook” of explanatory paragraphs on thirty-two persons and concepts helpful to understanding its story, as well as a brief “Bibliography” of works the authors used and liked—the kinds of appendices that do not appear in most comics or novels. This apparatus of paratexts typical of textbooks serves to authenticate Logicomix’s evidentiary status and to support the norms of scholarly and classroom work. The use of techniques of fictionalization to heighten and dramatize aspects of the story may account for Doxiadis’s identification of Logicomix as a “novel.” In our view, however, it is an auto/biographical narrative. As we have observed, “life writing and the novel share features we ascribe to fictional writing: plot, dialogue, setting, characterization. . . . But they are distinguished by their relationship to and claims about a referential world . . . what fiction represents is ‘a world,’ and what life writing refers to [is] ‘the world’ ” (Smith and Watson 9–10). Doxiadis, as scriptwriter, mobilizes the generative features and visual and textual grammar of the comics form used in graphic memoirs and graphic novels (such as those included in courses) but also insists on preserving its subversiveness, observing that the “best comics are meta-commentaries” and that “they are great because they subvert the medium in which they are written” (“What Comic Books Have”). That is, even when the narrative is predominantly a biographical one, it can introduce an autobiographical frame tale of its author’s role in its invention. Doing so works against the illusion of verisimilitude created in the novel and suspends readers between levels of telling. Driven by the “need to present complex ideas that made me try to best exploit the language of comics,” Doxiadis lists “three distinctive characteristics of graphic novels”: “First, . . . the way in which a comics form can blend different levels of representation, from the naturalistic to the symbolic, creating new forms of expression”; “second, . . . endless compression of information” . . . through its “overt artifice”; and, third, the form’s “capacity to inspire thought . . . to control the flow of [the reader’s] time, and more specifically to slow it down at will” (“What Comic Books Have”). These affordances of comics feature prominently in Logicomix, where the voices of three distinct narrators are intermingled throughout.

284   Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson Additionally, Logicomix is organized as an elaborately mulitiered narrative. This “architecture” situates Russell’s quest in multiple frameworks and embeds it within the authors’/artists’ efforts to compress ideas yet inspire thought through comics. In addition to its six chapters on Russell’s life story, three sections present authorial comments on making the comic, couched in theatrical or musical terms: the “Overture,” the “Entr’acte” halfway through, and the “Finale.” In these “intermissions,” the collaborating writers and artists discuss choices for developing the comic and observe how it is related to their lives in contemporary Athens, now a more multicultural and at times dangerous place than the fifth-century BCE Acropolis. Much of the critical commentary in reviews of and essays on Logicomix focuses on its philosophical emplotment as a quest for the axiom-free foundations of logic. Critics overlook—and some resist—the comic’s larger motif, that the quest for foundations has often ended in psychosis or the threat of it: “the ‘Logic and Madness’ theme,” as Papadimitriou observes (208). This view of human inquiry as potentially tragic and selfdefeating is echoed both in Aeschylus’s Oresteia, drawings and a performance of which conclude Logicomix, and the biographies of the many philosophers Russell, like a superhero on a dangerous and potentially self-annihilating quest, encounters in his travels (Figure 16.5). Reading Logicomix within its multiple narrative frameworks and theme of the personal tragedy often underlying intellectual discovery reveals its paradoxical ­subtext and suggests the complexity of self-reference in ways that address the focus of humanities courses in literature, visual studies, or life writing. Intrigued by a possible correlation between the incidence of mental illness and the quest to establish axiom-free foundations in mathematics during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the authors focus on Russell’s aim to establish these principles, which occupied him, alone and in dialogue or collaboration with, at various points, Alfred North Whitehead and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For that narrative, the authors incorporate Russell’s substantial body of autobiographical writing and cite from his autobiographically inflected talks, where Russell’s voice can be “heard.” The first scene of the quest narrative provides readers with a textual/visual grammar for Russell’s autobiographical voice in his lecture on “The Role of Logic in Human Affairs” at Princeton University on September 4, 1939, the day the United Kingdom declared war on Germany, a time when both theories of logic and political realities were quite different from in the 1890s. His audience included many isolationists skeptical of the call for the U.S. to join its allies. Although the biographical chapters of Logicomix generally move chronologically, entwining Russell’s personal life story with the stages of positions he provisionally espoused, his 1939 address casts an ironic gaze at his earlier idealism. The grammar of this complex relationship of a subject to his past is crucial to Logicomix, as the retrospective voice of Russell the lecturer is mirrored in the temporal architecture of the comic itself. When the visuals depict the older narrating “I” in the frame, the white dialogue balloons across the pages contain the transcribed words of Russell’s 1939 talk; when he is not pictured as the Princeton lecturer, his words appear as voice-overs in yellow boxes. The contrapuntal movement of voices in white and yellow boxes continues throughout the narrative. And the authors and artists add a third voice,

Logicomix and Abina and the Important Men   285

Figure 16.5 From Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos, and Annie di Donna. © 2009 by Logicomix Print Ltd.

that of an imagined Russell, at different stages of life in his exchanges with other logicians. Through this comics grammar, they both foreground the voice of Russell’s autobiographical writing and link it to the imagined unfolding life of their biographical subject. Logicomix’s grammar also includes modes of projecting terror and threat, such as using dramatic bubbles and drawn words jumping off the page in enlarged, jagged, onomatopoeic lettering (Figure 16.6). Its quest unfolds through the syncopation of orderly and disorderly boxes and panels, sudden radical leaps in the scaling of figures, and shifts of perspective. Bertrand (the Third Earl) Russell’s life is presented not just as a “great man profile” but as a study in contradictions. Although born into a prominent British family, he was orphaned at four and grew up under the tutelage of his severe Scotch Presbyterian grandmother, who kept from him the secret of his parents’ early scandalous life in a ménage à trois and their young deaths from diphtheria. His early life is presented as a Gothic tale in which the young boy is haunted by the cries of a mad uncle hidden away

286   Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson

Figure 16.6 From Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos, and Annie di Donna. © 2009 by Logicomix Print Ltd.

in the manor, which filled him with a lifelong fear of madness, fueling his attraction to “the vision of a totally logical world” in the mathematics taught him by his German tutor (73). For example, the older narrating “I” of Russell’s incorporated autobiographical writings represents his young self, in a drawn dual perspective, as fixed between his aim to investigate the new world of books and his fear of the monstrous unknowns around him (Figure 16.6). While the older Russell of 1939 only occasionally interjects observations on his younger self, the drawn representations highlight his retrospection, as interpreted by the author-artist team. Perceiving life as a contradiction between knowledge and faith, Russell apprenticed himself to mathematics at Cambridge while consuming the literary works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ivan Turgenev, and Henrik Ibsen. He experienced life as “extreme inner tension” between a “near-manic passion for certain, absolute knowledge” and “intense loneliness,” which courtship and marriage allayed for a while, although his attraction to other women, notably Whitehead’s wife, Evelyn, kept him in a restless state (87). (In fact, Russell was married four times and known as an inveterate philanderer.) The central chapters of the comic focus on the stages of Russell’s quest to give philosophy the “strong foundations and a logically precise language” of a science through encounters with ­several of the great thinkers of his time (95). Attracted to the search for first principles through reexamining the basic assumptions of mathematics (114), Russell embarked,

Logicomix and Abina and the Important Men   287 both physically and personally, on “a grand voyage of intellectual discovery” (115), “Wanderjahre” like those of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. But his aim to interrogate the foundations of mathematics haunted his dreams like an earthquake, undermining the world and filling him with anxiety (139). And his aim, to travel into “the dark basement of Arithmetic,” is often imaged in terms of the superhero’s perilous quest, one not evident in Principles of Mathematics but a theme of his later threevolume Autobiography (154). Logicomix juxtaposes Russell’s ongoing quest with the larger history of the twentieth century’s wars as they impinge on his personal experience. Much of the comic concerns Russell’s extended conversations with Whitehead and, later, Wittgenstein on writing treatises on first principles, illustrating abstract principles through such lively examples of paradox as the unshaved barber (Figure  16.7). The older narrating “I” of Russell regards these decades as one stage, “my affair with logic” (162). With the onset of World War I, he comes to see nationalism as a kind of political madness invested in manipulating language to blur distinctions between truth and falsity (240). Russell encapsulates his changing view of the world by narrating an embedded biography of Wittgenstein’s son, shot down during World War I, who came, in extremis, to see that a human will “become either a mystic or a madman . . . which is probably the same thing” (250–251). As a result of this ironic view of world war and his history as “a militant pacifist” who was imprisoned for six months for his antiwar activities, Russell’s “I” narrates the quest of mathematics for certainty as often a self-deluding one (253). Concluding his lecture, Russell advises his listeners, “Take my story as a cautionary tale, a narrative argument against ready-made solutions” (297). After presenting his “story” to the isolationist-inclined American audience in 1939, he observes that the “extreme systems” of Nazism and Communism had the shared aim of mandating “the abolition of freedom” (294). But the authors and artists of Logicomix metacritically

Figure 16.7 From Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos, and Annie di Donna. © 2009 by Logicomix Print Ltd.

288   Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson s­ituate the quest in two ways, and its “Finale” articulates those alternative framings through a dialogue that reaches no final resolution. On the one hand, Russell’s quest for the logical foundation of mathematics can be seen as culminating in Alan Turing’s work in developing the computer, which put “the tools of reason at everybody’s fingertips” and is thereby potentially a means of greater citizen engagement in creating a more peaceful world (304). On the other, a tragic view is played out, at the personal level, in the madness, and sometimes suicide, of many of the philosophers and mathematicians engaged in the quest (Gottlob Frege, Georg Cantor, Kurt Gödel, etc.) and, at the international level, in the devastation of World War II. The conclusion of Logicomix returns to the story of its making, as the authors and a­ rtists attend a performance in Athens of the Oresteia, Aeschylus’s drama cycle of familial murder and its ultimate resolution (Figure 16.8). The final play concludes with Athena’s intervention which allows Orestes to live, despite his having killed his mother, Clytemnestra, and offers the ancient Furies a place in the city-state, as the founding premises of Athenian democracy. In dialogic fashion, Logicomix leaves its audience with two alternative paradigms of rationalism that must be weighed against both personal struggles and the catastrophe of World War II that ensued, although British intervention and Russian resistance ultimately prevailed. (Russell, for his part, remained a lifelong pacifist and antinuclear campaigner, apparently overcoming the fear of madness that had bedeviled several in his family.) Logicomix exploits how a comic produced at the multimodal conjunctions of novelistic, philosophical, and graphic storytelling can incorporate the signature features and effects of comics to generate possibilities for new meanings. While its three interlocking frames—biographical, archival-autobiographical, and self-consciously authorial— make it a virtuoso auto/biographic, its focus on logicians as superheroes, plot of a dangerous quest, and sometimes vividly raw graphics emphasize its connection to the subversive impulse of comics rather than the explicit lessons of Abina. The many

Figure 16.8 From Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos, and Annie di Donna. © 2009 by Logicomix Print Ltd.

Logicomix and Abina and the Important Men   289 ­ leasures of reading Logicomix derive not just from its complex architecture, its visualp ization of disputatious thought, its heightened intertextual resonances, its tripled voices, and its open-ended conclusion but also from its irreverent energy that elicits both delight and insight.

Concluding Questions Although Abina and the Important Men and Logicomix are radically different texts, they suggest the range of comics now being conceptualized through disciplinary or multidisciplinary lenses and either explicitly or implicitly aimed at college classrooms. Such comics share several features. They are collaboratively produced, requiring multiple actors with differing kinds of expertise to create a pedagogical vision relevant to particular modes of knowledge. They anticipate and address specific communities of readers in forms of address intended to elicit student responses that run the gamut from aesthetic pleasure to discomfort or alienation as they enable readers to visualize new or forgotten information and inhabit, avatarlike, the positions of unfamiliar ­others. They may animate historical figures in the classroom and energize interest in remote events by incorporating first-person sources, ranging from legal testimony to diary entries, autobiographical passages, and drawn photographs or portraits. They can locate theoretical issues in the courtroom as a forum that often silenced underdogs and redress that injustice by writing “history from below” or rethink the pursuit of foundational principles as a dangerous quest. And they may dramatize the experiences and recognitions of protagonists by dramatizing their stories as representative of larger political and cultural formations and events. When a comic is tied to a particular issue or disciplinary quest for knowledge, it may also help to clarify the scope and methodology of that inquiry, acting as what Fenton says Abina is, “a Trojan horse, a creative work designed to convey a historian’s methodologies.” Nonetheless, not all comics with weighty, discipline-specific content are easily adapted to the classroom. As Logicomix suggests, a comic may also incorporate a subversive critique of a discipline’s norms and values. We conclude with a few questions: What might pedagogical comics as an emergent form contribute to redefining disciplinary methods, theories, and interpretations? How does a visualized story not just illuminate a text but “unflatten” or expand analog and singular conceptions of meaning, as Sousanis suggests? In didactic projects such as Abina that align the textual and visual components of a comic rather than setting them in tension or juxtaposing multiple levels to subversive effect, as Logicomix does, do comics scholars need to rethink their criteria of what constitutes a “good” comic? What is gained, what lost, in making a comic the centerpiece of a forum on a disciplinary history or core issue? That is, when an explicitly didactic comic’s visuality seems primarily illustrative and instrumental, is it less a comic? Must the best comics tell complex, competing stores that generate productive tension between the visual and verbal planes of storytelling and let alternative meanings roam free?

290   Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson

Notes 1. We refer readers to Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, especially the section on using comics and the “Toolkit” (168–173, 235–251). 2. Other titles, several of which are also illustrated by Liz Clarke, include Mendoza the Jew: Boxing, Manliness, and Nationalism, by Ronald Schechter (2013); Inhuman Traffick: The International Struggle against the Transatlantic Slave Trade, by Rafe Blaufarb (2014); Debating Truth: The Barcelona Disputation of 1263, by Nina Caputo (2016). 3. The full-page image of Abina making her claim in court appears on the left-side page rather than the right, as in the comic on page 37. 4. “The digital app was created by and for students. Drawing upon SF State resources, Getz assembled a cast and crew of nearly three dozen students, faculty, and staff. History s­ tudents developed content. Music and theater students voiced characters. Graphic design and ­animation students produced clips. Some grant funding enabled the team to purchase equipment and to compensate faculty and some students; other students earned academic credit. . . . While students played an outsized role in developing the app, teachers helped to shape its design [to determine] how it might map onto the World History AP exam and Common Core standards” (Fenton). 5. Logicomix was named the Time Top Nonfiction Book of the Year, the Financial Times Book of the Year, and the Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, and it was a New York Times bestseller. 6. See Paul John Eakin’s definition: “[Relational autobiographies] offer not only the autobiography of the self but the biography and the autobiography of the other” (58). 7. Logicomix was written in English but translated by its authors into Greek, was first p ­ ublished in Greece in 2008, and was published in the United States and United Kingdom in 2009; it has been widely translated.

Works Cited Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Houghton Mifflin, 2006. “Bertrand Russell: The Thinking Person’s Superhero.” Independent, 2 Sept. 2009, www. independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/bertrand-russell-the-thinkingpersons-superhero-1780185.html. Chaney, Michael A. Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel. UP of Mississippi, 2017. Chute, Hillary L. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Harvard UP, 2016. Chute, Hillary  L. “ ‘The Shadow of a Past Time’: History and Graphic Representation in ‘Maus.’ ” The Comic Studies Reader, edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, UP of Mississippi, 2009, pp. 340–362. Comics in Education. 2018, www.comicsineducation.com. Couser, G. Thomas. “Is There a Body in This Text? Embodiment in Graphic Somatography.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 33, no. 2, 2018, pp. 347–373. Dong, Lan. Teaching Comics and Graphic Narratives: Essays on Theory, Strategy and Practice. McFarland, 2012.

Logicomix and Abina and the Important Men   291 Doxiadis, Apostolos. “What Comic Books Have in Common with Brecht.” Times Literary Supplement, 2017. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/graphic-novels-logicomixdoxiadis. Doxiadis, Apostolos, and Christos Papadimitriou. Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth. Art by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna. Bloomsbury, 2009. Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Cornell UP, 1999. El Refaie, Elisabeth. Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures. UP of Mississippi, 2012. Fenton, William. “Tackling Slavery in the Classroom with a Graphic Novel and an App.” PCMAG, June 2016, www.pcmag.com/commentary/344946/tackling-slavery-in-theclassroom-with-a-graphic-novel-and-a. Getz, Trevor R., and Liz Clarke. Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History. 2nd edition, Oxford UP, 2016. Gravett, Paul. “Comic Books: A Freakish Kind of Writing.” Guardian, 2 May 2014, www .theguardian.com/books/2014/may/02/comic-books-freakish-writing. Kirk, Andrew G. Doom Towns: The People and Landscapes of Atomic Testing. Oxford UP, 2016. Kunka, Andrew J. Autobiographical Comics. Bloomsbury, 2018. Lewis, John, et al. March, Vol. 1 Top Shelf Productions, 2013. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Tundra, 1993. Miller, Matthew L., editor. Class, Please Open Your Comics: Essays on Teaching with Graphic Narratives. McFarland, 2015. Nakazawa, Keiji. Barefoot Gen, Vol. 1: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima. Last Gasp, 2004. Op de Beeck, Nathalie. “Autobifictionalography: Making Do in Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons.” Teaching the Graphic Novel, edited by Stephen  E.  Tabachnick, MLA, 2009, pp. 163–171. Polak, Kate. Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics. Ohio State UP, 2017. Rea, Jennifer A. Perpetua’s Journey: Faith, Gender, and Power in the Roman Empire. Oxford UP, 2017. Redniss, Lauren. Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout. It Books, 2010. Rifkind, Candida “Refugee Comics and Migrant Topographies.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 32, no. 3, 2017, pp. 648–654. Rifkind, Candida. “Review of Autobiographical Comics by Andrew  J.  Kunka.” Biography, vol. 41, no. 2, 2018, pp. 430–435. Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis I: The Story of a Childhood and Persepolis II: The Story of a Return. Pantheon, 2003, 2004. Scott, Joan  W. “Experience.” Feminists Theorize the Political, edited by Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott. Routledge, 1992, pp. 22–40. Smith, Sidonie. “Cultures of Rescue and the Global Transit in Human Rights Narratives.” The Handbook of Human Rights, edited by Thomas Cushman, Routledge, 2011, pp. 625–636. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed., U of Minnesota P, 2010. Sousanis, Nick. Unflattened. Harvard UP, 2015. Spiegelman, Art Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History. Penguin Books, 1986. Spiegelman, Art. Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began. Penguin Books, 1992.

292   Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson Spiegelman, Art. In the Shadow of No Towers. Pantheon, 2004. Tabachnick, Stephen E., editor. Teaching the Graphic Novel. MLA, 2009. Tilley, Carol L., and Robert G. Weiner. “Teaching and Learning with Comics.” The Routledge Companion to Comics, edited by Frank Bramlett et al., Routledge, 2016, pp. 358–366. Walsh, John. “Bertrand Russell: The Thinking Person’s Superhero.” Independent, 2 Sept. 2009, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/bertrand-russell-thethinking-persons-superhero-1780185.html. Whitted, Qiana. “Intertextual Journeys: Black Culture, Speculative Fiction and the Past Text in Jeremy Love’s Bayou.” Class, Please Open Your Comics: Essays on Teaching with Graphic Novels, edited by Matthew L. Miller, McFarland, 2015, pp. 195–215. Yang, Gene Luen. American Born Chinese. First Second, 2013. Yang, Gene Luen, and Lark Pien. Boxers and Saints (boxed set). First Second, 2013.

chapter 17

A m bigu it y i n Pa r a l l el Visualizing History in Boxers and Saints Lan Dong

Colored by Lark Pien, Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers and Saints received overwhelmingly positive reviews after their publication in 2013 and were finalists for the National Book Award. Released in a two-volume set, these graphic narratives present historical fiction about the Boxer Uprising (1899–1901) in China in the verbal-visual medium of comics. While incorporating several reconfigured characters based on historical figures such as Red Lantern Chu, General Tung, and Baron Clemens von Ketteler, the stories in these books unfold around two fictional protagonists: Little Bao (a Boxer who is inspired by nationalism and is determined to rid China of foreigners and Chinese Christians) and Four-Girl (a Christian convert and christened Vibiana who seeks belonging through faith).1 Together the volumes draw the reader’s attention to the intersection of politics and religion during a particularly contested period in Chinese history through the ­parallel stories of two teenage characters on opposite sides of the conflict. As Little Bao and Four-Girl come to terms with who they are and what they believe in while being spir­it­ually guided by the first emperor of China Ch’in Shih-huang and Joan of Arc, respectively, they cross paths in a violent moment during the Boxer Uprising when the Boxers besieged the foreign legations in Peking. Instead of an orderly closure, Boxers and Saints end with contradiction and ambiguity, thus prompting the reader to contemplate the complexity of the historical past. In several interviews, Yang has attributed the inspiration for Boxers and Saints to the first canonization of Chinese Christians. In 2000, Pope John Paul II canonized eightyseven Chinese saints, many of whom were martyred during the Boxer Uprising (Polter 45). The character Dr. Won in Saints, for example, is based on Saint Mark of China, who

294   Lan Dong was an acupuncturist and an opium addict (King). As Yang discovered after further inquiry and research, the Boxer Uprising was one of the most controversial and ­disputed occurrences in Chinese history. It also caused a media frenzy in Western countries at the time. Witness and journalist accounts that appeared in newspapers and other media outlets often were filled with varied degrees of fictionalization and questionable accuracy. They, by and large, reinforced the image of the “Yellow Peril.” As Diana Preston has stated, a lot of the foreigners’ accounts about the Boxer Uprising, “an extraordinary event—heroic and farcical, tragic and shocking, brutal and ridiculous, with far-­reaching implications,” are opinionated and “often prejudiced” (ix, xiv–xv). Preston pointedly quotes Irish journalist George Lynch, who covered the Boxer Uprising for the British Daily Express, to convey the virtually impossible task of telling the truth about large-scale conflicts such as the Boxer Uprising: “The actual truth has never been written about any war, and this will be no exception” (xxvii). Historians have debated among themselves so much that the occurrence is also known as the Boxer Rebellion or the Boxer Movement. It is both “one of the best-documented episodes in the history of the Far East” and “one of the most perplexing” (Preston 335). It is well documented in the sense of the quantity of personal accounts, correspondence, missionary documents, journalistic publications, and other materials, many of which are wrought with misconception, exaggeration, hearsay, incomplete documentation, or fabrication. It is perplexing because “there is no major incident in China’s modern history on which the range of professional interpretation is as great” (Esherick xiv) and because the perspectives reflected in existing documentation, historical or otherwise, are sometimes biased and limited at best. Anchoring the stories through individual characters’ perspectives and involvements, Boxers and Saints offer contrasting views of the Boxer Uprising and the social turmoil leading up to the main events. These books grapple with “issues of religious persecution, Western imperialism, and the meaning of heroism in China’s ‘Boxer Rebellion’ and break these complicated issues down into ‘bite-sized pieces’ ” (King). They engage history through Little Bao’s and Four-Girl’s actions, choices, and memories, all of which privilege the characters’ views of the events and their personal experience. As participants in and witnesses of the Boxer Uprising, these characters lack the knowledge of the future and that of the opposite side. [E]ither in the most immediate sense of their personal fate or in the broader sense of the outcome(s) of the event(s) in which they are participating or in the still wider sense of a future event context that is continually unfolding and in the process ­continually redefining the meaning of all prior events, direct participants also face limitations of a spatial nature—cultural, social, and geographical. Insofar as experience is conceived as a “text” and the experiencer as a “reader,” to use the vocabulary often encountered nowadays in the academic world, different readers will read—or “­construct”—the text in different ways, depending on the values, beliefs, and myths they bring with them to the reading. (Cohen 62)

As “experiencers,” Little Bao and Four-Girl “construct” the Boxer Uprising based on their knowledge and perspective from two opposing sides, with their beliefs and

Visualizing History in Boxers and Saints    295 l­imitations. The way the past is narrated and drawn in Boxers and Saints conveys the complexity of the conflict and prompts the reader to think beyond the dichotomy of right and wrong and to explore the gray area in between. Weaving together different layers of influence and impact through the characters’ ­stories also reflects the Boxer Uprising as being a global, national, and regional event at the same time (Esherick 1). It is estimated that around 250 foreigners, most of whom were Catholic and Protestant missionaries, and around 30,000 Chinese Christians lost their lives in the turmoil (Bays 85). It is a global event in terms of its impact and all the stakeholders involved; it is a national occurrence due to the political context, the role the Qing dynasty played, and its long-lasting effect on China economically and culturally; it is a regional affair because the uprising was mainly confined to northern China. In Boxers, Little Bao’s personal journey is filled with confusion and doubts through which he struggles to identify with his spiritual guide Ch’in Shih-huang, the first emperor, who united China in 221 bc, and to embody Ch’in’s concept of nationalism in the form of a bloody campaign to rid China of foreigners and their Chinese followers. The embedded story of Guan Yin (the Buddhist goddess of compassion), together with the recurring image of the “thousand palms with eyes” poses a counternarrative of the Boxers’ loosely defined nationalist ideology. In Saints, Four-Girl’s spiritual journey reflects Chinese Christianity in particular and people’s faith journeys in general. Struggling to find her calling, she initially persuades herself to strive to become a maiden warrior like Joan of Arc. Four-Girl ends her story with a feeling that she is “unable to protect anyone” (Yang, Saints 162). Her experience is not uncommon for Chinese Christians at the time. She may not have chosen Christianity and become a daughter of the church because of her firm belief in the faith, but she dies a true Christian in her refusal to apostate and her ultimate sacrifice. Her last prayer turns out to be a blessing that saves Little Bao’s life, as the reader finds out in the epilogue of Saints. The discussion that follows examines how Yang’s graphic narratives visualize the ambiguity of faith and nationalism through the parallel imagery of the “thousand palms with eyes” of Guan Yin and of Jesus Christ, how the lack of resolution at the end of the books probes the reader to reconsider the intersectionality of religion and politics, and how these books present what Paul A. Cohen has called a “historically reconstructed past” in which the Boxers and Chinese Christians’ encounters are visualized as “event, experience and myth” at the end of the nineteenth century (3). In contrast to the volume of written records of the Boxer Uprising, historical ­documentation by the Boxers themselves is scarce. As Cohen has pointed out: The Boxer episode . . . formed part of a plurality of larger event structures, including (but not confined to) the pattern of recurrent domestic violence in the late imperial era, the growing problem of rural breakdown, the history of conflicts between Christians and non-Christians from the mid-nineteenth century on, and ­Sino-foreign diplomatic relations. Since these event structures extended not only backward but also forward in time, the historical meanings of the Boxer Uprising were indeterminate at the time it occurred and could only be supplied retrospectively, by historians or others with a knowledge of post-Boxer developments. (9–10)

296   Lan Dong Comics, with their flexibility in structuring space and time, are particularly suited to convey such backward and forward extension and the historical meanings of the Boxer Uprising through intersections and fragmentations. Even though Little Bao is a fictional character, Boxers weaves historical facts into the fabric of his story. His journey shows how an illiterate boy from an impoverished village in northern China becomes a Boxer and how his political ideology is a process filled with doubts and struggles, rather than a set of predetermined ideas. It evolves and changes as he, together with his brother disciples, storms across northern China. His journey of fanatically trying to rid China of ­foreigners and their Chinese followers, many of whom are Christian missionaries and converts, is simultaneously a search for his own purpose and calling. Similarly, ­Four-Girl’s fated encounter with Christianity is shared by many Chinese Christians at the time. Their conversion has as much to do with politics as with religion. Using ­comics’ formalistic features, such as the absence of gutters between panels, bleeding pages, ­borderless panels, and silent panels, Saints traces Four-Girl’s search for herself and her ­calling and at the same time illustrates the larger story of the development of Christianity in China. Boxers and Saints introduce the historical background of late-nineteenth-century China, thus helping the reader contextualize Little Bao’s and Four-Girl’s choices, actions, and reactions and the turmoil surrounding them. Four-Girl’s conversion is as much a religious affiliation as a social belonging. After all, many Chinese Christians at the time were outsiders in the social and political structure of Chinese society. By the same token, Little Bao’s campaign across northern China is a religious persecution as much as a political attack. In reconfiguring the past, these graphic narratives help the reader comprehend how the Boxers’ political antagonism and religious enmity are closely tied to Christian development and the increasing presence and control of Western powers in China in the nineteenth century. Such colonial expansion and foreign interference weakened the imperial government of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and angered many Chinese by the late nineteenth century. In addition, drought, flood, and other natural disasters led to large-scale famine in northern China, which left many young men, and to a lesser degree young women, little provisions for survival and support of their families and no fields to attend to. As Cohen puts it, “These characteristics of the experiential world of North China at the turn of the century—prolonged drought, a growing foreign presence, the spread of a religio-military movement whose members practiced spirit possession and trusted in the power of magic, rumor and mass hysteria, and premature and/or violent death—converged and mushroomed in intensity” (68). To some degree, the Boxers were born out of such intensity. Young men loosely organized local groups and practiced martial arts to defend themselves and their villages. When their numbers grew, they adopted the name of the “Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fist.” Some ­ erformed of these semi-militia groups practiced rituals for spirit possession. They often p the rituals in public, gaining popularity and attracting more members to join them. As their influence grew, tales began to spread about their superpower and invulnerability. It is because of this performative spiritual aspect that Joseph W. Esherick considers the Boxer Uprising “an instance of mass shamanism” (xiii). “Boxer” was a name the ­foreigners gave

Visualizing History in Boxers and Saints    297 them because of their martial-arts training and ritual practice. Many of the Boxers came from northern China, poor and uneducated, not so dissimilar to Little Bao. Little Bao’s story begins in northern Shan-tung Province in 1894 and ends in the ­capital city of Peking in the summer of 1900. Boxers introduces Little Bao as a boy fond of opera performances. At the weekly fairs in the spring, Little Bao usually enjoys operas with the statue of Tu Di Gong, the local earth god, who is “brought out from his temple and given a seat of honor among the audience” (Yang, Boxers 3). The four panels arranged on the bottom of pages 4 and on page 5 not only present a sense of fluidity of the faith among the local people but also foreshadow the forthcoming conflict between ­different faiths. They set the stage for the Boxers’ performing spirit-possession rituals. These panels include very few words: “and together we watch” (Boxers 4). Instead, they mostly rely on visual registers of the medium to convey the connection between Little Bao, Tu Di Gong, and opera performances. The “arrangement of elements in the space of the page,” or mise-en-page, of these panels is particularly worth noting (Cohn 45). Little Bao is positioned in the foreground of each panel, while the statue of Tu Di Gong and the opera stage and various performance scenes serve as the background. All three elements are featured with equal emphasis in terms of size. Instead of facing the stage and watching the opera as part of the audience, Little Bao is facing the reader, as if he is part of the performance. His facial expressions and body language change from panel to panel, suggesting his reaction to and engagement with the operas. Although all four panels are framed with borders, the gutter is rendered to the minimum and invaded by the images of Little Bao together with his animated body language and Tu Di Gong’s pedestal. The sound effects of the opera’s music and singing bleed outside the panel borders as well. In addition, Little Bao’s shirt, the opera stage, and the pedestal are ­colored in various shades of brown, suggesting their connection to the earth and the local earth god, Tu Di Gong. His experience at the fairs, together with distinct images of opera characters, will accompany Little Bao through the rest of the year. Such blending of entertainment, worship, and faith poses a sharp contrast to organized religions. It foreshadows Little Bao’s fated encounter with Christianity and his transformation into a Boxer later in the story. The following spring, Little Bao witnesses Father Bey, a Catholic priest, shielding a Chinese thief, smashing the statue of Tu Di Gong, and proclaiming, “Worship one God! One God only!” (Boxers 18). The villagers are astonished yet unable to take any action in fear of discipline from the local magistrate, thus indicating foreign missionaries’ political privilege in China at the time. The village potter, Kwan-yu, fashions a new Tu Di Gong, as the text narration tells the reader several pages later. On the last page of chapter 1, positioned side by side with Tu Di Gong again, Little Bao’s body language—a stern face and crossed arms—and the image of the new yet deformed statue tellingly show how “things just aren’t the same” (Boxers 30). It is also worth noting that Yang uses three almost identical panels on this page to portray Little Bao and the new Tu Di Gong statue to exemplify moments of development in the narrative, thus relying on the same visual elements to convey the no-longer-the-same “things” in the story. As Scott McCloud has proposed, gutters play a vital role in indicating the passage of time (97). These identical visual details

298   Lan Dong also help indicate time passing and aid the development of the story leaping to four years later in the next chapter. Little Bao’s story presents a combination of the “knowing historian and the unknowing participant” (Cohen 10). Through the “knowing historian,” the reader catches a glimpse of the conflict between Christian missionaries and local people, which lays the groundwork for the Boxers’ antiforeign and anti-Christian aggression. Through the “unknowing participant,” Little Bao, the reader experiences frustration and despair. “Unlike the historian, whose object is to understand and explain, or the mythologizer, who draws energy from the past to accomplish purposes of a political or rhetorical or profoundly psychological nature in the present, the direct participant’s consciousness embraces the entire range of human emotions and goals” (Cohen 62). Little Bao’s first experience with Christianity sets the stage for his transformation into a Boxer in a few years, his disdain for foreign power and religion, and his ready acceptance of the ideology that Chinese converting to Christianity is a spiritual and cultural betrayal. In Boxers, Little Bao’s perspective as a participant is supplemented by historical information. “Not only is individual experience embedded in an event structure that is unfinished and therefore indeterminate as to outcome, entire events often have meanings that are different for their immediate participants from the meanings they acquire as a consequence of future developments that at the time are unforeseen” (Cohen 62). Historians cannot agree on how the Qing court viewed the Boxers at the time—rebels or allies. Neither is it clear whether the Boxers intended to overthrow the dynasty in addition to getting rid of foreign influences in China. The shared sense of antiforeignism seems to have been a major contributor to the loose alliance between the imperial ­government of China and the Boxers. Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908) declared war against all Western powers in June 1900, when the Boxers swept across northern China, vandalizing churches, attacking residences of foreign missionaries, and ordering Chinese Christians to choose apostasy or execution. By then, the Boxers had adopted the slogan “Support the Ch’ing! Destroy the Foreigners!” (Boxers 211). Through Little Bao and his brother disciples’ conflicted feelings about their new slogan, which signals a loose political alliance absent in their early campaign, Boxers reveals the evolving ideology and changing political position of the Boxers at the time and offers a critical engagement with history. Boxers concludes Little Bao’s story in the legations of Peking in the summer of 1900. The legations were the commercial and diplomatic district in Peking where people from America, Britain, Russia, and other countries resided in 1900. In the summer, the Boxers, endorsed by the Qing imperial government and collaborating with soldiers of the imperial army, kept the legations under siege for almost two months. It is not clear why they did not overrun the foreigners, whose numbers, in comparison with the Boxers and the Qing troops, were rather small. The siege ended with the arrival of an international expedition of eight countries. It is near the legations that Little Bao enjoys a fleeting moment of romance with his love interest Mei-wen, who, together with her

Visualizing History in Boxers and Saints    299 sister disciples, has joined forces with the Boxers. They sneak into the Hanlin Academy Library at night, where Mei-wen reads to Little Bao the story of the goddess of compassion, Guan Yin. Born a princess, Guan Yin sacrifices herself to relieve the suffering of others. She is believed to have “one thousand eyes to look for suffering and one thousand hands to relieve it” (Boxers 280). The graphic narrative uses a full-page-bleed panel (in which the panel runs to the edges of the page) to portray Guan Yin standing on her lotus throne, with a thousand hands and a thousand eyes as the background and Little Bao and Mei-wen in the foreground (Figure 17.1). The absence of text narrative calls the reader’s attention to the lack of connection between Little Bao and the story of Guan Yin, as he has fallen asleep during Mei-wen’s storytelling. While Guan Yin is seeing and relieving the suffering—past, present, and future—Little Bao is not. Such a contrast foreshadows the inevitable mass destruction that concludes Boxers: the loss of human lives, the disappearance of the gods of the operas, and the erasure of history and culture in the form of book burning. Yang envisions the Boxers volume as a journey, “a comics version of a Chinese war epic, full of color and drama and blood,” while the Saints volume is “a journal that was found on the journey” and reflects the concept of humility in sainthood (Liu). Both address the main characters’ search for identity and personal calling. Lark Pien, the ­colorist, has chosen a full palette for Boxers and a limited palette for Saints to represent the motivating questions behind them: what it means to be a hero (in Boxers) and what it means to be a saint (in Saints) (qtd. in Hogan). Besides the color schemes, the reader would also notice the parallel cultural influence on the books’ artistic style. In one of his interviews, Yang talked about how he grew up between two cultures, speaking one language at home and another at school, having one name at home and another at school, and having to figure out two sets of cultural expectations. In a way, he sees such duality in American superheroes in comics: having two lives, two names, and two personas and existing in a culture “that doesn’t completely understand them” (Delgado). Boxers ­portrays such duality overtly through Little Bao and his brother disciples’ spirit ritual and possession of opera gods. They adopt different personas before entering the battlefield, visually embodying the dual existence of Boxers as gods and men. Saints depicts such duality covertly through Four-Girl’s conversion to Christianity. She does not undergo transformation in the same sense as Little Bao during her journey; instead, she experiences spiritual visions of Joan of Arc and Jesus and embraces two names: she is born Four-Girl and dies Vibiana. Through these characters, Yang conveys a duality in seeking belonging and seeking faith. If Boxers addresses spirituality amid national and international conflicts, Saints takes a more direct and personal approach to faith and religion. In one of his interviews, Yang stated that “writing about faith is a tricky thing, especially since religion is such a ­contentious subject” (qtd. in Delgado). Addressing such a “contentious subject” amid a contested and controversial historical event such as the Boxer Uprising proves even more challenging, not only for the artist but also for the reader. Yang insists on telling stories about religion and faith, in Boxers and Saints as well as in his other works,

300   Lan Dong

Figure 17.1  Guan Yin with a thousand hands and a thousand eyes. Gene Luen Yang, Boxers, p. 282. © 2013 by Gene Luen Yang.

Visualizing History in Boxers and Saints    301 “because it’s one of the ways human beings find power and belonging” (“Exclusive”). Separating Little Bao’s and Four-Girl’s stories into two volumes is part of his strategy to cover the opposite sides of the conflict and invite readers to figure out where their ­sympathy lies and contemplate the implications of the Boxer Uprising well beyond its time and location. Yang stated: The more I read about the Boxer Rebellion, the more conflicted I felt. Who were the protagonists here? Who was more deserving of our sympathy? The Boxers or their Chinese Christian victims? When the Vatican announced the canonizations, the Chinese government issued a protest. They believed the Catholic Church was honoring women and men who betrayed their own culture. In many ways, the Boxer Rebellion embodies a conflict that some Asian and Asian American Christians struggle with, a conflict between our Eastern cultural heritage and our  Western faith. The two-volume structure is meant to reflect this conflict. (qtd. in “Exclusive”)

On the one hand, Yang presents Little Bao’s perspective, which views Chinese Christians as secondary devils who have betrayed Chinese faith and culture and have become an extension of the Western colonial powers controlling China. On the other hand, he destabilizes such a view with Four-Girl’s story, which portrays one girl’s spir­it­ual ­journey in Christianity. Together they visually and narratively depict alternative chronicles of the main characters’ experiences through which the reader can reconfigure and w ­ itness historical layers and opposite sides. Yang views religions as “collections of communally-held stories” that can give us “a history that extends beyond ourselves. This was certainly true of the Chinese at the time, both those who held onto traditional Chinese beliefs and those who adopted Western ones” (qtd. in Liu). It is, indeed, through stories that Four-Girl begins her journey into Christianity. Born the fourth daughter on the fourth day of the fourth month and her mother’s only child to survive infanthood, Four-Girl has been a familial outcast. As the first page of Saints explains to the reader, the Chinese character for four is a homonym of death (Saints 3). Thus, being fourth is associated with bad luck. Early expansion of Christianity in China was “driven primarily by politics and social dynamics” (Liu). In this context, it is not surprising that Four-Girl starts her involvement with Christianity for political and social reasons—seeking acceptance and a community—yet she ends up having an “authentic spiritual experience” nonetheless (Liu). Her introduction to Christianity is at the house of acupuncturist Dr. Won, where she initially shows more interest in the cookies than in the gospel stories. After hearing about her vision of Joan of Arc, Dr. Won introduces her to Father Bey and the village church, where she soon attends catechism classes regularly and is baptized Vibiana. Her conversion at the age of nine is viewed as a betrayal of her family and her culture and leads to physical punishment and further ostracization from her family, with the exception of her mother. After that, she spends her days working in the church-affiliated orphanage, feeling rather unfulfilled and searching for her vocation.

302   Lan Dong Four-Girl’s story offers “a powerful commentary on the ambiguous power of r­ eligion. The clean-lined style and muted palette serve to emphasize the flashes of color that highlight both the richness of the religious magical realism and the bloodiness of the rebellion” (Coody 34). The religious magical realism runs throughout Saints in Four-Girl’s visions of Joan of Arc and of Jesus, both of whom are drawn in shades of golden color. As Hillary L. Chute has pointed out, graphic narratives are “not only about events but also explicitly, about how we frame them” (2). Episodes of Joan’s life, colored in various shades of gold, are visually set apart from Four-Girl’s daily routine, portrayed in differing hues of gray. The different usage of colors and shades helps Saints frame Joan’s story as events that Four-Girl witnesses from outside and at the same time as interactions that she experiences. To put it in other words, Four-Girl internalizes the “communally-held stories” and lives them as she searches for her purpose. While witnessing Joan’s journey of saving her country, Four-Girl thinks of her calling as becoming a warrior maiden, until she receives a message from Jesus in her last prayer. Yang considers comics “an amalgamation of two different media, of words and ­pictures. Each has its own strengths. When you communicate an emotion through words, you filter that emotion through the reader’s mind and can get much more subtle emotions. Images allow you to approach emotion in a much different way—with an image you put the emotion directly into the reader’s gut, bypassing the brain” (qtd. in Polter 48). He takes advantage of texts, images, and the deliberate combination and sequencing of both and uses comics’ ability to convey emotions in multiple ways to frame history and individual characters’ stories. He portrays Four-Girl’s last prayer as a catalytic moment to highlight the commonalities between Jesus and Guan Yin. The three silent panels on page 157 in Saints suggest Yang’s conscious choice as a writer and artist to explore the overlap between Christian and Chinese religions. He has addressed their similarity in one of his interviews: “The hands-with-eyes were symbolic of ­compassion. The eyes showed that Guan Yin was constantly looking out for suffering. The hands showed that she was constantly working to relieve it. To me, those handswith-eyes looked remarkably similar to crucified hands” (qtd. in Clark). In the absence of text narration, the visual details on page 157 transform the crucified mark on Jesus’s hand into an eye. The detailed change in the visual representation of these panels reinforces that “action serves to determine the viability of images drawn from common experience” (Eisner 18). Read together with the full-page panel on the opposite side of the spread—Jesus being crucified with his eyes closed—these silent panels show the mark on his palm turning into an opened eye and seeing people’s suffering in general and seeing Four-Girl in particular in the moment right before her execution (Figure 17.2). Jared Gardner has argued: “Of all modern narrative forms, comics are the most compressed, the most dependent on ellipses and lacunae; comics, that is, must always show and tell only a fraction of the information required to make narrative sense of the information being presented” (138). In this sense, comics and graphic narratives are fragmented by nature. These silent panels exemplify how meanings are generated by and between fragments.

Visualizing History in Boxers and Saints    303

Figure 17.2  Crucified hand turning into a hand with an eye. Gene Luen Yang, Saints, p. 157. © 2013 by Gene Luen Yang.

304   Lan Dong Yang then uses a full-page panel on the next page to visually tie “Chinese and Christian mythology together, drawing parallels between Guan Yin and Jesus Christ, both figures of sacrifice and compassion” (Hong 73). Growing up in a Chinese Catholic community, Yang views Catholicism as an embodiment of tension and the central figure, Christ, as “at once divine and human, a nobody and a somebody” (Hogan). In the full-page panel on page 158, Jesus and Vibiana both are facing the reader (Figure 17.3). Different from Little Bao falling asleep in the full-page panel of Guan Yin with a thousand hands and a thousand eyes in Boxers, Four-Girl is fully attentive here, receiving the message from Jesus calling her by her Christian name, Vibiana: “Be mindful of others as I am mindful of you” (Saints 158). His words remind the reader of what her mother told Four-Girl right after her baptism: “Please, Four-Girl. Be mindful of those who are near you” (Saints 74). If Four-Girl chose to run away from home then (therefore not being mindful of others near her), Vibiana chooses otherwise now. The omission of gutter space on this page enables a meaningful juxtaposition of Jesus with a Chinese follower who finally finds her calling. Jesus is portrayed in the middle of the page against a background of a thousand hands with a thousand eyes. The marks on his crucified hands are eyes, thus blending his hands with the background. The image of Jesus rising above an opened entrance ties the panel to his resurrection as well as to the story of Guan Yin’s return after death in Boxers. Vibiana is positioned in the lower left corner of the page; her image bleeds to the edge of the page. She is literally halfway in the panel and halfway out. Instead of facing Jesus, she is looking directly at the reader, seeing and being mindful. At this moment, she is seen by Jesus and at the same time is seeing with him, thus connecting her character with the book’s title emphasizing sainthood. Vibiana’s sacrifice before her death is to teach her executioner, Little Bao, a prayer, which ends up saving his life as the reader finds out in the epilogue of Saints. The Boxer Protocol between the Qing court and the Eight-Nation Alliance signaled the end of the uprising in 1901 (Cohen 54, 56). However, its impact would extend much farther. Some historians consider the Boxer Uprising “a harbinger to the two world wars. It was the first global conflict involving both the East and the West. It was also the first war in the age of media, the first one that people around the world followed in their newspapers. And it was the culmination of China’s century of humiliation, a century that still affects Chinese foreign policy today” (“Gene Luen Yang on Boxers & Saints”). The interconnectedness is apparent, for example, in the aftermath of the Boxers Uprising. The US government received an astronomical amount of indemnity and used part of it to fund the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program to bring Chinese students to study in the United States. Some of these students returned home and played important roles in modern China (Yang, Oziewicz, and Midkiff 127). Historically grounded graphic narratives such as Boxers and Saints deal with “an event that is ‘already told,’ already weighted with cultural significance,” but it can be reconstructed and retold with a difference (Witek 4, 17). Drawing the reader’s attention to both sides of the conflict, Boxers and Saints offer what Matthew Pustz has called a process of “casual learning”—“a real, meaningful comprehension that life was different in the past, that people were different in the past, that those differences are determined by certain historical factors that are

Visualizing History in Boxers and Saints    305

Figure 17.3  Jesus with a thousand hands and a thousand eyes. Gene Luen Yang, Saints, p. 158. © 2013 by Gene Luen Yang.

306   Lan Dong shaped by complex causes and effects that are driven by actual human beings actively working (but not always consciously working) to change society” (4). Characters like Little Bao and Four-Girl may not be consciously working but have been actively w ­ orking to help shape history and change society.

Note 1. This chapter follows Yang’s spellings of Chinese names and locations if they appear in Boxers and Saints. Additional Chinese names and places use Chinese pinyin spelling, unless otherwise specified.

Works Cited Bays, Daniel  H., editor. Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present. Stanford UP, 1996. Chute, Hillary L. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. Columbia UP, 2010. Clark, Noelene. “Boxers & Saints: Gene Yang Blends Chinese History, Magical Realism.” Los Angeles Times, 10 Sept. 2013. Cohen, Paul A. History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth. Columbia UP, 1997. Cohn, Jesse. “Mise-en-Page: A Vocabulary for Page Layouts.” Approaches to Teaching the Graphic Novel, edited by Stephen Tabachnick, Modern Language Association, 2009, pp. 44–57. Coody, Elizabeth Rae. “Boxers and Saints.” Religious Studies Review, vol. 40, no. 1, 2014, p. 34. Delgado, Max. “After the Quiet: Creator Gene Luen Yang.” Maximothree.com, 25 Mar. 2014, http://maximothree.com/creator-blog/2014/3/25/after-the-quiet-creator-gene-luen-yang. Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist. W. W. Norton, 2008. Esherick, Joseph W. The Origins of the Boxer Uprising. U of California P, 1987. “Exclusive: Gene Luen Yang Announces New Boxers and Saints Graphic Novels.” Wired, 23 Jan. 2013, https://www.wired.com/2013/01/exclusive-gene-yang-announces-new-boxersand-saints-graphic-novels. Gardner, Jared. “Same Difference: Graphic Alterity in the Work of Gene Luen Yang, Adrian Tomine, and Derek Kirk Kim.” Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, ed. Austin: U of Texas P, 2010, pp. 132–147. “Gene Luen Yang on Boxers & Saints.” Teenreads.com, no date, https://www.teenreads.com/ authors/gene-luen-yang/news/interview-083013. Hong, Caroline Kyungah. “Teaching History through and as Asian/American Popular Culture in Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers and Saints.” Redrawing the Historical Past: History, Memory and Multiethnic Graphic Novels, edited by Martha  J.  Cutter and Cathy  J.  Schlund-Vials, University of Georgia Press, 2018, pp. 61–86. King, Nia. “Addicts and Saints: An Interview with Gene Luen Yang.” Niaking.tumblr, 21 Jan. 2015, http://niaking.tumblr.com/post/108798648195/addicts-and-saints-an-interview-withgene-luen.

Visualizing History in Boxers and Saints    307 Liu, Jonathan  H. “Interview: Gene Yang Talks Boxers & Saints.” GeekDad, 9 Sept. 2013, https://geekdad.com/2013/09/gene-yang-boxers-saints. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: An Invisible Art. Harper Collins, 1993. Polter, Julie. “ ‘Write Your Life, Live Your Faith’: Comic Book Creator Gene Luen Yang on His Latest Work, Boxers and Saints.” Sojourners, vol. 42, no. 9, 2013, pp. 45–48. Preston, Diana. The Boxer Rebellion: The Dramatic Story of China’s War on Foreigners That Shook the World in the Summer of 1900. Walker, 2000. Pustz, Matthew. “Introduction: Comic Books as History Teachers.” Comic Books and American Cultural History: An Anthology, edited by Matthew Pustz, Continuum, 2012, pp. 1–8. Witek, Joseph. Comic Book as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. UP of Mississippi, 1989. Yang, Gene Luen. Boxers. First Second, 2013. Yang, Gene Luen. Saints. First Second, 2013. Yang, Gene Luen, Marek Oziewicz, and Emily Midkiff. “ ‘The Asian Invasion’: An Interview with Gene Luen Yang.” Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 38, no. 1, 2014, pp. 123–133.

pa rt I I I

K E Y IS SU E S I N C OM IC S

chapter 18

Iron y, Ethics, a n d Ly r ic Na r r ati v e i n Mir i a m Engelberg’s Ca ncer M a de M e a Sh a llow er Person James Phelan

In 2001, Barbara Ehrenreich made a claim about the place of breast cancer in American medical culture that remains true today: “it’s the biggest disease on the cultural map, bigger than AIDS, cystic fibrosis, or spinal injury, bigger even than those more prolific killers of women—heart disease, lung cancer, and stroke” (45). Thus, narratives about breast cancer matter, because they inevitably both respond to and influence its place in our culture. In her essay, Ehrenreich, who is in part reflecting on her own experience with the disease, goes on to identify and rail against the coercive power of the master narrative that surrounds it. This master narrative, bathed in “sentimentality and good cheer” (48), is dominated by the martial rhetoric of fighting and surviving, and it spins the experience as ultimately positive: “cancer has made me stronger/better.” Thus, anyone with the disease who, like Ehrenreich, doesn’t see herself in that narrative can feel that her experience—or, indeed, she herself—has been deficient in some way. Before and since Ehrenreich’s landmark essay, other feminists have contributed to this critique, including Sharon Batt, Jackie Stacey, S. Lochlann Jain, and, most notably for my purposes, Judy Z. Segal in two essays, one written before and the other after she herself had breast cancer. In her more recent essay, inspired by positive responses she received to her op-ed in the Vancouver Sun titled “Cancer Is Not the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me,” she notes that the master narrative (her phrase is “the standard story” [“Cancer Experience” 299]) has become somewhat less dominant but that its primary alternatives retain its key features. One alternative goes like this: “I reject the usual battle and survivor rhetoric. I’m just living my life and sometimes life is rough; I’ve managed to have cancer

312   James Phelan and keep going. Anyway, I’m no hero. (But for denying my own heroism I’m pretty great)” (294). The other alternative is what Segal calls the ironic cancer story, which engages in self-praise by seeming to reject it. Segal’s primary exemplar of this variation is Miriam Engelberg’s Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person, a collection of Engelberg’s series of short comics that she drew from shortly after her diagnosis until shortly before her death: “Books like Miriam Engelberg’s Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person do not, in fact, unsettle more typical stories so much as reinscribe them sideways, with this important addition: ‘I haven’t lost my sense of humor.’ (I am pretty great)” (294). Segal continues, “I do not want to be mean-spirited, especially about Engelberg’s book, after her death; however, in promoting the figure of the cancer-patient-with-a-sense-of-humor, the book shares some of the coercive quality of other cancer narratives” (294). In exposing the coercion underlying the master narrative and its variations, these analysts have done very valuable cultural work. Indeed, the numerous grateful responses Segal received to her op-ed demonstrate that many women who have had breast cancer feel that the master narrative leaves no room for their stories. Furthermore, both Ehrenreich and Segal persuasively argue that in focusing on the individual breast cancer patient, the master narrative(s) block any recognition of large structural and societal forces that are likely contributors to the frequency of breast cancer. Ehrenreich notes that the master narrative takes attention away from “the multinational corporate enterprise that with the one hand doles out carcinogens and disease and, with the other, offers expensive, semi-toxic pharmaceutical treatments” (52). Nevertheless, I worry that these valuable critiques begin to inscribe a counter-master-narrative that can exert its own forms of coercion: no self-improvement, self-deprecation, or irony allowed. I also worry that the critiques can lead to the too-easy dismissal of some breast cancer narratives that do not conform to this counter-master-narrative. Indeed, as I argue in this chapter, I regard Segal’s assessment of Engelberg’s memoir as a case in point. Consequently, I ­contend that even while these analysts’ attention to the politics of the master narrative is salutary, we should be cautious about assessing individual narratives in terms of a priori political positions about what those narratives should and shouldn’t do. Breast cancer, like so many other human experiences, can be the basis for a range of worthwhile (and not so worthwhile) personal narratives with a corresponding array of productive ­purposes, from enhancing the teller’s ability to cope to modeling responses that can benefit others afflicted with the disease. We can, I submit, do better justice to both the achievements and limitations of this range via a two-step rhetorical process. Step one is an effort to reconstruct the narratives’ purposes and to analyze the means by which they seek to achieve them, and step two is an effort to assess the efficacy of those purposes, including their politics. In reexamining Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person from this perspective, I align myself with other appreciative treatments, especially those of Martha Stoddard Holmes, Emily Waples, and Mary K. DeShazer,1 but my rhetorical approach leads me to focus on two main aspects of Engelberg’s storytelling that I believe deserve more attention: (1) the diversity of her irony and its consequences for the ethical dimension of her narrative and (2) her use of serial narration to construct an innovative hybrid lyric-narrative form. This attention follows from the rhetorical principle that the way to the memoir’s politics is through its form.

Miriam Engelberg’s Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person   313

Engelberg’s Ironies and Their Ethical Dimensions Engelberg’s title clearly signals her interest in countering the master narrative of breast cancer, but the precise tone of its irony is not immediately clear. Wayne C. Booth, in his landmark study, A Rhetoric of Irony, persuasively argues that all irony involves the ­ironist inviting her audience to reject the literal meaning of her communication in favor of an alternative meaning that the audience reconstructs through a series of inferences about the relation between that literal utterance and the ironist’s actual beliefs and ­attitudes. But Booth also notes that the exact relationship between the literal and the reconstructed alternative can vary greatly. An ironist can sometimes direct her audience to infer that she means the direct opposite of what she says (“awesome” can be a way of saying “totally unimpressive,” and vice versa). But at other times, an ironist can suggest that the literal meaning has some share in the reconstructed one. Furthermore, different degrees of that sharing produce different ironic effects. In other words, some ironies are more ironic than others (and I leave it to you to determine the degree of sharing between my literal utterance and my irony). Consider, for example, three different ironies in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. After Elizabeth Bennet tells her sister Jane about her engagement to Darcy, Jane is ­initially incredulous, saying, “I know how much you dislike him.” Elizabeth explains that the past should be forgotten and adds that in such cases “a good memory is unpardonable” (chapter 59). Here Elizabeth’s irony invites Jane to almost totally reject her ­literal utterance. Elizabeth herself will, of course, remember the progress of her move from strong dislike to stronger love, and she knows—and expects—that Jane will do the same. But Elizabeth’s irony allows her to indirectly tell Jane that her present feelings are so strong that they render her past ones inconsequential. Austen’s famous first sentence, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” (chapter 1), may initially seem to invite her audience to totally erase the literal meaning. As the novel progresses and the marriages accumulate, however, Austen indicates that the literal utterance does capture something about the way the novel’s marriage market operates. Totally rejecting the literal utterance would be a misreading of the irony and its relation to the rest of the novel. Finally, consider Elizabeth’s reply to Jane’s question about how long she has loved Darcy: “I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley” (chapter 59). While Elizabeth is ironically poking fun at herself by saying it is not the man but the mansion that attracted her, Austen also relies on her audience to recognize a considerable measure of truth underneath that fun: the beautiful grounds at Pemberley provide ample evidence of Darcy’s character that enhances Elizabeth’s estimation of him. In addition, deployments of irony typically have an ethical dimension, which can itself be broken down into an ethics of the told and an ethics of the telling. The ethics of the told refer to the moral values expressed in the particular reconstructed meaning

314   James Phelan of the literal utterance, while the ethics of the telling refer to the values expressed in the teller-audience relationship that underlies the reconstruction. Thus, for example, in Austen’s first sentence, the ethics of the told involve her stance against the acquisitiveness of the marriage market, while the ethics of the telling involve her trust in her audience’s ability to recognize the irony and share the ethics of the told. I now want to return to Engelberg’s title by juxtaposing it to the end of her (prose) introduction. Engelberg uses that introduction to provide the larger context within which her illness and her production of the memoir occur. In her late thirties, after her son was born, she began writing short autobiographical comics, while also working part-time as a computer trainer. In 2001, at age forty-three, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and began writing the comics collected in the book. At the end of the introduction, she offers several salient reflections that begin to reveal both her relationship to the breast cancer master narrative and her diverse uses of irony. They say hardship reveals one’s true character, and it was clear right away that I  wouldn’t be the heroic type of cancer patient portrayed in so many television shows and movies. My immediate response was to spend a lot of time in front of the television. I didn’t go inward, I looked for pop culture distraction. (xii)

After a paragraph that ends “faced with cancer and cancer treatments, it’s hard to see life in terms of good times” (xii), she elaborates: There are some days when I’ve literally lain in bed all day, in complete despair about my cancer, and watched bad science fiction movies on TV. But most of the time, drawing comics has been my lifeline through this cancer experience (that—and wanting to stay alive as long as possible for my husband and son, of course). We all have issues that follow us through life, no matter how much therapy we’ve had. The big one for me is about feeling different and alone—isolated in a state of Miriamness that no one else experiences. That’s what drew me to read autobiographical comics, and that’s why I hope my comics can be of comfort to other readers who might be struggling with issues similar to mine. When I was first diagnosed, I felt pressure to become someone different—someone nobler and more courageous than I was. But maybe nobility and courage aren’t the only approaches to life with an illness; maybe the path of shallowness deserves more attention! Life, death, enjoyment, and suffering . . . as I get older I feel more uncertain than ever about the point of it all. Maybe someday I’ll have something profound to say about these important issues, but right now I have to go—it’s time to watch Celebrity Poker. (xii–xiii; ellipses in original)

Although Engelberg ends each of the last two paragraphs on an ironic note, her ­ redominant tone here is serious, even earnest, as she acknowledges her limitations, p especially her struggles with despair and a feeling of isolation. That seriousness marks her comments on her coping mechanism (comics) and expresses her hopes for her book (comfort to others). That tone continues as she acknowledges the force of the master

Miriam Engelberg’s Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person   315 narrative (“I felt pressure”), and it only begins to shift as she names what for her is a ­necessary alternative path (“shallowness”). In these passages, Engelberg clearly resists the master narrative—and her reference to the heroic characters in television shows and movies suggests that she is skeptical about it—but she does not rail against it the way Ehrenreich, Segal, and others do. Instead, she emphasizes that its demands for nobility and courage were not ones she could meet. Within this larger context, when Engelberg shifts to irony (“shallowness deserves more attention”; “it’s time to watch Celebrity Poker”), the main effect is to leaven these serious confessions. In addition, each irony works in a different way. With “the path to shallowness deserves more attention!” Engelberg invites her audience to retain some of the literal meaning in the reconstructed one: let’s make room for narratives that valorize things other than nobility and courage. The ethics of the told involve both her recognition and her acceptance of her limitations. The ethics of the telling involve the invitation to find value in the alternative path, including in the reading of this irony. This analysis leads me to interpret Engelberg’s title as also including some carryover from the literal to the reconstructed meaning. Furthermore, that carryover does not suggest, as Segal would have it, that Engelberg is indirectly proclaiming her greatness. Again, the carryover is part of her ethically honest acknowledgment of her limitations even as she implicitly claims the value of such acknowledgment in a world dominated by the master narrative. With “it’s time to watch Celebrity Poker,” Engelberg hits a lighter note, one that teases her audience about what she will do next. Should her audience accept or reject her claim that she’s going to stop writing in order to watch this shallow television show? At the same time, the whole paragraph exemplifies what it means to follow the shallow path: to find a place for serious consideration—and doubts—about “the point of it all” without becoming overwhelmed by that activity. The combination of seriousness and irony here includes an admirable ethical stance both in the told and in the telling. That stance in turn has implications for the politics of Engelberg’s position, one that both resists the master narrative and makes a case for her version of the nonheroic narrative. Of course, it’s one thing to manage and modulate the ironic tone in a prose introduction and quite another to manage it in the comics themselves, where Engelberg faces the pressures of economy and of handling multiple semiotic tracks of communication. Let’s look first at the affordances of her visual style. Engelberg draws in a simple style, one that appears amateurish. As Figure 18.1 indicates, she restricts herself to black-and-white; her depictions of people and objects are highly schematic; her pages do not have the same semiotic density as those of most other graphic artists. In addition, she relies heavily on the verbal track, so that her images sometimes function primarily as illustrations of what she communicates on that track. Just like any other style (verbal, visual, or verbal-visual), Engelberg’s is politically ­neutral or, if you prefer, ambidextrous. That is, she can use it in combination with the ­verbal track to generate humor of all kinds, including further variations of her irony. (I will analyze the irony of Figure 18.1 below.) Engelberg can also use her visual style in

316   James Phelan

Figure 18.1  “Everything Is My Enemy.” Engelberg, n. p.

combination with the verbal track for a range of nonhumorous, even deadly serious communications. In addition, she can use it to fluctuate between the humorous and the serious on the same page. And of course, she can use it to communicate the message that Segal attributes to the memoir: “I haven’t lost my sense of humor (I am great).” By exam-

Miriam Engelberg’s Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person   317 ining in some detail three of Engelberg’s chapters, I offer my understanding of how she deploys her style for a wide range of ironic effects. In so doing, I suggest that the apparent simplicity of her style masks her ability to engage in complex, multilayered communications. Figure 18.1 is one of Engelberg’s early chapters. (After the introduction, she does not number her pages.) It is a single page with only one panel, and Engelberg fills it with multiple images, including three of herself, and multiple narrative comments and speech balloons spread across it. This execution of her style reproduces on the page the unsettled subjective experience she names in the chapter title and repeats in the middle of the page. Is this utterance literal or ironic? The intersections of the verbal and visual tracks indicate that the best answer is both. The panel is a long and not very coherent list of inimical objects: hot dogs, a hole in the ozone, cheese, transfat, an electric blanket, and so on. This list must be ironic because it is so indiscriminate: some objects she encountered only once, others multiple times, some in the distant past, others more recently. Surely, she does not want her audience to take her literally. But just as surely, she does not want her audience to totally reject her literal meaning. Some of these things— and others not depicted in the list but part of “everything”—are her enemy. Furthermore, the panel succeeds in conveying her actual paranoia, and in that respect, her audience needs to take the literal meaning seriously. At the same time, the irony indicates that Engelberg recognizes her paranoia and can poke fun at it. In other words, the panel shows her deep investment in both the literal and ironic channels of communication. The ethical dimension depends heavily on the interaction of the ethics of the told and the ethics of the telling. Clearly, there’s something deficient in regarding “everything” as one’s enemy, but there’s also something ethically admirable in confessing to that condition and being almost but not quite able to rise above it. Engelberg both exposes her limitations and displays her wit. Her larger message is “I’m in distress, trying to cope, and only partially succeeding.” The chapter “Something Unpleasant and You” shows Engelberg using the interaction between the verbal and the visual to do other things with irony and ethics. In this chapter, she explores the differences between the implicit narratives of educational booklets about cancer (“booklet world”) and her own actual experience (“Miriam’s world”). The booklets paint a rosy picture through their cover illustrations (beach scenes) and their “cool and calm” tone, while Engelberg finds nothing rosy in her experience. In one panel, she extends the relentless emphasis on the positive in booklet world to its absurd conclusion by creating dialogue for three of its smiling patients: “I loved having surgery.” “Me, too.” “Plus we get all these great prescriptions.” In this irony, she invites her audience to do at least two things with the literal meaning of the dialogue: first, to recognize it as the logical extension of attitudes in booklet world and thus not so far from what is literally in the brochures; second, to completely reject the literal meaning of the utterances, as a way to reveal the chasm between her world and booklet world. In this way, she calls out the deficient ethics of the telling and the told in booklet world and begins to stake her own ethical ground in an honest depiction of Miriam’s world.

318   James Phelan In another panel, Engelberg uses a double-edged irony by writing “I’d introduce more realism into the illustrations” above an image of a patient kneeling over a toilet bowl at booklet world’s idyllic beach. The play between the literal and the ironic hinges on the interaction between the word realism and the image. The patient kneeling over the toilet bowl underneath the beach’s coconut tree is, of course, anything but an instance of realism, yet Engelberg’s ironic point is that it is more realistic than—and ethically superior to—the beach scene in booklet world.2 Engelberg completes the chapter by slowly turning from her strategy of correcting booklet world to one of trying on its messages. In other words, she makes the ethically admirable move of trying on the perspective of booklet world. Her first step is to construct a panel in which the verbal track departs from the visual track. On the visual track, she draws the contrast between herself, bald and crying, and patients in booklet world who are smiling happily. On the verbal track, she says, “But hold on here—­ perhaps I’m dismissing the world of the educational booklets too quickly.” Strikingly, there’s no irony in her realistic depiction of herself, but that portrait casts doubt on the hypothesis that there’s more to booklet world than she’s acknowledged. She deepens the doubt with two more panels presenting a nonironic contrast between the two worlds. In both, she gives half of the space to “Miriam’s world” and the other half to “booklet world.” In the first, she juxtaposes two images: herself watching television with a blank expression on her face and an unnamed patient in the idyllic beach scene (now sans ­toilet bowl), lying in a lounge chair under a coconut tree with a smile on her face. In the second, which is all text, she uses three bullet points to convey life in Miriam’s world: “I feel lousy.” “What’s the point of life and death?” “Woe is me.” She then uses the other half of the panel to deliver booklet world’s response: “With a few simple tips you’ll feel good as new!.” The final panel reintroduces irony as Engelberg shows what would happen if she ­followed those tips. She frames the panel with the affirmation “Yes, a trip to booklet world would definitely calm me down,” and she depicts herself saying with a smile, “Exercise can help radiation fatigue. Ginger tea cures nausea.” She then gives the punchline to her husband, who asks, “Why are you talking like some kind of Stepford cancer patient?” The irony here is in the radical understatement of “calm me down,” an understatement that comes to have a considerable ethical force. To adopt the perspective of booklet world would mean losing her humanity. She would achieve not ­calmness but robot-hood. As a result, Engelberg underlines both her objection to the ethics of booklet world and her preference for her own life, however difficult. The contrast between the ethics of booklet world and the ethics of Engelberg’s memoir is especially powerful. “Survivor” appears toward the end of the memoir, after Engelberg’s cancer has metastasized, and its six panels show Engelberg using irony in still another way to resist the master narrative. The first panel (Figure  18.2) introduces the term survivor, and the ­second and third raise questions about when it’s appropriate to apply the term to a ­cancer patient (at time of diagnosis, surgery, or metastasis?). The fourth, fifth, and sixth panels set up an interplay between the literal statements of the narration and the ironic invented dialogue in the speech balloons, with the images adding to the signals of irony.

Miriam Engelberg’s Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person   319

Figure 18.2  “Survivor.” Engelberg, n. p.

In panel 4, Engelberg declares, “Really, I could do without the term entirely. What does it actually mean? Is it just a statement of fact?” and she juxtaposes these questions with an image of a self-satisfied patient declaring, “I’m alive. She’s not. Na na nana na!” Here the play between the literal and the ironic is especially effective. Of course, the

320   James Phelan patient’s declaration is to be rejected as ethically deficient. But since the patient is a generic rather than an individualized figure, Engelberg suggests that the term itself invites such misplaced self-esteem. Thus, the ethical deficiency extends to the master narrative that encourages the use of the term. In panel 5, Engelberg asks, “Or is it a moral statement?” and juxtaposes that question with an image of the same patient, who asserts, “I’m alive because I’m a survivor. I’ve obviously done all the right things.” The irony here exposes a different kind of ethical deficiency: the hubris and arrogance that the term can encourage. In panel 6, Engelberg moves to the moment the term is no longer relevant, but the patient still insists on using it. The irony here exposes the ethical deficiency of being invested in the term, especially but not only at the moment that will render it wholly irrelevant. As these analyses suggest, Engelberg is very much the cancer patient with a sense of humor, but she harnesses her diverse ironies not to indirectly assert her own greatness but to honestly explore the ethical and experiential dimensions of her experience and to do so in ways that lead to ethical critiques of aspects of that experience, including the pressure of the master narrative. These ethical critiques undergird her political stance against that master narrative. These conclusions suggest that Segal should recognize Engelberg as an ally rather than another perpetuator of the master narrative.

Engelberg’s Lyric-Narrative Hybrid and Its Ending In a review essay of five breast cancer narratives,3 including Engelberg’s, Dina Georgis offers this general assessment: “These memoirs seem to be products of their not yet digested accounts of surviving cancer [Georgis apparently was not aware of Engelberg’s death]. Though perfectly understandable, the memoirs’ aesthetic value gets undermined by the urgency of needing to make sense of a horrible experience” (106). While Georgis is certainly entitled to find flaws in Engelberg’s memoir, I question her method. Rather than reconstructing the artist’s purposes and the means by which she seeks to achieve them, Georgis relies on the a priori principle that a successful cancer memoir must show that the writer has “digested” her experience, a requirement that entails afterthe-fact retrospection. This principle means that Engelberg’s serial storytelling during her experiences of diagnosis, treatment, and just living with the illness is doomed to fail. But applying this principle also means that Georgis finds fault with Engelberg’s memoir for not being something that it does not aspire to—and indeed cannot—be. As I suggest earlier, I think a better approach is to start first with Engelberg’s purposes and means of achieving them. In following that approach, I conclude that Engelberg has constructed a remarkably effective narrative, as she uses her diverse ironies as part of a distinctive lyric-narrative hybrid in the service of worthwhile purposes. I have written elsewhere (Phelan, Experiencing Fiction) at some length about the ­differences and similarities of lyric and narrative, so I shall offer just a short summary

Miriam Engelberg’s Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person   321 here. Narrative is somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some ­purpose that something happened. This conception includes the ideas that narrative addresses change over time and that it proceeds through the introduction, complication, and resolution (often only partial) of one or more unstable situations. Lyric is somebody telling somebody else that something is or somebody telling somebody else about her meditations on something. This conception means that lyric is less concerned with change over time than with revealing the quality of things and expressing attitudes toward them— emotions, situations, ideas, and so on. Its movement is not governed by the sequence of instability-complication-resolution but rather by a logic of gradual revelation. Individual texts can combine elements of the two modes in different ways for different purposes. In Engelberg’s case, many of her forty-seven chapters are predominantly lyric, some are predominantly narrative, and others are themselves lyric-narrative hybrids. Furthermore, although more of the individual chapters are lyric than narrative, the overall arc of the memoir subordinates the lyric to the narrative. Engelberg’s story is ultimately one of change over time, as it takes her from the onset of her illness to the edge of death. Engelberg clearly marks the main events of the trajectory: diagnosis, surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, metastasis, and brain radiation. But it’s also a story whose texture and quality depend on the accumulation of those lyric and lyric-narrative chapters. By frequently suspending the forward movement of the instability-complication sequence, Engelberg is able to accomplish her first purpose: to explore multiple dimensions of what’s it like to be a cancer patient in the United States in the early twenty-first century. Furthermore, that exploration and revelation form the basis of her second and third purposes, announced in her introduction: to find a coping mechanism that can simultaneously give comfort to others. Her implicit message is: I hope sharing the ­texture of my experience, including my limitations, can provide some solace to me and be educational for others.4 The three chapters I have examined here are predominantly lyric. “Everything Is My Enemy” is not a story of change but rather a representation of the understandable paranoia that accompanies her diagnosis. Its play between the ironic and the literal, the humorous and the serious, is designed to reveal one significant dimension of her experience of cancer. “Something Unpleasant and You” does include a mini-narrative in which Engelberg moves from directly opposing booklet world to trying on its bromides. But Engelberg subordinates that mini-narrative to her revelation of and response to the relentless optimism and misrepresentations of booklet world, itself a metonym for aspects of the master narrative that she resists. “Survivor” works as a powerful meditation on the term. Engelberg’s opting for the hybrid genre of lyric narrative to achieve her purposes has consequences both for the number of her lyric chapters and their order. To achieve her purpose, she needs many such chapters—but there is no magic number. Similarly, she has some freedom with their order, especially with those lyric chapters located between the main events of the narrative. For example, “Ace Bandage,” a whimsical—and fictional— depiction of how her surgeon was able to wrap her in “the biggest Ace Bandage I’d ever seen,” needs to come after her surgery and before “Nausea,” the chapter that marks the beginning of her chemotherapy. But “Ace Bandage” could follow rather than precede

322   James Phelan the next chapter on “The Disposition of Doctors,” which offers her meditations on how her doctors’ attitudes significantly affect her own. In addition, there are lyric chapters that precede the surgery, such as “Luck,” that could be placed after that event without any ­negative effect on achieving her purpose. “Survivor” gets additional force because Engelberg locates it after her cancer metastasizes; its final panel has a greater relevance to her situation than it would if the chapter appeared before she tells of her cancer’s return. Engelberg’s serial narration, her lyric-narrative hybrid, and her inability to narrate her own death mean that she does not have a natural way to end her memoir. She cannot, for example, offer a retrospective account of her last days. Nevertheless, these ­features of her memoir shed light on how she handles its ending. After “The Undead,” the chapter announcing the return of her cancer, Engelberg composed fifteen additional chapters, all of them short and most of them lyric. Engelberg’s move to shorter chapters—most are one or two pages; the longest are three—may very well be a function of her weakening state. The brevity also lends itself to lyric exploration. Collectively, these chapters function to round out her account of the texture and quality of her experience. The last chapter, “In Perspective,” is an especially apt finale (Figure 18.3). “In Perspective” is another one-page, six-panel chapter. In its first five panels, Engelberg flashes back to an experience in college, when she approached a final exam “with a particularly heavy heart.” Engelberg draws her former self (with a full head of hair) and lists the many things that put her under stress: her boyfriend’s “waffling” about visiting, her grades, her need to do laundry. As with her enumeration of her fears in “Everything Is My Enemy,” Engelberg’s lack of discrimination among the causes of her stress contributes to her psychological portrait—and to the honesty underlying the ethics of the telling. In the fifth panel, Engelberg depicts the moment when she achieves perspective; the image shows her looking up at the stars and moon, and the text announces that “suddenly my anxieties seemed insignificant.” The title of the chapter and the progression of these five panels seem to be setting up a final panel in which Engelberg will apply the lesson of her college experience to her present situation. But Engelberg combines text and image to do something different, something more ethically appealing but more affectively distressing. The image shows Engelberg adopting an even wider perspective than she does in the fifth panel, as she locates herself “(and [her] breast cancer)” as a small dot on the planet Earth in the larger solar system. But the text, which returns to the present tense, confesses that she is not able to adopt that perspective: “I wish I could recapture that feeling now.” This chapter is such an effective ending because it implicitly acknowledges the lure of the master narrative that will allow her to compliment herself (I am suffering, but I can put that suffering in a larger perspective) and then repudiates it in favor of a more honest but less comforting note: My suffering now is so great that I cannot achieve the kind of perspective that I once had. Although the disparity between text and image may initially appear to be another stroke of Engelberg’s irony, I find that she invites her audience to read beyond that appearance to the pairing of two nonironic communications: I’m aware of the perspective that could help me out, but I’m unable to achieve it. The best I can do is wish for it. This lyrical exploration of perspective gets additional force from

Miriam Engelberg’s Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person   323

Figure 18.3  “In Perspective.” Engelberg, n. p.

its position as the last chapter. Engelberg’s telling ends on this unfulfilled wish, which becomes a marker of her final days, and leaves her audience to contemplate both what happens next and the texture and quality of what has already happened.

324   James Phelan Engelberg’s narrative, with its simple and rough visual style, its heavy dependence on text, its short segments, and its consistent ironies, has the marks of a light entertainment, one primarily focused on her using the cancer experience for amusement. But the close reading of Engelberg’s diverse ironies, which depend on a range of intersections between the verbal and visual tracks of the storytelling, on the ethical dimension of her narrative, and her innovative lyric narrative structure, reveals Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person to be a remarkably impressive graphic memoir, well positioned to achieve its worthy purposes. To be sure, Engelberg does not foreground her politics the way Ehrenreich and Segal do, but the ethical engagements she offers serve her own re­sist­ance to the master narrative. Her memoir has the limitations of most personal narratives—Engelberg does not expose the forces behind the frequency of breast cancer, for example—and not all the chapters are as rich as the ones examined here. But I submit that Engelberg’s performance deserves to take an important place beside the valuable critiques of Ehrenreich and Segal in the discussion of the master narrative of breast ­cancer and its alternatives and, indeed, of the place of breast cancer in American medical culture.

Notes 1. Holmes approaches Engelberg’s memoir as well as two other cancer memoirs, Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s Cancer Vixen and Brian Fies’s Mom’s Cancer, through the lens of what she calls “graphic body studies” and makes a strong case both for the general affordances of the graphic medium for cancer narratives and for some of the particular ways her authors take advantage of those affordances. Waples also groups Engelberg and Marchetto, but she views them through the generic lens of autopathography and argues that each in its own way effectively merges the visual and the verbal and effectively represents what’s “graphic” about some aspects of the experience of breast cancer. DeShazer integrates Engelberg’s memoir into her broader insightful study and offers some excellent close readings of individual chapters, including “Something Unpleasant and You,” which I discuss here. 2. If I had more space, I’d discuss Engelberg’s frequent recourse to local fictionality within the memoir, her inventing nonactual scenarios such as this one—and those in “Survivor,” discussed later—in order to better convey something about her actual thoughts, feelings, or experiences. For a discussion of local fictionality in Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? see Phelan, “Local Fictionality.” 3. The other memoirs are by Marchetto, Smith, Watters, and Fussell. 4. Engelberg’s chapter titles typically signal whether her goals in each are primarily lyric, ­primarily narrative, or hybrid. “Diagnosis,” for example, signals narrative, while “Luck” indicates lyric and “Waiting” lyric-narrative.

Works Cited Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. 1813. Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ files/1342/1342-h/1342-h.htm#. Batt, Sharon. Patient No More: The Politics of Breast Cancer. Gynergy, 1994.

Miriam Engelberg’s Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person   325 Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. U of Chicago P, 1974. DeShazer, Mary  K. Mammographies: The Cultural Discourses of Breast Cancer Narratives. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2013. Ehrenreich, Barbara. “Welcome to Cancerland.” Harper’s, Nov. 2001, pp. 43–53. Engelberg, Miriam. Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person. HarperCollins, 2006. Fies, Brian. Mom’s Cancer. Harry N. Abrams, 2009. Fussell, Tucky. Mammoir: A Pictorial Odyssey of the Adventures of a Fourth Grade Teacher with Breast Cancer. Author House, 2005. Georgis, Dina. “Bearing Cancer in Graphic Memoir.” Canadian Women’s Studies/Les Cahiers de Les Femme, vol. 28, nos. 2–3, 2010, pp. 105–109. Holmes, Martha Stoddard. “Cancer Comics: Narrating Cancer through Sequential Art.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 32/33, 2013/2014, pp. 147–162. Jain, S. Lochlann. “Cancer Butch.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 22, no. 4, 2007, pp. 501–538. Marchetto, Marisa Acocella. Cancer Vixen: A True Story. Random House, 2006. Phelan, James. Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progression, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Ohio State UP, 2007. Phelan, James. “Local Fictionality within Global Nonfiction: Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?” Enthymema, no. 16, 2016, pp. 18–31. Segal, Judy Z. “Breast Cancer Narratives as Public Rhetoric: Genre Itself and the Maintenance of Ignorance.” Linguistics and the Human Sciences, vol. 3, no. 1, 2007, pp. 3–23. Segal, Judy  Z. “Cancer Experience and Its Narration: An Accidental Study.” Literature and Medicine, vol. 30, no. 2, 2012, pp. 292–318. Smith, Annie. Bearing Up with Cancer: Life, and Living with . . . Second Story Press, 2004. Stacey, Jackie. Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer. Routledge, 1997. Waples, Emily. “Avatars, Illness, and Authority: On Embodied Experience in Breast Cancer Narratives.” Configurations, vol. 22, no. 2, 2014, pp. 153–181. Watters, Debbie. Where’s Mom’s Hair: A Family’s Journey through Cancer. Second Story, 2005.

chapter 19

A n i m a l s i n Gr a phic Na r r ati v e José Alaniz

An expansive account of animal representation in graphic narrative would go at least as far back as the various fauna in the cave paintings at Lascaux, France, executed around 14,000 bce. French artist Charles Le Brun’s seventeenth-century studies of physiognomy, comparing the heads of humans and animals, might perhaps also figure into such an account, as would the anthropomorphic satirical illustrations of French caricaturist J.  J.  Grandville in the nineteenth century and various British and German political ­cartoonists of the era. Finally, the 1870s motion studies by Eadweard Muybridge in the United States and Étienne-Jules Marey in France in the 1880s form a crucial link between scientific measurement, cinema, and comics; they often utilized animal bodies in their research (Bukatman). In fact, animal representation has figured in many of the medium’s important developments and anchored one of its most popular genres, funny­animal comics. But let us start the story proper at the modern emergence of the comics form sometime toward the end of the nineteenth century, with the work of such artists as T. S. Sullivant and Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, whose charming sequential drawings of cats appeared in the French journal Le chat noir in the 1880s and 1890s. These pieces, at most a page long, featured felines in various activities in six to eight borderless panels. In a precinematic age, Steinlen’s brief, wordless stories figured a new precision in the visual rendering of time, according to Scott Bukatman: “Charting the progress of the cat’s attempts to land a goldfish, or get its head unstuck from a bucket, one marks the smooth passage of moment to moment” characteristic of the medium’s future development (Bukatman 92; see also Kunzle 203–212). In “The Awful End of a Goldfish,” Steinlen even makes use of a “motion blur” to indicate a cat’s frenzied attempts to snag a meal; such effects would become a standard part of the repertoire, especially in humor comics. In addition, Steinlen occasionally took steps toward full-blown anthropomorphism, as in “A Moonlight Cat Tragedy,” featuring star-crossed feline lovers; this, too, would become standard in the medium.

Animals in Graphic Narrative   327 With the rise of newspaper strips at the turn of the twentieth century, especially in the United States, animals appeared as sidekicks or companions; an example is the pit bull terrier Tige in Richard Outcault’s Buster Brown (1902–ca. 1921). Often, these animals (dogs, cats, rabbits) figure as “out of control” elements of chaos, as seen in James Swinnerton’s Jimmy (aka Little Jimmy, 1904–1958) and Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–1926). Their bodies may even protrude from the panels into the white space of the gutter, as occurs in various strips featuring Outcault’s Yellow Kid character (1895–1898). Once more, such representations facilitated aesthetic breakthroughs for the art form as a whole. Comics scholar Thierry Smolderen argues that the use of a parrot in “The Yellow Kid and his New Phonograph” (October 25, 1896) helped cement the popular use of word balloons in the medium: “just by being a parrot, the bird conjures up irresistibly, transparently, the image of a sound picture in the reader’s mind. Instead of the traditional written banner, the bird produces what we now call a speech balloon” (Smolderen 104). One of the greatest masterpieces of graphic narrative, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (1913–1944), had its origins in another set of animals “breaking out” of their panel ­confines. Herriman’s The Dingbat Family (1910–1916), while centered on humans, often featured a separate running gag about a cat and a mouse along the bottom of the strip. Eventually, these figures took over as the main attraction in their own series about ­gender-ambiguous Krazy, Ignatz the mouse, Officer Pupp, and the denizens of Coconino County. Krazy Kat’s absurdism and ongoing sadomasochistic love-triangle plot—­ punctuated by Ignatz hurling a brick at Krazy’s head, “producing” a heart icon—inspired even the early Dadaist movement in Europe (Inge). Today the Small Press Expo, one of the most important US festivals for alternative comics, gives out its annual prizes in the form of bricks, calling them the Ignatz Awards. The metaphorical approach to animals in newspaper strips saw perhaps its most wrenching application in Al Capp’s satirical Li’l Abner (1934–1977), in the form of the shmoo, a fantasy domestic species that provides for all humanity’s food needs—they lay eggs, give milk, and enjoy dying so as to be consumed as delicious steaks. Their eyes even make fine suspender buttons, and their whiskers are excellent toothpicks. Introduced in 1948, the shmoos’ abundance of benefits comes to threaten capitalism itself. Among the strip’s more disturbing sights is the mass slaughter of shmoos in the name of preserving the Western economic order. The shmoos became a mid-century hit, spawning comics collections, merchandising, and many popular-culture references. More conventional depictions of animals manifested in adventure strips such as Roy Crane’s Wash Tubbs (1924–1988) and Tarzan of the Apes (1929), initially illustrated by Hal Foster. A gorilla even featured in a notable 1949 storyline in Chester Gould’s crime series Dick Tracy (1931). Animals remained a common feature of the medium with the rise of comic books in the mid-1930s. The first appearance of Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster’s Superman (debuted in Action Comics #1, June 1938, National), which launched the superhero genre, ­compared the alien strongman to Earth insects such as ants and grasshoppers by way of a “scientific explanation” for his extraordinary physical feats. Paul Norris and Mort

328   José Alaniz Weisinger’s water-based Aquaman (debuted in More Fun Comics #73, November 1941, National) also interacted with and controlled sea life, while more obscure costumed adventurers also featured animal companions or partners, such as the lion Zar in Ben Thompson’s Ka-Zar series (debuted in Marvel Comics #1, October 1939, Timely), the trained seal Battler in Steve Broder’s Kinks Mason stories (debuted in Fight Comics #1, January 1940, Fiction House), and Bingo the intelligent kangaroo in S. M. Iger and Jerry Winters’s Kangaroo Man (debuted in Choice Comics #1, November 1941, Great Comics). Bingo, notably, expresses himself in thought balloons. The most famous such character remains Superman’s pet Krypto the Superdog, created by Otto Binder and Curt Swan (debuted in Adventure Comics #210, March 1955, DC). Superheroes’ so-called silver age of the 1960s and beyond saw the appearance of such figures as the copious insect life associated with Stan Lee, Larry Leiber, and Jack Kirby’s Ant-Man (debuted in Tales to Astonish #35, September 1962, Marvel), Lee and Kirby’s sabretooth tiger Zabu as the new companion to the revamped Ka-Zar (debuted in X-Men #10, March 1965, Marvel), and Lee and Kirby’s Lockjaw the Inhuman dog (debuted in Fantastic Four #45, December 1965, Marvel). Funny-animal comics, the genre in which the (quasi-)animal body serves as a central focus, traces its origins largely to Gus Dirks’s strip Latest News from Bugville (1900–1902), comparable in some respects to the Russian-Polish animator Wladislaw Starewicz’s insect films (e.g., The Cameraman’s Revenge, 1912). With children as their p ­ rimary audience (see Berger 20–22 for the link between children and animals in modernity), funny-animal strips came to largely define the art form for many casual readers. Among the most prominent early examples: Swinnerton’s Mr. Jack (1903–1935), which featured human-cat hybrids; Sidney Smith’s Old Doc Yak (1912–1919), starring a talking goat; and the aforementioned Krazy Kat. As in that strip, many funny-animal figures developed from and referred back to a long tradition of racial or ethnic stereotyping in caricature (see the aforementioned Sullivant). The funny-animal genre’s primary mode, anthropomorphism, operates in complex ways. For example, in “Catastrophe,” a four-panel story in Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks’ Mickey Mouse (1930) from 1933, artist Floyd Gottfredson shows Mickey (an animalhuman hybrid) sitting upright at a table in a restaurant, being served by a dog-man waiter. Yet Mickey’s dog, Pluto (an animal-human hybrid of a different register) does not stand upright or wear clothes as the others do but rather gets about on four legs, naked except for his collar and leash. He, in short, acts more “animal-like,” despite his “cute” face and human-like expressions, chasing a cat (also normal-sized, quadruped) that sticks its tongue out at him. As the story illustrates, there exist different degrees of “­animalness” in funny-animal comics, what the animation scholar Paul Wells has termed “bestial ambivalence” (72). Such a dynamic obtains throughout the genre, whether in mega-popular manifestations such as Charles Shulz’s Peanuts (1950–2000), with its vainglorious beagle Snoopy and his avian sidekick Woodstock, or in Ernie Hart’s little-remembered superhero/ funny-animal fusion Super Rabbit (debuted in Comedy Comics #14, February 1943,

Animals in Graphic Narrative   329 Timely), or in Chilean cartoonist René Pepo Ríos’s Condorito (1949) and Cubans Marcos Behemera and Virgilio Martínez’s Supertiñosa (1959). The undisputed master of the funny-animal genre, Carl Barks, spent decades depicting the comic-book exploits of Donald Duck and his extended family, including his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie and his wealthy uncle Scrooge McDuck, starting in the 1940s. Barks helped catapult funny-animal comics to the top of the sales charts in the 1950s. Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories #156 (September 1953) had a print run of more than 3 million copies (Gabilliet 40). The genre in its mainstream incarnation could and did go beyond its “familyfriendly” image, never more remarkably than in former Disney animator Walt Kelly’s Pogo (debuted in Animal Comics #1, September 1942, Dell; newspaper strip 1949–1975). In the interactions of Pogo Possum, Albert Alligator, Porky Pine, Deacon Mushrat, and other citizens of Okefenokee swamp, Kelly offered a decidedly leftist view of life in the ­mid-century USA. Pogo exhibited a “liberal” attitude in its diverse extended family of animals, love of nature, and critique of American nativism, most pointedly in 1953, when Kelly attacked the red-baiting Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy through the character of Simple J. Malarkey, an evil opportunistic cat who wants to “clean up” the swamp. With the years, Kelly’s nature studies and swampscapes became more elaborate and delicately rendered, in keeping with his growing concerns over the ecological crisis. Kelly championed environmentalist causes, as in a 1970 poster and a 1971 strip in which a dejected Pogo sits before a polluted swamp and utters his famous phrase, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” “Bestial ambivalence” pervades, in a very different way, Robert Crumb’s adult underground comix series Fritz the Cat (1965–1972), a parody of funny animals featuring a foul-mouthed, pot-smoking, sexist feline college-student protagonist. The stories presented a countercultural critique of relations between the races and the sexes, as well as US policy in Vietnam. In the final installment, “Fritz the Cat Superstar” (1972), the hero date-rapes a rabbit-woman and emotionally abuses an ostrich-woman, who kills him with an ice pick to the head. The series not only validates Wells’s point that “sometimes the notion of sexuality or gender is reinforced by an implied notion of animality” (67) but also demonstrates how the strategic blurring of the boundary between human and animal destabilizes both; Fritz may appear more “human” in one panel, sitting in an alligator-woman’s mouth, pondering the effect of divorce on his finances, and in the next, he may look more “catlike” as he flies through the air after she spits him out. No work pushes such questions in more complicated and productive directions than Art Spiegelman’s celebrated graphic Holocaust memoir, Maus (1986–1991), in which he deploys a “funny animal” trope of human-mouse amalgams as Jews, human-cat amalgams as Germans, human-pig amalgams as Poles, and so on. Spiegelman first explored his family’s Shoah experiences in a short work by the same name, published in Funny Aminals Comix #1 (1973), edited by Justin Green. For that piece, he experimented with a technique reminiscent of woodcuts, which he eventually rejected in favor of the more crude and “minimalist” approach in the final work.

330   José Alaniz Identity in the memoir functions in much more fraught and self-reflexive ways than the “species = ethnicity” scheme might suggest. When Jews try to pass as Poles, they wear a pig mask. The children of a Jewish-German couple are human-mouse-cat hybrids. At one point, Jews are hiding in a dank cellar infested with (realistically drawn) rats. In a direct address to the reader, a human Spiegelman wearing a mouse mask ­agonizes over the ethics of his work, while sitting atop a mountain of naked human corpses with mouse heads. In short, Maus’s “funny animal” trope exists only to be archly deconstructed. Other key instances of funny animals in more “adult” contexts include underground comix artist Dan O’Neill et al.’s Air Pirates Funnies (1971), whose depictions of Mickey Mouse and other characters engaging in sex and other non-child-friendly activities prompted a 1975 lawsuit by the Disney Corporation, which it dropped in 1979 (Levin); Steve Gerber and Val Mayerik’s Howard the Duck (debuted in Adventures into Fear #19, December 1973, Marvel); Reed Waller and Kate Worley’s pornographic soap opera Omaha the Cat Dancer (debuted in 1978 in Vootie #8, January 1978, Self-published); Dave Sim’s Cerebus the Aardvark (1977–2004); Matt Groening’s Life in Hell (1977–2012); Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1984); Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo (1984); Chris Ware’s Quimby the Mouse (1990); and Jim Woodring’s Frank (debuted in JIM #4, October 1990, Fantagraphics). As noted, alongside the funny-animals genre, a separate representational mode—less recognized—has striven to depict nonhuman life more in its uniqueness and radical otherness. While still sentimentalized in their portraits, works and series such as The Lone Ranger’s Famous Horse Hi-Yo Silver (1952–1960, Dell), Walt Disney’s Big Red (1962, Gold Key), August Lenox’s adaptation Walt Disney’s Water Birds and the Olympic Elk (Four Color #700, April 1956, Dell), the wire fox terrier Milou (aka Snowy) in Belgian artist Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin (1929–1976), and even, to a certain extent, Robert Kanigher and Alex Toth’s superpowered Rex the Wonder Dog (1952, DC) all show animals behaving more or less as animals. All the same, the matter of anthropomorphism’s ubiquity in graphic narrative bears deeper examination. In his 1980 essay “Why Look at Animals?” John Berger c­ ontends that the representation of nonhumans, including in comics, memorializes the disappearance of the “animal gaze” in modern life. In his discussion of Grandville’s s­ avagely satirical series of illustrations The Public and Private Life of Animals (1877), he notes that animals in and of themselves vanish in a bid to comment on human social mores: These animals have become prisoners of a human/social situation into which they have been pressganged. The vulture as landlord is more dreadfully rapacious than he is as a bird. The crocodiles at dinner are greedier at the table than they are in the river. . . . The dogs in Grandville’s engraving of a dog-pound are in no way canine; they have dog faces, but what they are suffering is imprisonment like men. (19; emphasis in original)

This raises a crucial point: the nonhuman figure is almost always “emptied” of its own value so as to effect what Michael Chaney calls a “strategic and parodic veiling of the

Animals in Graphic Narrative   331 human” (130). He goes on to say that animals in comics, in particular those that h ­ ighlight an anthropomorphic mode, enact a “queering of the [human] body” (134). Or, as Wells puts it: “Animal metamorphosis . . . privileges cross-species engagement, cross-dressing, gender-shifting and the performance of identity as a method by which unreal settings and impossible situations may be used as a vehicle to play with contemporary issues” (Wells 66). We might even extend this reasoning to declare that any attempt at visually representing an animal cannot avoid investing its image with some vestige of its human maker. We see this most markedly in the conventions and clichés of visual depiction; as Lisa Brown writes, “images of animals are culturally coded and take on certain prescribed characteristics—especially in comics: the proud lion, the mischievous cat, the sly fox, the wise owl, the dumb bear, the untrustworthy snake” (4). As Wells warns through understatement, “the animal might be evacuated” (83–84). Let cartoonist Edwina Dumm’s Tippie (aka Cap Stubbs and Tippie, 1918–1966) serve as an example and test case. A Sunday strip from August 3, 1941, shows, over three tiers and fifteen speechless panels (except for sniffs, growls, and meows), Tippie the dog’s “befriending” of a wayward kitten. He defends the young feline from all threats, real and imagined (at one point even growling directly at the reader), until its mother comes to retrieve it. Tippie is left alone in the final panel, staring at the reader in befuddlement. Dumm’s short tragicomedy sets up some important questions. Does Tippie feel “happy” about his new companion, as his expressions seem to show? Does he experience “loneliness” at the end of the tale, as Dumm seems to draw him? Or are these decidedly human (?) emotions mostly projections of readers accustomed to narratives with human ­protagonists? Unlike the aforementioned Mickey Mouse strip, in which the animalhuman hybrids speak (except for Pluto), this episode of Tippie presents its animals in a more “realistic” and “silent” mode, while at the same time clearly skewing their responses toward sentiment. No humans are in sight, yet one could argue that in critical respects, the human gaze suffuses these figures. As such, if their human representers all too easily “speak for” animals, this clearly happens because—as pointed out by Michel Montaigne and others—animals do not speak for themselves, at least in human language. And despite the rise of animal rights movements and new laws to partly address their suffering, the “muteness” of animals remains an impediment to fully placing their needs on some sort of equal footing with our own. As Jacques Derrida famously phrased it, “It would not be a matter of ‘giving speech back’ to animals but perhaps of acceding to a thinking, however fabulous and chimerical it might be, that thinks the absence of the name and of the word otherwise, as something other than a privation” (48). Such a state of affairs makes those graphic narrative works (many of them from the late 1980s on) that seek either to problematize the question of the animal and speech or else to convey an animal consciousness on “its own terms” as far one can imagine such a thing, utilizing comics’ unique meaningmaking strategies to do so, worth examining in the final portion of this chapter. David Herman, by combining a narratological with a critical animal studies approach, arranges animal graphic narratives along a continuum from “coarse-grained” (e.g., funny

332   José Alaniz animals) to “fine-grained,” that is, works that “mode[l] the richness and complexity of ‘what it is like’ for nonhuman others . . . [thus] underscor[ing] what is at stake in the ­trivialization—or outright destruction—of their experiences” (“Storyworld” 159), arguing that the medium opens non-“monomodal” avenues for animal representation (160). He takes up the example of Nick Abadzis’s historical graphic novel Laika (2007), which ­during the space-mission scene juxtaposes no fewer than four “experiential frames” on a two-page spread to convey the space dog’s “objective” (e.g., telemetry readings) and “­subjective” state, or Umwelt (“the lived, phenomenal world . . . of creatures whose organismic structure differs from our own” [159]).1 Major works which follow similar strategies include Grant Morrison and Chas Truog’s Animal Man series (1988), notable for advancing environmentalist and animal-welfare themes; Morrison and Frank Quitely’s We3 (2005), which employs unconventional ­layouts and speech to convey its cyborg animal protagonists’ Umwelt; Peter Kuper’s Ruins (2015), about a monarch butterfly’s migration to Mexico; and Stephen Murphy and Michael Zulli’s The Puma Blues (1986–2015), which, in a landmark chapter, “The Empire of the Senses,” enlists silence, sound effects, layouts, and other devices to depict a cougar’s nighttime hunt (see Alaniz). All of these works explore to varying degrees the place of animals in an age of human-caused ecological destruction (i.e., the Anthropocene) and how the lack of human speech consigns them to subordinate, instrumentalized status, mass extinctions, and unspeakable suffering in industrialized food systems. Few works tackle the latter theme as unflinchingly as Filipino comics artist Gerry Alanguilan’s Elmer (2009), in which chickens gain the power of human speech, followed by a transitional period of social chaos modeled to an extent on human civil-rights struggles. Such a link between animal and human welfare also appears in John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell’s March (2013–2016); the memoir, by the iconic black congressman from Georgia who played an active role in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, recounts how seeing the slaughter of chickens as a child first sparked his struggle for social justice. Comics representations of animals continue to figure in  politically charged contexts, as both allegories and tropes, in such works as Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon’s graphic novel Pride of Baghdad (2006); the “feast” episode (about the slaughter of a bull) from Joe Sacco’s journalistic account Footnotes in Gaza (2009); and Rutu Modan and Igal Sarna’s short story “War Rabbit” (2011), on the 2009 intifada in Gaza, the Israeli government’s military response, and non-Palestinian Israelis’ reaction to the violence. At the risk of overly simplifying Herman’s aforementioned scheme, I offer this list of animal depictions in comics that tend toward the “coarse-grained” part of the spectrum, chiefly through highly anthropomorphic approaches: Japanese manga master Osamu Tezuka’s series Jungle Emperor (1950–1954); Jack Kirby’s Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth (1971, DC); Bill Mantlo and Keith Giffen’s Rocket Raccoon (debuted in Marvel Preview #7, Summer 1976, Marvel); Roy Thomas and Scott Shaw’s Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew (debuted in New Teen Titans #16, February 1982, DC); Walter Simonson’s fanfavorite-storyline Frog version of the superhero Thor (Thor #346, February 1986, Marvel); Masashi Tanaka’s Gon (1991); Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1994); the 1995 storyline dealing with the death of Farley the dog in Lynn Johnston’s newspaper

Animals in Graphic Narrative   333 strip For Better or for Worse; French artist Lewis Trondheim’s La Mouche (1995), told from the point of view of a housefly; Jay Hosler’s Clan Apis (1998); Spanish authors Juan Díaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido’s Blacksad (2000); French-Algerian artist Joan Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat (2002); Chris Eliopoulos and Ig Guara’s Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers (2009, Marvel); Adam Hines’s Duncan the Wonder Dog (2010); Joshua Barkman’s Web series False Knees (2011); Matt Dembicki’s Xoc: The Journey of a Great White (2012); the popular series My Little Pony (2012, IDW); Cece Bell’s graphic memoir El Deafo (2014); Gabrielle Bell’s serial in the Paris Review, Little Red and Big Bad (2017); and the work of Norwegian cartoonist Jason (John Arne Sæterøy). A list of works that gravitate toward Herman’s “fine-grained” zone of the spectrum, privileging less humanized depictions of animals or otherwise complicating readerly ­preconceptions of same, whether real or imaginary, would include: Bryan Talbot’s Tale of One Bad Rat (1994); French artist Leo’s Worlds of Aldebaran series (1994); Steve Bissette’s Tyrant (1994–1996); Ricardo Delgado’s The Age of Reptiles (1997); Rwandan-Canadian ­artist Rupert Bazambanza’s Smile through the Tears (2005); Australian graphic novelist Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006); James Vining’s First in Space (2007); German artist Jens Harder’s Alpha (2009); Brazilian comics artist Pedro Franz’s short story Dead Horses Remains by Highway (2013); Sharon Rosenzweig’s Mom’s Flock (2015), published in the Annals of Internal Medicine; Mita Mahato’s Sea (2015); Richard McGuire’s Here (1989–2015); Finnish comics artist Hanneriina Moisseinen’s graphic novel The Isthmus (2016); Nicole Georges’s graphic memoir Fetch: How a Bad Dog Brought Me Home (2017); Gabrielle Bell’s Everything Is Flammable (2017); and the work of Seattle artist Jon Strongbow. Among the most-discussed examples of comics animal imagery in recent years, we may include cartoonist Matt Furie’s Pepe the Frog (debuted in Boy’s Club #1, 2005), which became the object of a heated tug of war between its creator and the “alt-right” during and after the 2016 US presidential campaign; and Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Lucky the Pizza Dog (debuted in Hawkeye vol. 4, #1, August 2012, Marvel), a breakout nonhuman star of that series, which even earned it an action figure. Comics artists continue to wrestle (either overtly or latently) with the ethics of what it means to depict nonhuman life in words and pictures, with the ineluctable truth that in modernity, “[t]he visual animal is caught in an argument over whether the animal should be considered on its own terms or understood through a network of human-­animal relations” (Burt 188). Graphic narrative’s visual-verbal representation of animals starkly reminds us, as no other medium can, of Helen MacDonald’s observation: “None of us sees animals clearly. They’re too full of the stories we’ve given them” (4).

Note 1. A term coined by the Baltic German biologist Jakob Von Uexküll.

Works Cited Alaniz, José. “ ‘In the Empire of the Senses’ and the Narrative Horizons of Comics.” Humanities, vol. 6, no. 2, 2017, https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/6/2/31.

334   José Alaniz Berger, John. About Looking. New York: Vintage International, 1991. Brown, Lisa. “An Introduction to the Illustrated Animal.” Antennae, no. 16, 2011, 3–6. Bukatman, Scott. “Comics and the Critique of Chronophotography, or ‘He Never Knew When It Was Coming!’ ” Animation, vol. 1, no. 1, 2006, pp. 83–103. Burt, Jonathan. Animals in Film. Reaktion, 2002. Chaney, Michael. “Animal Subjects of the Graphic Novel.” College Literature, vol. 38, no. 3, 2011, 129–149. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. Marie-Louise Mallet. Fordham UP, 2008. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. UP of Mississippi, 2010. Groensteen, Thierry. Animaux en cases: Une histoire critique de la bande dessinée animaliè. Futuropolis, 1987. Herman, David. Animal Comics: Multispecies Storyworlds in Graphic Narratives. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Herman, David, ed. “Storyworld/Umwelt: Nonhuman Experiences in Graphic Narratives.” SubStance, vol. 40, no. 1, 2011, 156–181. Inge, M. Thomas. Comics as Culture. UP of Mississippi, 1990. Kunert-Graf, Rachel. “Dehumanized Victims: Analogies and Animal Avatars for Palestinian Suffering in Waltz with Bashir and War Rabbit.” Humanities, vol. 7, no. 3, 2018, https://www. mdpi.com/2076-0787/7/3/79/pdf-vor. Kunzle, David. The History of the Comic Strip. U of California P, 1990. Levin, Bob. The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney’s War against the Counterculture. Fantagraphics, 2003. MacDonald, Helen. “What Animals Taught Me about Being Human.” New York Times Magazine, 16 May 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/magazine/what-animalstaught-me-about-being-human.html. Smolderen, Thierry. “Of Labels, Loops and Bubbles: Solving the Historical Bubble of the Speech Balloon.” Comic Art, no. 8, 2006, pp. 90–112. Wells, Paul. The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons, and Culture. Rutgers UP, 2009.

chapter 20

The Di v ersiona ry A rt of Zei na A bir ach ed i n Le pi a no or ien ta l Mark M c Kinney

The Art of Crossing the Affrontier in the Graphic Novel 1 The colonial heritage of French-language comics is vast and runs through the publications of seminal cartoonists, including Rodolphe Töpffer, Christophe (Georges Colomb), Alain Saint-Ogan, and Hergé (Georges Remi), some of whom continue to influence artists and readers enormously in French-speaking Europe and beyond. The process of assessing that heritage and creating alternatives has only begun (see McKinney, The Colonial Heritage and Redrawing French Empire). In the vanguard of that reevaluation and reinvention are a growing number of cartoonists who publish in France, Belgium, or Switzerland and have a family connection to formerly colonized groups. Of course, others are engaged in this activity, too: cartoonists, publishers, and readers without such a heritage. Moreover, there is often no direct causality between ethnic or family heritage and artistic choice. One problem facing cartoonists who choose to focus on postcolonial issues is how to balance a focus on artistic form with political intent and ethnic content, broadly speaking.2 Artists from postcolonial ethnic minority groups who thematize (post)colonial issues risk having their art read as ­transparently autobiographical and their artistic creativity or formal inventiveness ­discounted or ignored. For cartoonists in French-speaking Europe, one way out of this classic conundrum runs through alternative comics and avant-gardism. In twentiethcentury France, the move away from comics as a children’s medium and toward establishing them as a respectable art form can be traced back to Futuropolis, a comics bookstore and publisher directed primarily by Etienne Robial and Florence Cestac, beginning in

336   Mark McKinney 1972 (Cestac). Cartoonists of immigrant or postcolonial ethnic minority heritage whose comic books were published by Futuropolis include Baru (of Italian immigrant her­it­ age), Enki Bilal (emigrated from Yugoslavia), Farid Boudjellal (of Algerian and Armenian heritage), José Jover (emigrated from Spain), and Roland Monpierre (of French Caribbean heritage). Ironically, Futuropolis also gave renewed life to the colonial heritage of classic French comics, for example, by republishing book collections of Saint-Ogan’s Zig et Puce (Guy and Flea) comic strip without including critical commentary, despite colonialist (and anti-Semitic) content (McKinney, The Colonial Heritage). In the following decades, alternative or avant-garde cartoonist groups and publishers, such as L’association and Amok in France and Fréon and La cinquième couche in Belgium, picked up where Futuropolis left off, by promoting formal innovation within comics, including the comic book itself, for example, by publishing long-form paperbacks in black-and-white, instead of the standard comics album, which is hardback, on glossy paper, in color, and sixty-four or forty-eight pages long (Menu 25–26; see also Beaty). Again, these groups included, or published, some artists of postcolonial her­it­ age. The most notable group in this respect was Amok, run by Yvan Alagbé (his father was from Benin) and Olivier Marboeuf (of Caribbean heritage), who published the journal Le cheval sans tête. Their own comic strips and books have expressed postcolonial themes in artistically innovative manners, as did Amok’s publications of cartoonists such as Kamel Khélif (of Algerian heritage). In this chapter, I focus on a graphic novel by Zeina Abirached, a cartoonist of Lebanese heritage who has been living and working in Paris since 2004. Her comic books have engaged in an expanding range of formally ­creative ways with history, including colonialism, and its effects on the present. The relationship between the artistic form of the graphic novel and its content is a central concern in Abirached’s Le piano oriental (The Oriental Piano), published by Casterman in 2015. The reader soon realizes that she created the work as what she calls a “livre-objet” (book-object) (in Dreyfus and Vila). We shall see that its form is delicately balanced between the artist’s book and the mass-produced book3 and between the experimental works of the literary group Oulipo4 and those of alternative comics groups such as Oubapo.5 For several years, I have attempted to elaborate a critical approach for analyzing the poetics of migration in colonial and postcolonial comics. For that, I created the neologism l’affrontière (the affrontier) to name a barrier related to colonialism and around which different ethnic groups and individuals take affront, and confront each other (ils subissent et se font des affronts, et s’affrontent), but that can also provide an opportunity for healing historical wounds (McKinney, “Redrawing the Franco-Algerian Affrontier”).6 As a French and Lebanese Arab artist who survived the civil war in Lebanon and now lives in France, Abirached has an acute comprehension of the obstacles that may separate cultures and people and of things that can unite them. She represents the frontier as an arbitrary and violent institution in her graphic novel A Game for Swallows: To Die, to Leave, to Return (2012), when her character Saïd Nahas disappears, no doubt assassinated, at the boundary between East and West Beirut (51, 85–86). The artist represents violence at the border through black space emptied of all visual human presence and of any compassion or empathy by those who make him disappear

the DIVERSIONARY Art of Zeina Abirached in Le piano oriental   337 (see Abirached and Bouillon 141). In Le piano oriental, she again draws our attention to the violence of the civil war and also, for the first time, directly represents colonial and postcolonial relations between France and Lebanon. By doing this, she attempts to defuse conflicts, as in her earlier albums. She offers ways to circumvent the affrontier, to render possible egalitarian exchange and mutual understanding both within France and Lebanon and between the two countries. She is familiar with the crude or subtle ways in which barriers often limit opportunities for Arabs in France and with the negative image of Beirut as the place par excellence of fratricidal civil war: in France, “C’est Beyrouth” (It’s Beirut) still idiomatically means “It’s a place of extreme violence and destruction” (see Figure 20.1). She reminds readers of this in a sequence of panels showing how the French reify her identity as Lebanese in orientalist ways—paradoxically, after she has acquired French nationality, making her “Franco-Lebanese”—by also associating her successively with Oum Kelthoum and Eastern music, the mysteries of a veiled Bedouin woman, Lebanese cuisine, and a bearded Arab man (Abirached, Le piano oriental 171–172). It is therefore completely logical that diversions away from the reification of identities, passages across the affrontier, or the art of circumventing obstacles to transcultural understanding lie at the heart of Le piano oriental. Before I proceed with my analysis, here is a short summary of the plot and structure of the novel. It alternates between two stories. The first features Abdallah Kamanja, the fictional double of the maternal great-grandfather of the artist. In the second, Abirached retraces her life in Beirut during and after the war, lasting from 1975 until 1991, and then her voyage to France to study art at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris. She especially recounts her experience of adapting to life in France before and after acquiring French citizenship. She also presents her paternal grandfather, who

Figure 20.1  Reifying a migrant’s identity: Zeina, now Franco-Lebanese, after having been naturalized French, realizes that her interlocutor still associates Beirut, her birthplace, with fratricidal violence and massive urban destruction. From Zeina Abirached, Le piano oriental, p. 172. © Editions Casterman.

338   Mark McKinney worked as an interpreter for the military administration during the French mandate in Lebanon and was naturalized French. The novel opens in Beirut in 1959, when Abdallah shares with his best friend, Victor Challita, the much-desired news that he has just received an invitation from the Hofman company, which builds pianos in Vienna. The directors would like him to show them his invention, the oriental piano, so they may determine its musical and commercial value. When he does so, they are very impressed by it and promise to build oriental pianos if Abdallah can gather a hundred orders. Delighted, he returns home to Beirut with Victor. Sadly, over the following years, Abdallah is unable to gather the minimum number of orders, despite meeting some of the most celebrated musicians of the Near East and North Africa. He dies in January 1975 without achieving his artistic dream. The novel ends with the cartoonist returning to Paris, years after first moving there. This time, she brings with her material given to her by her mother that will allow her to tell the story of Abdallah and his oriental piano.

Le Déhanchement In Le piano oriental, Abdallah spends years trying to solve a technical problem: how to transform his upright piano so that it plays the quarter tone of the oriental musical scale, without changing its external appearance. He stumbles upon the solution when his upstairs neighbor, exasperated by the noise he makes tinkering with his piano, yells at him to be silent, which startles him. This is Abdallah’s “eureka” moment. He accepts Thérèse’s advice but diverts it, because instead of stopping his work and being silent, he persists, modifying the direction and effect of the soft pedal. The genial inventor transforms the vertical mechanism of the pedal into a horizontal movement, as he explains to the Hofmans in Vienna: “In my piano, instead of stifling the sound, the soft pedal will shift the hammers inside the piano” (Abirached, Le piano oriental 142).7 This physical deviation will allow him to switch from occidental to oriental music, and vice versa, on the same instrument. Abirached represents the piano’s transition from one musical form to the other with diverse visual metaphors including the silhouettes of dancers, whereas Abdallah describes the shift of the modified piano mechanism in related terms: “The déhanchement [hip swaying] of the piano, if you allow me this shortcut, is interior and above all invisible” (142). It is therefore a “bilingual piano,” as Abdallah explains: “For, when one releases the pedal, the piano again becomes a tempered keyboard, and if one again pushes the pedal down, the piano plays the quarter tones anew! In summary, dear Sirs, this piano . . . is a bilingual piano!” (143).8 The turns of phrase describing the oriental piano anthropomorphize the instrument, as though it could speak two languages, had hips and could sway them like a dancer. This sideways movement suggests that a useful way of understanding the artistic activity of Abdallah and Abirached herself is through the swerve of the clinamen. Philosophers and physicists, poets and novelists, literary critics and theoreticians, from Democritus and Epicurus to Michel Serres, from Lucretius to Alfred Jarry and

the DIVERSIONARY Art of Zeina Abirached in Le piano oriental   339 Georges Perec, and from Harold Bloom to Warren F. Motte Jr., have used the clinamen to describe a movement that is physical or virtual, atomic or literary. Abdallah’s musical deviations, both his inventive modification of the instrument and his playing on it, ­constitute a physical clinamen, analogous to the motion of atoms as conceived by Epicurus and described by Lucretius, that makes them deviate from the vertical fall imagined by Democritus. In the model of Epicurus and Lucretius, the detour or diversion of the clinamen constitutes the movement and moment of creation. It “becomes the locus and the guarantor of free will,” according to Motte (263). He observes that “the clinamen may be seen to function as a metonym” in Lucretius’s De rerum naturae, as “the mise en abyme de l’énoncé” (265), because “the text illustrates the phenomenon it describes.” In Le piano oriental, Abirached, too, orchestrates a mise-en-abîme of the enunciated, because her drawings and text illustrate the movement of the oriental piano through a variety of alternating metaphors: straight and wavy keyboards, white notes on a black background and vice versa, or ballet and belly dancers. The transition between the two types of dancers makes visible the hidden shifts of the oriental piano, just as the déhanchement of the belly dancers represents the playing of oriental music. These ­textual signs and visual symbols translate the two alternating musics of the piano and serve as metonyms of Western and Near Eastern cultures. They therefore make visible a hybridity that is both cultural and musical and bridge the gap between the oral and the visual. They provide a shortcut and a detour made necessary by the visual and textual, rather than sonorous, nature of comics. Motte explains that in Lucretius, the “text illustrates the patrophagous character of ” its model. In his 1972 article, “Clinamen or Poetic Misprision,” Bloom constructs a European, masculinist, and muscular model of poetic influence. The relationship between two strong poets would constitute a sort of cannibalism, where the younger one would consume his poetic father in a metaphorical manner, through a bad reading of his work, thereby inventing a new model. Bloom concludes by saying, “This clinamen between the strong poet and the Poetic Father is made by the whole being of the later poet, and the true history of modern poetry would be the accurate recording of these revisionary swerves” (391). By contrast, any influence of one poet on another “through a generosity of the spirit, even a shared generosity,” would be the work of weak and minor poets, the authors of impoverished poetry (380). Bloom cites the importance of the clinamen for Jarry (389–391), and according to Motte, the latter probably transmitted the clinamen as a poetic concept to Oulipo, and especially to Perec, who is “exemplary of the attitude of the Oulipo as a whole in regard to the clinamen” (Motte 274; cf. Perec, Entretiens 240–242, 281). According to Motte, “Perec gradually became convinced of the creative efficacy of the integration of a minimal element of chaos into literary structures” founded on Oulipian constraints (Motte 274). However, Motte shows that this “minimal element of chaos” deviates structure in Perec’s work in a manner that is counterintuitive, given the importance of often difficult formal constraints to Oulipian literary production. He explains that after the clinamen, “the language of the new form, when compared to the old, describes a radical swerve toward the normative, the texts engendered are more readerly, less writerly” (275).

340   Mark McKinney Perec changed his approach progressively: “From his initial belief in the value of maximal formal rigor as the guarantor of the text, he came to feel that the textual system must be intentionally flawed, the flaw scrupulously cultivated, in turn, as the real locus of poetic creativity” (276). Motte links that to how Calvino saw “the possibilities offered by the computer to the writer of combinatory literature.” According to Calvino (qtd. in Motte 276): This clearly demonstrates, we believe, that the aid of the computer, far from replacing the creative act of the artist, permits the latter on the contrary to liberate himself from the slavery of a combinatory search, allowing him also the best chance of concentrating on this “clinamen” which, alone, can make of the text a true work of art.

Motte concludes his synthetic overview by observing that all his examples “­suggest . . . that the surest guarantor of intellectual, aesthetic, and political freedom is a gentle (or not-so-gentle) bias” (280). Taken together, these models are useful for analyzing Abirached’s approach to artistic creation in Le piano oriental but also require an adaptation, a clinamen, that is postcolonial and antimasculinist, or feminist. To summarize, I would say that the clinamen or bias of Abdallah’s oriental piano and Abirached’s narrative is reversible. Instead of producing a permanent displacement that would abandon the first term, or the artist-father, as in Bloom’s model, the clinamen in the novel is a déhanchement, a back-and-forth dance movement between Beirut and Paris, Lebanon and France, oriental and occidental music, the story of the great-grandfather and that of his descendant, fact and fiction, French and Arabic. The author suggests that only through this constant oscillation can she express the transculturalism of her world, which is also ours. To separate, confine, and fix these poles in a rigid manner would reify them and stifle her artistic, linguistic, and cultural creativity.

Le Tricotage In Le piano oriental, Abirached proposes le tricotage, or knitting, as a metaphor of her bilingualism (95–97). She represents herself in the process of knitting together the alphabets of her two mother tongues to produce a hybrid language that resembles the bilingual music of the oriental piano (143). There is a striking resemblance between the double page of Abirached (96–97) and the last page of Cestac’s La véritable histoire de Futuropolis: 1972–1994 (The True History (or Story) of Futuropolis, 1972–1994) (102), where Cestac shows herself knitting her comic-book story. Cestac’s album, too, mixes autobiography and artistic history, that of Futuropolis, the comic-book publisher that played a key role in the rise of alternative comics in France. The choice of knitting by the two cartoonists surely comments on their status as cartoonists in a field of artistic ­production still dominated by men, even though women play an increasingly active and visible role there. Knitting can also serve here to designate the larger intertextual and intercultural activity of Abirached’s comics (see Figure 20.2).

the DIVERSIONARY Art of Zeina Abirached in Le piano oriental   341

Figure 20.2  Knitting as a metaphor for linguistic and cultural hybridity: Abirached shows Zeina, her alter ego in the novel, knitting together French and Arabic to create a single fabric. “Since childhood I have been knitting one language made of two fragile and precious strands,” says the narrator. From Zeina Abirached, Le piano oriental, pp. 96–97. © Editions Casterman.

In Système de la bande dessinée (The System of Comics), Thierry Groensteen proposes the metaphor of braiding to designate placing images, and sometimes text within images (183–185), across comics in a more or less exceptional manner, one that exceeds the ­normal visual stream necessary to construct a narrative: “braiding, normally based on the remarkable resurgence of an iconic motif (or an aesthetic quality), is implicated first and foremost in situations with a strong dramatic potential, of appearance and disappearance” (180). Literally, braiding is, of course, usually the action of alternately folding each of three strands across the others to produce a larger one with a simple pattern. By contrast, knitting (or weaving or embroidery) often produces more complex patterns in two dimensions, and even figurative images, as Cestac and Abirached indicate through their metaphor of knitting comics and languages, images and words.9 The image or ­metaphor of knitting is therefore a very suggestive variation on, or substitute for, braiding. In Le piano oriental Abirached's knitting represents an exceptional repetition of images, letters and words to produce complex intertextual and intercultural patterns. Le piano oriental contains another superb example of knitting to represent bilingualism and interculturality: Abirached also knits or strings together a sequence of printed

342   Mark McKinney Arabic words and French words written cursively in yarn or string form (126; see Figure 20.3). In fact, Abirached’s comics abound in related imagery. In A Game for Swallows (2012) and I Remember Beirut (2014), a cloth wall hanging serves as a mise-en-abîme of intercultural and intertextual knitting or weaving (see McKinney, “Avant-Garde Abirached”). The cloth represents the Hebrews’ flight from Egypt after the last plague sent by God, when the angel of death kills the firstborn ­children of the Egyptians but spares the Hebrews, whose homes had been marked with the blood of a pascal lamb (Calargé 164). A comment by the artist clarifies the semantic and cultural complexity of her model, a family heirloom, and its role in the graphic novel: The tapestry is a printed Iranian cloth from the 18th century (called Kalamkar, the term designated cloth printed with wooden stamps). So I think that it is written in Persian (I can decipher but I cannot understand). I read “majles 18” or “majlech 18,” but I don’t know what it corresponds to. I long asked myself that question, I looked without success in the Koran, . . . knowing that Majles in Arabic means meeting (from the verb Jalassa = sat down), but I don’t know any more (I took loads of notes but left them in Lebanon. I did research in 2002 when I still lived in Beirut).10

The tapestry combines references to several cultures and to the three Mosaic religions. The fact that the pattern was printed on cloth reinforces its effectiveness as a mise-­enabîme of the author’s textual work, because, of course, she drew it in a printed book. The object also possesses a familial complexity. Early in A Game for Swallows (40), the author represents herself on a page divided into three vertical panels, each occupied by a member of her family next to a portion of the tapestry: her paternal grandfather, her father, and then Zeina. The two men look at the person or people below, whereas Zeina directs her gaze upward, producing a configuration of looks that somewhat resembles the one on the front cover of Le piano oriental. By placing her fictional double in this

Figure 20.3  Another knitting metaphor for linguistic and cultural hybridity: After moving from Beirut to Paris, Zeina “must use guile” by “first finding equivalents for certain Lebanese words” that she will extirpate from her hybrid Arabic-French speech so that she will be understood by the French. From Zeina Abirached, Le piano oriental, p. 126. © Editions Casterman.

the DIVERSIONARY Art of Zeina Abirached in Le piano oriental   343 sequence, Abirached effects a clinamen that troubles the patrilineal and patriarchal order, because she represents herself as the recipient of an heirloom initially passed down from father to son, according to the image. At the end of A Game for Swallows, the author herself escapes death when a projectile falls through her window and explodes.11 At that moment in the story, the dragon magically leaves the tapestry and flies off (166–168). The symbolism of the tapestry and its dragon is powerful and ambivalent, as Abirached explained in an interview (Calargé 164): the tapestry does not keep its promise [as the talismanic protection that the young Zeina had imagined] and a projectile explodes in the apartment. So to symbolize the war that enters into the apartment I use the dragon. The tapestry then disappears, and the only thing left is the dragon, which becomes threatening, whereas at first it was, rather, protective. It changes functions at the precise moment when there is no longer a boxed-in space [un huis clos], when there is a breach and the exterior enters in a terrifying way.

From something resembling the staff-serpent of Moses that wards off danger and ­ rotects the Hebrews (and Zeina’s family), the dragon molts into the angel of death, p which could have killed Zeina, the firstborn. As we saw, Abirached, the eldest child in her family, represented her double as the heir of her paternal lineage, standing next to the tapestry, thereby usurping the place normally assigned to a male heir (40). The transformation of the dragon symbolizes the evaporation of young Zeina’s confidence in her invulnerability. The patterns that decorate the edge of the tapestry, whose central image comes from the Mosaic story, make it resemble, precisely, a mosaic, a decorative form that has already served as a metaphor for the architecture of comics, which Fabrice Leroy (“De la bande dessinée”) has analyzed. Moreover, the decorative plays a capital role in Abirached’s comics, as she has explained (e.g., Abirached and Bouillon 141): And then, there is all this play of ornamentation, which I adore, and comes perhaps from what I retained from Arabic calligraphy. When I was a child, I looked at the tapestry a lot, at my parents’ home, and also the carpets. I was fascinated by all those patterns, all those repetitions.

Elsewhere she said that “those details fed my imagination. . . . But the ornamentation is also there to express tenderness, and the absence of ornamentation to say something brutal” (Calargé 168). In fact, one finds such nourishing details everywhere in her books. They are often of oriental inspiration and at the limit between abstraction and figurative representation, on tables, cushions, stools, and elsewhere. She often uses the decorative to knit together discrete narrative fragments. For example, in I Remember Beirut, it helps to link fragmentary memories. In Le piano oriental, it often plays the same role by linking the history of Abdallah with that of Zeina. However, the decorative here is even more complex than before. In interior space, the artist expresses it, for example, through the rug that one finds in her two previous books or in the 1950s wallpaper in the apartment of Abdallah and his family. Outside, the decorative appears in architecture (balcony

344   Mark McKinney ironwork, building facades, porch roofs) but also in advertisements, clothing, and ­newspaper racks. It plays a capital role in recreating a lost landscape that mixes occidental and oriental, French and Arab elements. The richly complex decoration in her books resists the destruction of war. It translates emotion, care for beauty, and the attention to detail that Abirached encourages us to grasp in a pair of panels showing a hand holding a magnifying glass to examine a page (41, 160). Within her decorative tableaux, one finds the music of the oriental piano arranged like a visual and sound tapestry (145, 180–182, 184, 198–200), as well as Abdallah’s feet dancing around the double page in his new Italian shoes (10–11). The cartoonist uses a computer to avoid the fastidious work that creating the complex textual and visual patterns in her tableaux, which brim with details, would necessitate if done solely by hand, for example, in the repetition of the wall hanging throughout A Game for Swallows (Calargé 163). Her technique recalls Calvino’s description of computer-assisted textual production to allow the Oulipo artist to focus on the creative clinamen. Abirached deviates from the model of Bloom, who envisions a Freudian relationship to a single, strong, and paternal poet, because the intertextual knitting of her comics interweaves references to several sources of inspiration. True, the cartoonist explicitly took, as inspiration for her I Remember Beirut, Perec’s Je me souviens (I Remember, 1978), itself inspired by I Remember by Joe Brainard (1975 [1970]), the gay American poet and visual artist. However, even in I Remember Beirut, Abirached’s intertextuality is far more complex than this linear literary genealogy might suggest. Her artistic techniques often formally resemble those of Oubapo, the group inspired by Oulipo and founded by Groensteen and several artists from L’association, and by similar experiments, for example, by Marc-Antoine Mathieu, whom Abirached has cited as an inspiration. There are indeed similarities between the albums of Abirached and how Oubapo, Mathieu, and other contemporary cartoonists such as Chris Ware and Matt Madden rework the form of the graphic novel. Toward the end of Mathieu’s L’origine (The Origin, 2007 [1991]), the first in a series of books reflecting on the formal properties and possibilities of comics, Mathieu inserted a page with a missing, cutout panel, to encourage meditation on the relationship among narrative, temporality, sequentiality, and space in comics (41–42; see Miller, Reading bande dessinée, 145–146). Abirached’s 38, rue Youssef Semaani (38, Youssef Semaani Street, 2006), a comic that she has called a “livre-objet” (in Dreyfus and Vila), possesses a modifiable form allowing the reader to recompose short stories in ­several ways, by opening and folding comic strips over each other, recalling Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes (One Hundred Million Million Poems, 1961), an Oulipian book that similarly enables the reader to produce an exponential number of sonnets. Le piano oriental is also a “book-object” that includes an inventive modification to its form: two pages unfold, somewhat like a medieval polyptych painting, to form a large tableau. Folded up, the pages depict the hands of Abdallah above the keyboard, ready to play, as though we were him. Unfolded, they reveal and recount his demonstration of the oriental piano in Vienna (see Figure 20.4). This double page, twice as large as the others, includes three strips that run across its entire length. In the center half of the double page, the keyboard undulates and se déhanche to symbolize the production of oriental music each time Abdallah steps on

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Figure 20.4  Déhanchement as diversion from predetermined artistic form: A director of the Hofman piano factory in Vienna listens to Abdallah Kamanja play his upright piano, whose mechanism he has modified to allow the soft pedal to produce the quarter-tone scale of oriental music. The keyboard alternates between straight and sinuous lines to represent Abdallah switching between Western and Eastern musical forms. From Zeina Abirached, Le piano oriental, pp. 136–137. © Editions Casterman.

the soft pedal. Implicitly, therefore, by unfolding the pages, one displaces occidental music from its central position and replaces it with oriental music. Another manner, more subtle but just as important, in which the cartoonist modified the form of the book was by coloring the page edges. They are almost always black when she recounts her own story and white for Abdallah’s. The exceptions permit her to create other artistic effects, as when Abdallah’s feet dance around the edge of the double page (10–11), or to underline a continuity between his story and hers (35–37). In comics, alternating colors or shades often distinguish between the narration of past and present events. What is remarkable here is that this separation replicates the alternation between the black and white keys of a piano keyboard. That transforms the book itself into an oriental piano. One finds similar experiments in Oubapo publications, for example, in Oupus 3, where the reader is invited to fold and cut comic strips to change their meaning and form. Nonetheless, Abirached’s comics are not formalist in the manner of Oubapo or some Oulipian productions; instead, her work more resembles that of Perec, who combined formal experimentation with autobiographical expression and sociocultural reflection.

346   Mark McKinney In more or less explicit ways, Abirached’s comics knit together references to several other influences in the comics field. At points in A Game for Swallows (120, 122) and I Remember Beirut (44), she visually quotes Hergé’s Tintin volumes The Red Sea Sharks and Red Rackham’s Treasure in ways that I have analyzed elsewhere (McKinney, “AvantGarde Abirached”). Here I will simply add that Abirached reworks the detectives Dupond and Dupont (Thomson and Thompson) from the Tintin series in her characters Victor and Ernest Challita, twins who appear alone or together in most of her albums. In a plate from Le piano oriental that I have already mentioned, the artist draws our attention to small physical differences that distinguish her twins, by positioning a magnifying glass above them (41; a related passage is found in A Game for Swallows 81). The metatextual gesture reminds us that the Dupond(t)s or Thom(p)sons are detectives differentiated only by small details, for example, the form of their mustaches, also true for the Challitas, and the spelling of their surnames. However, whereas Hergé’s inseparable characters are well known for the anachronistic, folkoric costumes they put on to try to go unnoticed in each foreign country they visit (but produce the opposite effect), Ernest demonstrates his ability to integrate seamlessly into French culture by becoming a French teacher who can recite all of Cyrano de Bergerac from memory. His brother Victor is a most cosmopolitan character, as much at ease—no doubt especially with women—in Paris and Vienna as in their father’s chic lingerie store in Beirut. Abirached visibly winks at another comics classic, the Corto Maltese series by Hugo Pratt, an artist whom she has already cited as an artistic influence (“Zeina Abirached: An Artist’s Statement” 71; Abirached and Bouillon 141). One evening in front of the Vienna opera house, while Victor is waiting for Abdallah to join him for the show Don Giovanni (Le piano oriental 158–159), featuring another great seducer, he meets Gisela and invites her to take the place of his tardy friend. The page depicting their encounter rhymes with one in Pratt’s Tango (38), which represents the handsome Corto Maltese and one or more beautiful female partners doing the eponymous dance. In the pages of both authors, women’s bodies are represented as fragments in a visual blason. Abirached’s page suggests a dance of intercultural seduction between the Lebanese man and the European woman, who “against all expectations” will join him later in Beirut (179). The cartoonist also appears to knit references to two postcolonial comics in her book. She inserts into Le piano oriental a reworked version of the thirty-page autobiographical comic, Paris n’est pas une île déserte (Paris Is Not a Deserted Island), which she drew in 2012–2013 and published on the site of the Centre national de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris as part of an exhibition on immigration and comics.12 The two comics that rhyme with hers were also cited in that exhibition.13 Even if she was unaware of the other albums, the similarity between some of her images and one in each of them demonstrates that she is knitting her own version of a visual and textual discourse that runs through a comics corpus recounting postcolonial migration to France. The first example comes from Les migrations de Djeha: Les nouveaux immigrés (The Migrations of Djeha: The New Immigrants), published in 1979 by Algerian cartoonist Saladin (Slimane Zeghidour), one of the first French comic books on postcolonial migration. The image on the title page and the last plate shows a North African worker sailing in his open

the DIVERSIONARY Art of Zeina Abirached in Le piano oriental   347 s­ uitcase, navigating with a broom, which obviously recalls the street cleaning often done in France at the time by North African workers (see Figure 20.5). His oversized head and eyes, his lost look in the manner of Poulbot, our upward gaze, the crescent moon in the night sky, and the absolute isolation of the mariner sailing on the open sea, surely the Mediterranean, together impart a nostalgic sadness to this powerful image of exilic migration. The title page of Paris n’est pas une île déserte, incorporated into Le piano ­oriental (35), shows Zeina, eyes closed and sitting on her suitcase, sailing across the Mediterranean during her first voyage from Beirut to Paris (see Figure 20.6). There are strong visual and semantic resemblances between the two imaginary, symbolic

Figure 20.5  Symbolizing working-class migration between North Africa and France in the 1970s: A solitary immigrant man uses a broom to steer himself across the Mediterranean sea in his suitcase. His broom-oar alludes to menial jobs such as street sweeping that North Africans did in France at the time. From Saladin [Slimane Zeghidour], Les migrations de Djeha: Les nouveaux immigrés, title page. © La Pensée Sauvage.

348   Mark McKinney

Figure 20.6  Symbolizing trans-Mediterranean migrations and dreams of artistic hybridity: The cartoonist shows her younger self crossing the sea on her suitcase in 2004, on her way to Paris to study art, an image that imaginatively connects her voyage and her artistic project to those of her great-grandfather in the 1950s. From Zeina Abirached, Le piano oriental, p. 35. © Editions Casterman.

r­ epresentations of postcolonial emigration toward France. However, Abirached’s trip was not part of the exodus recounted in Les migrations de Djeha: a mass working-class migration, often of former peasants coming from North Africa to France to work in heavy industry or otherwise occupy a subaltern position in the economy. Zeina’s voyage is instead a postcolonial version of what Benedict Anderson (113–140; cf. 55–61) describes as the pilgrimage of an elite, to which Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor belonged, from colonies worldwide, for advanced studies in France. The nautical image of Abirached links her voyage to Paris, made by airplane, to the boat crossing by Abdallah and Victor from Beirut to Marseille and from there by train to Paris and Vienna (38). I will analyze my second example of a rhyme with a postcolonial comic in the following section.

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The Detour of Fiction The concept of the clinamen also helps clarify Abirached’s approach to autobiography and fiction in the graphic novel. Jan Baetens recognized the fact that autobiography has become one of the most visible and promising forms of comics, which has led to innovation in the ninth art but has also brought the risk of propagating clichés of the autobiographical genre. Several elements indicate that Abirached’s comics should be read “as situated in the space between autobiography and novel” (Miller, “Autobiography in bande dessinée” 236), a space where she zigzags between history and her story, Lebanon and France. Her works fall within “certain bande dessinée autobiographies that are overtly political” and often rooted in postcolonial contestation, and that—as Ann Miller argues for other such works (256)—escape the “reproach of ‘egocentrism’ often aimed at the genre.” Abirached succeeds in part by injecting fiction into her stories and leaving flagrant autobiographical gaps there. For example, in her two preceding albums, she names neither herself nor her brother in the narrative, thereby leaving an open space in the autobiographical pact as defined by Philippe Lejeune. In the narrative of Le piano oriental, she finally names herself but only through nicknames (“Zanzoun” [26], “Zenzen” [68]) used by her parents and never as “Zeina,” thereby continuing to maintain a distance between the cartoonist and her “homunculus” which, says Miller (251), ­borrowing from Michael Sheringham, is a “term [that] seems very apposite in designating the drawn selves of bande dessinée autobiographers.” However, Abirached finally twice inserts her patronym into the narrative, first deformed in a playful manner (“M. Abiratruc” [“Mr. Abirathingy”]) on a door in the office where Abdallah works (84). Then she writes it correctly in the letter officially announcing her French naturalization (166), which recalls the letter sent by the Hofmans to Abdallah depicted at the beginning of the novel (20), as well as the naturalization of her paternal grandfather (32). Still, there is a significant fictional element in Le piano oriental, which justifies calling it a graphic novel. First, as already in A Game for Swallows, the dates and ages of the characters do not seem to correspond exactly to (auto)biographical facts. Here Abirached represents her mother as a young girl in 1975, at the death of her grandfather and a few months before the beginning of the civil war (189–190), whereas the cartoonist was born in 1981, only six years later. By contrast, the date of the death of Abirached’s greatgrandfather seems correct. In the novel, the coincidence between this event and the premises of the war is symbolic, as though the disappearance of the inventor and his dream of a bilingual and bicultural oriental piano signaled the end of peaceful coexistence between ethnic and religious communities in Lebanon and of the prewar Beirut that Abirached also commemorates in her novel, one that will soon be ravaged. An earlier, mock-epic passage in the novel playfully recounts the migration of young Abdallah to Beirut, injecting an element of fiction into his story, but it is obvious that Abirached imaginatively reconstructed a great deal more of the life of her ancestor, and of his prewar Beirut, as always in biography. Fabrice Leroy (“Joann Sfar”; Sfar So Far) has shown the

350   Mark McKinney importance of fiction for recovering Jewish history in the albums of Joann Sfar, including in The Rabbi’s Cat; there it helps heal wounds inflicted by anti-Semites and fill gaps in the historical archives of French Algeria. In Le piano oriental, Abirached does something similar to reconstruct the Lebanese past and a Beirut permanently ­ ­transformed today by the civil war and postwar rebuilding.14 Whereas Abdallah disappears from the graphic novel just before it concludes, leaving the cartoonist at center stage, she is not patrophagous; instead, she celebrates her ancestor’s artistic dream throughout the novel. She makes a detour through the past to import his transcultural project into her own art, to renew both. She thereby produces what I have called elsewhere a contre-bande dessinée, a kind of comics contraband that counters reifying colonialist and other forces (McKinney, “La Marche”). This transgenerational transmission and transnational transculturalism are powerfully expressed in two images. On the front cover, an abnormally large Abdallah (really a rather small man in the story) hovers above Zeina, who looks at him. Behind him, one sees the lines of musical score paper—which also appear on the back of the book—and Zeina leaning against the oriental piano. On the back cover appear eight other pianos, suggesting that Abdallah’s dream of mass-producing his oriental piano is finally a reality. In a symbolic image near the middle of the novel (153), Abirached again represents herself next to Abdallah, this time playing music with him on a piano and thereby creating, in a magical manner, a landscape that combines the horizon of central Paris with the lost one of Beirut from the 1950s. The two images suggest a relationship of generous sharing between the two artists. The ­cartoonist thereby shows herself to be an heir capable of realizing the dream of her great-grandfather by inventing a new instrument herself, this time an oriental version of the graphic novel, to unite East and West, Lebanon and France. The novel succeeds by encountering commercial success in Europe, reaching a transnational and transcultural audience, and helping to reconcile groups long in conflict. In fact, landscapes of Beirut and Paris are scattered throughout the novel, like those that represent Algiers and Paris in Là-bas, another autobiographical, or autofictional, postcolonial comic book, drawn by Didier Tronchet, scripted by Anne Sibran, the daughter of pieds-noirs (French colonial settlers in North Africa), and published by Dupuis in 2003 (see McKinney, “Redrawing the Franco-Algerian Affrontier”). The image that knits together Beirut and Paris in Le piano oriental (153; see Figure 20.7) rhymes richly with the last page of Là-bas (64; see Figure 20.8). The latter shows Paris and Algiers merged together and marks the culmination of the narrator taking over her father’s role in telling his story about French Algeria and how his family migrated to Paris toward the end of the Algerian War. The storytelling by the narrator, also a character in the novel, relieves the burden of colonial guilt borne by her father since he observed, powerless, a massacre of Algerians carried out by OAS (Organisation armée secrète [Secret Armed Organization]) terrorists in the Lyre marketplace in Algiers. This image closes the story and symbolizes a somewhat ambiguous relieving of historical guilt. In the two graphic novels, the artists create the position of a storyteller who reconstructs, under the benevolent gaze of a paternal figure, the memory of a troubling past insufficiently examined or atoned for by the nations involved. They thereby extend and

Figure 20.7  Imagining a shared, hybrid artistic project across generations: Abirached depicts Abdallah Kamanja and Zeina playing his bilingual oriental piano together and thereby merging the skylines of Beirut and Paris against the horizon of the Mediterranean sea. From Zeina Abirached, Le piano oriental, p. 153. © Editions Casterman.

Figure 20.8 Imagining postcolonial continuity and pied-noir community: Sibran and Tronchet represent the transmission of cultural memory through a storytelling that relieves the historical guilt of French settler complicity in anti-Algerian violence during the Algerian War and magically merges Paris and Algiers, the Seine River and the Mediterranean Sea. From Didier Tronchet and Anne Sibran, Là-bas, p. 64. © Editions Dupuis.

the DIVERSIONARY Art of Zeina Abirached in Le piano oriental   353 complete a transcultural, transnational project initiated and bequeathed by the proge­ nitor. The two rhyming pages transport the image of the capital of a former colony into French space to meld it with Paris, thereby creating what one might call “Palgiers” and “Beiris.” By knitting together facts and fiction, the artists try to heal historical wounds, diminish interethnic violence from the past, and inscribe the memory and history of the former colony within the former colonizing country, thereby creating a postcolonial continuity, a link also made manifest by the presence of the storyteller in Paris and her adoption of the project of the paternal figure. The differences between the two images and the projects they embody are certainly large, but the similarities between the images and storytelling bear pointing out. Abirached constructs her intermediary position between Lebanon and France through a fictionalized version of her family history. Just after a passage showing Abdallah and Victor back home in Beirut after their voyage to Vienna, she evokes her own repeated returns from Paris to Beirut, underlining the fact that she continues to consider Beirut as her home (“chez elle”), even after a long stay in Paris (164–165): “After ten years in France, I continue to ‘go home’ to Lebanon.” A drawing of Beirut mocks the hexagon (a symbol of France) at the end of a ping-pong match, in which Zeina is a ball bouncing back and forth between the two: “Game, set, and match!” (165). However, in the novel’s conclusion, the narrator suggests a new relationship to Paris: “I took the shoebox and I went back home, to Paris” (205–206; emphasis added). Carrying her shoebox, she imports her Franco-Lebanese heritage into France. Her trip to Paris is again a detour or diversion, a clinamen, that allows her to reconstruct Lebanese and family history in a new country. Joseph, her maternal grandfather, plays a crucial role in that transmission, as the cartoonist indicates in two places. First, he plays the oriental piano during the wake for his dead father, Abdallah (197–201), in a passage that just precedes the final departure of Abirached for Paris in the book (202–205). Next, on the penultimate page, the author dedicates her book to “the memory of my grandfather Joseph Chahine” (211). On the last page, Abirached reveals that she took the detour of fiction to evade the constraints of biography and family history: “The character of Abdallah Kamanja is freely inspired by the life of Abdallah Chahine, pianist, piano tuner, and inventor of the oriental piano in Beirut in the ’50s” (212; emphasis added). The freedom of fiction is visible, for example, in the family name, “Kamanja,” that Abirached gave to her ancestor and that remains unexplained in the book. The term designates a string instrument, either a standard violin or a related instrument, played in North Africa and the Near East. Just like the oriental piano, the kamanja can therefore be a Western instrument played in an Eastern manner. By naming her character in this way, Abirached indicates that Abdallah is for her what the oriental piano is for him: an instrument for expressing bicultural harmony, for making a detour, a clinamen or a déhanchement between her cultures and languages. Referring to Lejeune regarding the self-portrait, Miller (“Autobiography in bande dessinée” 244) affirms that “identity is established” in many cases in comics through “metarepresentative panels showing the character at the drawing board or, in some cases, simply the metonym of the drawing hand, with previous and subsequent panels ­confirming that the hand belongs to the artist/character.” Abirached establishes the

354   Mark McKinney a­ rtistic ­identity of her fictionalized alter ego in diverse ways, including through the ­artist’s portfolio, pencils, and sketchbooks that Zanzoun packs in her suitcase before traveling to Paris the first time, in 2004 (28). The last image of the book, also metatextual, just before the last page of the story, which is entirely black, shows a female artist’s hand drawing a horizon line and a boat, thereby inserting the Mediterranean above the roof line of Paris, for the second and last time in the narrative. This is the last image of the sequence of urban horizons that Abirached knits across her narrative, visible through windows in Beirut or Paris. Through the detour of fiction, she reunites her two homes, while realizing the dream of her great-grandfather, of combining Eastern and Western cultures into a single virtuoso artistic performance. The simplicity of the horizon line and the ocularized perspective of this image suggest that the artist also offers the position of spectator-artist to her readers.15 The author’s identity is not exclusive here but rather inclusive, because she invites us to celebrate Franco-Lebanese hybridity with her.

At Home in the Languages and Images of Multicultural Comics In an interview, Abirached explained the meaning of the epigraph that opens her novel (“Zeina Abirached: La langue’ ”): I have two homes [deux chez moi], because I feel just as well in the one as in the other. Moreover, it is not for nothing that I begin Le piano oriental with a quotation from Mahmoud Darwish: “Who am I? It is a question that others ask. Me, I am my ­language.” Darwish was Palestinian and you know that there is a problem of territory between Palestine and Israel. Darwish considered language to have become his territory, his country. Language allows us to feel at home everywhere. I love that rather beautiful idea that one can carry one’s home everywhere, thanks to languages.

It is perhaps useful to recall that Darwish long lived in exile in Beirut, before and ­during the Lebanese civil war, and later in Paris, too.16 The last image of Le piano oriental ­suggests though that one should modify the end of this excerpt from the poem “Une rime pour les mu’allaqât” (“A Rhyme for the Odes [Mu’Allaqat]”) so that it is more in tune with Abirached’s comic book: “Me, I am my language and also my hand and my drawing,” because her poetry is to a great extent visual, and her rhymes are at least as much of images as of words. Le piano oriental is filled with a bicultural visual-verbal poetry akin to the music of Abdallah Chahine’s oriental piano or the famous song of Josephine Baker— the French words of her song hauntingly shaped by her African-American accent—that Abirached sings after her naturalization: “J’ai deux amouuuuurs, Mon pays et Paaaaris” [sic] (“I have two loves, My country and Paris”) (166). It is a déhanchement swaying between cultures and languages, a knitted pattern of self and other, of fact and fiction, and a diversion that takes one home to what was once foreign.

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Notes 1. I read earlier versions of parts of this chapter while on a panel with Livio Belloï and Fabrice Leroy at the International Colloquium for 20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies, in Bloomington, Indiana, on 8 April 2017, and then in the art ­history seminar of Laurence Bertrand Dorléac at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), on 25 April 2018. Portions of the latter talk, absent here, are to be included in my monograph on postcolonial comics and migration in France. Ann Miller generously read and responded to the extended, Sciences Po version. I am deeply grateful to all these colleagues for their comments, which have been most helpful. 2. Of course, ethnicity may influence artistic form or express itself through it. 3. On this distinction, see Labio. 4. Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature), founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, has included several prominent authors and artists, such as Marcel Duchamp, Georges Perec, and Italo Calvino. At least one experimental cartoonist, Etienne Lécroart, was a member. 5. Ouvroir de bande dessinée potentielle (Workshop for Potential Comics), founded in 1992, includes several prominent contemporary cartoonists, many of whom have also been members of, or published by, the French cartoonist group L’association, such as François Ayroles, Anne Baraou, Jean-Christophe Menu, Lewis Trondheim, Patrice Killoffer, and Etienne Lécroart. 6. One meaning of affronter is to “[p]ut into contact the two labia of a wound to facilitate healing, or the fragments of a broken bone to allow their fusion.” (http://www.cnrtl.fr/ definition/affronter). 7. All translations from French are mine, unless otherwise indicated. 8. Abirached has said, “I realized that what interested me in this piano was its bilingual quality, between two cultures, two musical modes, two languages” (Abirached and Bouillon 143). 9. In Reading bande dessinée (95), Miller very perceptively envisions this creative activity as “weaving”: “we will use Groensteen's simpler term tressage, which makes reference to the idea of weaving (Groensteen  1999: 174).” I gratefully borrow from Miller the weaving ­metaphor for this artistic activity and note that at several points Groensteen does conceive of textual activity in terms of weaving: he repeatedly uses the French verb for “weaving” (8, 34, 48, 79, 95), refers to “the shuttlecock of the narrative” (“la navette du récit”; 121), and later to cloth (“tissu”) and thread (“fil”), in the passage to which Miller refers. However, I note that the corresponding French terms for “to weave” and “weaving” are “tisser” and “le tissage,” whereas “tresser” translates as “to braid” or “to plait” (hair), except for basket weaving (“tresser un panier”). Tressage was correctly translated as “braiding” in the published English version of Système de la bande dessinée. For Groensteen, braiding is essentially a formal concept, although Système (77–79) does suggest it may be used to signify intercultural interweaving, or métissage, a word that rhymes of course with tissage. 10. Abirached, personal communication, March 13, 2013. 11. This event has other intertextual resonances, recalling both a television report of Abirached’s grandmother in wartime Beirut and the projectile that explodes in the room of Professor Calculus in Destination Moon (Hergé 17). 12. Abirached, Paris n’est pas; Marie and Ollivier (86–87); Abirached and Bouillon (142). 13. Marie and Ollivier (186–187); in the bibliography (“Les bandes dessinées de la bibliothèque Abdelmalek Sayad”) on the website of the Cité during the exhibition.

356   Mark McKinney 14. Among the other differences between Le piano oriental and reality are the following: Abirached represents her paternal grandfather as a drogman/interpreter, whereas it was her paternal great-grandfather (Abirached and Bouillon 142); in the novel, Abdallah makes the prototype of the oriental piano in Beirut, ships it to Vienna (Le piano oriental 133), and none is produced in Vienna, but in fact, “[t]he factory prototype was built at the end of the 1950s in Vienna by Hoffmann [sic]” (Abirached and Bouillon 143). 15. On ocularization and focalization, see Miller, Reading bande dessinée (91–94, 106, 110–119). 16. One can also note that Abirached omitted some words in the passage of the poem that she quotes: “C’est une question que les autres posent. Et elle est sans réponse” (“It is a question that others ask. And it has no answer”) (Darwich 89; emphasis added). Perhaps she did this to avoid excluding others on the threshold of her text.

Works Cited Abirached, Zeina. A Game for Swallows: To Die, to Leave, to Return. Translated by Edward Gauvin. Lerner, 2012. Abirached, Zeina. I Remember Beirut. Translated by Edward Gauvin. Lerner, 2014. Abirached, Zeina. Je me souviens: Beyrouth. Cambourakis, 2008. Abirached, Zeina. Le jeu des hirondelles: Mourir, partir, revenir. Cambourakis, 2007. Abirached, Zeina. Paris n’est pas une île déserte. http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/musee/ expositions-temporaires/albums-bd-et-immigration/paris-n-est-pas-une-ile-deserte, 2012–2013 (no longer online). Abirached, Zeina. Le piano oriental. Casterman, 2015. Abirached, Zeina. 38, rue Youssef Semaani. Cambourakis, 2006. Abirached, Zeina. “Zeina Abirached: An Artist’s Statement.” European Comic Art, vol. 8, no. 1, 2015, pp. 69–86. Abirached, Zeina. “Zeina Abirached: ‘La langue nous permet de nous sentir chez nous ­partout.’ ” Interview with Christian Missia Dio. ActuaBD, September 21, 2015. http://www .actuabd.com/Zeina-Abirached-La-langue-nous. Abirached, Zeina, and Hélène Bouillon. “Un jeu de ping-pong entre la France et le Liban.” Hommes et migrations, no. 1311, 2015, pp. 140–143. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. Verso, 1991. Baetens, Jan. “Autobiographies et bandes dessinées.” Belphégor, vol. 4, no. 1, 2004. http://hdl. handle.net/10222/47689. Beaty, Bart. Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s. U of Toronto P, 2007. Bloom, Harold. “Clinamen or Poetic Misprision.” New Literary History, vol. 3, no. 2, 1972, pp. 373–391. Brainard, Joe. I Remember. 1970. Full Court Press, 1975. Calargé, Carla. “Souvenirs d’une enfance dans la guerre: Rencontre avec Zeina AbiRached.” French Review, vol. 87, no. 3, 2014, pp. 161–172. Cestac, Florence. La véritable histoire de Futuropolis: 1972–1994. Dargaud, 2007. Darwich, Mahmoud. Pourquoi as-tu laissé le cheval à sa solitude? Translated by Elias Sanbar. Actes Sud, 1996. Dreyfus, Antoine, and Pascal Vila. “Zeina Abirached, une enfance libanaise.” VSD.fr (ca. 2008). https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4oafj.

the DIVERSIONARY Art of Zeina Abirached in Le piano oriental   357 Groensteen, Thierry. Système de la bande dessinée. Presses universitaires de France, 1999. Hergé [Georges Remi]. Tintin’s Moon Adventure, containing Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon. Methuen Children’s Books, 1986. Labio, Catherine. From Bande Dessinée to Artist’s Book: Testing the Limits of Franco-Belgian Comics. Center for Book Arts, 2013. Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Seuil, 1975. Leroy, Fabrice. “De la bande dessinée comme mosaïque: Calypso de Baltus et Peeters.” Relief, vol. 2, no. 3, 2008, pp. 424–449. Leroy, Fabrice. “Joann Sfar Conjures Marc Chagall: The Politics of Visual Representation in The Rabbi’s Cat.” European Comic Art, vol. 4, no. 1, 2011, pp. 39–57. Leroy, Fabrice. Sfar So Far: Identity, History, Fantasy and Mimesis in Joann Sfar’s Graphic Novels. Leuven UP, 2014. Marie, Vincent, and Gilles Ollivier, eds. Albums: Des histoires dessinées entre ici et ailleurs: Bande dessinée et immigration, 1913–2013. Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration/Futuropolis, 2013. Mathieu, Marc-Antoine. 1991. Julius Corentin Acquefacques, prisonnier des rêves: L’origine. Delcourt, 2007. McKinney, Mark. “Avant-garde Abirached.” International Journal of Comic Art, vol. 17, no. 1, 2015, pp. 210–245. McKinney, Mark. The Colonial Heritage of French Comics. Liverpool UP, 2011. McKinney, Mark. “La Marche de 1983 et Convergence 84 chez les dessinateurs de bande dessinée issus de l’immigration, ou la contre-bande-dessinée.” Migrance, no. 41, 2013, pp. 111–121. McKinney, Mark. “Redrawing the Franco-Algerian affrontier in Là-bas.” International Journal of Comic Art, vol. 13, no. 1, 2011, pp. 127–152. McKinney, Mark. Redrawing French Empire in Comics. Ohio State UP, 2013. Menu, Jean-Christophe. Plates-bandes, janvier 2005. L’association, 2005. Miller, Ann. “Autobiography in Bande Dessinée.” Textual and Visual Selves: Photography, Film and Comic Art in French Autobiography, edited by Natalie Edwards, Amy L. Hubbell, and Ann Miller, U of Nebraska P, 2011, pp. 235–262. Miller, Ann. Reading bande dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strip. Intellect, 2007. Motte, Warren F., Jr. “Clinamen Redux.” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 23, no. 4, 1986, pp. 263–281. Perec, Georges. Entretiens et conférences, vol. 1, 1965–1978. Edited by Dominique Bertelli and Mireille Ribière. Joseph K., 2003. Perec, Georges. Je me souviens. Hachette, 1978. Pratt, Hugo. Tango All at Half-Light: A Corto Maltese Graphic Novel. Eurocomics, 2018. Queneau, Raymond. Cent mille milliards de poèmes. Gallimard, 1961. Saladin [Slimane Zeghidour]. Les migrations de Djeha: Les nouveaux immigrés. La Pensée Sauvage, 1979. Sfar, Joann. The Rabbi’s Cat. Pantheon, 2005. Sfar, Joann. The Rabbi’s Cat 2. Pantheon, 2008. Tronchet, Didier, and Anne Sibran. Là-bas. Dupuis, 2003.

chapter 21

Disco, Der by, a n d Dr ag The Queer Politics of Marvel’s Dazzler Nicholas E. Miller

In a 2016 essay about Marvel’s Dazzler (aka Alison Blaire), Ira Madison III asked: “What was it about a white woman singing disco music, sashaying around on roller skates, that resonated with gay fans?” While Madison primarily calls for Dazzler to return to her disco roots as a “love letter” to her queer fan base, this question has lingered in revisiting her solo series and attempting to read it alongside more recent iterations of the character. Although Dazzler has long been canonically heterosexual, the case can be made for reclaiming the queer subjectivities of her early comics in order to understand how they opened up space for queer readings of her character—particularly in a period when Marvel Comics (under editor Jim Shooter) was widely considered homophobic. Originally designed in the image of Grace Jones, a major disco figure and black woman who subverted gender norms and influenced cross-dressing movements, the cinema divisions of Marvel Comics and Casablanca Records ultimately requested a white character modeled after Bo Derek instead. Despite these changes, however, and the limited impact of her solo title, Dazzler remains a popular character among LGBTQ+ fans and continues to appear in titles such as A-Force (see Figure 21.1) and Astonishing X-Men.1 In this chapter, I demonstrate how Dazzler—in both her solo series and her appearances in other titles—opens up the possibility for what queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called “reparative readings”: readings that affirm queer pleasures and potentially repair the damages of homophobia rather than merely expose queer narratives as markers of oppression and repression.2 In what follows, I provide an analysis that begins with Dazzler’s complex disco origins and her first appearance in the “Dark Phoenix Saga,” works through the politics of her “closeted” identity in Beauty and the Beast, tackles her fraught relationship to roller derby, and explores her advocacy efforts

Disco, Derby, and Drag: The Queer Politics of Marvel’s Dazzler    359

Figure 21.1  Dazzler being introduced as “Ali-STUN Blaire,” a jammer for the Elm Street Nightmares roller derby team, as well as a pop star and a mutant. A-Force #2 (2016).

in more recent titles. Drawing on early histories of disco and recent scholarship on drag and derby cultures, I highlight the queer subtexts of Dazzler comics in order to better articulate her inadvertent status as a queer icon in the twenty-first century.

Queer Reading Practices and Their Discontents In September 2014, the feminist satire website Reductress released a story in its print edition titled “Graduate Student Can’t Stop Queering Things” (Gray). The joke was, of course, that “queering” things as an intellectual move had become reductive and passé, a typical graduate student strategy. Despite various revisions (and some resistance) to queer reading practices as popularized in the early 1990s, these practices remain essential to our work as comics scholars—particularly as we think about comics being ­produced in historical periods or institutional settings where explicitly LGBTQ+ content was not permitted. In fact, even as scholars continue to interrogate the value of queer reading practices, to distance ourselves from such practices leaves LGBTQ+ ­communities without representation in historical studies of certain texts (in this case, “mainstream” superhero comics in the 1980s) and therefore excluded from conver­ sations about aesthetics, canons, and origins. In fields such as comics studies—where canons and methods are still forming, reforming, and being resisted—queer reading practices must contribute to how we orient our field toward the future.3 As such, this chapter is informed by the work of Nishant Shahani, who coined the term “queer retrosexualities” as an interpretive mode that could “actively recreate an

360   Nicholas E. Miller understanding of the past rather than merely restoring it” (2–3). Indeed, my aim in exploring the queer politics of Dazzler is not to restore some imagined, “authentic” past to the character but instead to highlight the importance of offering a retrospective that, in the words of Shahani, “reverts back into that past to consider its reparative possibilities” (3).4 As Shahani argues, this kind of work allows us to imagine “not only how to ‘queer’ retrospection [e.g., via queer reading practices] but also how retrospection, in some senses, can be thought of as always already queer” (3). The recent work of scholars such as Ramzi Fawaz and Anthony Michael D’Agostino on queerness and the X-Men comics highlights the importance of such a retrospective turn. Fawaz and collaborator Darieck Scott have argued that “rather than needing to be queered, comics themselves ‘queer’ the archive of US culture” (Scott and Fawaz 199). Yet even as their argument about the inherent queerness of superhero comics is compelling, the need for engaging in queer retrospection persists as we negotiate the cultural histories produced by those archives. Motivated by Fawaz’s articulation of queerness in superhero comics as an “affective orientation toward otherness and difference,” in addition to arguments about queer orientations by Sara Ahmed, I seek to orient readers toward specific modes of ­difference in the narratives of Alison Blaire—queer modes of being tied to her identity not only as a mutant superhero but also as a performer and a celebrity (Fawaz 22). The importance of this work, particularly when it comes to popular-culture artifacts, lies in its ability to “disorient” heteronormative worldviews. While it may seem intuitive to readers in the twenty-first century, the following argument by Mark Lipton remains apt: “Queer reading practices articulate queer positions in and about mass culture that reveal popular culture need not exclusively and inevitably express straightness. . . . [They] resist dominant social and political models of identity and representation” (172, 178). Even as I embrace this claim, however, I also want to recognize that attempts to “identify” queerness are always fraught; they risk normalizing queerness in ways that undermine the concept itself. As D’Agostino writes about the queer feminist imagination: “This nonidentitarian exigency of queerness as a field has made queerness at once ­boringly common (anyone and everyone is queer), uselessly utopian (can I be queer at all?), and infuriatingly abstract (what does queer mean again?)” (255). My aim in this chapter, then, is not to demonstrate how queer reading practices can offer us an essentialized view of queerness in superhero comics but rather to explore how narratives of performance and celebrity in Dazzler comics expand queer readings in ways that ­connect them to other concepts in queer studies such as disco, roller derby culture, fame studies, and drag performance. My decision to focus specifically on Dazzler developed as the result of several interpretive possibilities that are now inherent to her character. The first is the emergence of a queer fan base that has enabled readers to view Alison Blaire as an LGBTQ+ advocate and icon. The second is Dazzler’s initial development during Shooter’s editorship at Marvel, where heteronormative romance narratives often reveal the queer subjectivities of her character. Finally, Alison Blaire’s status as a mutant performer allows her to embody queerness in ways that are unique within the narrative universe of Marvel Comics. The hypervisibility of Dazzler, whose powers are tied to creating light

Disco, Derby, and Drag: The Queer Politics of Marvel’s Dazzler    361 (­visible) out of sound (invisible), allows us to examine her queerness not solely as a function her mutant status but as something also tied to her roles as a performer and a public figure. Through these lenses, this chapter offers a timely contribution to a growing body of scholarship on mutant superheroes and queer narratives in comics and related media.

Grace Jones and the Disco Origins of Alison Blaire To understand the queer politics of Dazzler, however, we must begin with her origin story and the formative nature of her disco years. As I mentioned earlier, her character was originally imagined by artist John Romita Jr. in the style of Grace Jones (see Figure 21.2). In his own words, Romita says: “Originally it was supposed to be Grace Jones. . . . Grace Jones was a very popular singer at the time, and I wanted her to be the basis of the character, because I thought that was realistic. And then, all of a sudden, it became Bo Derek in 1981 because of that movie 10. And that’s when I said, ‘That’s it. They’ve sold out for

Figure 21.2  Early concept art for Dazzler modeled after Grace Jones. Sketch by John Romita Jr., 1979.

362   Nicholas E. Miller some whitebread blonde chick’ ” (qtd in Nolen-Weathington and Khoury 17–18). Yet the initial choice of Jones as a model also mattered because Jones was an influential queer figure. As Barry Walters wrote in a retrospective on Jones: “She was as queer as a relatively straight person could get. Her image celebrated blackness and subverted gender norms; she presented something we had never seen before in pop performance—a woman who was lithe, sexy, and hyperfeminine while also exuding a ribald, butch swagger.” Although Alison Blaire did not ultimately embody this blackness as intended, much of the above statement about Jones still speaks to Dazzler as a character: she remains as queer as a relatively straight person could get. And, much as seen in reviews of most Grace Jones performances, Dazzler’s shows are often notable as much for their visual artistry (i.e., the light shows and camp aesthetics) as for her singing. Marvel Comics and Casablanca Records opted for a different direction, however, demonstrating how the queer potential of this character (as well as her racial politics) could be subject to corporate demands that would attempt to contain those politics. Yet even as the androgynous and black potential of Dazzler-as-Grace-Jones was lost before ever appearing on a comics page, Dazzler’s relationship to disco remains an important part of the character’s origins. Despite the discarded original design, Alison Blaire remains a product of disco as a culture that was resistant to both heteronormative and homonormative articulations. As cultural studies scholar Tim Lawrence has argued, “[disco] dancers engaged in a cultural practice that did not affirm their maleness or their femaleness, or their queer or straight predilections . . . but instead positioned them as agents who could participate in a destabilizing or queer ritual that recast the experience of the body through a series of affective vectors” (233). Drawing on this definition of disco culture, I argue that Dazzler’s relationship to disco as a formative space serves to destabilize institutional attempts to contain her within a heteronormative framework. The queer politics of disco are also featured in Fawaz’s work on superhero comics, and X-Men in particular. Drawing on an analysis of “The Phoenix Saga” and “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” arguably two of the most famous storylines in X-Men comics, Fawaz ­situates both Storm (aka Ororo Munroe) and Phoenix (aka Jean Grey) alongside the countercultural undercurrents of disco that often served to destabilize superhero bodies and politics. More specifically, Fawaz argues that Storm embodied the “black female ‘disco diva’ ” persona that “dominated gay and African American visual culture” and that the two women’s “differences [in “The Phoenix Saga”] could be reconciled by visual reference to the cross-racial and sexual culture of disco, where difference was dissolved in the psychedelic pleasures of the dance floor” (50, 56). Yet as Fawaz moves from “The Phoenix Saga” (1976–1977) to “The Dark Phoenix Saga” (1980), he highlights how the comics move away from the liberatory political energies of the 1970s and instead embrace a vision in which “disco culture is now equated with deviant forms of desire, presumably of the sexual variety” (213). This claim aligns with Lawrence’s argument that a popular turn to disco (including the creation of Dazzler) coincided with a media overproduction of disco following the success of the film Saturday Night Fever (1977)—a turn that also coincided with a homophobic backlash against disco that further implicated the movement as queer.5

Disco, Derby, and Drag: The Queer Politics of Marvel’s Dazzler    363 Amid this shift, Fawaz articulates the queer potential of Jean Grey, noting her “vile” thoughts as she enters a disco club in Uncanny X-Men #130: “Her seeming openness to deviancy also positions her as a potential gender outlaw, a woman willing to seek out a variety of desires rather than simply be a sexual object to men” (213). This is an interesting interpretive move, particularly in the issue that first introduces us to Alison Blaire. Indeed, if the visual transformation of Jean Grey “from a benevolent force of sexual liberation into a violent sexual predator” described by Fawaz is visually represented as a transformation into the Black Queen of the Hellfire Club (whose name itself is reminiscent of a disco club), what might we make of the decision to shift Dazzler away from being an actual “Black Queen” (i.e., a Grace Jones figure) and instead to render her less “deviant” in the guise of a white woman (214)? In both of these shifts, we see implicit efforts to either contain or to (in this case, literally) demonize the queer potential of disco as a cultural movement, even as the characters themselves actively embody such “deviant” tendencies and verbalize their nonnormative status on the page. What is not present in Fawaz’s analysis of this issue, of course, is the disco performer herself, who is later introduced as Dazzler in the same scene that Fawaz uses to describe Jean Grey as “deviant.” In fact, in Uncanny X-Men #130 (Claremont et al.), Cyclops asks himself as he enters the disco, “What kind of mutant are we going to find in a place like this?!” The mutant he is referring to, of course, is the kind of mutant who not only ­frequents but performs at such a place. Moments before they are attacked by Hellfire Club goons, Cyclops and Jean Grey realize that Dazzler, now onstage, is the mutant they seek. After a quick battle at the disco, Dazzler gets her first verbal encounter with the X-Men. Cyclops takes that opportunity to inform her that she is a mutant, that being one “set[s] you apart from the rest of humanity,” and that this status will lead others to try to capture or kill her (Figure 21.3). He invites her to join them for protection, which she does temporarily. What is striking about this explanation is the emphasis that Cyclops puts on difference; he explains that being different from the rest of humanity has social consequences. Moreover, Cyclops’s explanation comes on the heels of Dazzler explaining that her name is directly tied to her mutation because she “dazzles”; in this way, his statement implies that her name—her very identity—might be considered nonnormative and dangerous. In Uncanny X-Men #131 (Claremont et al.), however, after defeating Emma Frost and other members of the Hellfire Club, Dazzler rejects an invitation to officially join the X-Men. Instead, she informs Professor X that “world-savin’ ain’t my style. I prefer the excitement I got on stage.” Departing from the status quo of X-Men comics, where mutants either join the team or become villains, Dazzler embraces her disco identity to pursue a career as a performer—a move that places her in the spotlight and marks her as visible. This decisions emphasizes an important aspect of Dazzler’s queer ­origins: she is not restricted to a mutant identity but chooses to negotiate her status as both a mutant and a performer. She harnesses her disco origins in a way that affirms neither of her primary identities but rather allows her to destabilize both narratives from the outset.

364   Nicholas E. Miller

Figure 21.3 Cyclops explains to Dazzler that she is a mutant immediately after they are attacked by a group of armored Hellfire Club goons. Uncanny X-Men #130, 1980.

Before examining this visibility in more detail, I will briefly look at a storyline that revisits Dazzler’s disco origins in the X-Men: Curse of the Mutants collection (Sequeira and Takeda). While many versions of Dazzler revisit her disco look, this story invokes her origins at a time when they seem like a distant past. Indeed, at this moment, she walks through the world in a dark X-Men uniform that looks nothing like her original costume. After an altercation at a local bar, Dazzler saves a predatory man from a vampire attack. She follows the vampire, Ivory, to an underground club of disco vampires, led by a black woman named Sheba Sugarfangs. Here we see a distant echo of the Grace Jones figure that inspired Dazzler, or at least a reminder about the multiracial politics of disco and queer subjectivities of Dazzler’s origins. Being in this space allows Alison to reflect on her own early disco days and to remember that she actually loved “that old stuff ”—a nod, perhaps, to the liberatory sexual politics of disco culture. She also learns that these vampires have been shunned by the world and spend their time protecting their descendants from corrupt people. The vampires cannot go public as Dazzler did in her past and instead find themselves “closeted” and trying to live an invisible life of ­vampiric pseudo-celibacy: they avoid violence and the drinking of human blood when possible. Now Ivory has violated this code of “celibacy” in an act of same-gender desire symbolized through his attack on the bar patron. As Sheba tells Dazzler that the ­vampires will take care of the situation, the two get into a fight in which Alison inadvertently kills Ivory. As Sheba mourns the loss of Ivory, she laments that their existence as vampires is something that Alison cannot understand, to which Dazzler responds, “Ain’t no one tougher on us freaks but ourselves, sometimes” (Figure 21.4).

Disco, Derby, and Drag: The Queer Politics of Marvel’s Dazzler    365

Figure 21.4  Dazzler reflects on what she shares in common (as a “freak”) with a group of disco vampires she encounters at Studio 13. X-Men: Curse of the Mutants—X-Men vs. Vampires #1, 2010.

In this concluding sentiment, Alison embraces an ideology of self-acceptance that is also tied to regrets about hiding her identity. In this case, we get a narrative in which she sees herself in Sheba and the other “freaks” of this underground disco, perhaps mourning a queer element in herself that has been hidden or lost over time.

“Going Gaga”: Fame, Excess, and the Politics of Visibility That Alison Blaire is capable of thinking of herself as a disco “freak” also helps establish Dazzler as a mutant performer who must negotiate not only her human/mutant identity but also the public/private tensions inherent in being a celebrity or seeking fame. That she often chooses to do so without disclosing her mutant identity is one of the defining tensions of her character’s history. This long-running focus on her music career and her attempts to keep her mutant identity hidden has not only led to Dazzler being embraced by LGBTQ+ fan communities but has also led to questions about her sexuality that are explicitly tied to her status as a performer. In fact, a common ­comparison made between Dazzler and contemporary performers has been to pop entertainer Lady Gaga.6 While such comparisons have a long history (fan communities often engage in “fan-casting” their favorite superheroes on-screen), the reference

366   Nicholas E. Miller to Lady Gaga also provides a useful entry into thinking about Dazzler and the queer politics of fame. More specifically, this comparison led me to revisit J.  Jack Halberstam’s Gaga Feminism, a meditation on performance and popular culture that seeks to reformulate gender politics through narratives of excess and artifice. Halberstam argues that “Gaga feminism is a politics that brings together meditations on fame and visibility with a lashing critique of the fixity of roles for males and females”—or, in other words, a queer politics that challenges normative gender categories (5). Whereas Dazzler’s disco origins specifically destabilize those categories for her character, her long-running status as a pop performer in later decades also opens up broader possibilities for a queer retrospection on performance itself. Like Lady Gaga, Dazzler is not easily confined to gender or genre categories; she is also a singer, actor, superhero, romantic lead, and star. No story illustrates this point more clearly than Marvel Graphic Novel #12, “Dazzler: The Movie” (Shooter et al.). While this text primarily offers a fraught narrative about consent, gaslighting, and sexual assault, it is also helps to establish the stakes of celebrity and fame for Dazzler.7 Early in the story, we see Alison return home from her job as a dance exercise instructor; she turns up her music and lets loose with a small light show in her apartment (Figure 21.5). The language she uses to describe this experience is that of a person feeling closeted: “It’s murder keeping it bottled up inside me till it fades— instead of turning it into light and letting it shine.” She contemplates her situation through the lens of the nonnormative; she wonders what sound feels like to “normal” people and then imagines a form of empathy tied to how brains are wired. She even speculates, “Maybe it’s one of those things that if some little switch were thrown inside their brains, then everybody could feel the energy like I do.” Such reflections speak to her wish for others to experience the world the way she does, particularly in terms of desire and pleasure. And for that particular moment, we get a version of Alison Blaire that seems content with herself—as she prepares to look at herself in the mirror, she states, “I’m glad I’m me.” This contentedness gets disrupted as the story progresses. In an attempt to win her affections, waning movie star Roman Nekoboh begins circulating rumors about their relationship in ways that thrust Alison into the media spotlight. He eventually persuades her to star in a movie with him, and we are soon introduced to Dazzler the star, a woman whose life is filled with publicity shots, movie deals, swanky affairs, and paparazzi. Yet this celebrity status becomes complicated when Roman decides to “out” Alison as a mutant. This outing takes place immediately following a scene in which Alison looks at herself critically in the mirror—a clear reversal of the opening narrative in which she is glad to be herself. Roman sees this as a perfect publicity gimmick; he points out that this news will make Alison visible not only as a performer but also as a mutant. Alison reluctantly agrees to a public exhibition of her powers, which ultimately frightens people; they are not prepared for the excess of light or the absence of sound at this high-profile performance of her mutant powers. This public display leads to an onslaught of antimutant sentiment toward Alison and others. It is the politics of her visibility, perhaps more than her actual status as a mutant, that people find upsetting. What these public

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Figure 21.5  Dazzler arrives home from work and lets loose (with a light show) while contemplating what sound must feel like to “normal” people. Marvel Graphic Novel #12, 1984.

­ utbursts do is make Alison the public face of mutantkind, or a mutant celebrity. This o new status drives her to to return to the self-loving version of herself from the beginning of “Dazzler: The Movie”; she plunges head first into making a great movie that can ­perhaps change public perception. For the next few pages, Alison is shown poring over the movie script, working out, and making other revisions to the film. She wants the movie to be true to the mutant experience, a sentiment that speaks broadly to narratives of representation and authenticity in popular culture. This moment also demonstrates how Dazzler (much like Lady Gaga) never truly drops her persona, neither as Dazzler nor as Alison Blaire. Instead, I would argue, her character is always both performative and authentic—those categories themselves are destabilized. Alison explicitly comments on this during a scene where she is to perform her own stunts: “This scene must be perfect, Rene! It has to look real! Our big advantage is that my part of the action will be real!”

368   Nicholas E. Miller Yet even as she attempts to demonstrate—through performance—how her mutant powers can be used for good, she is reviled by the public. Demonstrators begin to gather outside her residence, and we are given scenes that depict police officers who are uninterested in protecting her and humans who tell her that she “shouldn’t be allowed to walk the streets with normal people” (Figure 21.6). The language of not walking the streets here again speaks to concerns that are familiar to those working in queer studies; those concerns are based not solely on the status of being queer but on being visibly queer. Similar to other narratives of queer liberation and resistance, the counterarguments in this story tend to focus on not wanting “her kind” visible in the neighborhood or around children. It is Dazzler’s status as a mutant performer, in addition to simply being a mutant, that causes alarm. Throughout “Dazzler: The Movie,” these protests continue, always tied to a media leak or a film screening. Still, Alison remains resistant to giving up her dreams. Even as the narrative concludes with her destroying the film reel, her final remarks to Roman express a clear desire to see her name in lights again. Halberstam argues that “Gaga feminism” is about excess, pop performances, and the embrace of a loss of control, and “Dazzler: The Movie” is undergirded by those sameconcerns. The narrative also reveals a tension between this desire for fame and the ­consequences of being a public figure. Lady Gaga has often referred to herself as a “fame monster”; Dazzler also sees herself as a fame monster, often without the positive connotations. Indeed, she sometimes sees herself as truly monstrous, as I demonstrate in the following section. Still, as Dazzler moves away from her disco origins, her “monstrous” mode of pop performativity sustains a similarly queer politics of destabilization. Halberstam claims, in an interview with the Chronicle, that “ ‘going gaga’ represents a methodology that steps away from oppositions between queer and feminist, men and

Figure 21.6  Dazzler attempts to enter her home amid a throng of antimutant demonstrators who are upset by her “out” status as a celebrity mutant. Marvel Graphic Novel #12, 1984.

Disco, Derby, and Drag: The Queer Politics of Marvel’s Dazzler    369 women, homo and hetero. To ‘go gaga’ is to revel in and participate in the recent riotous disregard for clear distinctions” (qtd. in Potter). In addition to the formal performances on stage and screen, this disregard is also made visible through the charades of masculinity frequently on display in “Dazzler: The Movie”: she lifts heavier weights than the men in her gym, rejects heteronormative courtship expectations, and assumes agency over her career in the face of abusive, misogynistic men—all while performing a hyperfeminine aesthetic and loosely adhering to the heteronormative tropes of the romance genre. Additionally, in Gaga Feminism, Halberstam highlights “the strangeness of heterosexuality,” particularly when it comes to popular narratives of romance (11). Indeed, he emphasizes the importance of a “How weird is that?” approach to heterosexuality in the classroom that disrupts narratives of queer tolerance and invites students to interrogate behaviors long believed to be “normal.” Elements of Halberstam’s argument are also echoed by Osvaldo Oyola, who specifically applies them to romance comics and argues that the heteronormative values that “romance comics reinforce are really friggin’ queer. I don’t say queer to mean homosexual, as in the political and pejorative usages, but I mean strange. I mean, not adhering to the categories of ‘normal.’ ” While Oyola’s essay primarily focuses on stories from Weird Love, he notably closes with an analysis of the Beauty and the Beast limited series, which features both Dazzler and Beast (aka Hank McCoy). Oyola argues that “Beauty and the Beast succeeds at doing what X-Men comics have long tried to do, make effective use of the mutant metaphor—not as a stand-in for race or queer sexualities, but as a stand-in for the strangeness of these characters themselves, for the queerness possible within a cisgendered heteronormative framework.” Such frameworks are bound to collapse, however, and Halberstam proposes “that we look more closely at heterosexuality . . . to find in its collapse new modes of intimate relation” (22). We see the potential for such modes of relation in Beauty and the Beast but only after Dazzler and Beast experience the violence of the (metaphorical) closet.

“The Beast in the Closet”: Strange Heterosexualities and Weird Romance In Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick defines the closet as “that curious space that is both internal and marginal to the culture: centrally representative of its motivating passions and contradictions, even while marginalized by its orthodoxies,” and notes that “a small, shadowily identified group both represented the hidden, perhaps ­dangerous truths about a culture to itself ” (56–57). Sedgwick’s claim that “the epistemology of the closet has given overarching consistency to gay culture and identity throughout [the twentieth] century” still rings true, and it certainly held true for the 1980s (68). As early as the 1990s, Sedgwick argued that “the closet” and “coming out” verged on “all-purpose phrases for the potent crossing and recrossing of almost any

370   Nicholas E. Miller politically charged lines of representation” tied to secrecy and disclosure (71). She argued that coming out “can bring about the revelation of a powerful unknowing as unknowing, not as a vacuum or as the blank it can pretend to be but as a weighty and occupied and consequential epistemological space” (77). In the wake of the events of “Dazzler: The Movie,” Alison’s retreat to an underground mutant theater in Beauty and the Beast reveals a narrative of (in)visibility that speaks to the queer politics of her character through the lens of the closet. It is perhaps indulgent to title this section “The Beast in the Closet” after Sedgwick’s chapter in Epistemology of the Closet, yet that title speaks directly to the role Beast plays in this limited series. While the narrative framework is in many ways explicitly heteronormative, it simultaneously demonstrates the “weirdness” of heterosexual romance and resists compulsory desire toward a heterosexual object, McCoy. Like Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” which Sedgwick analyzes in Epistemology of the Closet, the Beauty and the Beast limited series opens up queer possibilities for female desire and gratification within the conventions of a heteronormative romance narrative. Indeed, I would argue that Dazzler constructs a closet for Beast (and herself) explicitly because of her inability to perceive his value beyond her predicament, a claim similar to the one Sedgwick makes about May Bartram and Marcher in James. Alison’s experience in “Dazzler: The Movie” demonstrates the dangers of making her identity public, and in this series, she not only returns to a closeted space—one curated by the theater manager to appear mutant-normative—but also pulls Beast into that space with her. The premise of the series is that Alison cannot find work amid the antimutant sentiment following her public “outing” in “Dazzler: The Movie.” She notes in Beauty and the Beast #1 (Nocenti et al.), “I could never go back . . . face the world . . . I tried my best and failed. They’ll kill me out there.” Instead, she gets recruited to perform in an all-mutant theater just as her powers are beginning to act up (which we later learn is the result of being drugged). In a reversal of the liberating light show we saw at the beginning of “Dazzler: The Movie,” we instead find Alison trying hard to hide her light, noting that she “can’t let them see.” Beast attempts to dissuade her, but she ultimately chooses to perform at the underground theater, which is more like a gladiatorial arena. There she develops a taste for a new spotlight, one that highlights her difference as a mutant but allows her to work as a spectacle for a human audience that revels in her performance, even as humans reject her “kind” in more public spaces. In this way, her performances closely resemble the commodification and curation of queer cultures by a nonqueer audience—specifically the act of being “out” of the closet in socially mandated or acceptable ways. Not only that, but these performances celebrate literal violence against other “queer” beings (mutants) for the sake of nonqueer spectators, a potent symbol of internalized queerphobia. Even as Dazzler negotiates this “closeted” space, however, she continues to experiment with other public spaces. Notably, in Beauty and the Beast #3 (Nocenti et al.), she and Beast take a stroll on a local beach, a visible act that leads to public scorn. Reminiscent of the protests featured in “Dazzler: The Movie,” here we see a beach crowd that is disgusted by the sight of them together (Figure 21.7). One beachgoer states, “Th-they’re holding hands—in public?!” Another responds by saying, “I can’t believe their kind is even allowed on this beach!” Notable in each of these

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Figure 21.7  Dazzler and Beast are ridiculed for being “out” together on a beach, where onlookers criticize their public displays of affection. Beauty and the Beast #3, 1985.

claims is the fact that what troubles the crowd is the public nature of their relationship and its visibility. This point is driven home when an older woman in the next panel covers the eyes of a young boy and says, “Don’t look, Bobby. It’s disgusting!” While such a scene speaks broadly to the “mutant metaphor” often present in X-Men comics, the ­following page (Figure 21.8) makes explicit that what strikes the pubic as abnormal is the visible display of a relationship, a clear analog for queer romance in a heteronormative world. After another insult from the crowd, Beast tells Dazzler, “You’re right, Daz. What matters is our love. We don’t need public approval to love each other.” This inability to negotiate a public space with Beast, however, drives Alison back to the underground theater to perform alongside her own “kind.”

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Figure 21.8  After confronting a small group of hecklers, Beast expresses to Dazzler his belief that their love does not need public approval. Beauty and the Beast #3, 1985.

I find this series fascinating not only because it is written by Ann Nocenti, who is known for her social-justice commentary in comics, but also because it interrupts the Shooter era in queer ways. It certainly serves as a useful site for queer reading because it is a narrative that can be carefully mapped onto the “coming out” stories of queeridentifying persons. It also serves as a useful extension of the kinds of performative excess discussed as forms of “Gaga feminism” in the previous section. While acknowledging that she was not trying to make a specific political statement with the relationship between Beast and Dazzler, Nocenti had this to say about potential queer readings of the Beauty and the Beast series: “I would say that I was thinking about all prejudice—race, otherness, the anti-mutant sentiment in Marvel’s world, and what you are living feeds into what you write, so perhaps there was some thought of my gay friends in the prejudice aspect of the story.”8 While attempting to identify authorial intent is often antithetical to queer reading practices, I do find it interesting that when I posed the question, Nocenti was able to see the possibility there and even recalled that she was writing the story as several of her gay friends were struggling with the AIDS epidemic; for them and other LGBTQ+ folks, the need to remain publicly “­closeted” during the epidemic was traumatic.

Disco, Derby, and Drag: The Queer Politics of Marvel’s Dazzler    373 As Jay Edidin and Miles Stokes have discussed on their podcast, this pairing of Beast and Dazzler is also interesting in part because it represents the intersection of a visible mutation (Beast) and fame/celebrity (Dazzler). As such, neither one of these mutants can “pass” as Homo sapiens any longer. The queer potential of Dazzler is subsumed in this limited series under a narrative of being hidden and yet still not being able to negotiate her identity in private. That this question of being “out” has carried over into recent years is apparent in the 2010 epilogue to Beauty and the Beast that Marvel included in the Heartbreakers #1 collection (McCann et al.). Meeting up in secret with Beast, this version of Dazzler asks him: “How do you do it? Be so . . . out. You can walk around and no one says anything. I was outted and the world goes crazy” (Figure 21.9). The language of the closet here raises questions about which visibilities are permitted and which are stigmatized. Buried in the implicit layers of this quotation is a narrative about how Beast—who is visibly “queer” in his nonnormative features—is more accepted as an “out” character than Alison Blaire, who is expected to “pass” as a hyperfeminine, cisgender, heterosexual woman. Yet if Beauty and the Beast provides us with queer subtexts to the narrative of Dazzler (or highlights the inherent weirdness of heterosexuality), it also becomes a narrative that Shooter attempts to contain when he returns to the series in Dazzler #35 (Shooter et al.).

Figure 21.9  Dazzler expresses to Beast her struggle with being “outed.” Marvel Heartbreakers #1 (2010).

374   Nicholas E. Miller

“Femme” Fatale: Derby Culture and the “Un-Queering” of Dazzler Dazzler #35 is a story that can be difficult to place in continuity due to its publication history. Depending on how you read it, this narrative occurs either immediately before or after the Beauty and the Beast limited series.9 For my purposes, however, it only matters that this issue exists adjacent to Beauty and the Beast; indeed, I am primarily interested in the ways in which Dazzler #35—again written by Shooter—offers a strikingly different view of Dazzler and her gender identity from the version we saw written by Nocenti in the previous section. While I am always hesitant to ascribe intentionality to a creator, I consistently read this issue as one in which Shooter implicitly acknowledges the queer possibilities of Dazzler, even as he attempts to foreclose such possibilities and reaffirm her heterosexuality. After the fallout from “Dazzler: The Movie,” in which Dazzler becomes the public face of mutantkind and the catalyst for antimutant sentiment, this issue begins with Alison in a familiar situation: she is unable to pay her rent and is actively looking for work. Unlike in previous issues, however, now Alison is being rejected for jobs explicitly because of her mutant status. She eventually finds employment as a waitress in a womenonly club called Femmes. Alison is surprised to see only women in the club when she walks in, to which the hostess responds, “Of course! Femmes is a women-only club! There are hundreds of men-only establishments! Why not a place exclusively for women?” While the decision to situate this story at such an establishment might open up a number of liberating (and queer) possibilities, what is telling about this narrative is that the antagonists end up being a roller-derby team named the Racine Ramjets, a group of butch-coded women who crash the club and disrupt the evening for Alison and other women. Notably, the masculine coding of the team extends beyond visual cues; one of the Ramjets performs a masculine form of “flirtatiously” ordering drinks as she tells Alison, “Treat us real good, babe, and we’ll give you a big tip, okay?” As the evening progresses, the Ramjets begin bullying not only Alison but also her self-deprecating and noticeably short friend, Barb. Eventually, these confrontations lead to a brawl in which Alison takes down the Ramjets with her training and physical prowess before walking out on yet another job. Her parting note in the issue is to tell Barb not to be self-demeaning in talking about herself or her height. Alison says, “If you let them, those people will make you into what they think you are! They’ll force you to be a toy . . . a clown . . . or a monster . . . or worse” (Figure 21.10). While this narrative seems again to be one about Dazzler learning something about accepting herself for who she is, it also demonstrates an implicit effort on the part of Shooter and other creators to contain Dazzler’s queer subjectivity. In naming the club Femmes, for example, Shooter has positioned normative femininity as the base identity of this scene—a far cry from the deviant cultural spaces of Alison’s disco origins.10

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Figure 21.10  Dazzler explains to her coworker Barb that she should not let others dehumanize or define her; that is how bullies make other people into “monsters.” Dazzler #35, 1985.

Instead, nonnormative gender identities are positioned outside of femininity, as the Ramjets are framed as intruders who do not belong in this space. Their aggression toward the “femmes” in the club, and particularly their aggression toward Alison, can be read alongside (admittedly fraught) narratives of violence committed against femme lesbians for “passing” as straight, particularly when framed adjacent to butch or stud identities. Through this lens, then, we might imagine this confrontation as one in which Shooter makes Dazzler battle her own queerness. Such a move would certainly align with other homophobic examples of Shooter tackling homosexuality and sexual ­violence and would also make sense within a certain view of Dazzler’s relationship to derby and derby culture.11 Such references begin early in Dazzler’s solo series; for instance, during a backstage fight scene in Dazzler #3 (DeFalco et al.), she says, “Zowee! If the music biz ever gets dull . . . I could always become a jammer!” Similarly, her return to a superhero team in

376   Nicholas E. Miller A-Force #2 (Wilson et al.) includes an introduction to her roller-derby alter ego: “­Ali-STUN Blaire, jammer for the Elm Street Nightmares roller derby team.” In these ways, we see Alison inhabiting a space within derby, a sports culture created in large part by women who had systematically been excluded from other spaces in society. More important, perhaps, derby is a cultural space—much like disco—that relies heavily on camp and the destabilization of normative gender categories. Indeed, derby is a theatrical culture that highlights women’s bodies (as a full-contact sport) yet also simultaneously untethers them from normative views of women as aesthetic objects. It is this destabilizing culture that Shooter invokes with the Ramjets, only to attempt to represent them strictly in terms of stereotypical butch aesthetics. In the confrontation between a “femme” Alison and the “butch” derby players, here it is Alison who walks away triumphant. However, what we truly experience at the end of this issue is not Alison rejecting the queer possibilities of derby (or butch identities) but rather her abandoning a space that enforces a butch/femme dichotomy altogether. Drawing on the liminal status she held with disco, through her relationship to derby she occupies a similar space that cannot be reduced to binary gender categories—even in a place named Femmes. That other creators would later capitalize on derby imagery seems like a logical progression, even as Shooter tried to downplay that association through enmity with the Ramjets. Indeed, in A-Force #2, Alison is found by Singularity while participating in a roller-derby bout, only to get mocked by Medusa for identifying the derby rink as her “place of work.” To this, Alison responds by saying, “Judge much? And yeah, it is my work. I’m figuring some things out. And you know, not all of us can be queens” (Figure  21.11). The reference here to “figuring some things out” again highlights the unstable identities that Alison inhabits, even as it echoes a common narrative about ­discovering or understanding one’s own gender and/or sexuality. That her attempt to figure things out would happen in a queer cultural space like roller derby is telling, as is her reference to not being a queen. It is this attention to figuring herself out—potentially through a form “queening” and drag in A-Force—that I now turn.

Yas (Drag) Queen: Punk Aesthetics and the Dazzler Thor Popular culture writers frequently refer to Dazzler as a drag performer, although her performances are rarely gender-bending in nature (at least explicitly). Yet these performances do manifest queerly in their attempt to negotiate normative human/mutant identities and in Alison’s periodic efforts to hide one identity while actively promoting another. As we transition into the representations of Dazzler in the twenty-first century, I examine other modes of gender variance in Dazzler comics that are not strictly gender-bending. One illustration of this can be found in the language of drag; for

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Figure 21.11 Dazzler defends her work as a roller-derby jammer to Medusa, while also explaining that her participation in derby is part of an attempt at “figuring some things out.” A-Force #2, 2016.

example, we might gravitate toward a queer analysis of her pop performances as being “fabulous” or an interpretive mode akin to what Meredith Heller refers to as “drag discourses” (446). Heller notes how online media often use the language of drag to describe “fabulous” figures such as Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Beyoncé, Katy Perry, and other pop artists who perform the “reality” of their gender and embodiment through theatricality. What I find striking about Heller’s argument is her claim that drag discourse is as concerned with narratives of authenticity as it is with gender variation. In this section, I argue that applying a drag framework to my analysis of Dazzler leads to a radical queerness that, in the words of Heller, is capable of “dismantling the ideological stability of the ‘real’ body” (447).

378   Nicholas E. Miller I want to emphasize what Katie R. Horowitz makes clear in her writing on drag, that “there are many distinct, frictional, and even oppositional cultural practices that constitute the various identity categories subsumed under (and often eclipsed by) the queer banner” (304). What I want to avoid is an essentializing of gender performances under a drag umbrella. My aim is not to uncover an authentic queer persona for Dazzler but—as Horowitz does in her own writings—to position drag “as the connective tissue between the political and the performative” (305). The performative changing of costumes, hair colors, and other physical aesthetics that have defined Alison since her first comics appearance also speaks to the same political project as her early disco years: the destabilizing of normative gender categories. To be clear, Dazzler does not perform drag explicitly in either of the best-known genres, kinging and queening. And I do not want to suggest an easy conflation of her mode of drag and that of those who participate in other more explicitly LGBTQ+ drag cultures. Instead, I want to examine, as Horowitz does, how “drag carves out a space in which the only stable gender identity is one that deviates from the norm” (313). Just as I did with disco and derby cultures earlier, I use drag ­discourse as a model that helps to make sense of her performativity through both fashion and self-fashioning—not strictly as a performer on stage but in terms of her appearance more broadly. In the previous section, I noted how Alison was trying to figure herself out on the pages of A-Force #2. In the final pages of A-Force #4 (Wilson e al.), Alison asks Nico Minoru for help with a makeover, one that reflects a personal change in her worldview. While fans have occasionally expressed concern about these frequent changes to Dazzler’s look, these changes reveal the difficulty of identifying an “authentic” or “original” version of Alison Blaire. Instead, as Horowitz notes, “this tension within queer studies generally and drag performance specifically mirrors a parallel conflict at the border of performance and performativity that pits ‘real’ enactments of selfhood against ‘artificially’ produced ones” (323). It is no accident, then, that Alison’s previous change of appearance was in reaction to another mutant (Mystique) assuming her identity and violating her body, leading Alison to recast herself as a punk performer. These punk aesthetics, as scholars such as Tavia Nyong’o have argued, share an ­affiliation with queer feeling; this affiliation is manifested as a shared dismantling of “reproductive futurity” and in the “transmission of affect” between punk and queer subcultures (114). Now, some drag scholarship sees overly stylized, campy, or otherwise self-conscious performance of femininity as a form of drag that makes the performer an aesthetic object more than a subject. Yet here we see a countercultural performance by Dazzler through another version of punk (pink hair and a studded leather jacket) after her makeover, an aesthetic that is quickly paired with a transformation of Minoru as well, from a supernatural Goth aesthetic to an emo punk look. That Minoru is herself a queer character in Runaways is also striking in this context. At the beginning of A-Force #5 (Thompson et al.), the team’s conversation turns to the possibility of encountering a land with many Thors, to which Dazzler and Nico share a fist bump against the backdrop of a large heart, as Nico says, “I dunno. Sounds hot to me” (Figure 21.12).

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Figure 21.12  Dazzler and Nico Minoru share a fist bump at the idea of “a bunch of Thors,” to which Nico remarks that it “sounds hot” to her. A-Force #5, 2016.

This series emerges at a time when Jane Foster carries the mantle of Thor and raises questions about gender-bending and drag superhero performance—as well as the object of Dazzler’s and Nico’s Thor-related desires. That the next Thor they encounter is also a woman (in this case, Dazzler Thor) highlights the additional queer possibilities of this exchange.

380   Nicholas E. Miller This encounter with a Dazzler Thor, however, unnerves Alison at first; she is forced to confront an uncanny version of herself in drag. Yet she slowly comes to accept this version of herself as something more than an oddity (or a masculine-coded version of herself with an Asgardian accent). As the narrative progresses, readers learn that both Dazzlers are dying of a disease induced by contact with Terrigen mists, one that only affects mutants. The echoes of AIDS here are easily identified, as they often have been in narratives with mutant-specific diseases. When Alison discovers that Dazzler Thor is affected, she worries and offers to help. In response, Dazzler Thor says simply, “Canst thou cure thyself?” The queer possibilities of this exchange include a commentary on not being able to cure something that is part of oneself—a line of thinking that extends beyond the disease to the ways in which Dazzler keeps attempting to reinvent herself. This moment of self-realization leads both Dazzlers to inform their teams of their conditions: a “coming out” of sorts. That this coming-out narrative is followed up with Dazzler Thor performing a light-filled distraction speaks again to the relationship between authenticity and performativity for Dazzler; in A-Force #7 (Thompson et al.), Alison says of her Thor counterpart, “We don’t do subtle.” Instead, their shared reality is a one of overperformed theatricality. As the narrative concludes, Alison is forced to take up that performance for herself; Dazzler Thor is injured and dying. In the closing moments of the story, Alison reaches for Lightbringer (Dazzler Thor’s hammer) in hopes that she is worthy to wield it. In a last-ditch effort, she strikes her enemy and screams, “Eat punk-rock-flavored Dazzler Thor lighting lady!” The invocation of punk here again highlights the countercultural affect of her drag identity as it is performed in this series. As we have seen repeatedly, Alison finds a sense of self-worth through performance; this time, that performance is as an Asgardian version of herself. After defeating their enemy, Dazzler Thor dies in Alison’s arms and makes a final request: she wants Alison to promise her that she will find her light again. Two issues later, in A-Force #9 (Thompson et al.), Alison finds herself reflecting on Dazzler Thor, and she refers to her as “an old me that never actually existed.” An echo of her experience with disco vampires might be heard here as Alison reflects on who she was and who she has been—and, implicitly, on the queerness of those selves.

Ali the Ally: Mutant Pride and the Limits of Solidarity After a hiatus of more than thirty years, Dazzler again appeared in a 2018 solo title with Dazzler: X-Song #1, a one-shot issue that set up her return to an ongoing X-Men title. Written by Magdalene Visaggio, a trans woman, and with artwork by Laura Braga, who previously worked on queer-led titles such as DC Comics: Bombshells, this issue was hailed by some as “the most socially relevant X-Men story in decades” (Fugere).

Disco, Derby, and Drag: The Queer Politics of Marvel’s Dazzler    381 I ­conclude this chapter by examining this issue as a culmination of the queer evolution of Dazzler, which highlights how expectations of queer allyship are tied to her status as a performer. Perhaps more than any previous Dazzler storyline, this issue explicitly uses the “mutant metaphor” to examine the queer politics of mutant life and to foreground Dazzler as an LGBTQ+ advocate and icon. I am particularly interested in how this issue serves as a return to the narratives of failure (as a superhero and a performer) that haunt her early solo run in the 1980s but also mark her as a queer character who has grown into her failures. As Halberstam argues in The Queer Art of Failure: “Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well; for queers failure can be a style” (3). Indeed, the capitalistic failures that Halberstam has highlighted mark Alison’s entire career in music, and Dazzler: X-Song #1 opens with a return to underground music scenes where she can perform in less public ways and under a new identity. More important, her earlier failures have allowed her to perform in explicitly queer ways. This issue takes place shortly after Alison has left A-Force, and readers find her performing under a new stage name: LIGHTBRINGR. In many ways, this issue returns us to Alison’s earliest storylines as the fabulous mutant who is always torn between being a singer and a (reluctant) superhero. Yet this story is not focused on her as a typical hero; it eschews a big supervillain plot in favor of a characterization of Alison that highlights her status among fans as an LGBTQ+ advocate. More specifically, this issue depicts Alison as a champion of mutant/Inhuman solidarity as a metaphor that speaks to contemporary debates about trans inclusion/exclusion from queer and feminist communities, a debate that locates this story alongside contemporary queer and feminist concerns about ComicsGate, TERFs, and the #MeToo movement.12 In this way, Visaggio and Braga tackle online bullying, trolling, and other kinds of exclusionary practices that have often marked LGBTQ+ solidarity events across history. That this one-shot was released during Pride Month is no accident. Alison opens her first concert in this issue by declaring, “This is mutant pride! Inhuman solidarity! We may be the world’s genetic pariahs, but we aren’t finished yet!” The reference to being genetic pariahs in this statement invokes the fraught essentialist/ determinist beliefs that many (even those in queer communities) might hold about trans communities being pariahs who violate a normative biological or genetic coding. It is also worth highlighting that Alison specifically invokes Pride, a celebratory month and series of events that aim to create LGBTQ+ solidarity and have repeatedly come under fire for engaging in exclusionary practices (specifically when it comes to trans communities, asexual communities, and queer communities of color).13 The scene quickly cuts from the stage to the audience, specifically to an Inhuman named Nora, who cuts loose and feels—for the first time in a while, it seems—fully in control of her powers and her body. Over all of the dancing, a narrative voice emerges and states, “It was just so positive, you know? All these kids out there being themselves, letting their Mutie flag fly.” The opening performance, then, is a celebration of inclusion and solidarity. As Nora and her friend Zee wait after the show to meet Alison, Nora gets nervous. Zee says, “Did you or did you not wanna tell them how much it meant to have a non-baseline

382   Nicholas E. Miller band out here kicking butt?” The emphasis on “non-baseline” here has its own queer implications, especially if Inhumans are metaphorically coded as trans characters. Their waiting, however, is interrupted by mutant bullies who tell them, “Hey, Inhuman. How about you stay the hell away from Mutant Pride, you gene reject.” Alison interrupts from behind by putting the bullies down with her light powers and saying, “Listen, everyone’s just trying to have a good time tonight. Everyone.” She continues, “No gene tests for admission. No anti-Inhuman nonsense. You get in the way of that, and believe me, the only person having a good time will be me.” We learn in the following conversation that this group of mutants bullying Inhumans is called Mutant Action, and it is hard to see their abbreviation (MA) as anything but one letter removed from MRA (Men’s Rights Activists), or persons who are often associated with the misogynistic and homophobic bullying cultures prevalent in contemporary popular-culture discourse. The MA ­members follow Alison to all of her shows, slowly increasing in numbers. Yet Alison remains defiant and committed to a message of solidarity, at one point yelling from the stage, “This is yours! This is ours! Mutant, Inhuman—we are rocking, dancing, and ­loving together!” As the tour progresses, readers watch as Alison signs merchandise, and a young (­presumably Inhuman) boy comes up to tell her, “It’s so great what you’re doing. It means so much to all of us.” This exchange is interrupted by an MA member who argues with Alison by saying, “Inhumans are just humans. They don’t get to colonize our oppression.” This narrative echoes a number of contemporary debates in feminist and queer communities about trans persons, especially in regard to those whose transitions might later code them (or allow them to “pass”) as “straight.” Similar arguments are leveled against asexual communities as organizers and/or activist often deny them access to Pride events. In Dazzler: X-Song, however, Alison has no time for this gatekeeping, and she calls security to remove the MA member. At a later show, several MA members physically assault Nora and then use a dampener to cancel out her powers. Dazzler again intervenes, and the MA says, “But you— you’re one of us! What happened to solidarity?” Here Dazzler is coded as queer herself, but she also makes an important point about LGBTQ+ advocacy and solidarity: that it is not unconditional. Or in her own words, “Oh, sweetie. Your little cheapo gang of bullies don’t get solidarity.” After dispatching the MA members with the help of her fans and her band, Dazzler gears up for her final show of the issue. She plays for a crowd in Brooklyn, where she spells out her philosophy about solidarity: “I gotta say, you all were amazing tonight! And I hope you saw what I saw. That we’re more powerful than our powers. That we don’t need to be afraid so long as we stand together. That we’re bigger than the X-Men, or the Avengers, or the Champions. We’re not just a scene. We’re a family. And we have to stand together . . . because we will always stand apart.” This concluding remark sums up the queer politics of Dazzler’s history as one of radical inclusivity for those who exist apart from normative identity categories. It is through statements like this one that the “subtext” of her affiliations with disco, derby, and drag cultures becomes “text” and we can see the reparative potential of reading her early years through queer interpretive frameworks. By orienting ourselves differently toward the

Disco, Derby, and Drag: The Queer Politics of Marvel’s Dazzler    383 spaces and desires that produced Alison Blaire in the 1980s—despite the implicit and/or explicit restrictions of Marvel Comics—we can engage in the kinds of radically queer world-making projects that Fawaz argues are inherent to superhero comics. Indeed, as Ahmed argues, “the queer subject within straight culture hence deviates and is made socially present as a deviant”; but in making that claim, she also notes that “risking departure from the straight and narrow makes new futures possible, which might involve going astray, getting lost, or even becoming queer” (21). By orienting ourselves to read Dazzler through this retrospective lens, we might be able to provide fans of Alison Blaire with the “love letter” that Madison called for in the opening of this chapter, one that affirms the queer pleasures of her disco origins and (dis)continuities.

Notes 1. While quantifying fandom is always difficult, there is considerable evidence that the character of Dazzler has resonated with LGBTQ+ communities. For example, in 2008, the Comic Book Queers podcast performed dramatic readings of Dazzler #1 and shortly thereafter began a series on the show titled “Dazzlered and Confused” in her honor. In addition, Dazzler has repeatedly been referred to as a “gay icon” in print publications, including the fan-focused The Comic Book Podcast Companion and the journalistic LGBT-interest magazine Advocate. 2. Even as I suggest a “reparative reading” of Dazzler, however, it is worth noting other important scholarship that resists and qualifies the reparative impulse. In a brilliant essay on “Dazzler, Melodrama, and Shame,” for example, Brian Johnson complicates queer readings of Dazzler by focusing on the ambiguity of the mutant metaphor as a space of liberation for queer readers. 3. Engaging in queer reading practices is particularly important for long-running superhero narratives, where access to characters, storylines, and communities is often still subject to gatekeeping by fans and scholars. That being said, scholars should also be careful and/ or critical of how we engage with queer reading practices. There are certainly risks of enabling queerbaiting through our efforts, for example, and valid concerns remain about how queer readings might encourage essentialist or assimilationist narratives (i.e. homonormativity). 4. This reference to “reparative” possibilities is directed at the work of Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading.” 5. As Lawrence notes, however, “the perceived failure of disco was really therefore the failure of a form of disco that valorized the patriarchal, the heterosexual, and the bourgeois. . . . As such, the failure was not so much a failure of queerness as a failure of the regressive attempts to contain queerness and appropriate disco” (242). 6. See Krishna; Bonomolo. 7. A more thorough exploration of these abusive gender politics can be found in Miller. 8. Ann Nocenti, email to author, 24 Aug. 2017. 9. The timing here is difficult, as Dazzler #35 is being published concurrently with the Beauty and the Beast series. There is a strong argument to be made for Dazzler #35 occurring before Beauty and the Beast and immediately after Marvel Graphic Novel #12; it opens with a flashback to Alison’s experience with Roman Nekoboh and the resulting antimutant sentiment. That said, a similar case can be made for Beauty and the Beast occurring after Marvel

384   Nicholas E. Miller Graphic Novel #12 and before Dazzler #35; both the hardcover Beauty and the Beast collection and the Essential Dazzler collection appear to place Dazzler #35 immediately after Beauty and the Beast. 10. I want to acknowledge that another reading might position “femme” as a more explicitly queer identity that is often rendered invisible. Joan Nestle has long highlighted the invis­ ibility of femme lesbians and the ways in which that invisibility can subject femme lesbians to violence. 11. See Mangels 39–40. 12. ComicsGate refers to a fringe movement of comics “fans” who believe that the comics industry is motivated entirely by political agendas and is “ruining” comics through pushes for diversity and inclusion. The movement has been marked by aggressive online tactics aimed at women and creators of color and began to take shape in 2017. TERF is an acronym that stands for “trans exclusionary radical feminist” and refers to people who actively seek to exclude trans people from feminist movements. The #MeToo movement is an international movement against sexual harassment and sexual assault that has its origins in an effort by Tarana Burke in 2006 to empower survivors through empathy. In 2017, the term resurfaced and was popularized online in the aftermath of sexual misconduct allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein. 13. It is worth noting that this trend of associating Dazzler performances with Pride continues in Volume 4 of the Iceman series, written by Grace. In the fourth issue, Dazzler not only headlines a formal Mutant Pride event, but is also introduced by Shade (Marvel’s first mutant drag queen superhero).

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke UP, 2006. Bonomolo, Cameron. “ ‘X-Men’ Star Hugh Jackman’s Photo with Lady Gaga Has Fans Wanting HerasDazzler.”ComicBook,8Sept.2018,comicbook.com/marvel/2018/09/08/x-men-wolverinehugh-jackman-lady-gaga-dazzler-marvel. Claremont, Chris (writing), John Byrne (pencils), Terry Austin (ink), and Glynis Wein (color). Uncanny X-Men #130. Marvel Comics, February 1980. Claremont, Chris (writing), John Byrne (pencils), Terry Austin (ink), and Glynis Wein (color). Uncanny X-Men #131. Marvel Comics, March 1980. D’Agostino, Anthony Michael. “ ‘Flesh-to-Flesh Contact’: Marvel Comics’ Rogue and the Queer Feminist Imagination.” American Literature, vol. 90, no. 2, 2018, pp. 251–281. DeFalco, Tom (writing), John Romita Jr. (pencils), Alan Kupperberg (pencils), Danny Bulanadi (ink), Armando Gill (ink), and Bob Sharen (color). Dazzler #3. Marvel Comics, May 1981. Edidin, Jay, and Miles Stokes. “Post-Disco Panic.” Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men, 14 Dec. 2014, xplainthexmen.com/2014/12/35-post-disco-panic. Fawaz, Ramzi. The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics. New York UP, 2016. Fugere, Mike. “Dazzler: X-Song May Be the Most Socially Relevant X-Men Story in Decades.” Comic Book Resources, 19 June 2018, cbr.com/dazzler-socially-relevant-xmen-story. Grace, Sina (writing), Nathan Stockman (pencils, ink), Federico Blee (color), and Ulises Arreola (color). Iceman #4. Marvel Comics, February 2019.

Disco, Derby, and Drag: The Queer Politics of Marvel’s Dazzler    385 Gray, Meredith. “Graduate Student Can’t Stop Queering Things.” Reductress, vol. 6, no. 2, 10 Sept. 2014, reductress.com/post/graduate-student-cant-stop-queering-things. Halberstam, J. Jack. Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. Beacon, 2012. Halberstam, J. Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke UP, 2011. Heller, Meredith. “Is She He? Drag Discourse and Drag Logic in Online Media Reports of Gender Variance.” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 16, no. 3, 2016, pp. 445–459. Horowitz, Katie R. “The Trouble with ‘Queerness’: Drag and the Making of Two Cultures.” Signs, vol. 38, no. 2, 2013, pp. 303–326. Johnson, Brian. “Dazzler, Melodrama, and Shame: Mutant Allegories/Closeted Readers, 198086.” Supersex: Essays on Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero, edited by Anna F. Peppard. U of Texas P, 2020, forthcoming. Krishna, Swapna. “Who Wore It Better? Lady Gaga vs. Dazzler.” Syfy Wire, 6 Feb. 2017, syfy. com/syfywire/who-wore-it-better-lady-gaga-vs-dazzler. Lawrence, Tim. “Disco and the Queering of the Dance Floor.” Cultural Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, 2011, pp. 230–243. Lipton, Mark. “Queer Readings of Popular Culture: Searching [to] Out the Subtext.” Queer Youth Cultures, edited by Susan Driver, State U of New York P, 2008, pp. 163–180. Madison, Ira, III. “The Queer Importance of Dazzler, Marvel’s Disco-Inspired, Rollerskating Heroine.” MTV News, July 28, 2016, mtv.com/news/2911767/the-queer-importance-ofdazzler-marvels-disco-inspired-rollerskating-superheroine. Mangels, Andy. “Out of the Closet and into the Comics—Gays in Comics: The Creations and the Creators, Part I.” Amazing Heroes #143, Fantagraphics, June 1988. McCann, Jim (writing), David López (art), Álvaro López (ink), and Emily Warren (color). “Beauty and the Beast: An Epilogue.” Marvel Heartbreakers #1. Marvel Comics, April 2010. Miller, Nicholas E. “ ‘Is There Anything Left to Be Shattered?’: Reading Dazzler in the #MeToo Moment.” The Middle Spaces, 10 April 2018, themiddlespaces.com/2018/04/10/dazzlerin-the-metoo-moment. Nocenti, Ann (writing), Don Perlin (pencils), Kim DeMulder (ink), and George Roussos (color). Beauty and the Beast #1. Marvel Comics, December 1984. Nocenti, Ann (writing), Don Perlin (pencils), Kim DeMulder (ink), Petra Scotese (color), and George Roussos (color). Beauty and the Beast #3. Marvel Comics, April 1985. Nolen-Weathington, Eric, and George Khoury, editors. Modern Masters Volume Eighteen: John Romita, Jr. TwoMorrows, 2008. Nyong’o, Tavia. “Do You Want Queer Theory (or Do You Want the Truth)?: Intersections of Punk and Queer in the 1970s.” Radical History Review, no. 100, 2008, pp. 103–119. Oyola, Osvaldo. “ ‘I’m Looking for a Weird Love, Baby . . .’: Romance Comics and the Strangeness of the Normative.” The Middle Spaces, 17 Feb. 2015, themiddlespaces.com/ 2015/02/17/looking-for-a-weird-love. Potter, Claire  B. “Gaga Feminism: An Interview with J.  Jack Halberstam (Part I).” Chronicle, 5  Dec. 2012, chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2012/12/gaga-feminism-aninterview-with-j-jack-halberstam-part-i. Scott, Darieck, and Ramzi Fawaz. “Introduction: Queer about Comics.” American Literature, vol. 90, no. 2, 2018, pp. 197–219. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. U of California P, 1990. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky.“Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You.” Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Duke UP, 1997.

386   Nicholas E. Miller Sequeira, Christopher (writing), and Sana Takeda (art). “I’m Gonna Stake You, Sucka.” X-Men: Curse of the Mutants—X-Men vs. Vampires #1. Marvel Comics, November 2010. Shahani, Nishant. Queer Retrosexualities: The Politics of Reparative Return. Lehigh UP, 2012. Shooter, James (writing), Frank Springer (pencils), Vince Colletta (ink), and Christie Scheele (color). “Dazzler: The Movie.” Marvel Graphic Novel #12. Marvel Comics, October 1984. Shooter, Jim (writing), Frank Springer (pencils), Vince Colletta (ink), and Petra Scotese (color). Dazzler #35. Marvel Comics, January 1985. Thompson, Kelly (writing), Ben Caldwell (pencils), Scott Hanna (ink), and Ian Herring (color). A-Force #7. Marvel Comics, September 2016. Thompson, Kelly (writing), Ben Caldwell (pencils, ink), and Ian Herring (color). A-Force #5. Marvel Comics, July 2016. Thompson, Kelly (writing), Paulo Siqueira (pencils, ink), and Rachelle Rosenberg (color). A-Force #9. Marvel Comics, November 2016. Visaggio, Magdalene (writing), Laura Braga (pencils, ink), and Rachelle Rosenberg (color). Dazzler: X-Song #1. Marvel Comics, August 2018. Walters, Barry. “As Much as I Can, as Black as I Am: The Queer History of Grace Jones.” Pitchfork, 25 Aug. 2015, pitchfork.com/features/from-the-pitchfork-review/9708-as-muchas-i-can-as-black-as-i-am-the-queer-history-of-grace-jones. Wilson, G.  Willow (writing), Kelly Thompson (writing), Jorge Molina (pencils, ink), and Laura Martin (color). A-Force #2. Marvel Comics, April 2016. Wilson, G.  Willow (writing), Kelly Thompson (writing), Jorge Molina (pencils, ink), and Laura Martin (color). A-Force #4. Marvel Comics, June 2016.

chapter 22

The R epl acem en ts Ethnicity, Gender, and Legacy Heroes in Marvel Comics Jeffrey A. Brown

Following the apparent death of Spider-Man (Peter Parker) in 2011, Marvel announced that a new character would assume the web slinger’s mantle. The series Ultimate Comics Spider-Man (2011–2013) introduced Miles Morales as the new high-school-age superhero, of African-American and Puerto Rican descent, ushering in a new era for Spidey. Since the debut of Miles’s Spider-Man, Marvel has slowly changed the landscape of its fictional universe by replacing many iconic characters with younger versions who are of a different gender or ethnicity (or both) from the original superheroes. In 2013, Carol Danvers was promoted to Captain Marvel, leaving the title of Ms. Marvel to Kamala Khan, a Muslim Pakistani teenager from New Jersey with shapeshifting powers. Thor became unworthy to wield his magic hammer in 2014 and was replaced as the God of Thunder by his ex-girlfriend, Jane Foster, who was able to lift the hammer and assume his powers. In 2014, Steve Rogers’s age was accelerated, and he could no longer fulfill his role as Captain America. Steve’s one-time sidekick, African American Sam Wilson (aka the Falcon), donned the familiar red, white, and blue costume and shield to become the all-new Captain America. After the death of Wolverine, his younger female clone, Laura Kinney (aka X-23), assumed the Wolverine name and a similar costume in 2015 to honor him. That year also saw Amadeus Cho, a Korean-American genius teenager, take over the role of the Hulk from Bruce Banner. And, inspired by Iron Man, fifteen-year-old African-American prodigy Riri Williams invented her own suit of armor and began adventuring as Ironheart in 2016. Riri even took over the lead role in Invincible Iron Man when Tony Stark fell into a mysterious coma for more than a year. Marvel refers to these and several other new heroes who take on the roles of more established characters in their absence as “legacy heroes.” Marvel branded these changes as part of its “All-New, All-Different” initiative, and they became the basis for a soft reboot of the Marvel comic-book universe. These legacy

388   Jeffrey A. Brown heroes drastically changed the image of superheroes at the world’s largest comic-book publisher. Marvel’s superheroes, like those of most publishers, have been predominantly male and white ever since the genre first emerged with the success of Superman in 1938. The modern Marvel universe is a very different world. As New York magazine reported when Marvel’s character changes were first taking root, “Marvel’s printed superhero books are more ethnically diverse, feminist, and queer-positive than they have ever been” (Riesman par. 1). The new heroes mark a clear divergence from the superhero ­status quo, and this was an intentional move by Marvel to reflect the diversity of American identities and comic-book fans. “Marvel Comics’ driving philosophy dating back to Stan Lee is to reflect the world outside your window, and the world outside your window has changed since the early ’60s,” Marvel’s then-editor-in-chief Axel Alonso told the Los Angeles Times. “We’re following that mantra. Our new stories reflect the world outside your window in all its diversity” (Clark par. 22) These legacy heroes do reflect the changing cultural makeup of American cities; they also reveal a virulent resistance to diversification on the part of some audience members. Many people applauded Marvel’s commitment to diversity and the quality of stories being told with these fresh, new characters. Others were angry that their favorite heroes had been replaced so thoroughly by a group of inexperienced upstarts. The polemical reaction to these characters from some fans, critics, and the general public exposes the tenacity of misogynistic and racist fears that have become a central political issue in these tumultuous times. The use of legacy heroes to introduce a greater range of gender and ethnic representation in Marvel comics literalizes the far right’s fear of cultural change as a form of replacement, where traditional privileges and advantages are erased.

White Men with Power Gender and ethnicity have always been vital to the superhero genre. The flashy costumes, incredible powers, secret identities, and outlandish villains may be more obvious conventions, but the overwhelming maleness and whiteness of most superheroes structure white men as the default heroic standard. Superman, Batman, Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Green Arrow, Daredevil, Thor—all of the oldest and most famous superheroes are decidedly male and white. The genre’s preoccupation with masculinity is one of its most organizing themes. Superhero stories play out a rather obvious adolescent male power fantasy wherein any wimpy Billy Batson, Peter Parker, or Bruce Banner can be magically transformed into an astonishing Captain Marvel, an amazing Spider-Man, or an incredible Hulk. The superhero is a concise embodiment of a very conventional image of ideal masculinity. His steely jaw, bulging muscles, miraculous powers, and unwavering ability to defeat all evildoers mark him as the idol of the grateful masses and the object of every damsel’s affections. Since the late 1930s, comic-book superheroes have provided their target audience of young men with an ideal fantasy ­figure with whom to identify. The conventional superhero represents one of the clearest

Ethnicity, Gender, and Legacy Heroes in Marvel Comics   389 examples of hegemonic masculinity (see Connell) for boys to idolize and emulate. The superhero has also, for most of the genre’s history, been overdetermined as strictly a masculine and white fantasy ideal. The glorification of hegemonic masculinity at the root of superhero stories means that female characters have been treated very differently from male ones. Male super­ heroes have always vastly outnumbered superheroines, the women’s powers are usually more limited than the men’s, and the women are almost exclusively illustrated as sexual objects posed for the appreciative gaze of young male readers. As Carolyn Cocca notes in her overview of superheroines: “Most superhero titles have white male-dominated teams and white male leads, and tend to portray female characters as weaker and in a sexualized manner” (14). Though the number of female costumed characters has increased significantly from the 1950s, when Wonder Woman was the sole female member of the Justice League (and was reduced to being the League’s secretary for the first few adventures), superheroines are still overdetermined by their sex. The female characters continue to be predominantly illustrated as curvy pinups in skimpy costumes and as lesser heroes relative to the iconic male characters. Furthermore, women in the comics have often been subjected to a more extreme and degrading level of violence than male characters have been. The term fridging, coined by comics writer Gail Simone when she amassed the list of “Women in Refrigerators” who had been unceremoniously killed, depowered, and/or sexually assaulted, has become a common reference point for the unequal violence to which the women are subjected. Obviously, male superheroes also suffer violent assaults and even death, but the men often rise again or suffer in a heroic manner not afforded the women. Despite the progressive depiction of women in many comic books and an increase in women writers and artists, traditionally misogynistic assumptions remain. “Comics in the 2000s continued to underrepresent, sexualize, and fridge female characters,” Cocca summarizes. “The sheer repetition of these three elements to the exclusion of others, apparently resonant to many readers, made them appear natural and timeless” (13). Of course, the unequal treatment of female supercharacters is anything but “natural” and is slowly being challenged in current comic books, much to the delight of many female readers looking for legitimate heroic representations and to the chagrin of some male readers who prefer their stories with sexy illustrations. For most of the genre’s eighty-plus-year history, superheroes have been overwhelmingly white. For decades, any depiction of nonwhite ethnicities was reserved for “yellow horde,” Fu Manchu-style villains or shuffling, Sambo-like comedic relief. Unfortunately, blue-, green-, orange-, and purple-skinned characters appeared long before realistic nonwhite heroes became more common. The first black superhero did not appear in mainstream comic books until Marvel introduced the Black Panther in 1966, followed by the first regularly appearing black hero, the Falcon, as Captain America’s sidekick in 1969. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, several other significant superheroes of color emerged, such as Marvel’s Brother Voodoo and Luke Cage, and DC Comics’ Black Lightning and Cyborg, but these characters were often burdened by racial stereotypes and were heavily outnumbered by their more famous white counterparts. For the most

390   Jeffrey A. Brown part, comic-book writers seemed ill equipped or unwilling to conceive of well-rounded characters from different ethnic backgrounds. As Sheena Howard and Ronald Jackson argue in the introduction to the collection Black Comics: “Comics dealing with issues specific to the African American experience, such as racial profiling, discrimination, integration, etc. have been scarce, perhaps because these realities are swept under a rug in order to avoid state responsibility for them” (5). Contentious real-world issues such as discrimination are far more complicated to deal with than the average super-criminal. No hero can just punch systemic racism in the face. More often than not, superheroes have avoided ethnicity as a topic, sticking to the relatively safe (and assumed neutrality) of white male heroes. As Frances Gateward and John Jennings summarize in the introduction to their anthology about black comic books: “The genre of the superhero is very much a white-male-dominated power fantasy that is itself very much based in ideas around physical performance and power in relation to the negotiation of identity” (5). As I have argued elsewhere (Brown) AfricanAmerican superheroes have historically faced challenges rooted in racist fears of black men as already hypermasculine, as too physical, violent, and threatening. Indeed, any nonwhite superhero character is still visually and narratively marked as an “other” in a manner that often overburdens them as characters defined by their race—running the risk of either reproducing stereotypes or being deemed “inauthentic” by some readers. More nuanced storytelling and a commitment to socially responsible portrayals with the legacy heroes have allowed Marvel to build on past success with nonwhite heroes and to learn from past mistakes. Regardless of politics, when a new character such as Miles Morales first removes his mask in Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #1 (September 2011) to reveal that he is not white, as he proudly announces “I am Spider-Man,” this type of revelation and heroic self-declaration of identity that is common for white superheroes (“I’m Batman,” “I am Iron Man,” etc.) can be a very exhilarating scene for many readers who struggle to find positive representations of their own ethnicity (Figure 22.1). Marvel’s change in the gender and/or ethnicity of the characters bearing the names of Spider-Man, Thor, Hulk, Captain America, Ms. Marvel, Nova, Wolverine, and Iron Man is a recognition of the importance of identity politics and heroic fantasies. Marvel’s director of content, Sana Amanat, told CNN: “it’s also a reminder that these characters have these messages behind them and these aspirational qualities. We want to remind people that anyone can pick up that mantle. Captain America is not a race, Captain Marvel is not a gender. We want to make sure that it’s about the ideas and what they represent” (qtd. in Pallotta par. 7). The idea that anyone should be able to imagine themselves as superheroic regardless of their gender or skin color (or religion, sexuality, nationality, etc.) is a significant shift from a cultural presumption in the media that only white men are heroic. The socially progressive commitment Marvel Comics has made to reflect the reality of “the world outside our window” through the diversification of even its most iconic heroes is coupled with the economic reality that the market for comics readership has changed a great deal over the last fifteen to twenty years. A desire to cultivate a more diverse audience couples an economic strategy with an organic narrative move to nonwhite and nonmale heroes. As numerous news articles pointed out,

Ethnicity, Gender, and Legacy Heroes in Marvel Comics   391

Figure 22.1  Miles Morales reveals himself as the new Spider-Man.

“the publisher is shaking up the rest of its superhero roster in an effort to freshen the Marvel universe and attract new readers” (Clark par. 2). In an ever more competitive multimedia and globalized market, comic-book publishers such as Marvel need to expand their market demographic in order to survive. Introducing characters who reflect that wider demographic in terms of gender and ethnicity (as well as sexuality, religion, and nationality) is evidence not just of socially progressive stories or shrewd marketing strategies but of free-market-driven cultural change. Unfortunately, statistics about comic-book readers are notoriously difficult to gauge precisely. Diamond, the primary distributor of print comics in North America, does not release sales data, nor do the two big publishing companies Marvel and DC Comics. But Marvel’s senior vice president of sales and marketing, David Gabriel, did claim a significant rise in female consumers in 2016: “From things that we gather from some analysis that Disney does on who is buying Marvel as a brand, and from talking to retailers and looking at our titles, we’re probably up to at least 40% female. Which eight years ago might have been 10%, and 15 years ago might have been nothing. So, there has been a real shift, which is great, and it could be even higher than 40%” (qtd. in Macdonald par. 7) Indeed, the media analysis organization Graphic Policy, which tracks industry trends through Facebook analytics, has charted a significant month-by-month increase in both female and nonwhite comic-book readers over the last five years. Graphic Policy charts women

392   Jeffrey A. Brown as high as 53.5 percent of the comics audience, with African-American and Hispanic rea­ ders (male and female) each ranking at 18.31 percent and Asian Americans at 5.26 percent, for a total of 41.88 percent nonwhite readers (Graphic Policy). While the accuracy of these audience statistics may be debatable, there is no doubt that the ethnic and gender standards of comics readership is changing. When comic-book creator and critic Scott McCloud released his groundbreaking book Understanding Comics in 2000, his introduction noted that superhero comics were consumed overwhelmingly by a “white uppermiddle class male” audience (11). But the rise of digital comics and online subscription services has greatly expanded the audience demographic in the last ten years, as has the success of the blockbuster movies that appeal to audiences from a range of backgrounds.

All-New, All-Different The legacy heroes introduced by Marvel beginning in 2011 are different from other spinoff characters who constantly appear in the world of superheroes. The most popular superheroes have long inspired variations: Spider-Man begat Spider-Woman, SpiderGirl, Spider-Gwen, Venom, Carnage, and many others; likewise the Hulk led to S­ he-Hulk, Red Hulk, Grey Hulk, Red She-Hulk, and Skaar. Similarly, the narrative devices of alternative Earths, different timelines, and “What if?” stories allow writers to temporarily explore different takes on specific superheroes (see Jenkins). These derivative characters often become popular in their own right, but they are designed to capitalize on and extend the brand of the original superhero. These Spider-Man and Hulk analogs (or Batman’s or Superman’s, etc.) may be of a different gender or ethnicity, but they are still depicted as under the umbrella of the original hero. Spider-Woman obviously indicates a gender variant on the Spider theme, and one of the Spider-Girls (Anya Corazon) is Hispanic, but both are members of the larger Spider-Man family of heroes. And as the “family” metaphor implies, the original white male hero is the central figure—a type of patriarch—whom all of the spin-off characters are inspired by and to whom they defer. Unlike earlier spin-off characters, legacy heroes were primarily intended to attract a more diverse readership to comics by recasting many of Marvel’s most iconic heroes as women and/or nonwhite superheroes. Yes, the new heroes are linked directly to the most recognizable figures in Marvel’s pantheon, and that allows them to tap into the popularity of those characters. The innovative change employed by Marvel is to have the legacy heroes replace the old guard of white male heroes. Replace is not entirely accurate, even though it is the term often used in the press and among readers to describe the position of the legacy heroes. With each new hero, headlines declared: “Marvel Is Replacing Steve Rogers with the New, Black Captain America” (Opam); “Miles Morales Is to Replace Peter Parker as First Black Spider-Man in Marvel Comics” (Wyatt), or “Tony Stark to Be Replaced by Black Woman as Marvel’s Comic Book Iron Man” (McMillan). I will return to the perception that the new heroes “replaced” the older white male heroes later. But, to be clear, the legacy heroes did not push out, displace, or cause the older heroes to lose their roles. Each of the established characters either died

Ethnicity, Gender, and Legacy Heroes in Marvel Comics   393 or was depowered in a way that made it impossible to continue as a costumed hero. The younger heroes only “replaced” the old guard in the sense that they were able and willing to assume the responsibilities of the vacated title. The “All-New, All-Different” SpiderMan, Captain America, Ms. Marvel, Thor, Nova, Hulk, and Wolverine each followed a similar narrative arc of admiring the original hero and then being called to assume his mantle through a series of unusual circumstances. Each of the new heroes expresses doubts about filling the shoes (or the spandex costumes) of his or predecessor but eventually finds a way to be an exceptional hero in his or her own right. Riri Williams as the new Iron Man (eventually deciding on the name Ironheart) is one of the most popular of the legacy heroes, and the character received a great deal of media attention when first announced. With Riri fulfilling the role previously held by Tony Stark, she represents a change in both gender and ethnicity. A feature article in the New York Times introduced Riri Williams as a definitive sign of Marvel’s commitment to socially progressive heroes: “The development of Riri’s character reflects a comics industry that has made strides to expand its default superhero archetype—that of a straight, white male—to reflect broader diversity in race, gender and sexuality” (Rogers par. 8). Riri’s case is a good example of how Marvel’s legacy heroes challenged the status quo of the superhero genre and became a focal point for identity politics in the real world. Riri was created by superstar comic-book writer Brian Michael Bendis and made a brief first appearance in Invincible Iron Man, vol. 2, #7 (2016), where the fifteen-year-old AfricanAmerican prodigy is shown making her own robotic armor from scraps in her dorm room at MIT. A few issues later, Tony Stark pays a surprise visit to Riri at her mother’s house in Chicago and quickly realizes that in addition to their incredible genius-level intellect, the two share a vision and a passion for inventing. Tony is impressed by Riri and offers his encouragement and support. He mentors her and slowly introduces her to the world of superhero adventures. But when Tony falls into a mysterious coma at the conclusion of the crossover event Civil War II, Riri becomes Iron Man. It is when Riri becomes the titular hero of the series Invincible Iron Man with a new issue #1 in 2016 that the character is fully fleshed out. Riri grew up in Chicago with her mother and aunt after her biological father was killed in a random act of violence. Her intellect and passion for inventing things in her mother’s garage resulted in a lonely childhood for Riri, though she did have one very close friend in her neighborhood, Natalie. Unfortunately, Natalie and Riri’s new stepfather were both killed in front of Riri during a family picnic in the park, by stray bullets from a drive-by shooting. Despite her enormous losses, Riri devoted herself to inventing devices that could help people. Bendis told Time magazine that the character of Riri was sparked by his experience ­living in Chicago and the overwhelming amount of chaos and violence in the city. Specifically, Bendis said that a “story of this brilliant, young woman whose life was marred by tragedy that could have easily ended her life—just random street violence— and went off to college was very inspiring to me. I thought that was the most modern version of a superhero or superheroine story I had ever heard” (qtd. in Dockterman par. 3). By basing Riri on the story of a real-life woman from Chicago, Bendis manages to incorporate a hint of the adversity that some children from minority backgrounds have to overcome.

394   Jeffrey A. Brown Riri, like most of the other legacy heroes, is nervous about assuming her new role. As she says in a video log that begins her first starring comic: “The invincible Avenger Iron Man is no more. I was just getting to know him and now he’s gone . . . and I have armor . . . I’m supposed to be Iron Man now? Me. That is insane . . . I have no idea if I’m even close to ready” (Figure 22.2). But with the help of an advanced artificial intelligence system (based on Tony Stark’s downloaded consciousness), Riri learns how to be a great superhero, and she completes numerous solo missions. As Ironheart, she defeats villains such as the Rhino, the Armadillo, Lady Octopus, and Tomoe the Techno Golem. Riri even liberates the country of Latveria (homeland of Dr. Doom) by defeating the superpowered Lucia Von Barda and the entire Latverian army all on her own. Riri temporarily declares herself the new queen of Latveria and arranges for the poor to be fed, schools to be reopened, and free elections to be held before she hands the country back to its ­people. Riri also quickly becomes a large part of Marvel’s interconnected comic-book universe as she teams up with other legacy heroes in the Avengers and the Champions, as well as appearing as a supporting character in several issues of All-New Wolverine and Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur and playing a part in both Marvel-wide crossover events, Civil War II and Secret Empire. Tony Stark and Riri Williams share a particular type of genius and an impulse to fight evil, but there are very few other similarities. Tony is a white male billionaire who grew up a child of extreme privilege. Riri, on the other hand, is a teenage African-American female raised by a widowed mother in a lower-income section of Chicago. These blunt differences between Tony and Riri, like the differences between all of the classic heroes and the legacy heroes, allow the stories to address issues that have generally been excluded from superhero stories. In Invincible Iron Man #8 (June 2017), flashbacks reveal that a g­ rade-school-age

Figure 22.2  Riri Williams realizes it is her responsibility to become the new Iron Man.

Ethnicity, Gender, and Legacy Heroes in Marvel Comics   395 Riri idolized the scientist Mae Jemison, who became the first African-American female astronaut. Riri recognizes the historical achievements of African Americans who overcame extreme prejudices to achieve incredible goals. Other legacy heroes have similarly introduced concerns about racism in America from the perspectives of different minority groups who have been historically discriminated against and are still subjected to racial injustices. For example, in Champions #10 (July 2017), when the team of young legacy heroes discovers a government-run prison full of Inhumans during the Secret Empire event, the Hulk (Amadeus Cho) invokes a comparison to one of America’s darker moments from World War II when he announces, “Trust me, as an Asian American I have a deep historical hatred for internment.” Kamal Khan’s Ms. Marvel faces a wide range of racist comments in both her civilian and superhero identities. Most of the racism is literal, but some is metaphorical, like the “Mecca” storyline in Ms. Marvel #19–23 (2017) which sees her family targeted by an anti-immigrant-like government agenda. And in Sam Wilson: Captain America #10–13 (2016), Sam becomes embroiled in a racially divided struggle against a faceless superpowered police agency, the Americops, which is targeting African Americans and using excessive force, a clear analogy to real-life events such as the Ferguson protests, “Black Lives Matter,” and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.” The change in gender from Tony Stark to Riri Williams also introduces a perspective on sexism that is rarely expressed in superhero comics. Tony is perhaps the most notorious womanizer in the Marvel universe, constantly bedding women, from supermodels to She-Hulk to the alien Gamora. Conversely, Riri is an outspoken feminist who revels in working with, and learning from, other women and is quick to call out any misogynistic remarks she hears. Riri even points out the absurdly gendered tradition of superhero naming. When the artificial-intelligence version of Tony tries to help Riri come up with a superhero name of her own in Invincible Iron Man #3 (January 2017), he says, “I assumed Iron Girl.” Riri gives him an exasperated look. Clueless, he counters, “Iron Woman?” So Riri explains, “I’m really not a fan of sexual identity as a qualifier. ­She-Hulk? What does that even mean? It’s an antiquated and weird line in the sand. Like ‘Best Actor’ and ‘Best Actress’ . . . Why are they separate?” Both the Kamala Khan version of Ms. Marvel and the Jane Foster embodiment of Thor also explicitly address conventional forms of sexism that routinely occur in superhero comics. When Kamala first develops her shapeshifting powers in Ms. Marvel #1 (November 2015), she has a vision of Captain Marvel (Carol Danvers) and tells her, “I want to be beautiful and awesome and butt-kicking and less complicated. I want to be you. Except I would wear the classic, politically incorrect costume and kick butt in giant wedge heels.” But by issue #2, after Kamala has spent some time as a scantily clad, white-skinned blonde, she realizes that the sexy-heroine look is a ridiculous and demeaning standard: “I always thought that if I had amazing hair, if I could pull off great boots, if I could fly—That would make me feel strong. That would make me happy. But the hair gets in my face, the boots pinch, and this leotard is giving me an epic wedgie.” Jane Foster’s bodily transformation into a female Thor is less troublesome for her than simply earning some respect. Throughout her time as Thor, Jane’s legitimacy is ­constantly questioned because she is a woman. The original Thor, the Norse All-Father

396   Jeffrey A. Brown Odin, frost giants, and elf kings all refuse to believe that a woman could be anything more than a cheap impostor. Even relatively minor Marvel bad guys have a problem with the idea of a female Thor. When Thor thwarts Absorbing Man’s robbery of a bank truck in Thor #5 (February 2015), he dismissively says, “Thor? Are you kidding me? I’m supposed to call you Thor? Damn feminists are ruining everything! You wanna be a chick super hero? Fine, who the hell cares? But get your own identity. Thor’s a dude. One of the last manly dudes still left.” But when she easily bests him in battle, he asks, “What the hell kind of Thor are you?” As Thor delivers the knockout punch, she replies, “The kind who just broke your jaw!” and thinks to herself, “That’s for saying ‘feminist’ like it’s a four-letter word, creep.” These are not just superheroines designed as sexual fantasy objects to satisfy the more salacious interests of male readers. These are women who actually resist misogynistic standards. The challenges these female legacy heroes present to the traditional misogyny of the superhero genre also seem to be making a difference beyond the confines of the fictional stories. When Riri Williams took over the lead role in the series Invincible Iron Man (2016), Marvel commissioned a number of artists to create variant covers for the newly renumbered first issue. One of the artists was a longtime Marvel contributor and a fan favorite, J. Scott Campbell, who is primarily known for his pinup-style illustrations of female characters. Campbell’s cover portrait of Riri was a standard glam type of image commonly used for superheroines and villainesses. Riri is depicted holding the Iron Man mask against one hip, with the other thrust out in a sexy pose, one arm extended out toward the reader. She is dressed in tight black yoga pants that ride low across her hips and a tight, sleeveless, red crop top that leaves most of her taut midsection exposed. Overall, the cover was a fairly typical Campbell image of an erotic, idealized, and scantily clad female body posed to be fully on display as a sexual object for the presumed male readers. But as a large number of angry fans pointed out, Riri Williams is supposed to be a fifteen-year-old girl and a super-genius, not a barely dressed supermodel. To Marvel and Campbell’s credit, they did listen to the complaints about the sexualization of Riri in this image and changed it. Instead of the conventional erotic pose that has overdetermined female sexuality in the comics, Campbell produced a new image of a clearly younger and more innocent-looking Riri dressed in jeans and hoodie, with her Ironheart helmet in her lap covering most of her torso. The more modest cover was a clear win for the fans who decried the traditional sexism of the industry.

Being Replaced Though most fans and critics embraced the legacy heroes and the different perspectives their ethnicity and/or gender differences allowed, there was a very vocal group that condemned these new characters. Online trolls complained that the new heroes were nothing more than a surrender to the forces of political correctness and a pandering to whiny social justice warriors. Racist and sexist Internet trolls have become a standard plague

Ethnicity, Gender, and Legacy Heroes in Marvel Comics   397 that afflicts any attempt to change the status quo of popular media texts. These trolls are occasionally written off by media producers as an example of toxic fandom, implying that some fans are simply too territorial about fictional characters and love to voice their criticisms anonymously over the Internet. Trolls (who may or may not actually be fans) have famously attacked the gaming industry for including more female characters and programmers; the BBC, which announced that the next Dr. Who would be the first female incarnation of the long-running television figure; the inclusion of several nonwhite actors in feature roles in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016); and even what they perceived as “fake geek girls” when a group of women who work at Marvel Comics posted a picture of themselves getting milkshakes. The troll response to the “All New, All Different” superheroes was typical of the vile reaction expressed by some about any socially progressive changes to media texts—changes that in most cases, especially in relation to the new versions of Marvel heroes, were feared as proof that traditional white masculine icons were being systematically replaced by women and minorities. This fear of white masculinity being replaced runs much deeper than fannish ­concerns about who wears the Iron Man armor or carries Captain America’s shield. The trolls’ focus reveals a troubling logic that pervades the alt-right in America, whose members fear that white men are on the verge of losing their vaunted status that is based on nothing more than gender and skin color. In mid-August 2017, most Americans were shocked by the news coverage of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Hundreds of white men, many carrying tiki torches, angrily marched past the cameras, chanting, “We will not be replaced! You will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!” As the weekend-long event played out on the national stage, counterprotesters challenged the white supremacists, and many news outlets and politicians denounced the neo-Nazi rhetoric of the rally. Tragically, the clashes escalated, and numerous individuals were hurt, with one counterprotester killed by a car driven by a white nationalist. Also tragically, President Donald Trump famously refused to denounce the white supremacists. Instead, Trump offered a tacit endorsement of the white supremacists, claiming there were good people “on both sides.” This paranoid and hateful rhetoric expressed from a variety of groups associated with the American alt-right has become far more common in an era dominated by Trump’s xenophobic idea of what makes America great. This same extreme right-wing fear of white men being replaced in American society is at the root of racist and misogynistic troll rantings about Marvel’s legacy heroes. Dozens of news articles have reported on the wave of negative troll comments regarding Marvel Comics’ diversity initiative. Complex magazine noted: “If you were on Twitter when the fit hit the shan [sic], there was indeed an outcry with an array of comments from butt hurt comic book fans and fake mad heads the world over” (Khal par. 2). And the Huffington Post pointed out: “There was, of course, online backlash from readers opposed to any change, especially ‘politically correct’ change driven by ‘social-justice warriors.’ The folks at Fox News took particular offense to the progressive politics fueling last fall’s relaunch of Captain America: Sam Wilson” (Ostroff par. 14) Indeed, Fox News did run a segment during its nightly newscast lamenting that the new black Captain America was attacking conservatives instead of more traditional supervillains.

398   Jeffrey A. Brown The irony that Fox News was acting just like the racists in the comic books was ­completely lost on the outraged anchors. Thousands of Twitter and blog postings, as well as YouTube video rants, have expressed thinly veiled (or outright) racist, sexist, and homophobic views about the emergence of nonwhite and nonmale superheroes. Many of these troll comments demonstrate a fear of change that aligns with the “We will not be replaced” anthem chanted by the white supremacists. In the case of superheroes, some of the most iconic signifiers of mythic white masculinity seemed to be in the process of being “replaced” by women and/or minorities. The enormous amount of racist and sexist troll comments condemning the legacy heroes was even incorporated into many of the comic stories themselves. For example, in the first issue of Captain America and the Mighty Avengers (November 2014), the writers swing back at the Fox News criticism of a black Captain America who dares to have political opinions about racial discrimination. The opening montage shows numerous people expressing support for the new hero, except for one ranting (and finger-wagging) blond newswoman who shouts, “This is pandering, pure and simple. Throwing America’s greatest traditions under a bus for the ‘social justice’ crowd. It’s political correctness gone mad.” Likewise, in All-New, All-Different Avengers #4 (January 2016), which includes the legacy heroes Captain America (Sam Wilson), Thor (Jane Foster), Ms. Marvel (Kamal Khan), Spider-Man (Miles Morales), and Nova (Sam Alexander), some citizens complain about the new heroes even though they just saved them from a supervillain attack. “Whoop-de-doo. Rescued by the understudy Avengers!” complains a man in a business suit. A bearded guy in an undershirt adds, “Where are the real ones? Man, the world’s gettin’ so politically correct these days!” These ungrateful white men are clearly expressing the same sentiments as the online trolls in the real world. Captain America is shocked. “Did you hear that?” he asks Thor. “After we saved their lives?” Thor simply replies, “Let them be ungrateful. What does it matter?” (Figure 22.3). Even more to the point, in All-New Wolverine #4 (January 2016), Doctor Strange tells the new female Wolverine, “You are the right person to replace Logan.” Laura is appreciative of the ­compliment but also tells him, “I know there are people who disapprove . . . Guys on the internet mainly.” While these scenes are a bit of self-referential fun, incorporating the real-world troll complaints into the comics also allows the writers and characters to address the small-mindedness of the comments and to position these perspectives as the antithesis of what superheroes are all about. Though Laura metatextually jokes about “Guys on the internet” who are unhappy with her replacing Logan, she does go on to clarify: “But I’m not replacing him. I don’t really know what I’m doing yet. All I know is, while I’m wearing this, he isn’t gone. And neither am I. I’m Laura Kinney. I’m X-23. And I’m Wolverine.” It is this idea of “not replacing” the long-standing superheroes that is a very important factor that the trollish bigotry misses. It is the same dynamic that the white supremacist groups chanting “We will not be replaced” also miss. The inclusion of women and different ethnicities does not mean white men are replaced in some abstract and absurd idea of a pecking order of privilege where they are barely hanging on to their advantages. Social class systems (whether based on gender, economics, race, education, religion, etc.) have historically

Ethnicity, Gender, and Legacy Heroes in Marvel Comics   399

Figure 22.3  Jane Foster’s Thor and Sam Wilson’s Captain America are not appreciated by everyone.

been imagined as a type of hierarchy with lower, middle, and upper echelons or the haves and have-nots. But the reality is that the advancement of peoples from subaltern groups does not mean anyone is necessarily being replaced. Women and minorities can make progress without it being at the expense of white men. For all the panic trolls expressed about legacy heroes doing away with their traditionally white male predecessors and namesakes, none of the classic versions of the superheroes was really replaced. The legacy heroes merely added to the pantheon of super-characters that populate the Marvel universe. In fact, within a few short years, all of the original white male versions of the characters had returned to life or been repowered and resumed their lofty positions. These are comic books, after all, where even death is never permanent, and profitable characters will always come back. Miles Morales became Spider-Man in 2011, but the original Peter Parker version returned in 2014 (and even before that, Peter returned briefly, but then Doc Ock swapped his mind into Peter’s body for a year). Laura Kinney occupied the role of Wolverine in All-New Wolverine from 2015 to 2018, when Logan returned from the dead. And even when Logan was not around, Marvel brought an alternative-universe version of “Old Man Logan” into regular continuity. And Marvel ran no fewer than six  “Hunt for Wolverine” miniseries that included the Logan version in numerous

400   Jeffrey A. Brown ­ ashbacks. Amadeus Cho was the titular Hulk in The Totally Awesome Hulk from 2015 to fl 2017, until the Bruce Banner version returned in 2018 with a new series, Immortal Hulk. The Jane Foster incarnation of Thor led The Mighty Thor from 2015 to 2018, when the original male Thor once again became worthy to wield the enchanted hammer. But even while the female Thor fulfilled the role of Goddess of Thunder, the male character ­continued his adventures in a separate title, The Unworthy Thor (2016–2017). After a few reality-bending storylines restored Steve Rogers to full health and then rewrote him as an evil leader of Hydra, the real Rogers version of Captain America returned to continuity in Secret Empire #10 (August 2017), fighting alongside the Sam Wilson Captain America. And after two years of Riri Williams’s Ironheart taking the lead in Invincible Iron Man from 2016 to 2018, Tony Stark woke up from his coma and resumed his role as Iron Man. It is important to note that the return of the original white male heroes did not result in the elimination of the so-called replacement heroes. With the exception of the female Thor (Jane Foster was battling cancer and could no longer continue adventuring), all of the female and/or nonwhite legacy heroes continue on in the Marvel ­universe as solo heroes or as a part of various super-teams. The coexistence of Marvel’s diverse legacy heroes and the original superheroes ­conveys a stronger message of social progress than mere replacement ever could. The Marvel universe shows readers that there is enough room for everyone; nobody has to be replaced just because new versions of something come along. Comic books have never been known for their subtlety when it comes to moral lessons, and these stories are no different. Through the legacy heroes, Marvel presents ethnic and gender diversity among superheroes as natural and desirable. The nonwhite and/or female versions of Spider-Man, Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk, and Ms. Marvel are never ­presented as lesser heroes. In fact, story after story depicts the legacy heroes surpassing everyone’s expectations and saving the day, sometimes saving the entire world. Moreover, all of the new heroes are explicitly praised and accepted by the old guard of supers. With a few twists in time and space, even the original heroes express their admiration for the newcomers who adopt their titles. The 2017 series of Generations ­one-shots threw the original heroes and their legacy counterparts together for teamedup adventures set in the past, the future, or alternative realities, where they could get to know and appreciate one another. Likewise, when the Miles Morales Spider-Man was still restricted to Marvel’s Ultimate Universe, the miniseries Spider-Men (2012) allows Miles to work alongside his idol Peter Parker. The story concludes with Peter telling Miles he is “entirely” OK with him being Spider-Man and that he absolutely has his “blessing.” In Thor #4 the original male version recognizes Jane Foster’s heroism and ­ orthy. That is all I know. I am still the Odinson. But she is Thor now. That says, “She is w hammer has the power to destroy worlds. Or to save them. Carry it well, Thor.” Similar praise is heaped on all the new heroes by the classic ones. The moral is clear: superheroes embrace diversity and social progress, and so should the readers. Anyone who resists these types of changes is characterized as small-minded or even villainous. With the legacy heroes, Marvel seems to be heeding its own advice: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Ethnicity, Gender, and Legacy Heroes in Marvel Comics   401

Works Cited Brown, Jeffrey A. Black Superheroes: Milestone Comics and Their Fans. U of Mississippi P, 2001. Clark, Noelene. “Marvel Comics Shaking Up Its Superhero Roster to Attract New Readers.” LATimes.com, 4 June 2015. Cocca, Carolyn. Superwomen: Gender, Power, and Representation. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Connell, R. W. Gender and Power. Allen and Unwin, 1987. Dockterman, Eliana. “Exclusive: Marvel’s New Iron Man Is a Black Woman.” http://time. com/4394478/iron-man-riri-williams-tony-stark/, 6 July 2016. Gateward, Frances, and John Jennings. The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art. Rutgers UP, 2015. Graphic Policy. https://graphicpolicy.com/tag/facebook-fandom. Howard, Sheena C., and Ronald L. Jackson. Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation. Bloomsbury, 2013. Jenkins, Henry. “Just Men in Tights: Rewriting Silver Age Comics in an Era of Multiplicity.” The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero, edited by Anglea Ndalianis, Routledge, 2009, pp. 16–43. Khal, “With the New Iron Man, Marvel Continues to Move Forward and Diversify Its Superheroes.” https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2016/07/marvel-comics-switchingcharacters/, 7 July 2016. MacDonald, Heidi “Marvel: 40% of Our Readers Are Female and Our Sales Are Just Fine, Thanks.” http://www.comicsbeat.com/marvel-40-of-our-readers-are-female-and-our-salesare-just-fine-thanks/, 16 Aug. 2016. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. William Morrow, 2000. McMillan, Graeme. “Tony Stark to Be Replaced by Black Woman as Marvel’s Comic Book Iron Man.” https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/tony-stark-be-replaced-by908725, 6 July 2016. Opam, Kwame. “Marvel Is Replacing Steve Rogers with the New Black Captain America.” https://www.theverge.com/2014/7/16/5878527/marvel-is-replacing-steve-rogers-with-thefirst-black-captain-america, 16 July 2014. Ostroff, Joshua. “Superhero Diversity Takes Flight as Comic Books Fight for Gender, Race and LGBT Balance.” https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/05/26/superhero-diversity-marvelcomics-dc_n_9349666.html, 26 May 2016. Pallotta, Frank. “A Marvel Insider Explains Why Its Iconic Superheroes Are Getting More Diverse.” Money.CNN.com, 7 July 2016. Rogers, Katie. “Marvel’s New Iron Man Is a 15-Year-Old Girl,” https://www.nytimes. com/2016/07/07/books/marvels-new-iron-man-is-a-15-year-old-black-girl.html, 6 July 2016. Wyatt, Daisy. “Miles Morales Is to Replace Peter Parker as First Black Spider-Man in Marvel Comics.” https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/miles-moralesto-replace-peter-parker-as-first-black-spider-man-in-marvel-comics-10336153.html, 22 June 2015.

chapter 23

H a m m er i n H a n d Feminist Community Building in Jason Aaron’s Thor Susan Kirtley

“Flying is woman’s gesture—flying in language and making it fly.” Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of Medusa”

While most associate the mighty hammer Mjolnir with the burly Scandinavian god Thor (sometimes known as Odinson, the Prince of Asgard, or Donald Blake, or, rarely, Eric Masterson), in fact, several others have wielded the hammer in the pages of Marvel comics, including Korbinite Beta Ray Bill, patriot Captain America, and even pet Avenger Throg, the illustrious Frog of Thunder. However, it is arguably the passing of the hammer to a new Goddess of Thunder in writer Jason Aaron’s eight episode run of Thor, which ran from October 2014 through May 2015, that has inspired the most outrage and, for that matter, the most acclaim. In the 2014 Marvel “Original Sin” storyline, the ultimate spy, Nick Fury, whispers something to Thor, a statement so powerful that it causes the God of Thunder to become unworthy. His beloved Mjolnir slips from his grasp and lands heavily on the moon. As Thor struggles in vain to lift the hammer, a new hero, her identity shrouded in mystery, picks up Mjolnir and assumes the power, strength, and mantle of Thor.1 In this remarkable eight-issue story arc, the narrative establishes a diverse feminist alliance inspired by the new, female Thor, which ultimately triumphs over the patriarchy as embodied by Odin, achieving victory through collective social action.2 Aaron had worked on the Thor series for some time before launching this specific ­storyline, and he explained in an interview with Dave Richards of the Comics Reporter that he’d long been planning this particular narrative:

Feminist Community Building in Jason Aaron’s Thor   403 I knew when I took over Thor that at some point I wanted to do a Beta Ray Bill-style story about somebody else wielding the hammer for awhile. It took me awhile to figure out what kind of story that should be and who the character should be. When you look back over the history of Thor comics, a lot of different people have picked up the hammer at one point or another and hardly any of them female. The only women to wield the hammer are in brief moments here and there, or “What If?” stories, or future stories and stuff like that. So we’ve never seen a big story about a woman picking up the hammer and if you look at the inscription on the hammer it even says, “Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor.” I’m going to flip that on its ear and for the first time see what it’s like to have a brand new version of Thor who is female; the Goddess of Thunder.

Aaron was joined in this endeavor by artist Russell Dauterman and color artist Matthew Wilson, along with artist Jorge Molina for issue #5, and in October 2014, Thor #1 launched with the Goddess of Thunder holding Mjolnir aloft for the first time. Some readers welcomed the change. In a piece for the Comics Reporter, Brett White explained: “Equality is what’s important. Women are not an invading army here to steal male territory and conquer men—although I would be totally fine with reading a comic book based on that. Half of the population identifies as female; they’re people. We’ve had over 600 issues of a male Thor, and I’m excited to get my first issue starring a female one.” White was effusive in his praise for the book, noting that “Aaron was not content to just launch a new female-led book, thus subjecting it to the whims of a marketplace that has—in the past—been hesitant towards those comics. He took the big, A-List, prominent book he was working on to great acclaim and pretty unanimous fan praise, and made it the dictionary definition of feminist. That’s fantastic.” And for his part, Aaron has maintained that he is entirely comfortable with a feminist label. In an interview with Lidia Jean Kott, Aaron commented, “I’m not one of those people that think feminist is a bad word. I don’t see why everyone shouldn’t be a feminist.” But in her piece, Kott notes that not all of the readers praised the feminist turn of the series: “[T]here’s already been a backlash against the female Thor. Graeme McMillan from Wired wrote that if Marvel really wants to give voice to women it should create more standalone female characters, rather than just having them temporarily fill male roles.” In the San Francisco Weekly, Benjamin Wachs parodied the Marvel press announcement, stating that Wolverine would be a “transgender Samoan Atheist.” Despite the outrage and disapproval, particularly online, the series sold well. In fact, sales increased, as Danielle Henderson reported for the Huffington Post: When Marvel introduced the newly rebooted Thor comic book last October, some fans were bothered by the fact that Thor is now a woman. “Bothered” is an understatement—the comments ran the entire length of the field between the goalposts of sexist and misogynist while deeply entrenched fans failed to wrap their heads around the fact that in a made-up universe you can do whatever you want, which includes changing the race and sex of long-standing characters. While the audience breakdown is not available and there’s no way to know if the new Thor is bringing in

404   Susan Kirtley more female readers, it is clear that she’s outselling the last series by A LOT. The first five new Thor books are currently selling more copies than the last five Thor books from 2012 by close to 20,000 copies per month, not including digital copies.

This particular Thor series concluded after eight issues with the revelation that the new Thor is, in fact, Dr. Jane Foster and, furthermore, that she is battling breast cancer in addition to supervillains. Despite her medical woes, the female Thor continued to hold the title throughout The Mighty Thor series, which ran from November 2015 through April 2018. The first story arc focused on the identity of the mysterious female who lifted the hammer, but the subsequent narrative explored Foster’s numerous battles, the most important one being her battle with breast cancer. For every time Foster was called upon to fight, and she was called upon frequently—battling Frost Giants, Dark Elves, Absorbing Man, the Destroyer, and Odinson himself—it sapped her strength as a human and eradicated the effects of the chemotherapy, bringing her closer and closer to death. Ultimately, in The Mighty Thor #705, Jane Foster Thor defeats the evil Mangog by chaining it to Mjolnir and throwing the hammer and the villain into the sun, destroying the menace as well as the hammer, and her opportunity to be Thor. In The Mighty Thor #706, Jane Foster Thor reverts to her human self, almost perishes, and enters Valhalla, but she is called back to Earth by Odinson. Foster survives to continue fighting, but she does so now as a human and not as Thor. While the female Goddess of Thunder has stepped down for now, I believe that there is a message and a legacy that should not be lost in the midst of the whirlwind of controversy about a female Thor or the sales numbers or a writer’s choices: Thor envisioned a powerful feminist community and shared the message that real social change can be achieved through collective action, the storyline standing as a powerful intervention and interruption of patriarchal narratives of the past. Jane Foster Thor is almost entirely absent from Thor #1, the issue focusing instead on the family drama of Thor Odinson and his father, Odin or the All-Father, and his mother, Freyja or the All-Mother. Freyja has been ruling Asgard while Odin slept, and upon his return, a distinct power struggle is taking a place, a struggle that demonstrates a clear difference between Odin’s patriarchal approach to governance and Freyja’s more feminist technique. An exchange between the two rulers sets the scene and the stakes quickly, as the parents are confronted with Odinson crouching on the moon, kneeling before Mjolnir, and begging the hammer to move. Odin shouts at his son and his wife, declaring, “Perhaps he can ignore you, Freyja . . . But the boy will speak to his Father. THOR! Thine Imperial All-Father Odin has returned to Asgardia and demands of thee answers!” Odinson ignores his father’s shoutingi and, wiping tears from his eyes, reflects on the moment he became unworthy through a faded flashback appearing above and behind him. Fury is pictured whispering into Odinson’s ear, a small speech balloon emanating from Fury’s mouth, the contents of which are tiny, indecipherable dots. Regardless of the words that brought the hero low, it is clear at the opening of this saga that men and gods have both been disgraced—they are unworthy. Odin and Freyja have distinctly different reactions to this situation. Freyja consults with “the mortal” Captain America for advice and information, but Odin commands

Feminist Community Building in Jason Aaron’s Thor   405 the hammer to move, and when it doesn’t, he, not surprisingly, rages: “Move, you blasted hunk of Uru! Odin Commands thee! I am the Way and the Wrath and the Wonder! I am him who speaks while galaxies obey!” Far less concerned with the power of the hammer, Freyja focuses on her son, pulling him onto her lap and soothing: “Worthiness should not be defined by the whims of magic weapons. Rise, my son, and let the hammer be damned. Rise and remember the hero that you are.”3 Odin, the fading patriarch trying to reclaim his power, asserts his dominance with wrathful displays of fury and temper, roaring at his son, the hammer, and the injustice of it all, shifting blame for the situation to any and all but himself. Freyja, however, displays logic and reason and love, reaching out to allies for information and focusing not on a weapon but on an individual’s worth. The discussion is cut short, though, and the power struggle comes to a head when the messenger Volstagg arrives to announce that Frost Giants have invaded Midgard, also known as Earth. When Volstagg poses the question “What would you have us do, my liege,” it is unclear to whom he is speaking, and both Freyja and Odin respond, in a panel that places them side by side: two formidable leaders. Odin, with his two ravens, Hugin and Munin, resting on his horned helmet, looks fierce but slightly absurd as he responds, “Return to Asgardia. This is not our fight,” just as Freyja, looking equally fierce and determined but more regal in her winged headdress, answers, “Ready the Bifrost. We march to war.” The two responses exemplify their policies—while Freyja will rush to the side of her allies, Odin prefers a unilateral approach. Their scuffle continues in a comical fashion as they both exclaim, “What didst thou say?” in overlapping speech balloons in a subsequent panel. Both claim the title of “Liege Lord,” but Odin objects, “Odin has returned, Woman. There is no more need for an All-Mother.” But Freyja rejects this argument, stating, “Now that Odin has returned, perhaps there is more need than ever before,” suggesting that in the face of such aggression, an alternative form of leadership is more relevant and more necessary than ever before (see Figure 23.1). Odin lashes out at Freyja, his face a mask of fury, as he shouts, “The fleeting age of the All-Mother has passed. Asgard will be again as it was for centuries—with Odin above all. It is time you remembered your place in that world, Freyja.” But in spite of Odin’s tirade and his intimidating stance, Freyja holds her ground, and as Odin disappears, Freyja is pictured standing alone on the moon. A close-up panel shows a tight shot of her pensive face, framed on the side by Mjolnir, resting just outside the frame but clearly in her line of sight as she responds, “Yes . . . perhaps it is.” Freyja studies the hammer and contemplates her place, a look of longing evident in her sharpened gaze as she studies Mjolnir. Thor Odinson has lost his hammer and his title, and Odin clings to power through intimidation, but there is clearly a new order. Freyja remembers her place, her new place, in which she commands and claims the title of “Liege Lord” and refuses to step aside for her husband. Soon after, Odinson battles the Dark Elves and Frost Giants without his signature weapon and subsequently loses his arm. Upon the defeat of Odinson, the dark elf Malekith triumphantly declares, “We have seen the last of Thor,” but unbeknownst to the others, the final pages of the issue show an amazing transition. Six vertical panels move

406   Susan Kirtley

Figure 23.1  “Freyja and Odin,” Thor #1.

from a narrow and distant view of Mjolnir resting on the moon. The second panel draws nearer the hammer, revealing a shadow, which the third panel shows to be a woman’s profile. She whispers, “There must always be a Thor.” The fourth panel pulls in even closer on Mjolnir, the inscription visible as a woman’s hand grasps the handle, and in the fifth panel, her grip tightens as electricity crackles, lighting up the inscription. The sixth and final panel is the largest, a tight shot of the head of the hammer as it lifts from the ground, the inscription lighting up, the “He” of the fifth panel changing, blazing, as a bright “S” transforms the lettering to read, “Whosoever holds this hammer, if She be worthy, shall possess the power of . . . Thor.” The progression leads into a striking final splash page depicting a regal female Thor lifting Mjolnir triumphantly over her head. The female Thor wears a costume made of modified armor and a winged helmet that covers most of her face, revealing only her lips and jaw, thus shielding her identity for the next seven issues. Her blond hair swirls around her, as does a red cape. Whirling white lightning bolts crash around her as the world is introduced to the new, female Thor. Dauterman’s art and Wilson’s colors shine in this moment, introducing a powerful, undeniably female hero. James Whitbrook notes that “Wilson’s colors are vivid and bold, equally warm whether it’s painting the humdrum of Jane Foster’s life or the most bizarre vistas in the nine realms. Dauterman’s line work is clean and simple, and yet vivid in detail.” Later, in the next series, The Mighty Thor, Dauterman and Wilson play up the striking contrast of Jane Foster’s pale, diminutive form as a cancer patient and the strong, muscular body of Thor, the change between the two shapes happening magically as she lifts the hammer. But for the first eight issues, with the mystery of Thor’s identity intact, the focus is on introducing a hero who maintains many of the traditions of the past Thor, such as the hammer, the armor, and the red cape, with a female lead.

Feminist Community Building in Jason Aaron’s Thor   407 Dauterman draws Jane Foster Thor as undeniably female; she is strong and capable, her arms muscled but not outrageously so. She wears armor and pants, albeit with a cutout panel at her midsection. Her long blond hair twirls around her, echoing the flow of her cape. The costume is stylized but not overly sexualized. With her face almost entirely covered, it is her eyes and the set of her lips that imply a fierce determination. The second issue of the run picks up directly after Jane has hefted the hammer and transformed into Thor, although her “civilian” identity remains hidden from the reader. The opening pages use speech balloons, stylized text, and language to reveal that this new Thor speaks in the voice of the Scandinavian gods of old while thinking from a contemporary human point of view, with the human perspective utterly baffled by this turn of events. In one panel, Jane Foster Thor is pictured in profile from the waist up, studying the hammer, demonstrating her divided identity through a fascinating conversation with herself, illustrated by a series of descending speech and thought balloons and ­different lettering to suggest who is speaking—mortal or goddess (see Figure 23.2). Her earthly side exclaims in a thought balloon, “I can’t believe I am holding Thor’s Mjolnir! Does that make me . . .,” before her Thor persona interrupts with a speech ­balloon, stating, “Nay. No time for questions. Midgard is in peril.” Her human thought ­balloon responds, “The Earth,” to which the goddess responds, speaking, “I must away.

Figure 23.2  “Thor and the Hammer,” Thor #2.

408   Susan Kirtley But how do I . . .” The dialogue is continued in her earthly thought balloon: “How do I fly? I can fly with this thing, right?” This scene deftly and humorously utilizes the affordances of comic art, using balloons and lettering to establish Jane Foster Thor’s division of self. She appears to be both a human struggling to make sense of this startling turn of events and the hero of old Scandinavian myth and legend. The new Thor, though certainly sharing commonalities with her predecessor, also acts quite differently. She learns to use Mjolnir in original ways and even inspires unexpected allies. In issue #5, illustrated by Jorge Molina, Jane Foster Thor battles Carl “Crusher” Creel in downtown Manhattan, in a somewhat “on the nose” fight scene that echoes the complaints of Internet trolls unhappy with a female Thor. First, however, the issue opens with a page devoted to Odin, the All-Father, lamenting the loss of the ­hammer, as he watches Jane Foster Thor through a crystal scrying ball and shouts, “Show me the face of this thieving Sorceress! Show me the one who dares call herself Thor!” Neal Curtis notes that the opening page sums up these problems especially as they relate to certain male creators and readers who see ALL THESE WOMEN as a threat to their domain. . . . The new, female Thor is therefore an affront to this personification of male authority, of legitimacy and entitlement. Basically, Odin represents [all of] those men getting pissy (writing ­letters to Jason Aaron or drawing pictures of female superheroes looking like porn stars) because their throne room has been challenged by some “uppity” women.

The scene quickly shifts to a double-page spread showcasing Creel on the left, a huge, hulking brute shadowed in gray and swinging a ball and chain above his head, facing off against Jane Foster Thor, her hammer raised and shooting bolts of lightning. They are surrounded by the wreckage of their combat: guns, screaming people, and bodies scattered on the ground. Dollars float in the air above them. The following pages showcase their battle, a violent pummeling punctuated by banter that feels eerily familiar to ­anyone who read Internet discussions of the new Thor. Creel has a long history with the God of Thunder; he was a boxer and criminal given the power to absorb the power of whatever he touches by Loki, in an attempt to defeat his brother. Thus, an arrogant man is attempting to absorb the power of a female hero, and he does so with a particularly egregious show of chauvinism, exclaiming: Thor? Are you kidding me? I’m supposed to call you Thor? Damn Feminists are ruining everything. You wanna be a chick superhero? Fine, who the hell cares? But get your own identity. Thor’s a dude. One of the last manly dudes still left. What’d you do, send him to sensitivity training so he’d stop calling Earth girls “wenches”?

During this monologue, Creel smashes Jane Foster Thor with his ball and chain, landing a particularly bruising blow that knocks her backward, underscoring the power of his verbal and physical attack. But Jane Foster Thor gains the advantage on the following page, throwing Mjolnir at Creel. The hammer wraps around the stunned villain as he

Feminist Community Building in Jason Aaron’s Thor   409 stares in dismay, lamenting, “What the?! What’s gotten into this crazy thing? This ain’t how it’s supposed to work! What the hell kind of a Thor are you?” The Goddess of Thunder responds in the final panel of the page, with a bruising punch that knocks Creel over, blood spurting from his mouth. Jane Foster Thor counters, stating, “The kind who just broke your jaw!” while her thought balloons proclaim, “That’s for saying ‘feminist’ like it’s a four-letter word, creep. And also . . . you know . . . for the robbing” (see Figure 23.3). But here is where things get particularly interesting, as the following two pages feature a fascinating moment of feminist connection. Creel’s wife, the villain known as Titania, confronts Thor after the hero breaks Absorbing Man’s jaw. Titania wonders, “Thor’s a woman now? Like the for-real Thor? She ain’t called She-Thor or Lady Thunderstrike or nothing like that?” Foster replies, “Thor is Thor.” For Titania, this statement must resonate, for according to the comic-book canon, she struggled her entire life to gain power. As Mary MacPherran from Denver, Colorado, Titania was small and sickly, bullied by the other children. She longed for strength, only to be granted it, in exchange for service, by Dr. Doom. And thus, the skinny, tormented girl received her greatest desire and was transformed into an imposing, muscular woman, but her dream came with a debt to a man who controlled her. It is easy to see how Titania would admire this Thor, who claimed power on her own terms, based on her own

Figure 23.3  “Thor and Crusher Creel,” Thor #5.

410   Susan Kirtley ­ erits, and the villain seems thrilled and baffled that this new Thor is no diminutive, no m lesser-than, no Adam’s rib version of Thor-Girl. Titania studies Thor intently, her hand restraining her husband as she picks up his ball and chain and swings it in a vicious arc above her head, declaring, “Let me handle this, baby.” And in a delightfully surprising twist that takes place over the course of two wide panels, Titania unleashes the weapon without looking, and the ball and chain (an undoubtedly humorous armament for a wedded couple to wield) smashes her husband to the ground with a resounding “Thuung,” as she declares, “I ain’t fighting no woman Thor. And neither is he. Not today at least. I’m standing down, out of respect for what you’re doing. Can’t have been easy for you. Hasn’t been for me either” (see Figure 23.4). The two women face each other, their fists curled and ready to fight. Thor declares, “Do not think this means I will allow you to flee.” But in this moment of feminist camaraderie, Titania sees a powerful woman who retained her moral center and found her strength, and she chooses to stand down in solidarity, just this once, responding, “I’m not asking you to . . . But just so you know, this is a one-time girl-power pass. Next time you get in my way . . . I will rip off your head and toss it in the Hudson.” The two mighty women are pictured in a tight close-up shot of their profiles, portraits of female power in dark and light, with only their speech balloons dividing them. Jane Foster Thor ­counters, “Very well.

Figure 23.4  “Titania and Thor,” Thor #5.

Feminist Community Building in Jason Aaron’s Thor   411 And just so you know, I am going to hit you now. Rather hard.” Titania retorts, “Kinda thought you might,” before the final silent panel of the page depicts Thor’s hammer cracking against Titania, knocking out her foe. And in this m ­ anner, Jane Foster Thor gains the respect of an unexpected ally, a woman who recognizes Jane Foster Thor’s challenges and her courage in claiming a title and a mantle that many would deny her, and chooses to destroy the sexist dogma espoused by her own partner. Titania isn’t alone in her admiration of the Goddess of Thunder; the All-Mother also appreciates the new hero, and Freyja similarly represents a female who takes on a position of authority when a male leader fails, with Freyja acting as a more dialogic and less aggressive head of state. In issue #5, Freyja finds Jane Foster Thor on the moon, and the two commanding women stand face to face. Freyja confides to the younger woman, “You carry that hammer well. You carry it when no one else in all the heavens could so much as budge the wretched thing. Though I hate to see my son in pain, I rejoice for you. I do. But I am afraid I come to you now not with blessings . . . but dark tidings.” Jane Foster Thor laughs off the warning with a cocky smirk, explaining that she and the ­hammer will be “coming for it,” but the All-Mother cautions: That hammer is the greatest trouble of all. It is a fickle mistress that makes fools of even the gods. Do not just be worthy of the hammer. You are not the first to wield it, and no matter your fate, you will not be the last. Be worthy of the name. Long after every hammer in creation has crumbled to dust, the name of Thor will echo still. That is the true honor you bear. That is the burden you must carry.

In this fascinating passage, the All-Mother identifies Mjolnir as female, giving the tool a gendered identity and personality, suggesting that it is a “fickle mistress.” Hence, the source of Thor’s power is, in fact, female and has a personality of its own. Yet Freyja cautions Jane Foster Thor not to rely so heavily on a tool, a blunt instrument that can both create and destroy, an implement that is fleeting, but instead to focus on the name, the legend that endures. This points to the importance of naming Jane Foster “Thor” rather than a diminutive such a “Batgirl” or “She-Hawk.” Thor is Thor, not “one of the last manly dudes,” as argued by Crusher Creel, but an honor and a burden not tied to gender. Freyja encourages Jane Foster Thor to rely on her own inherent power, even as she asserts her own authority as ruler of Asgard. The All-Mother is finding her own agency as a ruler and reaches out to form a connection, a solidarity forged in a challenge to male dominance. Jane Foster Thor defies the expectations of a male superhero, both for her compatriots within the Marvel universe and for readers in the world at large, and Freyja works to maintain control of Asgard, now that the patriarchal power has returned. In this story arc, the original Thor and his father, Odin, represent the traditional male leaders and the failings of authority mired in aggression and pride. Jamie Rice notes, “Overall, both of these plots, Odin’s and Thor’s, are used to show ways that these men have fallen away from what they are supposed to stand for. But not to worry because Freyja and the new Thor understand what has to be done for the better of society and

412   Susan Kirtley will do it.” And it is in this meeting that the two women come together, with Jane Foster Thor kneeling and pledging her “solemn vow” to “die before I dishonor the legacy of Thor,” a dishonor embodied by Thor Odinson and the All-Father. Before they part, Freyja makes a final request of her new compatriot in a delightful page designed to showcase a series of corresponding panels focusing on the connections between the two female leaders (see Figure 23.5). A taller, narrow panel depicts Freyja’s face, regal yet lined with age, and occupies the upper center of the page, positioned just above a wider panel showing a headshot of Thor, bright and smiling with a playful joy. Four panels are situated in each corner; the two upper panels show narrow images of the two women, and the two bottom panels are wider squares looking down as the women gaze up. In the first two panels, Freyja asks, “How does it feel? How does it feel to be Thor?” Molina deftly renders Freyja’s longing in the creases in her forehead and the lines around her eyes. Jane Foster Thor turns the question around in the third panel, responding, “How do you imagine it feels?” with her arms outstretched and questioning. Pictured from behind, the All-Mother conjectures, “I imagine it to be unimaginable.” And in the fourth panel, featuring the new Thor’s cocky grin, she responds, “Not even close,” before taking flight in the fifth panel, her hammer leading the way and bridging the gap between the fifth and final panels and between the two women. In the final panel, the All-Mother looks up, her mouth open

Figure 23.5  “Freyja and Thor,” Thor #5.

Feminist Community Building in Jason Aaron’s Thor   413 and eyes wide as she proclaims, “Should have picked the damn thing up when I had the chance . . .” Curtis argues: Molina brilliantly renders the connection between Thor, Freya and the hammer by using it to bridge the gap between panels 4 and 6. The page is perfectly balanced by the reverse shot in panels 1 and 3, while panel 2 begins a possible movement of the eye directly to Thor in panel 4, through the hammer in panel 5 only to be met by Freya again in panel 6. Visually, Freya effectively embraces both Thor and Mjolnir as the page traces a strong female lineage within the mythical realm of Asgard.

Lynn Worsham argues that feminists, like Freyja and Jane Foster Thor, must find ­solidarity that acknowledges difference yet finds commonality: The immediate and most pressing task for feminism’s third wave is to forge a collective subject capable of making mass movement—if not a sisterhood, exactly, then surely an alliance that does not protects us from our differences but finds in difference, disagreement, and even despair occasions to hear one another’s words; an alliance that recognizes that our histories and experiences are not only diverse in all the ways we have learned to name them, they are also intertwined in complex and mutually determining ways. (329)

The All-Mother and Jane Foster Thor thus find a connection, a love not of Mjolnir, per se, but rather of what it represents—freedom and power—and they do so despite being, quite literally, from different worlds. And both share a philosophy of compassion and connection rather than divisiveness and separatism. Their vision is shared, a point aptly demonstrated in this moving sequence. Perhaps the most surprising transformation isn’t that of Jane Foster into Thor but, rather, that of Freyja’s son, the former “manly dude,” Thor Odinson. The original Thor does not accept the new Thor as quickly as his mother did, but throughout the story arc, he exhibits an evolution in thinking, from an angry foe to a feminist community builder. In the opening issue, Odinson first appears on the moon, his enormous figure crumpled in despair over Mjolnir, which rests firmly in the soil. His enormous torso is unclothed, revealing his characteristically muscular and hypermasculine chest, but the red cape draped around his shoulders is tattered and muddy, and his worn expression and stooped posture eloquently express his dejected mental state. Odinson pleads, “Please move . . .” before clutching the hammer and pulling with all his might. Mjolnir remains unyielding, and Odinson scrubs away tears of frustration. Thor Odinson eventually leaves the hammer behind to confront Malekith and the Frost Giants, in an epic battle that results in defeat and the loss of his arm. But Odinson’s misery is quickly replaced by rage. After receiving a new, magical arm, Odinson sets out to confront the new Thor in issue #4. Odinson finds the Goddess of Thunder on Roxxon Island, immersed in the continuing battle with Malekith and the Frost Giants, but the former Thor is initially more concerned with retrieving his hammer and punishing this “thief ” than with ­confronting the villains. Odinson argues, “That hammer does not belong to thee,” before

414   Susan Kirtley demanding, “Put down that hammer, thief,” and before asking what Jane Foster Thor has done to his mother, Freyja, who has gone missing. As the villains look on in amusement, Odinson rages at the new Thor, in a sequence that emphasizes his physical dominance. Odinson looms over Jane Foster Thor, jabbing at her with his ax, but she stands her ground, holding out one hand in a placating gesture and tapping him lightly with the hammer, while urging him to “Calm thyself down.” Odinson responds with a furious rage worthy of his father, attacking Jane and smashing her through a wall, in one panel looming above her prostrate form and striking at the hammer. Yet in a close-up panel, Jane Foster Thor responds, “I say thee nay,” engaging Odinson in a fierce battle as he cries rather plaintively, “The power of Thor . . . belongs only to Thor! And you are not he! . . . You are a blasphemy! There cannot be two Thors!” And in this, at least, Odinson is correct. There can only be one Thor, and with a magnificent throw, Jane Foster proves that she is the chosen one, as Mjolnir whizzes around, smashing through the chest of an enormous Frost Giant before flying past a bewildered and beseeching Odinson and returning to her hand. A series of four descending horizontal panels begins at the top of the page with the two heroes standing at opposite sides of the slain Frost Giant, appearing like mirror images in their red capes and dark pants, simply staring at each other in silence. The following descending panels depict closer and closer shots as Odinson approaches Jane Foster Thor. Her response is to reach out and comfort him, explaining, “Thor . . . I truly am sorry.” Odinson steps nearer and nearer, still much taller than the Goddess of Thunder but with his head bent in supplication as he responds, “You have brought new life to that hammer. Whoever you are . . . you are correct. It has chosen you.” And thus, Odinson relents, accepting that he is no longer Thor. He asks if the new Thor is his mother, sensing a similar nobility in the two women, but the Goddess of Thunder responds with a kiss, effectively and soundly quashing that theory before the two work together to defeat the remaining Frost Giants. As the battle is won, the old and new Thors free the many heroes frozen in ice by the Frost Giants, including the missing ­All-Mother. The released heroes, including Spider-Woman, Spider-Man, and Iron Patriot, ask Odinson about the mysterious woman, with Spider-Man quipping, “Does she have a superhero name yet? Please tell me it’s Thunder-Woman, or Thorita, or Lady Hammer Pants!”4 But Odinson simply responds, “She is worthy. That is all I know,” before requesting that he no longer be called “that name,” for he is no longer “worthy of it,” instead declaring for all of the assembled to witness, “She is Thor now.” And in that performative speech act, Odinson accepts what has already been decided, recognizing the worthiness of a woman, proven both by the hammer and by her heart in battle. In this sequence, Odinson has come to accept that he is no longer worthy, but more important, he has come to accept the worth of this unknown woman. Although Odinson accepts the new Thor’s legitimacy, he still struggles with the ­mystery of her identity, and in his search for the secret, he revisits the many powerful women in his life, coming to a new understanding and appreciation of female strength. In his quest, Odinson composes a list of possible suspects, including Freyja, Angela, Brunhilda, Jane Foster, Roz Solomon, and Lady Sif, and sets out to visit each one.

Feminist Community Building in Jason Aaron’s Thor   415 He quickly eliminates Freyja and also excludes Jane Foster, who is battling breast cancer and refusing magical intervention. Their visit is particularly poignant, as he urges her to “be not prideful” and accept help. The two former lovers hold each other close in a touching embrace, with the reader (at the time of publication) and Odinson unaware that Jane Foster’s medical setbacks are a result of taking up the mantle of Thor. Odinson is further disappointed when Lady Sif expresses her disinterest in the hammer, although the two bond over their shared preference for the All-Mother as leader of Asgard. After crossing off all of the names, Odinson ultimately decides that Roz Solomon, a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, is the new Thor. But Odinson’s list of powerful women serves a new purpose when he chooses to rally an army to support Jane Foster Thor, as his father sets his “murderous, deranged brother in control of the most dangerous weapon known to the gods,” according to the ­All-Mother, in an attempt to destroy the new Thor. It is this inciting incident that brings together a powerful community of feminists to stand against the patriarchal power. When she learns of the plan, Freyja strikes her husband, then immediately contacts her son through the Bifrost. The All-Mother wishes for an army to fight “the Destroyer,” Odin’s brother Cul’s weaponized robot, explaining, “Against such a foe as we must face this day, aye, it would be best if we had an army. But I’m afraid we haven’t the time to raise one.” But Odinson responds that he “begs to differ. We have the rainbow bridge.” And with a tight shot of Odinson’s magical hand clutching the rolled-up list bleeding out of the panel, his speech balloon declares, “And I already hold a list.” The list now represents a number of formidable feminists, each worthy in her own way. The final page of issue #7 is a fantastic splash page, with the profile of Jane Foster Thor turned to see Odinson arriving to help her fight Cul’s Destroyer, surrounded by a phalanx of women, ready to fight. Thor Odinson, ax in hand, declares, “You will not stand alone this day, Thor! So swears Prince Odinson of Asgard!” Freyja, positioned just behind him and clutching a sword and shield, announces, “And his mother! And their army! Am I right, ladies?” (see Figure 23.6). This image is striking in the assemblage of female heroes, including Captain Marvel, Black Widow, Lady Sif, Scarlet Witch, Karnilla, Spider-Woman, and many others. The women are fierce and determined, not sexualized or diminished in any way, an image of intersectional feminism in action. Worsham contends that recognizing differences, rather than essentializing experience, is the key to the future of feminism, for “there is no need to eradicate difference to find solidarity, no need to share common oppression to fight oppression, even those forms that may not affect us directly or individually” (329). This group forms a feminist community committed to supporting the Goddess of Thunder and fighting the patriarchal aggression of Odin. The group teams up in spectacular fashion in issue #8, fighting valiantly in a sequence of colorful panels swirling with motion and color and featuring the delightful quips and banter for which Marvel is known. (When Captain Marvel Carol Danvers asks SpiderWoman Jessica Drew for her opinion of “the chick with the hammer,” Drew responds, “One word, Carol: Hawt.”) Meanwhile, Cul bemoans the “army of females” and “foolish she-gnats.” Jane Foster Thor protests, “There was no need to endanger these others,” but

416   Susan Kirtley

Figure 23.6  “Odinson, Freyja, and the Heroes Arrive,” Thor #7.

continues to fight alongside the “strange family.” For her part, Freyja leaps at the Destroyer, spearing him through the head with her sword, crying, “The All-Father’s Reign of Idiocy is at an end! So swears Freyja, daughter of Vanaheim! So swears the All-Mother of Asgard!” Freyja has risen up and pierced the emissary of her husband, declaring a female lineage as the daughter of Vanaheim and the All-Mother, asserting the close of Odin’s “idiotic” rule. But the Destroyer is undaunted, grasping Freyja around the neck, as Cul ­commands, “Your temperamental wife and her impetuous friends must be reminded that there is still an All-Father in Asgard.” Odinson and Jane Foster Thor immediately come to Freyja’s aid, attacking the enormous Destroyer, but Freyja calls to Odin, who watches through a crystal ball, “Do you see what you have wrought, Lord Husband?” Odin watches the crystal, slumping in defeat, and calls out, “Let it go,” calling back his weapon. Odin has realized the cost of his tyrannical regime and is conquered not by being physically overpowered but by being forced to consider the morality of his choices. Through collective action, the feminist alliance of heroes demonstrates a commitment to another type of leadership, and, confronted with the truth, Odin finally relents. As the group disperses, the women joke and laugh, heralding the new Thor and teasing her about her “sidekick” Odinson. Freyja reminds the Goddess of Thunder, “You stand for more than yourself now. And you need never stand alone.” In the final pages, Odinson realizes that Thor is not, in fact, Roz Solomon, but the Goddess of Thunder

Feminist Community Building in Jason Aaron’s Thor   417 exits before revealing her true identity. However, on the final page of the story arc, she removes her helmet, disclosing, “I am Dr. Jane Foster. And I will not stop being the Mighty Thor. Even though it is killing me.” And thus, Jane Foster sets off on her next major story arc, battling breast cancer while remaining Thor in the series The Mighty Thor, another run that undoubtedly deserves additional analysis. However, for this particular series, the emphasis is clear: through collective action, feminists can bring about change, helping even the most stubborn misogynists see another way. I would argue that in its unabashed feminism, this comic-book series makes a particularly important contribution to dialogue around female empowerment, as it serves as an interruption in a conversation and a community that has historically been maledominated. Martha Rampton makes the case that “Feminism is now moving from the academy and back into the realm of public discourse,” and this is particularly true and particularly powerful in the case of Thor. Nedra Reynolds maintains that “Agency is not simply about finding one’s own voice but also about intervening in discourses of the everyday and cultivating rhetorical tactics that make interruption and resistance an important part of any conversation” (59). Thor intercedes in the conversation of the commonplace, contesting preconceived notions of heroism as a male domain and challenging narratives of entrenched patriarchal control. Jane Foster Thor’s battle with the Destroyer was, indeed, a messy one, as evidenced by the smoldering debris surrounding the women, but change is undeniably messy. Worsham reasons, “The development of political consciousness—in an individual, a ­discipline, or a social movement—is always a process, an ongoing, painstaking, transgenerational process of two steps forward, one step back, three stumbling steps sideways into the nearest ditch” (346). Drawing on comics like Thor, I encourage readers to join and support this somewhat messy, painstaking feminist movement, collectively taking down the villains, naysayers, and absorbing men who would seek to steal women’s thunder.

Notes 1. This chapter contains numerous spoilers for Aaron’s run of Thor from October 2014 through May 2015 and beyond. The ultimate identity of the female who picks up the hammer and becomes Thor is an important plot point for the entire series and remains a secret until May 2015 but will be discussed here in detail. 2. Given that there are two Thors in this series, and since assuming the name is integral to the story, it is important to differentiate between the two heroes. Thus, I refer to the original Thor as Thor when discussing events that happened before he lost the hammer, and I refer to him by his preferred moniker Odinson or Thor Odinson after he loses the hammer. Given the legacy and long association of the name Thor with Odinson, it can be somewhat confusing to refer to the female Goddess of Thunder as Thor. Thus, even though her identity is not known in this story arc, I refer to the new Thor as Jane Foster Thor or the Goddess of Thunder, in an attempt to differentiate the heroes. 3. The lettering for Odin and Freyja helps to identify their voices and tell the story and, unfortunately, cannot be replicated here. While the speech of both rulers suggests an ancient,

418   Susan Kirtley exalted quality and looks very similar, Odin’s is slightly heavier and thicker, suggesting a louder, rougher tone. When Jane Foster is speaking as Thor, her words are lettered in the traditional, ancient style, but when she speaks as Jane Foster, her words are lettered in a stripped-down, modernist style. This quickly establishes Jane Foster Thor’s divided persona as an individual person and as a superhero. 4. Interestingly, in the August 1978 comic What If Jane Foster Had Found the Hammer of Thor? the hero dubs herself Thordis.

Works Cited Aaron, Jason, writer. Thor Volume 1: Goddess of Thunder. Art by Russell Dauterman (#1–4); Jorge Molina (#5). Color by Matt Wilson (#1–4); Jorge Molina (#5). Marvel, 2016. Aaron, Jason, writer. Thor Volume 2: Who Holds the Hammer? Art by Russell Dauterman. Color by Matt Wilson. Marvel, 2016. Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of Medusa.” Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. Rutgers UP, 1997, pp. 347–362. Curtis, Neil. “Thor #5.” https://multiframe.wordpress.com/2015/05/20/thor-5-by-jason-aaronand-jorge-molina. Henderson, Danielle. “New Feminist Thor Is Selling Way More Comic Books Than the Old Thor.” Huffington Post, 23 Mar. 2015, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/23/feministthor-comic-books_n_6920666.html. Kott, Lidia Jean. “Lessons from Behind the Counter at the Comic Book Store.” NPR.org, 27 July 2014, https://www.npr.org/2014/07/27/332615488/lessons-from-behind-the-comic-bookcounter. Rampton, Martha. “Four Waves of Feminism.” https://www.pacificu.edu/about/media/fourwaves-feminism. Reynolds, Nedra. “Interrupting Our Way to Agency: Feminist Cultural Studies and Composition.” Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words, edited by Susan Jarratt and Lynn Worsham, MLA, 1998, pp. 58–73. Rice, Jamie “Female Thor Revisited: She Is Worthy.” https://comicsverse.com/female-thorrevisited-she-is-worthy. Richards, Dave. “Jason Aaron Explains New ‘Thor’s’ New, Female Goddess of Thunder.” Comic Book Reporter, 16 July 2014, https://www.cbr.com/jason-aaron-explains-thors-new-femalegod-of-thunder. White, Brett. “Equality and the Feminist Mission Statement of Thor #1.” Comic Book Reporter, 11 Oct. 2014. https://www.cbr.com/equality-and-the-feminist-mission-statement-of-thor-1. Whitbrook, James. “Verily the Art of Mighty Thor Is So Damn Good.” https://io9.gizmodo. com/verily-the-art-in-mighty-thor-is-so-damn-good-1787095283. Worsham, Lynn. “After Words: A Choice of Words Remains.” Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words, edited by Susan Jarratt and Lynn Worsham, MLA, 1998, pp. 329-356.

chapter 24

W hen Femi n ism W en t to M a r k et Issues in Feminist Anthology Comics of the 1980s and ’90s Rachel R. Miller

In their editors’ letter for Wimmen’s Comix #12 (1987), coeditors Angela Bocage and Rebecka Wright assemble a cast of Wimmen’s Comix Collective members, including Trina Robbins, Dori Seda, Diane Noomin, Carol Lay, and Lee Binswanger, for a showdown against the “Big Weenie.” Their foe embodies the all-women collective’s fraught relationship to core parts of the comics industry: comics retailers, the direct market, and the late-1980s speculator boom. As “Breathtaking Bombshells Battle the Bratwurst” opens, the battle begins at the comic-book shop: Angela has the maxi-day blues, Rebecka has an overflowing cat box. . . . But they’re pissed at the retailers who won’t stock their books. “Where’s Wimmen’s Comix?” they politely asked. “It’s completely sold out,” was the inevitable reply. “Can you order any more?” they cagily inquired, still polite. “No one buys that title,” they were inexplicably informed. So now they sit, and think, and stew. (Bocage and Wright 668)

Sitting on the stoop outside a comic-book shop on Mission Street, Bocage and Wright are confronted by their nemesis: “The Big Weenie. ‘I tell the retailers not to stock your books!’ he sneers, retreating to the reading room to gloat over the small-circulation comics he has already vanquished.” In 1987, the “Big Weenie” faced down by the Wimmen’s Collective could personify the myopic figure of the comics collector, a speculator whose consumption of comics as ­collectible items drove the comics marketplace for much of the 1980s and ’90s (Gearino

420   Rachel R. Miller 132–133). In particular, in the late ’80s, the comics marketplace was oversaturated with titles printed in black-and-white, which had become the purview of the burgeoning field of alternative comics published by independent publishers such as Fantagraphics, Last Gasp, and Renegade Press. As Gary Groth outlined in his 1987 editorial “Black and White and Dead All Over,” the success of black-and-white comics such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sparked the interest of “a gang of speculators” and incited a “­consumer frenzy” for black-and-white comics spurred on by “the belief that the American public will consume limitless quantities of useless garbage” (Groth 62). While retailers kept ordering “mountains of this garbage—the rodents, the parodies of the ninjas—until their shops were bursting with junk,” the black-and-white boom, according to Groth, devastated the marketplace for alternative comics (61, 62). Retailers became too lazy, too greedy to discern the trash such as Washmen and Pork Knight knockoffs from independent small-press titles trying to find their footing such as Love and Rockets, put out by Fantagraphics, and Wimmen’s Comix, which was then at Renegade Press. Although the all-women anthology had its origins in the underground comix movement of the 1960s and ’70s and in its second life in the 1980s was resituating itself within the alternative comics scene, Bocage and Wright’s 1987 editorial, along with Groth’s, dram­a­tize the collision between small-press alternative comics and the mainstream commercial comics industry that had begun playing out in spaces such as the comicbook shop. But the frustrations of putting out a comic book that sells but that shops won’t order or restock because “No one buys that title” were not just an unfortunate byproduct of the 1980s black-and-white boom and bust whose effects were felt across all alternative comics titles. Nearly a decade later, Sarah Dyer expresses similar frustrations with retailers as she tries to get her new “all-girl” anthology, Action Girl Comics, off the ground. In her review zine, Action Girl Newsletter, Dyer writes: [Action Girl Comics] is doing worse and worse, simply because no one cares if you put out something of quality or something interesting. Some shops are racking it with porno books. Some are burying it in a tiny “alternative” section and dooming all the books by shoving it into a back space and not telling anyone about it. Most are not carrying it at all. (Action Girl Newsletter 2)

Although Dyer’s all-girl anthology weathered the 1990s comics industry shake-ups passed down from the ’80s boom-and-bust cycles, here Dyer reads retailers’ misunderstanding of her anthology as a willful disruption of her efforts to put out an anthology that centered on women and catered to an audience of girls. Action Girl Comics wasn’t finding its readers because the venues such as the comic-book shop intentionally ­misread the anthology, mis-shelving it, burying it in back stock, or refusing to sell it altogether. “Everyone in comics has been moaning about getting more female readers—and I think I’m proving that having a book that girls/women would like to read is not the problem,” Dyer writes. “It’s the shops that scare you, the comic stores full of Penthouse posters and guys that leer at you. The geeks working who don’t care if you become a

When Feminism Went to Market   421 c­ ustomer or not.” Whereas Bocage and Wright’s tale of the showdown between the Wimmen’s Collective and the “Big Weenie” only hints at gendered dynamics of retailers refusing to restock their anthology, Dyer makes the issue plain: “The vast majority of the people who go on and on about how they want to make comics girls will like, and shops women will feel comfortable in, and bring women artists and writers in to the so-called industry are doing nothing to make this happen. And they backbite some of the people who are.” Despite being published almost a decade apart, Bocage and Wright’s and Dyer’s editorials elucidate the increasingly embattled situation that feminist-oriented comics makers faced in the public spaces they had to enter in order to make their work visible—spaces such as the comic-book shop or the comics convention. Elsewhere I have argued that anthology comics with a feminist consciousness such as Wimmen’s Comix and Action Girl Comics are a unique kind of feminist media because of their capacity to tie together a multigenerational cast of feminist thinkers issue to issue. Here, however, I turn to the material conditions under which these anthologies were actually produced and circulated, in order to document “what happens when feminism goes to market,” as Elizabeth Groeneveld puts it in her study of third-wave, 1990s-era girls’ magazines (50). As Groeneveld and many other feminist media scholars point out, feminist activists and thinkers have turned to self-made and independently published print media since ­suffrage, and the networks that grow from feminist periodical circulation often shape the historical organization of feminist movements.1 Although comics are among the few examples of a feminist medium that circulates beyond the context in which we typically locate feminist discourse—such as the feminist bookshop, the consciousness-raising meeting, or the rally—they have been altogether left out of accounts of feminist periodical culture. Comics have always been a site through which feminists make visible their labor, daily lives, and agendas; however, as Margaret Galvan elaborates, comics themselves have not always been accepted into feminist spaces such as women’s bookshops (“Archiving Grassroots Comics”). Even into the 1990s, when feminist media became more fluid in its exchanges with mass media due the rise of zine making and glossy ­magazines that grew out of zines such as Bitch and Bust, comics remained at the margins of a new ecosystem of feminist periodical culture. I spoke with Julie Doucet at the Small Press Expo in 2018, and she recalled how she actively read and sought out feminist newsletters and magazines coming out of Canada. Doucet, who, along with Roberta Gregory, was one of the only women to helm her own alternative comics serial (Dirty Plotte, in the 1990s, through a large independent publisher, Drawn and Quarterly), initially tried taking her self-published minicomics to a local women’s bookshop in Montreal. “I gave them my fanzine to ask if they wanted to sell them,” she remembered, “but they looked at it and they told me that it was too violent, there was too much violence against women—so to me, that said it all.” The marginalization of comics from both sites of feminist discourse and historical accounts of how feminist networks formed out of feminist periodical cultures forecloses opportunities to analyze how this particular kind of feminist media navigated a unique

422   Rachel R. Miller set of conditions as it tried to find a readership and build communities of like-minded readers around the visual depiction of feminist issues and ideas. In her monograph The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability, Kristen Hogan historicizes the feminist bookshop by persuasively asserting that these spaces generated “new reading and relational practice[s]” through “the feminist shelf ” (xxi). Hogan’s “feminist shelf ” links the feminist bookshop’s “practice of using spatial organization, programming, and reflection to map shelf sections as ways of relating to each other” and to a multitude of functions that feminist bookshops served for activist ­communities (109). In the space of such a shelf, feminists could curate an archive of materials, “chang[ing] reading and relational practices by creating new contexts for each text and ourselves through the books on the shelf,” building “collective accountability” and “new vocabularies” for readers, and enacting “a feminist ethics of dialogue, speaking with each other rather than for each other” (109). Hogan even structures her analysis of the “feminist shelf ” as it exists from the 1970s through the 1990s through readings of a feminist periodical that grew out of the formation of women’s bookstores: the Feminist Bookstore News. Hogan’s excavation of the feminist bookstore demonstrates how networks and collectives of feminist thinkers were shaped by the curation of texts and community building that feminist-oriented spaces such as the bookshop afforded. If comics made by women with an eye to feminist issues were, by and large, not integrated into the offerings of feminist bookshops—even denigrated and maligned within these spaces—how did their marginalization impact the formation and vitality of feminist networks that grew out of the circulation of this particular kind of periodical? While feminist scholars of comics have productively illuminated the radical potential of the network of women making comics generated by anthologies with a feminist consciousness (Galvan, “Archiving Wimmen”) or even tracked how comics map onto the preexisting wave model of feminist history (Kirtley), in this chapter, I turn to the actual conditions under which these collective comics were made and circulated. In so doing, I follow feminist art historian Linda Nochlin, who in her 1973 essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” puts aside questions of the aesthetic quality of women’s work and instead frames the problem of marginalization as a systematic, institutional one. “The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces,” she writes, “but in our institutions and our education.” In what follows, I consider how the material conditions under which the 1990s-era feminist anthology Action Girl Comics (1994–2000) came together impacted the ­community and kind of feminist discourse that editor Dyer was able to build through her all-girl anthology. Influenced by Dyer’s personal history as a zine maker, Action Girl Comics intervened in commercially driven spaces such as the comic-book shop by ­making the principles of feminist zine making—such as anticorporate authenticity, grass-roots networking, and do-it-yourself print production—widely available to its readers, disrupting the notion that making comics and reading comics were activities reserved for only cis-gendered white men. Locating the origins of Action Girl Comics in

When Feminism Went to Market   423 Dyer’s zine making, I consider how she modeled collecting, curating, and commu­nity building as feminist acts for her readers in the pages of her all-ages anthology, teasing out the ways in which she navigated the collision between mainstream comics and in­de­ pend­ent, alternative comics that is particular to the comics marketplace. I then turn to an example of a self-published comic, Yvonne Mojica’s Bathroom Girls #1 (1996), that elaborates the vitality and functionality of the network of women comics creators that Action Girl Comics sought to inspire and support. Although no longer widely available to readers, Mojica’s minicomic, along with many other comics self-published by girls and women throughout the 1990s, is preserved in the Sarah Dyer Zine Collection at the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University. In this chapter’s final turn, I consider the many “afterlives” that Mojica’s self-published comic leads. In so doing, I expand Janice Radway’s potent s­ uggestion that radical, self-­published feminist zines “live on in transmuted social contexts—in archives and circulating collections, in classrooms, on Websites, and in the writings of former zinesters, zine fans, and zine analysts” (148), extending her ­theorization of zines’ afterlives to ­consider the unique media legacies left by anthology and self-published comics.

“Be an Action Girl”: Feminist Collecting, Curating, and Community Building in the Comics Marketplace “Sorry boys, but we girls need your room!!!” declares the lithe Action Girl as she uses just the pointed toe of her shoe to force the boys out of what was once their space exclusively. (See Figure 24.1.) Inside, the boys’ room buzzes with activity: a bespectacled girl with a highlighter jammed behind her ear thumbs through A Century of Women’s Cartoons (which, if you look very, very closely, is “by Trinna”); another ­gleefully cuts up an issue of Virile Comics (tag line: “He’s Big!”); a girl with perfect ­posture and cropped hair helms the computer, typing up Action Girl copy, while another crouches over pieces of the latest Action Girl spread out over the floor as she lays out the new issue. This cover, drawn by frequent Action Girl Comics contributor Elizabeth Watasin for the comic’s second issue (January 1995), is the conclusion to a story Dyer herself began on her own cover for the first issue of the all-girl comics anthology. Like that of issue #2, the cover of Action Girl Comics #1 (October 1994) bears our eponymous heroine in her double-breasted jacket embossed with the gold letters “AG,” clashing green skirt, and black headband. She’s now in the foreground, her thumb jutting back at a makeshift windowless shack affixed with the banner “Sooperhero Club No Gurlz Allowed” as she addresses her new readers: “Yeah, like I wanted to join their club!” While the first cover of Dyer’s anthology swiftly rejects the boys’ clubhouse, the second

424   Rachel R. Miller

Figure 24.1  Action Girl Comics #2, edited by Sarah Dyer, Slave Labor Graphics, 1995.

When Feminism Went to Market   425 finds the girls effectively taking over that space where once “no gurlz” were allowed, transforming it into a busy site of production for the very comic we hold in our hands. Taken together, Dyer and Watasin’s covers for the all-girl comics anthology provide a succinct and compelling visual thesis for how to be an “action girl” in the face of an alienating “Sooperhero Club,” an apt visual analog for the comics industry at large in the mid-1990s, dominated by superheroes, variant cover gimmicks, and a presumed male readership. Be an Action Girl: Call out the boys’ club of publishers, fanboys, and artists. Kick ’em out. Replace that club with the frenetic energy of an all-girl team of comics ­creators, who slash up the “virile” BOOM, POW of the superhero comic book for a ­collage; who learn their history, passed down by previous generations of women such as Trina (“Trinna”) Robbins, cofounder of Wimmen’s Comix; and who revitalize the long, ongoing legacy of women making comics. Or, if all that shake-up isn’t your thing, simply do: write and draw and produce. As Dyer wrote in her manifesto, which she ran as part of her editor’s letter in all nineteen issues of Action Girl Comics: ACTION IS EVERYTHING! Our society, even when it’s trying to be “alternative” usually just promotes a consumerist mentality. Buying things isn’t evil, but if that’s all you do, your life is pretty pointless. Be an ACTION GIRL (or boy)! It’s great to read/listen to/watch other people’s creative output, but it’s even cooler to do it yourself. Don’t think you can do comics? Try anyway, even if they’re just for yourself! Or maybe think about writing for a zine, or working at shows or benefits. Volunteer! Learn to sew! . . . go out and do something with all that positive energy! (1)

With nineteen issues published by small indie outfit Slave Labor Graphics over the course of seven years (1994–2000), Action Girl Comics is one of the longest-running one-woman-run anthologies to publish a cohort made up solely of girl and women ­comics makers. Each issue drew together a cast of twelve to fourteen contributors working in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, creating a transnational ­dialogue among comics makers who were grappling with feminist issues in their own self-published minicomics and zines. In the first issue alone, Action Girl Comics features the work of Jessica Abel and Megan Kelso, both of whom were self-publishing their own comic books, Artbabe and GirlHero, respectively; Elizabeth Watasin, whose self­published Adventures of A-Girl, followed the adventures of her asexual avatar, A-Girl; and Leanne Franson, whose long-running minicomic Liliane dealt with her coming to terms with her own bisexuality and finding a queer community; as well as lesser-known ­comics makers and zinesters such as She-Ra, Ms. Phink, and Fallen Angel. That the allgirl anthology traded in content that was exclusively all-ages gave readers small doses of these artists’ work while pointing them to the more radical material that Action Girl ­contributors produced by providing information on how to order contributors’ other comics from them directly in the roll call at the back of each issue. Beyond making a new generation of women’s work in comics visible to her readers, Dyer’s insistence that “action is everything,” that her readers be girls or boys of action who can “do it yourself ” and create their own comics, zines, and communities, intertwines her values as a longtime zine maker, active in DIY communities, with her new

426   Rachel R. Miller task of putting out a comic book through a small publisher on a semiregular schedule. As she puts it in her first editor’s letter, “the best way to explain [Action Girl Comics] would probably be to say that it is not exactly an anthology. It is being put together more like a zine is (one of my zines at least)—it is wholly my comic, not some publisher’s ­collection of stuff.” Indeed, Dyer’s work as a zine maker has been productively taken up by zine scholars Kate Eichhorn, Janice Radway, and the late Alison Piepmeier, all of whom highlight the legacy of Dyer’s review zine Action Girl Newsletter as exclusively tied to an explosion of “girl zines” during the early 1990s (Radway 146; Eichhorn 55–85). Piepmeier positions “Action Girl”—which she uses interchangeably to signify Dyer’s cartoon character and the newsletter but, crucially, not her comics anthology—as one of two institutions that established “a style, rhetoric, and iconography” for 1990s-era feminist media, the other being Riot Grrrl, a feminist arts movement that spanned music, zines, and performance art and has largely come to characterize the intensification of feminist discourse during the 1990s or the “third wave.” “Riot Grrrl and Action Girl,” she writes, “function as sites at which grrrl zines and third wave feminism emerged,” with Dyer’s newsletter and superheroine in particular elaborating “a deployment of strategic femininity” that differentiated girl zines from previous eras of feminist print culture (Piepmeier 45, 48). What feminist media scholars miss by not considering comics as a unique dimension of Dyer’s intervention into DIY culture and feminist zine making is the story of how Dyer sought to translate the ethos of zine making to the production of a comic-book anthology that had mainstream sensibilities. Radway suggests that “zines ought to be thought of not simply as texts to be read but also as acts to be engaged and passed on” (142), and Dyer conceived of her comic as positioning readers to be more than just consumers, to take action and create their own media—comics in particular. Applying her sensibilities as a zine maker to her comics anthology, Dyer modeled for readers and the comics industry at large how collecting, curating, and building a community of women and girls making comics were radical modes that restructured ­preconceived notions of what comics were and whom they were for, as well as the conditions under which comics were created, circulated, and received. Casting Action Girl Comics as “more like a zine” than a comic book, Dyer situates her all-girl comics anthology as an interjection into the legacy of the comic book as merely a consumer good or collectible object as she begins a new trajectory for feminist grass-roots media such as the zine. By calling on the readers of her comics anthology again and again to “be an Action Girl,” Dyer demonstrates a deep investment in rerouting the course of comics history and visual culture throughout the seven-year life span of her anthology, invoking a critical mass of her readers to become creators themselves. While appealing to her personal history as a zine maker lent the anthology authenticity (“it is wholly my comic, not some publisher’s collection of stuff ”), Dyer’s community-oriented investments shaped how the project sought to make the work of women and girls in comics visible. She writes that Action Girl Comics provides “a place for a new generation of cartoonists to be discovered—a generation that I think has not been given much of a voice in this industry.”

When Feminism Went to Market   427 Dyer had long been modeling how collection and curation could be deployed as feminist acts that bolstered community building and networking among women and girls creating their own media through the pages of her zines and newsletters that led up to and coincided with the publication of Action Girl Comics. Both Dyer’s music zine Mad Planet, and her Action Girl Newsletter, which reviewed girl zines, comics, and other ­feminist resources, testify to Dyer’s need “to intervene in the larger zine culture, to ­create a community of women,” so that her labor, and the labor of other women, could be made visible on a local level (Piepmeier 24). As she writes in a subsection of her editor’s letter for Mad Planet #2 labeled “Grrrl Trouble,” “As those of you who read [Mad Planet] number one know, one of the main reasons for my starting this zine (besides inflicting my world view on everyone I possibly can) was to put out a project by myself, so that I could actually get some credit for once, as it seems that no-one, PC or not, can believe that a female can be an important contributor to a project.” To her dismay, however, those who read Mad Planet still referred to her longtime partner, Evan Dorkin, who contributed comics to each issue, as the sole creator of the zine, a misrepresentation that would continue to plague the project. She writes in issue #3, “Mad Planet 2 was reviewed more than once as being a zine by Evan Dorkin . . . and then was reviewed another time as ‘another Riot Grrrl zine’ whatever that is supposed to mean.” Gender trouble plagued Dyer’s goals for Mad Planet, which she saw not only as a platform for making her labor and efforts as a woman in the scene visible but, perhaps more important, as a space in which she could earnestly collect the things she loved to present to her readers. A particularly potent visualization of this project, the cover of Mad Planet #3, centers on an Action Girl prototype, eyes closed, quietly strumming her guitar. (See Figure 24.2) She is surrounded by the stylized names of the bands Dyer interviewed for the issue: Tiger Trap, Mombo Taxi, Unrest, and more. On her chest, a large heart encircles the acronym “DIY,” and her guitar bears scrawled letters, “Action Girl.” Beneath her feet is Dyer’s signature. The image is not riotous but instead quietly puts the mission statement of the zine out in front of the reader: this is a one-woman show; the hum, the beat, the chorus all come from a girl of action. As her opening salvo in each issue attests, Dyer’s two goals for Mad Planet—visibility and action—were intimately intertwined. A single-sentence manifesto that all of her subsequent editor’s ­letters echo claims Dyer’s ownership over the space carved out for her voice by her zine: Mad Planet is “my zine, and it reflects my opinions, and my generally eclectic approach to everything.” Even as she self-published Mad Planet, however, merely writing about what she loved and giving it to her readers fell short of solving the problem that got her working on the zine in the first place: the casual and cutting misattribution of her work to her male partner, Dorkin. Dyer’s singular efforts weren’t enough to change the DIY landscape so that its participants would actually start to talk about zines created by girls and women as if those girls and women were agents and not just bystanders. Action Girl Newsletter, then, found Dyer employing a new tactic for toppling the status quo: make all the women and girls visible; flood the market with their words, their songs, their rants and raves, their work. Again, her new project is best put forth by an image (See Figure 24.3). On the cover of Action Girl Guide #1, which collects the first six issues of Dyer’s Action Girl Newsletter,

428   Rachel R. Miller

Figure 24.2  Mad Planet #3, Sarah Dyer, self-published, 1993.

Action Girl herself sits cross-legged atop a flood of zines and minicomics. There’s Watasin’s minicomic Adventures of A-Girl, Misery and Vomit by Chantal Doyle, and Ros Garbles’s comics zine Garbles; there’s GirlFrenzy, Girl Cola, Satan Wears a Bra, Bi Girl World, and Action Girl herself, lifting Stink Zine #4 and Verboslammed #3 high above her head, her mouth jubilantly open as if proclaiming the gospel of this all-girl wave of media. Unlike

When Feminism Went to Market   429

Figure 24.3  Action Girl Guide #1, edited by Sarah Dyer, self-published, 1994.

Mad Planet, the Action Girl Newsletter isn’t about the single voice of one girl taking action but about making heard and sustaining the many voices of girl creators. “To girls,” Dyer writes in her editor’s letter to the Action Girl Guide, “you may feel like you’re the

430   Rachel R. Miller only one trying to do anything, but there’s lots of us out here. Network with the women you see listed here for inspiration. Girl love can save the world.” In many ways, Action Girl Comics is an extension of the project Dyer began in Action Girl Newsletter: collecting a cohort of women making comics, curating their work so it can be read by an all-ages audience, and building a community of readers who could see themselves reflected in the pages and mission of the anthology. Key properties of Dyer’s anthology, however, speak to the negotiations and exchanges she had to levy in order to make her work legible in the commercially driven spaces where Action Girl Comics would be bought and sold. Making the comic all-ages, for instance, was an effort to ­circumnavigate the underhanded tactic by which comic-book shops often marginalized comics by women by bagging and shelving them alongside pornographic or erotic comic books because of their explicit depictions of sex, queerness, and women’s bodies. As Dyer writes in Mad Planet #3: While looking through the racks at a shop one day I realized that every single alternative comic by women was “adults only”—bagged and sealed and on the top racks because of the explicit sexual content . . . I mean, I do buy a lot of the above-mentioned “mature readers only” books, but the fact of life today is that these books are often not carried because stores don’t want to deal with adult material. And if they do carry them, customers under 18 often have trouble buying them.

Though making her anthology all-ages was one way of effectively broadcasting the gospel of DIY comics making, Action Girl Comics would also be subject to the larger forces of the comics industry, such as the consolidation of the industry’s direct market into a single distributor that took place in the mid-1990s. Whereas zines, “unlike mainstream ‘niche market’ periodicals” like comic books, “don’t follow well-laid plans for market penetration or move purposefully in a defined direction courting profitable demographics” (Duncombe 12), Dyer’s anthology had to sell in order to continue as a viable title for publisher Slave Labor Graphics. The distribution shake-up of the ­mid-1990s,2 which found many small publishers threatened by the prospect of not being carried by the monopolistic Diamond, had Dyer shifting the manifesto that had carried her through twelve issues of Action Girl Newsletter from one of anticonsumerist, DIY optimism to asking that her readers become conscientious consumers. In her editor’s ­letter for Action Girl Comics #3 (1995), Dyer begs readers to direct their action toward consuming rather than creating. She writes, “if you care about any small-press [comic] book, even if it’s a ‘best-seller’ like Cerebus or Bone, you need to become an active ­consumer, not a passive one.” Although Action Girl Comics would survive the tumultuous comics marketplace of the mid-1990s, Dyer’s lesson to her readers about conscious ­consumerism is a marked departure from the more radical feminist activism envisioned by girl zines and even Dyer’s own utopian vision of her readers as radical makers rather than just consumers. The challenges Dyer faced in making her all-girl wave of media visible to a larger audience, such as that constituted by the comics marketplace, shaped and dictated

When Feminism Went to Market   431 Action Girl Comics’ capacity to sustain the feminist ethos and values Dyer had established in her zines Action Girl Newsletter and Mad Planet. Action might have been “everything” to Action Girl herself, but the realities of putting out a regular comic book through a small publisher in a turbulent corporate industry tested the radical potential that self-publication had offered Dyer through her zine making.

In the Archives with Action Girl: The Afterlives of Feminist Comics Although Dyer’s anthology had to make concessions to her vision of an industry-wide, all-girl comics takeover during the seven years of its publication, her archive of the girl wave of minicomics and zines made in the 1990s has had a rich afterlife as it is preserved in the Zine Collection at the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University. Previous to Dyer’s donation of one thousand pieces of self-published material culled from her own collection in 2000, the Bingham Center did not house zines or self-published comics of any sort. Since Dyer’s founding donation, however, zine makers and collectors have continued to send their collections to the Bingham Center for preservation, with Dyer herself making two additional donations of 250 items each as the collection grew after her founding donation. While comics are the top subject category for Dyer’s collection as a whole, these last two additions house the bulk of the self-published minicomics in her archive. While the methodology I employed in order to center the comics self-published by girls and young women that have found a home in Dyer’s archive is, perhaps, beyond the scope of this chapter, in what follows, I take up one exemplary comic found during my work with the Sarah Dyer Zine Collection in order to animate the differences between comics and zines as projects of feminist self-publication. In her exploration of the afterlives of zines in institutional archives such as the Zine Collection at the Bingham Center, Radway compellingly asserts, “Zines did not simply die in the early 1990s” (143), concluding that her work on zines “is designed to explore what kinds of subjects were brought into being through zine-ing, how these subjects were constituted socially, and how the social forms they created enabled particular kinds of activities and activism on behalf of an altered relation to the twenty-first-century world” (148). Although comics and zines often bleed into each other with no singular set of conventions differentiating the one from the other, my own investigation highlights how ­comics self-published by girls and women point to a different set of social conditions— some of which I’ve outlined above—that redirect how we read and contextualize the “afterlives” of this particular sort of feminist media. While what follows moves from anthology comics to self-published minicomics or comics zines, here I reenact how an anthology comic such as Action Girl Comics acts as a feminist institution with the capacity to build and encourage a community of like-minded comics makers. Indeed,

432   Rachel R. Miller alongside many of the comics contained in Dyer’s archive are personal letters to Dyer herself, expressing how Action Girl Comics inspired the letter writers’ own comicsmaking ventures, illuminating the reciprocity of the network Dyer built in spite of the challenges she faced in making her anthology visible and relevant to the larger comics industry. Beneath the glares of a gang of girls arrayed around a row of bathroom sinks, Yvonne Mojica’s minicomic Bathroom Girls #1 (June 1996) bears a banner in the lower righthand corner that reads “San-Diego Edition.” (See Figure 24.4.) Mojica’s comic follows the girl-on-girl violence that erupts as the Bathroom Girls (or maybe it’s the “Dust Bunnies”) try to scrape together enough members for a local battle of the bands, where they plan to face off against rivals the Hello Kitties. Whereas Dyer’s zines and comics traded on the promise of girl love, Bathroom Girls #1 sets itself apart from the Action Girl brand of optimism by culminating in a violent showdown between the rival girl gangs in which one girl walks away with a broken arm. While the comic’s backmatter promises to continue the story in a second issue of the self-published comic, Dyer’s archive itself only holds issue #1, along with Mojica’s hand-drawn business card and résumé. The back cover of the minicomic reads, “Have Fun at the Con,” in blocky white letters set against a black background. Taken together, Mojica’s file in Dyer’s archive is something of a dossier that positions the practice of self-publication outside of expressly feminist motives. The intentions of Bathroom Girls #1 are not solely geared toward building a community of like-minded women making comics themselves. Especially made for the largest comics convention in the United States, San Diego Comic-Con International, the comic operates, in part, as promotional material that might further Mojica’s own career and job prospects in the comics industry writ large. Although the minicomic is a self-published effort, Mojica’s résumé highlights how her independent work is situated within the larger ­context of her work experience in the mainstream comics industry: listing her work for Marvel laying out pages; as an assistant to Michael Davis, cofounder of DC imprint Milestone Comics; with artist James Fry during his work on Image Comics’ Shadowhawk; and as a penciller for Elvira #33 from indie outfit Claypool Comics. On her business card, Mojica draws a beaming portrait of herself. “Hi! We met at . . . ComicCon International San-Diego -96-,” she spouts, touting her black portfolio onto which her address is embossed. Mojica’s résumé, a standard-size piece of printer paper folded in thirds, along with her business card, might have easily been slipped into the pages of her minicomic as it circulated from her table at the comics convention out into the hands of readers, comics publishers and editors, and fellow cartoonists. That Mojica’s minicomic would eventually be nominated for an Ignatz Award at the Small Press Expo in 1998, alongside independent and alternative cartoonists such as John Porcellino, James Kochalka, and Rachel Hartman, further highlights the multiple public spaces through which her work circulated. Not confined to the networks of self-published girl zines or comics, Mojica’s work was translated across mainstream venues for comics, such as the San Diego Comic-Con and the “big two” publishers, DC and Marvel, as well as burgeoning alternative spaces such as the Small Press Expo, which, along with conventions such as the now-defunct

When Feminism Went to Market   433

Figure 24.4  Bathroom Girls #1, Yvonne Mojica, 1996.

434   Rachel R. Miller Alternative Press Expo, arrived in 1994 as a convention catering specifically to the world of self-published and independently published comics. And Bathroom Girls’ own “afterlife” is itself multidirectional. As a print artifact, it lives on in Dyer’s archives, contextualized as part of a girl wave of independent media published during the 1990s that ranges from zines to minicomics and anthologies such as Real Girl and GirlFrenzy. A quick search for Mojica online, however, extends the legacy of Bathroom Girls further. As she writes on her personal website, “My career started at the age of 17. I worked as a cashier in various comic shops and bookstores while dreaming of being an artist. Drawing [every day] eventually inspired me to create my own comic book, Bathroom Girls.” She continues: A stroke of luck landed me in a trivia contest on the Howard Stern Show. During the commercial break I gave Howard some of my Bathroom Girls comics. When we got back on the air he praised my work. . . . By the time I got home I had multiple offers from publishers, distributors, and several media companies who wanted to hire me as a cartoonist. The job offers I accepted gave me the chance to design and develop a wide variety [of] web content for many corporate clients.

The clients Mojica claims in a list that follows run the gamut from women’s glossy magazines such as Elle, Woman’s Day, and Jane to fashion houses Chanel and Roxy and media corporations such as Sony, AOL, Samsung, and Verizon, and the rest of Mojica’s website details her work as a graphic designer and animator for TV shows 30 Rock and Chappelle’s Show. Much like Dyer’s work on Action Girl Comics, Mojica’s self-published Bathroom Girls #1 cannot simply be understood as solely the product of feminist-oriented networks of cultural creators, but it points to the multidirectional afterlives that feminist media might lead when produced under cultural contexts that don’t wholly align with feminist values or discrete movements. The minicomics contained in Dyer’s archive evince a boom in comics self-published by girls and women in the 1990s, drawing together comics creators from diverse backgrounds and locales, all of whom understood their work to be circulating beyond the bounds of grass-roots networks of ­like-minded thinkers. While Dyer’s own Action Girl Comics was able to navigate the comics industry with varying degrees of success in part thanks to a figurehead who fit mainstream values and norms (whiteness, conventional femininity, heteronormativity), Dyer’s archive hosts a more diverse cross-section of women and girls like Mojica who fell outside those norms.

Notes 1. In recent years, a particularly incisive cohort of feminist media scholars has emerged with studies documenting the intersections between feminist movements and feminist periodical cultures. In Making Feminist Media: Third Wave Magazines on the Cusp of the Digital Age (2016), Groeneveld productively takes up a media history of 1990s-era girls’ and women’s magazines that came to the mainstream by way of independent print media such as the

When Feminism Went to Market   435 zine. Agatha Beins’s Liberation in Print: Feminist Periodicals and Social Movement Identity (2017) tracks the emergence of self-published media during the “second wave” of feminism in the 1970s; while Alison Piepmeier (Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism, 2009) and Adela C. Licona (Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric, 2012) both document the rise of zine making during the “third wave.” Licona’s study of zines by women of color is particularly useful for thinking about the breaks between feminist movements such as Riot Grrrl and the development of feminist discourse by women-of-color activists of the time. 2. For a fuller account of the comics industry’s consolidation into a single-distributor model in the 1990s, see Gearino 141–153; and Deppey.

Works Cited Beins, Agatha. Liberation in Print: Feminist Periodicals and Social Movement Identity. University of Georgia Press, 2017. Bocage, Angela, and Rebecka Wright. “Breathtaking Bombshells Battle the Bratwurst.” The Complete Wimmen’s Comix, vol. 2, Fantagraphics, 2016, p. 668. Deppey, Dirk. “Suicide Club: How Greed and Stupidity Disemboweled the American ComicBook Industry in the 1990s.” Comics Journal, vol. 277, June 2006, pp. 68–75. Doucet, Julie. “Cutting Up: Julie Doucet’s Reinventions from Dirty Plotte to Carpet Sweeper Tales.” Interview with Rachel Miller, Small Press Expo, September 16, 2018, Bethesda. Duncombe, Stephen. Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture, 3rd ed. Microcosm, 2008. Dyer, Sarah. Action Girl Guide #1, Winter, 1993–1994. Sarah Dyer Zine Collection in the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, David  M.  Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, box 1. Dyer, Sarah. Action Girl Newsletter #12, 1989. Sarah Dyer Zine Collection in the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, box 1. Dyer, Sarah. Mad Planet #2. Sarah Dyer Zine Collection in the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, David  M.  Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, box 4. Dyer, Sarah. Mad Planet #3. Sarah Dyer Zine Collection in the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, David  M.  Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, box 4. Eichhorn, Kate. The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order. Temple UP, 2014. Galvan, Margaret. “Archiving Grassroots Comics: The Radicality of Networks and Lesbian Community.” Archive Journal, November 2015. http://www.archivejournal.net/essays/ archiving-grassroots-comics-the-radicality-of-networks-and-lesbian-community/#identif ier_27_6123. Galvan, Margaret. “Archiving Wimmen: Collectives, Networks and Comix.” Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 32, 2017, pp. 91–92, 22–40. doi: 10.1080/08164649.2017.1357007. Gearino, Dan. Comic Shop: The Retail Mavericks Who Gave Us a New Geek Culture. Ohio UP, 2017. Groeneveld, Elizabeth. Making Feminist Media: Third-Wave Magazines on the Cusp of the Digital Age. Wilfred Laurier UP, 2016.

436   Rachel R. Miller Groth, Gary. “Black and White and Dead All Over.” Comics Journal, vol. 116, July 1987. Reprinted in Comics Journal, vol. 277, June 2006, pp. 60–67. Hogan, Kristen. The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability. Duke UP, 2016. Kirtley, Susan. “ ‘A Word to You Feminist Women’: The Parallel Legacies of Feminism and Underground Comics.” The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel, edited by Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey, and Stephen Ely Tabachnick, Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 269–285. Licona, Adela C. Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric. SUNY Press, 2012. Mojica, Yvonne. Bathroom Girls #1, June, 1996. Sarah Dyer Zine Collection in the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, David  M.  Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, box 1. Nochlin, Linda. “From 1971: Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” ARTNews, 30 May 2015, http://www.artnews.com/2015/05/30/why-have-there-been-no-great-womenartists/. Piepmeier, Alison. Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism. New York UP, 2009. Radway, Janice. “Zines, Half-Lives, and Afterlives: On the Temporalities of Social and Political Change.” PMLA, vol. 126, no. 1, 2011, pp. 140–150.

chapter 25

Childr en i n Comics Between Education and Entertainment, Conformity and Agency Maaheen Ahmed

This chapter unpacks representations of children in comics as well as the many connec­ tions established between children, children’s culture, and the medium of comics. In looking at the connections between children and comics from within (representations of children in comics stories for both children and adults) and without (associations established between children and comics, especially the shared attribute of childishness and the often nostalgic perception of comics as childhood reading), the chapter seeks to nuance and complexify the relationship between children and comics. It also suggests that, irrespective of intended audience, comics children reflect their rapidly changing modern contexts. Striking a balance between education and entertainment, which var­ ies according to the intended audience, these children channel the desires, fears, and prejudices of the society in which they are created and propagated. Beginning with Heinrich Hoffmann’s Der Struwwelpeter and Wilhelm Busch’s Max und Moritz, the chapter examines children in popular American and European comics from the late nineteenth century until the end of World War II, covering Richard F. Outcault’s Yellow Kid and Buster Brown and several young characters from the Beano. Juxtaposing early comics made for a mixed audience and comics for children helps trace how comics children changed with their audiences, their times, and the ­formats in which they were bound.

Fluid Media Contexts and Changing Readerships “The world’s most popular and influential comics have always been rooted in ideas about childhood, and they have had millions of child readers,” writes Charles Hatfield (101). Although old, the relationship between children and comics is also entangled and

438   Maaheen Ahmed fraught. While children and childishness have been a recurrent feature of comics, the acceptance of both elements is deeply affected by the discourse surrounding comics legitimization, which is based on the claim that comics have “grown up” and cater, like other legitimized literary forms, to a serious adult readership (cf. Pizzino). Before and even alongside the legitimization of the graphic novel, comics have traditionally and infamously been regarded as reading material for the young, the illiterate, and even the degenerate. Accused of corrupting young minds, comics have faced censorship cam­ paigns, the most virulent of which can be dated to the 1940s and the 1950s in Europe and the United States. As Martin Barker highlights through the example of Britain, these censorship campaigns were often also battlegrounds for cultural and ideological power; the backlash against in comics in Europe was often also a backlash against American influences, both in allied countries such as the United Kingdom and in the more openly hostile Soviet bloc (cf. Scholz). Comics have often been hailed as a distinctively American form, incarnating the energy and vitality of an emerging superpower and a burgeoning consumer culture (Bukatman; Gordon, Comic Strips). As suggested by the repeated episodes of comics censorship, the medium, owing to its marked preference for images over words, has been perceived as both a powerful but also subversive means of communication. The prominence of images coupled with the informal, caricatural drawing style preferred by comics has also contributed to the medium’s relatively low, sometimes disreputable status. The role of comics children as early proponents of mass culture complicates the rela­ tionship between children and comics: on one hand, the medium of comics was seen as childish, and this childishness spread, like contagion, to comics readers, increasing numbers of which were children; on the other, while many successful comics characters have been children, they have often catered to a mass adult readership rather than an exclusively young one. This holds for the earliest comics, such as The Yellow Kid (ca. 1895) and continues today; children, especially in newspaper comic strips such as Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, or Mafalda entertain, often in spite of themselves, both adults and children. It is also important to situate comics in the context of the rapidly transforming media environment of the late nineteenth century, which was the golden age of book illustra­ tion. It also witnessed the rise of the illustrated press and caricatural art that targeted primarily adults. Around the same time, children’s literature also became a profitable enterprise, offering memorable characters such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice (1865) and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (who first appeared in a theater piece from 1904). As these char­ acters suggest, children’s literature rapidly moved away from the educational impera­ tives incarnated by early alphabet books proposed by John Locke at the end of the seventeenth century toward striving to entertain children. Nonetheless, the guiding principle behind these works, to teach children, never went away completely; it was imbued instead with the importance given to untutored imagination during the Roman­ tic period. Concurrently, the modern notion of childhood, which had earlier taken hold in the households of the upper classes in the seventeenth century, was established across classes, becoming the “privileged age” of the nineteenth century (Ariès 26, 30).

Children in Comics   439 The ­distinction between the child and the adolescent would take longer to be concretized, at first slowly in the course of the eighteenth century, acquiring prominence through Romantic protagonists, and, after the generational split propelled by World War I, ­borrowing elements from both childhood and adulthood and becoming society’s “favou­ rite age” (Ariès 30). This generational split is in many ways incarnated by the figure of Tintin, who hovers between youth and adulthood (Apostolidès). In order to better ­contextualize these changes in perceptions of childhood and adolescence, it is important to first understand how the connections between childhood and adulthood were strengthened and how comics and children, through the attribute of childishness, estab­ lished a distinctive relationship in the course of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. This relationship, based on humor and drawing style, not only allowed for the denigration of comics but also created space for largely permissible moments of realistically impossible liberty and subversion. Through the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, the notion of childhood “came to be understood as a component of selfhood” (Steedman 7). ­ Conceptualizations of the modern self, Carolyn Steedman reminds us, interiorize the self and layer it with past experiences, especially those from childhood (12). Such con­ ceptualizations were encouraged by psychoanalytical theories. As Steedman has argued, the child came to figure (adult) interiority. This is the source of the affective power asso­ ciated with children: child figures incarnate a degree of pastness which, in the case of a mass-cultural product like comics, is also a shared or collective past. By the 1890s, chil­ dren had become “discursive vessels of cultural and personal memory” (Crain 151). The concretization of the notion of childhood was reinforced by a growing children’s culture thriving on illustrated books. Patricia Crain points out that the “material artifact of the book” itself was “one of the first dedicated spaces of childhood” (Crain 18). Childhood was therefore also being indirectly defined through the works consumed by child readers. Books were, and still are, seen as companions of their readers, especially young ones. This association also extends to comics, which nonetheless always run the risk of being figured as disreputable companions. Both comics and illustrated books marked not only entrance into the world of commodities and consumerism for children but also a degree of empowerment, through the imaginative freedom offered to readers. The close relationship between children’s literature and comics can perhaps best be described as follows: comics were indulging in childishness as the very concept of mod­ ern childhood was in the process of being redefined and acquiring unprecedented importance as an incubator for adult subjectivities. The inherent presence of childish­ ness in comics drawing informs prejudices regarding the low cultural standing of com­ ics and their readership. Despite the childishness evoked by the naive, untutored, primitive aspect of the drawing, such works were catering to a mostly adult readership through the nineteenth century (Smolderen 22, 25). For Thierry Smolderen, influences from caricature, graffiti, and children’s drawings are inherent components of comics style and enable the medium to ironically transform its subject matter. Complementing the childishness of the style, another link between comics and ­children can be drawn out through the connections between laughter and children.

440   Maaheen Ahmed Nelly Feuerhahn traces the source of laughter to two kinds of orders: one aims at social critique, whereas the other evokes childlike logic (251). For Feuerhahn, children’s laugh­ ter can have carnivalesque elements when unfolding in an adult context (21–25). She traces this back to François Rabelais’s Pantagruel, who was a child in an adult world. Maria Lypp develops a similar line of thought in arguing for the affinity between the fool and the child: “the fool is child and teacher in one person” (184). She locates this connec­ tion in four aspects: the accessibility of folk humor for children; “the ambivalence between simplemindedness and wisdom”; the conceptualization of childhood as a happy time; and the conflation encouraged by the Romantics between children and “ordinary” or “common” people (186). These factors, combined with the rise of carica­ ture, which transposed a liberating strand of humor shunning all norms in images, ­normalized carnivalesque laughter in children’s literature (187). For Lypp, this normal­ ization is regrettable because it banalizes subversive laughter and restricts it to the world of children’s literature. Strains of similar laughter, however, prevail over comics, in vary­ ing degrees of subtlety: while the Yellow Kid cheerfully turned the grown-up world upside down, mocking both class and culture, Tintin’s subversion is only apparent through an ageist lens; it is Tintin, the child, who is able to bring order to and resolve the issues of the grown-up world (Apostolidès). As a figure of laughter and liberty, the comics child seems to be quite the opposite of the interiorized child discussed by Steedman. Yet the liberty manifested by the comics child is a reflection of adult fantasies about childhood. The comics child molds and expresses a variety of concerns that change according to the intended readership and often map, somewhat distortedly, the binaries central to the modern age of child­ hood and adulthood, urban life and rural life, work and leisure. Despite this variety of readerships and publication formats, which range from news­ paper comic strips to the book-like form of the album, it is possible, as Ian Gordon has recently suggested, to unite comics with child protagonists under the common generic banner of kid comics. Often humorous in nature, these comics enable an understanding of what qualifies as funny while providing clues about the social contexts of those com­ ics. As Gordon shows, recurrent factors in kid comics, such as street play and interac­ tion with authority, particularly parents, teachers, and the police, can paint fairly accurate pictures of actual lived conditions (Gordon, Kid Comic Strips). This is compa­ rable to the way in which the diversifying media appearing toward the end of the nine­ teenth century, such as chronophotography and cinema, were reconfigured to create “an audiovisual stage on paper,” a “bundling together of speech and action without any hier­ archy” in contemporaneous comics (Smolderen 145). Newspaper strips such as Yellow Kid and Katzenjammer Kids (1897) were at the forefront of incorporating direct speech into the panels, first through the words on the Yellow Kid’s nightshirt and eventually in the form of word balloons. Comics as a medium therefore incorporates changing media contexts and experiences of reality (cf. Bukatman; Smolderen; Gardner). For Michael Chaney, “the child has been the default actor of American comics since the commercial conception of the form” (57). While Chaney is here referring to the many famous kids populating American comics from the turn of the nineteenth

Children in Comics   441 c­ entury, such as the Yellow Kid and the Katzenjammers, it is possible to extend Chaney’s remarks to the many children in European comics. Two of the earliest child protagonists in a “comic” are Busch’s Max and Moritz, who left a strong imprint on the imagery of nineteenth-century visual culture, inspiring, among others, Rudolph Dirks’s Katzenjammer Kids, which had been created with the aim of competing against the popularity of Yellow Kid. Busch himself had been inspired by Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter (Ries). Instead of reproducing visual tropes, however, Busch reversed them and, in the case of Max und Moritz, added a note of irony to the harsh punishments meted out to the incorrigibly naughty boys. Although most of the comics examined in this chapter also put norms and figures of authority to the test, they are, on closer observation, rarely as radical as Busch’s two naughty boys. The extent to which the naughty child is punished functions as a litmus test revealing the different shades of compromises made between education and ­entertainment. It also, by extension, reveals the extent to which the comics child is an entertainer and a model for how not to act in a cautionary tale or, instead, an enabled hero enjoying, unpunished, a degree of freedom denied to children, and even adults, in the real world.

Struwwelpeter’s Far-Reaching Influence While determining when comics really started is a thorny debate since it entails decid­ ing on a more or less monolithic definition of what comics really is, it is easier to point out several works that function as milestones in comics history: Max und Moritz is one of these, and comics starring children such as Yellow Kid and Tintin are others. Although Struwwelpeter, first made available to the public in 1845, is less frequently mentioned in discussions of early comics, in contrast to those on children’s literature, it merits further attention for the kind of stories it offered to children as well as its far-reaching influence on Busch’s own work and beyond. Like Max und Moritz, the series, Défauts des enfants (Children’s Shortcomings) from 1857 by French caricaturist Bertall was also inspired by Hoffmann’s work and contributed toward establishing the figure of the enfant terrible in popular images and, eventually, comics. Also aimed at a young readership, these ­children were naughty but avoided the excess of their German counterparts (Sausverd). This was in keeping with the motto of the Hachette magazine La Semaine des enfants, in which they were published: “Magazine of amusing and instructive images and texts.” Decades later, brothers Robert and Philip Spence wrote and illustrated the anti-Nazi sat­ ire, Struwwelhitler, for the Daily Sketch War Relief fund, which catered to soldiers and victims of air raids. In this case, material intended for very young children—three to six years old, as announced by the subtitle of Struwwelpeter—was reconfigured for adult amusement. German psychiatrist, or alienist, Hoffmann originally wrote and drew Der Struwwelpeter, a collection of short stories with fifteen colored illustrations, as a

442   Maaheen Ahmed Christmas gift for his son. Unable to find a worthy illustrated children’s book and ­convinced of the power of images to productively harness children’s attention and imagi­ nation, he decided to make his own book, unaware of the phenomenal success it would have. Bearing the subtitle “Pretty Stories and Funny Pictures,” the book shows each young misbehaving protagonist facing a punishment tailored to his or her tort: the thumb sucker has his thumb cut off by “the great long red-legg’d scissor-man,” and the three boys laughing at a young black boy are thrown into a giant pot of ink, becoming so dark as to resemble silhouettes. Amid the resounding success of the book, the only objections levied against Struwwelpeter concerned the negative impact of its caricatural style on children’s aes­ thetic senses, which Hoffmann rebuffed. Such criticism is comparable to the one levied on comics. As he explains in his note from 1871, Hoffmann had chosen a childlike draw­ ing style and evocative, sensual images, rejecting the laws of realism with the express purpose of effectively communicating to children (see Figure 25.1). Resembling but also inverting the trope of a religious icon—a pair of scissors and a comb become the symbols of this unholy martyr—the title figure of Struwwelpeter only appears on one page (Feuerhahn 65). The attribution of his name to the entire collection ­ ictured testifies to the character’s popularity with young readers. Of all the boys and girls p in the book, he is the largest, taking over most of the page. Dressed in eye-catching red, horrifically unkempt, with curling nails uncut for a year and a wild bush of hair, he is the most monstrous of the child characters encountered in the book. Reworked editions were careful to add a single teardrop capturing the boy’s isolation and loneliness and, by extension, remorse for his unkempt appearance. With this title image Hoffmann shrewdly combines the fascination wielded by images with the affective pull of characters calling for reader identification. Propelled by these two forces, Struwwelpeter channels the educational message of bodily care and hygiene. Hoffmann’s manner of conveying an educational message was completely unprecedented: “the invisible, the impermissible, the forbidden and the unreal were made visible through the image” (Feuerhahn 64). Struwwelpeter, writes Feuerhahn, is “the first book where the spectacle of children’s imag­ ination and its seductive lack of reason can be read.” This is comparable to the “edge of seriousness” evoked through untutored, childish drawing styles, with which nineteenthcentury cartoonists chose to express themselves (Smolderen 25). More than moral and affect, for Max und Moritz, Busch seems to have picked up on the lightness and liveliness of Hoffmann’s other drawings in the book and added an ironic twist to the early children’s literature genre of the cautionary tale. Like Struwwelpeter, Max und Moritz: Eine Bubengeschichte in sieben Streichen (literally, A Story of Young Boys in Seven Strokes), is a small book starring two boys, unfolding in verse, and accompanied by illustrations. “In earlier kids strips,” Gordon points out, “from Wilhelm Busch’s Max und Moritz, Rudolph Dirks’s Katzenjammer Kids, to Richard Outcault’s Yellow Kid and Buster Brown the core aspect of the humor centered on the contrast between prevailing notions of childhood innocence and the reality of the mischievous child” (Kid Comic Strips 39). In the first six of the seven “strokes” or chap­ ters, Max and Moritz are seen gleefully wreaking all kinds of havoc in their village: they

Children in Comics   443

Figure 25.1  Heinrich Hoffmann, Der Struwwelpeter, 1844. Original manuscript. Universitätsbibliotheek J. C. Senckenberg, Frankfurt am Main.

kill a widow’s chickens and then eat them up after she has cooked them, they saw off bridges, cause explosions, and introduce bugs under the covers of the nicest man in the village. While they survive being baked in an oven, they do not survive the mill they are eventually dumped into and transformed into fodder for two gleeful ducks. Although the drawing style adopted by Busch can be called childish because of its simplicity and abstraction, he indulges in a strain of social satire that would only be comprehensible to adults, mocking the tenets of moral education. Its irony exemplifies

444   Maaheen Ahmed what Lypp sees as the “humor of liberation” accompanying the rise of caricatural art in the nineteenth century (189). This humor of liberation also speaks to children, allowing them to vicariously experience and, like the two boys, enjoy acts of naughtiness. Since, at the end, this naughtiness does not go unpunished, Max und Moritz also fulfills an edu­ cational function, but it does so by combining a range of elements that are bound to ­fascinate the young reader: the energetic movement of the drawings, their simplicity and playfulness, the ample use of rhyme, and, eventually, lots of onomatopoeia adding an extra dimension to the action and contributing toward building the audiovisual stage that comics transformed into. This technique echoes Hoffmann’s theory of enticing the child through images and giving form to the forbidden. It also contributes to the carni­ valesque element of comics humor, which is arguably at its strongest with the presence of the comics child; in acquiring more power and liberty than real children, these ­comics children underscore the extent to which the order of the modern world has been reversed or turned upside down. The world turned upside down is a centuries-old staple of both the carnival and caricature (Stallybrass and White; Mainardi). In this respect, it is noteworthy that the boys’ pranks result in performative, slapstick, bodily humor. Moreover, most of these pranks involve eating, an act that foregrounds bodily needs, which is also a carnivalesque trope embodied by Pantagruel, the gluttonous child replac­ ing the adult (Feuerhahn 21–22).

Commercialized Kids Max und Moritz was a direct inspiration for Dirks’s Katzenjammer Kids, where joyful naughtiness, once again, is not punished until the very end of the story. These newspa­ per strips, such as the one from May 26, 1901, used a motif that would be a faithful ­companion of naughty comics children for decades to come: the spanked child. The Katzenjammers are a family of German immigrants in America, and the two children, Hans and Fritz, resemble Max and Moritz both visually and in their endless thirst for pranks. Recalling slapstick comedy, the stories are laden with action, and dialogue is limited. In this particular strip, however, Hans and Fritz have a relatively elaborate plan that relies on sound. The two teach an obliging parrot the line “Mama, your time has came [sic].” They then hide the parrot under the chair of their mother, who settles in it to read a story to the children. The parrot does not take long to start declaring his ominous sentence. As their mother becomes increasingly scared, the children can barely control their laughter, and one remarks, in exaggeratedly German-accented English, “Oh, how pale Ma iss!!!!” Meanwhile, the parrot bites the unsuspecting Mama’s thumb, and the children burst out laughing. After trying to thrash the parrot but only succeeding in destroying its cage, Mama Katzenjammer turns to her two boys. The last panel shows a crying Fritz turned over her knee, being thrashed by a stick (possibly a remnant of her chair). A wailing Hans rubs his behind, while the parrot triumphantly declares, “Your time has came” (see Figure 25.2).

Children in Comics   445

Figure 25.2  Rudolph Dirks, “The Katzenjammer Kids’ Time Had Came,” last two panels: Mama smashes the parrot’s cage and then beats up the kids. American Humorist (Sunday supple­ ment to the New York Journal), May 26, 1901.

Comics children’s time for spanking will come again and again, but not in the case of the Katzenjammers’ rival, the Yellow Kid. However, while Katzenjammer Kids ­continues to this day, drawn by different hands, Outcault’s Yellow Kid only survived a few years due to Outcault’s inability to successfully copyright his character, much ­coveted by other newspaper publishers because of his ability to attract new readers (Gordon, Comic Strips 44). Katzenjammer Kids began in 1897 in American Humorist, a supplement to William Hearst’s New York Journal, to counter the popularity of the rival New York World, owned by Joseph Pulitzer, which had been publishing the immensely successful Sunday strip, Hogan’s Alley. This comic strip with street urchins as protagonists, much in the vein of Michael Angelo Woolf ’s cartoons from the 1870s (Gordon, Comic Strips 25–26), shifted to the Journal in October 1896, retitled as McFadden’s Row of Flats and eventually The Yellow Kid, after the most popular character from Hogan’s Alley. Sunday strips such as Yellow Kid and Katzenjammer Kids were a distinctively American phenomenon that would eventually be exported across the Atlantic. However, as Gordon is careful to emphasize, American comics had “a distinctively commercial bent and those comics were a constitutive element in shaping a culture of consumption in America” (Gordon, Kid Comic Strips 3; cf. also Harvey; Wood). “What made American comics different,” Gordon explains, “was that they were ongoing features that appeared on a regular sched­ ule and were so essential to the creation of mass circulated newspapers, the mass media, that it is difficult to separate the two” (Kid Comic Strips 3). The Yellow Kid himself is arguably the first of these commercial enterprises propelled through comics. He closely resembles the “Me Worry?” kid, which had been used in American advertisements ­aiming at adults rather than children since at least the early twentieth century (Sweet). He persists, since the 1950s, as Alfred E. Neuman, the ageless mascot of Mad magazine. Something, perhaps the “cuteness” of these childlike figures, contributed toward selling products to adults (and not essentially children and women, as is the case nowadays). The “archetypical working-class city dweller,” the Yellow Kid was able to “capture the public and boost newspaper circulation” (Gordon, Comic Strips 29, 32). In the context of

446   Maaheen Ahmed the New York newspaper wars between the World and the Journal, the Kid was a formi­ dable tool for attracting readers, inciting, especially in the absence of copyright, fervent copying. The Kid first appears on the sidelines, in a pale nightshirt, in a 1895 circus strip. The nightshirt and his baldness reinforce Outcault’s claim that the Kid, who would later be given the name Mickey Dugan and the identity of an Irish immigrant in New York, “was not an individual but a type” (Harvey). Barefoot and wearing a shift that in this early cartoon is stained by a handprint, the Kid highlights the difficult living conditions of New York’s poor while reflecting increasing concern regarding the plight of street children as concretized by Woolf ’s cartoons and Jacob Riis’s photographs in How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890). But the Kid is simul­ taneously timeless. He stands out with his nightshirt, colored a bright yellow after his first few appearances and often bearing his words, poorly spelled and heavily accented. His baldness likewise situates him between babyhood and old age. This ambiguity of age, mirroring the scope of readers the comic spoke to, permitted the Kid to create ­disorder, or exacerbate existing disorder, while commenting on the dire social condi­ tions of his milieu. The difference between the urban experience of the rich and the poor is a recurrent theme in the comic. While the circus mentioned above is already a disastrous affair, with the street children failing at being acrobats and clowns, the Yellow Kid’s two attempts at golf result in more casualties in the flurry of intense action that marks all of the Kid’s strips. In “Golf—the Great Society Sport as Played in Hogan’s Alley” from January 5, 1896, the Kid only points to the disorder and violence around him as clubs are swung, hitting other children instead of golf balls. In “The Yellow Kid Takes a Hand at Golf ” from October 24, 1897, the Kid announces, “This gang tinks dey kin queer me but wait en see,” joyfully proceeding, in the course of the final three panels, to hit every other child, parrot, and cat on the scene. The Kid and his environs transform the leisurely game of golf into one of physical combat. Such reversals of elements of upper-class urban living resemble the carnivalesque trope of turning the world upside down. That same year, in December, the Kid takes part in a grand opera in his neighborhood, a ­production of Faust. Dressed up as the devil (“Gee, ain’t I a sassy little devil?”), the Kid plays the cello while another one blows a horn “left over from election.” The “private boxes” are on top of the fence separating the backstage, where the Kid is playing, from the main stage. A stage manager is shown shooing away the only black child in the car­ toon, hissing, “Git out of here, dis ain’t vaudeville.” Even though the Kid himself is marked out as an outsider, he is connoted in a far more positive manner than any black child in Outcault’s comics. Less well known and comparatively less successful is the strip Pore Lil’ Mose, which first appeared in the Herald in 1901 (Halvig 33; cf. also Saguisag 73-83). One of the earliest strips starring a black character, it consists essentially of letters, often in rhyme, that Mose sends from New York City back to his family in “Cottonville,” Georgia, also called “coon town.” The comic is rife with racist stereotypes, which are reinforced by the ­contrast between the urban milieu of New York in which Mose finds himself and the rural Cottonville where his family lives. Unlike Outcault’s other two comics children,

Children in Comics   447 who are usually accompanied by one animal—Tige in Buster Brown’s case and a dog or a goat in the Yellow Kid’s—Mose has an entourage of animals, including a bear, a monkey, a dog, and a cat. Domestic animals and wild ones coexist, just like the racist association of black people with the jungle. By the time Mose was printed, the imagery of minstrel shows, concretized by the Jim Crow figure, was widespread, and Outcault’s comic was no exception, as suggested by the cover of the collected edition of Mose comics from 1901, in which the boy wears white gloves, his mouth stretched in a wide smile. In comics, it is difficult to find images that rejected stereotypes, and this extends to the representation of children. Mose, like many other black children in comics, follows the dictates of a stereotyping that is harsher on him than on the Yellow Kid. Even in the comics, his realm of action seems more limited than that of the other children, his poor­ ness and littleness more of a hindrance. And while Outcault’s drawings are not flattering to any community, black characters always fare worse: their features and gestures are overexaggerated, and there is less differentiation of individual characters’ traits. It is, then, hardly surprising that in “The Yellow Kid’s Great Fight” from December 20, 1896, which unfolds between the Kid and a black boy, it is the Kid who wins, with help from his goat, who “turns dat nigger blue,” dislocating “de bote of dat coon’s jaws.” As a final act, “dat goat at de wool right off dat nigger’s nut.” Similarly, even though Mose is the protagonist of his strip, he is often far less agentic than the Yellow Kid. This is exemplified by two comic strips with a similar theme: “The Yellow Kid’s R-R-Revenge” from January 9, 1898, and a Pore Lil’ Mose strip from 1901 where “He Gets Mixed Up with a Painter.” While the Kid emerges victorious but soaked in paint after his scuffle with a painter’s son, Mose and his animal friends emerge terri­ fied from a similar paint shop. This incident is accompanied by a little letter from Mose to his mother making a pun on the adjective colored: “When I lef home ob cose yo knows I wuz a colored boy . . . now we haf ter go an buy a bran new set ob clothes/Cause we is yaller, red an blue.” Just like Lil’ Mose is often beaten up and thrown out, it is Buster Brown, the Yellow Kid’s cousin from a comfortably bourgeois family, who is subjected to rhythmic spank­ ing. Spanking was clearly not a sufficiently strong punishment for Max and Moritz or even the children drawn by Hoffmann. Outcault never seems to have considered spank­ ing the Yellow Kid. In the case of Buster Brown, whose antics infringe on the ordered, clean home space of Mrs. Brown, spankings are frequent and intense, as suggested by the pillow that Buster sometimes wears on his rear. Outcault began his Buster Brown strips for the New York Herald in 1902. Buster Brown was transformed into a lucrative commercial enterprise through becoming, most memorably, the face of Buster Brown Shoes as early as 1904. His love interest, Mary Jane, lent her name to the buckled leather shoes that have become a staple of girls’ wardrobes. Nonetheless, the most dominant image remains that of Buster and his pit bull terrier, Tige. In contrast to the Yellow Kid but similar to Mose, Buster is dressed in an elaborate Lord Fauntleroy costume. While Buster is—like the Yellow Kid, Mose, the Katzenjammers, Max and Moritz, and the ­children in Struwwelpeter—a naughty kid, his pranks unfold by and large within the ­confines of his home. This setting mirrors what can be called the “gentrification” of

448   Maaheen Ahmed the notion of childhood and children’s culture, which was increasingly located in the space of the home. This change of setting is accompanied by the presence of parental, usually maternal, control. Mrs. Brown often appears at the beginning and at the end of the comic strip, containing Buster’s actions through her presence and chastising. The somewhat unwieldy title of a strip from 1903 summarizes its story: “Buster Brown Gets Some New Summer Boots, His Mother Gets a New Brush and Buster Gets a New Licking, While Tige Only Gets a New Laugh.” The panel behind the title page shows Buster at a counter gravely telling the salesclerk, “My Ma sent me for one of your best spanking hair brushes,” and adding, “You better send her a strong one, as I have a board in my pants.” This is accompanied by an insert showing Mrs. Brown furiously spanking her child, who cries while his dog looks on in despair. This insert works as both past and present. Its rounded, almost circular form mirrors the seemingly endless cycle of Buster’s naughtiness and foolery and beatings from his mother that structure the strips (see Figure 25.3). The story itself is more mundane and less naughty than most of Buster’s other adven­ tures. Thanking his mother for a new pair of rubber boots, Buster sets out in the rain with his boots and his umbrella, delighted with his new equipment, while Tige looks on baffled. As the rain turns into a storm and Buster tries to prevent his umbrella from ­flying away, he falls into the rapidly gathering water on the street. His boots soaked, he prefers carrying them in his hands and walking back home in his socks, knowing he is in for a beating. In the last panel, we see Buster, pillow tied against his back, writing under “Resolved” his lesson from the incident. This is not the actual moral of the story but a continuation of the humor already present in the mistakes and nonsense peppering the text: Buster has learned that the board in his pants cannot protect him from a thrashing when the pants are taken off. With Katzenjammer Kids and Buster Brown, spanking is established as just punishment for naughty children in comics, becoming the norm for most of the twentieth century, until it stopped being socially acceptable. Many of Buster’s resolutions evoke social issues, much like the Yellow Kid. In one strip, for instance, Buster’s resolution pokes fun at the apathy and lack of concern

Figure 25.3  Richard F. Outcault, “Buster Brown Gets Some New Rubber Boots” title panel, New York Herald, Sunday supplement, 16 August 1903.

Children in Comics   449 r­ egarding social issues, such as the assumption that the unemployed are “time wasters” (April 11, 1909). In this story, Buster prints an advertisement offering to hire a hundred men with red whiskers and inviting them to visit the Browns’ house. While he is receiv­ ing the customary spanking from his mother, his father is shown handing out money for red dye to one of the many hopefuls queued up before their house. In the last panel, Buster opens his “Resolved” note with a declaration that “those men are all members of the Time Waster’s Union” and contrasts the fate of “the boy who is industrious, honest, ­earnest and believes in himself . . . steered for easy street and happiness” with “the boy who is lazy, idle and slip shod” and destined to run after menial jobs. Despite the irony ­pervading the comic, the socially acceptable path of industriousness remains cast in a positive light. Buster crosses many lines in the course of his appearances in Sunday supplements. One of the most memorable ones is a 1903 strip in which he entices Florence, the daugh­ ter of his mother’s friend, into cross-dressing. The panel announcing the title foretells the plot: Buster is wearing a frock, twirling and smiling at another child with a ribbon in her hair, who wears Buster’s clothes. She stands next to a neatly folded scroll of resolu­ tions and an overturned inkpot that predicts the transgression. The story proceeds as follows. Smiling at Florence and heeding his mother’s command to amuse her, Buster takes her to his room. As Tige watches aghast, Buster follows Florence’s instructions to cut her hair like his. After switching clothes and accessories, the two children are delighted at how similar they look. Their mothers, in contrast, are horrified, and both children end up being spanked with hairbrushes. Pillow against his back, wearing his own clothes, Buster regrets his poor judgment but resolves to “be happy, whatever else betide, how’s that?” A note of resentment seems to ring through this last line. Gender is one of those boundaries that none of the comics children drawn by Outcault seem to have crossed. All of the main characters remain male and heterosexual, and even though Buster is by far the “prettiest” of the children and is usually dressed in pink, he is not allowed the option of testing girlhood. Yet out in the real world, writer Charlotte Perkins Gillman had declared, in her 1898 book, Women and Economics, how the “tomboy” had become the new norm (Abate ix). In Buster Brown, however, and in the eyes of most readers of the Herald, tomboyishness and cross-dressing seem to have remained an aberration, permissible only for brief moments of humor and meriting a spanking. Comics children, however, are often queered, even when they are given unmistak­ ably specific gender identities, which are usually those of the heterosexual male or the heterosexual female. They are likely to be read by all kinds of children, regardless of gender. This is similar to children’s interactions with other elements of children’s cul­ ture, where stories with boy protagonists are popular across genders simply because boys, even in storyworlds, have greater liberty and are allowed to participate in more interesting stories than girls. Nonetheless, it is possible to argue that many comics chil­ dren live in a queer time, imposed by the seriality of their existence which insists that they continue, usually unchanged and following a familiar plot line as long as they remain lucrative and attract readers. Their lives are marked by moments of energy and action that remain under the threat of being cut short (Halberstam 2–3). In this way,

450   Maaheen Ahmed comics children also grow sideways (Stockton), accumulating a variety of adventures without really changing. “There’s something queer about comics,” write Ramzi Fawaz and Darieck Scott (197). I would like to suggest that queerness is almost the norm in popular comics with ­children. It can be connected to the resilience of comics, which in turn relies on the medium’s ability to speak to a mass readership. This “capacity to adapt and innovate in a rapidly evolving media world” is tied to the functioning of comics “as a powerful semi­ otic laboratory” (Smolderen 158), reworking and innovating with the visual vocabular­ ies accumulated and disseminated for more than two centuries of print production. This constant need to innovate and rejuvenate, to capture and entice a significant readership in order to survive on a serial basis, could be one of the reasons behind the many proudly, openly “abnormal” children populating the Beano’s pages, ranging from TinCan Tommy the robot boy to the muscled, extremely strong Pansy Potter. However, even amid the proliferation of abnormality, racist stereotypes persist. I will now turn to the Beano to wrap up these reflections on children in comics and show how elements highlighted by the comics children discussed above—naughtiness but also racist stereo­ typing—persist in Britain’s longest-running comics magazine for children.

The Beano: Stereotyping and Queering, Companionship, and Education Although the Beano is now associated with its mascot from the 1950s, the black-haired, extremely naughty Dennis the Menace, the early issues of the magazine, which started in 1938, bear the figure of Peanut on their front pages. Peanut is a barefoot black boy in patched-up overalls, often eating a banana, while a bunch of other bananas stick out from his pocket. Affirming the persistence of racist stereotyping, Peanut closely resem­ bles Mose. Moreover, a 1909 postcard drawn by Outcault and currently housed in the National Museum of African American History and Culture, shows a black boy with a wide grin who closely resembles Peanut, eating a watermelon. It is, of course, revealing that both figures are shown gleefully eating exotic fruit. Already, Peanut’s name evokes food. His eating bananas echoes racist imagery that associates black people with uncon­ trollable “base” instincts such as eating and with monkeys. Food, as epitomized by Max und Moritz, also plays a prominent role in children’s culture, since (from the adult ­perspective) children still need to be socialized into containing instincts such as the drive to eat. Apart from Peanut, nonwhite characters, even in racist forms, are by and large absent in the pages of the magazine. Peanut himself usually reappeared in the title for the jokes section and for some time in a brief comic strip (see Figure 25.4). The Jokes section, providing “Lots of merry jokes for you—to cheer you up when you’re feeling blue” (August 20, 1938), is headed by Peanut’s smiling face, holding a curv­ ing something that he seems to have bitten into but that does not look edible. The s­ logans championing the page change each week. The Beano from December 31, 1938, declares,

Children in Comics   451

Figure 25.4  “Jolly Jokes” title image with Peanuts’ head. Beano, 11 December 1938. © DC Thomson & Co.

“Peanut is black as jet—his page is a winner you can bet!” whereas the one from February 11, 1939, promises, “Peanut’s jokes are bright an’ snappy—the very thing to make you happy.” Once again, the functions of the children’s book, often personified as a child’s companion and friend, are taken over by the comics magazine. The Jokes section in these early Beano magazines is also a page that usually contains advertisements, often for other comics magazines, and these advertisements usually offer candy as incentives. There is even a comic strip, The Magic Lollypop, that revolves around fantasies of food, especially candy, fantasies that children are very likely to indulge in and which also mark the establishment of a consumer culture. Apart from the stereotyping informing Peanut’s appearance and being, other (white) children in the Beano are less conformist. Most notable among these children is Pansy Potter, the Strongman’s daughter, who first appeared in the Christmas issue of December 17, 1938. Stronger than most characters she encounters in her world, she rectifies a vast range of problems through sheer strength and thus rejects clichés associated with respectable girlhood. Already, her appearance rejects femininity: her hair stands up in spikes around her head, her gestures are ungainly, and her hands and feet are big. She comes across as a less attractive version of Rosie the Riveter, whose image adorned American propaganda posters a few years after Pansy’s first appearance. In what seems to be a rare moment in the magazine, the editor himself appears in Pansy’s first comic strip to introduce her to readers in the manner of a television pre­ senter: “Boys and girls meet Pansy Potter, daughter of the world’s strongest man.” While order is maintained in the panels as Pansy shakes the editor’s hand, things start getting out of hand as soon as she realizes that she has dropped her penny. Unaware, she tugs too much on the editor’s arm as she bends down, causing him to scream. Pansy does eventually find her penny but only after the entire office has been turned upside down. Once again, the carnivalesque trope of the world turned over structures a comic with a child protagonist. Pansy’s disruptions are good-natured and unintentional, as in the story where she takes the initiative to search for what she thinks is a newt for a biology class (February 6, 1939): she ends up with a crocodile, a terrified teacher, and a guard chasing after her. The gags in Pansy’s stories rely on her impossible strength and her ability to do unex­ pected, unthinkable tasks. Tellingly, she does not use this strength against adults unless

452   Maaheen Ahmed they do wrong. A story from March 16, 1940, shows Pansy being punished for uninten­ tionally breaking a blackboard while cleaning it. Banished to the roof, Pansy ends up breaking, bending, and fusing the iron railings on the roof into a rope. On seeing her furious teacher waiting for her at the end of the rope, Pansy is terrified. Crucially, instead of using her strength to beat the teacher, she is the one who is beaten. This final scene, likely to lack credibility for regular readers of Pansy, is covered up by a note from the edi­ tor: “I’ve stuck a piece of paper over this painful scene.” Only symbols of violence and sound effects are to be seen (see Figure 25.5). Hence, despite being queer and bending norms, the children of The Beano remained at the service of adult authority, even going so far as to actively help in the war effort. In a story from November 19, 1939, Pansy ends up finding and punching a German subma­ rine. She then informs the captain of a British destroyer of the enemy’s presence and shoots down a second German submarine with his encouragement. On reaching shore, Pansy is awarded a medal for her courage. Similarly, in a story from March 9, 1940, Pansy and her friend run into two escaped German POWs, with swastikas on their caps and even, we find out later, on their underwear. She not only stuffs them back into the tunnel they had dug but also uproots a tree and replants it on that spot. Other Beano children likewise helped with the war. Tin-Can Tommy, the Clockwork Boy, and Baby chase a Nazi spy into a police cell and are rewarded with a sumptuous feast (March 23, 1940); Mikki from Hooky’s Magic Bowler Hat also catches a Nazi spy (December 30, 1939); and Lord Snooty traps a Nazi submarine (January 6, 1940). The list is long, and it shows that these children, already unrealistically agentic, participated actively in the war and thus engaged with the very real experience and desires of their young readers while reinforc­ ing the spirit of patriotism, consequently fulfilling a patriotic, pedagogical agenda. “It all starts with a kid and his books,” Brian Cremins writes in his book on nostalgia and superhero comics (3). Indeed, comics often form a memorable part of childhood reading. They are, at the same time, strictly relegated to childhood; giving up reading comics, even throwing them away, is seen as part of the rite of passage toward adulthood (Gibson). Such real, lived childhood practices are, however, very different from the

Figure 25.5  “Pansy Potter, the Strongman’s Daughter,” final two panels: Pansy is beaten up by her teacher. Beano, 16 March 1940. © DC Thomson & Co.

Children in Comics   453 childhoods painted in the comic strips discussed here. Regardless of intended read­ ership, the children of comic strips are freer, more agentic. Their actions and the conse­ quences of those actions are far more exaggerated than those faced by most children. The agency of the comics children discussed in this chapter reverberates beyond the comics page, the newspapers, magazines, and albums in which they find themselves; they are sociopolitical agents taking part in the work of entertainment, acculturation, and education. While entertaining their readers, these children also prepare them for the real world, propagating the world view of the dominant class. The comics child has a fluid body, anchored in commercial desires, while also incarnating, in skewed ways, changing notions of not only childhood and children but also collective notions of the permissible and impermissible, of the very constitu­ ents of the social fabric in which they find themselves. This body, its actions, and its world are ­distinctive because it is often carnivalesque while maintaining an affective hold, combining nostalgia (for adult readers) and comfort and companionship (for young readers). A history of children in comics is, in part, also a history of the reconfiguration of moral education to attract and convince young readers. Furthermore, while over the years, the entertaining potential of comics children has been exploited to the full, they, even the naughtiest of them, continue to reflect the general moral landscape of society, through the implicit labeling of the children as naughty and deviant, which reaffirms how good children are expected to act, as well as through tempering entertaining deviancy and queerness with acceptable and even commendable behavior. The horrific visual fascination wielded by Struwwelpeter and the prankful lightness of Max and Moritz remain as undercurrents in later comics children, who retain the ­carnivalesque inclinations of their predecessors while adopting less directly pedagogic and more unabashedly commercial tactics. As confirmed by these early works, comics children were always made to attract the eye and delight the imagination before educat­ ing their young readers. Entertainment and education remain the core business of ­comics for children and sociopolitical commentary is often only to be gleaned between the lines (or panels); comics for a broader audience, such as Yellow Kid, energetically entertain while channeling sociopolitical commentary.

Works Cited Abate, Michelle Ann. Tomboys: A Literary and Cultural History. Temple UP, 2008. Apostolidès, Jean-Marie. Tintin et le mythe du surenfant. Moulinsart, 2003. Ariès Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Translated by Robert Baldick, Alfred A. Knopf, 1962. Barker, Martin. A Haunt of Fear: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign. UP of Mississippi, 1992. Bukatman, Scott. Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit. U of California P, 2012. Chaney, Michael A. Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel. UP of Mississippi, 2016.

454   Maaheen Ahmed Crain, Patricia. Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America. U of Pennsylvania P, 2017. Cremins, Brian. Captain Marvel and the Art of Nostalgia. UP of Mississippi, 2016. Fawaz, Ramzi, and Darieck Scott. “Introduction: Queer about Comics.” American Literature, vol. 90, no. 2, 2018, pp. 197–219. Feuerhahn, Nelly. Le comique et l’enfance. Presses universitaires de France, 1993. Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First Century Storytelling. Stanford UP, 2012. Gibson, Mel. Remembered Reading: Memory, Comics and Post-War Constructions of British Girlhood. Leuven UP, 2015. Gordon, Ian. Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890–1945. Smithsonian, 1998. Gordon, Ian. Kid Comic Strips: A Genre across Four Countries. Palgrave, 2016. Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York UP, 2005. Halvig, Alan. “Richard F. Outcault’s “Poor Lil’ Mose”: Variations on the Black Stereotype in American Comic Art.” Journal of American Culture, vol, 11, no. 2, 1988, pp. 33–41. Harvey, Robert  C. “Outcault, Goddard, the Comics and the Yellow Kid,” Comics Journal, vol. 9, 2016. http://www.tcj.com/outcault-goddard-the-comics-and-the-yellow-kid. Hatfield, Charles. “Graphic Novel.” Keywords for Children’s Literature, edited by Philip Nel and Lissa Paul, New York UP, 2011, pp. 100–105. Hoffmann, Heinrich. Der Struwwelpeter, oder lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder. 1876. http://www.gasl.org/refbib/Hoffmann__Struwwelpeter.pdf. Lypp, Maria. “The Origin and Function of Laughter in Children’s Literature.” Aspects and Issues in the History of Children’s Literature, edited by Maria Nikolajeva, Greeenwood, 1995, pp. 183–189. Mainardi, Patricia. Another World: Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Print Culture. Yale UP, 2017. Pizzino, Christopher. Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature. U of Texas P, 2016. Ries, Hans. “Max und Moritz treffen Struwwelpeter,” Wilhelm Busch Was ihn betrefft, Swiridoff, 2016, pp. 9–24. Saguisag, Lara. Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics. Rutgers UP, 2018. Sausverd, Antoine. “Les ‘Défauts des enfants’ par Bertall.” Töpfferania, 14 May 2009, http://www.topfferiana.fr/2009/05/les-defauts-des-enfants-par-bertall. Scholz, Michael. “The First World War and the German Revolution of 1918–1919 in East German Comics.” European Comic Art, vol. 8, no. 2, 2015, pp. 34–60. Smolderen, Thierry. The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Windsor McCay. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen, UP of Mississippi, 2014. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Poetics and Politics of Transgression. Cornell UP, 1986. Steedman, Carolyn. Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority. 1780–1930. Harvard UP, 1995. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Duke UP, 2009. Sweet, Sam. “A Boy with No Birthday Turns Sixty.” Paris Review, 3 Mar. 2016), https://www. theparisreview.org/blog/2016/03/03/a-boy-with-no-birthday-turns-sixty. Wood, Mary. “The Yellow Kid on the Paper Stage.” http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma04/wood/ ykid/intro.htm.

chapter 26

I’m Not a K id. I’m a Sh a r k! Identity Fluidity in Noelle Stevenson’s Young-Adult Graphic Novels James J. Donahue

An adolescent girl sneaks into a castle to confront “Ballister Blackheart, the biggest name in supervillainy,” looking for employment as Ballister’s sidekick. Protesting against the need for such assistance, Ballister notes, “I can’t have some KID following me around all day,” to which the plucky young criminal-to-be replies, “I’m not a kid. I’M A SHARK!” scaring Ballister by appearing behind him as a shark (Stevenson, Nimona 2; see Figure 26.1). Ballister, impressed by such a useful ability, immediately reconsiders and agrees to hire the shapeshifter. Nimona, the title character of Eisner award winner Noelle Stevenson’s 2015 youngadult graphic novel, demonstrates here and elsewhere her powers as a shapeshifter, ­taking on a myriad of forms, including, but not limited to, a shark, a cat, a bird, a wolf, a rhinoceros, a dragon, and humans of differing ages and genders. With such range, readers must wonder, why did she approach Ballister as a young girl? Why did Nimona approach her criminal idol in a form that she had to assume he would immediately ­dismiss? Or, put another way, why would Nimona choose to identify as a young female human when, quite literally, she can identify as anyone or anything she can imagine? In the first two pages of her humorous graphic-narrative sendup of the fairy-tale genre, Stevenson introduces her readers to the importance of identity construction, while also suggesting that identity should best be understood as a fluid concept. Nimona refuses to be pinned down to a single identity while also insisting that others not stereotype her in terms of whatever identity she presents at the moment; as readers learn, Nimona can be quite dangerous as an adolescent girl, and she can be vulnerable as a giant dragon. Dedicated to “all the monster girls,” Nimona serves as a powerful statement to her audience1 that they are in charge of how they identify and that identity need not conform to anyone else’s standards, expectations, or shortsightedness.

456   James J. Donahue

Figure 26.1  Nimona, “I’m a shark!”

That Nimona is a fairy tale is not unimportant, for two reasons. First, genre identification helps us to properly read narratives by allowing us to form expectations and recognize important tropes. In this regard, had Nimona not noted that Ballister is a supervillain, the reader surely would have known anyway: his last name is Blackheart, and he has dark hair, as opposed to his counterpart, the blond-haired, officially titled Sir Ambrosius Goldenloin, whom Stevenson has characterized in an interview with the Geek Girl Project as “the codpiece-wearing swishy-haired hero.” Both male characters, as well as Nimona, are featured on the cover, suggesting to readers their respective moral alignments before the reader enters the narrative world (with Nimona situated centrally between them; see Figure 26.2). Second, in addition to the clear (if misleading, as the reader learns later) identification of good and evil, fairy-tale conventions also allow the reader to accept Nimona’s shapeshifting ability due to the genre’s use of magic. Castles, peasants, and a final fight with a giant dragon will later fulfill stock expectations of a traditional fairy tale, a historically popular genre for younger readers. However, Stevenson provides these telltale markers for the reader, in part, to later challenge them, unsettling the reader’s expectations while simultaneously demonstrating the fluidity of individual identification. The hero is not the golden-haired knight; the black-haired opposition is not a villain. And most important, Nimona herself is not what anyone believes her to be. Our expectations—whether established by genre or by social norms—are meant to be upended. Genre recognition is also important in helping the reader to properly identify the narrative’s primary audience. While it is true that readers of various ages (and other

I’m Not a Kid. I’m a Shark!   457

Figure 26.2  Nimona, cover.

identifications) can and do enjoy such works, Stevenson’s intended audience is young readers, a group that has been often overlooked by the larger comics industry. As Charles Hatfield noted in his article on comics and children’s literature (which have often, to their detriment, been treated as wholly separate areas of study),2 “comic shops have ­generally excluded the young” (361). In Nimona (and, as we will see later, Lumberjanes), Stevenson actively engages this often-ignored audience by composing familiar-seeming stories within the larger body of children’s literature. As such, Nimona is both a fairy tale and a reminder that fairy tales—and other genres aimed primarily at younger readers, such as the summer-camp stories that make up Lumberjanes—should be taken seriously by readers. Echoing Hatfield’s charge, Mark Heimermann and Brittany Tullis lament the continued state of affairs with respect to a bias against age in comics scholarship: “Childhood, as well as its complexity and the ways in which it affects adulthood, has been represented in the pages and panels of comics since their very inception, and yet focused and sustained scholarship in this area is scarce” (3). While it is true that comics are enjoying a golden age of scholarly study, the vast majority of such works focus on adult-oriented texts, matching trends in comics publishing; as Frederick Luis Aldama reminds us, “[c]omic books now are aimed at adults more than children” (xii),3 even when many of those works feature children and teenagers in their pages and focus

458   James J. Donahue on  the  experiences of childhood and young adulthood, exploring what Aldama has ­characterized as “webs of influence beginning in childhood” (xi). Readers familiar with the scholarship may notice that I only quoted half of Hatfield’s charge against “comic shops” above; he also notes that “similarly, they have marginalized girls and women, a once crucial readership that is now neglected” (361). Girls and young women are doubly marginalized along the intersection of their age and gender. Additionally, young LGBTQ readers are another often-ignored group that Stevenson consciously seeks out for her audience. She writes for these multiply marginalized readers in her volume Nimona and in her series Lumberjanes, providing her audience(s) with stories that employ characters with whom they can identify, engage issues important to their lives, and do so in a format that is on the one hand easily approached (once the genre is recognized) and on the other hand compellingly divergent in execution. For these reasons, one answer to the question of why the shapeshifter Nimona chooses to identify as an adolescent girl when approaching Blackheart for a job in his criminal enterprise is that the author is signaling to her intended audience that this is a book for, and in many ways about, them. Nimona is not merely a “fairy tale for girls” but a ­complex reworking of a familiar genre meant to engage important issues relevant to its audience’s everyday lives. And Nimona herself is a heroic young female character at the center of a grand adventure tale. Writing about Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, a wildly popular young-adult series that itself takes liberties with genre expectations, Laurie Langbauer argues, “Adolescent fiction is by definition metafictional,” which she clarifies as “writing about writing itself ” (503). Much fiction written for adolescents—which Langbauer aptly identifies as “[a]n identity that is sometimes child, sometimes adult, but also both or neither” (504)—explores a hybrid generic space that recognizes rules but chooses not to follow them precisely, humorously breaking down structures that provide limitations as well as coherence. One of those structures is, of course, the social order, which dictates the norms and expectations for young adults, including expectations regarding social identity and gender performance. And as Judith Butler has famously put it, “gender is always acquired” (111), meaning that humans are not born with a gender identity but obtain it through their social interactions, with one such social interaction being reading popular genre narratives. As Stevenson demonstrates, a graphic-narrative fairy tale becomes a perfect place to allow readers to both pinpoint and challenge those norms associated with the construction of a social identity, a complex process engaged by ­adolescents as they cross that vague but profound boundary from childhood into adulthood. Another answer to the question of why Nimona chooses to initially identify as an adolescent girl is that Nimona is challenging the normative expectations of the fairy-tale genre. Young ladies are not villains. But of course, neither are they the heroes. She can be neither Blackheart nor Goldenloin. And yet, as the title character as well as the character who inflicts the most damage on the town and its residents (as well as the most devilishly devious planner of criminal escapades), she is also simultaneously both. Nimona chooses to operate primarily as an adolescent in order to demonstrate to Nimona’s

I’m Not a Kid. I’m a Shark!   459 young readership that she should not be dismissed based on how she appears, that ­neither her age nor her gender (remember that Blackheart and Goldenloin are both men) should be read as shorthand for her limitations or her abilities. We learn that Nimona is without question the strongest, most dangerous individual in the narrative, whether she is knocking down security doors as a rhinoceros (35) or laying waste to ­castles as a dragon (205; see Figure 26.3). Similarly, we learn that most of the other major characters in the narrative are not what they appear to be at first sight. Ballister Blackheart is only a villain because he opposes the Institution of Law Enforcement & Heroics, the office entrusted with training heroes and defeating monsters; we discover later in the narrative that the Institution is actually behind an evil plot to poison the townspeople, a plan that Blackheart and Nimona work together to thwart. And while Sir Goldenloin does not support the Institution’s endeavors—he really does have a good heart and wants what is best for the community—he ­succumbs to his desire to be a traditional hero and play the role the Institution has written for him: wear the armor, inspire hope, capture the evildoers. However, he does have a dark secret: early in the narrative, we learn that Blackheart defeated Sir Goldenloin in

Figure 26.3  Nimona, laying waste as a dragon.

460   James J. Donahue combat, prompting Sir Goldenloin to shoot Blackheart’s arm off; in Blackheart’s words, “Turns out that the Institution had no use for a one-armed hero. I took the only other viable option” (6). Blackheart was always meant to be a hero, not a villain; as he notes to Sir Goldenloin, “I never had a choice! The Institution needed a villain. That lot fell to me” (96). In other words, every fairy tale needs a villain to act as a foil to the hero. And in the grand tradition of fairy tales—not unlike the troll under bridge or the ogre in  the f­orest—the “freak” becomes the monster. The one-armed ­former knight, too ­broken for proper hero work, becomes the convenient villain (at least until the more “­monstrous” Nimona arrives on the scene). By the end of the narrative, however, Blackheart becomes the hero he always knew he could be, having saved the townspeople, exposed the treachery of the Institution, and, perhaps most important, helped a young shapeshifter to realize that regardless of how anyone else might see her, she does, in fact, have a place in this world. By the end of the narrative, we also learn that Blackheart and Sir Goldenloin have a secret identity that they have been unable to share publicly. Throughout the narrative, there are subtle hints—Sir Goldenloin holding Blackheart’s hand when they meet secretly (94), for instance—that Blackheart and Sir Goldenloin were more than friends and rivals. Stevenson herself acknowledged this on her Tumblr account, responding to the large number of fans who read their relationship as romantic: “Ballister and Ambrosius are, canonically, former secret(-ish) boyfriends, but I must admit it wasn’t my intention from the beginning. It’s one of the things I’d change if I could do it all again—I’d make it clear, in the text, from the start.”4 Of course, traditional fairy tales do not allow for the forming of romantic bonds between the “hero” and the “villain,” given the reliance on a traditional, even toxic, masculinity that characters in those roles are supposed to embody. In fact, the most “masculine” c­ haracter—­ at least in terms of fairy-tale convention—would be Nimona herself, with her short butch haircut, her raw physical strength, and her rugged individualism. In this regard, Nimona reminds us of Judith Halberstam’s point that “masculinity does not belong to men” (241), just as Nimona powerfully portrays for its readers the importance of being able to live as yourself and not the role that has been assigned to you by others. Nimona ends the narrative having chosen to go off on her own, but not before leaving Blackheart a note suggesting that she will be OK. Blackheart and Sir Goldenloin end the narrative in each other’s arms, suggesting that they will be able to embrace their feelings for each other publicly. Having destroyed the Institution (which kidnapped her and ran experiments on her, in an attempt to weaponize her powers) and frightened the townspeople, Nimona knows she cannot stay, as much as Blackheart wants her to. But she also cannot leave without letting Blackheart know that she will be fine. Blackheart’s—and the reader’s—last sighting of Nimona comes when she secretly visits the hospital where Blackheart and Sir Goldenloin are recovering from the final battle. Taking the form of a nurse, she checks in to make sure Blackheart is recovering properly. While secretly in Blackheart’s room, she mentions “the monster,” to which Blackheart replies, “Don’t call her that . . . She’s not a monster” (250). After Blackheart notices the shark drawn on his medical chart—a subtle

I’m Not a Kid. I’m a Shark!   461

Figure 26.4  Nimona, saying goodbye.

reminder of their first meeting—he runs out to find Nimona, sees the young girl he has come to care for smile and wave goodbye, and then loses her in the larger crowd (see Figure 26.4). The implication is clear: she knows she cannot stay, but she will be fine wherever she goes; she knows that Blackheart cares for her and that there will be others. The narrative ends on a hopeful note, suggesting that the three queer characters—the two men whose love cannot be openly shared and the young girl whose ability frustrates rigid notions of identity—have found some measure of peace by choosing to live their lives according to their own desires, rather than become the characters of a narrative that would impose socially normative roles on them. They are, in other words, who they want to be, not who the world would have them be. Although such a reading may sound glib or trite, I would like to suggest the power of such an ending, especially for Stevenson’s audience of young readers, themselves struggling to discover who they are, many of them coming to age in a society not designed to accept them on their own terms. And for those whose identities are not socially normative or publicly celebrated, asserting oneself in a hostile world is nothing less than an act of heroism. As Roxane Gay reminds us—writing about Trevon Martin, whose life was tragically cut short when George Zimmerman chose to read him as a villain in his own hero fantasy—“[h]eroism can be a burden. . . . These heroes are often strong at the ­broken places. They suffer and suffer and suffer but they still rise” (281). Although she may not wear a cape, Nimona is very much a hero, not just for an audience who needs to see positive examples of nonnormative identities in print but also in the growing canon of queer comic-book superheroes. Nimona suffers throughout the narrative, such as when she is branded a monster by the Institution, hunted down by Sir Goldenloin, and subjected to painful experimental treatments in the Institution’s efforts at weaponizing her. (And in a nod to superhero comics, we get a flashback that can be read as Nimona’s origin story [224–226]. We learn that when she first manifested her powers, she was incarcerated in a facility that used her as a subject for scientific experimentation, not unlike what we see with many modern comic-book superheroes.) Yet despite all her ­trials, Nimona does not merely survive; she defeats the Institution, destroys its castle,

462   James J. Donahue and leaves knowing that her true friends will always care for her. The first two points identify Nimona as the hero of this fairy tale, while the third marks her as a heroic figure for the audience, who can read in Nimona a reminder that true friends stand by you, especially when your life seems hardest. That said, we should also read Nimona through the lens of the superhero comic,5 a genre not too far removed from the fairy tale. In a different narrative universe, Nimona would be a prime candidate (to use but one prominent example) for Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters and a valuable member of the X-Men. There is even a parallel to be found in the popular character Rogue. Anthony Michael D’Agostino remarks about Rogue that she “enacts identification as a process that overflows rigid articulations of identity and deterministic conceptions of subjectivity” (255), a characterization that could easily apply to Nimona. As a mutant whose power is to absorb the abilities and memories of all whom she touches, Rogue embodies what D’Agostino calls a “new hybridized subjectivity” (257), a literal version of “Judith Butler’s conception of queer identity as continually unmade and remade” (256). Interestingly, as D’Agostino notes in his history of the character, Rogue first appeared in the X-Men comics as a villain and was only later reconceived as a hero (261–267). I would suggest that this is no coincidence; queer characters who possess fluid identities and uncontrollable abilities are first read as monstrous, because they are nonnormative and uncontrollable. The ability to transcend a fixed identity is frightening because unpredictable, even if played for laughs when Nimona turns into a shark to scare Blackheart. And just as Rogue marks for D’Agostino a widening “of established discourses about ‘diversity’ in superhero comics” (277), so, too, does Nimona mark the same widening for young-adult graphic narratives. In this regard, although it is not a nonfiction narrative, we can certainly read Nimona as embodying what Hillary Chute has noted for “the most important graphic narratives”: their exploration of “the conflicted boundaries of what can be said and what can be shown at the intersection of collective histories and life stories” (459). Nimona may not be a historical figure, but her position as a queer individual with a fluid identity certainly speaks to the everyday lives—and struggles—of many of her readers. Stevenson has been working along these lines for some time, addressing similar and related issues in the series Lumberjanes, working as writer for the first five volumes (along with Grace Ellis and Shannon Watters). Most simply, Lumberjanes follows the adventures of a group of young girls spending the summer at Miss Quinzella Thiskwin Penniquiqul Thistle Crumpet’s Camp for Girls. In addition to the obviously humorous name meant to suggest a relic from the past of boarding schools for young ladies (as well as, perhaps, a humorous dig at institutions like Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters), Stevenson’s attempts at challenging social convention are evident by having “Girls” crossed out on the title page and replaced with “Hardcore Lady-Types.” These are not children who need babysitting but young women learning how to explore the world and overcome its challenges. And for all that we can read Nimona in terms of superhero comics, Rachel Dean-Ruzicka has aptly pointed out that Lumberjanes should be read very much in opposition to comic-book superheroes, as “the girls cooperatively use their learned skills and abilities, rather than their Chemical X driven superpowers, to

I’m Not a Kid. I’m a Shark!   463 work together to conquer the monsters that they face” (225). The girls of Roanoke Cabin are “Hardcore Lady-Types” as a result of their very human—and thus very relatable— talents, abilities, and learned skills. The series also takes pains to remind its readers that such “Hardcore Lady-Types” can be found throughout history, as Roanoke Cabin camp counselor Jen frequently use the names of historically significant women in her excited outbursts, such as “Holy Mae Jemison!” (vol. 1, chap. 2) or “Holy bell hooks!” (vol. 2, chap. 5).6 These women are invoked to serve as role models for the campers as well as for the readers. And by not explaining who these women are in the narrative, Lumberjanes subtly inspires its readers to look them up for themselves in a creative move toward extradiegetic education. Further, “Hardcore Lady-Types” is more than just a humorous turn of phrase; readers learn that the Lumberjanes—especially those in Roanoke Cabin, who as a group are the series’ main protagonists—are an inclusive group who welcome into their ranks all who embrace their values (often summarized by the phrase “friendship to the max!”). This group is especially welcoming to queer girls, such as Mal and Molly (who are developing a romantic relationship over the course of the ongoing series) and Jo, who comes out as transgender. “Lady-Types” thus refers to all individuals who identify as women, allowing that term as much breadth and variety as necessary, or as Dean-Ruzicka notes, “a queering of gender indicating new ways of being” (228). At various points, the narrative shows queer young women living their lives as queer young women (that is to say, without attempts at passing), without making those moments the focal point of the larger story. In this way, Lumberjanes shows LGBTQ youth interacting with society in myriad positive ways. Jo is often drawn in such a way as to deemphasize her gender identity, with facial features that could read as gender-neutral and drab clothing that does not highlight her figure (in opposition to April, for instance, who is drawn to very clearly present as traditionally feminine). However, in issue #17 (reprinted in vol. 4), Jo explicitly comments on her gender identity in the context of a conversation with Barney, a young boy who reminds Jo of “[a] version of me I didn’t like. The me I would’ve become if I’d had to become a Scouting Lad.” Barney also questions his place in the Scouting Lads by asking, “Do you . . . ever feel like you belong somewhere else?” Jo replies that “[t]he Lumberjanes scouts were the first place I ever felt like I could be who I actually was.” (See Figure 26.5.) In the very next issue (reprinted in vol. 5), we see Jo being dropped off at camp by her two fathers, who note, “We will support her NO MATTER WHAT she wants to do” (see Figure 26.6). Presenting queer characters in a positive light has long been important to Stevenson, who has commented about the former exchange by stressing how important it is “to know that this is just one more way to be normal, and that you can be the protagonist and you can be loved while being yourself ” (qtd. in Mey). In these two powerful pages, Lumberjanes thus enacts what Michael Cart and Christine Jenkins call for in their study of queer young-adult works: that such literature be “more than coming out stories. It needs to include more stories about young people whose homosexuality is simply a given and who are dealing with other issues and challenges—emotional, intellectual, physical, social, developmental, etc.—that are part of teens’ lives” (166). In these pages,

464   James J. Donahue

Figure 26.5  Lumberjanes, Jo’s coming out.

Jo’s trans identity and her fathers’ homosexual relationship are not the driving narrative forces, but their inclusion and representation as everyday events are important to young readers who need to see such moments represented in popular literature. Or to borrow language from Eti Berland’s essay on Raina Telgemeier’s graphic novel Drama, Lumberjanes “provide[s] important opportunities for teens to affirm and expand their identities as both mirrors and windows” (216). As much as the Lumberjanes engage in fairy-tale-like adventures—Greek gods, mermaids, shapeshifters, and dinosaurs are but a few of the fantastic creatures they tangle with—the focus in the books is always on building strong communities in what DeanRuzicka has termed “collectivism,” or “a prioritization of group success over individual attainment,” which “requires cooperation, a flexible leadership model, and trust in the

I’m Not a Kid. I’m a Shark!   465

Figure 26.6  Lumberjanes, Jo’s supportive dads.

abilities of others” (219). Stevenson noted the importance of crafting a community—as opposed to creating a single strong female character—in an interview for Vanity Fair: “Without variety you end up with this one archetype and you see her a lot, you see her in everything. She’s the one action woman and she’s often very likable, but she’s vetted and approved to have the widest appeal. She never gets too funny or too goofy. She doesn’t really fail at things, usually. It’s an O.K. character, but it’s most of what we see.” Lumberjanes, then, is not about a single strong female character succeeding in a maledominated world, but rather it follows several strong (in different ways) female (with different identifications and modes of presentation) characters in a largely female ­community, learning numerous ways to solve a host of problems and defeat various antagonists. Further, in many cases, former enemies are either eventually welcomed into the group or the two opposing groups part ways as friends, having come to a mutual understanding of their needs. Defeating an enemy is more about working out differences to everyone’s benefit than it is about violently asserting dominance. Such conclusions are merely an extension of the series’ focus on creating inclusive spaces for all, most especially for those who might otherwise be cast out for not adopting normative social identities. The artwork for Lumberjanes emphasizes the series’ commitment to diversity of ­representation by drawing the characters in a variety of styles and variations. Brooke

466   James J. Donahue Allen has provided most of the artwork to date, but beginning with issue #9 (reprinted in vol. 3), the series employed a variety of authors to visualize the stories.7 In addition to the various examples of cover art representing the characters in myriad forms (cartoon, manga-influenced, photorealistic, etc.), the chapters included in volume 3 highlight the work of illustrators who draw with a variety of aesthetic influences; the result is that the characters themselves—while readably recognizable to readers—all appear as differently imagined versions of themselves. In one respect, employing a variety of illustrators adds to the overall aesthetic quality of the series, with new artwork accompanying new stories, thus providing the reader with another reason to return to the series. However, given this series’ explicit focus on diversity and inclusion, we can also read this as a conscious choice to use the visual art to highlight the thematic content. As such, the various illustrators for Lumberjanes here provided an answer to Darieck Scott and Ramzi Fawaz’s question: “How might a medium made up of the literal intersection of lines, images, and bodies capture the values of intersectional analysis?” (199). Each issue or chapter of Lumberjanes presents a single artist’s vision of the characters and their world, but taken as a whole, the series presents a diverse array of similar, but not quite exact, representations. It is not a stretch, then, to read the various visual representations of the girls as a subtle reminder that—like the young readers following the series—their identity is not yet fixed, and there are a multitude of ways they can present themselves in the world while remaining true to themselves. Readers familiar with Lumberjanes, then, will already be primed to read Nimona’s shapeshifting abilities as a comment on identity and public presentation. These forms are neither costumes nor masks behind which she hides; these are all versions of herself in some way. When she first changes into a shark, she retains her breasts (drawn identically on Nimona as both adolescent girl and shark). Anatomically unnecessary on a shark and completely irrelevant to the conversation at hand, the breasts are used to provide a subtle visual link between the two forms, indicating not only that they are the same being but also that she chooses to embody an adolescent girl in both forms. In other words, regardless of the animal shape she chooses in this meeting, she will p ­ reserve a feminine identity. This is not the case with the rest of the forms she takes, many of which appear gender-neutral (or indeterminate). Her gender presentation—masculine, feminine, or nonbinary—is a conscious part of her shapeshifting choices and, as such, is a foundational part of her identity. And just as Blackheart accepts her in all her various forms, those who would do her harm are those who would affix to her a single identity (and dismissing the others as in some way not “really” her). We see this when Sir Goldenloin reports back to the Institution (when he is still ignorant of its nefarious plans), “We assumed she was a girl disguised as a monster, but she’s not. She’s a monster disguised as a girl” (162). Sir Goldenloin not only characterizes her as a monster—her presentation as a girl becomes a form of misdirection—but he also refuses to accept that her identity can be unfixed; he sees her as a monster, but he also sees her only as a monster. Nimona herself would not argue with the first point; she recognizes that she can be a monster. But she would dismiss out of hand that she is only any one thing or that any one of her identities is who she really is. Every form she assumes is a version of herself; every form is Nimona.

I’m Not a Kid. I’m a Shark!   467 But of course, those are forms she takes to serve specific ends; Nimona is neither a r­ hinoceros nor a dragon. However, we would miss the point if we were to pick one form as her “true” form. Even if she presents herself as an adolescent female human for most of the narrative—and is drawn as a young girl in a flashback (224–226)—we should not make Sir Goldenloin’s mistake by selecting one version of herself as her “real” identity. Those in the book who refuse to recognize the fluidity of her identity are the ones who characterize her as a monster, regardless of the form she takes in the moment. As such, we can read those various forms as visual literalizations of the nonnormative woman as (in Rosi Braidotti’s words) the “monster,” “the bodily incarnation of difference from the basic human norm,” for Nimona is most certainly “a deviant, an a-nomoly . . . abnormal” (62). As a shapeshifter, Nimona quite literally defies expectations and refuses to be limited by how others read her; remember that we first witnessed this ability when Blackheart dismissed her due to her age. Similarly, each form—in its own way—­ demonstrates to the reader the dangers of l­imiting our understanding of her by her outward appearance: she receives the most physical damage when she is in the form of a dragon (154–155) and is her most brave (in the face of almost certain death, having been stripped of her abilities) while in the form of a young girl (245–246). Nimona is never merely what she appears to be and is always more than she is given credit for. However, while she refuses to conform to any single identity, she is clear about one point: “I’m not a weapon” (195; see Figure 26.7). She may be dangerous, but she is not a tool for destruction.

Figure 26.7  Nimona, “I’m not a weapon.”

468   James J. Donahue Writing about comics and children’s literature, Hatfield argues that “comics can make for dense, complex reading” and that “they ought to have a more prominent place in children’s literature studies,” given that “comics are a lively, diverse global phenomenon that is strongly associated with childhood” (364). And creators like Stevenson are aware of the necessity for young readers, especially marginalized readers, to find characters with whom they can identify and who encounter problems not unlike their own. And there is no reason these stories and characters cannot be full, rich, and well developed. Further, as Lara Saguisag reminds us in her discussion of Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman’s RAW Junior series, “the comic book’s association with childhood may have been exactly what allowed it to develop into a space for interrogation and disruption” (135). Comic books—especially those written for younger readers—can be sites for the disruption of received norms and the exploration of the unknown. Nimona is—and the readers are meant to read her as—a complex, contradictory person full of desires, dreams, and possibility. Like the group of young women occupying Roanoke Cabin in Lumberjanes, Nimona is an adolescent coming to terms with who she is in the world, exploring myriad versions of herself to respond to various situations, react to different social pressures, and make sense of the chaotic narrative she finds herself at the center of. Nimona and the Lumberjanes are, among other things, agents of productive “disruption,” while Nimona and Lumberjanes are sites for the creative exploration of such ­disruption for their readers. In Stevenson’s young-adult graphic novels, young readers can find a safe space for contemplating their own questions about their identity and ­follow the adventures of characters who demonstrate that young girls can be whoever they want to be and need never limit themselves to any one identity.

Notes 1. Obviously, this book can and should be read by everyone. However, in multiple interviews, Stevenson has noted that her primary audience is young girls and nonbinary readers, who often struggle to find works that sympathetically represent them and speak to issues important to them. 2. Hatfield provides a short but thorough history of scholarship in this area, especially pp. 366–374. Hatfield claims that “the gap between comic books and today’s children has long been a source of concern among professionals” and notes a growing interest among creators who “have sought to bridge this gap” (360). Stevenson, as I will demonstrate, deserves attention for her conscious attempt to write for marginalized readers, as well as for the ­quality of her comics. 3. Aldama includes “all the Marvel Studio iterations” (xii) in his claim, and to this end, it should also be noted that the collected movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe are focused almost exclusively on male superheroes. Of the twenty movies that have been released as of this writing, only one features a woman as a title character, Ant-Man and the Wasp, and she shares that honor with the male costar of the film. Ms. Marvel, scheduled for release in 2019, will be the first MCU movie with a female character as the sole lead, and it will be the twenty-first movie in the franchise. (Marvel’s Jessica Jones, a Netflix series tied into the MCU, and Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., a digital series, also feature women as title characters.)

I’m Not a Kid. I’m a Shark!   469 4. In its review of the book, NPR noted, “The fans were often so angst-stricken once things got rough that Stevenson started posting reassuring doodles on Tumblr, promising that in an alternate universe somewhere, Blackheart and Goldenloin were gay dads with Nimona as their adopted toddler” (Robinson). At this point, I should note that Nimona began as a webcomic, which was available free online, until she secured a publishing deal for the book. Other than redrawing the first few pages to regularize the artwork, the print version is no different from the online version, parts of which can still be found online: https://gingerhaze.com/nimona/comic/page-1. 5. Stevenson is no stranger to the superhero comic and its conventions. In addition to contributing stories to Runaways, Thor Annual, and Sensation Comics Featuring Wonder Woman, she is one of the founders of the popular website the Hawkeye Initiative (http://thehawkeyeinitiative.com), which has helped identify and lambaste many of the sexist tropes in the visualization of women in superhero comics. We should also remember Hatfield’s point that “[f]or many, of course, ‘comics’ means superheroes” and that “as icons of childhood and adolescence (of boyhood especially), superheroes hold much potential interest for scholars of youth culture” (374). Stevenson, it can be argued, is reworking the traditional superhero to explicitly move away from a focus on “boyhood.” 6. Mae Jemison (b. 1956) was the first African-American woman to travel in space, serving as a mission specialist on STS-47, and is currently professor-at-large at Cornell University. Bell hooks (b. 1952) is a prominent author, activist, and educator whose books—including Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism (1981), Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994), and Writing beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice (2013)— have inspired multiple generations of scholars and educators. It should also be noted that hooks has published numerous children’s books with Hyperion. 7. Volume 3, A Terrible Plan, lists eight different illustrators, some of whom have contributed to later issues. It’s also important to Stevenson that the creative team for the series be made up of women. As she explained in an interview with Oliver Sava for the A.V. Club: “Yeah, and it’s not like male writers or male artists can’t draw or write female characters, because that’s not true, but at the same time, there are plenty of woman writers or artists out there that aren’t getting employed as much as male writers or artists are and so we want to launch people who might not necessarily be discovered yet by the rest of the comic world. We want to be a place that can raise people up and bring them visibility and we want to be a place for women and gender non-performing people to really have that safe space and do what it is we want to do without trying to appeal to something else, some kind of idea of what comics should be or what comics are supposed to be. And that’s what Lumberjanes is; I think that’s important and what this book is. And, again, it’s not that I don’t think men can’t write as well as girls, because I know that’s not true, but that’s not this book.”

Works Cited Aldama, Frederick Luis. “Putting Childhood Back into World Comics: A Foreword.” Picturing Childhood: Youth in Transnational Comics, edited by Mark Heimermann and Brittany Tullis, U of Texas P, 2017, pp. vii–xiii. Berland, Eti. “The Drama of Coming Out: Censorship and Drama by Raina Telgemeier.” Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Michelle Ann Abate and Gwen Athene Tarbos, UP of Mississippi, 2017, pp. 205–217. Braidotti, Rosi. “Mothers, Monsters, and Machines.” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, edited by Katie Conboy et al., Columbia UP, 1997, pp. 59–79.

470   James J. Donahue Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990. Cart, Michael, and Christine Jenkins. The Heart Has Its Reasons: Young Adult Literature with Gay/Lesbian/Queer Content, 1969–2004. Scarecrow, 2006. Chute, Hillary. “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.” PMLA, vol. 123, no. 2, 2008, pp. 452–465. D’Agostino, Anthony Michael. “ ‘Flesh-to-Flesh Contact’: Marvel Comics’ Rogue and the Queer Feminist Imagination.” American Literature, vol. 90, no. 2, 2018, pp. 251–281. Dean-Ruzicka, Rachel. “ ‘What the Junk?’ Defeating the Velociraptor in the Outhouse with the Lumberjanes.” Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Michelle Ann Abate and Gwen Athene Tarbox, UP of Mississippi, 2017, pp. 218–232. Gay, Roxane. “Holding Out for a Hero.” Bad Feminist. Harper Perennial, 2014, pp. 280–284. Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Duke UP, 1998. Hatfield, Charles. “Comic Art, Children’s Literature, and the New Comic Studies.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 30, no. 3, 2006, pp. 360–382. Heimermann, Mark, and Brittany Tullis. “Introduction: Bridging Comics Studies and Childhood Studies.” Picturing Childhood: Youth in Transnational Comics, edited by Mark Heimermann and Brittany Tullis, U of Texas P, 2017, pp. 1–12. Langbauer, Laurie. “The Ethics and Practice of Lemony Snicket: Adolescence and Generation X.” PMLA, vol. 122, no. 2, 2007, pp. 502–521. Mey. “In Lumberjanes Issue #17, Jo Comes Out as Trans and It’s So Awesome.” Autostraddle 26  Aug. 2015, https://www.autostraddle.com/lumberjanes-issue-17-continues-positiverepresentation-as-jo-talks-about-being-trans-303008. Robinson, Tasha. “Fun, Fast-Moving 'Nimona' Is a Perpetual Surprise.” NPR, 19 May 2015, https://www.npr.org/2015/05/19/407077625/fun-fast-moving-nimona-is-a-perpetualsurprise. Saguisag, Lara. “RAW and Little Lit: Resisting and Redefining Children’s Comics.” Picturing Childhood: Youth in Transnational Comics, edited by Mark Heimermann and Brittany Tullis, U of Texas P, 2017, pp. 128–147. Scott, Darieck, and Ramzi Fawaz. “Introduction: Queer about Comics.” American Literature, vol. 90, no. 2, pp. 197–219. Stevenson, Noelle. “How Noelle Stevenson Broke All the Rules to Conquer the Comic Book World.” Interview with Joanna Robinson, Vanity Fair 10 July 2015, https://www.vanityfair. com/culture/2015/07/noelle-stevenson-nimona-lumberjanes-comic-con-eisner-awards. Stevenson, Noelle. “Interview with Noelle Stevenson, Creator of Nimona.” Interview with Jessica Greenlee, Geek Girl Project, 21 Feb. 2013, http://www.thegeekgirlproject.com/ 2013/02/21/interview-with-noelle-stevenson-creator-of-nimona. Stevenson, Noelle. Nimona. New York: HarperTeen, 2015. Stevenson, Noelle. “Nimona Q&A,” http://gingerhaze.tumblr.com/post/100017892553/ nimona-qa. Stevenson, Noelle. “Noelle Stevenson Invigorates YA Comics with Lumberjanes and More.” Interview with Oliver Sava, A.V.  Club, https://www.avclub.com/noelle-stevensoninvigorates-ya-comics-with-lumberjanes-1798280810. Stevenson, Noelle, et al. Lumberjanes, Vol. 3: A Terrible Plan. Boom!Box, 2016. Stevenson, Noelle, et al. Lumberjanes, Vol. 4: Out of Time. Boom!Box, 2016. Stevenson, Noelle, et al. Lumberjanes, Vol 5: Band Together. Boom!Box, 2016.

pa rt I V

C OM IC BO OK T R A NS C R E AT IONS

chapter 27

Forget ti ng at th e I n tersection of Comics a n d th e M u ltimoda l Nov el James Sie’s Still Life Las Vegas Torsa Ghosal

In his multimodal memoir, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), Roland Barthes not only recalls and records events from his life but also examines what can be called the “cognitive poetics” of life writing. By cognitive poetics, I mean the embodied mental processes informing our relationship with various semiotic systems, including l­ anguage, that come into play in the crafting of literature.1 Writing a memoir, Barthes suggests, does not involve the pursuit of a past self; rather, the process requires fabrication. As such, Barthes issues a disclaimer at his book’s outset, “It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel” (1), calling attention to the imaginative and the fictive aspects integral to writing the past. Indeed, the label “autofiction,” coined by French author and critic Serge Doubrovsky, a contemporary of Barthes’s, would be an appropriate designation for Roland Barthes.2 Referring to himself with a third-person pronoun to circumvent the problem of making truth claims about the past on the grounds of ­having experienced it “first-hand,” Barthes discusses the centrality of artifice in any account of the self. He claims that his bête noire is “analogy,” “the similitude of signifier and the signified”—that is, the neat identification of the “I” narrating the memoir, a ­subjectivity constructed in and for writing, with the living author—because “analogy implies an effect of Nature” (44). The “captivating bait” or “lure” of analogy, according to Barthes, is that it prompts the perception of an aesthetic construction as “natural.” At the same time, he must admit that analogy is irrepressible, though its implicit claim that any representation is “natural” or is an “effect of Nature” can be undermined by taking the potential of analogy to two polar extremes. Artists and writers can resist

474   Torsa Ghosal “analogy”: “How? By two contrary excesses, or call them two ironies which flout Analogy, either by feigning a spectacularly flat respect (this is the Copy, which is ­rescued), or by regularly—according to the regulations—distorting the imitated object (this is Anamorphosis)” (44; emphasis in original). Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes is an anamorphic memoir. The prefix ana- means backward and morphosis implies change. An anamorphic memoir acknowledges that the act of looking back transforms or distorts what is being looked at. Or, as Barthes makes evident throughout Roland Barthes, since one cannot know the past without ­considering it, which also amounts to distorting it, the pursuit of the past or remembering is a creative process, generating its own truth. As Barthes the memoirist forms his self through theses on the nature of thought and writing, he willfully distorts any “natural” equation between the subjectivity at the center of his memoir and himself by defamiliarizing narrative conventions associated with memoir writing. What persists through his book is the sense of a “disturbing familiarity” between author and character, “the fissure in the subject” of memoir and memory (3). Asian-American author James Sie’s debut novel, Still Life Las Vegas (2015), illustrated by Sungyoon Choi, delves into the cognitive poetics of life writing in ways that are reminiscent of Barthes’s theses on memorializing. Still Life Las Vegas is a fictional memoir3 of Walter Stahl, an aspiring comics creator, that makes the most of the creative anxieties that inform a memoirist’s relationship with the past and the distorted memories that are brought forth over the course of remembering and writing. A hybrid between comics and the multimodal novel, Still Life is interspersed with image-text sequences that the character Walter creates to recount his family’s history and develop a picture of his mother, Emily, who abandoned him when he was five years old. Oscillating between third- and first-person pronouns to explore the rupture among multiple subjectivities of Walter as a memoirist, straddling the line that separates “facts” in the world of the text from fiction, and tracing how the relationship of pictorial and linguistic means of representation impact perception, Sie’s novel shares many stylistic conventions and philosophical commitments with Roland Barthes (and similar instances of postmodernist memoirs). However, ultimately, Still Life is a “fictional” memoir; that is, it is a fiction about a character-narrator’s process of creating a memoir. So whereas Roland Barthes announces its anamorphic aesthetic from its opening sentence, Still Life’s narrative ­progression depends on the memoirist Walter’s gradual recognition that his sketches and stories do not restore or record the past; rather, they distort it. The novel’s premise leads Sie to construct a memoirist’s (Walter’s) consciousness, delineate the evolution of his subjectivities, and signal through the narrative poetics how memoir writing, an act of representing the past, tends to be anamorphic, inevitably altering what it sets out to recall. Thus, while Walter writes to remember in the storyworld of Still Life, Sie finds ways to represent how and what Walter forgets, ­imagines, and transforms when trying to remember. The tension between the fictional memoirist Walter’s project and that of Sie’s in Still Life brings contemporary assumptions about memory as these pertain to writing and representation into focus. As a result, the novel turns out to be a rich site for examining aesthetic conventions used to

Comics and the Multimodal Novel   475 present memory’s unreliability, particularly concentrating on the tendency to forget and distort during recall. Representation of memory has interested literary scholars for decades, and it has been at the center of an especially prolific body of research since what has been called the 1990s memory boom (Huyssen 5). However, more often than not, these studies remain invested in understanding how experiences are remembered in life and literature, the ways in which literature portrays the phenomenon of remembering, and also how experiential memory comes into play during reading. Forgetting, on the other hand, is of concern in memory studies usually for being an involuntary error or fault, triggered by trauma, or as a deliberate means of political silencing (Winter). There are exceptions, of course. Most notably, Paul Connerton contests the view that forgetting, or remembering, for that matter, must always have “an inherent ethical-political value” (34) and distinguishes among seven types of forgetting: repressive erasure, prescriptive forgetting, forgetting that is constitutive in the formation of a new identity, structural amnesia, forgetting as annulment, forgetting as planned obsolescence, and forgetting as humiliated silence. Nonetheless, the more widespread emphasis on remembering, in Western cultures and also memory studies, is motivated by an implicit understanding that it is an active process, requiring effort and willful exercise of cognitive faculties. What also goes without saying in such cases is that remembering is valuable. Still Life, however, offers a picture of forgetting that is equally as active and willful as remembering. To use Connerton’s classification, forgetting in Still Life is presented as constitutive in the formation of identity. In this chapter, I analyze the strategies that undergird Sie’s fictional portrayal of forgetting as it relates to memoir writing and the role of representational images and tellable narratives in the depiction of this cognitive process. I argue that Sie’s novel playfully alludes to but also subverts assumptions prevalent in Western philosophical and folk-psychological discourses about forgetting being a spontaneous process, facilitated by the illusory nature of analogic images that get in the way of one’s ability to store traces of “reality.” To present the fictional memoirist Walter’s embodied mental processes, Sie adopts a multimodal narrative style in Still Life, including comics attributed to Walter in the storyworld. In this sense, Still Life belongs with a growing corpus of print novels published in the last couple of decades that combine a variety of semiotic resources, design features, and document types (such as images, maps, typography, emails, and transcripts) to stage questions related to representation, perception, and the nature of consciousness, especially the workings of memory.4 These novels, including Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World (2005), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), and Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (2018), among many ­others, are distinguished from comics and photonovels on the grounds that they are more heavily reliant on language than on images or other semiotic systems. However, some of these—such as Sie’s Still Life and Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel (2010)5—also incorporate stretches of comics within the text. The narration in Still Life is fragmented, as it often is in multimodal novels, with seemingly multiple narrative voices interrupting one another. Sie’s novel also switches

476   Torsa Ghosal back and forth among three different timelines, with Walter being five years old in one, seventeen years old in another, and thirty-eight years old in the sections framing the two other timelines. The different timelines are not always clearly demarcated. The multimodal style, along with the chapter organization, allows Sie to gradually build up to Walter’s recognition of the various ways in which he has distorted and, indeed, forgotten his mother while aspiring to create an accurate image-text representation of her and his family history. Given that Sie’s novel uses comics and other visual design features to explore the ­tensions about fact and fiction, forgetting and distorting while life writing, it is worth noting here that images are among the more commonplace semiotic modes interpolated in Western philosophy to voice anxieties about how analogic representations trigger misperception. For instance, Plato, while pioneering the distrust of analogical arts through his well-known The Allegory of the Cave, constructs elaborate analogies to drive home his point—in these analogies, shadows and images are said to stand in for “reality” in memories and perceptions. Plato worries that images can trick consciousness into taking them as substitutes for reality. Anamorphic visual art addresses this long-­standing philosophical and folk-psychological concern by obstructing identification of the representation with the referent. From Pablo Picasso’s Cubist self-portraits to Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych to caricatures, visual art that is representational while also being critical of or resistant to conflation with what it represents is commonplace. Anamorphism and artifice are often at the service of excavating deeper “truths” in the works of twentieth-century visual and conceptual artists. Caricature, too, is anamorphic: having “relations between the parts of the face deliberately distorted, the nose too much long, the cheeks . . . too prominent,” caricature manifests “something that was lacking in the photograph . . . life, expression,” according to Jean-Paul Sartre in The Imaginary (17), the text to which Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1981) is dedicated. In other words, there is a genealogy to Barthes’s supposed discomfort with analogy and his celebration of anamorphic memoir writing. Images, as both semiotic modes and metaphors, are central to this genealogy. Accordingly, Sie’s novel, starting with its title, Still Life, incorporates and cites myriad visual arts as well as related artistic practices to depict how Walter and the various characters in his life—Owen, Vee, Chrystostom, and Acacia—formulate their perceptions of the past. Sie is quite explicit about tackling the deep history of concerns about the analogical in art and the potential of analogies, even beyond “visual” representations, to manipulate perceptions. To begin with, the novel is a self-reflexive “caricature” of ancient Greek myths and classical tragedies. Las Vegas becomes Sie’s plain of Lethe, where characters, doomed as their counterparts often are in the Greek myths, go to wash away memories that torture them and construct new subjectivities free of their cursed past. Sie characterizes Walter’s father, Owen, as a professor of Greek, who introduces Orpheus, Orestes, and Oedipus to his son, prompting him to view life as an ancient Greek tragedy. Thus, when Walter imagines his father reflecting on the death of his sister, Georgia, he feels his father regretted not having had “lamentations” like the Greeks would, such that “Cheeks would be scratched; Katharsis could begin” (177). Alongside Owen, Chrystostom and Acacia, two living statue performers impersonating Apollo and Diana in Las Vegas’s

Comics and the Multimodal Novel   477 Venice Venice hotel (modeled after the Venetian) become Sie’s vehicles for infusing Still Life with various, and at times contradictory, takes on the significance of mimesis in the visual and verbal arts. Chrystostom, for instance, seems to believe that the only way he can emancipate himself from painful memories is by vandalizing a statue of the person he wishes to forget. As far as Chrystostom is concerned, if forgetting is a ritual, then homeomorphic images can function as substitutes did in ancient Greek ceremonies.6 Another subtext that runs through the novel has to do with Walter’s mother Emily’s devotion to Liberace, who, in Sie’s words, is “the deity of Las Vegas, representing all the promise, the artifice, that Vegas has to offer” (Partington). And Emily, we later learn, committed suicide in the bathroom of the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas, though in Owen’s and Walter’s imagination (and their counterfactual narratives), she survives having sustained some injuries in her scuffle with a Liberace impersonator. With Las Vegas, a city invented in the middle of a desert and fitted with copies of the world’s ­wonders, Sie has gotten what could possibly be the best setting for his characters to grapple with apprehensions related to how analogic representations might shape memories, subjectivities, and destinies. Throughout the novel, the protagonist, Walter, creates sketches and comics sequences to narrate the past. The process is supposed to help him arrive at a representation of his mother, whom he claims not to remember. He has no records, apart from his father’s narratives about her, to help him in this process of memorializing and representing. Characterizing Walter, who very early on acknowledges having no firsthand memory of his mother, as a memoirist intending to, nonetheless, write her back to life, Sie approaches life writing from the “other” end; that is, instead of beginning with remembering, he begins with forgetting. In Still Life, Walter is not trying to make sense of what he remembers as much as he is trying out different ways to narrate what he has forgotten. Even the other characters, such as Owen and Chrystostom, who are engaged in considering their past in Sie’s novel are required to reckon with forgetting. In the following sections of this chapter, I outline how Sie imagines and represents what forgetting is as a cognitive process. Subsequently, I show that in Sie’s model of forgetting, which aligns with an “interference-based” understanding of the process as opposed to the more ­commonplace approach to it as involuntary decay over time, it is the tellability of narratives rather than the visuality of representational art that emerges as the force behind morphing and manipulation.

Anamorphosis, or, the Poetics of Remembering That Is Also Forgetting Blurring boundaries between what is history and what is story in the world of the text, and between imagination and memory in Walter’s consciousness, Sie’s fictional memoir dramatizes the fractures in the memoirist’s subjectivity through formal conventions of linguistic narratives as well as comics. James Phelan has traced how the split between the

478   Torsa Ghosal experiencing I (the version of the self that is at the center of the narrated experiences) and the narrating I (the self that is voicing these experiences, usually in retrospect) is used to serve different rhetorical ends in fictional autobiographies. Still Life shares features with that genre, but in several chapters, the experiencing I is not “I” at all but “he.” In other words, Walter as the memoirist employs a degree of linguistic disidentification. Still Life begins with a preface and is divided into three parts. In the first two parts, chapters with Walter’s narration marked by the first-person pronoun I alternate with those focalized through Walter’s parents, Emily and Owen Stahl, wherein Walter is a minor third-person presence. This enables Sie to create an illusion that suggests that Walter, the narrating I, has involuntarily forgotten certain experiences to which readers, owing to the third-person narrative voice, are privy. The distancing of the “I” from the “he” in the accounts of the past also gives credibility to these narratives, seemingly made available to the readers not by an unreliable character-narrator but through narrative omniscience. This illusion makes the revelation that these facts are, in fact, counterfactual more impactful toward the end of the novel. Sie opens the novel with a sketch of a car driving away, at the right-hand corner of the page, and behind the car is a trail of feathers. On the facing page, titled “Preface,” an ­italicized “I”—which we later identify as the thirty-eight-year-old Walter—observes: It always starts with a blue Volvo, driving away. No, that’s not right. It starts with graphite poised above a new white page. Or fingers crouched over a keyboard. And then, a memory. One that often involves a blue Volvo, driving away. (1)

The second sentence revises the first, signaling more clearly that the blue Volvo with which the narrative begins has been brought into existence through writing. In the subsequent paragraphs of the preface, the narrator also acknowledges that there are multiple beginnings to this narrative “lining the twisted corridors of my most unreliable brain” (3). In a sense, the preface gives everything away, and yet, by not naming the narrating I and by following up the prefatory section with chapters alternating between third- and first-person pronouns for Walter, Sie manages to present Walter’s fabrications as facts of the storyworld. The third-person narrative voice lays out these “facts,” beginning with the day Emily Stahl left her adoptive mother Vee’s house in Milwaukee (also Liberace’s hometown), abandoning her husband, whose mind remains clouded by antidepressants, and their five-year-old son, Walter. In the alternating chapters, where Walter is the narrator, he is seventeen and lives in Las Vegas with his father. However, in part I, when it is not yet clear that Walter, the character-narrator and memoirist in the novel, is imagining how Emily grew up, how Emily and Owen met, how their daughter (Walter’s sister) Georgia died, causing Emily to leave Milwaukee and seek refuge in Las Vegas, rather than the author Sie using narrative omniscience to recount the Stahl family history, comics strips, attributed to Walter, foreshadow the ­revelation that the “he” in the chapters focalized through his parents is also Walter’s construction.

Comics and the Multimodal Novel   479 For  instance, in part I’s last chapter, which follows Emily, an italicized block of text ­hanging in the middle of a white page interrupts the omniscient narrative voice: Enough. There’s no putting it off any longer—time to speak of the unspeakable. It really can’t be avoided. Emily could never escape it. Owen will never rise above it. Even our young Walter, who at this point knows practically nothing of the particular circumstances of the event, can still feel its ripplings beneath his feet more than a decade later. Omnes viae Georgia ducunt. Let’s talk about Georgia. Better yet let me draw you a picture. (83)

Over the next seven pages, the “particular circumstances” of the tragedy that the young five-year-old Walter supposedly knew nothing about is recounted in comics form by the unidentified “me” from the last sentence of the italicized passage. That this “me” is Walter’s thirty-eight-year-old self is explicitly revealed another two hundred pages later (on page 292), when the narration, which at first comes across as intimate family history, turns out to be a means for forgetting what actually happened in the storyworld. This forgetting, we also eventually learn, has been collaboratively performed by the narrating I—who is the comics creator, Walter—and his father, Owen. The primary indicator of Walter being the comics creator is the young Walter’s absence from the visual illustrations in the comics panels. The tails of the speech bubbles that, based on context, can be attributed to the five-year-old Walter point to the frame. Beyond the frame is the empty gutter or gap. Unlike Emily, Owen, and Georgia, Walter supersedes the comics panel. The older Walter has avoided the homeomorphism of self-portraiture. At the outset, though, Walter is not resistant to pursuing analogic correspondences. In fact, as a seventeen-year-old, he searches, quite arbitrarily, analogs of his mother, Emily—that is, women who seem to resemble her. He sketches strangers he comes across on the streets of Las Vegas, who share their age, location, race, or musical preferences with what he imagines of his mother, based on his father’s narratives. His practice of sketching is set into motion when, on hearing an accordion play on Fremont Street, the young Walter remarks to Owen, “Maybe it’s her,” and Owen responds, “It could be” (27). Walter’s sketches of women who could have been but were not his mother are ­supposed to help him ultimately construct a “picture of who she was” (28). These sketches that the young Walter makes and the comics that the thirty-eight-year-old Walter creates are the closest he gets to the past, and in both scenarios, Walter knows, at some level, even if he refuses to explicitly acknowledge it at seventeen, that the imagetext records he is creating are distorting rather than restoring “who she was.” In the comic strips, Walter draws his mother as a version of himself, locating himself both as a visual analog for her and as an embodied carrier of her trace. Chrystostom, Walter’s

480   Torsa Ghosal friend and lover and the champion of mimetic representations in the world of Still Life, notes this resemblance when Walter shows him his sketches of Emily (208). In the seemingly omniscient narrative that Walter focalizes through Emily, he also has her note, “she bore a striking resemblance to Walt” (181). In the end, however, Walter runs away from Las Vegas and separates from Chrystostom. As a thirty-eight-year-old, he is much more self-aware about the extent to which his representations cannot correspond to his mother, because anything he pictures is fashioned by who he wants her to be. Through Walter’s performance of writing and comics creation, Sie addresses questions central to life writing. Can one flatly reproduce life in writing or images? Is “memoir” an analog medium that records existing memory traces? Whose memory traces are these (given that Walter claims to have no memory of his mother)? Or should the ­memoirist recognize memories as distortions, subjectivity as suffused with “artifice,” and abandon any attempts at restoring the past? Still Life offers a range of tentative answers to these questions about memoir and memory through the many subplots ­featuring Emily, Owen, Vee, Chrystostom, and Acacia, but given that the overall structure of Still Life mirrors the thirty-eight-year-old Walter’s methods of piecing the past together, the novel ultimately privileges the self-reflexive anamorphic memoir among other possible means to negotiate with the past. Each chapter of the novel, apart from the italicized interludes of thirty-eight-year-old Walter, is named after the character at its center. The primary setting and the time frame—“Earlier,” “Later”—are also indicated. The listing of character names and spatiotemporal markers remediates conventions associated with textual presentation of dramas. However, the fuzziness of the temporal markers also emphasizes the indistinctness of certain details remembered or imagined in Walter’s consciousness, blended with the memories of his father. Several chapters in the novel are marked by a common quest: in the “Earlier” sections, Owen is searching Emily on the streets of Las Vegas because he has an inkling that when Emily flees, being a devotee of Liberace, she will end up in the city, and in the “Later” sections, when the older Owen is housebound, Walter continues his father’s quest, looking for family resemblance among strangers and sketching them. Neither Owen nor Walter seems to be able to forget Emily. Emily’s adoptive mother, Vee, on the other hand, comes across as the most matter-of-fact of the characters. When Owen is searching for Emily, Vee simply says he will not find her. At the end of the novel, however, Walter reveals that it is he who forgot what happened to his mother all those years ago, when she abandoned Owen and him in Milwaukee. Vee remembers and comes all the way to Las Vegas to remind the seventeen-year-old Walter. So by withholding the “actual” information and offering an alternative trajectory for Emily’s character in the chapters told using the omniscient narrative voice, it becomes clear that the thirty-eightyear-old Walter’s memoir has formally reenacted his experience of forgetting. Forgetting is a significant trope that remains present in life writing as well as in ­fictions such as Sie’s that borrow conventions of life writing. Astrid Erll has observed that “the phenomenon of forgetting is every bit as unobservable as is memory,” (9) and because it is unobservable, metaphors or analogs become especially useful for both understanding and representing forgetting. Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir lists some

Comics and the Multimodal Novel   481 of the common metaphors used to conceptualize forgetting: forgetting is often figured as absence or death in narratives, forgetting can be imagined in terms of water-related images (through the association of oblivion with the river Lethe), and forgetting can also be represented as fault or error in memory. Gudmundsdottir subsequently argues that the conception of forgetting as a fault is related to the conception of memory as a storage or deposit system, and this, she argues, is a reductive equation, as it undermines the complexity of both processes. In the common metaphors that Gudmundsdottir catalogs, forgetting is explained as a gradual, involuntary, and “natural” process of decay in which time plays a chief role. There are also other metaphors for forgetting that encapsulate the same principle. For instance, a popular analog for forgetting is the fading image, where memory is envisioned as a series of photographs or pictures, sure to decompose unless conserved. Cognitive theories about verbal memory also claim that “memory traces (in the phonological loop) decay over a period of a few seconds, unless revived by articulatory rehearsal” (Baddeley 419). In other words, unless called upon, rehearsed, and revived every so often, what has been imprinted on the mind (whether in the form of words, pictures, or any other mode) will slowly but surely vanish. This understanding of forgetting also offers impetus for recording and archiving. Unless recorded, history and memory will slip away. Still Life’s Walter thus records “memories” that “come from varied sources” (Sie 3).7 Given that Walter has no access to photos of his mother in the house, he sketches women “who could-have-been-but-weren’t my mother” (27) before their faces “disappeared from my mind” (27). The seventeen-year-old Walter claims, “I can do it automatically, this recording of faces” (27). The practice of recording enables Walter to sustain the illusion that it is time that got in the way of his memories—for instance, he says the time he lived with his mother and father in Chicago as a child “is down the sink hole. Life began at five,” when he moved to Las Vegas (24). Similarly, speaking of his father’s “intentionally vague” narration of the past, he says “the years have eroded the details” (203), only to add, “Or maybe they were never there” (203). Of course, Walter’s muted memory of his mother can be ascribed to what is known as childhood amnesia. Children are supposed to forget early experiences for lacking the requisite memory skills that would help them fully understand or register experiences. The cutoff age for this kind of childhood forgetting is normatively taken to be around three and a half years (Ochs and Capps 256), and Walter in Still Life was only five when he lost his mother. However, Sie’s narrative leans more on Walter’s memory having been actively “scrubbed clean, white and smooth as an egg,” rather than on childhood amnesia (296). When, at seventeen, Walter meets Vee, she asks him what he remembers of her and his mother. When Walter recalls nothing, Sie has Vee respond, “You didn’t just lie in a coma those first five years, you know. . . . You were old enough to remember something” (287). The thirty-eight-year-old Walter is aware of having had the past distorted by the dual collaborative workings of his father’s narratives as well as his own sketches and visual imagination that supplemented these accounts. Recalling the spot in Venice Venice where his father claims to have last seen his mother, the overlapping subjectivities of seventeen- and thirty-eight-year-old (signposted through regular text interspersed with

482   Torsa Ghosal italicized block) Walter says, “his [father’s] story spins from there” (47), drawing ­attention to the fabricated nature of Owen’s account of Emily. And it is not his father alone who “spins” yarns. Walter’s “Sketch 1: Just the Facts” (29), an illustration of what Walter presumably knows, shows a man sleeping on a bed with the outlines of a young boy sitting next to him. These figures are in the background. A large fist enclosing a note is placed nearer the frame of the sketch. There are also packed bags on the floor. This is one of the many ways Walter perceives the scene of his mother’s disappearance. His mother, in this picture, seems to be ready to leave before his own eyes and behind his father’s back. Yet the framing of the sketch also signals a perspectival distortion. Walter, the ­artist, is trying to consider his five-year-old self from the perspective of his mother. In other words, every attempt on Walter’s part to record and remember what ­happened, his supposed struggle against involuntary memory loss, also turns out to be a more willful process of distortion. Through Walter, Sie presents forgetting as a process that does not completely fit the more commonplace understanding of it as necessarily gradual or “natural.” In fact, the model of forgetting that Still Life constructs aligns more closely with recent cognitive studies that present interference and distraction as key contributors to forgetting. While not doing away with the conception of memory as a deposit system, cognitive psychologists Ullrich Ecker and Stephan Lewandowsky, in their research on memory updating, suggest that intrusion of misinformation accounts for loss of memory. They argue in favor of “an associative network model that binds distributed item and positional-context representations, with no role of time in forgetting. Forgetting . . . is instead interference-based: Because items are associated to overlapping context markers, they tend to over-write each other during encoding into the common associative network” (2). While acknowledging the popularity of decay as a conceptual metaphor for forgetting, Ecker and Lewandowsky highlight the existence of “Other models of forgetting . . . [that] have stressed that it is not time (viz. decay) per se that ­produces forgetting, but activities that—when they occur—require time to execute, where those activities interfere with retrieval of the memoranda” (1). As such, Ecker and Lewandowsky draw attention to the different iterations of interference-based cognitive theories of forgetting (posited by Underwood, Anderson and Neely, Oberauer and Lewandowsky, among others), which propose that “activities” rather than time distort memories. This is true of forgetting in Still Life, where Walter’s forgetting the “facts” of his mother’s death is not an outcome of gradual temporal distance from the experience; rather, it is his father’s act of storytelling, which also allows Walter to imagine Emily’s life in sketches and comics form, that enables his oblivion. However, Still Life goes a step further than the interference-based cognitive theories of forgetting to also suggest that since memory is no safe-deposit or storage-retrieval system, any act of recollection is inevitably generative, constituted by the interferences and distortions. Thus, the cognitive poetics of memorializing cannot but be anamorphic. The book’s design shows that Walter must draw the past into existence. By tracing how Walter sketches the mother he does not remember and offering readers those ­pictures, Sie emphasizes that there is no remembering without morphing and forgetting. Spinning stories has also distorted Owen’s perception of the past. So when Walter

Comics and the Multimodal Novel   483 confronts his father about the stories being “false,” following his meeting with Vee, Owen responds, “It’s what I remember happening” (316). Key scenes from Walter’s ­family history are given in comics form: why Emily left, Owen’s supposed reunion with Emily in Las Vegas’s Venice Venice following her heart-rending performance of “Come Back to Sorrento,” and her second disappearance are all presented in comics form. Each of these scenes, at least in part, is counterfactual in the storyworld. Thus, if comics come across as the thirty-eight-year-old Walter’s preferred mode of recording at the outset, by the end of the novel, it is evident that comics are Walter’s preferred mode of imagining. Still Life’s narrative structure, its interspersing of events perceived differently by Walter’s multiple fractured subjectivities and revisions in his accounts of crucial events, including the death of his mother and his sister, highlights the anamorphism or distortion of the past that is integral to Walter’s memoir. Sie and Choi collaborate to present Walter’s attempts at creating art that does not try to reproduce the past as faithfully as Walter can but reflects his imagination and contrivance, his willful forgetting. Thus, the comics keep Emily alive, even after Vee has intervened to correct Walter’s perception of the past. When he is about to turn eighteen, Walter relearns of his mother’s death from Vee: Emily did come to Las Vegas, and Owen came in search of her, but on reaching Las Vegas, he found her dead in the Liberace Museum’s bathroom and not playing “Come Back to Sorrento” at Venice Venice. Acknowledging the corrective that Vee offers to set past records straight, the thirty-eight-year-old Walter—the comics creator—still sketches the falsified narrative. As I have been arguing, through Walter, Sie establishes that acts of interference— which, in this case, amount to fabricating a competing narrative account that explains Emily’s absence by negating the “fact” of her death—contribute to forgetting. Forgetting, understood in this way, as an active, intentional, and generative process, also underlies the novel’s overall approach to memoir writing. However, through the interferencebased approach to forgetting, its tendency to juxtapose competing narrative accounts of events, Still Life also prompts us to consider if all methods of interference have equal force to affect perceptions of the past. Given that Still Life is a multimodal novel, it also raises question about different forms of fabrications. Do certain semiotic modes have greater capacity to mold memories? I take up these questions in the next section, revisiting in this light the anxiety about analogical arts in general and its place in comics scholarship. Through my analysis, I show that it is not images per se that strengthen certain fabrications; rather, it is the tellability of the narrative that those image sequences constitute that accounts for the power of particular interferences over others.

Visuality and Tellability in Sie’s Model of Forgetting Sie’s use of comics and his collaboration with comics creator and illustrator Choi to ­present the workings of Walter’s consciousness can be understood with reference to the ­connections drawn between memory and the comics form, highlighted in a vast body of comics scholarship, including recent book-length studies on the subject by Jane Tolmie,

484   Torsa Ghosal Mel Gibson, Daniel Marrone, and Andrés Romero-Jódar. Referring to Henri Bergson’s theorization of memory as imagelike, Maaheen Ahmed and Benoît Crucifix observe that “Images, usually presented in some kind of sequential flow and thus in constant transformation through panels but also in the reader’s head, are central to comics . . .  [T]he essential building blocks of comics, including the under-theorized drawn line and colors, the cut-and-paste material, are direct outcomes of bodily actions and are thus traces, mediated through various production processes of bodily memory” (2). In Still Life’s storyworld, Walter’s comics creation and sketches are acts of memory, but for Walter, picturing the past does not entail mediating imagelike memories onto the page; rather, through the images, Walter manages to co-construct, with his father and later with Chrystostom, the past as he would like to remember it. By the time Vee corrects Walter’s way of seeing the past, he already has a repertoire of sketches that contradict the particulars of Vee’s account. That Walter’s process of imagining his mother is visual is important. Walter’s seventeen-year-old self remarks, “All this time I’ve been trying to figure out what my mother looked like, I never considered what she might sound like” (81). Images, as I pointed out in the introductory section of this chapter, have been long considered especially effective in abetting misperception. Hypotheses about the analogical or representational potential of images inform the understanding of how comics impact perception. Following this line of argument, c­ omics creator Will Eisner observes that mimetic (“lifelike”) visual imagery more readily interferes with the “mental inventory of memories retained from real life experiences” because they make “limited demands” on a viewer’s cognitive skills, presumably due to the apparent similitude of the signifier and the signified. Eisner claims, “Film actors are more ‘real’ than people created within texts” (xvii) and concludes that comics strike the middle ground between traditional print literature and film, being relatively more anamorphic (he does not use the term, though) than film but more representational than traditional literature that solely relies on language as a sign system. The representational is conflated with the “visual” in his argument, as he assumes that when reading text, comprehension requires “word-to-image” conversion. The underlying assumption is that the more lifelike or mimetic a visual representation, the greater the risk it poses to unadulterated perception of reality. In the context of the interference-based model of forgetting, this would entail an acceptance of visual modes of misinformation as ­possessing greater threat for manipulating memory. Even when exalting comics, Eisner’s essentialist equation between visuality and the ease of perception (therefore, also misperception) or, at least, hierarchization of semiotic modes based on the cognitive skills required to supposedly process them echoes ancient Platonic distrust of images and analogic arts. In The Allegory of the Cave, Plato asks, if a subject who once thought reality to be “nothing but shadows of images” is disabused of the error, “Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown him?” (10). When Sie makes sketches Walter’s preferred mode of fabricating memories and forgetting “facts,” he is citing such concerns about images. Indeed, Walter, even when told otherwise by Vee, chooses to dwell on, reanimate, and seek “shadows of images” in Still Life. However, Sie, while recalling the essentialist correlations drawn

Comics and the Multimodal Novel   485 between distortion of perception and visual imagery, also debunks them. He does so by juxtaposing Walter’s friend Chrystostom’s attempts at forgetting the past with Walter’s attempts at remembering his, both efforts mediated through several layers of images. Multiple threads that run through the novel about the analogical relation of art with life culminate in Walter’s relationship with Chrystostom in the storyworld. Walter’s first encounter with Chrystostom, the live statue performer in Venice Venice, is mediated through Chrystostom’s impersonation of Apollo. Strolling through Venice Venice in search of his mother, or, more precisely, her analogs, Walter spots a pair of performers whom he begins to refer to as Apollo and Diana in the narrative. In other words, they immediately become the deities they impersonate in Walter’s imagination. Transfixed, he eventually sketches them and soon learns that he is not the first to sketch the pair. Brother and sister claim to have modeled for famous artists—they mention a Greek artist called Stavros, which could be a reference to contemporary Greek artists such as Stavros Ditsois or Stavros Galanpoulos. Chrystostom, who impersonates Apollo, extols the mimetic potential of arts. When discussing his career as a model, he tells Walter that the poser must give something to the artist, and if statues do not look lifelike, it is not only the sculptor’s fault, but the “One who sits is equally to blame” (230). He seems to be able to discern which sculpture is a copy of an “original” sculpture because the “original stone, the paint, the clay, this contains life that is not translating to copies” (231). The ­episodes through which Sie develops Walter’s relationship with Chrystostom dwells on the manipulation of perception and the almost mystical power of representational images. Chrystostom sees sculptures as surrogates for the human body-mind. He is in Las Vegas in search of a sculpture modeled after a woman he loved—Mara—but whom he lost in Greece. Chrystostom is also looking for a writer to record his life’s stories, and in both projects, Walter decides to help him. Like Chrystostom himself, his stories enchant Walter. He briefly becomes Chrystostom’s biographer and later even creates a comic strip illustrating the narratives Chrystostom fabricates about his past. These narratives are the basis for Chrystostom’s claim that he is looking for Mara’s statue to find closure for his love story. However, when Chrystostom does find the statue in Venice Venice, he shatters it in front of Walter. From Chrystostom’s sister, Acacia (Diana), Walter finds out that Chrystostom was all along intending to break the statue to free himself of the bad luck Mara supposedly brought him. He was not looking for a suitable resolution to an epic romance. It is Acacia’s narrative against Chrystostom’s, paralleling the competing narratives of Owen and Vee. The thirty-eight-year-old Walter knows the “truth” about Chrystostom, and given what he knows, the comic strip he creates realize versions of the past whose veracity has been contested. This is analogous to his creating comics to build on Owen’s rather than Vee’s narrative. He does so because in both cases, from Walter’s perspective, the “false” narratives are tellable to a greater degree than those that falsify them. Thus, Sie’s novel is ultimately not about how images are more effective in implanting false memories but is about Walter’s desire to picture particular falsified accounts of the past and let these ­narratives facilitate forgetting. In other words, from among competing narratives, Walter chooses to illustrate what he wants to make his memory.

486   Torsa Ghosal Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps argue that narrative practices guide what is encoded, retained, and revised in memory. They observe that “autobiographical memory both guides and is guided by narrative. Both are in flux, ever subject to reformulation” (255). In this context, tellability of narratives becomes important for fashioning memory. Tellability depends on how and to what degree any narrative interests the narratee. Tellability can result from aesthetic breach of expectations, confirmation of something familiar, or the association of personal significance to the narrative (Labov; Fludernik). The narratives after which the comic strips in Still Life are modeled have been told to Walter by Owen and Chrystostom. They are “tellable” over Vee’s and Acacia’s correctives for specific reasons. Vee’s and Acacia’s narratives may be true, but Owen’s and Chrystostom’s are successful in directing the course of Walter’s memoir writing. ­Marie-Laure Ryan has observed that “what makes a narrative successful involves two components: the rhetorical, or performantial component, which focuses on the ­discourse features through which narrators display storyworld in a way that invites audiences to respond emotionally, intellectually, or aesthetically; and the tellability component, which focuses on the discourse independent features that predict such responses” (590). Ryan further notes that while tellability involves a multitude of principles, it can be “concentrated in a single, precisely identifiable feature—the point of the text, such as the punch line or the piece of information wanted by the hearer—or it can be the effect of peaks and valleys” (590). Owen’s story gives Walter what he wants to hear, that Emily left them but is not dead. Indeed, through Sie’s presentation of Walter’s process of forgetting, remembering, and writing, Emily’s life becomes a narrative with forking paths: one has Emily dead in the Liberace Museum, and another lets her emerge from an altercation with a Liberace impersonator with some injuries but fit enough to perform at Venice Venice. Similarly, Chrystostom’s account of the past is tellable because Walter, as he recognizes in retrospect, always wanted to believe him. He writes, “And he [Chrystostom] tells me many things, little nuggets of information like honeyed nuts that he’d feed me by hand, and I’d lap them up, happy little love-starved puppy that I was” (212). However, Chrystostom’s stories also have remarkable “peaks and valleys.” Chrystostom is aware of it, as he tells Walter: “One day soon, I will tell you everything. My story. Fantastic” (211). He mimes scribbling on a page and asks Walter, “You know . . . writer? Person who writes? I am looking for this” (211). Like Owen, Chrystostom, too, has an explicit agenda behind the act of storytelling that Walter does not question. Chrystostom’s narrative of the past begins with the origin of life, as he bases his tale on the myths of Deucalion and Pyrhha, also told in book I of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Particular scenes from the story of Deucalion and Pyrhha have been previously imagined in visual art by Peter Paul Rubens, Leonaert Bramer, and others. But Sie and Choi have Chrystostom claim the myth as his ancestral history. Both Owen’s and Chrystostom’s narratives strain disbelief, but that also makes them tellable. In comparison, Vee’s account is “unvarnished” and hence of limited interest to Walter. The final comics panel in Still Life is black with shards scattered across it. The thirty-eight-year-old Walter remarks that he is still trying to piece his family history together, taking readers back, in a sense, to where the novel began—the preface, where Walter commented on his memoir’s multiple beginnings. Thus, Still Life creates a

Comics and the Multimodal Novel   487 dynamic loop of sorts, where Walter tries to remember and record what he has forgotten but in the process comes to learn how he also desires to actively forget what he wants to remember. And tellability of specific narratives, rather than the visuality of images, ­consolidates and directs his distortion of the past. Before writing Still Life Las Vegas, Sie had been a voice actor, and in pop culture, he was known as the voice of the animated Jackie Chan in Jackie Chan Adventures. It is ­perhaps fitting, then, that his debut novel is about the collapsing of identities, the similitude of reference and referent, and analogies. As a fiction about the process of writing memoirs, Still Life traces the manner in which memories are created through distortion and forgetting. While constructing the consciousness of the memoirist Walter, Sie develops a model of forgetting that locates interference and artifice rather than involuntary decay over time as the cause for oblivion. However, by presenting narration itself as a mode of interference and distortion, the novel also suggests that any act of threading memories will contribute to forgetting but that this forgetting is a generative process. Of course, Walter’s situation is an extreme and seemingly anomalous instance of memoir writing that is founded on forgetting. Yet the fictional representation of Walter’s case lets Sie reflect on the imagined nature of memories, which, as Barthes argues in Roland Barthes, informs the cognitive poetics of memoir writing. Anamorphosis, as an aesthetic principle, underlies the narrative poetics of Still Life, as the novel aligns what is memorable with what is tellable. However, within this framework, comics and sketches that are counterfactual in the novel’s storyworld are not meant to imply that their visuality specifically distorts Walter’s preexisting perception of the past. Instead, comics and accompanying multimodal features of the novel foreground how actively Walter remains invested in forgetting while he imagines the past in image-text form—thus making anamorphic drawings and memoir writing emerge as analogous to making memories in Still Life Las Vegas.

Notes 1. “Cognitive poetics” has been theorized by Peter Stockwell and others. My use of the term here is not radically different from theirs, except in its emphasis. Whereas Stockwell focuses on the process of reading and readers, I trace how cognition informs writing, but of course, to do so, I am “reading” (contextualizing, historicizing, and interpreting) the writings. 2. Doubrovsky dismissed autobiography as a privilege reserved for “important people,” to be written in a refined style. He himself aspired to write something between fiction of events and real facts, which he called “autofiction.” In Fils, He wrote: “Autobiographie? Non, c’est un privilège réservé aux importants de ce monde, au soir de leur vie, et dans un beau style. Fiction, d’évènements et de faits strictement reels; si l’on veut autofiction, d’avoir confié le langage d’une aventure à l’aventure d’un langage en liberté, hors sagesse et hors syntaxe du roman, traditionnel ou nouveau. Rencontres, fils de mots, allitérations, assonances, dissonances, écriture d’avant ou d’après littérature, concrète, comme on dit musique.” 3. As a subset of life writing, I use the term memoir over autobiography based on the understanding that memoir focuses on events the author remembers and records, in which the author may or may not have been the central figure, as opposed to autobiography, where the focus is on the development of the author’s self, the story of the author’s life, accompanied by

488   Torsa Ghosal the author’s reflection on formative experiences. In fictions, conventions associated with both these types of life writing have been remediated. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day (1988) comes closer to fictional autobiography, whereas the case study of this chapter, Still Life Las Vegas, is a fictional novel that resembles a memoir. The boundaries between these genres are fuzzy, and the generic distinction is not a key concern of this chapter. 4. See Gibbons for a detailed study of the poetics of multimodal literature. 5. Glaser explores the comics-style images that frame the different sections of the novel and emphasize interethnic relationships. 6. For an understanding of how representational articles worked in ancient Greek rituals, see Patera, who argues that in contemporary thought such practices of substitution are often assumed to be more rampant than they actually were. In this regard, Sie’s novel reflects modern theories about the use of substitutes in rituals. 7. Plato’s Phaedrus voices the anxiety that recording technologies may deteriorate memory and facilitate forgetting. Having entrusted the task of remembering to external media, one might more easily forget what has been recorded. However, such understanding of recording technologies undermines the extent to which biological cognition is entangled with recording media. As I argue in this chapter, Sie’s novel shows that comics and the process of memoir writing do not simply help recall but also actively shape what becomes memory.

Works Cited Ahmed, Maaheen, and Benoît Crucifix, editors. Comics Memory: Archives and Styles. Palgrave MacMillan, 2018. Anderson, M. C., and J. H. Neely. “Interference and Inhibition in Memory Retrieval.” Memory Handbook of Perception and Cognition, edited by E. L. Bjork and R. A. Bjork, Academic Press, 1996, pp. 237–313. Baddeley, Alan. “The Episodic Buffer: A New Component of Working Memory?” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 4, no. 11, 2000, pp. 417–423. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard, Hill and Wang, 1981. Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Translated by Richard Howard, Hill and Wang, 1977. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer, Macmillan, 1912. Connerton, Paul. “Seven Types of Forgetting.” The Spirit of Mourning. Cambridge UP, 2011, pp. 33–50. Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. Pantheon Books, 2000. Doubrovsky, Serge. Fils: Roman. Éditions Galilée, 1977. Ecker, Ullrich K. H., and Stephan Lewandowsky. “Computational Constraints in Cognitive Theories of Forgetting.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 3, art. 400, 2012, pp. 1–5. Eisner, Will. Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist. W. W. Norton, 2008. Erll, Astrid. Memory in Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Fludernik, Monika. The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction: The Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness. Routledge, 1993. Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Mariner Books, 2005.

Comics and the Multimodal Novel   489 Gibbons, Alison. Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature. Routledge, 2012. Gibson, Mel. Remembered Reading: Memory, Comics, and Post-War Constructions of British Girlhood. Leuven UP, 2015. Glaser, Jennifer. “Comics, Race, and the Political Project of Intermediality in Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel.” Comics Studies Here and Now, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, Routledge, 2018, pp. 69–89 Gudmundsdottir, Gunnthorunn. Representations of Forgetting in Life Writing and Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Heti, Sheila. Motherhood. Henry Holt, 2018. Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. Routledge, 1995. Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. Vintage Books, 1990. Labov, William. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. U of Pennsylvania P, 1972. Marrone, Daniel. Forging the Past: Seth and the Art of Memory. UP of Mississippi, 2016. Oberauer, K., and S. Lewandowsky. “Forgetting in Immediate Serial Recall: Decay, Temporal Distinctiveness or Interference?” Psychological Review 115, 2008, pp. 544–576. Ochs, Elinor, and Lisa Capps. Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Harvard UP, 2001. Partington, Heather Scott. “The Magic behind the Artifice: An Interview with James Sie, Author of Still Life Las Vegas.” Electric Literature, 2015. https://electricliterature.com/ the-magic-behind-the-artifice-an-interview-with-james-sie-author-of-still-life-las-vegasa04588509ca2. Patera, Ioanna. “Objects as Substitutes in Ancient Greek Ritual.” Religion in the Roman Empire, vol. 1, no. 2, 2015, pp. 181–200. Phelan, James. Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Cornell UP, 2005. Plato. The Allegory of the Cave. Translated by Benjamin Jowett, Enhanced Media, 2017. Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by James H. Nichols Jr., Cornell UP, 1998. Rawle, Graham. Woman’s World: A Novel. Counterpoint, 2008. Romero-Jódar, Andrés. The Trauma Graphic Novel. Routledge, 2017. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Tellability.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman et al., Routledge, 2005, pp. 589–591. Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination. 1940. Translated by Jonathan Webber, Routledge, 2004. Sie, James. Still Life Las Vegas: A Novel. Macmillan, 2015. Stockwell, Peter. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. Routledge, 2002. Tolmie, Jane. Drawing from Life: Memory and Subjectivity in Comic Art. UP of Mississippi, 2013. Underwood, B. J. “Interference and Forgetting.” Psychological Review 64, 1957, pp. 49–60. Winter, Jay. “Thinking about Silence.” Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century, edited by Efrat Ben-Ze’ev et al., Cambridge UP, 2010, pp. 3–31. Yamashita, Karen Tei. I Hotel. Coffee House Press, 2010.

chapter 28

My Favor ite Thi ng Is Monsters The Socially Engaged Graphic Novel as a Platform for Intersectional Feminism Dan Hassler-Forest

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (2017), the debut graphic novel by Emil Ferris, opens with an elaborate dream sequence. Karen Reyes, the ten-year-old Hispanic protagonist being raised by her single mother and older brother in working-class Chicago in 1968, vividly imagines herself transforming into an enormous werewolf. Both liberating and terrifying, her imaginary change is an experience that is simultaneously empowering and isolating: in a striking series of single- and double-page splash panels, we see her becoming strong enough to slay those who would harm her, while at the same time being pursued through the streets by an angry mob (see Figure 28.1). In a move that typifies both the book’s overall structure and the sensibility of its precocious narrator, the dream sequence cleverly incorporates and explains back to us the etymological roots of the word monster: “from the Latin word ‘monstrum’ which means ‘to show’ ” (Ferris);1 the word has a fundamental connection to revealing that which is hidden. Just as monsters in late-night horror films and cheap comic books give form to that which is invisible or, more commonly, deliberately repressed, so, too, does Karen’s embrace of the werewolf figure allow her to adopt an identity that makes her visible while also distinguishing her from what she calls the “M.O.B.,” her pithy acronym for the normative crowd that stands for “Mean, Ordinary & Boring” (see Figure 28.2). Easily one of the most acclaimed graphic novels of 2017 and a universally celebrated literary debut, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters arrived at a historical moment when a direct critical engagement with civil rights, gender, economic inequality, and the long shadow of twentieth-century fascism could hardly be more relevant. Blithely folding these themes into one another with almost uncanny creative ability, Ferris’s work reads in many ways like a textbook dramatization of the most basic tenets of intersectional

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Figure 28.1  The introductory dream sequence shows narrator Karen Reyes being liberated by her transformation into a monster.

feminism. So much so, in fact, that it might have appeared mechanical had the book not incorporated this critical and theoretical framework into such a gripping, immersive, and meticulously structured narrative. In this chapter, I will place My Favorite Thing Is Monsters in a longer tradition of comic books and graphic novels that reflect on and intervene in ongoing social, cultural, and political debates. While the book is radically intertextual, weaving in references to a large variety of cultural works from numerous media, I argue that it builds on three specific foundational works that have been particularly influential in the graphic novel’s relatively short history as a literary genre. The first of these intertexts is Art Spiegelman’s groundbreaking autobiographical Maus, which in many ways established the graphic novel as a literary genre that enjoyed some degree of cultural legitimacy by combining autobiography with an oral history of the Holocaust. The second is Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, which brings together the graphic autobiographical narrative of a queer woman’s family history with an intricately structured layering of references to modernist literature and the emphatic foregrounding of artworks’ ability to offer personal empowerment and a transformative broadening of personal, cultural, and political horizons. And finally, Marjane Satrapi’s two-volume autobiography Persepolis interweaves the confessional mode of graphic autobiography with a focus on ethnicity, cultural identity, ­religion, and social and political transformations. Without suggesting that these three foundational works are by any means the only influences on Ferris’s work as an author, my intertextual analysis of My Favorite Thing Is

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Figure 28.2  Karen’s visualization of the mob, or M.O.B.: mean, ordinary, and boring.

Monsters places it within a developing tradition of socially engaged production of the graphic novel as a cultural form. This chapter will show how our engagement with its narrative’s two main historical periods both builds on its literary forebears and at the same time revises our understanding of them by reading them through the prism of ­current social and political debates. Both aspects explicitly underline the importance of intersectional feminism as a way of thinking, a way of writing, and a way of engaging with history. But before this more elaborate discussion of the book’s powerful combination of intertextual and sociocultural engagement, I will first offer a brief introduction to the graphic novel’s subject matter and formal structure.

Form and Structure: The Diary of a Precocious Werewolf-Detective My Favorite Thing Is Monsters appeared from independent comics publisher Fantagraphics Books in May 2017. In physical form, the book approximates as closely as possible a reproduction of a collection of notebooks written and drawn by the fictional protagonist Karen Reyes. Following this spirit, the book’s prefatory material is reduced to an absolute minimum: the first page identifies Emil Ferris as author, alongside the book title and identifier “Book One,”2 and the publisher name all written down in the

My Favorite Thing is Monsters   493 mock-childish scrawl that represents the narrator’s handwriting throughout the book. The only other bibliographical information—still minimal in size and quantity—is relegated to the very last page. All other content between the two covers is designed to replicate the lined pages of a child’s spiral-bound notebook, while the spine has been made to resemble a pile of such notebooks, with the title hand-lettered across them as if with a marker pen. All the pages that make up the book proper consistently maintain this design: blue horizontal lines are visible across the background of every single page, and page numbering is absent throughout. This design aesthetic, applied consistently throughout My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, strengthens the book’s immersive recreation of its narrator’s point of view. Presenting itself to readers as a collection of private notebooks, the narrative’s confessional register is strengthened first by the design choices and second by the absence of consistently employed traditional comic-book panels. Again, as in a sketchbook, pages vary from full-page color drawings without any text whatsoever to long sections of handwritten prose interspersed with occasional sketches. While most of the book does indeed operate within Scott McCloud’s general definition of sequential art (9), Ferris takes a more flexible approach to page design than even Will Eisner’s famously “flamboyant” paneling work in A Contract with God and its sequels and successors (Witek 154). Nevertheless, Ferris’s consistent use of isolatable images accompanied by free-flowing prose text, as well as her frequent use of conventional text balloons, keeps the book conventionally readable by scanning the pages —roughly—from left to right and top to bottom. But while the book’s visual design might suggest a free-form collection of notes and drawings, the narrative is, in fact, rigorously and classically structured along recognizable genre lines. First, Karen’s autobiographical notebooks follow the familiar trajectory of the coming-of-age story, or the Bildungsroman (see Bakhtin). This aspect of the text portrays the environment of 1968 Chicago from an easily confused prepubescent girl’s limited point of view. Her autobiographical narrative focuses on her relationship with her working-class mother, her older brother, Deeze, her best (and only) friend, Sandy, and—later in the book—their black compatriot, Franklin. Many of these reflections involve her various recollections of visiting the Art Institute of Chicago, where her older brother has given her an impromptu education in art appreciation, art interpretation, and art history. Expanding and texturing the Bildungsroman through-line, these arthistorical digressions (organized around impressive and elaborate ink-and-pencil reproductions of many famous paintings) bring together the seemingly disparate spheres of high art and popular culture, as Karen also reproduces the garish covers of comic books with the same passion and craftsmanship she brings to her renditions of paintings by Seurat, Fuseli, and many others (see Figure 28.3). The plot’s forward movement is largely centered on Karen’s investigation into the death of an upstairs neighbor in her low-rent tenement building. Melancholy Holocaust survivor Anka Silverman (consistently rendered in impressionistic shades of blue) has been found dead in her bedroom, and while the police have somewhat indifferently ruled it a suicide, Karen’s pulp-fueled imagination prefers to render it a murder, thereby also providing herself with a specific role and generic identity that conspicuously allow

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Figure 28.3  An interpretive and transformative reproduction of high art: The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli.

her to evade the mystifying and traumatic circumstances of her own family history and social context. For as befits the Bildungsroman as a primary framework, the mystery of Anka’s death is ultimately intertwined with conflicts and tensions that exist within Karen’s domestic life, which must be addressed in order for her to transform her own sense of social, cultural, and sexual identity. Thus, while drawing herself as a self-created hybrid of werewolf and film noir private investigator, Karen’s investigation soon leads her to discover a set of audio tapes in which Anka recounts her life story to an unidentified interviewer who had visited her repeatedly six months prior to her death. This additional autobiographical tale makes up the second major plot of the book, as Anka’s stoic recollections of growing up as a Jewish girl in a bordello in 1930s Berlin intersect poignantly with Karen’s experience of being a working-class queer Latinx in 1968 Chicago. In its narration of emergent Nazism and one survivor’s harrowing flight from a genocidal regime, Anka’s autobiographical narrative focuses in particular on the community of sex workers among whom she grew up, and how her survival ultimately came about through her involuntary involvement in a covert pedophile network that included powerful figures in the ruling Nazi party. Paradoxically, the book’s visual depiction of Anka’s narrative is visually more detailed and conventionally “realistic” than the sequences set in the book’s present of 1968. Karen’s own narrative, with some notable exceptions, is more cartoonish in design as well as more sketchbook-like in style. The constant asides, flights of fancy, verbal and visual puns, and “unfinished” pictorial style give the Karen narrative an immediacy that

My Favorite Thing is Monsters   495 is strengthened by the book’s overall form, while the illustrations of Anka’s taperecorded recollections—which, by implication, are visualized entirely on the basis of Karen’s imagination—adopt an impressionistic realism that gives them both historical and emotional weight (see Figure 28.4). Thus, in a manner befitting the classical Bildungsroman and the larger structure of the frame narrative, Karen’s transparent attempts to evade her own questions about her own sexual, ethnic, and family identity end in a cathartic confrontation with those very things. Two key moments of catharsis and release bring together these diverse strands, first when an irate Deeze forces her to look at herself in the mirror, leading to the only image in the book in which Karen draws herself not as a cartoonish monster-detective but in a strikingly realistic rendition of a ten-year-old girl’s face in close-up (see Figure 28.5), and second when Karen comes out to her brother as queer directly on the following page. In this way, the embedded Anka narrative combines with Karen’s voyage of self-discovery to reach a point where the latter is able and willing to start merging her real identity with her imagined identity. But where the Bildungsroman has traditionally represented this kind of transformation and growth as an individual process of maturation, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters constructs this process as one enmeshed in social and political processes of overlapping, conflicting, and intersecting identities. In both main narratives, the challenges on the road to self-actualization and psychological growth are deeply connected to categories of gender (both narrators are cis-gendered women), ethnicity (Anka is a German woman of Jewish descent; Karen is the child of a Mexican father and a mother who

Figure 28.4  Visualizations of the Anka narrative combine expressionism with visual realism.

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Figure 28.5  The only page on which Karen draws herself as a girl rather than as a monster.

My Favorite Thing is Monsters   497 describes herself as “one half Irish from Appalachia and part Indian from . . . who knows where,” sexual identity (Anka is born into a brothel and forced as a child into becoming a sex worker; Karen is queer in a strongly homophobic domestic and cultural environment); and class (both Anka and Karen come from working-class backgrounds). Kimberlé Crenshaw articulates her concept of “intersectional feminism” so as to include an analysis of race if it hopes to express the aspirations of non­white women. Neither Black liberationist politics nor feminist theory can ignore the intersectional experiences of those whom the movements claim as their respective constituents. In order to include Black women, both movements must distance themselves from earlier approaches in which experiences are relevant only when they are related to certain clearly identifiable causes (for example, the oppression of Blacks is significant when based on race, of women when based on gender). The praxis of both should be centred on the life chances and life situations of people who should be cared about without regard to the source of their difficulties. (334)

In other words, while feminist theory collapses too easily into a critical framework that essentializes gender identity and in the process too easily excludes people of color, trans and intersex identities, and forms of patriarchal oppression grounded in socialeconomic class or migration, intersectional feminism is grounded in radical solidarity interweaving and connecting the many strands of identity within social systems of power. By identifying and connecting these multiple threads explicitly thought the fabric of her book, Ferris fleshes out each of these aspects within a fitting process of creative and transformative rewriting of specific elements drawn from three foundational intertextual forebears in the genre.

Rewriting Histories of Genocide: Maus as Foundational Intertext As I have described, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters combines a number of literary genres in ways that are both familiar and innovative. While the dominant structural framework remains that of the Bildungsroman, Ferris also incorporates the detective novel, Gothic horror, pulp fiction, the frame-story structure, and oral histories of the Holocaust as key elements within her eclectic and diverse but thematically unified vocabulary. Because she is working not in prose fiction but in the comics medium, her book is constructed in a way that also forges strong intertextual connections to earlier works in the medium that have in many ways defined the critical and scholarly reception of the graphic novel—most specifically as a cultural form that engages directly with questions of history, injustice, and social movements (Sabin 87–95). While one cannot reduce the complex cultural history of the graphic novel as a literary genre (let alone comics as a medium) to a small handful of influential titles, there are

498   Dan Hassler-Forest nevertheless a few specific works that stand out conspicuously in its deceptively short history, both in terms of their critical, public, and academic reception and in terms of their enduring and obvious influence on other works. And as Ferris’s book reflects in many ways on the social and cultural history of the late twentieth century and how to read it, she also builds upon the legacy of the key works that have also brought legitimacy and acclaim to the graphic novel as a literary form. First and most obvious among them is Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning comix work that changed many people’s perceptions about the medium’s cultural status and its creative, social, and artistic potential (Wright 254–280). The influence of Maus on My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is writ large throughout the book, embracing on the one hand Spiegelman’s formal strategy of estrangement in drawing all of his characters as all but indistinguishable animal characters (mice, cats, dogs, etc.) while on the other hand narrating a nonfictional (auto)biographical tale (Doherty 69). A similar strategy pervades the Karen sections of Ferris’s book, in which the visual representation of several key characters is highly cartoonish and obviously “unrealistic.” In these parts of the book, there is a noticeable spectrum along which the degree of detailed visual realism of various characters is organized. For instance, Karen’s close family members Deeze and Mom are consistently drawn without substantial ­cartoonish exaggeration, but other central characters, such as Sandy, Franklin, and— most crucially—Karen herself, are all depicted in a much less realistic mode. The Kentucky-born misfit Sandy is drawn as an emaciated, bug-eyed caricature; the largebodied, scarred, and silently dignified Franklin comes to resemble a black incarnation of Boris Karloff in the role of Frankenstein’s monster; and Karen herself, as mentioned above, is drawn as a pint-sized and most acutely unrealistic werewolf-detective hybrid, dressed appropriately but ridiculously in a fedora and a trench coat. Thus, by selectively giving readers access to some characters as realistic and textured while others remain hidden behind cartoonish depictions, the book’s character design choices strengthen and underline its central theme of learning self-love and self-acceptance, especially for female characters whose ethnicity, socioeconomic status, sexual identity, and/or physical appearance has made them social and political outcasts. The aforementioned cathartic moment where Deeze forces Karen to look at herself in the mirror and show readers the face behind the mask seems to pay specific homage to Spiegelman’s shattering coup de grâce, confronting readers with a reproduction of a photograph of the actual person whose horrific journey as an Auschwitz survivor has been represented from behind the relative safety of the virtual “mouse mask.” The second way in which Maus is a constantly felt presence in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is in its incorporation of the oral history of a Holocaust survivor’s narrative as a frame story within its larger narrative. As in Maus, the intergenerational impact of a ­fascist regime takes center stage, though in this case from one orphaned woman to another rather than from father to son.3 As in Maus, tape-recorded monologues documenting one survivor’s point of view are edited, visualized, and structured by a narrator who was not a witness to the events being described. Thus, the truly unimaginable and unrepresentable horror of the Holocaust can in both cases only be visually rendered by a creative and imaginative leap undertaken by a younger generation.

My Favorite Thing is Monsters   499 But while Spiegelman’s influence is especially palpable in the Anka sequences of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Ferris’s book at the same time builds on Maus rather than merely replicating it. Especially notable in Ferris’s approach are the consequences of centering both parts of her narrative on female protagonists. In the case of Anka’s recollected experiences of fascism, anti-Semitic persecution, and genocide, the foregrounding of the fate of sex workers in Nazi Germany illustrates painfully how some lives are regarded as more valuable than others, even in the historical accounting of the victims of genocide. As Anka resignedly intones: Of course when the history books tell of the groups murdered by the Nazis, they never list the prostitutes, because I’m sure the mention of their deaths is considered a stain on the other victims. The attitude is that the lives of prostitutes are worthless. I think it is self-hate. Our world hates anyone who would accept us and our bodies, and our secret desires without reservation. That is what the ladies taught me . . . to welcome disdained things.

The bordello where Anka grew up is presented to the reader as what Michel Foucault would describe as a “heterotopia of deviation,” a community of individuals who refuse to abide by the normative frameworks of behavior for their society and therefore must find refuge in shared spaces like this one (25). Anka’s narration, together with the artwork, emphasizes how these sex workers, themselves social outcasts, provided warmth and comfort to the many maimed and otherwise damaged men in post–World War I Berlin. Exchanges between the women in the brothel are narrated and depicted with affectionate tenderness, and Anka’s relationship with matron Sonja forms a vital sequence in her own coming-of-age story. At the same time, Anka’s memories of life among the sex workers in Berlin is neither sentimental nor one-sided. Even before the Nazis rose to power, it is abundantly clear that these women, inherently vulnerable due to their occupation and its low social status, exist only at the whim of a deeply sexist and patriarchal social and political order. In her portrait of this marginalized community of sex workers, Ferris finds a delicate balance between depicting them both as subjects with agency and as the victims first of societal misogyny, then of fascist genocide, and ultimately also of historiographers who have deemed them less worthy of sympathy as Holocaust victims. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters therefore both draws on Spiegelman’s seminal influence and also transforms his frame story of patriarchal legacy and filial guilt and anxiety into a narrative of intersectional feminism. The heterotopian community of sex workers elegantly illustrates how intersectionality is grounded and defined by conjoined threads of identity and oppression; lines of social class, sexual identity, ethnicity, systems of faith and belief, and legal status are just a few of the various threads of identity that bind this heterotopia of deviation together, while also making it vulnerable to abuse, exploitation, and—tragically—genocide. At the same time, the book’s feminist perspective is made all the more powerful by the complex ways in which Anka’s illustrated memories are interpreted, experienced, and mirrored by Karen’s character development.

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Fun Home: Queering the Bildungsroman This brings us to the second work whose influence seems to hover over My Favorite Thing Is Monsters and an author with whom Ferris is similarly in dialogue. Together with Maus, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, and perhaps Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is among the most widely read and critically celebrated works in the graphic-novel genre. And as one of the few canonical works of graphic fiction not only to have been authored by a woman but also to be itself an intervention that foregrounds sexual identity, literature, and reflective autobiography, it occupies a similarly unique position within this comics pantheon. As an intricately structured autobiographical Bildungsroman, Fun Home depicts the author’s own childhood and adolescence, organizing its larger narrative around the many tensions, mysteries, and similarities between the author’s own history as a queer woman and her father’s closeted identity as a gay man. Only learning about his sexual identity after a deeply ambiguous road accident abruptly ended his life, Bechdel, too, tells the story of a precocious and highly literate young teenager determined to solve the mystery of a death that may or may not have been self-inflicted. Describing growing up in a highly educated and deeply literary family in rural Pennsylvania and residing in a funeral home of which her father is the director (abbreviated by its ironically inclined inhabitants to the titular “fun home”), Bechdel’s book is as much about her own history as it is about her father’s, thereby sharing a great deal of thematic engagement with its own remarkable forebear Maus. As a work of graphic autobiography, or “life writing” (Smith and Watson 83–109), Fun Home is stubbornly nonchronological in the asynchronous unfolding of its narrative and thematic structure. While it is clearly organized around the intergenerational tension between a father and child who have more in common than first appears—again, like Maus—Bechdel’s book is as much about the transformative nature of art and literature as it is about the main subject’s coming-of-age story. The central role played by books and, more specifically, modernist literature reflects not just on the importance of literature and mythology to Bechdel’s personal development but also on how multiplying and overlapping interpretations of these works make both them and their role within her family more meaningful. Ferris’s deeply enmeshed dual narratives are both more linear and straightforward than Bechdel’s famously recursive “labyrinthine” approach, which simultaneously refers to and transforms the narrative forms and strategies of modernist literature that are featured, cited, and critiqued throughout the text (Freedman 126). At the same time, Bechdel’s austere visual style, with precise and regular panel grids framing a simplified and slightly cartoonish representation of an otherwise stable and realistically detailed environment,4 is far removed from Ferris’s heterogeneous collection of garish and cluttered notebook pages.

My Favorite Thing is Monsters   501 But besides the unmistakable generic trappings of the autobiographical Bildungsroman shared in different ways by all three foundational intertexts in this chapter, two specific creative choices connect My Favorite Thing Is Monsters more deeply to Fun Home, as well as to the critical framework of intersectional feminism. First, both books’ narrative and thematic trajectories are structured around trajectories of coming out and queer self-discovery, and in both cases, the narrator/protagonist sees aspects of her own development mirrored in the life story of a (real or symbolic) generational predecessor. Second, both books prominently feature an eclectic but hugely meaningful cross-section of artworks from both high and low culture, which are simultaneously reproduced and—literally—rewritten in the context of both books’ feminist perspectives. Starting, then, with Bechdel’s prominent theme of sexual self-discovery within the framework of the literary Bildungsroman, her book explores the tension between the author/narrator’s own memories of adolescence and the uncanny ways in which her own emerging sexual desires and her father’s reflect and invert each other: “Not only were we inverts, we were inversions of each other. While I was trying to compensate for something unmanly in him, he was attempting to express something feminine through me” (Bechdel 98). Fun Home’s central focus is on her fraught relationship with her eccentric and caring but also emotionally distant father, whose sudden death, by either a freak accident or suicide, has left this tension unresolved. The book is therefore in many ways a coming to terms with this filial relationship, made even more complicated by the posthumous revelation that her father was himself a closeted gay man—a disclosure that overshadowed and transformed her own coming out. Throughout her graphic memoir, Bechdel masterfully maps out the tension between the memoir as a nonfictional literary form on the one hand and the writerly impulse to embellish, interpret, and fictionalize on the basis of any number of cultural and literary tropes on the other. In the case of Fun Home, the constant references to classical mythology, fine arts and architecture, and—especially—modernist literature add ambiguous layers of meaning both to Bechdel’s own life writing and, inversely, back to the cited sources themselves. More than anything, the ways in which family dynamics are inextricably intertwined with the interpretation of cultural texts become a central motif throughout the book. Bechdel constantly compares her life, her surroundings, and her family members to literary and pop-cultural figures, from Henry James to The Addams Family, to illustrate how this cultural archive can be especially meaningful to those who feel excluded from normative society (Spiers 319–322). An all but identical strategy is used in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, where Karen’s omnivorous approach to the cultural resources she absorbs constantly infects and adds meaning to the notebooks that document her own life. While obviously dissimilar in visual style as well as in formal genre (fiction versus nonfiction), the two books also have in common that the text on nearly every page is driven by first-person prose rather than the more conventional type of sequential art usually employed in anglophone comic books and graphic novels. In both cases, the narrator’s first-person prose is the driving force for the narrative, while the images serve a predominantly illustrative function.

502   Dan Hassler-Forest While clearly essential to both books in any number of ways, there are remarkably few transitions between panels that could be described as linear narrative progression. Or, to put it more simply, while many comic-book narratives can be roughly followed and interpreted by “reading” the sequence of pictures, most panels in these books only make sense in combination with the text captions that accompany them. Scott McCloud famously introduced a basic taxonomy of types of transition between comics panels. This model makes categorical distinctions, for instance, between what he calls “subject-to-subject” transitions, in which two different images communicate narrative and temporal progression by showing different images that remain “within a scene or idea” (70), and “scene-to-scene” transitions, which move the narrative from one location to another. Quantifying these transitions in different ­comics genres and national traditions, McCloud concludes that the vast majority of mainstream American comics primarily feature “action-to-action” transition, in which panels picture a single subject engaged in consecutive actions, with far lower (though still substantial) numbers of subject-to-subject and scene-to-scene transitions. Fun Home, by contrast, features remarkably few action-to-action or subject-tosubject transitions, as the vast majority of panels visualize or otherwise complement the text captions directly above them. While both the Karen narrative and the Anka narrative in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters are organized into narrative structures that are certainly far more linear than the emphatically nonchronological Fun Home, we do find here as well that the first-person memoir is again accompanied by more of a reliance on scene-to-scene transitions than on either of the more commonly used categories of comics transitions. This is especially the case in the Anka narrative, which favors long stretches of first-person narrative, with only occasional sequences that are depicted in panel transitions that can be categorized as either action-to-action or subject-to-subject. This helps foreground the historical distance that accompanies Anka’s narrative, as well as underlining the idea that the visual content of the panels—including the voice balloons attributed to other characters—are all extrapolated by the narrator/author from Anka’s voice recordings. But while the Karen narrative begins similarly, with seventeen pages of introductory first-person narration illustrated by a striking sequence of scene-to-scene transitions, her frame story is dominated by the more customary action-to-action and subject-tosubject formations. Even without clearly defined rows of standard comic-book panels, the higher frequency of formal comic-book devices used for linear narrative progression brings a stronger sense of immediacy to the temporal “present” of Karen’s life writing, contrasting it deliberately with the oral history recounted through Anka’s tapes and subsequently dramatized in Karen’s notebooks. This ongoing juxtaposition ultimately strengthens the book’s thematic commitment to creative and sexual self-discovery. The pioneering work done by Bechdel, both in Fun Home and in her long-running comic strip series Dykes to Watch Out For, uses the comic-book form to create a space for representation of the LGBT community. The ­syndicated series in particular, which ran from 1983 until 2008, has been widely

My Favorite Thing is Monsters   503 c­ elebrated as an important cultural expression of the diversity within the American LGBT ­community, while the influence of Fun Home extends to and includes the Tony Award–winning stage adaptation that ran successfully on Broadway in 2015. Like Bechdel’s representation of her childhood self, Ferris’s semiautobiographical5 protagonist/narrator Karen is portrayed as an articulate, creative, and culturally omnivorous protagonist who struggles to find recognizable representation in the heteronormative culture that surrounds her. Just as Bechdel’s younger self finds early indications of her emerging sexual identity in her rejection of the “girlish” costumes her father repeatedly forces her to wear, Karen reaches for the monstrous, socially ostracized ­figures of pulp fiction to forge a fitting identity for herself. In both instances, the struggle these girls must face poignantly dramatizes the extent to which LGBT adolescents are forced to construct their sense of selfhood from the ground up. In both cases, the only models that are available to them are considered undesirable or even monstrous by the normative frameworks that surround them. For Bechdel, her recollection of catching a glimpse of a “bulldyke truck driver” while on a road trip with her father, along with his distasteful reaction (“Is that what you want to look like?”; Bechdel 118), provides the narrator with a rare vision of a possible identity that would sustain her through the years (119). In a similar way, we find in Ferris’s book that Karen is also pressured to perform her gender on the basis of normative femininity. She therefore embraces the freaks and monsters of comic books and horror movies as a way of constructing an identity for herself in the absence of LGBT representation or acceptance. Karen, too, finds herself resisting various kinds of social pressure to conform, and she, too, finds meaningful symbolic representation in visual arts and literary figures— though her socioeconomic background clearly makes some forms of culture more open and available to her than others. In the context of both books’ thematic motif of the struggles faced by LGBT adolescents to find appropriate identities and strategies of self-representation in an overwhelmingly heteronormative culture, the incorporation of other cultural works becomes more than mere citation. Just as Bechdel’s many playful incorporations of ­literary tropes and characters effectively perform the double gesture of reading and (re)writing, Ferris’s lavish pencil-and-ink reproductions of comic-book covers, movie monsters, and fine artworks constitute a transformative act of interpretation and appropriation (see Figure  28.6). For just as Bechdel’s references to characters from novels by Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Henry James help both her and her reader make dramatic sense of her own family life, they simultaneously cast new meaning on the texts she is quoting from. By the same token, Karen’s reproductions, visual analyses, and ­thematic interpretations of various narrative and nonnarrative artworks from high and low culture open up new meanings both for the character and for the reader. More than merely contributing to the book’s already-rich intertextual web, these transformative readings, reproductions, and appropriations ultimately underline the book’s basic connection between LGBT representation and the act of interpretation as an intersectional strategy for identity construction (see Figure 28.7).

504   Dan Hassler-Forest

Figure 28.6 Imaginative reproductions of comic-book and Gothic horror book covers ­complement the narrative throughout.

My Favorite Thing is Monsters   505

Figure 28.7  Franklin’s visit to the Art Institute is the best example of queer transformative readings of high art.

Persepolis: Race, Gender, and Migration The third graphic novel that this chapter draws on as a foundational intertext for My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Originally published in four French volumes between 2000 and 2003, the widely read English translation first appeared in two volumes in 2003 and 2004 (subtitled, respectively, The Story of a Childhood and The Story of a Return), followed by a successful film adaptation (codirected by Satrapi) in 2007 and then a single-volume book titled The Complete Persepolis (2007). While highly distinctive in structure and visual style, Satrapi’s work falls within the same generic framework as both Maus and Fun Home, using the graphic novel as an expressive form for autobiographical life writing. Like Spiegelman’s book, Persepolis gives readers a vivid personal history that documents the rise of a totalitarian and genocidal regime. And as with Bechdel’s consistent focus on issues of gender and sexual identity, Satrapi similarly uses her personal memoir to underline the specific ways in which the oppression and objectification of women are central to patriarchal authoritarianism. At the same time, Persepolis is also structured as a Bildungsroman in which a young woman’s coming of age is dramatized as a struggle to find meaningful representation for the construction of identity (Trousdale 241–243). While far more linear in structure than either Maus’s frame narrative or Fun Home’s recursive and labyrinthine patterning, Persepolis still largely follows the same formal

506   Dan Hassler-Forest pattern evident in those other works: an ongoing first-person prose narration provides the primary storytelling engine, with the visuals in the accompanying panels illustrating, dramatizing, or otherwise enhancing and complementing the written text. While the linear structure accommodates the use of more action-to-action and subject-tosubject transitions than in Fun Home’s overwhelming reliance on scene-to-scene sequencing, the scene-to-scene category remains the dominant one here as well—most notably in the many mini-narratives, historical reflections, religious and mythological fables, and stories recollected by other characters that constantly interrupt and enhance Satrapi’s ongoing life writing, and in the early episodes where the narrative relies ­primarily on the stories being told to a prepubescent narrator and less on the events she recalls from her own life in her teenage years. But while Persepolis clearly has formal, generic, and thematic parallels with both Maus and Fun Home, its focus on questions of ethnicity, migration, and class offers vital threads to My Favorite Thing Is Monsters’ tapestry of intersectional feminism. As a foundational intertext within the developing graphic-novel genre, Persepolis contributes a visual and narrative vocabulary for representing some of the challenges faced by migrant women of color in a globalizing world and where people of color (including those of Middle Eastern descent) are too often treated like second-class citizens. In Satrapi’s life writing, we follow her transformation from precocious only child of educated and privileged parents in prerevolutionary Tehran, through an adolescence spent mainly in Austrian boarding schools, to her return to her family in a nation transformed by the religious fundamentalism of an autocratic regime. The early episodes in the book paint an especially vivid portrait of public life undergoing enormous transformations as the struggle for hegemony between various groups opens up spaces for new conventions, structures, and social norms (Žižek 10). The many public protests against the corrupt and brutal regime of the Iranian shah are depicted as representing several highly diverse social and political groups, including Satrapi’s own upper-middle-class family and their desire for a more liberal, socially progressive, and democratic government. For a short time, at least, such change seems possible, as the crowd becomes not a single voice of a homogeneous people but the liberated chorus of a radically diverse multitude (see Hardt and Negri). But this doesn’t last long. As the fundamentalist Revolutionary Guard increasingly takes control of the multitudinous energy and violence comes to dominate public gatherings, hopes for a liberal and democratic transformation quickly dissipate. And while the new regime’s ascent to power is narrated in broad strokes by the protagonist, her firsthand account of changes in her own environment powerfully illustrate how the public sphere is affected by radical political change. Even more than under the shah’s corrupt and abusive government, the space for dissent, difference, and nonnormative behavior is increasingly policed not only by the police and other government-employed officials but also by opportunistic individuals eager to adapt to the new norms, codes, and practices. This resonates strongly with two key elements in Ferris’s book: first, the ways in which children experience political protest and eruptions of tension and conflict in the public sphere and, second, how gender and ethnicity are key categories of marginalization and

My Favorite Thing is Monsters   507 oppression in Western heteronormative societies. Starting with the representation of political protest in the public sphere, two specific elements in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters have striking similarities to Satrapi’s frightening depiction of Iran’s transformation into a fully totalitarian state. Most obviously, the Anka narrative’s depiction of how social relations were affected by the Nazis’ ascent to power emphasizes how political regimes become palpable at the level of daily life. In particular, the two pages in which Anka describes how “even the decent people” started treating Jews differently out of fear have marked similarities to Satrapi’s account of Iran’s fundamentalist regime (Satrapi 75). In Ferris’s book, Anka says: A lot of people were in a state of terror. They tried to be happy, have parties, play records, see their friends. But it was as if they were infected by a virus. Like fear was a virus. It passed from person to person. Like from a bite one to the other. The bitten became the biters. Parents were more silent in the presence of their children, fearing that their words against the Nazis might get repeated at school. People put their heads down and shuffled through their lives, hoping to escape the notice of the authorities, but that was nearly impossible.

In both cases, a child’s first-person perspective is used to illustrate how fascist and fundamentalist political movements thrive in a climate of fear, operating (though in wholly different cultural and historical contexts) through the deliberate and organized ostracization and othering of vulnerable groups, defined in both situations on the basis of intersections of gender, ethnicity, and religion. Moreover, a second and internal ­parallel is drawn within My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by having Karen encounter situations on the streets in 1968 Chicago where combinations of racism, sexism, and homophobia make her vulnerable to the attacks of moblike groups guided by heteronormative frameworks. Again, a similar thematic parallel is developed within Persepolis, as Satrapi’s experience of discrimination and social isolation in Austria reminds her repeatedly of the threats she experienced in her native Iran. Clearly, these parallels are not meant to suggest an equivalence between fundamentalist Iran and a liberal democracy such as Austria—just as anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany is not presented as the same thing as abusive mob behavior on the streets of 1960s Chicago. But both books use these parallels to emphasize how vulnerable any open society is to the kind of predatory and proto-­fascist group dynamic that these historical cases illustrate. Above all, they show how some groups are much more vulnerable to these political and cultural shifts than others: women, migrants, people of color, members of the LGBT community, sex workers, the working class, and those whose ideological or religious beliefs clash with the emerging order all repeatedly bear the brunt of this violence. Therefore, by drawing together these specific connecting threads from several ­foundational precursors, Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters forcefully establishes intersectional feminism as the only viable way forward. By visualizing and narrating the lived experiences of those whose various identities make them particularly vulnerable to symbolic, social, and/or physical violence, her work offers a model for thinking

508   Dan Hassler-Forest through the necessity of social movements that are fundamentally intersectional. Written and published in a historical context where far-right neo-fascist groups are once again on the rise, Ferris’s book draws effectively on its foundational graphic-novel forebears to illustrate how these movements thrive on the forms of hatred, fear, and indifference that impede the multitude’s inherent solidarity. The only answer to such threats to our most vulnerable groups and communities is a form of social consciousness that is not only explicitly feminist and anti-racist, but also and above all fully and truly intersectional.

Notes 1. The book has no page numbers. References to specific passages will be clarified in the text as accurately as possible in terms of their general location within the book. 2. A second book, unpublished at the time of this writing, has been announced as the final part of the series. But the first volume stands on its own as a coherent and complete literary work, regardless of what its successor may add. 3. Where Maus is strongly focused on the patriarchal continuity (and its constitutive tension) between father and son, fathers in both of Ferris’s narratives are conspicuously absent, leading the female narrators to construct alternative frameworks of support and community. 4. In interviews, Bechdel has explained how she went to great lengths to base her line drawings on photographic evidence, just as many key moments and close-ups are pencil-drawn reproductions of photographic, printed, or handwritten materials. 5. While the book is ostensibly a work of fiction, there are strong autobiographical elements throughout My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, including its setting in the author’s native city of Chicago in the period of her own childhood years, her multiethnic heritage, details of her artistic development and cultural interests, and so forth. See Tumey.

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism: Mikhail Bakhtin. Parasitic Ventures Press, 2007. Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Mariner Books, 2007. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “The Politics of Paradigms: Gender Difference and Gender Disadvantage.” Feminism and Politics, edited by Anne Phillips, Oxford UP, 1998, pp. 314–343. Doherty, Thomas. “Art Spiegelman’s Maus: Graphic Art and the Holocaust.” American Literature, vol. 68, no. 1, 1996, pp. 69–84. Ferris, Emil. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book One. Fantagraphics Books, 2017. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, 1986, pp. 22–27. Freedman, Ariela. “Drawing on Modernism in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 32, no. 4, 2009, pp. 125–140. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude. Penguin, 2005. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. Harper Perennial, 1993. Sabin, Roger. Adult Comics. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2010. Satrapi, Marjane. The Complete Persepolis. Pantheon, 2004.

My Favorite Thing is Monsters   509 Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. U of Minnesota P, 2001. Spiegelman, Art. Maus, A Survivor’s Tale I: My Father Bleeds History. Pantheon, 1986. Spiegelman, Art. Maus, A Survivor’s Tale II: And Here My Troubles Began. Pantheon, 1991. Spiers, Miriam Brown. “Daddy’s Little Girl: Multigenerational Queer Relationships in Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Studies in Comics, vol. 1, no. 2, 2010, pp. 315–335. Trousdale, Rachel. “A Female Prophet? Authority and Inheritance in Marjane Satrapi.” Drawing from Life: Memory and Subjectivity in Comic Art, edited by Jane Tolmie, UP of Mississippi, 2013, pp. 241–263. Tumey, Paul. “The Emil Ferris Interview: Monsters, Art, and Stories (Part 1).” The Comics Journal, 16 Feb. 2017, http://www.tcj.com/the-emil-ferris-interview-monsters-stories-andart-part-1. Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of Comics.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 52, no. 4, 2006, pp. 965–979. Witek, Joseph. “The Arrow and the Gird.” A Comics Studies Reader, edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, UP of Mississippi, 2009, pp. 149–156. Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Johns Hopkins UP, 2003. Žižek, Slavoj. Event: Philosophy in Transit. Penguin, 2014.

chapter 29

Pa per or Pl astic? M a ppi ng the Tr a nsm edi a l I n tersections of Comics a n d Action Figu r es Daniel F. Yezbick and Jonathan Alexandratos

As pioneering comics scholar Arthur Asa Berger argues, everyday objects such as toys, tools, automobiles, and action figures can enhance academic inquiry from just about every scholarly perspective relating to semiotics, narratology, material history, cultural studies, gender- and race-based identity theory, networked cultures of virtual remediation/transmedia, and, of course, the continuing exploration of the mutually satisfying intersections between creators, consumers, and commoditized materials (Berger 9). This chapter seeks to advance previous discussions of action-figure studies, especially as such toys relate to the forms, myths, and themes of comics. As we argue elsewhere, the action figure as a playable object is defined by five “interrelating contrasts”:

1. It must embody a branded or cross-marketed “spreadable” personality (often in spectacular fashion), as in the super-gendered Mattel Masters of the Universe, crypto-cybernetic Hasbro Transformers, or hyper-detailed Mcfarlane Spawn toy lines whose properties are featured across comics, TV, and films (Jenkins et al. 3).

Paper or Plastic?   511







2. It must encourage an ongoing serial continuity or expanded playable universe developed through successive waves of products and accessories, as every Batman line necessitates not only a Robin, Batgirl, Joker, Catwoman, or Harley Quinn but also renditions of the Batmobile, Wayne Manor, and the Bat Cave. 3. It must introduce some pleasurable interplay or cleverly constructed “toyetic” contrast between its static material representation or simulation of the property and some remarkable functionality, novelty, or continuity with a larger system of narrative, behavior, or belief. In other words, its textual design must satisfy users as a believable transmedial figure that encourages further personal action, ­private play, or engagement through or within the outside mother franchise.1 For instance, the “Auto Morphin” Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (1994) line of toys preserved a working resemblance to the TV show’s cast while offering ­consumers “Real Morphing Action” via the toy’s ability to flip between each Ranger’s masked and unmasked head.2 4. It must emphasize questions or connections of simulated verisimilitude, realism, “likeness,” and relationship on an exaggerated, usually diminutive, scale. In other words, the accuracy, style, and format of its replication should remain familiar yet thrilling or seductive. The nearly minuscule Lego mega-mini AntMan figure bears no resemblance at all to the more meticulously sculpted Marvel Select Ant-Man based on actor Paul Rudd’s likeness, yet its familiar squarish Lego design brings both commercial weight and transmedial identification to the object itself. Similarly, most bobbleheaded Funko Pop! designs bear only vague, impressionistic resemblance to the many transmedial personalities they embody. 5. It must appear conversant in larger cultural habits of collecting, completism, curating, or otherwise orchestrating pleasure, taste, value, and meaning. Hasbro and Mattel both participate in this by creating Build-a-Figure (BAF) or Collect and Connect toys, which are only completed if one acquires the disparate body parts circulated in a given series or “wave,” each of which contains patchwork pieces required to assemble the final figure (Alexandratos and Yezbick 103).

The action figure has revolutionized everyday habits and habitats of media production, distribution, and consumption. It has also completely absorbed and appropriated most traditional forms of toy development, doll design, franchise marketing, and, of course, popular taste, individualized fantasy, and private play. As roadshow comic conventions and local fan shows expand their base audiences, overhaul their attractions, and adopt more generalized and inclusive titles such as Wizard World and Pop Culture Con, the action figure articulates itself, figuratively and literally, at the apex of defining changes in the ways we conceive, sell, and perform fandom, identity, and happiness— especially in relation to what we call comics.

512   Daniel F. Yezbick and Jonathan Alexandratos

Of Wood, Rubber, China, and Chalk: Character Toys, Comic-Book Thrills, and the Prehistory of the Action Figure The action figure’s ancestors are vast.3 Our idolatry of miniature icons and diminutive effigies persists across human history, and the privileging, coveting, and personifying of “special” favored material objects can become intensely private (pens, teddy bears, baseball bats) and publicly compulsive (Pet Rocks, Beanie Babies, Pokemon cards).4 In 1912, the Kewpie doll emerged as a prominent, porcelain transmedial object, blooming Rose O’Neil’s 1909 comic strip into a toy (Van Patten). The collectability of early Kewpie dolls is immensely high, with originals signed by O’Neil carrying the heftiest price tags. Furthermore, as the dolls evolved from bisque porcelain to composition to, ultimately, vinyl in the 1950s, the doll embraced the plastic toyetic nature of which today’s Funko Pop!s are emblematic.5 Between the world wars, the first Western markets for twentieth-century newspaper comic strips and pamphlet comic books were built on industrial innovations involving pulp paper, high-speed color printing technologies, and streamlined newsstand distribution. Popular characters and scenarios were frequently cross-marketed back and forth between comics publishers and toy companies through interrelated puppets, dolls, statues, model kits, games, comics, albums, annuals, digests, and other material ephemera composed of paper, chalkware, rubber, or synthetic resins such as Leo Baekeland’s Bakelite.6 In this crucial interwar period, ur-figures like cheaply molded miniatures, dolls, and toys were first commercially wedded to comics and comic-strip properties in ways that would eventually revolutionize how both were consumed, ­collected, and conceived. Contemporary plastic action figures’ immediate origins lie in the post-WWII repurposing of synthetic materials and industrial processes from which they are traditionally assembled: the first waves of cheaply manufactured plastic toys in the late 1940s and early 1950s by Marx, Ideal, Aurora, Hartland, Playskool, and, of course, Hasbro and Mattel sparked later global networks of transnational manufacturing, shipping, and consumption devoted to the cost-efficient assembly of molded micro-bodies.7 Even in its pre-WWII crucible, the themes and features of the action figure evolved from interrelated design elements borrowed from dolls, miniatures, and automata.8 The results led to a defining shift away from rough-hewn rag dolls, homemade play pals, and fragile porcelain keepsakes to more uniform, mass-produced, brand-driven products. Such charmingly industrialized objects introduce two defining imperatives of the early action figure: (1) the wish to playfully personify, unite with, or otherwise animate an evocative branded product, tool, or thing and (2) the urge to expand, proliferate, or spread that blended persona and its toyetic appeal across multiple markets. Thus, ­ur-action texts are generally mass-produced, adamantly anthropomorphized, and meticulously copyrighted for concerns of quality, continuity, and profit. In many cases,

Paper or Plastic?   513 they also extend the reach or value of a preexisting concept remediated from storybooks, comics, animated shorts, radio serials, or feature films. At first, only a few comics concepts or characters arose to primacy in mainstream material culture. Well-known examples of comics-borne ur-figuration include the diversified advertising blitzes involving the aforementioned Kewpies, Palmer Cox’s Brownies, or Richard Outcault’s Yellow Kid and Buster Brown. More commonly, comics and figural toys were enlisted to promote an already established character, celebrity, or concept framed within other media. Historically, the making or becoming of an action figure would facilitate or cement the transmedial market success of a promising ­franchise or fad. This top-down proliferation of miniaturized variations reaches a notable zenith with the plentiful licensing of Walt Disney Mickey Mouse products. For example, the introduction of the first Ingersoll-Waterbury Mickey Mouse watch in 1933 and the arrival of Lionel Toys’ Disney-themed handcars in 1934 saved both companies from bankruptcy (Gluck; Gluck and Seastrom). The infusion of spreadable Disney-ness into a material product provided enough pleromic appeal to dominate competitors. Powered by marketing pioneer Kay Kamen’s lavish biennial merchandising catalogs, the imbuing of Disney magic within everyday consumer products helped define the commercial practices that would cross-market comics, action figures, and media entertainment for more than a century. Kamen’s innovative methods for soliciting Disney characters and concepts in the early 1930s provide a valuable case study in how preexisting characters bring competitive, potentially enthralling, commercial appeal to random products with the simple addition of a label, image, or name. Initiating a process that Alan Bryman has christened “thematic Disneyization,” Kamen strategically monetized all use of Disney iconography in such a way that just the suggestion of the studio’s characters gave the object special transmedial life and commercial promise (Bryman 3).9 In one of the earliest inklings of the action figure, Kamen’s licensing arrangements with George Borgfeldt ceramics foretold the marketing potential of multiple series or “waves” of diminutive Disney friends. Borgfeldt’s contract with the Disney Brothers had been reasonably successful before Kamen’s magic touch, but once he galvanized the licensing process to ensure that only high-quality, competitive products could bear the Disney brand, Borgfeldt expanded his line of miniature Disney bisques with incredible results. Ranging in size from 1.25-inch micro-statues to 6-inch miniatures and even a few 12-inch jumbo Mickey monoliths, Borgfeldt set loose a stampede of hundreds of different low-cost mini-Disney bisque figures that delighted children and adults from the early 1930s until World War II, when their Japanese supply chains became “complicated” (Tumbusch 12). Mickey Mouse figures of various sizes and genres made up about 70 percent of the Borgfeldt line, with multiple Minnies and Donalds following close behind. Borgfeldt also merchandised other characters from Disney’s Silly Symphonies shorts and later features including The Three Little Pigs and The Big Bad Wolf, Horace the Horse, Elmer the Elephant, and multiple deluxe sets that included Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the cast of Pinocchio, and Ferdinand the Bull. Frozen in charming, contented motion, these

514   Daniel F. Yezbick and Jonathan Alexandratos early, cheap, and enduring Disneyized objects almost beg for the articulation and flexibility provided by later sonic molding of disparate plastic appendages. Many figures play banjos, accordions, drums, and fiddles. Others are captains boats, paddling canoes, or riding bicycles, again emphasizing the urge to imagine or promote playful motion and meaningful toyetic function rooted in the material replication of animated behaviors. In fact, the Three Little Pigs and Snow White sets feature individual characters locked in silent signature postures. The sweet, self-effacing princess sings with her hands demurely folded. Doc raises his finger with professorial emphasis. The Big Bad Wolf slouches with his paws shoved sullenly into his overalls pockets. Ferdinand meditates peacefully on his haunches, flower in hoof. Like Kamen’s Disneyized makeover of Ingersoll watches and Lionel handcars, the Borgfeldt bisques trade continually on their clever, convenient reiteration of transmedial fantasies perpetuated via animated entertainments. Borgfeldt miniatures were hardly limited to Kamen’s Disney formulas. The company also developed boxed sets promoting other comics-bound characters. These included bisque series featuring personalities from George McManus’s Bringing Up Father comic strip, Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie, and G. E. Studdy’s popular British Bonzo the Dog, among others.10 Borgfeldt’s nearly forgotten material personifications of comicsbound personalities suggest that even before the later age of the action figure, readers, fans, and consumers sought out expansive tactile “unflattening” objects that could materially signify their beloved paper-bound playmates (Sousanis 37). Narrative objects and accessories such as Disney bisques, Captain Midnight decoder rings, and Lone Ranger masks were ancillary items, orbiting their transmedial mother narratives, but the ur-figure market also fostered the first reversals of such relationships. Early wooden, rubber, and cloth effigies of Krazy Kat, Popeye, Captain Marvel, and Superman began imbuing objects with the charm and power of comics-mediated ­personalities. Among such comics-themed pals and puppets, Ideal Toy’s 1940 Superman figure represents an underscrutinized watershed moment in the material culture of not only comic books but also the history of American children’s media. The Ideal Superman is not only the first licensed doll relating to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s genre-defining concept but also probably the first superhero-derived toy and, as some argue, the first example of the articulated template on which legions of later smaller plastic or resin action figures would be based (Matetsky 25). Still arresting in its design and zealously coveted by collectors and fans, Ideal’s 13-inch Superman doll had a wooden body, a composite head, and a cloth cape. “Released for the Christmas season after the first big marketing push for Superman over the summer of 1939,” it sold for ninety-four cents and quickly confirmed that Superman and other comic-book heroes, like Mickey Mouse, were ripe for exploitation in material toy ­markets (Theagenes). Ideal’s Superman appears early in Superman’s rise to prominence, arriving little more than a year after Action Comics in late spring/early summer of 1938.11 Superman’s own comic-book title had arisen by summer 1939, but the hit radio serial Adventures of Superman did not premiere on New York’s WOR until February 1941. The stylish Fleischer Studios animated shorts often credited with cementing Superman’s nationwide success would not begin until later that same year. Thus, Ideal’s Superman

Paper or Plastic?   515 doll arrived at a pivotal moment in Superman’s movement from comic-book feature to household name and probably facilitated the character’s rising popularity with audiences and consumers of all ages. The doll itself stylishly recreates Shuster’s streamlined modernist uniform as well as Kal-El’s chiseled features and sculpted physique. With twelve articulated ball joints, rounded hands and feet, and a separated trimmed fabric cape, it predicts many defining characteristics of later superhero designs, especially the influential Mego World’s Greatest Superheroes, Kenner Super Powers and Batman Adventures, and Toy Biz X-men lines of the later twentieth century. The Ideal Superman also represents a seminal shift toward the objective definition and inviting playability that would make the next phase of action-figure production even more energetically pleasing. With the switch from wood, rubber, and bisque to plastic, the first true action figures of the 1950s and 1960s would urge children to fashion intrepid new relationships with transmedial toys and comics alike.

Dress Your Own Adventure: Postwar Gender-Performing Toys The rise of post-WWII industrial plastics occurred in tandem with changing mid-century perspectives on leisure, play, and propriety. Not surprisingly, Cold War cultures privileged space-age innovations, and, as DuPont declared, “better things for better living through chemistry,” convenience, and conformity. Television and radio broadcast direct advertisements, and their “hidden persuaders” dictated status-oriented trends and consumer tastes, especially those related to domestic products such as toys, foods, fashions, and furnishings (Satterthwaite 51). From the 1950s through the 1970s, “a suburban sprawl dotted with shopping centers and malls, frequented by women and teenagers with money and freedom to spend was an American phenomenon” (Satterthwaite 58). “The retail world was leading and responding to this new consumerism,” as the chain toy store became a fixture in the shopping centers which gradually replaced rural dime stores and downtown department stores. Modernized, modish plastic models, dolls, and action figures—all designed to promote charismatic personality and “toyetic” interaction—would bring new narrative immediacy to the continuing consumerist pursuit of “play, fun, display, and pleasure” (Bell 70). Competition between brands and concepts was brutal. The history of America’s “toy wars” has been well told, though no single study has focused on how the era’s nascent action-figure culture emphasized a bold new mode of body-centered fantasy.12 Changing a toy’s clothes became an adventurous act of empowerment, experiment, and investigation. Not surprisingly then, mid-century action figures’ defining features usually provide transformative emphasis on switchable garments, faces, hairstyles, homes, occupations, and lifestyles. This more personalized, unfixed quality was largely derived from the stripping, swapping, mixing, and amassing of store-bought

516   Daniel F. Yezbick and Jonathan Alexandratos or homemade persona-shifting outfits, costumes, and uniforms. The acquisition and application of doll clothes had always been an element of normative girls’ play, but the urge to dress, decorate, and dramatize boys’ toys now also became a defining feature of action-figure functionality. Dress-driven action figures provided more options for identity-defining experiment, unsupervised exploration, and pleasurable exegesis than ever before. Multiple mid-century toy lines emphasized this playable feature, promoting mostly 10- to 12-inch action figures with supplemental outfits, accessories, and dressing or ­styling products “sold separately.” The tactile unpackaging, undressing, fondling, and changing of clothes, uniforms, and related elements of costume or couture on miniaturized adult bodies allowed curious children to customize or curate the patented features of branded personalities. Like mirrors or magnets of identity, Barbie and Midge, G.I. Joe and Captain Action, and their competitors encouraged daring exploration of adult ­bodies quite new to the history of children’s play.13 For better or worse, the invasion began with Mattel’s Barbie, a chic “bombshell,” based on Bild Lilli, a German “gentlemen’s” fetish toy inspired in turn by Reinhard Beuthien’s titillating pinup gag cartoons concerning the misadventures of a “post-war gold-digging buxom broad who got by in life seducing wealthy male suitors” (messynessy). Famously shepherded to market by Ruth Handler, Elliott Handler, and Jack Ryan, Barbie’s sleek, athletic form and jointed structure resemble Ideal’s wooden Superman, but her pliable plastic molding provides added softness, sensuality, and “playability.” Only her famously combable hair—a seminal and consistently controversial element of doll design—borrows from traditional forms. Everything else was freshly figurative and enticingly action-oriented when Barbie premiered in 1959. Retaliating against Mattel’s Barbie bonanza, Hasbro focused on dominating the boys’ market with its rugged G.I. Joe action figure arriving in 1964. With beards, dog tags, weapons, tools, and hardy adventure gear, Stan Weston’s design was an equally variable icon of intensely gendered role play. Like Barbie’s, G.I. Joe’s complex history has been well documented, but it’s worth emphasizing that the origins of the two most iconic action-figure lines of the twentieth century are not only rooted in the contexts of World War II but also keyed to emphatic narratives of sexual control and deadly conflict.14 They are both also linked closely to comics. Beyond Beuthien’s original Bild Lilli gag cartoons, Mattel also cross-marketed Barbie and Ken through a variety of titles including six Dell specials that ran between 1962 and 1964.15 Each issue featured glamorous photo covers depicting Mattel figures enjoying romantic outings involving weddings, beaches, air travel, sports, and formal balls. Ernie Pyle’s original G.I. Joe portraits of American soldiers were also illustrated or anthologized with work by the most celebrated cartoonists and illustrators of World War II, including Carol Johnson, Bill Mauldin, and Milton Caniff. Postwar comics also expanded on Pyle’s vivid dispatches lionizing the endurance of American rank-and-file GIs. Like Fawcett and Dell’s long-running Don Winslow of the Navy and DC’s Sgt. Rock (featured primarily in Our Army at War) series, Ziff-Davis developed its own Adventures of G.I. Joe title updating Pyle’s portraits of military heroism for the Korean War era in fifty-one issues between 1950 and 1957.16 The title featured dynamic painted covers by

Paper or Plastic?   517 celebrated adventure and Western pulp artist Norman Saunders and regular artwork by “golden age” journeymen Bob Powell and George Tuska. By the mid-1960s, Barbie and G.I. Joe had spawned numerous competitors, copy cats, and spin-offs, most of which were also cross-marketed in some form of comic, coloring book, activity collection, or related paper format.17 Among the most intriguing was Ideal’s 1966 Captain Action figure (first conceived as Captain Magic). Thomas Endres summarizes the figure’s special relationship to comics: Dressed in a blue and black leotard uniform, the Captain came with boots, a ­utility belt, lightning sword, ray gun, and his signature captain’s hat with an anchor crest. His chest was emblazoned with the Captain Action logo: the letters CA inside an inverted triangle formed by red, green, and yellow arrows. Of course, the magic is not in the uniform that he was wearing, but in the uniforms he could change into. (28)

The Captain Action concept blends the empowering quick-change elements of Superman’s heroic undergarments with Barbie’s adamant urge to style your own adventure. Rugged outdoorsmen like G.I. Joe, Action Jackson, and Matt Mason endured every form of extreme adventure, but Captain Action could impersonate other preexisting personas, including pulp and radio vigilantes such as the Green Hornet and the Lone Ranger (and Tonto); classic comic-strip heroes such as the Phantom, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and Steve Canyon; and even competing comic-book icons, including Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, Captain America, and Aquaman.18 Thanks to Ideal’s “costume agreements with Marvel, DC, and King Features,” kids could switch, mix, and merge branded identities using the basic Captain Action template and any number of purchased, shared, or borrowed suits and uniforms (Endres 29). Thus, Captain Action’s brand-blending functionality represents another wholly new framework for action-figure dynamics, a mutable mannequin or man-canvas that could embody competing licensed identities and their genre-specific scenarios. The results could stretch or defy conventional views on transmedial characters. For example, Captain Action’s Spider-Man ensemble—widely considered the first viable Spider-Man figure—included accessories such as a gas tank filled with “spider-venom spray,” a “spider-light,” and a “web sword” that were well beyond Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s popular concept (Ballmann 116). Such anomalies show how action-figure designs often build out from established orthodoxies of character to promote original playable moments of synergistic, performative make-believe. The Captain Action ­concept cleverly appropriated the appeal of multiple comic-book properties, but Ideal’s chameleon hero also enjoyed his own brief six-issue DC title with vivid design from Gil Kane and Wally Wood. Meanwhile, another upstart toy company arose in the 1970s to expand the commercial potential of Captain Action’s magic wardrobe to legendary heights (Bonavita 14). When Marty Abrams became president of his family’s toy enterprise in 1971, he recognized ­pop-culture properties’ underutilized potential as both playthings and collectibles. He also saw the benefits of working with cheap base materials and efficient assembly.

518   Daniel F. Yezbick and Jonathan Alexandratos Developing Mego’s slightly smaller, more cost-effective template, “the company patented a soft plastic 8" fully interchangeable jointed body that could easily change into an infinite number of characters” (Bonavita 15). Expanding Captain Action’s transformative capacities on an industrial level, Mego’s signature 8-inch male and female bodies offered infinite licensing potential, while “minimizing the company’s exposure to licensing failure” as it followed trends in film, TV, music, sports, and comics. With accurately sculpted interchangeable heads, “the basic Mego action figure body could assume any identity” as well as various ethnicities.19 Abrams quickly put his ­formula to work. Alongside Joe Namath, Muhammad Ali, Franz Beckenbauer, and the casts of Happy Days and The Dukes of Hazzard, Mego introduced its World’s Greatest Super Heroes (WGSH) line in 1972, featuring marquee male and female characters from both DC and Marvel. Produced in various waves until 1982, Mego’s action figures included heroes and villains alike and quickly came to represent the definitive comicbook-themed toys of their times, much like G.I. Joe and The Transformers in the 1980s and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in the 1990s. Major characters were effectively paired with supporting figures, including many crossmarketed through new animated TV series such as ABC’s Spider-Man and Super Friends. Mego capitalized especially well on reruns of the campy 20th-Century Fox Batman show with multiple iterations of the “Caped Crusader” and Robin, as well as Bat-Girl, Cat Woman, the Joker, the Penguin, and the Riddler. Spider-Man also faced off against the Green Goblin and the Lizard, while Mego also produced the first fully playable iterations of the complete Fantastic Four, as well as ornate interpretations of Iron Man, Thor, and Conan the Barbarian. Though Mego was probably not the first, Abrams also pioneered the development of special, parallel, franchise-specific lines of action figures. At first, Mego’s WGSH Superman and Supergirl only matched wits with a fairly blasé Mr. Myxzptlk, but once Richard Donner’s blockbuster Superman films arrived in 1978 and 1980, Abrams released a second oversized, franchise-specific 12-inch line featuring Lex Luthor, Jorel, Zod, and a variety of companion products including Fortress of Solitude and earthquake playsets. Eventually, children could choose between the standard 8-inch WGSH figure, the 12-inch Christopher Reeve Superman, or yet another, smaller, 3.25-inch Comic Action Heroes/Pocket Heroes (CAH) line, which more or less bridged the gap between Mego’s 12-inch action “dolls” with fabric clothes and later palm-sized Kenner Star Wars styles.20 Mego’s remediated figures also proved that enticing, interactively designed renditions of the bridge of the Enterprise, the Hall of Justice, the Bat Cave, the Wayne Foundation, and even a Hulk Hide-Away play cave could actuate the material trappings of consumer fantasy, especially those of children. Most importantly, Mego cared more for profit than for prejudice. In Abrams’s mad dash to corner celebrity action-figure markets, he ignored the Anglocentric traditions of Barbies and Joes. Though Barbie’s African-American friend, Christie, arrived from Mattel in 1968, it would take until 1988 for her to find her partner, Steven, and an actual black iteration of Barbie was not produced until 1979.21 Hasbro fared a bit better with an early African-American G.I. Joe in 1965, but neither predominantly Caucasian line had emphasized racial equality or multicultural diversity in any consistent way (“Action

Paper or Plastic?   519 Soldier”). What’s more, not a single superhero doll, figure, or miniature had yet been produced until Mego broke the super-action-figure color barrier with its pulp and superhero characters. These included a Latino figure based on Guy Williams’s Disney Zorro, a heroic and empowering rendition of Captain America’s companion the Falcon, and an intimidating Nubia, the Wonder Woman villainess portrayed by groundbreaking African-American model and actress Jayne Kennedy in the 1977 Lynda Carter TV adaptation for Mego’s oversized 12-inch line.22 Though these three—and a handful of other TV and sports-related figures—hardly constitute a serious commitment to acceptance or tolerance, Mego was mostly fearless in its use of characters and celebrities of color. As a result, the Falcon is likely the first fully fledged African-American hero brought to actionfigure form and, in terms of design, one of the company’s most engaging toyetic creations. More than either Mattel or Hasbro, Mego also broke new ground producing large numbers of both male and female figures marketed as equals rather than secondary partners or romantic interests. Previous efforts such as Ideal’s lavish Posin’ Doll Super Queens adaptations of Batgirl, Super Girl, Mera, and Wonder Woman had failed to find a sustainable audience in 1967, but Mego’s Super Gals series brought female heroes more effectively into the spotlight, not to mention its equally adamant production of other pop female stars and celebrities. If one sets aside the lens of the capitalistic cash grab, recent words from Marty Abrams reverberate through this history. When asked about Mego’s recent Target-exclusive comeback, Abrams said that they “did a rainbow [on the Mego logo] for a reason: we’re very inclusive!” (Alexandratos). Reflecting on Mego’s history as presented above, there are strong, consistent examples of this being true. From tricked-out soldiers to women of color, the 1960s and 1970s provided a fundamental phase of transmedial experiment and diversification for the ever-increasing bonds between comics and action figures. In the twenty years that followed, those connections would become increasingly diversified and conflicted.

The Play’s a Thing: Star Wars and High-Concept Franchise Toys Initiating an international merchandising storm of near-galactic scale, George Lucas’s Star Wars onslaught included not only film, television, and radio adaptations but also equally dynamic extensions and spin-offs in comics, pop music, gaming, clothes, cars, and, especially, action figures and toys (Brooker 5). Well into the twenty-first century, the iconic 3.75-inch, six-piece molded Star Wars figure become either the template, the opposition, or the antithesis of every figural toy line developed in tandem with highconcept media franchises. The variegated links between Star Wars figures and comics constitute a massive history of overlapping traditions, appropriated forms, and multimarket panoplies of “the collectible,” but Lucas’s Star Wars is far more vital to both comic-book and action-figure history than even the most ardent fan may realize.

520   Daniel F. Yezbick and Jonathan Alexandratos In some ways, Star Wars was born of comics, as well as Lucas’s passion for ’50s hot-rod culture, matinee serials, John Ford westerns, and World War II Air Force films. Han Solo, Lucas’s roguish maverick, was himself an amalgamation of elements drawn from Howard Chaykin’s space pirate, Cody Starbuck, found in the alternative-press anthology series Star Reach, and Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières’s bande dessinée epic, Valerian et Laureline. As a film, Star Wars is a pastiche of dozens of different sources and influences, ranging from Ford’s The Searchers to Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress. Han Solo especially is rooted deeply in the pulp and comics traditions of swashbuckling brigands, foxy outlaws, scrappy gunslingers, and roguish “good bad men” of dime novels and Hollywood Westerns. In terms of action-figure history, Harrison Ford’s smug performance of the character proved so popular—especially among children who gobbled up his Kenner effigies—that Lucas famously revised his plans for Solo’s death in The Empire Strikes Back. Thus, Han Solo might prove the first case of an action figure’s commercial success actually keeping its originating character alive within the mother narrative itself. The story comes full circle when we recognize that Star Wars itself helped to sustain the comics industry during the potentially disastrous market shifts of the mid-1980s. Long before the world became fixated on the Force, a desperate Marvel Comics found its sales in free fall, and began “creating relationships with Hollywood,” hoping for the same lucrative synergy that had galvanized Mego’s profits. Its efforts included licensing a six-issue adaptation of an obscure “upcoming science fiction film that was in production in Algeria” (Howe 193).23 Pop historians have since mythologized what followed: “the phenomenal success of the Star Wars movie translated into a sales bonanza for the tie-in comics, which went into multiple printings and pulled the company out of its immediate financial straits” (Howe 196). Marvel’s Star Wars comics eventually became a saga all their own, with unique characters and scenarios that continue to fascinate fans and scholars alike. The series lasted for an impressive 107 issues from 1977 to 1986, developed by a variety of notable creators including not only Thomas and Chaykin but also Walter Simonson, Steve Leialoha, Michael Golden, and past master of 1950s science-fiction comics Al Williamson. Like the Marvel series, Kenner’s landmark action figures brought the Star Wars merch-iverse to life for generations of American children, though Kenner remained a bit closer to the actual movie’s continuities in developing its influential core one hundred figures between 1979 and 1985. Comics and action figures were integral to Star Wars’ gargantuan Death Star of merchandising networks, and strangely, their success also spurred new transmedial marketing strategies at both Marvel and DC, where editors were not only avidly adapting new ensemble titles but also seeking out new lines of figures to promote: As a general rule of 1980s children’s comics, the tripartite cross-promotional strategy of launching a toy line in tandem with a television series and comic book title became de rigueur and before too long, rather desperate. Soon a host of television/ toy franchises took their shot at comics supremacy including Hasbro’s Inhumanoids, Schaper’s Animax, Remco’s Saga of Crystar, TOMY’s The Starriors, Coleco’s Sectaurs, Sunbow’s Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light, and DC’s Atari Force and M.A.S.K. try-outs.  (Yezbick, “Children’s Comics” 949)

Paper or Plastic?   521 Both publishers developed new titles meant to kick off action-figure lines that appropriated the most appealing aspects of Mego Comic Action Heroes and Kenner Star Wars toys. At DC, editors Jenette Kahn and Paul Levitz struck their own deal with Kenner “to produce action figures of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman,” and other favorite properties in this new smaller style. They even invited an aging Jack Kirby to develop a cross-promotional title for these upgraded effigies of familiar heroes, while simultaneously resuscitating and completing his edgy Fourth World concept. Kirby had recognized some of his own ideas in Lucas’s intergalactic cash cow, and feuding with Marvel, he agreed to work on the brief but bold Super Powers title, which, in turn, introduced the era’s definitive DC superhero action figures (Howe 263). With DC and Kenner united in spreadable toyetic bliss, Marvel retaliated by teaming with Mattel to devise a competing transmedial concept that would have surprising influence in years to come. Unlike Kenner’s inventive Super Powers toys, Marvel/Mattel’s Secret Wars figures were stiff and uninspired. Their Captain America even lacked a suitable shield. Thus, both Super Powers and Secret Wars were born of complex agreements between toy and comics rivals, and they yielded somewhat opposite results. Marvel’s Jim Shooter and Mike Zeck went to work on Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars, a still divisive twelve-issue battle royale that permanently altered several elements of Marvel Comics continuity, introduced the first inklings of the Venom parasite saga with Spider-Man’s “new black hightech costume,” and competed with DC’s more multivalent Crisis on Infinite Earths, helmed by Marv Wolfman and George Perez (Howe 264). The title would influence Marvel continuity for decades, but its attendant figures were a toyetically toxic flop. Meanwhile, DC’s Super Powers toys were a commercial triumph, with several waves and accessories continuing throughout the early 1990s. Kirby’s Super Powers title—though characteristically brash and beautiful—did little of note for the future of either comics or toys, yet both series proved that post–Star Wars comics, toys, and entertainment media were now indelibly fused into a tantalizing triumvirate of design and desire. At Marvel, DC, Comico, First, Eclipse, and other publishers, new Star Wars–flavored concepts were developed in-house or imported from Japan, to emphasize science-fiction and cybernetic themes that mirrored or magnified Lucas’s cosmic fetishizing of speed, machines, and violence. Concepts such as G-Force, Micronauts, Robotech, Voltron, Transformers, Rom, and Gobots were developed across a variety of supporting media frameworks, including animated TV series, comics, toys, and even nascent video-game products. Some, such as Micronauts, Rom, Transformers, and Robotech, would inspire substantial comic-book narratives with rich aesthetics that went boldly beyond clunky toy concepts. This is especially true of Rom, a still underrecognized Marvel epic with moments of elegant mythic splendor provided by Steve Ditko, P. Craig Russell, Jim Starlin, Mike Zeck, and Bill Sienkiewicz. Rom’s seventy-five-issue run took its concept light years beyond its stiff Parker Brothers toy design, but several other titles more successfully built brand-driven backstory into a variety of action-figure lines, prominent and obscure. The other two masterpieces of 1980s synergy between toys, TV, and comics are Hasbro’s revival of G.I. Joe and its retconned Japanese Transformers brands. Each stands

522   Daniel F. Yezbick and Jonathan Alexandratos “as a seminal site of the fusion of entertainment and toy industries,” where “an action figure line” was promoted via “hypercommercial campaigns” involving “a wildly ­ ­successful comic book series published by Marvel comics and a cartoon television series . . . both in the service of Hasbro’s advertising ambitions” (Stevens 39). The new hyper-patriotic, inherently diverse, techno-militant G.I.  Joe figures were exciting on their own, but much of their appeal arose from Larry Hama’s worldbuilding in his now celebrated Marvel Comics title between 1982 and 1994. Hama’s fresh vision was so seminal to the new G.I. Joe’s success that he developed the enticing dossier copy on each figure’s packaging. Fellow Marvel scribe Bob Bundiansky spun complex backstories for each of Hasbro’s Transformers using another series of successful Marvel titles that continued well into the 1990s. As the 1980s ended, Star Wars, Super Powers, and Secret Wars had each built new Cold War conflict into older comic-book ideas. Each brand was also based on or borrowed by media discourse surrounding more serious postnuclear issues. Meanwhile, special-ops Joes and alien robots in disguise fascinated children of all backgrounds with their stunning toyetic statements about technology, terrorism, and transformative times.

Redub Revolution: Action-Figured Comics and Toys in the 1990s The following decade produced such a massive quantity of action figures of every ­conceivable genre that the first several pages of Google search results for “1990s action ­figures” yield almost exclusively clickbait titles such as “15 1990s Toys You Might Not Remember” and “Action Figures from the ’90s Worth a Fortune Today.” Their themes raise significant questions about the tremendous cultural baggage of the era’s overproduced, transmedial toys. Their answers further demonstrate how the interdependent lifelines between toys and comics were made ever more intimate and insistent on the cusp of the next millennium. The most influential creator of the 1990s—and arguably the first true auteur of comicbook action figures—is Todd McFarlane. After developing profitable landmark reboots of Marvel’s Hulk and Spider-Man, he and other celebrity artists founded the massively successful Image Comics, where rock-star talents churned out frenetic, creator-owned concepts then unheard of in mainstream American comic books. To cross-market his intense aesthetics—which propelled titles like Spawn, Violator, and Angela to incredible sales figures—the most innovative action-figure impresario since Marty Abrams shunned the formulaic templates of potential partner Mattel and founded McFarlane Toys in 1994. Originally keyed closely to Image’s Spawn characters, McFarlane Toys was devoted to “hyper-detail, articulation, and accessories to a level we’d rarely seen before” (Moore). Throughout the following decades, the company produced ornate fantasy fetishes “tied to film, music, and gaming,” as well as comics and TV. Devoted to intricately

Paper or Plastic?   523 detailed replications of mega-bodies of all sorts, McFarlane products have remained as “­incredibly diverse” as they are obsessively detailed. They also brought action-figure culture into previously unexplored contexts and territories: McFarlane nailed down official licenses which were up for grabs with four North American sports including football, basketball, baseball, and hockey. Broadening the base even more, the company would take on KISS, Shrek, X-Files, Austin Powers, Metal Gear Solid, Clive Barker, Akira, the Beatles, Army of Darkness, Jaws, Rob Zombie, Alien, Predator, AC/DC, the WWE, and more as they continued to ramp up production and design to meet demand. (Moore)

McFarlane’s transmedial licensing helped make action figures a more familiar component of numerous fan cultures, especially those populated by adult professionals. Some of its more expensive prestige figures were deliberately outside the interests and budgets of children, teens, and even some “grown-ups.” Yet McFarlane’s influence also exacerbated persistent problems of identity politics within the action-figure industry. First, McFarlane toys, though undeniably elaborate and realistic, generally lack toyetic interactive ingenuity. Derived of “more art, and less matter,” they are truly overdetermined signifiers of commercial spectacle and commodified nostalgia. Primarily sculptural or even effigial in their address, they rarely provide any interactive playability or kinetic resonance. Like so many Image genre comics of the era, McFarlane Toys are commodified statements of brash but shallow style, lacking the narrative depth or adventurous empowerment that got generations of kids excited for Mattel’s Barbie, Mego’s Superman, or Kenner’s Han Solo. McFarlane’s lavish designs also trend toward the obsessively decadent, introducing perverse themes of erotic objectification and blatant misogyny into a genre of objects historically associated with children’s leisure. The success of some of McFarlane’s more risqué toy lines also encouraged copycats and competitors who contributed to the 1990s’ trashy tsunami of buxom fetish dolls and salacious succubae so oversexed and underdressed that they would make even Beuthien’s frisky Darling Lilli blush (Barish). Fashion, gender, and fantasy have always been fundamental elements of action-figure design, but McFarlane Toys—despite its feats of articulated artistry—generally replaced pleromic playfulness with indulgent detail. Meanwhile, a more resonant narrative shift was taking place in the creative interrelationship between comics and toys. Select 1990s toys literalized the bond between comics and toys via the use of minicomics. Kenner’s 1992 Aliens toys included a rolled-up minicomic that put TwentiethCentury Fox’s R-rated source material into more G-rated contexts. With parents in an uproar over McDonald’s semigraphic Batman Returns Happy Meal toys, Kenner may have avoided a publicity debacle by using comics to reframe a narrative technically restricted to anyone younger than seventeen. The “Ages 4 and Up” crowd coveted their Aliens toy minicomics. He-Man’s 1984 action figures also included minicomics, but to a different end. In Mattel’s He-Man line, the comics didn’t revise an existing narrative but established the product’s all-original mythology. The 1990s Aliens minicomics had the added appeal of giving kids access to a story outside the more disturbing blend of ­science

524   Daniel F. Yezbick and Jonathan Alexandratos fiction and horror that defined the Fox film franchise. Minicomics featuring He-Man, Atari Force, and Starriors, though popularized by the 1980s, were already fading by the 1990s. Soon comics would blend much more differently and dynamically with liveaction kids’ TV imported from Japan. If the 1980s gave American children imported and redubbed media, à la cartoons such as Robotech, Voltron, and Transformers (based on an amalgamation of Japanesebrands), the 1990s catalyzed this process through Saban Entertainment’s purchasing and revising of live-action Japanese TV shows, manga, and merchandise to turn them into “new” American programs, comics, and toys. Among their most successful examples is 1993’s Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (MMPR). A product of Saban’s acquisition of Toei’s Kyōryū Sentai Jūrenjā, a Japanese-legacy children’s program about a team of “Dinosaur Squadron Beast Rangers” who fought evil monsters, the general concept remained the same in MMPR, but English-speaking actors were cast to create new scenes set at Angel Grove High School. This made the show less about myth and more about growing up as an American “teenager with attitude” and superpowers. MMPR was an immediate hit, quickly spawning numerous toys, comics, and psychological analyses of the effects of its hyperviolent content on young minds. Throughout the mid- to late 1990s, four comic-book houses—Hamilton, Marvel, Image, and Acclaim—tried their hands at Power Rangers titles, all with the same shortlived results. The transmedial synergies of Transformers and G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero oscillated seamlessly between page and screen, but live-action shows such as MMPR could not replicate their “look” in comics’ panels and splash pages. Furthermore, MMPR did not need comic-book sales as a financial buoy when its toys were flying off the shelves at Toys “R” Us and its production costs were kept relatively low with preshot footage cribbed from Japanese sources.24 Even MMPR’s toy packaging rejected animation. While G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and X-Men action figures of the era coated their toy cards in the art of Larry Hama, Joe King, Jim Lee, and others, MMPR toys demanded that consumers look at the physical product wherever possible.25 The only exception was the small, realistically painted icon of the Power Rangers team that appeared at the tops of MMPR toy boxes. Beyond that, photography was used to realistically show the looks, functionalities, and character source material of the toys. On Bandai’s 1993 doll-sized “Jason, the Red Ranger” toy, the triangular box featured a series of five photographs that showed the character morphing from Austin St. John’s Jason to the Red Ranger and then finally into, bafflingly, an eerily photorealistic Tyrannosaurus rex.26 Here the box uses a sequence of fantastical comics panels, yet there is an insistence that these images are “real.” This remediation of comic-book narrative allows the action figure to fill a role once occupied by tie-in comics. Other MMPR toys used action-figure photography to create more concise sequences. The “Auto Morphin” MMPR standard-sized action figures featured a “head-flip” function that was read through one panel on the toys’ cards in which a photograph of the masked head of the action figure was superimposed over the unmasked head, giving the unmistakable impression that the toy’s action feature had the ability to alternate between

Paper or Plastic?   525 identities. Such “Auto Morphin” toys did use sparsity in their iconic packaging, but, unlike in a comic, the goal was not to “inject” a reader into the narrative. The readers were simply told the type of story they could generate with this toy and its action feature via such a panel. The “injection” was retroactive, when the consumer got home, tore open the package, and made the Red Ranger flip from Angel Grove high schooler to superhero to save the toy box from whatever plastic threat was headed its way. This was the “delayed injection” promised by a singular toyetic panel on an action-figure package: you won’t get a narrative now, but when you get home, you can conjure up whatever kind you want. You did not need to “read” a comic; you could make up the story for yourself. In this sense, MMPR toys did apply comic-book narrative forms. They implied that narrative did not need a published platform on which to occur; it could spread across shelves, floors, playgrounds, and anywhere else a 6-inch plastic body could travel. If an “Auto Morphin” MMPR toy could do so much in just one panel on the side of the package, imagine what the toy could do when freed from its bubble and let loose by one’s imagination. The shattering success of MMPR gave Saban carte blanche to crank out more redubbed and remediated Japanese TV. It also allowed Bandai to continue its domination of toy aisles, stocking stores with merchandise for its shows. Though not the most popular of Saban’s endeavors, Big Bad Beetleborgs (Juukou B-Fighter and B-Fighter Kabuto in Japan) and the toys that followed represent another tectonic shift in the relationship between 1990s toys and comics. In the show, two siblings and their friend find a haunted house. After breaking in, they meet Flabber, a magical ghost who allows the kids one wish. They ask to become real-life versions of their favorite comic-book superheroes, the Big Bad Beetleborgs, large, cybernetic, humanoid beetles with the ability to summon arsenals of ships and weapons to fight off the Magnavores, antagonists from the comic book led by Vexor, who had the ability to bring forth new monsters week after week. Flabber grants this wish. The triad of friends, their benefactor, and other residents of the haunted mansion all resemble iconic Universal horror monsters who, themselves, have continually populated the pages of comic books since the 1940s. As the kids fight off Vexor’s monsters, they eventually meet the creator of the Big Bad Beetleborgs comic book, Art Fortunes. He uses his role as a comics artist to create new allies for the Beetleborgs. They then have positive real-world effects as everything from Fortunes’s comics has become “real.” Big Bad Beetleborgs ropes in comic-book storytelling in a way few, if any, other shows have. The concept even shares its title with the in-universe comic book that gives the protagonists their alternative identities. In so doing, the show both elevates and eliminates the comic book’s self-reflexive role within its narrative. As a result, Big Bad Beetleborgs uses the language of comics without ever using an actual comic.27 The ­creators of the resulting toys recognized this shift using very little comic-book mimesis in their packaging. Big Bad Beetleborgs action figures featured purple-and-black cards that bore only team photographs. Occasionally, on later products such as the Hillcrest Manor playset, comic-book illustration and call-outs were employed, but this only came after the first few waves of figures made no significant gestures toward the show’s comic-book-driven continuity.

526   Daniel F. Yezbick and Jonathan Alexandratos Yet within the franchise narrative, comics are everything. They give the heroes their powers. They, in part, inform our knowledge of haunted Hillcrest’s other residents. They supply the show with one of its most amusing personalities, the comic-book creator himself. Even if viewers never truly see the comic, it comes alive through the actions on the show. In this sense, each episode, and every toy, begs the question, why read when you can watch? The comic book is the show, and that negates the need for any actual ­promotional comic. This is a far cry from He-Man or Aliens, where one of each figure’s most compelling components is its minicomic. Big Bad Beetleborgs literalized a key ­element of Saban’s process: the days of comics being easier to produce than TV were over, and TV could, by then, get distributed as quickly as toys were released. In the fully deregulated 1990s, comic books were no longer needed to do TV’s commercial work. Compelling television and toys were already plentiful a continent away; they just needed to get Sabanized for US markets. By relegating comics to the status of a religious text, often referred to but rarely read, Big Bad Beetleborgs exemplified the 1990s’ transmedial relationships between TV, toys, and comics. Comics were respected forefathers but no longer necessities for success. This would change only much later, as nostalgia-driven adult fans looked back at their old favorites through comics, the only medium with the power to revive ’90s MMPR characters twenty-five years after the fact.

Retro Paradiso: New Forms, Global Markets, and Variant Futures In his 2017 essay “The True Meaning of Nostalgia,” Michael Chabon writes: Nostalgia, most truly and most meaningfully, is the emotional experience—always momentary, always fragile—of having what you lost or never had, of seeing what you missed seeing, of meeting the people you missed knowing. . . . It’s the feeling that overcomes you when some minor vanished beauty of the world is momentarily restored, whether summoned by art or by the accidental enchantment of a painted advertisement for Sen-Sen, say, or Bromo-Seltzer, hidden for decades, then ­suddenly revealed on a brick wall when a neighboring building is torn down. (par. 12) Chabon’s comics-inspired, nostalgia-drenched novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay further explores how reminiscence applies to the superheroes and comic books so many kids chased in their formative years. Chabon’s image of the “brick wall” covering up the phantom signage thought lost to time can easily apply to a particular comic quickly covered up by the following Wednesday’s wave of new releases, and then the next week’s, and then the following month’s. Sifting through longboxes at conventions in search of that one issue is akin to tearing down the building that obstructs the Sen-Sen ad. One pursues nostalgic experience by removing layers of time. Current action-figure and comics cultures that reveal such ­pursuits are often all-consuming and ultimately reductive.

Paper or Plastic?   527 For better or worse, comics and toy companies know this, too. They underwrite and abet nostalgia-seeking collectors’ quests through rereleases, reprints, and reboots. They know well how to capitalize on the wall covering Chabon’s Sen-Sen, and they offer, for a fee, to help us tear it down. Certainly, some connoisseurs still seek the rare and costly original toy or comic or fetish, but for most, the allure of the pristine simulacral copy of past copies, neatly boxed and beautified, seems irresistible. Toy Biz proved exactly this when, in 2002, it released its first wave of iconic Marvel Legends action figures. Each 6-inch, highly articulated figure came with a reprint of a rare or “important” comic book thematically connected to the character. Captain America, part of wave 1, came with Captain America #109, “The Origin of Captain America,” a milestone “key” book that generally sold for around $60.00 in eBay markets. The Marvel Legends reprint figure/comic package retailed at around $8.99 in 2002. X-Men’s Toad, also in the first wave, came with the incredibly scarce Uncanny X-Men #4. A severely damaged copy today can fetch well more than $300. Such pleromic “toys” function as totems, designed to appeal not to kids but to collectors, some of whom admit their nostalgic connection to older styles and stories of classic or retro Marvel material. When the current transmedial Marvel Cinematic Universe was in its infancy and the new black-suited X-Men were first taking to the big screen—effectively transforming the team into a sleek band of franchise-ready twenty-first-century heroes—Toy Biz was ready with another line of “classic” figure/comic combo packages, preserving, in both paper and plastic, “the way it used to be,” allowing nostalgic fans easy access to pre–Ray Park Toads or non–Eric Bana Hulks. Toy Biz knew its millennial figures were selling nostalgia rather than history. In 2006, the toy company made a Luke Cage action figure and packaged it, understandably, with Hero for Hire #1. Archie Goodwin’s 1972 story gave readers an unconventional hero, one whose race sentenced him to an origin more violent and ambivalent than that of many white heroes. John Romita’s cover for Hero for Hire #1 places Luke Cage, fight-ready, on the verge of breaking out of a blood-red background that taunts him with racist cops, ghettoized gambling, and seedy street references. The issue’s first page is emblazoned with the words “Out of Hell—a Hero!” proclaiming that this particular superhuman has risen out of absolutely evil depths. The original comic pushes back against squeakyclean and consistently Anglo superhero types, allowing Cage’s first appearance to introduce the vocabulary of difference, prejudice, and criminality. When Toy Biz issued the 2006 remediation with their Luke Cage action figure, it stripped the cover of any reference to violence, depicting Cage as lunging alone against a red background. Inside the comic, the first page now reads, “Out of Harlem—a Hero!” As Tracy Bealer observes, “Significantly, the reprints of the issue substitute ‘Harlem’ for ‘Hell,’ simultaneously ­softening the character (he is no demon), but also revealing the telling semantic slippage between the popular image of a black neighborhood and a mythological realm ­epitomized by evil and punishment” (172). Bealer finds two crucial values in this substitution: a toning down of the bluntness of the original and the ease with which one replaces “hell” with the name of a predominantly black neighborhood. Bealer’s first meaning carries the most weight here, when the analysis turns to a toy company’s ­opportunistic reconstruction of its strategically edited past.

528   Daniel F. Yezbick and Jonathan Alexandratos Toy Biz softens the sharp edges of Luke Cage’s seedy Bronze Age premiere, rewriting the character’s origins at the same time as the action figure memorializes and sanctifies them. This makes Toy Biz/Marvel especially unreliable historians but strangely equitable nostalgia merchants. Just as Happy Days focused on idealized All American 1950s milkshakes and diners for a 1970s audience, Toy Biz made a conscious decision to sanitize the more disconcerting facets of Luke Cage’s originating text. Those who may have remembered Hero for Hire #1 might find Toy Biz’s version of the story accurate enough and, once it’s accepted, could just as well find any extreme language surrounding Cage inappropriate or inconsistent with his current politically correct status as a proud African-American hero, when, of course, the actual extremes were every bit as much a part of Goodwin’s initial blaxploitation-driven vision. Toy Biz cashed in on collectors’ nostalgia for allegedly “classic” versions of Marvel heroes. When those versions did not fit the kid-friendly requirements of a toy company, they were altered to blend more seamlessly into the plastic playground of declawed wrestlers and earnest hobbits. Such sanitization constitutes the identity of Toy Biz products. This process also inherently privileges toys over comics, as it demonstrates how Marvel will alter its own comic-book milieu to better suit the marketing agendas of a toy line. It completes the 1990s transition where the comics that sold toys were swapped for toys that either included bonus comics or used the language of comics to sell themselves. When Hasbro took over the license for Marvel Legends action figures in 2007, it dropped the comic-book reprints. By then, even the nod to an original context for the action figure was deemed unnecessary. Soon after, Funko began its ascent to market dominance, building an entire company around the sale of homogeneously designed, character-only collectibles. Funko banks on the appeal of iconic, bygone packaging that they recreate and characters, comic book and otherwise, whom they can represent as Pop!s, often ­frozen in poses that recall iconic scenes from films or books as well as the stilled Borgfeldt bisques of the prefigure era. To Funko, a 4-inch Pop! bobblehead of SpiderMan will sell just fine without the context of Amazing Fantasy #15 or expensive added toyetic functions or articulations. Instead, box and all become decor, ornament, and— oddly—investment in the hyper-nostalgic appeal of transmedial franchised fantasies. At the end of the 2010s, the story is rarely different. Transformers: Generations action figures found minor success packaging their reboots of generation 1 characters with new, sophisticated comic-book stories developed from IDW. Whether any consumers bought these action figures because of the comic book itself is doubtful, and Hasbro eventually ended this practice, opting instead for giving new Transformers a strong presence on comic-book store shelves rather than action-figure packages. To date, this separation has remained the norm. Nostalgia-driven comics for the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, G.I. Joe, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers, My Little Pony, and many others thrive in ongoing series, spin-offs, and specials each week. However, the added value of comics as a toy-selling device, packaged with or made with the expressed interest of selling toys, remains minimal. Thanks to many recent media adaptations, comics-based characters can now live outside the panels and splash pages that originally birthed them, so much so that to include comic-book reprints with solicited action ­figures becomes more of a cumbersome liability than a transmedial commercial asset.

Paper or Plastic?   529

The Stuff That Dupes Are Made Of? To discuss the historical relationship between comics and toys is to trace decades of transference of economic, artistic, cultural, and nostalgic power. Irene Huang’s study, “Slowing Down in the Good Old Days: The Effect of Nostalgia on Consumer Patience,” found that “the relationship between nostalgia and consumer patience is diminished when people perceive a nostalgic experience to be repeatable” (Huang et al. 372). Thus, novel breakthroughs engineered by Kamen in the 1930s, Abrams in the 1970s, or McFarlane in the 1990s brought exciting change and commercial wit to both comics and toys. Disney, Mattel, Hasbro, Lucasfilm, and Saban also built cross-marketed empires on fresh concepts that remain so potent even today that our markets cannot help but reiterate or regurgitate their defining traits over and again. Toy companies now look to the past three decades for viable products to revive, when they would be wise to consider Huang’s warning that commercial repeatability lessens nostalgia’s vital power. In five years, Toy Biz saw its Marvel Legends comic-book tie-in shift from enticing feature to tired gimmick. Funko rarely lingers on any given property before moving on to the next, continuing to follow Mego’s formulas for mining the vast but fickle seas of desire and nostalgia in hopes of hitting it big with whatever comic book, cereal, or Hogwarts student generates substantial buzz. If nostalgia is embodied frantically in products produced by the thousands, nothing goes away or becomes scarce, but little is made new, fresh, or fun—or even for children. Without the playful address of Borgfeldt bisques or Hasbro Joes to tantalize young minds and forge meaningful narratives, our interdeterminate plastic friends and paper heroes have little beyond memory to motivate their media-made mythologies.

Notes 1. See reflections on the intimate pleromic relations among faith, prayer, and meditation in the art history of religious icons in Ouspensky and Lossky. 2. It’s worth emphasizing that in some cases, this deeply felt pleromic absorption, connection, or creative action may entail little more than displaying the pristine, packaged figure on a shelf as ornament or decor. 3. See previous speculations on relevant influences and distant global affinities to twenty-firstcentury transmedial action figures in Alexandratos; Yezbick, “Thirteen Ways”; and Alexandratos and Yezbick. 4. See relevant work on identity-defining objects and possessions in Appadurai; Deetz; Petroski; Mack; D. Miller; Berger; Turkle. 5. Some modern Kewpie dollmakers have reverted to the original porcelain, thereby offering a nostalgic throwback to the original dolls. We see echoes of this in Walmart’s recent line of Transformers toys, which feature the classic looks, packaging, and die-cast metal of the original ’80s toys. 6. Walt Disney Studios’ early success with licensed Bakelite toys and children’s products is especially innovative and worthy of further scholarship.

530   Daniel F. Yezbick and Jonathan Alexandratos 7. For incisive histories of the influence of synthetics on postwar consumer products, see Hanlon; Meikle; Fenichell; Rogers; Freinkel; Knight. 8. See Alexandratos and Yezbick. 9. See Kashtan for thoughtful analysis of the narrative politics of story, personality, and plot deployed across transmedial modes and formats. 10. Walt Disney was also cross-marketing his characters through syndicated comic strips (1930), storybooks (1931), comic books, and even landmark paper “action figure” prototypes such as the Mickey Mouse Waddle Book (1934). 11. Some uncertainly remains concerning the true date on which Action Comics #1 arrived on American newsstands, though most studies agree that it falls somewhere between midApril and late May 1938. 12. See Stern and Schoenhaus; G. Miller; Clark; Oppenheimer; Volk-Weiss. 13. For more memoirs and reminiscences, both deconstructive and nostalgic, relating to first Barbies, favorite G.I. Joes, new Skippers, encouraging Matt Masons, and intrepid Big Jims, see Ebersole and Peabody; Michling; Strohmeyer and Hansen; Lord; Stone; Stevens. 14. Hasbro’s icon of tough, straight masculinity is based on the heroic dogfaces featured in William Wellman’s 1945 movie The Story of G.I.  Joe, a film also meant to celebrate the Pulitzer-winning front-line journalism of killed-in-action correspondent Ernie Pyle. 15. Mattel would score a surprise hit with two later Barbie Marvel series. The primary Barbie title would run for an impressive sixty-three issues from 1991 to 1996, while its companion, Barbie Fashion, enjoyed fifty-three issues between 1991 and 1995. Both allowed a variety of women artists, writers, and designers, including Lisa Trusiani, Barbara Slate, Mary Wilshire, and June Brigman, to experiment with Mattel’s marquee fashion plate. 16. DC also gave Hasbro’s G.I. Joe a two-issue tryout in issues #54 and #55 of its anthology series Showcase in the 1964–1965 Christmas season, with gritty art by genre master Russ Heath. 17. For a more comprehensive list, see Alexandratos and Yezbick. 18. The 1966 Lakeside Toys Super-Flex Captain America, solicited in September 1966, just precedes the Captain Action iterations of Spider-Man, Captain America, and Sgt. Fury introduced later the same year. Captain Action Marvel figures were more high-profile, elaborately designed products, tricked out with intriguing toyetic accessories and exciting scenarios. Yet the packaging for Lakeside’s bendable Captain America cross-marketed its contents as a transmedial extension of the Marvel Superheroes TV show, emphasized that it “sits, stands, twists, and bends into thousands of action positions,” included samplings of Jack Kirby comic art in its commercial address, and emphasized its own seriality as “Another Super-Flex” figure by Lakeside. The series also included a Green Hornet, Popeye, Smokey the Bear, Bozo, Gumby, and Pokey. See Ballmann for more extended history of Marvel transmedial merchandising through Lakeside, Ideal, and others. 19. Mego’s groundbreaking development of major race- and gender-themed action figures is remarkable and worthy of expanded scholarship. Abrams arguably introduced the civil rights movement into toy culture with intrepid, culturally respectful action-figure treatments of Native American Cochise and the politically vocal Muhammad Ali. Mego fared even better with what is probably the first Hispanic TV-celebrity action figure in Erik Estrada’s Ponch from CHiPs and most likely the first African-American female TV action figure fashioned after Nichelle Nichols’s Uhura from Star Trek. 20. Mego’s knack for licensing superhero properties and diversifying action-figure lines also contributed to its eventual collapse. As Abrams kept expanding his action-figure formats, he developed strange new sizes and functionalities that glutted the market with gimmicks

Paper or Plastic?   531 that put familiar heroes in some truly strange forms. These included the 5-inch Bend ’n Flex series; 3.75-inchspecial magnetic renditions of Batman and Robin, web-spinning Spider-Man, and Growling Hulk; an Elastic Super Heroes series that included Plastic Man; an oversized 18-inch series of soft-clothed figures; and an even larger line of 22-inch Talking Super Softies. Some of Mego’s last regular WGSH figures were also its most intricate, including heavily accessorized treatments of Green Arrow, Speedy, Wonder Girl, Kid Flash, and Aqua Lad from Teen Titans (Bonavita 195). 21. An earlier Mattel doll, “colored Francie,” had appeared slightly earlier, in 1967. 22. Mego was also not above contributing to the entertainment industry’s whitewashing of characters such as the Egyptian superheroine Isis, who “soars as the falcon soars and runs with the speed of gazelles,” according to her packaging. Portrayed by Anglo actress Joanna Cameron, Isis was featured in a brief DC comics spin-off title developed in conjunction with the Filmation Secrets of Isis TV show, which ran from 1975 to 1977. 23. Stan Lee and Marvel’s circulation director, Ed Shukin, were both skeptical of the potential of Star Wars, but Roy Thomas persuaded them to green-light the life-saving miniseries on the strength of the “pre-production sketches” (Howe 193). Thomas adapted the space opera himself, and Lucas specifically requested that Chaykin tackle the artwork, probably due to its similarity to Chaykin’s own Cody Starbuck stories. 24. This production strategy served Saban well for hundreds of TV shows. 25. The transmedial saga of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in alternative black-and-white comics magazines, mainstream comics titles, animated series, action figures, movie franchises, and computer gaming is a complex tale unto itself. For some useful commentary on the TMNT in comics and action-figure culture, see Farago; Yezbick, “Children’s Comics.” 26. The Rangers themselves never changed into actual dinosaurs; they summoned large robotic “Dinozords” in which they rode. 27. The number of real-world issues of Big Bad Beetleborgs comics totals five, including a fourissue series and a one-shot wherein the Beetleborgs battle the Turbo Power Rangers.

Works Cited “Action Soldier (Negro).” Vintage3DJoes.com. 10 Nov. 2018, http://www.vintage3djoes.com/ action-soldier-negro.html. Alexandratos, Jonathan, editor. Articulating the Action Figure. McFarland, 2017. Alexandratos, Jonathan. “Interview: Marty Abrams, Founder of Mego Toys, Talks Comebacks, Figures, and the Future of His Iconic Company.” Legion of Leia. 20 Aug. 2018, http://legionofleia.com/2018/08/interview-marty-abrams-founder-of-mego-toys-talks-comebacksfigures-and-the-future-of-his-iconic-company. Alexandratos, Jonathan, and Daniel F. Yezbick. “Articulate This! Critical Action Figure Studies and Material Culture.” Comics Studies: Here and Now, edited by Frederik Luis Aldama, Routledge, 2018, 102–120. Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things. Cambridge UP, 1986. Ballmann, J. The Full Color Guide to Marvel Silver Age Collectibles. Total Mojo, 2014. Barish, Jay. “The Ten Sexiest McFarlane Toys Action Figures.” ToplessRobot.com. 14 Dec. 2010, https://www.toplessrobot.com/2010/12/the_10_sexiest_mcfarlane_toys_action_figures.php. Bealer, Tracy. “ ‘The Man Called Lucas’: Luke Cage, Mass Incarceration, and the Stigma of Black Criminality.” INKS: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, vol. 1, no. 2, 2017, pp. 165–185.

532   Daniel F. Yezbick and Jonathan Alexandratos Bell, Daniel. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Basic Books, 1976. Berger, Arthur Asa. What Objects Mean. Left Coast Press, 2009. Bonavita, John. Mego: Action Figure Toys. Schiffer, 1996. Brooker, Will. BFI Film Classics: Star Wars. BFI, 2009. Bryman, Alan. The Disneyization of Society. Sage, 2004. Chabon, Michael. “The True Meaning of Nostalgia.” The New Yorker, 25 Mar. 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-true-meaning-of-nostalgia. Clark, Eric. The Real Toy Story. Free Press, 2013. Deetz, James. In Small Things Forgotten. Anchor, 1996. Ebersole, Lucinda, and Richard Peabody, editors. Mondo Barbie. St. Martin’s Griffin, 1993. Endres, Thomas  G. “The (Re)Resurrection of Captain Action: Will Justice Be Done?” Articulating the Action Figure: Essays on the Toys and Their Messages, edited by Jonathan Alexandratos, McFarland, 2017, pp. 28–38. Farago, Andrew. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ultimate Visual History. Insight Comics, 2014. Fennichell, Stephen. Plastic: The Making of a Synthetic Century. Harper Business, 1997. Freinkel, Susan. “A Brief History of Plastic’s Conquest of the World.” Scientificamerican.com, 29 May 2011, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-brief-history-of-plastic-worldconquest. Freinkel, Susan. Plastics: A Toxic Love Story. Houghton Mifflin, 2011. Gluck, Keith. “Selling Mickey: The Rise of Disney Marketing.” Walt Disney Family Museum, 8 June 2012, https://www.waltdisney.org/blog/selling-mickey-rise-disney-marketing. Gluck, Keith, and Lucas Seastrom. “Disney and Lionel.” Walt Disney Family Museum, 30 Jan. 2015, https://www.waltdisney.org/blog/disney-and-lionel. Hanlon, Bill. Plastic Toys: Dimestore Dreams of the 40s and 50s. Schiffer, 1993. Howe, Sean. Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. HarperCollins, 2012. Huang, Irene, et al. “Slowing Down in the Good Old Days: The Effect of Nostalgia on Consumer Patience.” Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 43, no. 3, 2016, pp. 372–387. Jenkins, Henry, et al. Spreadable Media. NYU Press, 2013. Kashtan, Aaron. Between Pen and Pixel. Ohio State UP, 2018. Knight, Laurence. “A Brief History of Plastics, Natural and Synthetic.” BBC.com. 17 May 2014, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27442625. Lord, M. G. Forever Barbie. Walker Books, 2004. Mack, John. The Art of Small Things. Harvard UP, 2008. Matetsky, Harry. Adventures in Superman Collecting. Russ Cochran, 1988. Meikle, Jeffrey L. American Plastic: A Cultural History. Rutgers UP, 1997. Messynessy. “Meet Lilli, the High-End German Call Girl Who Became America’s Iconic Barbie Doll.” messynessychic.com. 29 Jan. 2016, https://www.messynessychic.com/2016/ 01/29/meet-lilli-the-high-end-german-call-girl-who-became-americas-iconic-barbie-doll/ Michling, John. G.I. Joe: The Complete Story of America’s Favorite Man of Action. Chronicle, 1998. Miller, Daniel. The Comfort of Things. Polity, 2008. Miller, G. Wayne, Toy Wars. Crown Business, 1998. Moore, Chuck. “The Incredible Rise of McFarlane Toys.” Completeset.com. 26 Feb. 2016, https://www.completeset.com/the-incredible-rise-of-mcfarlane-toys Oppenheimer, Jerry. Toy Monster. Wiley, 2010.

Paper or Plastic?   533 Ouspensky, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 1999. Petroski, Henry. Small Things Considered. Vintage, 2004. Rogers, Heather. “A Brief History of Plastic.” Brooklynrail.org, 1 May 2005, https://brooklynrail.org/2005/05/express/a-brief-history-of-plastic. Satterthwaite. Ann. Going Shopping. Yale, 2001. Sousanis, Nick. Unflattening. Harvard UP, 2015. Stern, Ladensohn Sydney, and Ted Schoenhaus. Toyland. Contemporary Books, 1990. Stevens, J. Richard. “Plastic Military Mythology: Hypercommercialism and Hasbro’s G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero.” Articulating the Action Figure, edited by Jonathan Alexandratos, McFarland, 2017, 39–57. Stone, Tanya Lee. The Good, the Bad, and the Barbie. Speak Reprint, 2015. Strohmeyer, Sarah, and Geoff Hansen. Barbie Unbound. New Victoria, 1997. Theagenes. “Rare 1939–40 12" Superman Action Figure—1st licensed Superman Merchandise.” CGC Boards, 15 June 2012, https://www.cgccomics.com/boards/topic/252921-rare-1939-4013quot-superman-action-figure-1st-licensed-supes-merchandise. Tumbusch, Tom. “Borgfeldt Bisque Figures, Part 2.” Tomart’s Disneyana Update, no. 10, 1994, pp. 12–17. Turkle, Sherry. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. MIT Press, 2011. Van Patten, Denise. “Sample Prices for Collectible Kewpie Dolls.” The Spruce Crafts. 25 Nov. 2018, https://www.thesprucecrafts.com/kewpie-dolls-price-guide-photo-gallery-4121920. Volk-Weiss, Brian. The Toys That Made Us. Netflix documentary series, 2018, https://www. netflix.com/title/80161497. Yezbick, Daniel  F. “Children’s Comics.” Comics through Time, edited by M.  Keith Booker, Greenwood, 2014, 945–955. Yezbick, Daniel  F. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at an Action Figure.” Articulating the Action Figure: Essays on the Toys and Their Messages, edited by Jonathan Alexandratos, McFarland, 2017, 13–27, 152–169.

chapter 30

Tr a nsfor m ati v e A rchitect u r e s i n Postcol on i a l Hong Kong Comics Kin Wai Chu

Hong Kong became a British colony in 1842 and was gradually transformed from a ­fishing village into an international city reputed to be the Pearl of the Orient. In 1984, the  Sino-British Joint Declaration was officially signed, outlining the “One Country, Two Systems” policy stating that Hong Kong would enjoy a high degree of autonomy after the handover of sovereignty from the United Kingdom to China in 1997. During the transition period, Hong Kong society was shrouded by a strong sense of uncertainty about the future regardless of the promise given by the Chinese government, especially after the Tiananmen incident in 1989. Some scholars considered the handover of Hong Kong to be a continuation of colonization through changing colonizers (Chow 163; M. Chan 17; Abbas 69; Fung, “Postcolonial” 399). Two decades have passed since Hong Kong became a special administrative region (SAR) of China, and there have been many studies trying to delineate the fundamental changes in the postcolonial era and the shifting cultural identity in Hong Kong (see, e.g., Erni; Fung, “Postcolonial”; Fung, “Discourse”; N.  Ma; Mathews et al.; W.  Law; E. Ma). Stuart Hall claims that postcolonialism involves processes of deconstruction, usually known as decolonialization, and reconstruction, which involves building up a new nationhood (254). Agreeing with him, Brenda Yeoh (457) and Leo Ching (767) argue that postcolonialism is an Anglo-American and Eurocentric phenomenon. Among many postcolonial entities, Anthony Fung claims that Hong Kong is an “anachronistic case of decolonization without independence” (“Postcolonial” 399), while ­former chief secretary for administration of the Hong Kong SAR government Anson Chan mentioned the “real transition is about identity and not sovereignty” (Yeoh 458; qtd. in Wong 198). Due to the “triangular articulation of Chinese nationalism, British

Architectures in Postcolonial Hong Kong Comics   535 colonialism, and globalism” and the occurrence of parallel events that have been ­interacting among themselves together with all these factors, John Erni argues that the Hong Kong postcolonial cultural identity can never be transitioned but is always in a transforming state (391). The changing cultural identity refers not only to the interplay among those political processes and events but also to the fact that identity is never a homogeneous construct but carries multiple dimensions, let alone the generational and demographic differences among people. Fung further adds the rise of local ­cultures since the 1970s to the cultural identity construction in which the local cultures and global values form an amalgam of the Hong Kong local identity to resist identity substitution in the process of nationalization propagated by the Hong Kong government, which is largely accommodating to China (“Discourse” 195–196). Various diachronic surveys on Hong Kong cultural identity have been conducting since the 1990s to get a general picture of the issue. For instance, the surveys done by Gordon Mathews, Eric Ma and Tai-lok Lui have shown a slight increasing trend of people identifying themselves with mixed identities in recent years (98–99; cf. similar surveys done by Hong Kong Transition Project1 and HKU POP2). Not only are there changes in politics, but the transformation of the Hong Kong ­cityscape is also striking. Urban studies scholar Lisa Law even asserts that “Hong Kong is a city known through the cliché of frenetic rebuilding” (1627). One of the most eye-catching changes is seen in the Central district, which is a major government administrative region and commercial district located at the Victoria Harbor front. Due to scarcity of space, there has been recurring de- and reconstruction of some famous landmarks from colonial to postcolonial times. This has reinforced not only an ambience of ephemerality but also an insecure feeling about the future of Hong Kong, especially during the transition period. Buildings play multivalent roles in society. Apart from providing functional space, they help constitute the identity of a place and its people; Ackbar Abbas claims that architecture is the “first visual evidence of a city’s putative identity” (64). It is important to note that identities are heterogeneous and fluid as they are assembled from various sources. It comes as no surprise that cultural products such as films, literature, and ­comics are always used to study cultural identity. Catherine Labio acknowledges the connection between comics, childhood, home, and identity proposed by Thierry Groensteen (7) and Charles Hatfield (par. 1); she also postulates the affinity of architecture and ­comics (Labio 339). Therefore, architecture in comics can go beyond its ornamental or situational functions in narratives. Over the past few decades, architecture has become more prominent in narrative construction, especially in Franco-Belgian comics since the 1980s, when “the architectural turn” was led by comic artists such as François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters. They also initiated a transmedial scenographic project in Train World, a museum of trains in Belgium based on comic stories. Jeffrey Mather, who studies Hong Kong comics as a means to read and write about the city, ­suggests that those works that both realistically and imaginatively depict urban spaces have the potential to “provocatively explore the connection between modernity, the production of social space, and urban identity” (83).

536   Kin Wai Chu This chapter will analyze Hong Kong comic artist Siuhak’s serial comic story Harbor Heroes, in which the harbor is Victoria Harbor and the heroes are the fictional characters in the form of anthropomorphologized robots transformed from the architectural landmarks in Central. Those landmarks are mostly skyscrapers constituting one of the most iconic views of Hong Kong. On the one hand, the imagery of those Harbor Heroes refers not only to the corresponding buildings but also to the Hong Kong cultural identity, since their hybrid physical form as half robot and half building reverberates the hybrid identity of Hong Kong—its colonial identity as a cultural pot mixing the Orient and the Occident, as well as its postcolonial identity as an international capitalist city in a Communist country. On the other hand, when creating the transformative robot characters, Siuhak was inspired by his childhood memories of watching TV animation series about robots, such as the Japanese Chōjin Sentai Barattack and Ōgon Senshi Gōrudo Raitan as well as The Transformers in America, which aired on Hong Kong television from the late 1970s to the 1980s. Thus, Harbor Heroes, as a parody of the robot animations, highlights the intertextualities of the ingrained influence of American and Japanese robot animations and proves the instrumental functions of comics as cultural product and as serious cultural critique following the tradition of political cartoons in print media. The overarching narrative often involves satirical comments on the changing status of some personified high-rises which were once the center of attention but have been overshadowed by the newer and taller skyscrapers. The plot may symbolically reflect the twists and turns in Hong Kong society, while the characters may encapsulate the corresponding evolving cultural identities. This analysis is divided into two parts. First, it explains how Harbor Heroes makes hybridity explicit in comics forms and themes, paralleling the hybrid regime and postcolonial Hong Kong identities. The aim of the study is to explore how hybridity is manifested in the narratives instead of examining the formation of hybrid identities which have been extensively explored from multidisciplinary perspectives as mentioned. Also, cultural hybridization seems to be an intrinsic characteristic of many places with extensive cultural contact. Second, the analysis explains how the strategic use of parody and its original publication format as weekly editorial comics have played a significant role in staging a ­dialectic relationship between the changing politics and postcolonial cultural identities of Hong Kong.

Hong Kong Comics A brief introduction to Hong Kong comics may help readers better understand the background of Harbor Heroes. Hong Kong comics can trace their roots in China but are strongly influenced by American comics and Japanese manga. The whole industry began to develop when China stopped commercial comics production shortly after it became a Communist state in 1949. Since the 1950s, comics produced in Hong Kong

Architectures in Postcolonial Hong Kong Comics   537 have been exported to many ethnic Chinese communities across Asia. Culturally ­specific Hong Kong comics gradually emerged in the 1960s. The local comics industry, dominated by the kung fu genre which was followed by lighthearted comics, reached its peak in the late 1970s. However, such mainstream comics gradually fell off their pedestal starting in the 1990s. The reasons behind this are manifold. The main one is that the mainstream comics had become formulaic, making them less attractive than other forms of entertainment, especially after the beginning of the Information Age. Meanwhile, independent comics emerged in Hong Kong, though they were not as ­popular in terms of sales. These are independent or small-press publications, usually created by a solo author who explores alternative and non-market-driven narratives and aesthetics (Lent 65; Au Yeung and Chi Hoi, 4). Their emergence tightly followed the bande dessinée renaissance brought by independent and small presses in the FrancoBelgian region as well as the rise of alternative comics in North America during the early 1990s. One of the possible links between such comics movements in the 1990s might be a result of some artistic exchanges among the comic creators. For example, a pioneering independent comic artist, Craig Au Yeung, mentioned that he was interested in overseas comics and also joined some international comic festivals with other Hong Kong nonmainstream comic artists (Au Yeung 79–87). Despite the absence of direct lineage among these alternative comics movements, all of them have made similar contributions to the revival of comics from “the crisis caused by the imposition of increasingly sterile formulas” in their respective comics market (Labio 328). Since many independent Hong Kong comic artists, such as Siuhak, Hok-tak Yeung, and Rainbow Leung, came of age during the transition period of Hong Kong between the 1980s and the 1990s, some of their works are not simply about their individual trajectories but also about their responses to the changing architectural landscape during Hong Kong’s transition era.

An Introduction to Harbor Heroes Harbor Heroes is a series of short stories in Siuhak’s long-running two-page-spread comic column, Fake Forensic Science, in a weekly infotainment magazine, East Touch, in Hong Kong. Selected stories from the column were collected into a comic album series and published by Joint Publishing Hong Kong from 2006 to 2016. Seven volumes have been published, and each is divided into a few thematic chapters including short stories, critiques, autobiography, and so on. Harbor Heroes appears in six out of the seven ­volumes, and its stories range from two to a few pages long. Some share the features of political cartoons by satirically critiquing current politics, so they have captured the zeitgeist of the moment, while some other stories narrate the “golden age of Hong Kong” in the 1980s. On the surface, many of these stories can be read separately, but the political ones indeed form a master narrative evolving from the changing Victoria Harbor skyline acted out by the transformative robots. In particular, those formerly tallest

538   Kin Wai Chu buildings voice their resentment toward the never-ending pursuit of newer and taller buildings that allegedly symbolizes progress. In the flashbacks of those old robots’ good old days, the narrative mirrors the bygone golden period of Hong Kong, projecting a nostalgic mood and an uneasy feeling about the downturn of the city. As Harbor Heroes has been running for twelve years, it accumulatively showcases the changing contours of the local politics and culture. In terms of characterization, each Harbor Hero carries a stereotypical or oversimplified identity that hinges on the name and function of the original building form. For example, the Bank of China (BOC) Tower designed by Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei, who grew up in Hong Kong and Shanghai, represents China and its financial influence in Hong Kong. The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited (HSBC) Main Building, designed by British architect Sir Norman Foster, represents the British colonial influence as well as local establishment.3 The ideological rivalry between these two robots is sometimes exaggerated to achieve a humorous effect. For example, BOC robot once called HSBC robot “short boy.” Their identities are also constructed in linguistic terms. Wordplay is constantly at play, usually by means of polysemy. For instance, the Hong Kong Central Library is the decision-making leader and the most intellectual robot based on its nature as a library and the word “Central” in its name which is a moniker of the Central Chinese government. Throughout ten years of narrative development, the characters are “transgressing socially constructed and stereotyped categories of identity in the course of the formation of their hybrid identities (Rosenbaum 61).” For example, Jardine House robot and BOC robot have demonstrated more complex personalities that are developed from their situated identities in Volume four and Volume seven respectively. Certainly, there are both personal and artistic concerns involved in the characterization of transformative robots. Apart from the physical similitude between modern commercial buildings and science-fiction robot narratives, its publication format may carry some weight. Harbor Heroes is marketed as a popular cultural product for mass ­consumption in Siuhak’s comic column, while it is classified as an independent comic book in its album format. Siuhak’s Fake Forensic Science column thus stands between the market logic of comics as entertainment and the “autonomous logic” of alternative ­comics or comic columns suggested by Bart Beaty, who analyzed alternative comics in Europe (20). This hybrid market position also embodies the market-driven ideology deeply embedded in Hong Kong identity (Mathews et al. 151).

Hybridity Comics have a structural affinity to hybridity, being a medium using text and image in storytelling. Harbor Heroes has transcended this innate hybridity in a multilayered fashion and manifested the hybrid cultural identities of Hong Kong. In this section, the hybrid comic forms and themes in articulating the hybrid identities are discussed.

Architectures in Postcolonial Hong Kong Comics   539

Figure 30.1 Siuhak, Fake Forensic Science 1, page 8, panel 10–11. Courtesy of Siuhak.

At a structural level, the comic consists of a range of page layouts and visual strategies. For example, Figure 30.1 is part of the story of “HSBCrazy,” when HSBC traveled back to the past. Historic photographs signifying the past are superimposed by the drawn HSBC robot representing the present.4 Besides, old photographs are sometimes diegetically used as an embedded story in a panel. For example, Figure 30.2 shows Jardine House robot looking at an old photograph of Victoria Harbor in the 1970s, when he was the tallest building in Asia. These examples are not at all innovative or experimental, as a variety of forms can be seen in alternative comics such as Shigeru Mizuki’s Showa: A History of Japan series (1988–1989) and many more. However, such comic forms are still considered experimental locally. At a textual level, hybrid linguistic features can always be seen in the text. The most obvious examples are code-mixing Cantonese and English, which is a common oral ­feature of Hong Kong people. Besides, written Cantonese and traditional Chinese characters are also markers of local culture, though traditional Chinese characters are also used in Taiwan (but most Taiwanese speak Mandarin and Taiwanese Hokkien) and Cantonese is spoken by people in some parts of southern China (but simplified Chinese characters are used in China). Apart from hybrid comic forms, Harbor Heroes also substantiates its plurality if the wide variety of visual elements used across the whole collection is taken into account. For instance, some pages are drawn with oil-painting techniques, while some are plain black-and-white line drawings. Then the question is how such a combination of formal and stylistic rendering affects the holistic narrative cohesion. Most important, the hybrid comic forms are core to Harbor Heroes. If the convention of using standardized stylistic forms in serial comics is considered, it still fulfills such expectation, because styles mostly vary from one story to another, while more coherent stylistic forms are used within the same story. Some common strategies, such as cliffhangers and textual narration to connect two episodes used in serial media, are also adopted in the serial

540   Kin Wai Chu

Figure 30.2 Siuhak, Fake Forensic Science 4, page 60, panel 7. Courtesy of Siuhak and Joint Publishing (Hong Kong).

stories. Since stand-alone stories that are loosely related to each other account for a bigger proportion of Harbor Heroes, narrative cohesion is not an issue even though almost every page looks stylistically different from the others in the album.

Character: Buildings/Robots Hong Kong has long been considered a hybrid city encompassing the East and West. While the buildings along the Victoria Harbor front are the synecdoche of Hong Kong, the architecture as transformer is thus a polysemic epitome figuratively expressing the hybridity of this city. The robots’ mobility and transformativity also highlight “dislocations of the local, where the local is something unstable that mutates right in front of your eyes” (Abbas 28). It is worth noting that public colonial architecture is absent in the narrative, so one may doubt whether Harbor Heroes is relevant for (post)colonial analysis. True, postcolonial architecture can establish a dialogue with its colonial counterpart (Kusno 551), but

Architectures in Postcolonial Hong Kong Comics   541 rarely was an important indigenous architecture demolished and substituted for by the colonial one, given the humble history of Hong Kong as a fishing village during the early colonial period. The most historic and important indigenous buildings are mostly temples, old indigenous village houses, and schools located far away from Central. Again, one has to let go of Eurocentric ideas about (post)colonial studies that often emphasize the power relation between the colonizer and colonized. There were times of riots and social unrest, but the colonial government started gaining support from the citizens starting in the 1970s, when Hong Kong gradually became one of the “Asian modernities” highlighted not by their specificity but by their internationality and flexible capitalism, so this has deconstructed the East-West dichotomist view (Barlow 2). Taking a cruise on Victoria Harbor, one can see how this mentality is materialized as the colonial buildings had already been obscured by the skyscrapers. Ideologically, Hong Kong is always positioned as a place for business instead of politics, so the most recognizable identity of Hong Kong to the West is as an international city that is “configured” by global consumerism (Erni 394). Therefore, the commercial buildings in Central have been integral to the (post)colonial Hong Kong cultural identity that is widely accepted by both foreigners and many Hong Kongese, especially those who were educated in the colonial era. This “market-based” cultural identity is the result of colonial rule: colonizer Britain “sought to distance itself from any responsibility to provide its own nationality to its colonial subjects,” while Chinese nationalistic education was equally absent in the colonial era, so people became predominantly shaped by the market discourse (Mathews et al. 151). When it comes to architecture and comics, there is a dual reading of architecture in comics and architecture of comics. The former is straightforward, and the latter refers to architecture as a structural component of a page layout. Labio has succinctly elucidated an analogy between the composition of comics and architecture by explicating how the structural features of a building form part of the comic layout and semiotically propel the narrative. A parallel example is seen in the story “Round & Loop,” featuring the Jardine House robot. It began when he was frustrated by some young people who did not know his name so he sulkily walked to the harbor and then met a little girl who invited him to go to Japan with her. The scene in Figure 30.3 illustrates the fantasy of Jardine House indicated by three circular panels as thought bubbles, signaled by a line of smaller bubbles tracing from his head and the diegetic reality in rectangular panels. The first bubble on the left displays a young lady with the caption stating that she is the same little girl in the future. The second one shows the robot holding a ring, and the caption describes him proposing to her. The third bubble portrays the moment of his death, captioned “during the earthquake that day, I sacrificed myself to protect her . . . my palm could feel the warmth from her tears before I died” (my translation). The two rectangular panels narrate the diegetic reality when the little girl calls him “Uncle!” and then yells, “Uncle, shall we go now?” at the pier. The circular panels are the visual parallels of the signature round windows of Jardine House building. Unlike the complex and realistic drawings of architectures in the works of Schuiten and Chris Ware, the Harbor Heroes are drawn in

542   Kin Wai Chu

Figure 30.3 Siuhak, Fake Forensic Science 3, page 23, panel 1–5. Courtesy of Siuhak.

c­artooning style. While Pascal Lefèvre maintains that sophisticated architectural ­pictures may hinder narrative development if the artist does not strike a balance between the two, Harbor Heroes has less of an issue with this than with the prerequisite background knowledge about Hong Kong on the readers’ part (cited in Van der Hoorn 21).

Hybrid Themes: Politics and Nostalgia Harbor Heroes abounds with verbo-visual humor that can be read as straightforward jokes, but many of the stories also contain strong satirical and symbolic undertones that require readers to know the contexts in order to read between the pictures and the lines. The hybrid themes contain a mix of political satire and nostalgia usually presented in parody, forming a web of intertwining narratives that cannot be readily categorized. Though nostalgia has been a postmodern cultural trend, as suggested by Linda Hutcheon in her seminal article “Irony, Nostalgia and the Postmodern,” and it has structured the comics scene in recent decades (see Groensteen; Gardner; Baetens and Frey), Harbor Heroes does not merely follow these trends but transcends them based on its hybrid themes and approach to parody. Regarding its political theme, Harbor Heroes follows the convention of satirical political cartoons, which are full of symbolism, parodies, and puns. For instance, the ending of “Cultural Explosion” (vol. 2, pp. 106–107) concerns the Central Library robot who has made use of his last gust of “cultural power” to combat the shrinking open space around him engulfed by new residential buildings. Central Library loses the battle, and his body is shattered after self-explosion. At the end, his limbs are used as mobile libraries; his

Architectures in Postcolonial Hong Kong Comics   543 torso is reconstructed as a shopping mall with a new real estate cluster on top (a popular residential building model in postcolonial Hong Kong); and his head becomes a public toilet. Even though the whole story is fictional, the metanarrative is factually expressed through symbolism. Central Library robot’s self-explosion as resistance symbolically implies the encroachment of cultural space and the tyranny of real estate developers in the territory. Some readers may simply understand the caption “Back to basics” describing the head of Central Library becoming a toilet as a joke—the basic need for a toilet. In fact, the real-life architect of Central Library used to design public toilets in Hong Kong. In Figure 30.4, we see a panel of “This Golden Week” that depicts HSBC’s reaction to “The Symphony of Light,” a multimedia laser show which was introduced as a strategic plan to boost the economy after the SARS outbreak in 2003, when Hong Kong was experiencing a devastating economic recession.5 “Golden Week” refers to a whole week of public holiday in China, that entails a peak travel and shopping season for mainland Chinese. “This Golden Week,” originally

Figure 30.4 Siuhak, Fake Forensic Science 1, page 5, panel 4. Courtesy of Siuhak.

544   Kin Wai Chu ­ ublished in 2004, refers to the first Golden Week after the light show and the Individual p Visit Scheme came about.6 In the story, the Heroes are performing for the show in the absence of HSBC. After the show, they find him sitting alone on an outlying island. Figure 30.4 shows how HSBC’s sorrow and anger are conveyed by his teardrops and the flame above his head. He yells, “I am designed by Sir Norman Foster (implying his prestigious status), but now I have to act like a clown [to please the tourists], turning into green tonight and pink tomorrow by the spotlight” (my translation). The bow ties worn by the Heroes are a visual metaphor hinting at them as performers. Likewise, the HSBC robot’s depression about his own downfall is fictional and symbolic, since Hong Kong people identify themselves with the HSBC building as much with the Chinese flag in a survey about national and cultural identity (Mathews et al. 103). Obviously, HSBC is one of the emotional anchors for Hong Kong cultural identity, and the robot’s frustration is probably shared by many as he speaks to the shifted role of Hong Kong from an international financial center to a tourism-oriented city during the second economic crisis after the handover of Hong Kong. Hybridized with the political theme, the nostalgic theme is inherent in Harbor Heroes, as comics can structurally blend the alternative universes as well as different periods of time on a single page (Baetens and Frey 220). The most salient example is that the robot characters parody the transformative robot animations the artist watched in his childhood. For the nostalgic plot, an example is seen in HSBC’s accidental time travel after he planned to go back to Shanghai because he saw the thriving economy there while Hong Kong was going the other way. When he was walking out of Victoria Harbor, he suddenly landed in the past of Hong Kong in the 1940s, and he met his “father,” the previous HSBC building built in 1936 (see Figure 30.1). Then the scene is fast-forwarded to the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s (vol. 1, pp. 8–9). The historical photographs in sepia tone are used as a classic retro color code for the past and nostalgia in photography. In contrast, a color photograph is used in Figure 30.2 to trigger nostalgia, this time a narrative use of colors. The black-and-white drawing of the Jardine House robot holding a color photograph of the past emphasizes the psychological state of him cherishing his colorful and glorious past. In general, the longing for the irretrievable past is a recurring topic acted out in different episodes by HSBC, Jardine House, Hopewell Center, and Two International Financial Center (IFC) robots.7

Parody The political and nostalgic stories in Harbor Heroes are always presented in parody. Before analyzing some examples, it is worth taking a detour to discuss the theory of parody. The Oxford English Dictionary defines parody as “an imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect.” There are some subgenres such as satire, pastiche, and burlesque. Like many loaded terms, it has been prone to ongoing terminological debate, but the encompassing term parody will be

Architectures in Postcolonial Hong Kong Comics   545 used here. Ole Frahm has not only confirmed the profound similarities between the ­theorization of parody and comics but also proposed the former as a structural feature of the latter because comics parody “the referentiality of signs” by deconstructing the normatively recognizable connection between signs and objects in order to bring about a humorous effect (179). In the same vein, Elizabeth El Rafaie points out that ­making jokes can be “a socially acceptable way of breaking taboos,” so this explains why political caricature, usually involving parody, is influential not only in the history of comics but also in political discourse, because it may be arguably easier to avoid political censorship than direct literal critique (214). From the narrative perspective, Victor Erlich indicates that Russian formalists stressed the contribution of parody as a “sign of emancipation,” because its “regrouping of the old elements” creates literary continuity (258). Hutcheon also acknowledges its “transgressive” and “transformative power,” differentiating it from plagiarism and piracy (Theory of Parody 20). While parody is legitimate and protected by law in some countries, David Roh, who studies it as a part of the culture industry, asserts that different copyright jurisprudence and sociocultural structures can lead to disparate trajectories of creative products, as can be seen in American fan fictions and Japanese dōjinshi or amateur manga (58). Clearly, parody is a sensitive subject under the copyright law, since there is always a fuzzy boundary between freedom of speech and infringement of copyright. In the Hong Kong government’s consultation paper on the treatment of parody, the term is not defined, but there are fair-dealing exceptions to allow limited copying for parody (“Treatment of Parody”). Overall, the parodic cases in Harbor Heroes fall into a relatively safe zone; how they work with the formal and thematic features discussed here deserves more attention than their legal implication. Using old photographs is not necessarily a marker for nostalgia in Harbor Heroes. In the episode “Harbor Miracle,” a photograph of a painting created in the early 1990s is parodied and incorporated into a humorously allegorical story told in hindsight. In Figure 30.5, the IFC robot asks the other heroes what message they could get from the painting of Jesus blessing Victoria Harbor. Then he answers (see Figure 30.6) that his birth was foretold by Jesus, as the level of Jesus’s right hand was implying his future appearance. Consistent with the financial-oriented Hong Kong identity, IFC says, “Even God knows, only financial economy can lead Hong Kong to a bright future. Even God agrees, I am the messenger sent from above and the only one who can bring improvement and future to Hong Kong” (my translation). This story was first released when Hong Kong was facing a financial tsunami in 2009, the third economic turmoil after the handover. However, the International Commerce Center (ICC) robot appears later (see Figure 30.7), and offers a different interpretation of the painting, after humiliating the IFC robot who is 70 meters shorter, by calling him “baby.” The ICC robot claims that Jesus’s right hand actually hints at his appearance, because Jesus was indeed standing in Kowloon, where he was, instead of on Hong Kong Island, where IFC was. ICC attributed IFC’s misreading to the misunderstanding of Chinese painting as lacking a sense of depth, a common misconception about Chinese paintings for Westerners.

546   Kin Wai Chu

Figure 30.5 Siuhak, Fake Forensic Science 3, page 12, panel 7. Courtesy of Siuhak.

Figure 30.6 Siuhak, Fake Forensic Science 3, page 13, panel 5–7. Courtesy of Siuhak.

This story is an intriguing example that unfolds some forms of postcolonial cultural identities. Both IFC and ICC identify themselves as a globalized financial power hub; they also indirectly reveal the Christian influence in Hong Kong by demonstrating the naturalized existence of the church and their general religious knowledge (but this does not mean that they are religious). This painting, hung at the church-operated Hong Kong Adventist Hospital, reflects Christianity as part of the colonial legacy, because ­different Christian churches have been running schools and hospitals under the approval of the colonial government since the 1840s.

Architectures in Postcolonial Hong Kong Comics   547

Figure 30.7 Siuhak, Fake Forensic Science 3, page 15. Courtesy of Siuhak.

Furthermore, the ICC robot exhibits more intricate Hong Kong cultural identities by adding an understanding of Chinese culture, as can be seen in the robot’s last line in the fourth panel of Figure 30.7: “from now on, West Kowloon holds its head up high to the blessing of God” (my translation). Apart from its literal meaning, this message also refers to the rise of West Kowloon after it has been long perceived as a grassroots region,

548   Kin Wai Chu as opposed to Hong Kong Island, especially the Central district, which has been an important and Westernized area. In the next few panels, the ICC robot introduces his neighboring modern robotized buildings. They collectively call themselves “West Kowloon Walled City,” with a team pose parodying classic robot animations at the end. Apart from this visual parody, there is a double parody of “Kowloon Walled City,” which was the only enclave ruled by the imperial Chinese government during the early colonial era and was turned into a notoriously ungoverned “sin city” before its demolition in the 1990s. In particular, it is parodied due to its linguistic proximity to the newly reclaimed land “West Kowloon” and its marked Chinese-ness in Hong Kong colonial history. Another example is the parody of a Chinese novel series titled 香港三部曲 (Hong Kong Trilogy), written by novelist and cultural critic Kwun-chung Chan. While only the novel’s title is borrowed in the Harbor Heroes story, some quotes from another book of Chan’s, 下一個十年—香港的光榮年代？ (The Next Ten Years: The Glorious Era of Hong Kong) are incorporated into the plot. Siuhak’s “Hong Kong Trilogy” has three subtitles, “Ko Yan,” “Return,” and “Healing and Governance” (vol. 4, pp. 60–65). Ko Yan means “tall people” but metaphorically refers to the personified tall buildings. It begins with the frustrated Jardine House robot, who wants to leave Victoria Harbor again. Unlike the planned elopement with the little girl that did not happen in volume 3, this time, Jardine House arrives in Beijing alone because he is determined to be “a whole new Chinese” by abandoning “the Hong Kong way of thinking” (my translation). However, he cannot help questioning his own identity when he finds himself feeling far from elated and touched among the overjoyed Chinese audiences at the closing ceremony of Beijing Olympics. His question is answered by Chan: “You are a hybrid of the East and the West. You played a leading role in the Hong Kong show during the 1970s. I am like you who was born in this baby boom” (my translation). This resonates with the hybrid identity of the “colonial-national-global complex” (Erni 407). In “Return,” Jardine House comes back to Victoria Harbor with Chan’s signature long hairstyle, but he is totally ignored by the other robots, who are horsing around. In the following panels, he keeps reading and quoting from Chan’s book The Next Ten Years. The last panel ends with a quote describing the characteristics of Hong Kong people in Chan’s generation, such as being money-minded but generally polite and law-abiding. This part explains the generation gap between Jardine House and the other younger Heroes who place entertainment first as they are enjoying the harvest of the previous generation. “Healing and Governance” starts when the Heroes are obsessed by using the big screen on the AIG Center for karaoke, which symbolizes the hedonistic lifestyle of many Hong Kong people. Then AIG robot suddenly collapses after hearing one Hero singing a song with the lyric “tsunami,” which is a pun referring to the economic tsunami happening in Hong Kong at that time. Jardine House comes to the rescue by quoting another line from Chan’s book. After AIG regains consciousness, Jardine House declares that knowledge saved AIG. Figure 30.8 shows Jardine House’s imagination near the end of

Architectures in Postcolonial Hong Kong Comics   549

Figure 30.8 Siuhak, Fake Forensic Science 4, page 65, panel 11. Courtesy of Siuhak and Joint Publishing (Hong Kong).

the story, when he asks the Heroes if they would contribute to improving the governance of Hong Kong, all of them respond “Can do” and raise the red book, which is Chan’s book. However, there is an uncanny resemblance to a well-known scene during the Cultural Revolution in China in which the young people excitedly raised the little red book containing Mao Zedong’s quotes. This is another excellent double parody—the red book refers to Chan’s book, because the next panel shows the red book again with Chan’s book title, but Figure  30.8 suggests an additional parody of the famous Cultural Revolution scene acted out by the Heroes. This rendering is believed to be deliberate, as the book was painted in red only starting from this panel, whereas it was in black-andwhite previously. The last panel is a quote from Chan who expresses his expectation of Hong Kong to be truly assimilated to China in the next ten years. In Siuhak’s parody, the Harbor Heroes in Central, representing the financial power and the heart of Hong Kong, are declaring their loyalty to China, just like the passionate young people during the Cultural Revolution. Architecture plays an important role in shaping the national and cultural identity of Hong Kong. Given the affinity between architecture and comics, an analysis of Harbor Heroes has been conducted as an attempt to present some forms of cultural identities carried by the transformative architectures and to study how such shifting identities reflect the changing political contours in postcolonial Hong Kong. Harbor Heroes clearly shows its lineage to editorial political satire based on its extensive use of parody to critique politics and its original form as comic column, though it was later collected into album form and labeled as an independent comic. Besides, it has presented its hybridity in forms, genres, and visual styles, making it difficult to be classified. The story has been running for twelve years, making it a rich source for studying the changing local politics. At the same time, the materiality of the album format has brought all those seemingly independent parts into a whole. This case study also foregrounds one of the functions of comics in illustrating the multilayered postcolonial Hong Kong cultural identities. Through the symbolic portrayal by the fictional Harbor Heroes, the transformation of the Victoria Harbor skyline has not only displayed the sociopolitical and cultural evolution in postcolonial Hong Kong but also externalized the underlining current of ideological changes that shape the hybrid Hong Kong identities.8

550   Kin Wai Chu

Notes 1. The results are based on the survey report conducted by the Hong Kong Transition Project, including questions about how people identify themselves based on some identity categories in 2002, 2007 and 2012. It is important to note that such surveys are not longitudinal by nature; different parameters are used to study identity, and different identity categories are used in such surveys. For instance, “Hong Kong person, Hong Kong Chinese, Chinese Hong Konger, Chinese and Hong Kong British/Overseas Chinese” are used in 2012, while only four of such categories were used in 2007. 2. HKU POP refers to the Public Opinion Program (POP), an ongoing survey conducted by the University of Hong Kong since 1991. 3. HSBC was the first locally owned and managed bank in Hong Kong. It was founded in March 1865 by British banker Thomas Sunderland, who also opened the bank in Shanghai a month later. For details, see https://www.hsbc.com/about-hsbc/company-history. 4. For detailed analysis of this story, see Huen; Mather. 5. This nightly multimedia light show involves the most iconic modern buildings of the Victoria Harbor skyline, in which colorful laser rays are projected from those buildings to the sky, and the surfaces of the buildings also function as colorful LED screens displaying animated patterns according to the rhythm of the music played at the Cultural Center of Hong Kong across the harbor in Tsim Sha Tsui. 6. The Individual Visit Scheme was introduced in July 2003 to allow residents from four Chinese cities to visit Hong Kong on an individual basis. In the past, mainland Chinese tourists could only travel to Hong Kong with a tourist agency. As of 2018, the scheme has covered forty-nine mainland cities. For details, see https://www.tourism.gov.hk/english/ visitors/visitors_ind.html. 7. “Two International Financial Center” (IFC) refers to a 420-meter-tall building completed in 2003 on Hong Kong Island. It is so named because it follows the first International Financial Center, called “One International Financial Center,” which was built in 1998. To facilitate more effective communication, the short form “IFC” instead of “Two IFC” is used in this chapter to refer to the robot form of Two IFC, because One IFC is not featured in the story and “Two” may cause possible confusion in reading. 8. This work was supported by the Research Foundation of Flanders. I would like to thank Siuhak for kindly sparing his time for an interview and generously sharing the original ­digital copies of the comic pages used in this chapter. I am also grateful to Joint Publishing (Hong Kong) for granting me permission to reproduce two of the Fake Forensic Science Volume 4 images in this chapter.

Works Cited Abbas, Ackbar. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Hong Kong UP, 1997. Au Yeung, Craig.  “不想放棄漫，所以把它擱在一旁 [Don’t Want to Give Up So I Put It Aside].” 漫漫：香港獨立漫畫25年 [The Road Has Been Long: 25 Years of Independent Comics in Hong Kong]. Joint Publishing, 2006, pp. 78–87. Au Yeung, Craig, and Chi Hoi. 路漫漫：香港獨立漫畫25年 [The Road Has Been Long: 25 Years of Independent Comics in Hong Kong]. Joint Publishing, 2006. Baetens, Jan, and Hugo Frey. The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. Cambridge UP, 2015.

Architectures in Postcolonial Hong Kong Comics   551 Barlow, Tani E. “Introduction: On ‘Colonial Modernity.’ ” Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia, edited by Tani Barlow, Duke UP, 1997, pp. 1–20. Beaty, Bart. Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Books in the 1990s. Toronto UP, 2007. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994. Chan, Kwun-chung. 香港三部曲[Hong Kong Trilogy]. Oxford UP, 2007. Chan, Kwun-chung.下一個十年: 香港的光榮年代? [The Next Ten Years: The Glorious Era of Hong Kong?]. Oxford UP, 2012. Chan, Ming K. “Hong Kong: Colonial Legacy, Transformation, and Challenge.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 547, no. 1, 1996, pp. 11–23. Sage Journals, doi:/10.1177/0002716296547001002. Ching, Leo T. S. “ ‘Give Me Japan and Nothing Else!’: Postcoloniality, Identity, and the Traces of Colonialism.” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 99, no. 4, 2000, pp. 763–788. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/30676. Chow, Rey. “Between Colonizers: Hong Kong’s Postcolonial Self-Writing in the 1990s.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, 1992, pp. 151–70. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/dsp.1992.0011. El Rafaie, Elizabeth. Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures. UP of Mississippi, 2012. Erlich, Victor. Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine. 4th ed., Mouton, 1980. Erni, John Ngyget. “Like a Postcolonial Culture: Hong Kong Re-imagined.” Cultural Studies, vol. 15, nos. 3–4, 2001, pp. 389–418. Taylor & Francis Online, doi:10.1080/095023800110046632. Frahm, Ole. “Weird Signs: Comics as Means of Parody.” Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics, edited by Anne Magnussen and Hans-Christian Christiansen. Museum Tusculanum Press and Copenhagen UP, 2000, pp. 177–192. Fung, Anthony. “Discourse and Cultural Identity: Toward a Global Identity for Hong Kong.” Discourses of Cultural China in the Globalizing Age, edited by Doreen D. Wu. Hong Kong UP, 2008, pp. 189–202. Fung, Anthony. “Postcolonial Hong Kong Identity: Hybridising the Local and the National.” Social Identities, vol. 10, no. 3, 2004, pp. 399–414. Taylor & Francis Online, doi:10.1080/1350 4630420002308754. Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford UP, 2012. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen, UP of Mississippi, 2007. Hall, Stuart. “When Was ‘the Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit.” The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, edited by Iain Chambers and Lidia Curtis, Routledge, 1996, pp. 242–260. Hatfield, Charles. “Introduction: Comics and Childhood.” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, vol. 3, no. 3, 2007. University of Florida, http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v3_3/introduction.shtml. “Hong Kong Transition Project: The First 5 Years.” Hong Kong Transition Project, May 2002, http://hktp.org/list/first_5_yrs.pdf. “Hong Kong, SAR: The First 10 Years under China’s Rule.” Hong Kong Transition Project, June 2007, http://hktp.org/list/ndi-hktp-2007-report.pdf. Huen, Yuk-wan. The Representation of Space and Cultural Memory in Hong Kong Independent Comics. 2012. Masters Thesis, University of Hong Kong, master’s thesis. Hutcheon, Linda. “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern.” University of Toronto Libraries Portal 19, 1998, www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html.

552   Kin Wai Chu Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. Illinois UP, 2000. Kusno, Abidin. “Beyond the Postcolonial: Architecture and Political Culture in Indonesia.” Public Culture, vol. 10, no. 3, 1998, pp. 549–575. Labio, Catherine. “The Architecture of Comics.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 41, no. 2, 2015, pp. 312–343. doi:10.1086/679078. Law, Lisa. “Defying Disappearance: Cosmopolitan Public Spaces in Hong Kong.” Urban Studies, vol. 39, no. 9, 2002, pp. 1625–1645. Sage Journals, doi:10.1080/00420980220151691. Law, Wing-san. Collaborative Colonial Power: The Making of the Hong Kong Chinese. Hong Kong UP, 2009. Lefèvre, Pascal. Architecture dans le neuvième art/Architectuur in de Negende Kunst. NBMAmstelland, 1996. Lent, John A. Asian Comics. UP of Mississippi, 2015. Ma, Eric Kit-wai. Desiring Hong Kong, Consuming South China: Transborder Cultural Politics, 1970–2010. Hong Kong UP, 2012. Ma, Ngok. Political Development in Hong Kong: State, Political Society and Civil Society in Hong Kong. Hong Kong UP, 2007. Mather, Jeffrey. “Hong Kong Comics: Reading the Local and Writing the City.” Wasafiri, vol. 32, no. 3, 2017, pp. 79–86. doi:10.1080/02690055.2017.1322325. Mathews, Gordon, et al. Hong Kong, China: Learning to Belong to a Nation. Routledge, 2008. Roh, David. Illegal Literature: Toward a Disruptive Creativity. U of Minnesota P, 2015. Rosenbaum, Roman. “Tezuka Asamu’s Postcolonial Discourse towards a Hybrid National Identity.” Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities, edited by Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji. Routledge, 2015, pp. 59–73. Siuhak. 偽科學鑑證 [Fake Forensic Science 1]. Joint Publishing, 2006. Siuhak.偽科學鑑證 [Fake Forensic Science 2]. Joint Publishing, 2007. Siuhak.偽科學鑑證 [Fake Forensic Science 3]. Joint Publishing, 2008. Siuhak.偽科學鑑證 [Fake Forensic Science 4]. Joint Publishing, 2009. “Treatment of Parody under the Copyright Regime Consultation Paper.” Commerce and Economic Development Bureau, Hong Kong SAR Government, 26 Sept. 2016, www.gov. hk/en/residents/government/publication/consultation/docs/2013/Parody.pdf. Van der Hoorn, Mélanie. Bricks and Balloons: Architecture in Comic-Strip Form. 010 Publishers, 2012 Wong, Siu-lun. “Changing Hong Kong Identities.” Hong Kong in China, edited by Gungwu Wang and John Wong, Times Academic Press (Singapore), 1999, pp. 181–202. Yeoh, Brenda S. A. “Postcolonial Cities.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 25, no. 3, 2001, pp. 456–468. Sage Journals, doi:10.1191/030913201680191781.

chapter 31

A da ptation a n d R aci a l R epr esen tation i n Dell/G old K ey T V Tie-i ns Andrew J. Kunka

In the 1960s and 1970s, Dell and Gold Key Comics published dozens of adaptations for some of the most popular (and not so popular) television shows of the time. Many of these comic books feature racially diverse casts of characters; however, they receive very little attention in comics histories (with the exception of TwoMorrows’s American Comic Book Chronicles series [Wells], which breaks down each year of comic-book ­history by publisher) or in examinations of racial representation in comics, which often, in dealing with that time period, tend to focus on either the introduction of racially diverse superheroes—such as Black Panther, Green Lantern John Stewart, and Luke Cage (see Nama, for example)—or on the use of racial caricatures in the underground comix of Robert Crumb and others (see Rifas). Nonetheless, with these works from Dell and Gold Key, we get a critical mass of examples that indicate sustained efforts by two publishers that resulted in broader inclusiveness and more realistic visual representation. As television shows such as Star Trek, Mission: Impossible, The Mod Squad, I Spy, Room 222, and others sought to be more inclusive and diverse in their casting, mainly with African-American characters, the comics adaptations also, obviously, reflected those casts. This sort of transmedia pollination can help us better understand comics’ responses to the cultural and social changes occurring in the 1960s. Such shows and actors are celebrated for breaking racial barriers in television; however, they also, ­perhaps inadvertently, broke similar, and possibly more pervasive, barriers in comics. In addition, these comic books can significantly contribute to our understanding of racial representation in comic-art and comic-book history.

554   Andrew J. Kunka More specifically, these characters also present consistent images of black heroism, the paucity of which is often lamented in discussions of comic books of that time. Both Jeffrey  A.  Brown and Adilifu Nama address the lack of black superheroes in comic books. Nama’s project is admittedly primarily focused on DC and Marvel comics (while also including Spawn from Image) and so begins with the Black Panther and does not address nonsuperhero comics from Dell and Gold Key. In his discussion of Milestone comics, Brown explains how readers lacked diverse heroic models in comic books: “for comic book readers of different ethnic backgrounds, there were no heroic models that they could directly identify with, no heroes they could call their own. Instead, they were required to imaginatively identify across boundaries of race since the only depiction of visible minorities in most comic books were the nameless criminals and barbarous ­savages that the real heroes defeated month after month” (3). Though Brown’s statement may be true for superhero comic books specifically, he seems to generalize this issue to all comic books, when, in the case of Gold Key and Dell’s television adaptations, black heroic models, in particular, were plentiful. Simply put, superheroes are not the only arbiters of heroism in comic books. Whether it was Scotty rescuing his partner Kelly Robinson from Chinese spies in I Spy, Linc solving an undercover mission in The Mod Squad, high school teacher Pete Dixon helping a student over personal obstacles in Room 222, Barney Collier and Dan Erickson applying scientific knowledge to lifethreatening problems in Mission: Impossible and Land of the Giants (respectively), or the Harlem Globetrotters resolving a variety of conflicts through basketball, comic-book readers did have access to stories featuring black heroic figures. If these characters could serve as heroic models for television audiences, why couldn’t they do the same for comic-book readers, even if they weren’t superheroes? Or were these characters influential only as television heroes, with their comic-book appearances serving merely as footnotes to their more significant influence? These are certainly far less glamorous or even exciting examples of heroism than one would get from superheroes, but they exist, and at a time (between 1966 and 1973) when other mainstream comics were lacking, and so they should be contrasted against their contemporaries, such as Black Panther, Falcon, Luke Cage, and other characters, when discussing black heroism in comic books.

History of Dell and Gold Key Comics Dell and Gold Key Comics can be examined together partly because of the similarities in publishing strategies. Both relied heavily on licensed properties for their comics, with most of their successes coming from adapting animated cartoons. In the 1960s, they also both competed for the same licenses from other children’s programming as well as prime-time television shows and movies. However, there is a more significant historical connection between the two companies. Beginning in 1938, the Dell Publishing Company, which put out a wide range of products that included periodicals and paperback novels, formed a partnership with the Western Printing and Lithographing

Adaptation and Racial Representation   555 Company which resulted in the comic books published under the Dell imprint. The ­relationship between the two companies was unique in comics publishing: Western ­provided all of the editorial and creative content for the comic books and handled all of the printing, while Dell financed their production and distribution. Western obtained the licenses (which they would use for other products, such as coloring books, puzzles, and Big Little Books), while Dell approved which licensed properties became comic books. This proved to be an incredibly successful partnership: during the peak of their popularity in the early 1950s, Dell comics made up 35 to 40 percent of all comic books printed and sold in the United States. In that period, Dell produced eleven out of twentyfive top-selling periodicals, with these titles selling between 950,000 and 2 million ­copies of each issue (Gabilliet 40). The most popular title in the United States, Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, peaked at 3,038,000 copies printed in September 1953, and that year Western printed around 375 million comic books (Barrier 297). While most of the ­successes came from Disney and Warner Brothers (Looney Tunes, Bugs Bunny, etc.) ­animated properties, Western also obtained lucrative licenses for Tarzan (Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc.), The Lone Ranger (The Lone Ranger Inc.), and western stars such as Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. However, these licensed properties required royalty payments, annual bonuses, and signing fees, which cut into profits; neither Western nor Dell owned many of its properties outright. The split between Dell and Western Publishing (the latter company having changed its name in 1960) built slowly over the late 1950s but finally came to a head in 1962. As Michael Barrier concisely explains, “It was the decline in comic-book sales that undermined and eventually ended the long-standing Dell-Western partnership” (334). Western, which still controlled all of the licenses, then formed Gold Key Comics, taking with it most of the creative talent as well. Dell had been building its own independent comic-book production in anticipation of the split, but the official separation resulted in Dell scrambling to find its own licensed properties, placing itself in direct competition with its former partner, until Dell finally closed its comic-book division in 1973 (Gold Key, which had morphed into the Whitman brand in the early 1980s, ultimately ceased comic-book publishing in 1984.). Mark Evanier makes an important point about how to understand the history of these two companies: in terms of creators and licenses, “it makes more sense to view all the Western Publishing product (Dell up until ’62, Gold Key thereafter) as one company . . . and the post-’62 Dell Comics as a brand-new, separate line” (30; ellipsis in original). Because of this shared history and the similar publication strategies of the two companies, they can be treated together in a discussion of television adaptations in the 1960s and 1970s.1 Early in the partnership, Dell/Western had issues associated with racial caricatures in the licensed comics. Two particular series stand out as notable: Our Gang Comics (1942–1947) and New Funnies (1942–1962), which featured mostly Walter Lantz’s cartoon characters through its run.2 Li’l Eight Ball appeared in only three cartoon shorts from the Walter Lantz studio in 1939, but nonetheless, he was included along with Lantz’s more famous Woody Woodpecker and Andy Panda in New Funnies in 1942. Unlike the anthropomorphic animals, Eight Ball was human—a black child, with a large, round,

556   Andrew J. Kunka bald head and other caricatured features, and he lived with his equally caricatured Mammy in an idyllic rural world. In 1947, a group of African-American children wrote a letter in protest of Eight Ball to Western editor Oskar Lebeck, and he not only responded to the children but also promised to remove the character from New Funnies. The character last appeared in issue #127 (September 1947). As the title indicates, Our Gang Comics adapted the Hal Roach short subjects of the same name. The comic-book stories were primarily created by Walt Kelly and, like their film sources, included the black character Buckwheat. Initially, Kelly’s depiction of the Our Gang characters look to be based on photo references of the actors, but as the series progressed, the art became more abstract, and Buckwheat (renamed Bucky in 1944) took on the features of a typical racial caricature. However, in 1947, Bucky appears as an adolescent, without the stereotyped iconography of his earlier appearances. Even the racially stereotyped dialect has gone away, and he speaks in the same informal dialogue as the other youthful members of the gang. Later that year, around the same time that Li’l Eight Ball was canceled, the Our Gang stories ended, possibly for the same reason, though Kelly was clearly working to move away from Buckwheat’s caricatured origins.3 The transformation of Buckwheat/Bucky demonstrates an evolution for Kelly away from caricature and stereotype, though it is unclear how much editorial involvement precipitated the change. Meanwhile, Li’l Eight Ball offers one of the few examples in comic-book history of a publisher responding directly and publicly to criticism of racial caricature.4 However, Western continued to feature racial caricatures in recurring roles, just not black ones. The Mexican caricatures Little Pancho Vanilla and Speedy Gonzales appeared regularly in Warner Brothers series such as Daffy Duck and Looney Tunes. In addition, Speedy Gonzales also had his own one-shot in Dell’s Four Color series (#1084, March–May 1960). Besides those recurring characters, Western’s humor and funny animal comics often dealt in Mexican, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Native American stereotypes and caricatures as sources of comedy. Western’s ambivalence toward racial caricatures seems consistent throughout the company’s history: while the company’s editors and creators made changes to some characters and responded positively to criticism, they also relied heavily on racial caricature in other comic books.

Methodology One goal of this chapter is to address an overlooked area of comics history in general and of racial representation in comics more specifically. To this end, a survey of the TV adaptations published by Dell and Gold Key shows just how many series can be included in such a discussion. However, these statistical data only provide a starting point for the discussion. They show the population density of racial minorities appearing in these comics during a specific period, but this study also needs to address specific questions about how

Adaptation and Racial Representation   557 that diversity functions in these comics and what it adds to our understanding of racial representation in comics. Here two strands of analysis emerge: style and content. By style, I mean the artists’ choices in visually representing racial identities. Will Eisner famously commented on the ubiquity of stereotypes in comic art: “Its drawings are a mirror reflection, and depend on the reader’s stored memory of experience to visualize an idea or process quickly. This makes necessary the simplification of images into repeatable symbols. Ergo, stereotypes” (11). Of course, some visual stereotypes, especially those involved in racial caricatures, serve the purpose of rendering a group subhuman or inferior. So there are visual characteristics of racial identity that are recognizable and inoffensive, while others are obviously racist and demeaning.5 What markers of racial identity, then, do the artists in the television adaptations rely on? Does the art ­feature racist caricatures and stereotypes, or does it fall into a more realistic mode? Does it matter that most of the comics are based on source material featuring live actors? The writing and dialogue can also be a factor in addition to the art. Does the characters’ language contain markers of racial identity and stereotyping? Content issues involve more of the narrative elements of the comics, such as plot, theme, character roles, or any kind of moral or social lesson the story purports to teach. For example, does the story deal directly and overtly with issues of diversity, prejudice, discrimination, or inclusion? If so, how does the comic address these issues? Are minority characters set up as spokespeople for the groups they represent? Is the storyworld populated by a diverse array of characters, or is the diversity limited only to ­specific characters dictated by the source material? Also, which characters have agency in the story? Finally, the larger cultural context in which these comics appear is also important. Television adaptations in comics form are transmedial by nature and are, therefore, dependent on their source material from other media for much of their content. So how much of the style and content related to racial representation is dictated by the source material? Are the comics responding to larger cultural and historical issues that affect all entertainment media at the time? And more specifically, how do the comics relate to specific issues in the comics medium and its history? How do they fit into the various traditions of racial representation in comics? As part of my methodology, then, I looked for TV adaptations between 1966 and 1973 (the point at which Dell stopped publishing new comic books) that featured nonwhite characters in recurring roles. These seem to be the peak years in which TV shows featuring more diverse casts were being regularly adapted in comics, so broadening out the survey earlier or later doesn’t seem to add many more examples. To give a sense of ­context within comics history, the Black Panther first appeared in Fantastic Four #52, dated July 1966; one month before that, Dell had begun publishing the Hogan’s Heroes comic, featuring the African-American character Kinch (played by Ivan Dixon in the show); one month after the Black Panther debut, Gold Key’s I Spy series started, with Bill Cosby as Alexander “Scotty” Scott. A newsstand in 1966 might have included the “sensational” introduction of the Black Panther (as the cover declared) alongside the early

558   Andrew J. Kunka issues of Hogan’s Heroes and I Spy, featuring photo covers that included Ivan Dixon and Bill Cosby, respectively, but no fanfare was offered. Also, in this survey, I left out certain genres, such as westerns and jungle comics. Westerns were incredibly popular, especially during the 1960s, and both Dell and Gold Key published a lot of them with considerable success. These genres have such specific issues regarding race that they require, and have received, special attention on their own (see, for example, Sheyahshe). For example, westerns included common stereotypes not only of Native Americans but also of Latinx and Asian characters (Hop Sing on Bonanza, Hey Boy and Hey Girl on Have Gun, Will Travel). So this study looks at adaptations in genres that did not already have stock or stereotyped characters as a part of the genre’s conventions. However, it is important to note that any sense of progressiveness evident in the comics I do discuss needs to be tempered by the fact that Dell and Gold Key continued at the same time to publish comics that reinforced racial ­stereotypes that were common across media. A broader study would have to include these other genres, though. In this survey of these comics, then, I found thirteen series from both publishers that feature African-American recurring characters and five nonwesterns that feature Asian or Asian-American characters (The Courtship of Eddie’s Father from Dell; Hawaiian Eye, The Green Hornet, The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan,6 and Star Trek from Gold Key). Therefore, I looked at seventeen total series (Star Trek appears in two categories) that featured nonwhite recurring characters who appeared in both the television series and the comic adaptations. For the most part, Asian and Asian-American characters tend to reinforce the stereotypical servant/housekeeper roles that we see throughout film and television history. Mrs. Livingston, played by Academy Award winner Miyoshi Umeki, in The Courtship of Eddie’s Father is the primary example here. Like many such characters, she serves as comic relief, the comedy coming from her use or misuse of the English language as a nonnative speaker (she regularly refers to Tom Corbett as “Eddie’s father” when speaking directly to him) and from her Confucian-style aphorisms. For example, in a story from the series’ first issue, two pigeons follow Eddie home, and he wants to keep them as pets. Mrs. Livingstone responds, “A saying says two birds in house better than a flock in sky.” However, she explains to Eddie that his father won’t be happy about it: “When two minds are made up . . . biggest mind usually is most made up” (ellipsis in original). We also see this character type earlier in Bachelor Father, which Dell adapted as a two-issue series in 1962, through the character Peter, John Forsythe’s Chinese butler, who served a similar function. Basically, these representations offer little surprise, as they reinforce stereotypes that persisted in popular entertainment for decades. However, The Green Hornet’s Kato is a complicated case. Kato is functionally Brit Reid’s/Green Hornet’s valet and chauffeur, thus fulfilling the servant role, but Bruce Lee’s popularity and legend, as well as the character’s extensive media history, complicate that role. The primary appeal of the 1966 Green Hornet TV series for contemporary audiences (and, by extension, the collector appeal of the three Gold Key issues, which carry a high value on the back-issue market) is Lee. Hawaiian Eye represents another recurring phenomenon with Asian-

Adaptation and Racial Representation   559 American characters on television in the 1960s and 1970s. Hawaiian Eye starred Robert Conrad as private detective Tom Lopaka and also featured Connie Stevens and, in its final season, Troy Donahue. Because of its setting, the series also had JapaneseAmerican characters in recurring roles, including police detective Lieutenant Danny Quon and taxi driver Kim. In 1962, Western had adapted Follow the Sun, an earlier crime series set in Hawaii that also featured similar Japanese-American characters. Most attempts at diversity in television shows of the era involved adding or including African-American characters in ensemble casts. That is the case for most of the thirteen series identified in this study. Dell: • Hogan’s Heroes #1–9 (1966–1967, 1969),7 “Kinch” Kinchloe (Ivan Dixon) • Mission: Impossible #1–5 (1967–1968, 1969), Barney Collier (Greg Morris) • The Mod Squad #1–8 (1969–1970, 1971), Lincoln “Linc” Hayes (Clarence Williams III) • The New People #1–2 (1970), Gene Washington (David Moses) • Room 222 #1–4 (1970, 1971), Pete Dixon (Lloyd Haynes), Liz McIntyre (Denise Nicholas) • The Young Lawyers #1–2 (1971), Pat Walters (Judy Pace) • The Young Rebels #1 (1971),8 Isak Poole (Louis Gossett Jr.) Gold Key: • I Spy #1–6 (1966–1968), Alexander “Scotty” Scott (Bill Cosby) • The Hardy Boys #1–4 (1970–1971), Pete Jones (voiced by Dallas McKennon, played by Bob Crowder in live-action segments) • The Harlem Globetrotters #1–12 (1972–1975) • Land of the Giants #1–5 (1968–1969), Dan Erickson (Don Marshall) • Star Trek #1–61 (1967–1979), Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) • Where’s Huddles? #1–3 (1971), Freight Train (voiced by Herb Jeffries)9 An odd entry on this list that shows some challenges within this methodology is The New People, a short-lived ABC series that ran for only seventeen episodes during the 1969–1970 television season. The show involved a group of forty college students whose plane crashes on a deserted island, which had been set up as a nuclear test site before being decommissioned. The island has an entire town built on it, and the kids see this as an opportunity to start civilization from scratch, without the mistakes of their parents and previous generations. As such, the series directly addressed pressing social issues of the time related to crime, racism, sexual harassment, violence, and so on. Of the forty survivors, only six characters recurred on the show, including one black student, Gene Washington, played by David Moses. All six actors appear on the cover of the second issue. What makes the two-issue comic adaptation odd is that while it follows the basic premise of the series, it only includes a couple of named characters from the show. Most

560   Andrew J. Kunka characters who appear go unnamed, and those who are named don’t correspond to characters in the TV series. So while there are a few panels that show an unidentified, nonspeaking black male character, it’s not completely clear that this is meant to be Gene Washington. Otherwise, the identified recurring characters tend to play fairly prominent roles in their respective series. In Room 222, Pete Dixon (played by Lloyd Haynes) is clearly the series’ protagonist, and in The Harlem Globetrotters, almost the entire human cast, with the exception of Granny, their elderly white driver, is black.

Style In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud introduces the concepts of the “picture plane” and “visual iconography” when describing the range of comic-art styles that runs from realistic to iconic. Though McCloud avoids issues of racial representation, these ­concepts still bear some relevance to the discussion. Racial caricatures such as Li’l Eight Ball and Little Pancho Vanilla would obviously fall on the abstract or iconic end of the picture plane, while the photo-referenced style used in many of the television adaptations certainly goes on the realistic end. On such a spectrum, there can be a value judgment and an ideological reading of images from either end, with the realistic images being more favorable and less problematic than the racial caricatures on the opposite side. Therefore, the television adaptations can represent a more progressive approach to racial representation than the racial caricatures that appeared in some of the companies’ animation adaptations. Such a distinction may seem obvious, but the use of photo references in the television adaptations can also complicate issues of racial representation and visual style. Some artists complained about the challenges of drawing actor likenesses, especially when they were given bad source material, such as the still photos and other publicity items that the studios or networks would provide. Artist Tony Tallarico talks about learning from Mad artist Angelo Torres how to take his own photos of the television screen at a time when recording, pausing, and rewinding were not options (Amash, “I Absolutely Love” 43). Many artists would create model sheets for actors’ likenesses, often based on a single photo reference, as artist Tom Gill describes (Amash, “To Be Continued” 27–28). In extreme cases, artists went beyond model sheets and traced photo references to create “stats” of various facial expressions and poses that they reused throughout the comics. These likenesses appear to be drawn in a different style from the main artist’s, as can be seen in an example from Room 222 issue #3, drawn by Jack Sparling (see Figure 31.1). In these four panels, the same head of Pete Dixon (Lloyd Haynes) appears three times but tipped slightly differently and reproduced at different sizes. Also, the same head of Principal Seymour Kaufman (Michael Constantine) is used twice. Joseph Witek identifies the key problems with the overuse of photo references when he discusses the extreme case of Don Sherwood’s art for Charlton Comics’ Partridge Family series: “The extensive deployment of photo reference . . . emphasizes the ­problems

Adaptation and Racial Representation   561

Figure 31.1  Panels from Room 222 #3 (July 1970), featuring Pete Dixon (Lloyd Haynes) and Seymour Kaufman (Michael Constantine), drawn by Jack Sparling, writer unknown. Published by Dell Publishing Co. © Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation.

inherent in depicting the faces of real-life persons in comic art. In comics the faces of such characters are generally delineated with much more specificity than are those of the fictional characters around them, and the facial orientation of a portrait’s subject outward toward the original camera creates a series of subtle disjunctions and displacements that suggest the characters exist for readers but not for each other in the story world” (34–35). Though Lloyd Haynes and Michael Constantine are not oriented toward the camera in these panels, such orientation does occur throughout the Room 222 series, and it is disorienting. Compounding the disorientation, then, is the repeated use of the same photo-referenced images. Such repetition has the effect of pulling the reader out of the narrative by focusing more on identifying and recognizing the repeated images rather than considering the images’ and panels’ places in the story’s narrative progress.

562   Andrew J. Kunka The  ­difference in style between the photo-referenced characters and the fictional ­characters, as Witek identifies, also creates a disorienting effect, but it can be one that emphasizes the depiction of racial identity between these two groups of characters. In a page from Room 222 issue #3, close-ups of Pete Dixon and Liz McIntyre are drawn with a fine line and distinct visual characteristics, while the character Andy Anderson, the black track star, is drawn with a heavier ink line and resembles most of artist Sparling’s young male characters, black or white (Figure 31.2). In addition, there are noticeable differences between the panels where the two main characters are drawn at a distance—and therefore are not heavily photo-referenced—and their close-ups. The distinction between these images on the same page invites the reader to pause and make a comparison, since the two styles are so dramatically different. By extension, the reader can also consider how Sparling makes different choices to identify a black character based on a real person and one whose features and identity are wholly from the artist’s imagination. Occasionally, creators may only have had a vague familiarity with the source material, leading to inconsistent characterization and dramatic visual misrepresentation. One example recurs in Gold Key’s successful Star Trek series, which ran for sixty-one issues from 1967 to 1979. The series has often been criticized by fans who accuse the creators of having little knowledge of the TV series. One of the most common complaints is the series’ inconsistency with uniform colors. However, inconsistent coloring causes other, more significant problems. In issue #25, Lieutenant Uhura is referred throughout as “Uhuru,” and she is colored as a Caucasian female (see Figure 31.3). The series is often incorrect in the coloring of her other appearances, especially when she is not identified by name. The cause of these mistakes is not clear. Western employed a team of colorists as a part of its production shop. They would likely have received color guides from the book’s editor, so somewhere in that process, a miscommunication about the character occurred. Weak editorial oversight and the creators’ lack of familiarity with the source material can also dramatically impact issues of racial ­representation.10 But this mistake also highlights some important questions for ­analyzing racial representation in comics more broadly. When is color the only marker of a character’s racial identity?

Social and Cultural Issues In addition to visual elements of the comic, such as coloring and an artist’s style, we can look at the ways these comics’ stories deal with social and cultural issues related to race. Even comics based on TV series where issues of diversity and equality were at the forefront—that is, where plots often focused on offering didactic antiprejudice arguments, as in Room 222—do not often show similar concerns. Other issues, such as juvenile delinquency, gender equality, and even drug use, do get addressed, but those involving race and discrimination are rare. So while the Room 222 comic has a diverse cast that reflects the TV series, it never calls attention to or directly addresses racial

Adaptation and Racial Representation   563

Figure 31.2  A page from Room 222 #3 (July 1970), featuring Pete Dixon (Lloyd Haynes) and Liz McIntyre (Denise Nicholas), drawn by Jack Sparling, writer unknown. Published by Dell Publishing Co. © Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation.

564   Andrew J. Kunka

Figure 31.3  A panel from Star Trek #25 (July 1974), featuring a miscolored Lieutenant Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), written by Arnold Drake, drawn by Alberto Giolitti. Published by Western Publishing Company. © CBS Studios Inc.

issues in the same way it addresses various social problems or in the same way the ­television series did. While the Room 222 comic book and most of the others avoided social commentary, race and discrimination are addressed in the first issue of The Young Lawyers, however obliquely. The Young Lawyers was an ABC drama that began in 1969 as a “movie of the week” before graduating to a weekly series for the 1970–1971 season, running for twenty-four episodes beginning in September 1970 and ending in March 1971. Though the show did not make much of an impact and is little remembered today, it is significant for the casting of African-American actor Judy Pace as young lawyer Pat Walters, one of the show’s three primary characters. The series also starred veteran character actor Lee J. Cobb as David Barrett, the mentor to the young lawyers in the Neighborhood Law Office, and Zalman King as crusading hotshot attorney Aaron Silverman. Dell’s comic adaptation of the series ran for only two issues, the first issue cover-dated January 1971 and the second and final issue from April of that year. While the TV show was heavy-handed in its dealing with social issues (as were most socially conscious

Adaptation and Racial Representation   565 shows at the time, often referred to as “relevance dramas”), the comic takes a less direct approach. In the first issue’s lead story, a black college quarterback named Jimmy Carter is severely injured in a game, resulting in paralysis and the end of a promising career. Black quarterbacks at Division I schools, such as USC’s Jimmy Jones, were a rarity in the early ’70s, so the simple “casting” of Jimmy Carter here is significant. The story centers around the rivalry between Carter and Lee Farnson, his blond white roommate and backup quarterback. Aaron discovers that Lee blames himself for Jimmy’s head injury: on the Friday before the game, Lee and Jimmy fought, and Jimmy accidentally landed on his head. Lee’s guilt leads him to go on a drug bender.11 Meanwhile, Jimmy’s paralysis is diagnosed as psychosomatic: he is convinced that Lee was intentionally trying to sabotage his career. At one point in the story, Pat Walters gives an impassioned speech that persuades Aaron to take Carter’s case: “Nobody asked me, but let me offer something. I think I might have what you would call some ‘inside information’ on Jimmy. It’s not easy for a boy like Jimmy to make it in a world that’s built around kids like Lee who have money and family . . . and opportunity.” This speech addresses issues of race and socioeconomic status but only through euphemistic language. Pat offers “inside information” on Jimmy’s situation, apparently based on her experience as a black woman. She refers to “a boy like Jimmy” without specifically identifying those qualities; however, in describing “kids like Lee,” she emphasizes money and family, thus contrasting the two characters’ socioeconomic backgrounds. But implied is the contrast between the white privilege of Lee, who, as David Barrett says, “had everything going for him from the start,” and Jimmy’s experience as an African American who gets “one big chance at life” despite his enormous skill and talent (that chance becomes slimmer when one considers the rarity of black professional quarterbacks in the early 1970s). Lee can recover from his mistakes and get multiple shots at redemption, while Jimmy gets only one chance to overcome social limitations, discrimination, and stereotypes. Ultimately, Pat concludes that the tension inherent in a “mixed relationship” like Jimmy and Lee’s was boiling below the surface for so long that it would inevitably blow up, despite (or because of) each roommate’s fear of “offending” the other. This story presents a complex message about white privilege and black opportunity, but it does so using coded language to address the problem. It’s difficult to tell whether this story is being subtle in its commentary about racial tension or if it’s dancing around the subject, avoiding more overt and controversial ­language so as not to upset sensitive readers. In the second story (each issue contains two stories), a young Latin boy name Angel Rivera has his hopes of attending a “gifted school” potentially shattered when he is accused by a store owner of stealing a typewriter. Aaron sees Angel’s situation as a case of discrimination, but Angel’s alibi doesn’t hold up. In a confusing resolution, Angel’s innocence is proved when Aaron discovers the young boy is color-blind. It doesn’t take a deep reading to figure out that “color-blind” is a metaphor, though the story never takes the opportunity to drive that point home. This story is notable, however, for using a Latin character as the focus of its message about discrimination, which was rare for the comics examined here.

566   Andrew J. Kunka With two stories that address, however obliquely, problems of racial tension and ­discrimination, The Young Lawyers #1 is the rare exception in the Dell and Gold Key adaptations. Even the second issue of the series appears to scale back. It does include one story that involves discrimination, but it’s about a white biker named Captain Freedom who wants to sue the United States for discriminating against bikers. Aaron is skeptical but soon realizes that the biker’s claims of prejudice are legitimate and decides to take the case. Captain Freedom, however, is just satisfied that someone finally believes him and chooses not to pursue legal action. This is hardly a useful lesson about civil rights (though perhaps a more useful lesson about white privilege), but it is curious that the writer chose this example to explore prejudice, especially compared to the previous issue. Like The Young Lawyers and The New People, though much more popular with television audiences, Room 222 regularly addressed a variety of social issues in its five ­seasons (1969–1974). The comic book follows the television series’ premise, with American history teacher Pete Dixon (Lloyd Haynes) trying to have a positive impact on the lives of the students at Walt Whitman High (curiously, however, English teacher Alice Johnson, played by series breakout star Karen Valentine, barely appears in the comic). The comic-book plots, though, do not deal with those issues, especially with regard to racism. One story is particularly telling. In the third issue, African-American track star Andy Anderson is not living up to expectations on the field, and Lloyd Haynes fears something is wrong. After talking to the student, Mr. Haynes believes that marijuana might be involved, and this suspicion seems to be confirmed when he sees Andy hanging out with dropout drug dealers. However, the problem turns out to be much simpler: Andy has a crush on fellow student Gail, and he can’t keep his mind on athletics. The story dances close to dealing with issues of drugs and race but fails to offer the didactic lessons that its source material would have. Why, for example, does Mr. Haynes automatically assume that a black athlete’s performance issues are the result of drug abuse? He does not seem to reflect on this question; instead, he celebrates the joys of young love. So while these television series regularly took on pressing social issues of the day—to the point where they appear dated and preachy to contemporary audiences—the comics seem to sanitize that aspect of their source material, dealing with it rarely and obliquely, if at all. However, the mere fact that these comics were populated by diverse casts—including characters such as Jimmy Carter, Angel Rivera, and Andy Anderson, who were not a part of the regular series—sets them apart from other comics of the same era.12 Mainstream comics from DC and Marvel were introducing more African-American characters, not only in their superhero comics but also in their war, humor, and romance series. Black Panther first appears in 1966, followed by the much less touted appearance of reporter Robbie Robertson in Amazing Spider-Man (1967). DC had already introduced African-American soldier Jackie Johnson in Our Army at War #113 (December 1961), and Marvel debuted Gabriel Jones in Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos #1 (May 1963). Between 1971 and 1972, John Stewart first appears in Green Lantern/Green Arrow #87, the Falcon becomes the co-headliner of Captain America’s comic (Falcon

Adaptation and Racial Representation   567 first appeared in 1969), and Hero for Hire premieres. These are usually established as ­significant touchstones in the history of black representation in comics, at least partly because their appearances regularly announced their significance. On the cover of his debut, John Stewart, holding the limp body of Hal Jordan, shouts, “They whipped this Green Lantern—Now let ’em try me!” and the cover proclaims, “Introducing an unforgettable new character who really means it when he warns . . . ‘Beware My Power!’ ” Our Army at War #160 (November 1965) announces on the cover, “Only Sgt. Rock dares to bring you the battle tale that’s too hot for anyone else to handle!” The story, “What’s the Color of Your Blood?” has Jackie Johnson providing a life-saving blood transfusion for a Nazi soldier, thus challenging the Nazi’s racist ideology. Stories like these, and many others of the time, seem to feature African-American characters as tools for sensationalized plots about racism and civil rights and, therefore, as spokespeople for the black experience. This contrasts sharply with the casual way Dell and Gold Key television adaptations feature African-American characters. Even though these comic books avoided the overt messaging that was common to their source material and was also emerging in other mainstream comics of the time, their casual approach to diversity remains significant on its own. Despite the lack of overt messaging, the Dell and Gold Key adaptations do present consistently positive black role models fighting crime and foreign threats, saving lives, and solving problems—the same general activities one would find in superheroes. Yet these comic books are generally left out of discussions of black heroism, such as Nama and Brown. Their absence, though, should not be a surprise. When comparing these stories to the sensational, action-packed adventures of Black Panther, Luke Cage, Falcon, Black Lightning, and so on, the Dell and Gold Key comic books just don’t meas­ ure up. They are often dull, poorly written and drawn, and hidden behind boring, nondescript photo covers. It may be difficult to imagine the audience for the adaptations or how a young reader might choose a Room 222 comic book over Captain America and the Falcon, as just one example. Though these models of black heroism do exist, they did not appear in the places where comic-book readers might truly want them.

Lingering Questions In the end, some questions remain about Dell and Gold Key when it comes to racial ­representation in these television adaptations. First, how do these comics fit into the overall publishing strategies of Dell and Gold Key? Were these publishers intentionally seeking out licenses that offered diverse casts? Both companies were in heavy competition for licenses, especially because Gold Key left the partnership with the most lucrative ones, and Dell had to scramble to replace them. Therefore, Dell’s post-1962 publishing strategy looks like an attempt to throw a lot of different stuff at the wall to see what would stick. And very little did. Most series that Dell produced rarely made it past a year (or four quarterly issues) before cancellation. And Gold Key had similar luck.

568   Andrew J. Kunka So the diversity in these comics could easily have been accidental, a coincidence that those properties most likely to translate to comics, such as action/adventure and science-­fiction shows (Mission: Impossible, I Spy, Land of the Giants, and Star Trek), were also the most diverse. Nonetheless, that doesn’t explain head-scratching choices such as Room 222, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, and The Young Lawyers. However, Dell may have been open to exploring racial diversity in comics as a means of attracting new readers. According to artist Tallarico, Dell president Helen Meyer was enthusiastic about the proposal for Lobo, the original Western comic from 1967, featuring the eponymous black cowboy (Amash, “I Absolutely Love” 42). Though Lobo was not a television adaptation, its publication does show that Dell was willing to take chances that other comics publishers were not. (Meyer even persuaded Tallerico to change the series title from Black Lobo to Lobo, in contrast to Marvel and DC, who gave many of their African-American heroes racially identified names, such as Black Goliath and Black Lightning.) Meanwhile, Gold Key began publishing the series Total War (later M.A.R.S. Patrol: Total War) in 1965, about a special military unit fighting against a mysterious invasion of technologically advanced forces. The Marine Attack Rescue Service features a racially diverse cast: two white soldiers, Corporal Russ Stacey and Lieutenant Cy Adams; Japanese-American Sergeant Ken Hiro; and African-American Sergeant Joe Striker. At the same time, both companies continued to publish jungle, western, and even humor comics that perpetuated racial caricatures and stereotypes. That makes it difficult to infer a progressive agenda on the publishers’ parts. Nonetheless, each company also seemed open to more positive images of diversity in its publications like Lobo and Total War, where the creators had the choice for casting different character roles. Finally, why are these comics neglected in comics scholarship and history? Do they seem like not-comics, tied more closely to the medium of their source material than to the comics medium, with their photo rather than illustrated covers? Or is there a bias against licensed comics, that such comics are inherently compromised in quality, creativity, and value, forced to maintain the status quo by their conservative corporate overlords trying to produce the most inoffensive, saccharine comics aimed at the most juvenile audience? In this sense, is there an anti-Dell-and-Gold-Key bias? As Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo explain in The Greatest Comic Book of All Time, the availability of past comics to current scholars and readers can give them an exaggerated significance (88–90). Conversely, and obviously, the lack of ready availability for some comics results in them being ignored in comics history. While Beaty and Woo make this point in discussing the paucity of an Archie comics archive, the same could be said about Dell and Gold Key comics, perhaps even more so. With the exceptions of comics by Carl Barks, John Stanley, and Walt Kelly, Dell and Gold Key comics almost never get reprinted, for a ­variety of reasons: little reader interest, difficult legal arrangements with copyright holders and performers, and the general low quality of the comics. So many of the comic books discussed in this chapter are poorly written and drawn adaptations of littleknown or uncelebrated television series that are not currently available on home video

Adaptation and Racial Representation   569 or streaming services. However, as Witek has explained in discussing many of the ­terrible comics produced by publisher Charlton, “an analysis of the failure to achieve what are the usually implicit minimal requirements of simple competence can identify some of the most fundamental aspects of comics production more precisely than might a consideration of superior artistic achievement or even of generically adequate work” (29). Not only can bad comic books address issues of general aesthetic criteria for the evaluation and analysis of comic art, but they can also contribute to discussions of racial representation and social issues in a way that is valuable and different from a discussion that only includes canonical or otherwise validated works such as Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner and Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, or truly problematic racist works such as Eisner’s The Spirit and Blackhawk. Another characteristic of these comics contributes to the bias against them: the writers and artists for Dell and Gold Key comics are almost never credited and so can only be identified by a diligent, dedicated group of fans who have researched available archives and studied characteristics of the creators. Those identified writers and artists were prolific journeymen creators who are generally uncelebrated. Most of the comics discussed in this chapter were written by writers such as Joe Gill and Paul S. Newman (credited by The Guinness Book of World Records as the most prolific comic-book writer of all time) and drawn by Jack Sparling, Frank Springer, Jose Delbo, and Dan Spiegle—the artists responsible for almost all of the television and movie adaptations from both publishers. Comics studies (and the humanities in general, for that matter) valorize auteurism as a means of generating distinction for the medium, and the most celebrated comics have been those produced by a single creator: Maus, Persepolis, Fun Home, and so on. This is why the Western creators who have gained the most critical and historical attention have been those who most directly feed that auteurist bias: Carl Barks, Walt Kelly, and John Stanley. The sheer number of comics produced by Gill, Newman, Sparling, Spiegle, and others every month seems staggering, and so the quality appears compromised by high output, tight deadlines, and other contributing factors. These comics were created to exploit licenses, not ­further the artistic development of the comics medium. The Dell and Gold Key comics attract a small niche of collectors, some of whom are willing to study the comics carefully in order to identify the uncredited creators but many of whom are attracted more to the nostalgic appeal of the photo covers than to the interior contents. Such collectors would not be interested in reprints of the original comics, since it is the materiality of the original that attracts them in the first place. Therefore, the expense and effort of securing licensing rights would likely far outweigh any potential profits. In addition, the prominence of photo covers on these series may make them not look like traditional comic books to many readers. Instead, they may fall into a different pop-cultural category, such as television memorabilia. These comics, then, are likely as far away from any canon in comics studies as works could get. And yet they still have cultural value. These Dell and Gold Key adaptations populate their storyworlds with diverse casts but with little fanfare or acknowledgment, unlike

570   Andrew J. Kunka the comic books from DC and Marvel that tout the introduction of new minority ­characters and use them in often heavy-handed stories that foreground social problems such as prejudice. When reading the Dell and Gold Key comics, therefore, one can get the sense of entering an alternative history of comics that seems largely isolated from the dominant histories of the 1960s and ’70s. In this alternative history, actors such as Nichelle Nichols, Greg Morris, Clarence Williams III, Bill Cosby, Judy Pace, Don Marshall, Lloyd Haynes, and Denise Nicholas serve not only as pioneers on network television but, inadvertently, also as groundbreakers in comics. In addition, these comics publishers were at least keeping pace with other media in terms of diversity, duplicating both the progress and the problems of those media but offering a critical mass of comics featuring African-American characters that are, collectively and individually, worthy of further study.

Notes 1. More details about the decline of this partnership and the inevitable breakup can be found in Barrier (234–238) and Wells (103). 2. New Funnies became Walter Lantz New Funnies with issue #109 (March 1946), with the title shifting to Walter Lantz New TV Funnies and Walter Lantz TV Funnies somewhat randomly in the series’ final four years. The series began as The Funnies in 1936, making it one of the first comic books. It started out reprinting various comic strips and later switched to original material. The title changed to New Funnies for issue #65 (June–July 1942). 3. For more detail on Western’s decision to end Li’l Eight Ball and on Walt Kelly’s transformation of Buckwheat/Bucky, see Barrier 235–240. 4. Fawcett’s removal of Steamboat, Captain Marvel’s black sidekick, is another example of a comic-book publisher responding to criticism of a racial caricature. For more on Steamboat, see Cremins 98–129. 5. For more about the definition of racial caricature and its history in comics, see Kunka. 6. The history of Charlie Chan in US popular culture is extensive and complicated and beyond the scope of this chapter. See Huang for a thorough discussion of that history. This HannaBarbera cartoon series, however, is notable for the voice actors who performed in it. Actor Keye Luke, who had played Chan’s Number One Son, Lee, in the film series, voiced Charlie Chan in the cartoon, making him one of the only Chinese actors to play the character. Most members of the Chan Clan (ten in all) were voiced by Chinese-American actors, with one exception being Anne Chan, played by a young Jodie Foster. 7. The gap between 1967 and 1969 for the Hogan’s Heroes series, as well as similar gaps for Mission: Impossible, The Mod Squad, and Room 222, is due to a common but confusing publishing practice for Dell comics in the years before it ceased comic-book publication. The final issue or two of these series were reprints of the earliest issues published a year or so after the main series was canceled. Therefore, for example, Mission: Impossible #5 and Room 222 #4 are reprints of the series’ first issues. 8. Many of Dell’s and Gold Key’s television adaptations were limited to single issues, such as The Young Rebels and Hawaiian Eye. Most of their series were published quarterly, leaving three months between issues. Both publishers were also known to wait for sales results of a first issue before preparing a second issue, so gaps between issues 1 and 2 for many series

Adaptation and Racial Representation   571 were significant. That being the case, I treat The Young Rebels as a “series,” assuming that Dell intended to publish more than one issue if sales had warranted. 9. Several of the Gold Key series were based on animated properties. The Hardy Boys was a Saturday-morning children’s program that featured a combination of live action and animation, with black musician Bob Crowder playing Pete Jones in live-action segments and white voice actor Dallas McKennon playing him in the cartoon. The Harlem Globetrotters was based on the comedy basketball team featuring Meadowlark Lemon, Curly Neal, Geese Ausbie, and others. The Globetrotters were voiced by a mix of primarily black actors (including Eddie “Rochester” Anderson and Scatman Crothers) and some white actors. Where’s Huddles? was a prime-time animated series about football players that followed on the success of The Flintstones. Animation can complicate matters of racial representation because the source material can rely on caricature that carries over into the comic-book adaptation. 10. Contemporary comics publisher IDW, the current license holder for Star Trek comics, has reprinted some of the Gold Key series. In these collections, IDW has cleaned up the color of the originals, but interestingly, they maintain mistakes like this and the incorrect ­uniform colors. 11. Though the Comics Code prohibited drug references like this, Dell never signed on to the Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA) which administered the Code (see Nyberg 116–117). Therefore, Dell comics could include such drug references without repercussion from the Code. 12. Fitzgerald Publications, which publisher Bertram Fitzgerald began in 1966, represents an important exception. Its primary series was Golden Legacy, which celebrated the lives of black historical figures. Fitzgerald also published Fast Willie Jackson, an African-American teen humor comic book in the style of the Archie comics.

Works Cited Amash, Jim. “ ‘I Absolutely Love What I’m Doing!’ ” Interview with Tony Tallarico. Alter Ego, no. 109, 2012, pp. 37–48. Amash, Jim. “ ‘To Be Continued!’ After 6½ Decades in the Comics Field, Artist Tom Gill Is Still Going Strong.” Interview with Tom Gill. Alter Ego, no. 43, 2004, pp. 23–34. Barrier, Michael. Funnybooks: The Improbable Glories of the Best American Comic Books. U of California P, 2015. Beaty, Bart, and Benjamin Woo. The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books. Palgrave, 2016. Brown, Jeffrey  A. Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans. UP of Mississippi, 2001. Cremins, Brian. Captain Marvel and the Art of Nostalgia. UP of Mississippi, 2016. Eisner, Will. Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist. Norton, 2008. Evanier, Mark. “Dell Comics and Gold Key Comics: Answering an Incessantly Asked Question about Their Relationship.” Alter Ego no. 151, 2018, pp. 29–30. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen, UP of Mississippi, 2010. Huang, Yunte. Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History. W. W. Norton, 2010.

572   Andrew J. Kunka Kunka, Andrew J. “Comics, Race, and Ethnicity.” The Routledge Companion to Comics, edited by Frank Bramlett et al., Routledge, 2017, pp. 275–284. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Kitchen Sink Press, 1993. Nama, Adilifu. Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes. U of Texas P, 2011. Nyberg, Amy Kiste. Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code. UP of Mississippi, 1998. Rifas, Leonard. “Race and Comix.” Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama. U of Texas P, 2010, pp. 27–38. Sheyahshe, Michael A. Native Americans in Comic Books: A Critical Study. McFarland, 2008. Wells, John. American Comic Book Chronicles: The 1960s, 1960–1964. TwoMorrows, 2015. Witek, Joseph. “If a Way to the Better There Be: Excellence, Mere Competence, and the Worst Comics Ever Made.” Image [&] Narrative, vol. 17, no. 4, 2016, pp. 26–42.

chapter 32

Ca n dy a n d Drugs for Di n n er Rat Queens, Genre, and Our Aesthetic Categories Sean Guynes

“Why is it that wherever there’s a Rat Queen, someone gets assaulted or a building gets destroyed?” —Sawyer, captain of the Palisade Guard (RQV1)1

The comic-book series Rat Queens, published by Image Comics on a semiregular ­schedule since 2013 and, as of early 2019, consisting of more than thirty issues and ­one-shot specials, opens like a typical Dungeons & Dragons-style (D&D) fantasy adventure. A town seemingly set in the Middle Ages, populated by humans, elves, dwarves, and other fantasy beings, has a problem. It’s an idyllic town with a bland name, Palisade, where everything runs smoothly and the citizens are happy, but all of this has been ­disrupted by some intervening, malevolent force. In the average D&D game or fantasy novel, this is the problem the adventurers work together to solve. Rat Queens writer Kurtis J. Wiebe bucks this fantasy trope immediately and in doing so sets the tone for the whole series. In Wiebe’s take on the D&D fantasy adventure, the titular Rat Queens—the elf necromancer Hannah, the dwarf warrior (and princess) Violet, the smidgen (a hobbit or halfling-like people) Betty, and the atheist human cleric Dee (the only person of color in the series, dressed as a cliché voodoo practitioner), with the transgender orc warrior Braga joining in later issues—are the town’s problem. They are introduced with a splash page that sets the narrative and aesthetic tone for whole series, a two-page spread of a Palisade street with sprawling, bloodied people everywhere, buildings ­damaged, poles knocked over, windows broken, signs and banners ripped down. To the left, at a canted angle, stand the triumphant queens, with Violet tired from the fight, Dee aloof, Hannah raring for more, and Betty uninterested in anything but her beer.

574   Sean Guynes On ­display here are the aesthetic principles that guide the series, what Sianne Ngai calls “the commodity aesthetic of cuteness, the discursive aesthetic of the interesting, and the  performative aesthetic of zaniness” in her groundbreaking book Our Aesthetic Categories. Together, the zany, cute, and interesting “help us get at some of the most important social dynamics underlying life in late capitalist societies today” (Ngai 1), and their presentation in Rat Queens is no exception. Rat Queens is a collage of references and narrative tropes drawing on a century of ­fantasy. Though not a D&D franchise comic, Rat Queens is nonetheless saturated with the tabletop role-playing game’s recognizable brand of quest-based fantasy adventure narrative that pits a party of diverse characters, with complementary backgrounds and skill sets, against the odds, typically embroiling the otherwise completely normal adventurers in immense plots to save the local town, city, world, or universe. Created in 1974, D&D has largely been (or has at least been understood in popular culture to be) played by adolescent boys and men. In Wiebe’s comic, the main characters are all women, some queer, and all unabashedly sexual, funny, violent, and debaucherous. This led many to hail the comic as a feminist spin on D&D, despite the fact that the series was initially created by two men, one of whom later left the series after he was arrested for domestic violence. The narrative and production situation of Rat Queens is symptomatic of the comics industry’s simultaneous attempts to tell diverse, socially just stories without courting diverse artistic talent, relying instead on a rotating door of white men (and occasionally women) to tell the stories of much more heterogeneous comic-book storyworlds. In this chapter, I link the seemingly disparate but deeply interconnected discourses and practices of contemporary media production, genre, aesthetics, and comics. For the purposes of The Oxford University Press The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies, I offer these arguments through a case study of a popular, if certainly problematic, comic book and in the process demonstrate the critical utility to comics studies of reading genre, aesthetics, and industry together. I read Rat Queens through Ngai’s conception of zany, cute, and interesting, showing how each of these categories is part of the aesthetic logics of the series, while also showing how each performs or critiques the series’ (superficial) investment in gender politics and the fantasy genre. Like Henry Jenkins’s contribution to this volume, this chapter offers a case study that gives insight into the broader political and industrial scope of comics and in doing so emphasizes the importance of aesthetics in understanding the relationship between the comics industry, comics themselves as art objects, and their narrative and representational strategies. I  suggest ultimately that Rat Queens’ aesthetic repertoire of the contemporary is symptomatic of the larger aesthetic cachet of its publisher, Image Comics, and no doubt a major impetus for its success as a pseudo-indie, pseudo-mainstream comic-book company that courts a wacky range of  creative talents, takes chances on short-lived series with strange premises, and is (­supposedly) not beholden to comics publishing and narrative traditions but conforms nonetheless to broader artistic expectations— cultural demands, even—to be zany, cute, and interesting.

Candy and Drugs for Dinner   575

Genre and Aesthetics in Comics Criticism Genre is a definitive category in comics studies. Though few comics scholars engage with genre theory as such, genre nonetheless weighs heavily on the field, where the categories of “mainstream” and “indie,” “art,” or “alternative” comics have been maintained with the same levels of distinction as have “genre fiction” (that is, popular genres such as science fiction, fantasy, horror, and romance) and “literary fiction” (for the most part a descriptor of supposed literary quality, as well as a product of what Mark McGurl calls the “program era” of university-based writing training) in postwar literature studies. In this way, “indie” and “alternative” comics, especially (auto)biographical comics about real people, places, and events—such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, or Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home—have come to be seen as simultaneously nongenre and a genre of their own. On the other hand, mainstream comics published by companies such as DC Comics and Marvel Comics, as well as a host of smaller, “indie” publishers that are nonetheless part of the same comics market and distribution model—such as BOOM! Studios, Dark Horse, Dynamite, IDW, and Image—are more clearly defined by the generic categories of popular fiction and film. Without doubt, the most significant genre in comics studies is the superhero, in no small part because caped crusaders and their offshoots have dominated the mainstream comics market since the 1950s, even though other genres, notably the western, romance, horror, and, to a more limited extent, science fiction and fantasy, have waxed and waned in popularity across the decades. Superheroes have their origins in comics, unlike the other genres, and so are a locus of some pride for comics scholars and have also, on account of their adaptation into blockbuster hits beginning in the late 1990s, inspired film scholars to put the genre in perspective. Thus, where genre has found critical purchase in comics studies, it has been in explicit attempts to define the transmedial genre of the superhero, as ­evidenced in the work of Peter Coogan, Scott Bukatman, and Ramzi Fawaz, the latter two of whom have also considered the superhero genre’s intersection with other genres, as well as the political and aesthetic dimensions of such genre crossings. Because comics is a hybrid visual medium, aesthetics plays a significant role in ­comics studies, even if references to aesthetics tend to only use it as a shorthand for the overall look of a comic. Like genre, aesthetics clearly plays a significant role in the ­history of comics and is often linked with shifts in the political and artistic terrain of comics genres that mark tentative boundaries of periodization, so that it is possible, for example in superhero comics, to notice an aesthetic shift alongside a turn toward more explicitly violent, nihilistic, and adult-themed storylines circa 1985 to 1996, which are also symptomatic of interconnected changes in culture (neoliberalism, the Reagan era, the AIDS crisis, heating and thaw of the Cold War), artists (the British invasion, Art Spiegelman, Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefeld), and industry organization (rise of the direct

576   Sean Guynes market, emergence of “alternative” and “indie” comics scenes, growing ­popularity of ­adult-­targeted imprints). Charles Hatfield makes a similar argument about the emergence of alternative comics in the 1970s and 1980s, which developed in part out of the “aesthetic and economic example” of underground comix in the decade before (ix). If underground and alternative comics (and to some extent the more recent development of indie comics) valued self-expression and originality and were for the most part not ­published serially (as most mainstream comics are), then mainstream comics ­valued something more like company identity or character visual integrity, so that Marvel and DC, the two most prominent mainstream publishers since the 1960s, developed their own “house” styles and aesthetic languages for certain characters which, although they did not remain static over the years, changed only slowly. Among those interested in how comics work, that is, in structural and formal questions about how text and image create meaning, aesthetics has been influential, particularly among the art historians in comics studies. Among these are David Kunzle, who recovered the work of Rodolphe Töpffer, likely the first modern practitioner of comics art and also a significant early aesthetic theorist. David Carrier deals with aesthetics in his aptly named The Aesthetics of Comics, though he is much more concerned with the analytic philosophical tradition of aesthetics that means, after Ernst Gombrich, “finding out what role the image may play in the household of our mind” (qtd. in Carrier 2) than he is with answering questions about the political economy of aesthetics in comics art. ­ owever, Thierry Groensteen, perhaps the most significant structural theorist of comics, h makes little use of aesthetics theory in his books on comics narrative and structure, though he makes common reference to aesthetics as that which describes comics’ literary and artistic qualities beyond the narrative and structural dimensions of the art. Aesthetics in comics studies, simply put, is about the look of comics art and is thus defined by local, discursive, and history-specific concerns. It is in part the look of ­comics, especially the look of children’s and mainstream comics, that has entangled ­aesthetics with the question of comics’ cultural status, making aesthetics, if not a ­common explicit topic for comics scholars, then at least an important and potentially field-­legitimizing one. As Christopher Pizzino argues, aesthetics is fundamentally linked with the question of comics’ status as a medium and especially with the status of the genre of comics that creators choose to produce (12). In part by reference to aesthetic traditions within and outside comics and a self-awareness of the aesthetic status of ­comics as simultaneously mass cultural and art objects, “a comic can express, respond to, or make visible the problem of illegitimacy, as if the text were sentient, and selfreflexively aware of its status” (13). As a medium, Pizzino continues, “comics responds to its status with energetically paradoxical thematic and aesthetic strategies, both acknowledging and exploiting its status to powerful effect” (13). For earlier comics scholars, ­aesthetic complexity—as recognized by a traditional artistic, and usually modernist or postmodernist, understanding of quality2—was a way to mark comics as “mature” or  “adult,” therefore worthy of interpretation. The quintessential example of this ­scholarship is Roger Sabin’s book on “adult comics,” a category Pizzino parses to mean “possessing aesthetic, moral or political value” (Pizzino 41).

Candy and Drugs for Dinner   577 Unsurprisingly, in their seminal work on the role of symbolic capital in the comics field, Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo argue that “the pursuit of pure, disinterested ­aesthetic goals” in a given comic is often synonymous with its lack of success in the ­comics market and its inverse popularity among scholars, such that foundational works of comics scholarship relied on comics that only specialists had read (66–72). In this way, comics scholarship has tended to reproduce what Bourdieu called the field of restricted production, and while comics scholarship in recent years has placed less emphasis on selecting comics with “pure, disinterested aesthetic goals,” arguments in favor of bringing this or that author, these or those comics, under the purview of criticism often nonetheless turn on the exceptionality of the art and the storytelling (to be sure, not without reason). This is especially the case with single-author studies or studies of an influential series, for example, Hatfield’s biocritical study of Jack Kirby or Paul Young’s study of Frank Miller’s Daredevil. Frederick Luis Aldama, on the other hand, has used aesthetics not to build a new canon of “plausible texts” (Beaty and Woo 5) but to describe the lengths (or not) to which creators go in their attempts to write and draw ­difference in comics, with specific reference to the production of Latinx superheroes. Aldama’s conception of will to style is an aesthetic and narrative call to integrate readers’ sociohistorical realities with the (re)presentation of those realities in comics and is thus particularly timely in relation to discussing a comic such as Rat Queens which was hailed as a feminist intervention in the usually all-male dynamics of comics generally and D&D fantasy adventure specifically. Following in this vein and building on a tradition of studying the sociology and political economy of aesthetics, this chapter focuses on a single series, drawn and inked and colored by multiple artists and written by one writer. But my intent is not to single out Rat Queens’ aesthetic exceptionality. In fact, the series is quite uneven across artists and even within individual issues; moreover, it suffered from shoddy, uninventive writing in Volume 4, after Wiebe trashed a previously published issue (#16 of the original print run, which was left out of the trade paperbacks) because he felt unable to wrap up its storyline. But, as I hope to show by pointing to the comic’s use of genre, particularly with reference to fantasy comics and D&D, and its expression of certain contemporary ­aesthetic priorities, especially zaniness and the interesting, the series offers an important symptomatic study of the contemporary comics industry and the political economy of what Beaty and Woo call the “quality popular comic book” (63).

Fantasy and Comics: Contextualizing Rat Queens It would not be a stretch to say that in the United States, fantasy media since the 1960s have been sculpted to the contours of three source texts: Robert E. Howard’s Conan ­stories, J.  R.  R.  Tolkien’s Middle Earth (including The Hobbit and The Lord of the

578   Sean Guynes Rings), and the tabletop role-playing game D&D. Each of these has had numerous instantiations; Tolkien’s original novels, for example, have been adapted to comics multiple times, were made into animated features by Rankin/Bass Productions between 1977 and 1980, and later became two trilogies of live-action films directed by Peter Jackson. Howard’s Conan stories, originally published in pulps in the 1930s and repopularized in the 1960s through heavily edited mass-market paperback reprints (Jerng 129–157), and D&D, a game system for generating fantasy stories of all sorts (heavily influenced by Howard and Tolkien), have circulated in comics since the 1970s, though the genre of fantasy comics dates to before the comic book and is at least as old as Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo newspaper strip (1905). McCay’s comic read more like Victorian fantastica than the mainstream genre fantasy of today, in part because the fiction and film marketing category of fantasy emerged only in the wake of Tolkien’s success in the United States in the 1960s, when his books were reissued in mass-market paperback by Ballantine. Hal Foster’s pseudo-Arthurian fantasy strip Prince Valiant (1937) is a more clearly generic predecessor of the fantasy comics that blossomed in the 1970s in titles such as Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld, Cerebus, Elfquest, Heavy Metal, Savage Tales, Sword of Sorcery, and Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian. Many of these ­comics, Conan included, drew on the amorphous horror-fantasy hybrid genre “the weird,” which took its name from the pulp magazine Weird Tales where Conan stories were originally published, and which is most clearly represented in contemporary media by the resurgence of interest in the writing of H. P. Lovecraft. As this short account shows, transmedia and adaptation have played a significant role in fantasy comics’ history. Indeed, outside of the tabletop role-playing game itself and the 1980s animated television show, D&D is also known from its comic-book adaptations in the form of the Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons series that DC produced through a license from TSR, then owners of D&D, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Conan comics are perhaps the biggest success in fantasy comics adaptation, having been published regularly since the early 1970s by Marvel and later Dark Horse. The character proved so popular in his pulp afterlife in the comics that he was franchised into a blockbuster 1982 film, named after the comic (none of the original Howard story titles bore either Conan’s name or the word barbarian), and the original draft of the film was even co-scripted by longtime Conan the Barbarian comics writer Roy Thomas. It is from this multimediated, transmedia field of fantasy comics that Rat Queens emerged, not only to satirize (or, at the very least, to make shallow jokes about) but also to break genre tropes. Wiebe’s Rat Queens makes heavy use of the breadth of transmedia fantasy, drawing especially on the D&D concept of an adventuring party taking quests to gain gold and fame. In addition, much of the humor in the series draws on readers’ knowledge of the fantasy genre broadly. For example, the first trade paperback volume is titled Sass and Sorcery, a play on the “sword and sorcery” fantasy subgenre that indexes the gendered attitudes of the main characters, and the fourth trade paperback volume is called High Fantasies, a dual play on the subgenre of morally righteous high fantasy and the characters’ drug use. Moreover, fantasy mainstays, such as Tolkien’s Bilbo Baggins and Conan

Candy and Drugs for Dinner   579 himself, are referred to throughout the series, the former via repeated references to a smidgen (Wiebe’s hobbits) mob boss named Bilford Bogin, whose name is also a curse, and the latter in the form of a painting (after Frank Frazetta’s style) displayed on the office wall of the merchant Gerrig (RQV1). The series as a whole is an intertextual circus of loosely deployed fantasy, weird, and other generic (including cyberpunk) signifiers all fit to the form of the D&D adventure and the raucous all-female buddy comedy. Not for nothing, Wiebe describes his comic as “Lord of the Rings meets Bridesmaids,” in reference to the trend-setting 2011 femaleled movie comedy (Esposito), and the back cover of RQV1 describes it as “a violent, monster killing epic that is like Buffy meets Tank Girl in a Lord of the Rings world on crack!” The first volume establishes the series’ bawdy tone and insensitivity to genre tropes but nonetheless turns on the basic fantasy role-playing game plot in which adventurers take quests for gold. The first issues of Rat Queens questions this premise, asks why adventurers adventure, and considers what a world of adventurers, each vying for glory and gold, would really look like. Palisade is overrun with adventurers who spend their off-quest time causing trouble. To solve the town’s adventurer problem, the mayor sends all of the local adventuring parties on quests. But Wiebe’s series departs from the regular formula at this point: rather than goblins to kill at the end of a trek through treacherous mountains, the queens find an assassin, as do the other parties—the Peaches, the Four Daves, Brother Ponies, and Obsidian Darkness. This twist in genre expectations touches off a series of events that lead, by the second volume, to a confrontation with the man behind the assassins, the bereaved merchant Gerrig, who seeks revenge on Captain Sawyer (a former assassin himself) for killing his wife and who exacts revenge by summoning servants of the Lovecraft-inspired god N’Rygoth to destroy the queens (because Sawyer is in love with Hannah). This invocation of the weird turns Rat Queens into a save-the-world epic fantasy story, and Wiebe develops characters through flashbacks that, for example, flesh out the world of the dwarves, where Violet was a bearded princess, and give background on Hannah that sets up the conflicts of the third volume, which sees another transformation in the series’ intertextual use of fantasy. Volume 3, Demons, marks an artistic shift in the series, as Tess Fowler takes over art duties (the last few issues of Volume 2 were done by Croatian artist Stjepan Šejić after the original artist, Roc Upchurch, was arrested for domestic violence). Fowler’s tenure is by far the best suited, of the four main artists, to the series’ characters, as she does more than the other artists to bring alive the striking range of emotions felt by the queens; in doing so, her art deepens the narrative from an emotional standpoint at a time in the series when Wiebe was attempting to move away from writing a merely “fun” or humorous comic and was trying to tell difficult stories about friendship and family (glimpsed, but neither narratively nor artistically fulfilled, in RQV2). Aptly named Demons, RQV3 explores Hannah’s past and her former possession by a demon, while at a magic university à la Harry Potter’s Hogwarts (or Ursula K. Le Guin’s earlier wizard school in the Earthsea books). The volume centers around the queens’ journey to the university to save Hannah’s father, who was imprisoned by the university’s Council of Nine for

580   Sean Guynes l­eading an insurrection to bring back academic freedom (i.e., studying necromancy). Following conflicts with the other queens, brought on by their fear of her increasingly impulsive behavior and discovery of her demonic past, Hannah once again embraces her inner demon, and the volume ends with her radical transformation into a headshaved, demon-horned, cigarette-smoking punk who murders university guards, is imprisoned by the Council, and is abandoned by her friends (see Figure 32.1). At this point in its publishing history, Rat Queens went on sabbatical. It was briefly published as a webcomic before returning with RQV4, which saw all of the queens, Hannah included, together again doing their usual adventuring. This led to some confusion among fans, but most assumed a story reboot. The fourth volume focused on a s­ ingle adventure to recover some treasure, which turned out to be an evil frog-man wizard’s attempt to trap and defeat the queens. The volume also adds family drama in the form of an adventuring party led by Violet’s brother to mock and mimic each of the queens (including a senile Elvis-impersonator wizard, another wizard who grows fungus on his body, and a possibly sentient mushroom person). RQV4 is by far the zaniest of the ­volumes, combing over its awkward ignoring of the RQV3 conclusion with jokes on jokes. RQV5, though also filled with humorous plot points common to the series (e.g., hipster club owners who kidnap the fungus wizard to create locally sourced craft recipes), brings emotional seriousness back by revealing that the events of RQV4 played out in an alternative reality that separated from the conclusion of RQV3. Thus, when RQV4 starts with Hannah and the gang going on adventures, with no comment about her traumatic

Figure 32.1 Hannah’s transformation. Kurtis  J.  Wiebe (writer), and Tess Fowler (artist), Rat Queens, Volume 3: Demons, Image Comics/Shadowline Productions, 2016.

Candy and Drugs for Dinner   581 a­ bandonment, it is because in this world, the queens never abandoned Hannah. The evil reality-bending wizard the queens face off against in RQV5 is the Hannah who was abandoned at the end of RQV3, who punishes and kills the queens one by one throughout the fifth volume in order to teach the queens a lesson: not to abandon friends. By the volume’s end, she restores them all to life (or, rather, erases the events of RQV5 from history) and leaves only Betty with the knowledge of the alternative realities so that Betty, the kindest among them, can “tell you about the Hannah we left behind” (RQV5). As this brief summary of Rat Queens shows, genre plays a key role throughout the series, not only as the main frame of the narrative, which is unapologetically a fantasy comic, but also as a tool for metatextually engaging the history of the fantasy genre across media, an aspect of the comic’s overall aesthetic that I ascribe to Ngai’s category of the interesting. Moreover, this summary suggests that while Rat Queens often plays genre tropes for jokes and relies heavily on zany and cute to make meaning and curry appeal, beneath it all, Wiebe builds on an emotionally powerful story about friendship and found family that is often at the heart of the best fantasy. The affective depths of Rat Queens are a hallmark of the Image brand of comics, which I will explore more in the coda to this chapter; they are also, in part, a result of the aesthetic sensibilities the series rallies to engage its audience and tell its story. Rat Queens frames its self-presentation as a fantasy comic, performs gendered and sexual politics, and critiques its role as ­commodity object through an appeal to the aesthetic categories of the zany, cute, and interesting.

Rat Queens and Our Aesthetic Categories Ngai’s work on the aesthetic categories of postmodernism argues that aesthetic sensibilities are carefully imbricated with our political economy; as a result, the aesthetic and affective registers of culture are both symptoms of and important tools for the critical understanding of how we relate to the capitalist system. Ngai finds in zaniness, cuteness, and the interesting that “[n]o other aesthetic categories in our current repertoire speak to . . . everyday practices of production, circulation, and consumption in the same direct way” (1). Indeed, these aesthetics describe the multiple meanings of a series such as Rat Queens and, beyond that, point to the constitutive relationship between aesthetics and genre both in this series and also in other projects published by Image Comics. Zaniness, cuteness, and the interesting can be seen at every level of the comic: in the art, the narrative, and the dialogue. They act in both discrete moments and as overarching logics of the series. Wiebe tries for edgy, sexual, shocking, and crude dialogue as often as possible, indexing both the performative qualities of zaniness and the discursive, genre-reflective ­qualities of the interesting. Take, for example, one of the earliest lines from the comic,

582   Sean Guynes when Sawyer chastises the adventurers for their partying and brawling: “actually, I’m not annoyed, I’m really hotter than a dragon getting his dick tickled” (RQV1). The line makes little practical sense, since it mixes meanings—anger beyond annoyance; sexual arousal—but it plays off its own incoherence with reference to a worldbuilding cornerstone of fantasy, dragons, which are occasionally written as temperamental (cf. Tolkien’s Smaug in The Hobbit). In the end, Sawyer’s meaning is less important than the fact that Wiebe got the reader to imagine a dragon getting a hand job, something that both undermines dragons’ usual veneration as ancient, powerful beings in fantasy and also sends the message that the genre tends to take itself too seriously, to pretend that people don’t talk about hand jobs or do drugs or make crude jokes as in real life. To be fair to Wiebe, Betty mocks Sawyer’s phrasing a few panels later, asking whether he meant to say he was sexually aroused by the adventurers’ drunkenness or if dragons get angry when they are given hand jobs. Invoking cuteness in the form of a small person’s seeming innocence and with a sincerity seemingly incongruous to joke and situation alike, Betty is serious; she is both confused about Sawyer’s meaning and curious to know if dragons enjoy manual stimulation—so much so that when she meets a dragon in RQV3, she asks him about it in full sincerity. This early scene establishes something of a pattern for the deployment of these aesthetics throughout Rat Queens. Cuteness, which Ngai describes as referring to the “basic human and social competences” of “intimacy and care” (13), is almost always invoked by the smidgen Betty—cute not only by virtue of her size (this aesthetic evinces a fetishization of the small and petite) but also by the incongruousness of her overly sincere and loving regard for the world and others. But cuteness is not only sensuousness, sweetness, and happy smidgens. As Ngai notes, “cuteness is not just an aestheticization but an eroticization of powerlessness, evoking tenderness for ‘small things,’ but also, sometimes, a desire to belittle or diminish them further” (3). Indeed, the plot of RQV5 might be described as (the evil version of) Hannah’s attempt to drive Betty slowly crazy, to break her down emotionally, to make her feel the same abandonment that evil-Hannah felt when she was abandoned at the end of RQV3. So while Betty is the site of cuteness and its innocence throughout, she is at the same time an object, a plaything, as a result of the same helplessness that cuteness is meant to render. Wiebe, however, does not have Betty reject the aesthetic register of cute in order to orchestrate some grand defeat of evilHannah; instead, the character traits that are symptomatic of Betty’s cuteness become her and the queens’ salvation when her sincere love for her friends stops evil-Hannah from destroying them. A marginal aesthetic of the small and hyper-commodified, and one largely understood to be at odds with the masculine heroism of fantasy, cuteness more than once saves the day in Rat Queens. As the example of Betty shows, aesthetics in the series are occasionally—and rather significantly—mapped onto individual characters, but for the most part, they do not map neatly and are instead dispersed across the series. They operate as moving signifiers that bounce from character to character, scene to scene, and infuse the series’ logic. This is especially true of the zany and the interesting, which seem to have the greatest hold on Wiebe’s aesthetic vision of the series and which attest to the larger aesthetic relation of Image to the comics industry.

Candy and Drugs for Dinner   583 Zaniness, as Ngai describes it, is unusual among aesthetic categories because it is t­ypically experienced in the form of a singular character, who can be pointed to and described as “the zany” (e.g., Lucy of I Love Lucy). In Rat Queens, no singular figure is always zany, but Hannah perhaps comes closest, since, as Ngai explains, the zany figure is one to be enjoyed at a distance—a truism of Hannah’s relationship to her friends (and on-again-off-again lover Sawyer) in the first three volumes and confirmed in her evil self ’s return in RQV5. Moreover, Ngai notes of the zany that it is always in motion, typically from activity to activity, job to job, so that the zany’s labor status is that of “the ­perpetual temp, extra, or odd-jobber—itinerant and malleable” (10). This perfectly describes the queens, who take on quest after quest in a seemingly endless attempt to make ends meet. More than once, the queens remark on their need to pay rent in Palisade, invoking conversations about the tenuousness of property ownership and financial stability in a supposedly premodern fantasy world that nonetheless operates within decidedly capitalist paradigms. Indeed, the orc Braga joins the team in RQV4 to make ends meet after her previous adventuring party splits up, and she notes that the best way to survive a tough economy is to own property that can be rented out. All of this suggests the basic criticism that fantasy is, well, a fantasy of the petit bourgeois, but beyond that, the series’ conception of a party of adventurers going on quest after quest to make the rent, barely leaving any money for leisure (and quickly spending the money on drinking), points to the underlying meritocratic capitalist fantasy of the D&D story model: characters go out, gain experience, and slowly move up in the world, gaining riches, glory, and, at some point, the status of property owner and rentier. Only, in Rat Queens, the characters never move up in the world; after five years and thirty-plus comics and having saved Palisade multiple times, the queens face the same money problems each issue. The zaniness of Rat Queens manifests as a critique of the political-economic make-believe of pseudo-medieval fantasy worlds like those popular in D&D, World of Warcraft, and The Lord of the Rings. Rat Queens’ zaniness underscores that the life of a fantasy adventurer is a rarely a quest for power or glory but instead a hustle. Zaniness also marks and undercuts the gender politics of Rat Queens. To be clear, gender haunts the series at the level of labor. The series’ main selling point was its gender flipping of the D&D fantasy adventure, making all the characters women and emphasizing their gender as a basis for humor. It was originally created by an all-male team, writer Wiebe and artist Upchurch. Early reviews of the series did not comment on the all-male creative team behind Rat Queens, but the situation highlights the gender disparity in the comics industry, not only at the level of representation, which has been thoroughly discussed in scholarship on race, gender, and sexuality in comics, but also at the level of creators. When Rat Queens debuted in 2013, female creators made up between 11 percent and 14.1 percent of the comics industry (Hanley). In 2014, artist Upchurch was arrested for “battery-family violence,” a major problem for a series about strong women (Johnston). Upchurch was replaced by Šejić, well known for his highly sexualized female-led comics published by Top Crow and his own erotic webcomic Sunstone. Šejić’s art brought the first nude scene to the comic and also emphasized the dramatic horror of N’Rygoth’s demonic monsters (which look like giant vaginas with teeth) in RQV2.

584   Sean Guynes Fowler followed Šejić (with colors by Tamra Bonvillain), but Fowler’s time was ­overshadowed by rumors that Upchurch would be welcomed back to the book, regular posts on Rat Queens social media about Upchurch’s original art, and Wiebe’s continued public friendship with and support for Upchurch (Jusino). Fowler was fired from the series over “creative differences” (Jusino) and replaced by Owen Gieni, who oversaw Rat Queens’ return to regular publication with RQV4—beginning what is the comic’s zaniest period in storytelling, with Gieni’s art varying wildly in quality and style and the queens facing wacky bad guys such as a giant magical goose and a reality-bending frog man. This publication history attests to an industry-wide problem with gender parity in ­comics production and also reflects, not incidentally, on the presentation of gender in the comic as not a political statement so much as an aesthetic one. Zaniness is fundamentally an aesthetic of performance. For Ngai, it is also heavily gendered. Moreover, if the interesting is an aesthetic that indexes the economic mode of capitalist circulation and if cuteness indexes consumption, then zaniness is an aesthetic that symptomatizes production and offers reflections on, even critiques of, labor. Indeed, as noted, Rat Queens does not shy away from critically unraveling the “odd job” labor practices at work in the D&D fantasy adventure (and perhaps, by analogy, the largely for-hire comics industry). The zany’s critique of labor is also affective, pointing to the ways in which the post-Fordist world of neoliberalism places laborers in “zany” ­situations whereby they serve as the performer/creator of affective ties between people and communities; the tensions this creates, between the laborer and those for whom s/ he or she labors, are part of the comedy of the text. The comedy of the zany (e.g., Richard Pryor in The Toy, Jim Carrey in The Cable Guy) reflects a new status of labor that has become, in Ngai’s reading, decidedly ungendered, and precisely because of this, “the question of gender becomes internal to post-Fordist zaniness,” so that the aesthetics of the zany turn the text into a performative playground of gender and (re)productive ­anxieties (Ngai 210). Unsurprisingly, these anxieties about production show up in the comic’s actual production history and in some reviewers’ frustration with the continued existence of the comic (Collins), where the writer’s unwillingness to fully split from an artist whose violence against his wife was well documented has become a clear and uncomfortable indication of the state of gender equality and social justice in the comics industry, even among those who write and publish books, such as Rat Queens, that are all about strong female characters. The question of gender is obviously central to Rat Queens; it is the series’ sole impetus for production, to turn the largely male fantasy adventure on its head, to populate it with gendered stereotypes (the Marie Laveau knockoff, the rockabilly babe, the hipster, the hippie), and to breathe “life” into those stereotypes through the characters’ wacky encounters and raucously uncouth behavior. The queens say “fuck” (and “fucktart,” “dickcheese,” “cunt,” etc.) often, not because real women say “fuck” often but because Wiebe wants readers to know he “gets” it, he knows patriarchy exists, but on the whole, the series does little to critique patriarchy and its structural violence. That all these aspects are part of the gist of Rat Queens, rather than a contextualized aspect of its worldbuilding, reveals as artifice the queens’ supposedly nontraditional performance of

Candy and Drugs for Dinner   585 gender; they are nontraditional only insofar as their difference from the norm is ­highlighted as (performatively) excessive, wacky, strange—in a word, zany. Gender is the final joke of Rat Queens, the zany zing that winds through the series and animates it, so that even as the narrative addresses economic woes through the “stressed-out, even desperate quality” of its characters’ attempt to fit the precarious economic position of the fantasy adventurer (Ngai 185), it does so always through the emphatic presentation of the difference of women—in a D&D fantasy setting, who say “dickcheese” (RQV1) and eat psychedelic mushrooms for lunch and get into crazy bar fights, who are boisterous and voluptuous and smart and funny, all the things “woke” men, perhaps as Wiebe imagines himself to be, are meant to find attractive in contemporary feminist women— as the final performative end of the comic’s humor. In Rat Queens, gender in conversation with genre is performed as the zany object of the series. The interesting, too, registers as another key aesthetic of the series, operating in ­similarly synoptic ways throughout Rat Queens to link the series’ aesthetic preferences with genre. If Rat Queens’ gimmick is that it gender-flips the D&D fantasy adventure, it can only succeed by virtue of the audience’s awareness of this project as intertextual with D&D and fantasy more broadly. Violet occasionally sports a beard, and Betty is an unabashedly sexual drug user; the humor of these things relies on understanding the source material they are departing from—in the case of Violet, the concept that dwarf women have beards, and in the case of Betty, that hobbits (which smidgens are based on) are conservative country folk. In both cases, the source text is The Lord of the Rings, ­filtered through the film adaptations and decades of similar jokes made by fantasy fans and D&D players. Much of the zaniness of Rat Queens is also only zany through similarly intertextual contexts. For example, in RQV5, multiple flashbacks and alternativereality sequences are drawn in artistic styles that diverge heavily from Gieni’s usual art, the purpose being to emphasize the distance between the present of the text and the past/alternity of the imposing scene. The imposition of these artistic styles is indeed zany, performative of the series’ overall sense of wackiness and excessive need to make new meanings, but it is also only possible because each of the styles refers to another text. When the queens confront a mind-altering toad to save Betty’s friend, they enter a world drawn in the style of Fleischer Studios animations from the 1930s, and when evilHannah, disguised as a powerful wizard, tells an “allegoric story . . . a tad on the fucking nose” about her abandonment by the queens, the story is rendered in the style of the 1980s animated series He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (RQV5). All of this is a hallmark of the aesthetic of the interesting, which Ngai describes as “[a]lways registering a tension between the particular and the generic” (6). Rat Queens defines itself through its intertextual relationship with other texts, ­making its own identity from their elements, but in doing so, as with its failure to critique gender while relying heavily on gender for self-definition, the series is less a critique à la the postmodern pastiche than it is about pointing to things the audience knows in order to generate audience recognition and the semblance of depth; it is generically deconstructive without revealing anything about the problems or interworkings of fantasy as a  market genre. Rat Queens’ aesthetic of the interesting draws attention to its own

586   Sean Guynes c­ irculation practices, to its branding as an unselfconscious homage to all the fantasy things that people in Wiebe’s demographic loved about fantasy (including the women, who are here less a feminist statement, perhaps, than the fulfillment of another kind of fantasy). And once again, this aesthetic activity is bound up with the series’ generic ­situation: Rat Queens is interesting precisely because it knows about—and excessively, zanily performs knowledge of—the genre it belongs to.

Coda: Image, Industry, and Aesthetics In Rat Queens, aesthetics and genre are inseparable. To speak of the aspects of Wiebe’s artistically troubled series that made it hot in the first place, namely, its zaniness with regard to gender and its evocation of the interesting in responding to and making use of the history of fantasy (not to mention cuteness, which is humorous in the series largely because the aesthetic is so anathema to the usual self-seriousness of fantasy adventure), is to speak always of Rat Queens’ status as a contemporary fantasy comic. This reading of Rat Queens through Ngai’s conceptualization of our contemporary aesthetics only scratches the surface of the ways in which aesthetics and genre are interwoven throughout the series. But it shows that a focus on aesthetics and genre has much to offer comics studies, which by and large emphasizes structural, political, and historical readings of comics. Of course, aesthetics and genre are integral to structure, politics, and history of/ in comics. The position of gender in Rat Queens—which is tied to the broader cultural status of women and feminism in American society and the comics industry, as well as the production history of the series, and which is coded into its aesthetics and genre— evidences this. I referred to Rat Queens as what Beaty and Woo call a “quality popular comic book,” which they define as “writer-driven, ground-level comics . . . that garner critical acclaim and substantial, lasting sales by innovating on popular genres” (63). Their primary examples are The Walking Dead, written by Robert Kirkman and drawn by Charlie Adlard (after #6), and Saga, written by Brian K. Vaughan and drawn by Fiona Staples. While it is unfair to call either series writer-driven, insofar as their distinctive artistic styles contributed in large part to their success, this is certainly true of Rat Queens, where the multiple changes in artists have, if anything, distracted from the continuity of Wiebe’s otherwise complex plotting. But it is also worth noting that Beaty and Woo’s quintessential examples are bastions of Image’s success in the twenty-first century. Image and other indie publishers, which all remain entirely mainstream in their publication, circulation, and distribution strategies, even as they offer perks such as creative ownership to the writers and artists who work for them (compared, for example, to DC and Marvel, where nearly all work is for-hire), specialize in these “quality popular comic books,” which might otherwise simply be called boutique comics. Like Rat Queens, these comics fit a postmodern audience niche perfectly, are gleefully representative of diversity but rarely critical of the structures that make diversity so difficult to achieve

Candy and Drugs for Dinner   587 and so necessary, and are only superficially mold-breaking where genre is concerned (though they market themselves as significant interventions in genre-as-usual). They are, for the most part—like Rat Queens, Saga, Descender, Paper Girls, I Hate Fairyland, and so many others, but with a few exceptions, such as Bitch Planet or We Stand on Guard—written and drawn to perfectly please and excite comics reviewers by appealing almost solely to the superficial, the faux avant-garde, and, as I have emphasized in this chapter, the cute, the zany, and the interesting. Comics studies needs aesthetics and genre criticism in part because it helps identify, describe, historicize, and critique the artistic, labor, and production practices of the comic-book industry. Rat Queens is symptomatic of a set of aesthetics that themselves reflect on the political economy but also operate in much more superficial ways, as the treatment of gender and genre in Rat Queens shows. Image and other indie publishers survive on a mixture of boutique comics and franchise projects (e.g., Dark Horse and Aliens, IDW and Star Trek, most of Dynamite’s catalog). To put aesthetics and genre, but aesthetics especially, at the center of comics criticism is to better understand the artistic, narrative, and economic practices of the comic-book industry. This case study of Rat Queens details just one way in which a single comic utilizes aesthetics of the zany, cute, and interesting to speak to a niche audience of D&D and fantasy lovers, as well as to appeal through superficial attempts at diversity to a new, growing audience of nonwhite, nonmale, nonheterosexual readers. Rat Queens by and large succeeds, when not plagued by production issues that directly undercut its feminist message, but aesthetic critique helps us to see not only larger industry practices at work in this supposedly unique comic but also the ways in which art, genre, narrative, and politics are co-constitutive aspects of comic-book meaning making.

Notes 1. References are to the trade paperback volumes collecting Rat Queens, instead of to individual issues; as with most comics, the trade paperbacks lack pagination, so I don’t attempt to give page numbers. Where possible, I describe the scenes so that it is easy to find them. For simplicity’s sake, I abbreviate the contemporary comic-book industry’s wordy titles, such as Rat Queens, Volume 1: Sass & Sorcery to RQV1, Rat Queens, Volume 2: The Far-Reaching Tentacles of N’Rygoth to RQV2, Rat Queens, Volume 3: Demons to RQV3, and so on. 2. See, for example, Katherine Roeder on Winsor McCay and modernism or Hillary Chute on comics and postmodernism.

Works Cited Aldama, Frederick Luis. Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. U of Arizona P, 2017. Beaty, Bart, and Benjamin Woo. The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books. Palgrave, 2016. Bukatman, Scott. Hellboy’s World: Comics and Monsters on the Margins. U of California P, 2016.

588   Sean Guynes Carrier, David. The Aesthetics of Comics. Pennsylvania State UP, 2000. Chute, Hillary. “The Popularity of Postmodernism.” Postmodernism, Then. Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 57, no. 3/4, 2011, pp. 354–363. Collins, Elle. “ ‘Rat Queens’ Is Returning: Do with That What You Will.” Comics Alliance, 18 Nov. 2016, http://comicsalliance.com/rat-queens-relaunch-kurtis-wiebe-owen-gieni. Coogan, Peter. Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre. MonkeyBrain Books, 2006. Esposito, Joey. “Rat Queens Pays Homage to D&D.” IGN.com, http://www.ign.com/ articles/2013/05/02/rat-queens-pays-homage-to-dd. Fawaz, Ramzi. The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics. New York UP, 2016. Groensteen, Thierry. Comics and Narration. UP of Mississippi, 2015. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. UP of Mississippi, 2009. Hanley, Tim. “Gendercrunching—December 2013 and the Year in Review.” Bleeding Cool, 28 Feb. 2014, https://www.bleedingcool.com/2014/02/28/gendercrunching-december-2013and-the-year-in-review. Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. UP of Mississippi, 2005. Hatfield, Charles. Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby. UP of Mississippi, 2012. Jerng, Mark. Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction. Fordham UP, 2017. Johnston, Rich. “Comics Artist John Upchurch Arrested on Charges of Battery, Misdemeanor.” Bleeding Cool, 18 Nov. 2014, https://www.bleedingcool.com/2014/11/18/comics-artist-johnupchurch-arrested-on-charges-of-battery-misdemeanor. Jusino, Teresa. “Conflicting Accounts of Artist Maneuverings Plague Rat Queens.” The Mary Sue, 16 May 2016, https://www.themarysue.com/conflicting-accounts-plague-rat-queens. Kunzle, David. The Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer. UP of Mississippi, 2007. McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Harvard UP, 2011. Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Harvard UP, 2012. Pizzino, Christopher. Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature. U of Texas P, 2016. Roeder, Katherine. Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay. UP of Mississippi, 2014. Sabin, Roger. Adult Comics: An Introduction. Routledge, 1993. Wiebe, Kurtis J. (writer), and Roc Upchurch (artist). Rat Queens, Volume 1: Sass and Sorcery. Image Comics/Shadowline Productions, 2014. Wiebe, Kurtis J. (writer), Roc Upchurch (artist), and Stjepan Šejić (artist). Rat Queens, Volume 2: The Far-Reaching Tentacles of N’Rygoth. Image Comics/Shadowline Productions, 2015. Wiebe, Kurtis  J. (writer), and Tess Fowler (artist). Rat Queens, Volume 3: Demons. Image Comics/Shadowline Productions, 2016. Wiebe, Kurtis  J. (writer), and Owen Gieni (artist). Rat Queens, Volume 4: High Fantasies. Image Comics/Shadowline Productions, 2017. Wiebe, Kurtis J. (writer), and Owen Gieni (artist). Rat Queens, Volume 5: The Colossal Magic Nothing. Image Comics/Shadowline Productions, 2018. Young, Paul. Frank Miller’s Daredevil and the Ends of Heroism. Rutgers UP, 2016.

chapter 33

Non- Com pli a n ts, Br im pers, a n d She-Romps Bitch Planet, Sex Criminals, and Their Publics Henry Jenkins

Kelly Sue DeConnick as a mainstream comic writer is most closely associated with reviving and reimagining Captain Marvel. Her husband, Matt Fraction, also a highly ­successful writer of mainstream superhero comics, is best known for his run on Hawkeye. They both also publish creator-owned comics (through Image) with a more overtly political bent. DeConnick’s Bitch Planet is set in a near-future society where women who ­refuse (or are unable) to comply with patriarchal expectations are shipped to an off-world penal colony. Fraction’s Sex Criminals deals with a group of people who discover they can stop time when they sexually climax and who struggle with sex police who regard this power as a threat to their society. DeConnick and Fraction both belong in the front ranks of contemporary comics creators and deserve to be taken seriously on their own terms. Despite efforts to differentiate their professional identities, their active and vocal fan followings are often curious about their relationship and, in particular, the ways Bitch Planet and Sex Criminals seem to be in conversation with each other. One reader wrote to Sex Criminals: On the surface we have the wife writing an angry feminist comic and the husband writing a comic that is literally covered in dicks. I’m assuming the irony isn’t lost on you two. But the beauty is that both books are so much more than that. Bitch Planet is a very obvious, raging feminist, down with the patriarchy, prison exploitation satire with powerful essays, tattooed fans . . . and a crazy intense letter column that’s all part of the BP experience. And yeah, on the surface, Sex Criminals seems like a porno comic, filled with dicks and dick jokes . . . and orgasms and a whole new glorious dictionary of sex lingo, but holy fuck, if the message of acceptance isn’t as apparent as what your wife is preaching. . . . And THIS goddamn letter column. How did you both create books that have the best letter columns in all of current comics?

590   Henry Jenkins Matt, you and your wife are both truly amazing people and if you could just clone yourselves and take over the entire comic industry, that would be awesome. Forever a Non-Compliant Brimper.1 (SC #15)

We will decode that last phrase, “Non-Compliant Brimper” a bit later, but for now, I want to focus on the other issues discussed here. This chapter will argue that Bitch Planet and Sex Criminals share a common vision of how comics might operate as vehicles for social change, providing the resources and platforms that facilitate what DeConnick might describe as “uncomfortable” conversations about gender and sexuality. In a 2015 talk, “How to Make People Uncomfortable (and Still Make a Living),” DeConnick outlined her vision of the creative process: Art and story and myth are the veins, the arteries, the lifelines, which map out our connections with one another. And weirdly, though togetherness itself is uncomfortable, people are much more willing to be uncomfortable together. So I urge you to seek out the artists, the colleagues, the friends, whose work and whose presence pushes you to be vulnerable, because these are your people. And as you begin to find your uncomfortable audience, make sure that they find one another. . . . As the people who make the maps that illustrate our connections, we [artists] have a calling to both embrace and rise above our own experience, to listen with our whole hearts and imagine how the world must look from another perspective. . . . On the other side of discomfort is growth.

Bitch Planet and Sex Criminals achieve this goal by “exploiting” genre elements associated with grind-house cinema to attract audiences, generate buzz, and spark controversies and by creating discursive spaces—more than just a traditional letter column in both cases—where they can host conversations generated around that content. Both comics construct particular kinds of publics (DeConnick’s “non-compliants” and Fraction’s “Brimpers”) in which shared cultural understandings (sex-positive and intersectional feminism) make it possible for strangers, brought together only by a shared interest in a comic book, to conduct conversations that they could not maintain in other spheres of their lives. Such discussions are not purely reactive—not simply critiquing what is already on the page—but also generative, representing a feedback loop informing future developments in these serialized stories and, sometimes, inspiring political actions in the real world (such as participation in marches for women’s rights). Over time, these comics have both expanded the number of pages given over to what DeConnick calls “community pages.”2

Feminist Exploitation? Bitch Planet and Sex Criminals might have appeared as a double feature on the marquee of a grind-house cinema somewhere in urban America circa the early 1970s. Their core premises are sensationalistic, designed to provoke immediate emotional

Non-Compliants, Brimpers, and She-Romps   591 r­ eactions; they embody core societal tensions in brute conflicts between larger-thanlife ­characters whose exploits provide the basis for comedy and drama. DeConnick has been explicit about her fascination with these genre traditions—in this case, the women-in-prison genre: “I have this real love, this genuine affection for the exploitation films of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. . . . Is there a way to still capture the things that I enjoy and extricate the things that I find deeply problematic? Can I give these women agency? Is there a way for me to turn exploitation over in my mouth and not have it be exploitative?” (“Kelly Sue DeConnick”). Fraction, similarly, discusses how Sex Criminals relates to soft-core sex comedies: “The whole thing’s a feint. The whole book’s a great big yeahbut. It’s about people who freeze time when they have sex, but it’s not science fiction and it’s not really sexy. It’s dirty but not prurient. It is about sex but not sexual” (SC #14). Exploitation in exploitation cinema captures a multitude of sins. At the most basic level, exploitation refers to a promotional strategy—the desire to create bold, intense, iconic images that might generate audience interest when splashed across a movie poster. Exploitation films sold sex, violence, nudity, drugs, rebellion; they spoke to the counterculture; they addressed divisive debates about gender, race, sex, and class. Exploitation films played in suburban drive-ins and urban grind houses, not in prestige first-run cinemas. These audiences often saw themselves as cultural outsiders. Exploitation films were not as mainstream as Hollywood blockbusters or as alternative as avant-garde films. Often, they were trying to play it both ways. Amid the emergence of second-wave feminism, the women-in-prison films exploited both the desire of women to rebel against patriarchal institutions and the desire of men to see women ­punished for their transgressions. A women’s prison film might depict women as rebels fighting against anyone and everyone who seeks to dominate them and women as ­victims whose vulnerability becomes the focus of moral outrage by others; its action might include moments of violence directed by men against women and scenes of resistance where armed women fight back against their oppressors. Similarly, sex comedies embraced masculine fantasies of sex without constraint, commitment, or consequences yet often demarcated the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable forms of sexuality (laughing with some characters, laughing at others). Speaking within third-wave feminism, Bitch Planet’s covers mimic the sensationalistic art and slogans associated with the women’s prison movies, but at the same time, these covers encourage us to subversively identify with the women’s resistance and rebellion. Issue #1 describes its protagonists as “caged and enraged”; #2 promises, “Girls! Girls! Girls! Fighting for their lives and their freedom”; #4 proclaims, “Shame them, maim them, try to contain them.” And every issue asks its readers, “Are you woman enough to survive Bitch Planet?” (Figure 33.1). The term exploitation also tells us something about the conditions of the films’ ­production—made quickly and with almost no budget. Willing to pay little, producers such as Roger Corman hired people who could not get jobs elsewhere in the entertainment industry. Many key filmmakers of the 1980s and 1990s (Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard, John Sayles, James Cameron, and Joe Dante) got their start working for Corman’s New World

592   Henry Jenkins

Figure 33.1  Bitch Planet #3, cover.

Pictures. Corman also hired female directors (Stephanie Rothman, Barbara Peeters, Amy Holden Jones), producers (Barbara Boyle, Gayle Anne Hurd, Julie Corman), and screenwriters (Rita Mae Brown), who often found it harder to advance into mainstream cinema than their male counterparts. Corman was willing to trade a certain degree of creative freedom for substandard wages, as long as the people he hired ­provided those elements he required to promote his titles. As Jonathan Kaplan, who got his start at New World, explained, “there was a male sexual fantasy to be exploited,

Non-Compliants, Brimpers, and She-Romps   593 comedic subplots, action/violence, and a slightly left-of-center social subplot. . . . And then frontal nudity from the waist up and total nudity from behind and no pubic hair and get the title of the picture somewhere in the film and go to work, so that was essentially it” (DiFranco). While early feminist film theorists such as Laura Mulvey sought to “destroy the pleas­ ure” of Hollywood entertainment, other feminist critics—Claire Johnston and Pam Cook—saw these exploitation films as offering a space for feminist “counter-cinema.” As Johnston wrote, “in order to counter our objectification in the cinema, our collective fantasies must be released; women’s cinema must embody the working through of desire; such an objective demands the use of the entertainment film. . . . Ideas derived from the entertainment film, then, should inform the political film, and political ideas should inform the entertainment cinema: a two-way process” (217). Cook saw the potential for such a fusion between politics and entertainment in the films of Stephanie Rothman, who made women’s prison pictures such as Terminal Island and sex comedies such as Group Marriage (Jenkins, 2007). Rothman consistently expressed female desire and feminist critique around the “exploitation” elements Corman required. Cook explains that Rothman’s films “work on the forms of the exploitation genres to produce contradictions, shifts in meaning which disturb the patriarchal myths of women on which the exploitation film itself rests” (127). Cook argues that exploitation films “offer the possibility of taking critical distance,” calling attention to their underlying stereotypes rather than accepting them as “natural” or realistic (125). Those moments in the women’s prison genre that a contemporary feminist like DeConnick finds pleasurable were actively negotiated across the production process, representing compromises that incorporated the elements that DeConnick identifies as troubling but also creatively challenge those expectations. Rothman, no less than DeConnick, was interested in how to work within exploitation cinema without accepting conditions that exploited women’s bodies for male pleasure, and DeConnick, no less than Rothman, turns to these genres because they can generate heat and dramatize political fault lines. Asked what she’s exploiting in Bitch Planet, DeConnick explains: Rage-sploitation? Is that a thing? . . . Righteous indignation. Indignitsploitation? It doesn’t roll off the tongue. Yeah, I’m trying to use the established tropes from the -sploitation genres, but subvert them and use them to instead underscore how these things are damaging, and some of the more subtle ways that this dehumanization of women—particularly women of color, but also women of size—marginalizes, criminalizes these women for just being who they are. Trying to use those tropes to put a spotlight on how that hurts us all. (Sharp)

Rothman would have recognized these goals, which also motivated her own work. Cook spoke of the exploitation cinema as offering resources and opportunities that might model future forms of feminist storytelling, imagining that working through an

594   Henry Jenkins inherited language might inspire new and more progressive entertainment experiences. As a creator-owned comic, Bitch Planet allows DeConnick much greater control over her own creative decision-making than Rothman ever had. The women’s prison genre offers her metaphors for the ways women’s voices are silenced, their bodies confined, and their behaviors regulated; she incorporates moments of active resistance and raw rage when these women fight back for the right to live their lives on their own terms. Rothman often had to signal her feminist politics covertly, through subtexts, unable to control how her works were promoted or what audiences they reached; DeConnick can more directly shape how her comics are framed. The characters in Bitch Planet are labeled in terms of the ways they have broken with societal norms: “Seduction and disappointment; emotional manipulation”; “Patrilineal dishonor”; “Unpermitted birth; genetic error; interred at request of family”; “Disrespect”; “Bad mother.” In each case, these women are defined in relation to the patriarchy before we know how they see themselves. Often, as in the case of a transgender woman who stands accused of “gender deception,” the gap between the two looms large. Across the comic, DeConnick encourages us to question the ways such stereotypes limit our ability to see these women as full, complex humans. In issue #3, Penelope “Penny” Rolle stands accused of, among other crimes, “insubordination” and “wanton obesity.” A male judge proclaims, “Good God, woman. What have you done to yourself?” Visually, Rolle is defined by her girth: she consistently dominates the frame, outsized by comparison with other characters, larger than life in terms of her gestures and actions. She enters the story in the very first issue, as the convicts are stripped and assigned their uniforms. “Where’m I supposed to put my other tit?” she asks, only to be told that “uniforms are constructed for your specific measurements.” She still refuses the premise that the system understands what fits her—“Bitch, I know my size!”—and her forceful noncompliance results in a full-scale prison riot when, still naked, she punches out a male guard trying to restrain her. In a flashback to Penny’s adolescence in issue #3, a white, blond schoolteacher takes a brush to Penny’s kinky scalp. “What are we going to do with this hair of yours, Hm? . . . It’s just like you—it refuses to behave. . . . Either curl up or lay down, perhaps? It’s not black or white, good or bad. Folks don’t know what to make of it because they don’t know what it is.” When Penny insists that she knows who she is, the teacher explains, “you need to learn to see yourself through the father’s eyes.” The system repeatedly demands that she be “happy” and shed her anger, that she feel shame for what she has made of herself and thus change her ways. In the issue’s final images, a psychiatrist seeks to make her confront a visualization of her “ideal self ” in the mirror, but she sees only her own reflection. Laughing in defiance, Penny Rolle explains, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I ain’t broke and you bastards ain’t never gonna break me.” From the first issue, artist Valentine De Landro depicts women of diverse sizes, shapes, and colors as naked and exposed but certainly not eroticized or powerless in their nudity. Rothman was required contractually to incorporate female nudity into her work, an imposition she challenged in various ways, seeking to incorporate male nudity as a site for female pleasure, challenging the representational code that linked female nudity to sexual vulnerability, and constructing negative depictions of craven male vo­yeurs. DeConnick chooses to incorporate frequent sequences of female nudity across

Non-Compliants, Brimpers, and She-Romps   595 Bitch Planet, contrasting these sequences to other representational strategies: “If we just covered them up, you wouldn’t notice or think about how they’re commonly presented” (Young). Issue #4 explicitly labels one sequence “the obligatory shower scene,” recalling the deal Rothman cut with Corman but also suggesting how genre expectations are aligned with patriarchal power. Several female prisoners have cut a deal with a male guard that they will stage a show for his excited gaze as long as he does not report other transactions that occur within the shower. Here, as in Rothman’s films, the male gaze is embodied in ways that make it uncomfortable for male viewers to occupy. All we see of the guard is an eye peering through a hole in the bathroom wall, until, later in that same issue, Kamau Kogo, Bitch Planet’s afro-haired badass leader, refuses to abide by these arrangements. Kamau rips up a pipe and, using it to smash open the wall, drags the vo­yeur through the hole and gets a stranglehold on him. Wallowing on the ground, his penis hanging limply from his half-open pants, and at the mercy of a strong woman, the all-powerful voyeur is a pathetic figure. Nakedness in this case represents anything but female vulnerability. De Landro adopts traditional representational strategies to fragment and fetishize Kamau’s body as she offers herself as an erotic spectacle to distract the guard (Figure 33.2), but he depicts the character’s full body as she reverses the power dynamic, emphasizing her strength and muscularity, her aggression and autonomy (Figure 33.3).3 At first glance, Sex Criminals’ raunchy premise—that its protagonists gain superpowers when they climax—might situate it alongside other fantastical sex comedies—for example, Russ Meyer’s The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959), about a timid man who gains greater confidence when X-ray vision allows him to see through women’s clothing. But a description of that same premise in a later issue suggests Fraction’s refusal to reduce his story to easily exploitable elements: This is a comic about two things: sex and crimes. And also love. Maybe human vulnerability and the difficulties of communication in the modern era. Maybe, too, it’s about inclusion and how finding out who we are and what we dig, sexually, results in complicated, turbulent identities, but that the journey unites us regardless of our destination? I don’t know, you’re the reader, you make the call. (SC #16)

If sex comedies have historically centered around male erotic fantasies, Sex Criminals’ first issue frames the story from the perspective of Suzie, whose sexual awakening— masturbating in the bathtub—leaves her confused and uncertain about some core facts of life, as she discovers the unanticipated capacity to enter another temporal dimension. One female reader, Julie, explains how central a female protagonist is to her engagement with the books: I love that Suzie explores sex, that she questions it, that it’s colors and feelings and sounds for her, that she laughs and cries and gets confused about it, that there are times she can get herself off better than her partner and so she does….There are very few places outside the bedroom where women can not-so-secretly enjoy the subject of sex, thank you for creating a new space. (SC #2)

596   Henry Jenkins

Figure 33.2  Bitch Planet #4.

Suzie, as a teenage girl, lacks access to older women with whom she can discuss sexual matters, she discovers that the “dirty girls” (i.e., those who are more sexually experienced) are mostly bluffing when they try to lay down ars erotica, and she finds the resources of her high school library totally inadequate. As Suzie explains, “No wonder so many dumb kids get knocked up. Nobody knows anything, and if they do, they’re legally bound from telling you” (SC #1). Sex Criminals thus depicts its own frankness

Non-Compliants, Brimpers, and She-Romps   597

Figure 33.3  Bitch Planet #4.

about sexual matters as an ideal space for sexual education in contrast to the ways other institutions fail curious young people. By the end of the issue, Suzie has met her male counterpart, Jon, and they discover, when they have simultaneous orgasms, that he can also step outside the flow of time. Suzie and Jon understand this temporal dimension on different terms: For Suzie, it is “the quiet,” whereas for Jon, it is “cumworld,” named after a local adult bookshop. By this point, Suzie has discovered that the simple physical act

598   Henry Jenkins can carry a range of different meanings: “Sometimes it felt very real, sometimes it felt very silly. Like a mistake. Sometimes it felt important and adult. Some of it exploratory. Sometimes it just felt like something to do instead of fall asleep alone. And sometimes it was entirely forgettable” (SC #1). From the start, Sex Criminals is not simply about realizing a heterosexual male fantasy but rather about exploring different dimensions of human sexuality. Sex Criminals offers multiple frames for thinking about sex: one issue takes readers through a gynecological exam (including a lecture on different forms of birth control), whereas another is framed around a lecture in a women’s studies class breaking down the concept of ­normality. Sex Criminals places a strong emphasis on human connection and communication between partners, since it requires active coordination if Suzie and Jon are going to unleash their powers and enter the alternative realm together. And throughout, the book models difficult and awkward conversations as sexual partners learn to ­communicate with each other about their pleasures and desires. For the other characters, their powers are unleashed through a range of different sexual acts, including masturbation, group sex, gay sex, and BDSM. At the same time, Sex Criminals is hyperconscious about its relationship to other forms of sexual representation. Inspired by Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman’s “chicken fat” gags in early Mad, artist Chip Zdarsky crams his frames with sexual puns, suggesting a world where even breakfast cereals are sold on the basis of their erotic implications and where every kink—from soft-core to “Obama-core”—is packaged and sold for profit. When Jon talks with Suzie about his adolescent wet dreams, he describes an actress, Jazmine St. Cocaine, as his “porno girlfriend,” and Suzie impulsively looks her up on Wikipedia, reading off her film credits. With a bemused smirk, she continues, “It doesn’t say which of her uncles touched her, but it’s Wikipedia. They have pretty high verification standards” (SC #2). In a self-reflexive moment, Jazmine’s photograph speaks from the computer screen to challenge her easy dismissal: “That’s not cool. That judgmental bullshit of yours. I’m a real person, y’know. And just because I’m a sex worker, you don’t get to shame me or insult me or insist I came from a background of molestation and abuse” (SC #2) (Figure 33.4). What could have been a brief comic disruption forms the basis for much further character development as the series progresses, with an entire issue dedicated to Jazmine’s backstory, working through the mechanics and economics of sex work (SC #9). And later still, Jazmine confronts the reality that even sympathetic male characters expect “porn sex” when they bed her. Jazmine explains to a disappointed lover, “The woman you want isn’t real, so you’re never really with me. You’re chasing her. . . . I wanted to be here, to feel you, to spend time with you. To make you feel good. You were here to write a sentence with an exclamation point at the end about how . . . virile you are, how able, how competent” (SC #20). Sex Criminals uses Jazmine’s story to illustrate how expectations shaped by porn damage men’s capacity to have intimate relations with the women they claim to love but barely know.

Non-Compliants, Brimpers, and She-Romps   599

Figure 33.4  Sex Criminals #2.

600   Henry Jenkins

Comic-Book Publics Both authors describe their books as asking questions that they themselves do not fully know how to address. As DeConnick explains, “Nothing in our book aims to put answers out there. If I thought I could fix these things, I wouldn’t be writing books—I’d be running for office” (Schreiber). Fraction talks about the connection Sex Criminals facilitates among its readers: I don’t think anybody that doesn’t want to talk about sex in a frank, honest, and open way should feel compelled to. There are those of us, though, that feel it ­connects us all in some way, no matter what our personal destinations may be, it’s a thing we all have to figure out about ourselves, all of us, even if for a moment. And I think there’s something beautiful and almost holy about that connection. I like talking about it, I like learning about it, and it always makes me laugh. (Galvin)

So what might it mean to think about comic books as generating publics? In his influential essay, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Michael Warner writes, “A public is a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself ” (50). More than this, Warner tells us, a public describes “a relation among strangers” brought together on a recurring basis around some shared set of interests: Texts clamor at us. Images solicit our gaze. Look here! Listen! Yo! But in doing so, they by no means render us passive. Quite the contrary. . . . Our willingness to proc­ ess a passing appeal determines which publics we belong to and performs their extension. . . . The direction of our glance can constitute our social world. (62)

While other theories of publics start with established social spaces—the conversations within a coffee house (Habermas), the members of a bowling league (Putnam), or the dispersed people who constitute the British empire (Anderson)—Warner focuses his formulation of the public on readers, specifically, in his case, the reading public that gathered around the nineteenth-century British magazine The Spectator. For Warner, the concept of public is closely related to that of publication. The periodic release of new content provides the occasion, and the publication offers readers a context where they can work through ideas together. What might it mean to “belong” to a comic, to feel implicated in its address, to be affiliated with the community of readers its content convenes, to feel an obligation to give something back, to share your stories, to offer your perspectives on fictional characters and imagined worlds? They call it speculative fiction for a reason. Michael Saler speaks of the fan communities that coalesced around pulp magazines in the early twentieth century as “public spheres of the imagination” (94). Saler tells us that Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, H. P. Lovecraft’s horror yarns, and Hugo Gernsback’s science-fiction magazines attracted readers deeply invested in the

Non-Compliants, Brimpers, and She-Romps   601 ­ ctional worlds they shared with one another, drawing on them as resources for making fi sense of real-world debates, events, and identities. Such publications were “good to think with,” and through letter columns, these communities developed shared identities and ethical commitments. Saler stresses that these readers saw themselves as distinct from the culture around them as a consequence of their willingness to explore ideas together. This cosmopolitan, if self-congratulatory, stance has been embraced by many fan communities across subsequent generations. Saler sees these exchanges as reflecting a distinctly twentieth-century perspective, a willingness to engage with fictional worlds “as if ” they were real worlds, using them to ask questions that would not be explored with the same openness in relation to a more mundane reality. Ramzi Fawaz makes ­similar claims for the countercultural discourses that emerged in the letter columns of Fantastic Four and other Marvel comics. These Marvel fans saw themselves as “outsiders” because of the low cultural status of their shared interests and, as such, came to identify with other social outcasts struggling for recognition during the civil rights era. These letter pages offered a place where they could question social norms and forge alternative civic imaginaries. Much the same can be said for Bitch Planet’s “Non-Compliants” or Sex Criminal’s “Brimpers.” In both cases, the act of the community naming itself helps to create boundaries around who “belongs,” and often, subsequent letter writers share their own experiences or perspectives in hopes of getting embraced within the larger community. In both cases, the names come from specific elements within the fiction. The prisoners in Bitch Planet are branded by the system as “non-compliant,” and by the time the first issues circulated, fans—both female and male—were sporting “NC” tattoos, distinctively inflected to reflect their individuality but also signaling membership within a ­particular counterpublic, defined through their resistance to gender norms. DeConnick is very clear that these readers get NC tattoos not because they are “fans” of a comic book but because they found something within the comic book that acknowledged their ex­ist­ence. One Bitch Planet reader sums up the NC ethos: I am finding the courage to be my authentic self, whomever he or she may be. I do not fit the box assigned me. I am too tall, too short, too fat, too thin, too loud, too soft, too silly, too serious, too masculine, too feminine, too passionate, too shy, too angry, too proud, too black, too brown, too devout, too atheist, too slutty, too frumpy, too gay, too WHATEVER THE FUCK IT IS that my culture will condemn me for today and I refuse to cede my power. I refuse to see myself through your eyes, just as I refuse to cast that same lens on my brothers and sisters. I will hold my head high and you will support me or get the fuck out. (BP #4)

For some, the NC tattoo signals aspirations about the political self they would like to become. Another writes, “I wish I were more non-compliant than I am, but I promise I’m working on it” (BP #4). And others see that the publication may allow future ­generations of women who might grow up without the misconceptions they carried into adulthood: “Were BP around when I was younger, maybe I would have had less

602   Henry Jenkins trouble imagining myself as a revolutionary. Maybe I would have spent less time ­fearing myself and my power. Maybe I would have joined the struggle against ­kyriarchal violence earlier. . . . I’m glad queer and trans youth today are growing up in a world where Bitch Planet exists” (BP #9).4 Such reading publics are characterized by shared identities, political agendas, and “structures of feelings” that shape their interactions. And readers share accounts of this movement from individual to collective affect, which they see as the catalyst for future political action: When I finished issue 3, first I wanted to curl up on the floor in a bathroom somewhere and release some pitiful, wheezing sobs. Then I realized that I needed to tell that woman to get off the floor and get busy being the woman she knows she is. Someday I want to see what Penny sees in the mirror (sans straps and electrodes). Someone free of “shoulds” and “ifs.” It’s a long road, but here’s hoping for my daughter and son that the conversations and community that are being initiated by Bitch Planet cause as much change everywhere else as it is inside their mother. (BP #4)

From The Spectator’s letter columns, Warner recovers the evocative concept of the She-Romps, an imagined community of female readers whose engagement with texts and social discourses about gender take transgressive shape behind closed doors: We are no sooner come together, than we throw off all that Modesty and Reservedness with which our Sex are obliged to disguise themselves in publick Places. I am not able to express the Pleasure we enjoy from ten at Night till four in the Morning, in being as rude as you Men can be, for your Lives. As our Play runs high the Room is immediately filled with broken Fans, torn Petticoats, lappets of Headdresses, Flounces, Furbelows, Garters, and Working-Aprons. . . . Once a month we Demolish a Prude, that is, we get some queer formal Creature in among us, and unrig her in an instant. Our last Month’s Prude was so armed and fortified in Whale-bone and Buckram that we had much ado to come at her, but you would have died with laughing to have seen how the sober awkard [sic ] thing looked, when she was forced out of her Intrenchments. (78)

For male readers of The Spectator, the She-Romps were the subject of male dread, rejecting all that they hold near and dear. As Warner explains the differences between these two publics, “His is all male, theirs female. His is regulated by an ethic of bourgeois moral urbanity—differences of class and self-interest correct each other through the general discussion. Theirs throw off the restraints of decorum. Differences are not ­balanced through equable conversation but unleashed through raw physical play. It’s a bitch fight” (80). The She-Romps were nineteenth-century versions of the Non-Compliants, and as such, they can be read against the grain as figures of female empowerment, women who question their assigned gender roles, women who are ready to have a “bitch fight” if that’s what it takes. Bitch Planet readers regularly describe the comic as offering them a safe(r) space—not quite as behind closed doors as the meetings of the

Non-Compliants, Brimpers, and She-Romps   603 S­ he-Romps—where they can feel things, think things, and say things that would be inappropriate elsewhere within the culture: I don’t know why I find Bitch Planet so comforting. Maybe because women are allowed to be angry and not condemned or infantilized for it? Maybe because horrible, unfair things are depicted honestly without wallowing in or exploiting the pain? Maybe because I get to see my own goddamned body on the pages without sexualization? Maybe because I know that for once here is a label that resonates with me, that I can claim as my own, that I can turn around and throw back at people? I am non-compliant. Damn straight I am non-compliant. (BP #8)

It is harder to imagine what a community of He-Romps might look like, what it might mean to so aggressively transgress the norms of masculinity, but the letter column for Sex Criminals imagines itself to be such a space. Sex Criminals readers call themselves brimpers. When Suzie seeks the expertise of “the biggest ho-bag in Eastview Middle School history,” she unleashes a hysterical series of stick-figure representations of various improbable sexual positions, with names such as “bloobing,” “swaffling,” “quisping,” “twerging,” and ”brimping,” suggesting that for all her big talk, this “experienced” girl is a fount of sexual misinformation (SC #1). Brimping—shown here as a man having sex with a woman’s hair—became shorthand for the subcultural knowledge that grows up among Sex Criminals’ regular readers (see Figure 33.5). These readers understand “Letter Daddy,” the counterpart to Bitch Planet’s “Bitchfest,” as a space where people can speak truths about their own uncomfortable, awkward, clumsy, or just plain weird sexual experiences, where male readers can acknowledge sexual uncertainty and dysfunction, where female readers can speak about desires that they have never discussed in mixed company before, and where readers and authors alike share advice about how to move beyond society’s problematic sex myths. One common theme is the discovery of porn in the woods, an experience many male readers—and few female readers—had growing up, which often created opportunities to learn about sex and to experiment with masturbation but which also represented a negotiation and conflict with other boys. Consider, for example, one such story: Six or seven 13-year-old boys descended on the clearing in the woods. The fight lasted about exactly 45 seconds: a barroom free-for-all in which all of us, and I mean all of us—nerds every last one, not an athletic event between us—fought each other like animals for right and title to a single article of pornography, beating the holy stuffing out of one another with not a single word spoken, except by the poor kid who’d brought the magazine in the first place and “could not believe” what was ­happening and tried to talk us out of it, while we destroyed his prize, and ourselves, right in front of him. The Penthouse in question was ripped into so many pieces in the course of that 45 second fight that to this day, I remember the ass and labia of a lady posed against the clear blue sky but have no idea what her body or face looked like above the waste, because she’d been bisected through the midsection. I hung onto that shred, and a few other shreds, and limped home broken and bleeding and hid them. (SC #3)

604   Henry Jenkins

Figure 33.5  Sex Criminals #1.

Non-Compliants, Brimpers, and She-Romps   605 Much as the She-Romps functioned for Spectator readers as a counterpoint to their own self-image as a rational reading and debating society, this heteronormative vision of men coming to blows over a Penthouse counters this community’s self-perception as a place where people can talk openly about diverse sexual experiences: “The thing I love most about this comic is how we’re all coming together (not even sorry) to weave this weird, wonderful, bodily-fluid-soaked sexual tapestry. I’ve never felt more included in comics or more in need of hand sanitizer” (SC #8). Another letter writer shares the way reading Sex Criminals has inspired him toward other acts of self-­improvement: “Every issue makes me braver to talk more confidently about sex in an open way that’s less rife with insecurity” (SC #13). And another speaks of the way the community gives itself permission to “just blurt all sorts of stuff out” (SC #15). Many describe how they have used the comics to open conversations with lovers or potential lovers, ­finding the kind of connection modeled by Suzie and Jon (at least, within their relationship at its best).

How Bitching Might Change Things Lynn Comella documents how feminist sex-toy shops offer “new kinds of sexual spaces and communities where individuals of all genders and sexual orientations can engage with their sexual selves in a supportive and encouraging environment” (243). Such spaces constructed sexual publics, as people came together to talk about things that ­previously had seemed “obscene” and shameful. Instead, these sex-positive spaces ­supported participants’ efforts to learn more about their bodies, fantasies, and desires: Sex positivity seeks to intervene in a culture overwhelmingly shaped by sex negativity, which is the idea that sex is a dangerous, destructive, and negative force. It includes the idea that the more encouragement and support people have around their sexuality, the better; that everyone deserves access to accurate information about sex; that people should not be embarrassed or ashamed for wanting more sexual pleasure and enjoyment in their lives. (245)

Both Bitch Planet and Sex Criminals offer similar resources to their readers. Each Bitch Planet issue includes one or more essays by third-wave feminist writers, many of them women of color, who reflect on contemporary debates around gender and sexual identity. Bitch Planet also features definitions of key concepts, such as cis-identity or intersectionality, or offers reading lists showcasing everything from feminist zines and comics to women’s history. Bitch Planet may be one of the few comics to give its readers homework. DeConnick comments on current events (such as the election of Donald Trump) and engages directly with her readers (for example, staging an ongoing discussion about how men might become allies). She challenges one male fan who complains that he finds feminist discourse off-putting:

606   Henry Jenkins Contrary to popular belief, feminists are not out to get you personally. We haven’t even mentioned your name at the meetings or anything! Feminists welcome men into the fold knowing that in order to reach true gender parity, it absolutely has to be all hands on deck. But you don’t get to come to our party and tell us how to dance. It’s possible that the best thing you can do . . . is to interrogate your desire to make demands of feminists in the first place, or ask other men some of these questions first. (BP #6)

Fraction performs a similar role for his readers, sometimes offering advice on how to build relationships, sometimes sharing his own experiences, and sometimes challenging elements of toxic masculinity that still shape the ways some male readers think or talk about their sexuality. Sex Criminals has invited sexologists to respond to readers’ questions, but every issue is also sprinkled with comic sex “tips”—creating a playful environment where readers feel free to take risks and where sex talk does not seem so intimidating. In one especially poignant and personal exchange, Mel, a female reader who wrote to discuss hints that one character might have had a miscarriage in her past, shared her own devastation in the wake of a similar experience: It knocked me sideways, emotionally. . . . Since miscarriage is a trauma that we REALLY don’t talk about in our society, I felt alone in it, for many years. I’m happy to not feel that way now. I’m so grateful there’s books like this out there that are talking about these things and giving people room in a letter column to talk about our experiences and Be Real about this. . . . It really means the world. (SC #22)

Fraction’s response filled almost three pages, and then he left another five pages blank, since he did not want to follow up this intimate exchange, where he shared his own experiences of losing a child, with the usual mix of dirty stories and penis jokes: “the last thing I could ever stand doing would be to make light, to make jest, to belittle or cheapen, the suffering anybody that’s endured a thing like this may feel. (SC #22) We might describe such exchanges as teachable moments, with DeConnick or Fraction responding as “community builders,” even therapists, rather than as authors. They do not simply tell whatever stories they want and walk away. They have ethical responsibilities to their readers—first among them, as DeConnick notes, to actively listen and learn what they can from the experiences and perspectives being shared. She is quick to distinguish such creative engagement from simple fan service, understanding herself as still making choices about what belongs in her book. But she also sees such letters as not only bids for attention but also often pleas for representation and inclusion. For example, one transgender reader shared that women in her life often tell her that her tastes and interests are “not girly enough” for her to call herself female. DeConnick responded: I know this is easier to say than it is to believe, but you don’t have to qualify for womanhood. There is no list of interests or preferences that confirm your authenticity, no secret handshake, no Official Arbiter of Femininity. No one’s approval is required— not your mother’s, your aunt’s, your grandpa’s, mine or anyone else’s. You are a woman if that is who you know yourself to be. . . . When people are mean, you come sit with me. We’ll read comic books and compare tattoos like the awesome ladies we know ourselves to be. (BP #7)

Non-Compliants, Brimpers, and She-Romps   607 But in that same issue, another reader took DeConnick to task for the language she uses in writing about gender, wondering whether she really embraces the “genderqueer” within the NC community. Publicly challenged, she announced her plans to develop transgender characters, but first, she used her Tumblr page to solicit insights from her readers and sought advice from transgender activists. She described this process in depth, trying to explain why she feels it necessary to so publicly think through how to include transgender representation while as an artist she feels free to construct other characters whose experiences and perspectives differ from her own: “White men are high status in our culture and we have a long tradition of portraying them as individuals, none shouldered with the burden of representing the White Male experience. . . . I’m not going to do damage with any version of white male representation. . . . The humanity of white men is never in peril” (BP #8). Something similar occurred when Fraction was asked how “asexuals” or “aces” would fare within the world depicted in Sex Criminals, inspired in part by letters from selfidentified asexual readers surprised that the comic spoke to them so powerfully, such as this one: Aside from being hilarious . . . I think I relate to the story of people connecting and trying to maintain that connection. . . . But, also, the openness and accepting nature of the book in both the story and letters column, even though it primarily revolves around the myriad ways people get their freak on, makes me feel more comfortable about how I live my life and wanting to be more open. I went a long time thinking I was broken and the positive, hopeful vibes I get out of this book help me to feel OK about being myself and not being interested in engaging in the physical sexytimes. (SC #10)

Once Fraction introduced an asexual character, “Letter Daddy” offered a space for asexual readers to debate the choices he made in this representation, suggesting ways the character’s experiences differed from their own, further addressing the burden of representation. Such conversations create discomfort, even within the kinds of relatively safe spaces these publications offer their readers, but as DeConnick notes, “on the other side of discomfort is growth.” Both writers see their comics as ultimately contributing to a process of social change, calling out a culture that has historically been too narrow in the kinds of diversity it was prepared to accept, and challenging their readers to act differently in the world as a ­consequence of their sense of affiliation with these “public spheres of the imagination.” We’ve already gotten some sense of the personal transformations represented by the NC tattoos: readers inscribe their bodies with marks intended to remind them of the insights they gained from reading these comics. Such transformations are often understood as individual acts of self-empowerment. Yet they can also signal the emergence of collective identities, which get expressed, for example, through these readers’ participation in the women’s marches in protest of the Trump administration. Much as iconography associated with Margaret Atwood’s book The Handmaid’s Tale and the TV series based on it has inspired activism in support of women’s reproductive rights, issue #10 of Bitch Planet included a two-page spread showing around two dozen photographs of

608   Henry Jenkins women and men wearing “NC” on T-shirts, pink pussy hats, signs, or their bodies, in challenging a new administration whose leader had bragged about grabbing women by their pussies (Figure 33.6). Of course, these images did not emerge from a vacuum, given the amount of ink that Bitch Planet has spent showcasing the work of feminist artists, activists, entrepreneurs, and craftspeople, showing different ways readers might translate the comic book’s themes back into real-world social-change movements. So far, we do not have anywhere nearly as vivid an image of what it might look like to brimp for social justice, but here, too, the social identity is one that could inspire change on both an individual and a collective basis.

Figure 33.6  Sex Criminals #1.

Non-Compliants, Brimpers, and She-Romps   609 Political philosopher Peter Dahlgren identifies those features that allow civic cultures to inspire political action: social connections and trust among participants, shared knowledge, shared values, spaces for discussion and deliberation, practices that embody agency and develop skills, and a recognition of political identity and agency. These ­cultural conditions are just as apt to emerge in the back pages of a comic book as in the forums associated with more prestigious publications, as long as the readers take themselves seriously as a public whose conversations might have real-world impact. And that brings us back to the “Non-Compliant Brimper.” Throughout this chapter, I have established similarities in how Bitch Planet and Sex Criminals conceptualize the role comic books might play in informing, facilitating, and empowering publics around intersectional and sex-positive feminist perspectives. On the surface, DeConnick seems to address mostly (though not exclusively) women, and Fraction has created a space where (again, by no means exclusively) men can rethink masculinity and heterosexuality. Both encourage readers who do not conform to social expectations to describe their experiences. We have no idea how much overlap exists between these readerships. Comic-book publics are not exclusive; we may “belong” to different communities, may embrace multiple identities. And indeed, these groups might make common cause around shared concerns, as happens when coalitions from different social movements join forces for events like the women’s marches. These comparisons account for why I have chosen to write about Bitch Planet and Sex Criminals in parallel; it is interesting that they come from two writers who are married to each other, but it is more interesting that they seem to be engaged in a conversation with each other that could have ­significant social ramifications.

Notes 1. Here and throughout, I am citing specific issues of Bitch Planet (BP) and Sex Criminals (SC) in their monthly floppy format (regular comic books), since the most important materials for this analysis do not appear in the graphic-novel reprints of this material and since the books themselves do not include page numbers. 2. For economic reasons, this material appears in the floppy monthly comics but not in the bound graphic novels. 3. For a useful scholarly roundtable on Bitch Planet, see Whitted, “Bound by Law,” “Caged and Enraged,” and “Hard Women.” 4. Kyriarchy was a concept from contemporary feminism which DeConnick introduced to  her readers through the “community pages” and refers to an interlocking system of oppression and marginalization, which, among other things, includes racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 2006. Comella, Lynn. “Changing the World One Orgasm at a Time: Sex Positive Retail Activism.” Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, edited by Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser, New York UP, 2012, pp. 240–253.

610   Henry Jenkins Cook, Pam. “ ‘Exploitation Films’ and Feminism.” Screen, vol. 17, no. 2, 1976, pp. 122–127. Dahlgren, Peter. Media and Political Engagement: Citizens, Communication, and Democracy. Cambridge UP, 2009. DeConnick, Kelly Sue. “How to Make People Uncomfortable (and Still Make a Living).” 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaxkgZ3eLak. DeConnick, Kelly Sue, and Valentine De Landro. Bitch Planet. Image, 2014–present. Di Franco, J. Philip. The Movie World of Roger Corman. Chelsea House, 1979. Fawaz, Ramzi. The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination in American Comics. New York UP, 2016. Fraction, Matt, and Chip Zdarsky. Sex Criminals. Image, 2014–present. Galvin, Chris. “Interview with Sex Criminals Creators Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky.” Comicsverse, 15 Sept. 2017. https://comicsverse.com/interview-with-sex-criminals-creatorsmatt-fraction-and-chip-zdarsky. Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Polity, 1989. Jenkins, Henry. “Exploiting Feminism in Stephanie Rothman’s Terminal Island.” The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture, New York UP, 2007, pp. 102–124. Johnston, Claire. “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema.” Movies and Methods I, edited by Bill Nichols, U of California P, 1976, pp. 208–223. “Kelly Sue DeConnick Tackles Exploitation Tropes in Bitch Planet.” Los Angeles Times, Hero Complex, 24 Jan. 2014. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Movies and Methods II, edited by Bill Nichols, U of California P, 1985, pp. 303–315. Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Touchstone, 2001. Saler, Michael. As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality. Oxford UP, 2012. Schreiber, Melody. “Kelly Sue DeConnick: Smashing the Patriarchy and Reaching New Audiences.” Book Riot, 14 Feb. 2017. https://bookriot.com/2017/02/14/kelly-sue-deconnicksmashing-patriarchy-reaching-new-audiences. Sharp, Sarah Rose. “Women’s Rage: A Conversation with the Creator of Bitch Planet.” Hyperallergic, 22 Apr. 2015, https://hyperallergic.com/200987/womens-rage-a-conversationwith-the-creator-of-bitch-planet. Warner, Michael. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture, vol. 14, no. 1, 2002, pp. 49–90. Whitted, Qiana. “Bound by Law: Bitch Planet Comics Studies Roundtable (Part Two).” The Middle Spaces, 8 Mar. 2018, https://themiddlespaces.com/2018/03/08/bitch-planet-2. Whitted, Qiana. “Caged and Enraged: Bitch Planet Comic Studies Roundtable (Part One).” The Middle Spaces, 6 Mar. 2018, https://themiddlespaces.com/2018/03/06/bitch-planet-1. Whitted, Qiana. “Hard Women, Hard Time: Bitch Planet Comic Studies Roundtable (Part Three).” The Middle Spaces, 13 Mar. 2018, https://themiddlespaces.com/2018/03/13/bitchplanet-3. Young, Damon. “Mythic Noncompliance: An Interview with Feminist Comic Book Author Kelly Sue DeConnick.” Kill Your Darlings, 11 Aug. 2015, https://killyourdarlings.com. au/2015/08/mythic-noncompliance-kelly-sue-deconnick/?doing_wp_cron=1531518191.4341 979026794433593750.

chapter 34

Liter a ry A da ptations i n Comics a n d Gr a phic Nov el s Jan Baetens

Adaptation and the F-Word: Fidelity It is impossible to address the notion of adaptation in the comics and graphic-novel ­formats1 without first discussing “fidelity,” an issue that has burdened intermediality studies for many decades, certainly in the field of film and literature adaptations, which still is the most frequently studied type of adaptation. The fidelity framework comes down to a simple argument: a filmic adaptation of a literary text is always disappointing, except when it manages to be faithful to the original, but absolute fidelity is nearly impossible. The problem with fidelity is threefold: first, it supposes a single and strictly linear proc­ess leading from a source text to a target text; second, it accepts as a kind of dogma that the source text is by definition superior to the target text, literature being a more pres­tig­ious medium than film and words, more generally, being emphasized in traditional views of culture at the expense of images; third, fidelity as a frame is mechanically imposed on any kind of adaptation, including, for instance, the comics and graphic-novel adaptations of literary texts. The logical conclusion of this way of thinking is that fidelity condemns the adapted work to be at the service of the literary source, either by showing by contrast the unsurpassable qualities of the original text or by using the adaptation as a teaser leading to the experience of the real stuff. Today things have changed a lot, and although the notion of fidelity is still part of most ongoing discussions, our take on it has dramatically evolved (Hutcheon and O’Flynn). Adaptation is no longer seen as a single and linear process; it results instead from many different influences, stimuli, and responses in and from different media, and it includes strong feedback moments. Moreover, an adaptation is now considered a stand-alone product, which needs to be evaluated according its own strengths and

612   Jan Baetens weaknesses. When comparisons with the original are made, they should be done not in terms of fidelity but in terms of interpretation, each adaptation offering a new interpretation of an original that is itself reshaped by this interpretation (Cléder and Jullier). Fidelity remains a valuable perspective, though, provided it is itself reframed in ­economic rather than aesthetic terms, studying, for instance, the financial logic behind the selection of adapted works, the alleged tribute paid to prestigious originals, or the production and rewriting of original works that aim at finding a second career as ­commercially successful adaptations (Murray). Finally, adaptations are no longer seen as just products; they are also studied as processes, often with a strong emphasis on all kinds of failures that occur during the adaptation process (Jeannelle).

A Very Short History of Literary Adaptations in Comics and Graphic Novels From the beginning, comics—first newspaper comics, then comic books—and graphic novels, which appear as a socially accepted concept in the second half of the 1980s, have always been characterized by the elaboration of specific contents. Comics were “­funnies,” that is, gag strips, before exploring in their way the world of adventure-genre fiction, either via adaptations (the Tarzan character was created by novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs before being adapted in various media including comics) or via more or less original creations (the Flash Gordon character existed in comics before being adapted to the screen but was itself, of course, influenced by existing science-fiction literature). Comic books specialized in superhero fiction, and even if there existed superheroes before the comic books (Regalado), it was the comic-book industry that really popularized the figure. Graphic novels, finally, introduced autobiography in graphic narrative, together with (new) journalism, the biopic, and, more recently, literary adaptations. What is most striking in this rough sketch is, first of all, the relative absence of literary adaptations, which have only lately become a fad in the graphic novel (even today, comic books usually stick to their traditional genre-fiction content). A second important feature is the systematic foregrounding of the literary canon (contrary to what happens in cinema, for instance, where it continues to be assumed that the best adaptations are based on the worst novels, the good ones being resistant to any kind of faithful reworking). As shown by the excellent collection of Tabachnick and Saltzman, it is a very small number of works—texts such as The Last of the Mohicans, Moby Dick, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, Othello, Pride and Prejudice, or Alice in Wonderland—that are constantly being adapted and readapted (for the intermedial and historical context of these permanently shifting adaptations, see also Barker and Sabin, who use the James Fenimore Cooper case as their primary example). Copyright issues may explain this narrow selection, which heavily focuses on

Literary Adaptations in Comics and Graphic Novels   613 works in the public domain, but underneath this choice, one finds, of course, the belief that this kind of adaptation has to serve as a springboard to the reading of the actual texts. A third feature is the lack of equivalence, in terms of prestige and stylistic ambition, between the prestigious source text and the often just run-of-the-mill target text, at least in the traditional comics field. As a matter of fact, comics or graphic novels based on literary works have for a long time seemed restricted to the didactic Classics Illustrated series (first run 1941–1971, with 169 issues), which exemplifies the preference given to the literary canon as well as the not always satisfying artistic qualities, to put it mildly, of the adaptation. The series ­targeted young and reluctant readers, aiming at introducing them to the great texts of the Western canon with the help of very short and very simple adaptations in comicbook format. In spite of the (sporadic) participation of major artists such as Jack Kirby, the series is considered an infamous example of uneventful, one-dimensional, often ­blatantly silly literary adaptation. That the very philosophy of Classic Illustrated is still alive, although in more sophisticated forms, is suggested by the three-volume anthology edited by Russ Kick, The Graphic Canon. The fifteen hundred pages of this enterprise clearly exhibit all the major tenets of Classics Illustrated, except for one essential and extremely revealing aspect. What does not change is the fidelity program; the editor insists on the fact that he only chose or commissioned works that accepted to “stay true to the source material,” that is, to the plot of the sources. What also does not change is the preference given to cultural heritage (mostly Western, with some digressions to the East). In The Graphic Canon, only highly canonical works function as source texts for the adaptations. What does change, however, are the nature of the artwork and the ­orientation of the adaptation: the artwork is no longer a comic book, but it covers both comic adaptations and (nonnarrative) illustrations, while the major objective of the project is no longer to use the adaptations to bring the audience closer to the originals to be discovered but is for the prestigious originals to upgrade the less prestigious art form of the visual adaptation, and, at least as important, the not always prestigious name of the adapting artists. Not all of them are as well known as Robert Crumb and Will Eisner, the two stars of the anthology, and in some cases, the adaptation is shallow and disappointing, if not slightly out of focus (a considerable number of contributors are illustrators, and their artwork doesn’t make any attempt to shift from image to narrative). Regardless of the quality of its contributions, The Graphic Canon thus reveals a landmark change in the adaptation policy for literary works in comics format, since it is now literature that is put at the service of the comics medium. This fundamental change, which matches the bigger changes in our vision of adaptation as a stand-alone work, had been prepared for by a series of highly personal and very ambitious one-shot adaptations in what were not yet labeled as graphic novels, although for current standards, they definitely should be called that. Among the excellent representatives of the creative take on adaptation that supersedes the limits of the dusty Classics Illustrated didacticism are Dino Battaglia , who adapted, among others, Guy de Maupassant; Jacques Tardi, who adapted the first great representative of hard-boiled French writing, Léo Malet; Paul Karasik and David Mazzuchelli, adapters of Paul

614   Jan Baetens Auster’s City of Glass; Lorenzo Mattotti, the adapter of the Eisner award-winning Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde based on Robert Louis Stevenson; Peter Kuper, who adapted Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis; Robert Crumb, who “illustrated” the Book of Genesis; and some other less-known artists. The most outstanding example of this approach to adaptation, however, is the Latin American artist Alberto Breccia, without any doubt one of the greatest graphic novelists ever. That none of his books has ever been translated into English is as much an enigma as a scandal. Breccia’s adaptations of North American writers H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe and later of Latin American authors such as Ernesto Sábato are certainly not adaptations in the traditional sense of the word. They are deeply personal and original recreations of the source texts, which they succeed in reinventing in ways that are incomparably much more faithful to the literary texts than traditional adaptations. Indeed, Breccia may abandon the more or less literal and c­ orrect transfer of the sources’ storylines, but his unique and imaginative exploration of the adapted texts, each time in a different style, succeeds in finding a strong visual equivalent of what is really at stake in the original work. Important as they are, these works are not considered key to the emergence of the graphic novel since the 1980s. The new trend in “serious” comics production is associated with the opening toward autobiographic narrative (Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, Alison Bechdel) and new journalism (Joe Sacco, Guy Delisle), as well as the critical reworking of the comic-book tradition (Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, the Hernández brothers) and the investigation of new layout and book-format techniques (Chris Ware), not with the practice of the literary adaptation, which remains marginal, as demonstrated by the fact that none of the above-mentioned graphic novelists has made a name by doing this kind of work (in spite of the quasi-Cyclopean dimensions of The Book of Genesis, this is not the work that has made Crumb’s reputation). When they make a literary adaptation, this is generally seen as a side project. The work by Spiegelman and others is currently read as “literature” but definitely not because they claim to be inspired by literary works, and there is only a small number of key graphic novelists who seem to specialize in literary adaptations. Perhaps the best-known example is Posy Simmonds, a British newspaper cartoonist whose drawings often satirize the English middle classes, in particular those of a literary bent, and who has made modern reworkings of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. This split may come as a surprise, since the author who made perhaps the largest efforts to impose the label of the graphic novel, Eisner, explicitly linked the worlds of ­literature and of graphic novels: The format of comics presents a montage of both word and image, and the reader is thus required to exercise both visual and verbal interpretive skills. The regimens of art (e.g. perspective, symmetry, line) and the regimens of literature (e.g. grammar, plot, syntax) become superimposed upon each other. The reading of a graphic novel is an act of both aesthetic perception and intellectual pursuit. . . . [T]he psychological processes involved in viewing a word and an image are analogous. The structures of

Literary Adaptations in Comics and Graphic Novels   615 illustration and of prose are similar. In its most economical state, comics employ a series of repetitive images and recognizable symbols. When they are used again and again to convey similar ideas, they become a distinct language—a literary form, if you will. (2)

Eisner’s analogy is open to debate; one might, for instance, compare it with Rodolphe Töpffer’s definition of the first graphic novels as drawn literature (littérature en estampes, “literature in drawings,” he called them), but that is another issue. What should strike us in light of Eisner’s claim, which many have considered with more than sympathy, is the strange resistance of the graphic novel to literary adaptations (to which I will return in the last paragraph of this chapter). True, at first sight, this resistance seems to be no ­longer there, since recent years have witnessed an incredible explosion of literary adaptations. However, the majority of leading graphic novelists continue to stay away from this kind of adaptation, while only a small number of the recently issued literary adaptations are considered key contributions to the development of the medium. In spite of the exceptional commercial success of the six-volume adaptation of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), the work by French comics artist Stéphane Heuet remains often ignored in scholarly and critical studies on the medium. Heuet’s approach, which tries to insert as much text as possible, although in a simplified form, is less bowdlerizing than it may appear at first sight. His decision to adopt the typically Franco-Belgian clear-line style best known for its use in the Adventures of Tintin progressively moves into a more pictorialist form of drawing which succeeds in bringing to the fore some of the visual intertext of Proust’s novel. One may even have the impression that, just as the field is infested with biopics of visual artists, the current interest in literary adaptations betrays a kind of growth crisis for the graphic novel. On the one hand, there is a growing demand for serious comics, including in the field of literature, where one can observe a rapid change in the reading habits of the public. Even “professional” readers, such as, for instance, college students, are eager to read graphic novels, not in order to contest in a more or less countercultural way the literary canon as it is handed over in class but more radically in order to replace the reading of literary texts with the supposedly easier and less time-consuming reading of graphic novels. On the other hand, there is also a strong dissatisfaction with the thematic and narrative shallowness and lack of range and scope of much graphic novels, which have rapidly developed their own stereotypes. As Douglas Wolk nastily stated: Two ideas that have poisoned a cross section of contemporary writing in general have also seeped into comics a little bit. One is the sentimental memoir—the firstperson story that explains why the author is in the right and why the author's pain and sadness are more sad and painful than yours. The other is the toxic maxim “write what you know”: the idea that, even in fiction, an author’s imagination has to be directly limited by his or her personal experience. (203)

The awareness of both the growing demand—and thus the need to turn out more books in less time—and the also rising dissatisfaction with the typical content matter of

616   Jan Baetens the graphic novel may (partly) explain the success of the literary adaptation, which moreover ties in very well with the still unfinished and in certain cases violently ­contested quest for status (Pizzino). In that sense, one can only conclude that the quantitative progress of literary adaptations discloses less an evolution toward more mature forms than a kind of thematic and narrative anemia and lack of inspiration and ­innovative power.

Two (and a Half) Basic Tendencies of Literary Adaptation? When studying the practice of literary adaptations based on or inspired by literary works—more specifically, narrative works, the corpus of nonnarrative works raising specific questions I will not address in this chapter (see McHale; Bennett)—it is important to make a distinction between two major types of adaptation. The first type focuses on storytelling and tries to replicate the storyline, the (number and appearance of) characters, and the setting of the original work—all elements that, according to classic adaptation theory (McFarlane), can be “transferred” more or less literally from text to image. This form of adaptation is, however, never mechanical, since many elements of the text, such as the psychology of the characters, will have to be remediated by the new host medium (in that case, there is no “transfer” but “adaptation proper”). But in general, one can argue that this first type of adaptation puts a strong emphasis on the relationship with the original, hence the frequent return of the fidelity issue during and after the making of these works. However, this text-oriented and story-driven type of adaptation inevitably implies a number of changes that the classic vision of adaptation does not always take into account. I give here three examples of an apparently clear “transfer” that in practice proves always strongly intertwined with elements of “adaptation proper.” First of all, there is the issue of characterization. True, characters who are verbally described in great length and with all kinds of details can more or less easily be reimagined in comics or graphic-novel format. Yet what is much more difficult is the drawing of such a character without the simultaneous elaboration of a surrounding space. In a literary text, the details of a storyworld can be completely abandoned to the imagination of the reader (in many stories, it may be hard to tell where and when they take place). In a comic or a graphic novel, the visualization of the storyworld comes quite naturally, even if there exist minimalist cases that refrain from materializing the place where the story happens, but these are really exceptions. In visual storytelling, the very presence of character implies the more or less detailed representation of a space, and that is one of the major challenges of any comics or graphic-novel adaptation of a literary text. The second kind of intertwining of transfer and adaptation proper has to do with the fact that in a comic or a graphic novel, one is obliged—once again, in general, for there are no rules without

Literary Adaptations in Comics and Graphic Novels   617 exceptions—to literally repeat, panel after panel, both the characters and the material features of the storyworld. This repetition may go unnoticed at first sight, since we are completely used to it, but it represents an important and necessary change of the original work and a wonderful opportunity for all adapters to make a creative use of this ­terrible constraint: how to keep the reader’s interest in something that has to be repeated over and over again, whereas in the original, it often suffices to give one rapid hint at the spatial and temporal context of the storyworld? A third and last element that shows the limits of “transfer” and its unescapable morphing into “adaptation proper” is, of course, the fact that, contrary to what happens in writing, that is, in writing in print, the “hand” of the author remains always visible—a strong point made by authors such as Philippe Marion, who coined the term graphiation to describe the varying degrees of presence of the visual artist in his or her work, and Jared Gardner, who rightly considers this aspect one of the most distinctive features of comics: In fact, alone of all of the narrative arts born at the end of the nineteenth century, the sequential comic has not effaced the line of the artist, the handprint of the ­storyteller. This fact is central to what makes the comics form unique, and also to what makes the line, the mark of the individual upon the page, such a unique challenge for narrative theory. We simply have no language—because we have no parallel in any other narrative form for describing its narrative work. In comics alone the promise of Benjamin’s looked-for “moving script" continued to develop throughout the twentieth century. Here the act of inscription remains always visible, and the story of its making remains central to the narrative work. (56–57)

The second type of adaptation—which is, of course, not incompatible with the first one, each adaptation being in practice a mix of both categories—tends to turn away from the original work, trying to conceive new forms of storytelling that explore the medium-specific properties of the host medium. Before discussing some aspects of this approach, I would like to stress that the distinction between the two major tendencies does not imply a quality judgment or appraisal; medium-specific adaptations are not necessarily better or more interesting than source-oriented adaptations, and they are certainly no guarantee that the final result will be remarkable per se. It cannot be denied, however, that, at least from a theoretical and critical point of view, modern scholars tend to prefer the medium-specific way of doing things. Color is a good example of such a medium-specific approach. Colors can, of course, be present in a literary text, in the description of the fictional world as well as in the typography used to print the story, but the systematic use of color, be it the black/white/ gray scale or the full color scale, is ubiquitous as well as inescapable in comics and graphic novels. The climactic pages of one of the Poe adaptations by Breccia, for instance, “The Mask of the Red Death” (Figure 34.1), are based on the literal repetition of a single panel, which only changes colors between its various occurrences. The most challenging cases, however, are those where the adaptation not only involves the adding of an element or a feature that is not present in the original work but

618   Jan Baetens

Figure 34.1  Alberto Breccia, “The Mask of the Red Death,” Le cœur révélateur et autres ­histoires extraordinaires. Racham, 2018, n.p. © 2018 Alberto Breccia Estate—Rackham

also reveals a possible clash between the properties of the source text and those of the target text, that is, in the cases where it proves impossible to keep the original story as it is, even when the “transfer” technique is possible and the adapting author is sympathetic to the traditional fidelity approach. Rhythm is a good case in point, since even the most literal and scrupulous transposition of a narrative sequence and a story arc will be modified by the fact that storytelling in comics or graphic novels is never a matter of sequentiality only. Panels may follow one another in a linear way (for instance, in a newspaper strip), but in all cases, the sequential deciphering of the successive panels will be modified by the fact that the reading of these panels obeys also a nonlinear or tabular logic. In other words, when reading a succession of panels and going from one panel to the next—and also taking into account that many things may happen in the gutter—one also sees more than one panel at the same time, and often one has already seen the whole strip or page before actually getting down to the reading of the individual panels. This is anything but a detail, not only for visual reasons (many comics and graphic novels or­gan­ize their page layout in such a way that the whole page constitutes an image in itself) but also for narrative reasons. What about the telling of a gag in a one-page comic or graphic novel, for example? Don’t we usually start reading it in its final panel, where the gag is revealed, before we initiate the actual deciphering of the gag in a linear and sequential way? In other words, how can one tell a gag, which is a genre where every-

Literary Adaptations in Comics and Graphic Novels   619 thing depends on the final denouement, in a medium that shows us in advance how the story ends? And, perhaps more important, what about the issue of length, of the work as a whole as well as of its parts, for in visual storytelling, too, size matters? When making an adaptation, comics authors and graphic novelists have to make decisions concerning the ideal length of the work. Since it takes less time, it is often argued, to read a comic than to read a novel, does this mean that the graphic adaptation of a three-hundredpage novel should be a six-hundred-page graphic novel? Similar decisions must be made concerning the spatial position of the elements on the page. Turning the page of a novel may be a neutral or uneventful action, but the place a panel occupies on the page of a comic or a graphic novel always has an impact, and often a very important one (each visual page generates a virtual cliffhanger effect, even when this effect is not intended at all). The construction of narrative tension, for instance, cannot be achieved the same way in graphic storytelling as in a literary text, since linearity and tabularity are inescapably intertwined. Comparable remarks apply to the classic distinction between narration and description, which literary narratology tends to conceptualize as different modes that alternate in the text, for the author is either developing the narrative or writing a description, and when the author is describing, the narrative is suspended—at least, this is what textual narratology generally claims. In comics and graphic novels, given the material coincidence of characters and spaces, plot-driven action on the one hand and visual description of the storyworld on the other cannot be separated, for they occur in the same panel, and one cannot have one without the other. Here as well, one of Breccia’s Poe adaptations, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” unmistakably illustrates this principle. In Poe’s story, a murderer’s feelings of guilt result in him hearing a thumping sound, which he interprets as the dead victim’s beating heart (see Figure 34.2). In Breccia’s adaptation, which adopts a very rigid and minimalist three-by-three and then three-by-four layout grid, with almost no text but with a sharp contrast between black and white,

Figure 34.2 Alberto Breccia, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Le cœur révélateur et autres histoires extraordinaires. Rackham, 2018, n.p. © 2018 Alberto Breccia Estate—Rackham

620   Jan Baetens the  only colors used in the eleven-page work, the gradual appearance of the beat is ­communicated through purely visual means. As shown by the film industry, the adaptation work cannot, however, be restricted to a one-to-one relationship between a single source text of variable size (ranging from a short story such as Julio Cortázar’s “The Devil’s Drool,” adapted by Michelangelo Antonioni in Blow-Up, to a two-volume epos such as Frank Herbert’s Dune, adapted by David Lynch) and a single target work (eventually expanded with sequels and prequels). Certain films that are more or less clear examples of literary source texts do not adapt unique works, but other types of sources, such as a mix of works (this is what Steven Spielberg did in his adaptation of Hergé’s The Secret of the Unicorn, which mixes plot ­elements from various Tintin adventures), the typical universe of an author (a Jane Austen is never just the adaptation of one book but takes on board the complete work of the author as well as the many ways in which it has been previously adapted), or even genres (Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution is, for instance, among many other things, an attempt to blend the two genres of science fiction and hard-boiled fiction). This is also what happens in the field of comics and graphic novels, and it would be deceiving to present an overview of literary adaptations in graphic fiction by skipping this kind of practice, not always easy to detect (generally, the sources used are not credited) but crucial to seeing the full gamut of adaptation policies. Martin Vaughn-James’s The Cage is a splendid example of a literary adaptation that is not based on a single work but inspired by a literary movement, more concretely the French New Novel of the 1950s and ’60s, as theorized by authors such as Alain RobbeGrillet and Jean Ricardou. Drawn in Paris, written in English, published in Canada, but actually made famous through its French translation one decade later, The Cage is a graphic novel that challenges most formal traditional features of the medium but whose narrative subtext or intertext makes it into an authentic literary adaptation. VaughnJames’s book is a breathtaking transposition and reinvention of some of the basic ­features of the descriptive style and antihumanist philosophy of the avant-garde narrative of these years. To start with, The Cage has no characters at all, that is, no human characters, and its plot is not action-driven (see Figure 34.3). The book confronts the reader with a limited number of objects and spaces—and the cage, actually inspired by the fence around a power station in Toronto is, of course, an example of both an object and a space—which change and morph page after page (contrary to the traditional grid layout of comics and graphic novels, Vaughn-James presents only one drawing per page). Besides, the transformations of these places and objects obey a logic that exemplifies the importance of permutational writing in the New Novel aesthetics (permutation is also a key element of constrained writing and anticipates what new media scholars will theorize as “database narrative”; see Manovich). Finally, the basic units of the ­fictional ­universe are clearly figurative translations of the basic material features of the production process: objects and places are fictional interpretations of the forms and devices one may find on the table of the artist: a sheet of paper, a bottle of ink, a pen, a compass, an eraser, and so on. In a sense, one might argue that The Cage, one of the most modernist works that exist in the graphic-novel field, is both perfectly performing and

Literary Adaptations in Comics and Graphic Novels   621

Figure 34.3  Martin Vaughn-James, La cage. Les Impressions Nouvelles, 1986, p. 166.

radically wiping out the modernist program of Clement Greenberg. The latter’s plea for a reduction of painting to its constitutive elements (color and flatness) is exemplified by Vaughn-James’s concern to limit the work to elements that refer to this material basis, while at the same time it gives birth to a proliferation of “thick” fictional elements and mutations that demonstrate the possibility of elaborating a work based on “nothing,” that is, on nothing else than the materials one needs to make drawings. The most radical example of such an adaptive practice can be found in the production of the OUBAPO group, originally French, now solidly transnational, with American graphic novelist Matt Madden as one of its most active representatives (Baetens). OUBAPO, which is short for Ouvroir de bande dessinée potentielle (Workshop of Potential Comic Book Art), is a comics movement which believes in the use of formal constraints to push the boundaries of the medium and which has developed as a branch of the umbrella organization OULIPO (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or “Workshop of Potential Literature”, which has defended similar positions in writing since its c­ reation in 1960. OUBAPO does not literally adapt OULIPO or other constrained-writinginformed works in comics format. Madden’s 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, based on the idea of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style (the telling of a simple story in ninety-nine different ways, each of them written in a different style), comes quite

622   Jan Baetens

Figure 34.4  François Ayroles, “Une traversée des comics,” OUBAPO, Oupus 2. L’Association, 2003, p. 85. An example of a “consecutive reinterpretation,” in which the author revisits the history of American comics by jump-cutting between images (here Winsor McCay, George Herriman, and Bud Fischer) built around a kind of UFO.

close to the one-to-one adaptation model. But in general, the OUBAPO authors do not adapt specific works but specific techniques such as palindromes, that is, comics one can read in two senses, upside-downs, comics one can turn by 180 degrees, all kinds of expansions and reductions, and so on. (OUBAPO) (see Figure 34.4). Although these creations do not qualify as literary adaptations in the narrow sense of the word, one would definitely misinterpret them by not reading them as transformations of literary models. A more classic example of genre adaptation is the Obscure Cities series by Benoît Peeters and François Schuiten, an attempt to build a new type of narrative that blurs the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, science fiction and historical narrative, encyclopedic (nonnarrative) and plot-driven fiction, as well as serialized fiction and one-shot graphic novels (for an introduction to this multimedia multiverse, see Schuiten and Peeters). Yet the interaction with literary models does not limit itself to the merging of generally incompatible genre constraints; it touches also upon issues of writing style in dialogues and captions, undeniably more literary than in most graphic novels, or questions of literary themes, figures, and techniques, often via cameo appearances of writers such as Jorge Luis Borges.

The Resistance to Literary Adaptations Are literary adaptations in comics and graphic-novel formats real literature, complementary to and competing with purely verbal texts? Or is this a false question and we should rather ask whether literary adaptations are real comics and graphic novels, not a kind of second-rate work ashamed of its own medium and affordances? The answers obviously depend on how one defines the basic notion of literature and the position one takes in the status debates that still accompany comics and graphic novels. If one foregrounds storytelling in the definition of literature, than the transmedial move from one

Literary Adaptations in Comics and Graphic Novels   623 medium to another should be not so big a problem. But if one highlights the play with words, then comics and graphic novels definitely start with a handicap. And if one refuses the old-fashioned debates on high culture (literature) versus low culture (­comics, graphic novels), many reflections on the status of literary adaptations will soon sound very hollow. Yet even if we accept taking the literary adaptation as a stand-alone product, there still is the intriguing observation that, except in recent years, literary adaptations remain quite rare in comics and graphic novels, contrary to what happens, for instance, in the film industry, where adaptations abound. The reasons for this lack of interest in literary adaptations are multiple. First, there is the fear that this kind of work disrupts the desired balance between text and image. The verbal element is said to become so dominant that the visual part of the artwork is in danger of being reduced to a mere and thus dispensable illustration. The strategies to counter this fear are twofold: on the one hand, one can note that literary adaptations tend to overcompensate the possible hegemony of the text and that they strive to reduce as much as possible the presence of the verbal elements (after all, one should not forget that, historically speaking, the modern-day predecessors of the graphic novel are the wordless woodcut novels of the 1920s; cf. Beronä); on the other hand, one observes as well that literary adaptations are not afraid of underlining the medium-specific affordances of the host medium, such as color and layout, at the expense of the traditional orientation toward action and narrative. A second problem has to do with the fact that many authors do not want to fall into fidelity debates that they do not consider relevant themselves but which they know will pop up when producing a literary adaptation. Third and finally, there is also the anxiety that a literary adaptation project will harm the authorial policy of the graphic novelist, who is expected to deliver a highly individual and immediately recognizable work, not a derivative of an already existing work. Fortunately, these obstacles do not prevent motivated and creative comics authors and graphic novelists from coming up with often extremely original solutions. An outstanding recent example is Dispossession, the adaptation of a typically Victorian 1879 novel by Anthony Trollope, John Caldigate, by British artist Simon Grennan (see Grennan and Grove). This work succeeds in striking the almost perfect balance between two apparently contradictory objectives: fidelity and reinterpretation. On the one hand, Grennan offers a faithful replication of both the story and the storyworld. In the less than one hundred pages of the graphic novel, he keeps the essential plot elements of the extremely long and hyperdetailed Trollope novel, and the visual reconstruction of setting, costumes, and, above all, gestures (the author is a specialist in nineteenth-century stage performance) is breathtaking, without ever being too heavy or purely ornamental (in comparison with a Merchant Ivory film production, Grennan’s adaptation is nearly minimalistic). The book is a superb example of medium-specific recreation. Its subtitle, A Novel of Few Words, can be read as a manifesto: Dispossession does not want to rival the original novel by including as much text as possible; its endeavor instead is to obtain analogous effects with purely visual means, exploiting, for instance, the rhythmic and

624   Jan Baetens narrative possibilities of the layout, a classic three-by-two grid with regular panels, to evoke the “evenness” of Trollope’s prose while at the same time promoting the page as a plot unit (each page is limited to a new step in the unpacking of the whole story), having moreover its own formal and rhythmic unity (the use of color as well as the place occupied by characters who are seen as if performing onstage, the bodily movements and gestures generating a waltzlike rhythm that belongs to the personal reinvention of the adapting artist). The page that describes the first meeting of the hero, John Caldigate, with his future wife, Hester Bolton, gives a good idea of Grennan’s way of adapting the Trollope text (Figure 34.5). He puts the reader in the position of Mr. and Mrs. Bolton and Robert Bolton (Hester’s bother), in that there are clearly things to see that these three characters do not see, and he has also made it easy for the reader to overlook them, even though they are clearly visible and unambiguous. In panel 4, there is a clear view of John and Hester looking directly at each other. We see the direction of the exchanged look over Hester’s shoulder. Her mother, father, and brother are unaware of this look. In panel 5, John holds Hester’s fingers. Again, Mr. and Mrs. Bolton and Robert are unaware. These rather subtle visualizations are completely clear, as well as being potentially easy to miss. This sense, on the reader’s part, of John’s deftness, impertinence, and slyness (he shouldn’t be looking or touching; he does it almost without the reader noticing) corresponds quite literally to the sense of the meeting in Trollope’s description, which goes as follows: On the next morning as he took his departure, Mr. Bolton said a word intended to be gracious. “I hope you may succeed in your enterprise, Mr. Caldigate.” “Why should I not as well as another?” said John, cheerily. “If you are steady, sober, industrious, self-denying and honest, you probably will,” replied the banker. “To promise all that would be to promise too much,” said John. “But I mean to make an effort.” Then at that moment he made one effort which was successful. For an instant he held Hester’s fingers within his hand. (18–19)

In short, it is not an exaggeration to argue that the status of the literary adaptation is not deprived of ambivalences. Yet the tensions that appear between word and image, story and storytelling, authentic and derivative, personal and anonymous, or high and low are very representative of the questions that current trends in comics and graphicnovel writing have been disclosing. In that sense, the question of the literary adaptation is a possible shortcut for the many challenges and opportunities the comics medium in general is facing today. And one of the most urgent issues is without doubt the very presence, traditionally rather tiny, today overwhelmingly strong, of adapting literary texts in comics or graphic-novel format, which all critics and readers may envisage in a more critical way than most publishers, which are currently overinvesting this strand in their production plans.

Literary Adaptations in Comics and Graphic Novels   625

Figure 34.5  Simon Grennan, Dispossession, Jonathan Cape, 2015, p. 18.

626   Jan Baetens

Note 1. In this chapter, I adopt a rather strict separation between comics and graphic novels, ­following the criteria presented in Baetens and Frey.

Works Cited Baetens, Jan. “Not Telling, but Retelling: From Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style to Matt Madden’s 99 Ways to Tell a Story and Back.” Drawn from the Classics, edited by Stephen E. Tabachnick and Esther Bendit Saltzman, McFarland, 2015, 235–248. Baetens, Jan, and Hugo Frey. The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. Cambridge UP, 2014. Barker, Martin, and Roger Sabin. The Lasting of the Mohicans: History of an American Myth. UP of Mississippi, 1996. Battaglia, Dino. Gargantua & Pantagruel. Mosquito, 2001. Bennett, Tamryn. “Comics Poetry: Beyond ‘Sequential Art.’ ” Image [&] Narrative, vol. 15, no. 2, 2014, pp. 106–123. Beronä, David. Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels. Abrams, 2008. Breccia, Alberto. Le cœur révélateur et autres histoires extraordinaires. Les Humanoïdes Associés, 1998. Cléder, Jean, and Laurent Jullier. Analyser une adaptation. Flammarion, 2017. Crumb, Robert. The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb. W. W. Norton, 2009. Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. 1985. W. W. Norton, 2008. Gardner, Jared. “Storylines.” Substance, vol. 40, no. 1, 2011, pp. 53–69. Grennan, Simon. Dispossession. Jonathan Cape, 2015. Grennan, Simon, and Laurence Grove, editors. Transforming Anthony Trollope: Dispossession, Victorianism and Nineteenth-Century Word and Image. Leuven UP, 2015. Heuet, Stéphane. À la recherche du temps perdu. Delcourt, 1998–2013. 6 vols. Heuet, Stéphane. Remembrance of Things Past. NBM, 2001–2007. 3 vols. Hutcheon, Linda, and Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge, 2013. Jeannelle, Jean-Louis. Cinémalraux: Essai sur l’œuvre d’André Malraux au cinéma. Hermann, 2015. Karasik, Paul, and David Mazzuchelli. City of Glass. Avon Books, 1994. Kick, Russ. The Graphic Canon. Seven Stories Press, 2012–2013. 3 vols. Kuper, Peter. The Metamorphosis. Crown, 2003. Madden, Matt. 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. Chamberlain, 2005. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. MIT Press, 2000. Marion, Philippe. Traces en cases. Académia, 1993. Mattotti, Lorenzo. Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. 2002. NBM, 2003. McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford UP, 1996. McHale, Brian. “Narrativity and Segmentivity, or Poetry in the Gutter.” Intermediality and Storytelling, edited by Marina Grishakova and Marie-Laure Ryan, De Gruyter, 2010, pp. 27–48. Murray, Simone. The Adaptation Industry. Routledge, 2012. OUBAPO. Oupus. L’Association, 1997–2015. 6 vols. Pizzino, Christopher. Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature. U of Texas P, 2016.

Literary Adaptations in Comics and Graphic Novels   627 Regalado, Antonio J. Bending Steel: Modernity and the American Superhero. UP of Mississippi, 2015. Ricardou, Jean. “Composition Discomposed.” Translated by E. Freiberg, Critical Inquiry, vol. 3, no. 1, 1976, pp. 79–91. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. For a New Novel. 1963. Translated by Richard Howard, Northwestern UP, 1989. Schuiten, François, and Benoît Peeters. Les Cités obscures. Casterman, 2017-2019. 4 vols. Simmonds, Posy. Gemma Bovery. Pantheon Books, 1999. Simmonds, Posy. Tamara Drewe. Jonathan Cape, 2007. Tabachnick, Stephen E., and Esther Bendit Saltzman, editors. Drawn from the Classics: Essays on Graphic Adaptations of Literary Works. McFarland, 2015. Tardi, Jacques. Fog over Tolbiac Bridge: A Nestor Burma Mystery. 1982. Fantagraphics, 2017. Töpffer, Rodophe. The Complete Comic Strips. Translated and edited by. David Kunzle. The University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Trollope, Anthony. John Caldigate. 1879. Oxford UP, 1993. Vaughn-James, Martin. La cage. 1975. Translated by Marc Avelot, Les Impressions Nouvelles, 1986. Ware, Chris. Building Stories. Pantheon, 2012. Wolk, David. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Da Capo Press, 2007.

pa rt V

C OM IC BO OK ST U DI E S Y E ST E R DAY, TODAY & TOMOR ROW

chapter 35

Comics St u die s i n A m er ica The Making of a Field of Scholarship? Ian Gordon

In 2018, it is possible to write about comics studies as a field and comics scholars as an academic undertaking with confidence. Comics studies comes replete with an array of journals and conferences and a global assortment of scholars from wide-ranging disciplinary backgrounds. But as recently as 2011, Greg M. Smith, a film studies professor, still felt the need to state that “comics are a distinctive form of cultural expression in their own right” and call for an end to a “comics and . . .” approach to their study (110–112). The certainty about comics studies constituting a field, then, may well be a recent and perhaps relative thing. Indeed, this study suggests that the field is more of a series of small backyards, separated by large, somewhat barren expanses. As spatial metaphors go, Australia comes to mind, with centers clinging to the edge at various removes from one another and separated by vast space between. In this chapter, I use the recent ­volume The Secret Origins of Comic Studies as a starting point to map some of the contours of comics studies. In their assessment of the field, Matthew Smith and Randy Duncan’s edited volume, The Secret Origins of Comic Studies, offered a variety of takes on its creation. In such a large collective undertaking, it is not always possible to establish a unifying narrative across and between some of the themes. Just as comics are not, as is so often proclaimed, a uniquely American art form, say, up there with jazz, but rather an international phenomenon with varying forms, so, too, is comics studies a diverse thing. The field as constructed in recent years is international in scope, with scholars of, say, American superheroes equally aware of theory from scholars in the Franco-Belgian tradition, although perhaps not as well read in such, as in runs of The Amazing Spider-Man (Miller and Beaty). Smith and Duncan’s book brings together a wide set of scholars from around the globe to discuss the matter and goes some of the way toward moving beyond a type of American scholarship, which, although cast in universal terms, remains resolutely

632   Ian Gordon national or English-language-based. In an article on the emergence of comic-art ­scholarship in Spain, Antonio Lázaro-Reboll, a University of Kent Hispanic studies ­academic, gently takes issue with such limitations in Comic Studies (8–29).

Methodology This chapter examines pre-2000 works on comics and their impact on present comics scholarship as constituted primarily in the United States. In part, this is to limit the study to something manageable, but also, the available methodology for a quick numerical survey of “impact,” Google Scholar, has an English-language bias and by sheer weight of numbers an American bias. Another reason for doing this is that I wanted to focus on a few recent works to discuss the impact, or lack thereof, of earlier works now claimed as part of comics studies’ heritage. As it happened, as I grappled with the focus for this piece, Charles Hatfield, the founding president of the Comic Studies Society (CSS) and the author of the foreword to Secret Origins, announced a graduate course in which he would use five comics studies books from the past decade. I am not holding Hatfield out as representative of comics studies, but he certainly has been at the center of many developments over the last twenty years, which, in addition to the CSS, include the International Comics Art Forum (ICAF) and the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) comics group. He is also the author of two books on different aspects of comics studies: Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (2005) and Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby (2011). I have therefore adopted those five books as ones through which I will examine the ways the authors encounter earlier studies. I am not claiming that the five books Hatfield uses are representative, but rather, I am using them as a random ­sample made all the more random by being chosen for a different undertaking from mine. The five books are Hilary Chute’s Graphic Women (2010), Scott Bukatman’s Hellboy’s World (2016), Christopher Pizzino’s Arresting Development (2016), Aaron Kashtan’s Between Pen and Pixel (2018), and Lara Saguisag’s Incorrigibles and Innocents (2018). I use them to determine which pre-2000 comics-studies-type authors, mostly as identified in The Secret Origins of Comic Studies, these scholars engage with. I then use the five works to see what comics scholarship their authors cited other than the p ­ re-2000 works. I compare these citation counts with the Google Scholar H-Index citation records for the two groups of comics scholarship to see how the key commonly cited works by the five authors in question compare to general citation rates. At the heart of this chapter is the issue of whether earlier work had an impact, beyond name checking, on the field of comics studies and whether since 2000, as the field has called itself by that name, it has more solidly coalesced around some shared works. The question of whether earlier work has been either overlooked or bypassed is somewhat more difficult to answer. I know from my own work that it is possible to read a work and have it influence you in some way, even if it is shaping your views in opposition, but not then use that piece in your own scholarship. On the other hand, neither Richard Samuel

Comics Studies in America   633 West’s majestic Satire on Stone: The Political Cartoons of Joseph Keppler (1988) nor John Canemaker’s works on Felix the Cat (1991) and Winsor McCay (1987) rate a mention in The Secret Origins. This absence probably says more about the relative lack of interest in editorial cartoons, the illustrated humor magazines, and, indeed, early comic strips as antecedents of American comic books and graphic narratives than the potential contribution their work made to the development of comics studies. Saguisag’s Incorrigibles and Innocents, the work of Alexander Beringer on comics from the 1850s to 1870s, and Christina Meyer’s work on The Yellow Kid suggest that a revival of interest in early comic strips might be afoot, but editorial cartoons still seem to languish in the dustbin of ­history for nonsequential work. If comic strips are simply out of favor, one wonders why Mike Benton’s comic-book histories from the late 1980s and early 1990s, which underpinned some early scholarship such as Bradford Wright’s, are not mentioned in The Secret Origins.

The Five Books and Pre-2000 Works on Comics From the index of The Secret Origins, I drew up a list of fifty-two mentioned authors whose works were published before 2000. To this list, I added Canemaker, West, and Will Brooker whose first Batman book appeared in 2000. I also added Marianne Hirsch’s 1992 journal article on Maus and postmemory, a study also strangely absent from The Secret Origins, unless one reads Hirsch as outside of comics scholarship even though her work on trauma and postmemory has shaped the understanding of a whole genre of graphic novels. Of all these figures, the only commonly cited author across all five books was Scott McCloud, primarily for his 1994 Understanding Comics but also for his follow-up in 2000, Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are ­ Revolutionizing an Art Form. In equal second place with two citations were familiar names such as Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, Umberto Eco, Robert Harvey, Hirsch, David Kunzle, Trina Robbins, Coulton Waugh, and Joseph Witek. Almost half of the names I gathered from the index had no mentions, and twelve authors had a ­mention in one of the five works. Chute listed twelve and Pizzino mentioned eleven of my list. Kashtan cited the fewest, with only four. Bukatman cited five and Saguisag nine. By contrast, in his 2005 Alternative Comics, Hatfield cited twenty-six of these fifty-five authors; in his 2011 Hand of Fire, thirteen; and in his foreword to Secret Origins, seventeen (and of course, that accounts for the presence of some of them on my list). The use of McCloud by all five authors suggests that the formal property of comics (the ways comics depict meaning using visual and textual devices) is a shared concern. But here there are variables. Saguisag uses McCloud to discuss the appeal of cartoony figures ­versus realistic representations. Kashtan cites McCloud’s Understanding Comics once but has a whole chapter taking apart McCloud’s argument in the 2000 Reinventing

634   Ian Gordon Comics. Bukatman cites McCloud to point to the limits in his linear model of reading comics with readers filling the gutter, the space between panels, with implied, or derived, meaning. Chute uses McCloud in a review of ways in which comics have been defined. Pizzino uses McCloud for the analytical vocabulary he offered that has since entered common parlance and as a touchstone for the legitimacy of comics. Chute includes Harvey in her overview of comics, and Saguisag employs him for several footnotes. Kunzle appears in Chute’s review and in Bukatman’s bibliography. Robbins flits into Chute’s book as a background character and is in Saguisag as a source of information on Nell Brinkley. Saguisag rightly chides Waugh’s inaccuracies, and Chute mentions him in passing. Although he is confined to her footnotes, Chute refers to Witek’s arguments to support her own take, and Pizzino marvels at Witek’s chutzpah in simply saying that comics warranted study without recourse to just why. Dorfman and Mattelart figure in Chute’s and Pizzino’s notes. Eco’s article “Myth of Superman,” long a hallmark granting respectability to comics studies, appears only twice: in Bukatman as a reference to the eternal present of superhero comics in the 1940s through the early 1960s and in Pizzino as a source to be checked for the way romance traditions existed in comics (Eco 14-22).1 Such a paucity of references to pre-2000 scholarship and writing on comics might suggest that Smith and Duncan chose their title well and that the origins of comics studies are indeed rather secret. On the other hand, some of this may simply be the result of the subject matter of the five authors Hatfield selected and the ways in which pre-2000 work has been supplanted by more recent scholarship. Such an occurrence would suggest a field that is developing.

The Five Books and Post-2000 Works on Comics Hatfield’s 2005 Alternative Comics is cited by all of the authors except Chute. If this seems a rather circular selection and citation loop, it is worth pointing out that there are 652 cites for that work, making it the sixth most cited book in comics studies, behind McCloud’s Understanding Comics’ more than 5,000 mentions, Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art (1985) with 1,131, Dorfman and Mattelart’s How to Read Donald Duck (1975) with some 850, Wright’s Comic Book Nation (2001) with 797, and Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics (2009) just slightly pipping Hatfield with 694 (but with another 394 for the original French edition). This statement, of course, presupposes that Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (1954), with 1,114 citations, does not count as comics scholarship. Of these figures, Hatfield is the only one engaged in American academic studies of comics, although that characterization might be a little too forced to distinguish him from Groensteen. In this analysis, I found Jared Gardner’s 2012 Projections and Groensteen’s System of Comics cited by Kashtan, Pizzino and Saguisag and by Bukatman, Kashtan, and

Comics Studies in America   635 Pizzino, respectively. Chute, then, cites none of the most commonly cited. Of the ­seventy-eight works cited in eighty-nine citations, she cites only nine and, of those, only cites three works cited by one of the other four: Bart Beaty’s 2007 Unpopular Culture: Transforming The European Comic Book in the 1990s, Rocco Versaci’s This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics As Literature, and Julia Watson’s 2008 article “Autobiographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home,” all of which Kashtan also cites. Both Pizzino and Kashtan cite Chute’s Graphic Women. Saguisag is also an outlier citing only nine of the works. Two reasons suggest themselves for this situation. First, Chute’s book is the oldest of the five, and as I write in 2018, it has likely been ten years since she completed her manuscript. Those ten years have seen a blossoming of comics scholarship. When Chute worked on her dissertation, parts of which she developed into Graphic Women, in the early 2000s, little scholarship from comics studies people existed on Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Phoebe Glockner, Lynda Barry, Marjane Satrapi, and Alison Bechdel, the subjects of her book. Likewise, Saguisag, whose book appeared in 2018, wrote on comic strips, not the most fashionable field in comics studies these days, and the number of her citations for pre2000 scholars is only one greater than the number of her post-2000 citations.2 It is hard to cite work that is not available to you. Bukatman cites fifteen recent works and Kashtan twenty-two. Pizzino cites thirty-four. These are all far larger numbers than they cite for pre-2000 work, which points to the growth of comics scholarship. Pizzino’s work is more general in nature than the others’, covering the issue of legitimacy in the study of comics. Bukatman’s is a shorter monograph focusing on one comics character, and Kashtan looks at the impact of dig­ital technologies on printed medium through a study of comics’ ability to adapt across media, a topic that has not yet garnered a great deal of work among comics scholars.

142  Works and Top “Twenties”: The Ins and Outs of Comics Scholarship To be sure, in the phrase Mark Twain made famous, there are three types of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics. So it is well to acknowledge that there are real limitations to this study in the selection of authors representative of the field of comics studies and in the group of recent works I have chosen. My aim is not to be scientific in the way positivists might understand that term but rather to offer some suggestive ways of thinking about the field and where it is today. In compiling a list of works about comics mentioned in The Secret Origins, I am drawing on the works mentioned by the forty-five contributors to that volume. When I add the works mentioned in the five books chosen by Hatfield for his course, I arrive at a total of 142 works. I checked Google Scholar for the H-Index count for each of these works. One had no citations recorded there. For some reason, the data for Roberta Pearson and William Urricho’s 1991 The Many Lives of Batman is

636   Ian Gordon somewhat distorted by reference to Matthew  P.  McAllister’s review of that book, so I have excluded it. From the 142 works, I then produced two tables. Table 35.1 is a list of the top nineteen works as cited by the five authors in question, those receiving from two to five citations. Table 35.2 shows the top twenty from my list of 142 works of those with the most citations according to Google Scholar. Ten of the nineteen works in Table 35.1 are also among the twenty works in Table 35.2. Table 35.1 has ten works published pre-2000 and nine post-2000. Of the top nineteen works, all but three are by holders of doctorates, and one of those three, Wertham, was a clinically trained psychiatrist. Waugh was primarily a comic-strip artist on Dickie Dare, and his 1947 book, The Comics, is mostly anecdotal in tone and has numerous errors of fact. He is on the list is because Chute mentions him in passing and Saguisag quotes him

Table 35.1  Top nineteen works as cited in five books (sorted by total, then by H-Index) Authora

Rank Year H-Index for cites of pub. Bukatman Chute Kashtan Pizzino Saguisag Total

McCloud

5,455

1

1993

1

Hatfield

652

7

2005

Groensteen 694

6

2007

Gardner

153

42

2012

Wertham

1,114

3

1954

1

1

2

Dorfman & Mattelart

854

4

1975

1

1

2

Nyberg

472

13

1998

Chute

377

17

2010

Eco

368

18

1972

1

Kunzle

349

19

1973

1

Witek

331

20

1989

1

Hirsch

262

26

1992

1

1

2

Versaci

259

27

2007

1

1

2

Gabilliet

180

37

2009

Beaty

153

43

2007

1

Waugh

144

46

1947

1

Kunzle

129

49

1990

1

Groensteen 127

50

2013

1

Watson

55

2008

a

106

1

1

1

1

5

1

1

1

1

4

1

1

1

1

1

1 1

3 1

1

2

1

2

1

2

1

2 1

1

2

1

2

1

2 1

1

2 2

1 1

3

1

Italics indicate author is in top twenty by H-Index citations (Table 35.2).

2 2

Comics Studies in America   637 Table 35.2  Top twenty works by H-Index citations Authora

H-Index

Bukatman

Chute

Kashtan

Pizzino

Saguisag

Total

McCloud 1993

5,455

1

1

1

1

1

5

Eisner 1985

1,331

Wertham 1954

1,114

Dorfman 1975

854

Wright 2001

797

Groensteen 2007

694

1

Hatfield 2005

652

1

McCloud 2000

583

Schodt 1983

554

0

Reynolds 1994

552

0

Schodt 1996

549

0

McCloud 2006

478

Nyberg 1998

472

Barker 1989

452

Duncan & Smith 2009

404

Sabin 1993

382

Chute 2010

377

Eco 1972

368

1

Kunzle 1973

349

1

Witek 1989

331

a

1

1

1

1

2

1

1

2

1

1

1

1

3

1

1

1

1

4 1

0 1

1

2 0

1 1

1 1

1

1

2

1

2

1 1

2 1

2

Italics indicate author is not in top nineteen cited in the five books.

on a view about the charm of comics while noting his many inaccuracies. McCloud was known primarily as the creator of the Zot! comic book from Eclipse Comics which ran from 1984 to 1991. The importance of McCloud’s work is demonstrated both by its being mentioned by all five authors examined here and by its having the highest citation count of any work on comics. McCloud sits at the center of American comics scholarship, because his was the first American work to lay out a comprehensive approach to understanding the formal properties of comics. A good many of his citations are from authors taking issue with his views. This state of affairs is further underpinned by McCloud’s having three of his books on the most-cited list. A concern with the way comics convey meaning runs through both lists, with McCloud and both of theorist Groensteen’s books in English being cited in the top nineteen in Table 35.1. In addition to McCloud’s three works, books by Eisner and Groensteen appear on the top twenty list of Table 35.2. Gardner’s Projections, which Kashtan, Pizzino, and Saguisag all cite, is a work also interested in the way comics convey meaning and the

638   Ian Gordon particular ways they tell stories. Gardner connects comics to the development of ­modernism and other modern narrative forms of storytelling. Gardner’s work is the only one on the two lists that directly takes up the development of the highly commercial American comic strip. Kunzle deals with the long-term development of comic strips in general, showing the many European antecedents that in America eventually blossomed into particular types of comics, American comic strips, and which in turn gave rise to particular types of comic books including the superhero comic books. Secret Origins might have dealt with this history better, although few comics scholars have had Gardner’s interest in comic strips in the last twenty years or so. As already mentioned, Saguisag’s, Beringer’s, and Meyer’s works raise the possibility of fresh interest in this area of comics scholarship. The theoretical work of Groensteen has transitioned into the American comics studies field, giving it some European underpinnings and exposure. But scholarship on manga and what it tells us in general about comics has not made such a broad transition, it seems. The work of Frederik Schodt, a pioneer in English-language work on manga, does not get mentioned in any of the five books I sampled. In some ways, this is an unfair charge, given the scope of the works in question, but if European theory has made the transition into American scholarship, why not work on the Japanese form of comics? In Secret Origins, Nicholas A. Theisen provides a very helpful overview of scholarship in the area, but such scholarship seems to have been siloed. The scope of Theisen’s piece, though, does not include the recent work of Casey Brienza on the ways manga has moved from Japan and has been domesticated to and in other comics traditions, and perhaps this work will open some doors to studies that find some useful methodology in such scholarship. Another figure absent from the five works but much cited elsewhere, is Richard Reynolds’s book on superheroes and mythology, first published in the United Kingdom in 1992. Again, none of the five books is directly engaged with the sort of superhero mythology that Reynolds wrote about. Reynolds, though, has been widely cited by scholars working on superheroes, and his work is seen enough as a central text so that it is included in the Charles Hatfield, Jeet Heer, and Kent Worcester edited anthology The Superhero Reader.3 My own contribution to Secret Origins discussed the work of Martin Barker, also not used in the five books under consideration here. Barker occupies a fair bit of space in Secret Origins, with a sidebar by William Proctor dedicated to his work, and he is also mentioned in the Robert  G.  Weiner ”Educating about Comics” chapter and in Ian Horton’s “Historians of the Art Form.” Three of these four authors are not Americans. It is to Smith and Duncan’s credit that they gave Barker such space, because although his work may have been foundational to comics studies in the United Kingdom, it does not seem to have been much read or used in the United States in recent years, although Hatfield did so in 2005, as did Jeffrey Brown in 2000 and McAllister, Sewell, and Gordon in 2001. Mostly, though, Barker is a scholar used by those interested in broader cultural studies and mostly not Americans. What this small study shows is that there are some key works in comics studies, but the field is not yet quite set. I have, for instance, included Hirsch’s 1992 article on Maus as

Comics Studies in America   639 a work of comics scholarship, something she and others may well refute. I haven’t included the work of W. J. T. Mitchell, whose Picture Theory is cited by three of the five authors I used to shape this study. One work is very focused on a comic, Maus, and the other is broader in focus. But I made a choice here and in doing so suggest a limit to the field of comics studies. Reading Hirsch, or at least one piece of her work, into comics studies and not Mitchell, is an interpretative act. Interpretative acts construct fields and canons. The Secret Origins of Comic Studies certainly reads a healthy group of scholars into the field. But the field is still taking shape. This chapter, then, started as a way of examining some of the ways the field might be coming together. Studying five works and setting those against 142 works on comics is a rather limited way to approach the subject, to be sure. On the other hand, authors common to my most-referenced and most-cited lists—Chute, Dorfman and Mattelart, Eco, Groensteen, Hatfield, Kunzle, McCloud, Nyberg, Wertham, and Witek—have all been important in shaping the field, as indeed have most of the authors on both lists. But the field could use more work that draws attention to scholarship that delineates the ins and outs of comics studies. In the absence of graduate programs in the field, those trying to grasp the breadth and depth of comics, both in America and internationally, could benefit from more work that discusses just what constitutes comics studies.

Notes 1. Eco’s work has been central to several comics scholars’ understanding of superheroes, including my own. For a critical account of such use, see Singer, “The Myth of Eco” and Breaking the Frames. 2. One of Saguisag’s major sources is my own Comic Strips and Consumer Culture (1998), which was not mentioned in Secret Origins, although it is pre-2000. 3. Having written a little myself on superheroes and myth, I might note that I have never used Reynolds’s work, because I thought it too rigidly structuralist compared to, say, Eco. Perhaps I was wrong.

Works Cited Barker, Martin. Comics: Ideology, Power, and the Critics. Manchester UP, 1989. Beaty, Bart. Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s. U of Toronto P, 2007. Benton, Mike. The Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History. Taylor, 1989. Benton, Mike. Superhero Comics: The Illustrated History. Taylor, 1989. Beringer, Alex. “Transatlantic Picture Stories: Experiments in the Antebellum American Comic Strip.” American Literature, vol. 87, no. 3, 2015, pp. 455–488. Brienza, Casey. Manga in America: Transnational Book Publishing and the Domestication of Japanese Comics. Bloomsbury, 2016. Brooker, Will. Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon. Continuum, 2000. Brown, Jeffrey A. Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans. UP of Mississippi, 2000. Bukatman, Scott. Hellboy's World: Comics and Monsters on the Margins. U of California P, 2016.

640   Ian Gordon Canemaker, John. Felix: The Twisted Tale of the World's Most Famous Cat. Pantheon, 1991. Canemaker, John. Winsor McCay : His Life and Art. Abbeville, 1987. Chute, Hillary. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. Columbia UP, 2010. Dorfman, Ariel, and Armand Mattelart. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. International General, 1975. Eco, Umberto. “The Myth of Superman.” Translated by Natalie Chilton, Diacritics, no. 2, 1972, pp. 14–22. Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Poorhouse Press, 1985. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books. UP of Mississippi, 2009. Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford UP, 2012. Gordon, Ian. Comic Strips and Consumer Culture. Smithsonian IP, 1998. Groensteen, Thierry. Comics and Narration. UP of Mississippi, 2013. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. UP of Mississippi, 2007. Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. UP of Mississippi, 2005. Hatfield, Charles. Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby. UP of Mississippi, 2011. Hatfield, Charles, Jeet Heer, and Kent Worcester eds. The Superhero Reader. UP of Mississippi, 2013. Hirsch, Marianne. “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory.” Discourse, vol. 15, no. 2, 1992, pp. 3–29. Kashtan, Aaron. Between Pen and Pixel: Comics, Materiality, and the Book of the Future. Ohio State UP, 2018. Kunzle, David. History of the Comic Strip: Vol. 1, The Early Comic Strip. U of California P, 1973. Kunzle, David. History of the Comic Strip: Vol. 2, The Nineteenth Century. U of California P, 1990. Lázaro-Reboll, Antonio. “Historicising the Emergence of Comics Art Scholarship in Spain, 1965–1975.” European Comic Art, vol. 11, no. 3, 2018, pp. 8–29. McAllister, Matthew  P., Edward  H.Sewell, and Ian Gordon, eds. Comics & Ideology. Peter Lang, 2001. McCloud, Scott. Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels. HarperCollins, 2006. McCloud, Scott. Reinventing Comics: The Evolution of an Art Form. Perennial, 2000. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. Harper Perennial, 1993. Meyer, Christina. “Urban America in the Newspaper Comic Strips of the Nineteenth Century: Introducing the Yellow Kid.” ImageText, vol. 6, no. 2, 2012. http://www.english.ufl.edu/ imagetext/archives/v6_2/meyer/?print. Accessed September 24, 2018. Miller, Ann, and Bart Beaty, editors. The French Comics Theory Reader. Leuven UP, 2014. Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. U of Chicago P, 1995. Nyberg, Amy. Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code. UP of Mississippi, 1998. Pearson, Roberta, and William Urricho. The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and his Media. Routledge, 1991. Pizzino, Christopher. Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature. U of Texas P, 2016. Reynolds, Richard. Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology. UP of Mississippi, 1994.

Comics Studies in America   641 Sabin, Roger. Adult Comics: An Introduction. Routledge, 1993. Saguisag, Lara. Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics. Rutgers UP, 2018. Schodt, Frederik L. Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga. Stone Bridge Press, 2011. Schodt, Frederik L. Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics. Kodansha International, 1998. Singer, Marc. Breaking the Frames: Populism and Prestige in Comics Studies. U of Texas P, 2019. Singer, Marc. “The Myth of Eco: Cultural Populism and Comics Studies.” Studies in Comics, vol. 4, no. 2, 2013, pp. 355–366. Smith, Greg  M. “It Ain’t Easy Studying Comics.” Cinema Journal, vol. 50 no. 3, 2011, pp. 110–112. Smith, Matthew, and Randy Duncan, eds. The Secret Origins of Comic Studies. Routledge, 2017. Versaci, Rocco. This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature. Bloomsbury, 2007. Watson, Julia. “Autobiographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Biography, vol. 31, no. 1, 2008, pp. 27–58. Waugh, Coulton. The Comics. 1947. UP of Mississippi, 1991. Wertham, Fredric. The Seduction of the Innocent. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1954. West, Richard Samuel. Satire on Stone: The Political Cartoons of Joseph Keppler. U Illinois P, 1988. Witek, Joseph. Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. UP of Mississippi, 1989. Wright, Bradford  J. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Johns Hopkins UP, 2003.

chapter 36

N ext Issu e Anticipation and Promise in Comics Studies Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith

One of the most fanciful plot-generating devices in William Moulton Marston and Henry G. Peter’s run on Wonder Woman was a mechanism called the “Magic Sphere.” Through it, Wonder Woman’s mother, Queen Hippolyta, could call up depictions of events in the past, present, or probable future. It was a kind of timeless television through which the island-bound Amazons could access the larger world of stories, such as the time when mother and daughter peered into the future one thousand years hence to ­witness Wonder Woman’s election as president of the United States (Marston and Peter; see Figure 36.1). Despite our best efforts, neither author of this chapter could gain access to the Magic Sphere or locate a technology similar to it in order to allow us to peer into the future of the academic field of comics studies. Like our Amazonian sisters, we might prefer to have the pageant of future progress play out before our eyes in a dynamic ­televisual play, but the best we can hope to do is point to patterns of which we have taken note and attempt to indicate directions we perceive them to be moving in. In this way, our chapter is more like a meteorologist’s weather forecast, attempting to combine our knowledge of past trends and present conditions to offer some prediction about the future. In 2017, we had the good fortune to work with a number of scholars across the field to publish The Secret Origins of Comics Studies, an anthology of essays tracing the educators, historians, theorists, and institutions that helped to shape comics studies as an interdisciplinary field (Smith and Duncan). That project served as a means of capturing the stories of the field’s growth and development before too much time passed and memories grew dimly into legend. What our contributors shared helps to inform how this field took shape. Combining that insight with our explorations into the topics ­currently being researched and debated has helped us to come to some tentative ­predictions about where the field may step next.

Anticipation and Promise in Comics Studies   643

Figure 36.1  Queen Hippolyta and Wonder Woman peer into the future using the Amazons’ “Magic Sphere,” as conceived by William Moulton Marston and Henry  G.  Peter in Wonder Woman #7, 1943.

We feel bold in asserting that the interdisciplinary endeavor of comics studies is only beginning to take shape and that the future for the field is full of promise and potential. We may not have access to a Magic Sphere to dazzle us with an entertaining display, but we can say without a doubt that comics studies has a future that will engage the intellectually curious for generations well beyond this one.

An Opening Caveat At the outset, we believe it is important to reiterate that the roots of comics studies as an academic field can be traced back to comics fandom (Duncan and Smith). Indeed, although a modest number of scholarly publications predated them, the upsurge in critical writings about comics took root in the fanzines of the 1960s and 1970s. Most of the first generations of comics scholars came from fandom, growing up reading and collecting monthly comic-book pamphlets, bande dessinée albums with recurring characters,

644   Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith or serialized stories in bande dessinée or manga magazines. Quite a few members of recent generations of comics scholars fell in love with the art form through the graphic novels they were assigned in their literature classes. How wonderful that this happens so often nowadays! Although there is now a perceptible distance between the work of fans and that of published academics, the field benefits from maintaining an orbit between the fan and scholarly communities. One need only attend an event such as Cartoon Crossroads Columbus to see productive discourse among creators, fans, and scholars. As comics studies are taken more seriously, there is a temptation to lose that kinship and perhaps adopt a posture of disdain for fanboys and fangirls of mainstream comic books. The lure is understandable: graduate training can be a heady experience as academics are schooled in theories that make for a kind of secret knowledge that separates us from the uninitiated multitude. Succumbing to this temptation to separate entirely would be a mistake. As the foremost self-identified “aca-fan,” Henry Jenkins has argued that the study of comics should remain “radically un-disciplined” and “inclusive in who it allows to participate” (6). Although academic training does provide additional insight, it does not guarantee exclusivity to insight. An ongoing dialogue with fans contributes to the potential vitality of the field. Such interactions help to check our assumptions. Fan blogs can provide important context from the wider community of comics readers, as can the old-fashioned conversations with fans at conventions and the local comics specialty shop. Maintaining the open channel enriches the potential insights the field might uncover and carry forward. Many of the trends we see being carried forward in the field are buoyed by fan support, as demonstrated in this chapter’s next section.

A Snapshot of What Is Being Studied In an explanation of their “What Were Comics” project, Bart Beaty, Benjamin Woo, and Nick Sousanis point out that the majority of comics that scholars most typically study are comics that are exceptional rather than common: To take but one obvious example, the Bonner Online-Bibliographie zur Comicforschung lists 243 scholarly contributions about Art Spiegelman’s widely ­celebrated autobiographical comic book Maus. On the other hand, there are only two on the more than seventy years of comic books published by Archie Comics, at one time the top-selling comic book publisher in the United States. While, of course, much can be learned from close readings of the “best” comics, these atypical works provide an unreliable basis for generalizing about the form in any meaningful way. Paradoxically, Maus is celebrated as an exceptional—which is to say, highly unusual—comic book but, without an understanding of the typical comic book, it is difficult to articulate the precise ways in which it deviated from the run of the mill products of this cultural industry. (Beaty et al. par. 4)

Anticipation and Promise in Comics Studies   645 Implicit in these scholars’ argument is a concern for the process of canonization. By the very operation of what we study—and what we teach—we engage in building a set of preferred works that become the defining works of the medium. A tally that we conducted of the Bonner Online-Bibliographie zur Comicforschung entries reveals that the modest amount of comics scholarship produced from 1970 through 2000 concentrated on Hergé (33 entries), Art Spiegelman (32 entries), René Goscinny (23 entries), Wilhelm Busch (14 entries), and Robert Crumb (13 entries). It is significant that the next five most-studied figures include three comic-strip creators— George Herriman, Charles Schulz, and Chester Gould. As Joseph Witek has pointed out, during the 1960s, editorial cartoons and single-panel magazine cartoons were at the top of the “cultural hierarchy of cartoon forms,” newspaper comic strips occupied a middle position, and comic books were at the bottom of the hierarchy, with graffiti. Yet in what Witek terms the “current academic hierarchy of cartoon forms,” graphic novels rank at the very top, with comic books not far below. The seldom-studied single-panel editorial and magazine cartoons barely make it onto the list. In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, there has been a proliferation of comics scholarship and the establishment of an entirely new canon, with hundreds of articles and book chapters written about Alan Moore and Art Spiegelman (Beaty et al.). However, as Beaty et al. point out, canonization is a distortion of the medium; it selects the exceptional and fails to represent the typical in any meaningful way. Canonization is a rather typical inclination in the academy; not only do literature programs engage in it, building various editions of the Norton Anthology of Literature in testimony to its lure, but so does almost every program in the humanities, from art ­history to speech communication. Given its age, the nascent canon in comics studies seems to be emerging from a variety of influences. Certainly, academics’ own fandom contributes to the selection process, including the genre preferences of many as well as the powerful draw of nostalgia. Lots of superhero fans (present company included) end up studying superhero comics. Another factor would be methodological training. Certain comics are more literary in nature and thus lend themselves to analysis with familiar techniques. Memoir comics harken to autobiographies and can be read through the same frames for literary analysis. Finally, ideology comes into play. Scholars can ­valorize content that supports one’s worldview—and consequently denigrate that which does not. The optimistic humor of Archie Comics might thus be left by the wayside of most scholarly analysis as more brooding and “serious” comics fall in line with academic expectations. (David B., creator of the somber Epileptic, is not from Riverdale!) We conducted a detailed scan of the contents of the previous few years’ worth of articles published in our field’s top peer-reviewed journals, including Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, and Studies in Comics, and certainly found further support for canonization. Creators such as Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Walt Kelly, and, of course Will Eisner were familiar, ­canonized names as likely to be studied in 2017 as they have been in most recent years. But we also noted the inclusion of topics that would have been difficult to categorize as canonical five years ago. Detailed studies into Luke Cage, Camelot 3000, and Dykes to

646   Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith Watch Out For suggest either a widening of the canon or a move beyond it. Frankly, this countertrend is not only a welcome development in terms of greater inclusivity, but it is also necessary for the field’s continued growth. At some point, comics studies would become stagnant if all we studied with any regularity was Tintin, Maus, Watchmen, and The Dark Knight Returns with a smattering of Understanding Comics thrown in on the side. The field grows stunted if all the scholarly energy is drawn into work about a handful of exceptional comics such as Persepolis, Fun Home, and March and the field fails to find other exceptional works or fails to explore the less exceptional—or common— works of the medium. We freely admit to loving and advocating for canonical works. We have each taught a stand-alone course on the works of Moore. What could do more service to canonization than that? That said, we recognize, as do others, that the future of the field is well served by a wider perspective on comics than just perpetuating the canonical works. Scholars new and old will—and should—expand the purview of their academic inquiry to works in both the mainstream and the independent press that are ignored by a limited canonical perspective on comics.

Emerging Areas of Study One prediction we feel confident in making even without access to the Magic Sphere is this: there is a lot more to study about comics than has already been written. What ­follows are some points of future interest in what we perceive to be this “undiscovered country.” They include potential growth areas such as the rediscovery of media-oriented inquiry, broadening the scope of scholarship on nonfiction comics, the examination of do-it-yourself (DIY) comics, the application of quantitative analysis, the inspiration of fan scholarship, and the appeal of practice-based research. First is a perspective that needs to be rediscovered. For centuries, the comics form has proven to be an effective way to convey information and tell stories. Whether the images appear on the page, on a screen, in a virtual-reality environment, or in an immersive ­hologram, the capacity for comics to communicate the human experience finds expression in all manner of media. In fact, some of the earliest English-language studies of ­comics were by communication and media studies scholars, including Kathleen J. Turner, Randall P. Harrison, and Martin J. Medhurst and Michael A. DeSousa. As comics studies began to flourish in the early twenty-first century, approaches that focused on content (close reading, critical theory) dominated, and studies of comics as a medium of communication were seldom seen. But understanding just how the comics form adapts to any given medium of communication is an area of considerable potential. Another area of emerging inquiry is the production of nonfiction comics, which has dramatically increased in recent decades. In some respects, the scholarship on nonfiction comics has kept pace. The most critically acclaimed, often taught, and thoroughly analyzed graphic novels are memoirs. The surge in comics being used to promote

Anticipation and Promise in Comics Studies   647 healthcare education has been both documented and facilitated by graphic medicine, a comics studies specialization that has its own conference and book series. However, other types of nonfiction comics have not received as much attention. Most of the scholarship on journalism comics has focused, understandably, on Joe Sacco, but a growing number of journalists are working in comics form. Didactic and advocacy comics have received almost no attention. Because comics can be an inexpensive yet engaging form of grass-roots communication, many advocacy comics are created by individuals with little or no previous comics experience. Since 1997, World Comics has been educating activists and nongovernmental organizations in developing nations about how to use comics to advocate for local social reforms. Most of these comics are never published; the original is posted on a wall or the side of a truck. Comix35 workshops in Africa and Asia teach Christians how to create and use comics as a tool for evangelism, and in the United States, they help inmates and ex-convicts tell religious-conversion stories in comics form. There has been some scholarship on how the lower barriers to creating and distributing webcomics has created a wave of digital DIY comics, but there has been very little work on the wide array of DIY comics on paper. There are currently hundreds (perhaps thousands) of people creating grass-roots comics and minicomics (so called because they are often small in size and always have a small print run). It is not surprising that these comics are seldom studied, because most of them have low visibility, being available only in certain locations, and some are ephemeral, existing only for particular events. Clearly, such forms are rich for potential investigation. Incidentally, comics studies has, until recently, been dominated by qualitative analysis. The opportunity to apply more empirical models has been largely untapped. The development of comic-book markup languages, such as the one developed by John A. Walsh, can be used to encode the textual and pictorial elements of a comic book. A team of researchers at Indiana University is building a huge digital archive of fan mail, fan clubs, fanzines, and so on, in order to document American comic-book readership and fandom (Walsh). Such digital humanities approaches can produce information visualizations seldom seen in comics studies journals. The recently ­published Empirical Approaches to Comics Research: Digital, Multimodal, and Cognitive Methods, edited by Alexander Dunst, Jochen Laubrock, and Janina Wildfeuer (Dunst et al.), displays the variety of approaches. Ideally, more researchers will follow the lead of these scholars. As Benjamin Woo has pointed out, what comic books “are and what they mean ­cannot be assumed—not even from the state of comic-book culture a few decades ago, for they are moving targets subject to reinterpretation and re-articulation over time” (196). There is some fan scholarship, primarily a body of work by Bill Schelly, that should not be overlooked, but academics can build on this work by delving into areas fans have seldom addressed, such as how changes in technology and distribution affected the development and evolution of organized fandom. Scholars assisting their institutional libraries have the opportunity to preserve case studies of comics readership and ­fandom. For example, Young Harris College received a donation of nearly ten thousand comic

648   Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith books from a man who had been collecting since the 1950s. University librarians have encouraged the donor to provide context for the collection. They have recorded interviews with the donor, and he has visited classes to talk about his reading choices and pleasures (Richardson and Frank). A virtually untouched aspect of reception studies is what people who do not read comics think about comics. In recent years, there has been increased interest in practice-based research, comics used as a means of presenting research findings or even as a method of conducting research. More than a quarter of a century ago, Scott McCloud demonstrated the ­usefulness of the comics form for exploring and explaining the comics form. While his groundbreaking Understanding Comics (published in 1993) has stimulated a great deal of discussion among comics scholars and is still frequently used to introduce students to comics form, it is not generally considered to be a work of scholarship. Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening (published in 2015) makes a more convincing case for the use of comics as a critical tool. A dissertation in comic-book form accepted by Columbia University and subsequently published by Harvard University Press, Unflattening ­certainly has the academic pedigree. The 152-page comic is followed by 19 pages of bibliography, evincing a theoretical grounding and methodological rigor considered to be lacking in McCloud’s work. In Unflattening, Sousanis both argues for and demonstrates the benefits of using ­comics for explication. Comics make abstract concepts more visceral and more manifest by making them visible. The comics form provides readers with multiple sources of information and multiple levels of cognitive processing, thus potentially producing a richer understanding of a concept. A text-only treatise imposes a linearity and logical progression that is always an imperfect, and often misleading, representation of realworld phenomena. Drawing can better represent spatial aspects and reveal associations and relationships that exist beyond the boundaries of formal logic. The act of creating a comic about a concept is metacognitive; you have to think about your own thinking, you have to bring your “unconscious cognitive processes to the surface” in order to strategize about how to draw your understanding of a concept (Latz et al. 460). Comics as a tool or method for analyzing the comics form would seem to be particularly constructive given that text alone is seldom an adequate tool for analyzing the formal aspects of comics. However, comics as a research method are also being embraced outside comics studies. In education, lesson plans are being operationalized as visual “lesson play” that anticipates the implementation of a lesson plan in an imagined classroom. Depict software allows the teacher to use the visual conventions of comics to ­create scenarios in an imagined classroom environment and thus role-play the interactions involved in teaching a specific mathematics lesson (Zazkis and Herbst). Eric Laurier of the Institute of Geography and the Lived Environment advocates geographers using the representational conventions of comics to create a graphic transcript of talks. Inspired by John Berger’s and Michael Taussig’s insights on drawing as a way of seeing, University of Toronto Press has instituted a new book series, “ethnoGRAPHIC: Ethnography in Graphic Form.” In a blog series leading up to the announcement of the book series, a variety of scholars acknowledged the power of comics as a means of

Anticipation and Promise in Comics Studies   649 c­ ommunicating research results, a pedagogical tool for teaching anthropology, and a methodology for doing anthropology, in that the process of drawing can lead one to see more fully and deeply than can the process of taking text notes. Sousanis was one of the scholars contributing to the ethnoGRAPHIC blog. As the field of comics studies reinforces its place in academia, it will be important for comics scholars to engage in outreach within their own disciplines or, as in the case of Sousanis, with other disciplines to facilitate the use of comics for pedagogy or research.

The Potential for Cross-Fertilization While all of the topics discussed here are rife with potential for study, they need not be considered in isolation. Comics studies is already a highly interdisciplinary field, and we see the potential for it to become even more productive through expanded collaborative initiatives. Perhaps it is partly due to the fact that monographs and single-author articles are given more weight in tenure and promotion decisions, but all too often, the academy has idealized the image of the solidary genius laboring away at discovery in romanticized isolation. Collaboration of any type is rare in our journals, and interdisciplinary collaboration is even more so. Where there are multiple authors, they are almost always from the same department. Even in edited collections, which might seem like collaborative works, most of the chapters are written by a single author. Some scholars might need the headspace of individual pursuits to reach clear conclusions about the topic at hand; for others, though, collaboration is the key. As the two of us have found, the dynamic interplay of multiple minds often reveals more to us in ­tandem than either of us could achieve separately. Comics studies is already poised to be a hotbed of collaborative activity. As currently composed, the comics studies community is interdisciplinary and should remain so. A quick review of the founding members of the Comics Studies Society, for example, shows not only representation from the traditional literary circles but also scholars from communication studies, languages, the arts, library science, gender studies, and psychology, among other academic disciplines (not to mention cartoonists, journalists, and other professionals). The field is prepped for collaboration by scholars from different disciplines. To that end, we foresee the possibility of even more research teams. An example of this kind of team-based approach is already emergent in the Comic Cons Research Project helmed by Benjamin Woo, Bart Beaty, Miranda Campbell, and Brian Johnson (see Woo et al.). This initiative is undertaking “a series of research activities on the place of comic cons, comic art festivals, and related fandom events in North America” over an initially planned three-year period in order “to understand convention organizing as a social, cultural, and industrial practice.” Not every collaboration needs to target big data as this one does; more modest ­projects are welcome. We foresee the opportunities for interdisciplinary teams being particularly fruitful, such as comics scholars with a background in rhetoric teaming

650   Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith with philosophers to apply analytic logic to the visual/verbal arguments in persuasive comics. We also appreciate the value of transborder teams, as called for by Pascal Lefèvre. As he explains, “scholars who do not publish in English will largely remain under the radar of the English speaking academics, because they usually don’t make the effort to learn other languages or take into consideration non-English sources” (281). Transborder teams can bring the best of two (or more) traditions to bear on a project and bring ­complementary insight to comics-related phenomena. The proliferation of conferences and festivals should accelerate the making of these connections, as attendees have greater opportunities to meet one another.

The Need for Institutional Infiltration Along with collaboration within the field, we should also consider integration of the field within academic institutions. Indeed, the trajectory of comics studies points it toward greater degrees of institutionalization. This is most evident in the founding of learned societies such as the German Society for the Study of Comics (founded in 2006), the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics (founded in 2010), and the Comics Studies Society (founded in 2014). As important as such independent organizations are to the identity of the field—and they are essential—of considerable importance are the ways in which comics scholars inculcate themselves into the existing structures of even larger, more prestigious institutions. For instance, in 2009, the Modern Language Association initiated a “Discussion Group on Comics and Graphic Narratives,” and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies added a “Comics Studies Scholarly Interest Group” in 2011. The presence of comics studies in such forums allows the field to be discovered by those with an interest in but no prior knowledge of the academic study of comics. The other institutional change taking place in comics studies is the founding of major and minor programs of study. Quite frankly, while we might all hope for more major programs to take root in universities, it is far more likely that more minors will spring up first. Some of these will prove successful and mature into majors, most will not, and ­several will wither away after their chief architects and advocates move on or retire. Indeed, given their relative newness, all of these programs are somewhat vulnerable, and a change in administration could jeopardize any of them as a new dean or provost casts a skeptical eye toward them. Jeremy Larance of West Liberty University points out that his institution’s track in “Graphic Narrative” has undergone several revisions—and is likely to face more—as shifts in personnel and programmatic participation in the interdisciplinary program continue to challenge the original vision for a major. Such programs cannot afford to be passive once they are established and must adopt a high profile on their campuses in order to appear every bit as vibrant and intellectually engaging as we know they can be. To that end, we endorse such programs providing

Anticipation and Promise in Comics Studies   651 s­ ervices to multiple programs on their campuses. For instance, a “Women in Comics” lecture could serve the gender studies program. Likewise, faculty can secure one or more comics studies courses as a general education. Matt Smith once linked his introductory comics course to an institution’s requirement for a course in “Fine, Performing, and Literary Arts” alongside art history and music appreciation, among other qualifying courses. Needless to say, it filled up every semester it was offered. Faculty members in such minors can help perpetuate their programs by getting themselves on search committees where they can have a voice in hiring comics-friendly faculty and possible successors. It is not enough to wait for administration to offer a well-tailored new faculty line for comics studies; better to be on the search committee for a literature, art, or media studies position and advocate for new colleagues who hold an interest in comics studies. Faculty members in these programs can also increase their relative value through engagement with their communities. For example, Ben Saunders, who heads the comics studies minor at the University of Oregon, not only attends middle school “comic cons,” but he also curated “Marvel: Universe of Super Heroes,” a multimillion-dollar museum exhibit that has been seen by hundreds of thousands of people. Susan Kirtley, who oversees the comics studies certificate program at Portland State University, not only ­conducts comics pedagogy workshops for K–12 teachers in her area but was, along with Peter Carlson and Antero Garcia, at the forefront of an outreach to teachers that led to the creation of the Comic Conference for Educators and Librarians offered at San Diego Public Library during Comic-Con International. Such outreach not only benefits the cause of comics education, but it also demonstrates the value of programs beyond the campus, something administrators love to tout. Not only have academic conferences devoted to comics studies proliferated, but, at the urging of comics scholars, a number of fan conventions have made room for an ­academic track or more. The aca-track at Atlanta’s Dragon Con grew into the “Comics and Popular Arts Conference,” and Denver Comic-Con supports both a “Pop Culture Classroom” track for K–12 teachers and a “LitCon” track of mostly college professors providing critical analysis of comics and associated popular culture. Perhaps an even better indication of the vitality of comics studies is that in addition to multiple broad-spectrum conferences, comics scholars have begun to create specialized conventions and conferences. In 2015, Frederick Aldama, John Jennings and Ricardo Padilla founded “Sõl-Con: The Brown and Black Comix Expo” to celebrate the work of current black and Latinx creators and to help youth of color develop the skills to express themselves through comics. The con brings together creative and analytic perspectives, because organizers and participants such as Jennings, Aldama, Damian Duffy, and Stanford Carpenter operate at the nexus of comics scholarship, creation, and publishing. While writing his dissertation on medical narrative in comics, physician and ­comics creator Ian Williams discovered a number of other people in healthcare fields who were making use of comics. This group organized a “Graphic Medicine Conference” in 2010, and it has been gaining momentum ever since. Penn State University has initiated a

652   Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith “Graphic Medicine” series of monographs, edited collections of essays, as well as o ­ riginal comics. We foresee more such focused initiatives in years to come. The other key ally, institutionally speaking, is the library. From Randy Scott at Michigan to Lucy Shelton Caswell at Ohio State, some of the earliest advocates for ­comics in universities were librarians. Today institutions from Columbia University to the Library of Congress have dignified comics by making room for them in their collections. Libraries have been increasingly aggressive in going after the papers of some of comics’ legendary creators and building special collections in their honor. Even so, there are many creators and varieties of comics that are not being preserved or studied. That creates an opening for an enterprising program to seize upon. There are also niches that can be filled by specialized collections. For example, the University of Nebraska’s “Government Comics Collection” is a digital archive of nonfiction comics published by government agencies. More and more centers for comics studies could take root within this milieu. Particular creators and specific genres, not to mention publishers or aspects of fandom, could become the focus of such centers, inspiring the kind of collaborative research we have suggested. Similar centers could encourage faculty collaborations, including those across disciplines, across institutions, and across international borders. They could also aid in securing funding for research projects, as well as initiating and overseeing the ­dissemination of findings in concluded projects. In integrating more fully into institutions, comics studies needs to become conversant in the vernacular of the academy, most notably the language of assessment. Comics scholars working in K–12 are required to create lesson plans that clearly state how the learning objectives relate to both the federal standards of the moment (e.g., Common Core) and particular school-district curriculum maps. They are also very aware that the actual learning outcomes based on those objectives will have to be measured. Comics scholars at the college level are less steeped in assessment ­processes, even though this is the level at which actual comics studies programs are coming into existence. Most comics studies minors are interdisciplinary, but they tend to be in some way tethered to the home department of the professor who was the driving force behind creating the minor. Each of these departments has an assessment plan in place, but that plan might not easily accommodate the assessment of comics courses. And even though minors sometimes get to fly beneath the assessment radar, at some point, the comics scholars directing these programs will be required to define and evaluate the studentlearning outcomes for a comics studies curriculum. No doubt, this is already occurring at some institutions. Perhaps one of our learned societies could take a lead role in doing some of the assessment work (suggesting appropriate student-learning outcomes and crafting assessment instruments to measure those outcomes) that would be useful for new programs starting from scratch and existing programs wanting to improve what they have already created. Also, a credible assessment plan from a learned society could be a useful tool for comics scholars who want to sell colleagues, chairs, and deans on the idea of a comics studies program.

Anticipation and Promise in Comics Studies   653

Toward a Cause As we have demonstrated, the varied trajectories—and opportunities—ahead for ­comics studies are numerous and exciting. Clearly, the work being done in institution building (e.g., degrees, journals, learned societies, etc.) promises to enrich our scholarly foundation substantially. But in our enthusiasm to follow in the footsteps of forebears such as film studies, we should not surrender anytime soon the defining characteristics that make us a movement rather than a discipline. To that end, we hope that comics scholars retain a bit of a zealotry about their cause. That is, we must continue to ­challenge, and hopefully change, stereotypes about the comics art form. We must ­continue to proselytize, with energy and passion, about the value of studying comics. With surprising regularity, we encounter those doing research on or with comics who know nothing of our journals or the Comics Studies Society. We must reach out to ­provide resources and introduce them to the movement. For years, Randy Duncan has been giving a “Comics Scholars Starter Kit” for neophyte comics researchers, including those who have no idea that one can be a comics scholar. Consider further the opportunity to proselytize the value of comics to the wider ­public. Graphic novels (and comic-book collections called graphic novels) have become incredibly popular at public libraries, and thus, libraries are very receptive to comicsrelated programs. The Cleveland Public Library provides a good example of what can

Figure 36.2  The “next issue” box at the end of Superman #236 (1971) beckons readers to ­purchase the subsequent monthly installment of the hero’s ongoing saga. Panels by writer Denny O’Neil and artists Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson.

654   Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith happen if comics scholars make themselves available. As scholar-in-residence at the library, Valentino Zullo hosted a graphic-novel book discussion series. The library also instituted a speakers’ series featuring Ohio-based scholars such as Tammy Clewell and Charles Coletta. Such programs can create wider exposure and acceptance for the idea of studying comics. While those of us with a long association with comics studies should justifiably pause and celebrate the arrival of volumes (such as this one) that showcase the breadth of work already accomplished by those in the field, our work is hardly done. Indeed, it has only just begun! Not only does the field itself demand more investigation, but our advocacy for the field is a necessary corollary of its continued success. We look forward to the “next issue” of comics studies. “Next issue” boxes are nothing more than a marketing technique, meant to lure readers back to the newsstands or ­comics shops for the next monthly installment of their favorite comic-book magazines (see Figure 36.2). However, their symbolic meaning, that the saga goes forward—and that readers are invited to take part in that progression—is emblematic of the field. Please consider this chapter a rather protracted “next issue” summons to comics studies scholars. We beckon you to accept the invitation to join us in the next exciting step of the field . . . and the one after that . . . and so on.

Works Cited Beaty, Bart, et al. What Were Comics. http://www.whatwerecomics.com/about. Berger, John. The Sense of Sight. Pantheon, 1985. Duncan, Randy, and Matthew  J.  Smith. “From an Informed Fan Culture to an Academic Field.” Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel, edited by Jan Baetens et al., Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 370–385. Dunst, Alexander, et al., editors. Empirical Approaches to Comics Research: Digital, Multimodal, and Cognitive Methods. Routledge, 2018. Harrison, Randall P. The Cartoon: Communication to the Quick. Sage Publications, 1981. Jenkins, Henry. “Introduction: Should We Discipline the Reading of Comics?” Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, edited by Matthew  J.  Smith and Randy Duncan, Routledge, 2012, pp. 1–14. Latz, Amanda O., et al. “Review of Unflattening, by Nick Sousanis.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, vol. 7, no. 4, 2016, pp. 459–461. Larance, Jeremy. Personal interview. 26 June 2018. Laurier, Eric. “The Graphic Transcript: Poaching Comic Book Grammar for Inscribing the Visual, Spatial and Temporal Aspects of Action.” Geography Compass, vol. 8, no. 4, 2014, pp. 235–248. Lefèvre, Pascal. “A Pioneer’s Perspective.” The Secret Origins of Comics Studies, edited by Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan, Routledge, 2017, pp. 281–283. Marston, Charles Moulton, and H.  G.  Peter. “America’s Wonder Women of Tomorrow!” Wonder Woman #7, 1943. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Tundra, 1993. Medhurst, Martin  J., and Michael  A.  DeSousa. “Political Cartoons as Rhetorical Form: A  Taxonomy of Graphic Discourse.” Communication Monographs, vol. 48, no. 3, 1981, pp. 197–236.

Anticipation and Promise in Comics Studies   655 Richardson, Chris J., and Kathryn M. Frank. “On the Value of a Comics Archive at a Small Liberal Arts College.” 1st Annual Conference of the Comics Studies Society, 9–11 Aug. 2018, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Smith, Matthew J., and Randy Duncan, editors. The Secret Origins of Comics Studies. Routledge, 2017. Sousanis, Nick. Unflattening. Harvard UP, 2015. Taussig, Michael. “What Do Drawings Want?” Culture, Theory and Critique, vol. 50, no. 2, 2009, pp. 263–274. Turner, Kathleen J. “Comic Strips: A Rhetorical Perspective.” Central States Speech Journal, vol. 28, no. 1, 1977, pp. 24–35. Walsh, John A. “Katy, Millie, Misty, and Me: Participatory Culture in Teen Fashion and Humor Comics.” 1st Annual Conference of the Comics Studies Society, 9–11 Aug. 2018, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Witek, Joseph. “Recovering a Usable Past: Materiality and Comics History.” 1st Annual Conference of the Comics Studies Society, 9–11 Aug. 2018, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Woo, Benjamin. “Understanding Understandings of Comics: Reading and Collecting as Media-Oriented Practices.” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, 2012, pp. 180–199. Woo, Benjamin, et al. The Comic Cons Research Project. http://comicconsproject.org. Zazkis, Rina, and Patricio Herbst, editors. Scripting Approaches in Mathematics Education: Mathematical Dialogues in Research and Practice. Springer, 2017.

chapter 37

Comics St u die s as I n ter discipli n e Dale Jacobs

In “Comics Studies, the Anti-Discipline,” Charles Hatfield writes, “Comics Studies forcefully reminds us that the disciplines cannot be discrete and self-contained; in effect, our field defies or at least seriously questions the compartmentalization of knowledge that occurs within academia” (xix). Meanwhile, in their introduction to “Roundtable: Comics and Methodology,” which appeared in the inaugural issue of Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, Blair Davis and Benjamin Woo write that “comics scholars come from departments of literary studies, film and media studies, history, and so on, bringing with them different research traditions and assumptions,” adding that “choices about methodology speak very directly to our identities, both as individual researchers with particular backgrounds and interests and, collectively, as a community of scholars” (Davis et al. 57, 58). As I think about the work being done in comics studies and about the current state of the field, I see the validity in both of these statements, but at first glance, it is difficult to see their compatibility. How can we productively reconcile these two ideas about comics studies? After all, with a few recent exceptions, scholars in the field were not trained in comics studies but rather in the many discrete disciplines that Blair and Woo begin to name. As comics studies becomes increasingly established, however, with an increasing number of dedicated journals, conferences, associations, and series at academic presses, it seems to me that we need to revisit Hatfield’s question regarding how we can work within the field to “[question] the compartmentalization of knowledge that occurs within academia” (xix). How, in other words, can we move from being a collection of scholars from ­disparate backgrounds and attendant methodologies who all happen to study comics to being an interdiscipline that productively draws on our varied methodologies? Working against compartmentalization of knowledge cannot happen if comics scholars remain rooted only in our home disciplines without accessing the ways of knowing seen across our widely divergent field.

Comics Studies as Interdiscipline   657 The question, then, is how we can productively draw on the constituent fields that constitute comics studies—including, but not limited to, art history, cartooning, librarianship, cultural studies, political science, linguistics, literacy studies, rhetoric, communications, composition, English education, and media studies. How can the field integrate the kinds of methodologies seen in Empirical Comics Research: Digital, Multimodal, and Cognitive Methods, a recent collection edited by Alexander Dunst, Jachen Laubrock, and Janina Wildfeuer? How can comics studies move beyond the dominance of approaches taken from the study of literature? As an interdisciplinary field, we need to not only acknowledge these disparate disciplinary approaches but also attempt to capitalize on their various strengths. The reality is that movement toward real interdisciplinarity can only happen through sustained, reflective, and collective effort. This chapter is a call for comics studies to become a fully interdisciplinary endeavor— an interdiscipline rather than an anti-discipline—and for that move toward interdisciplinarity to occur through reflective practice. In what follows, I propose that one way this move might be accomplished is by incorporating methodologies and ways of thinking from the fields of book history and media studies into comics studies. Both book history and media studies demand that in our work, we always keep in mind the ­commercial publishing contexts of comics, while additionally providing examples of hybrid methodologies that work toward interdisciplinarity in their own right. I will approach these questions of interdisciplinarity and methodology through ­discussions of my ongoing “1976 Project,” where these questions have been central to my thinking for the past two years. At the core of this project is the idea of examining a year of traditional output of the American comic book industry; for the 1976 Project, I have read all the commercially produced comics from 1976 that were available on the newsstands. Working on this project has shown me the necessity of using multiple methodologies to think through this extensive set of diverse texts, and undertaking this project has led me to reflect on a number of questions normally not within the scope of comics studies. What is the value in examining a year in traditional output of the American comic book industry? What can be discovered by undertaking such a project? What methodologies might be most useful or necessary in this kind of undertaking? How does a focus on one year of American comic book production intersect with ways of thinking from a variety of disciplines? How can such work help me to think about in­ter­ dis­ci­pli­nary research in comics studies? This project has meant being self-reflective about methodology and about what it means to do interdisciplinary research in comics studies, a thought process that has led me to investigate and embrace the questions raised by and the methodologies used by book history and media studies. This kind of self-reflection regarding methods is necessary in order for the field of comics studies to continue to develop as an interdiscipline. In this chapter, I detail how book history and media studies might contribute to comics studies and then use this integrated approach to briefly address the questions raised by and methodologies needed to examine seven comic books from August 1976. Before discussing this model, it will be useful to briefly address where the field is now.

658   Dale Jacobs

Comics Studies: The State of the Field Within comics studies, it is clear that literature scholars have been at the forefront, both in the early years of comics studies and as the field has developed and grown. The approaches that developed as a result focused primarily on comics as literary texts to be read from a range of theoretical/critical standpoints but almost always using a methodology of close reading. This view of the development of comics studies is best summarized by Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo in The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books, in which they argue that literature scholars (mainly in English but also from other departments of language and literature) “have contributed immensely to the development of comics studies, but the pull toward the problematics and methods of a single discipline has had significant repercussions on the development of this putatively interdisciplinary research area” and that their influence “has profoundly shaped the way that comics are understood” (28, 29). The predominance of the methodologies of literary study, focusing on close reading, language, narrative, and literary devices, has led not only to an emphasis on narrative but also to an inordinate attention to the question of which texts are worthy of study, a trend also pointed out by Aaron Kashtan in his recent book, Between Pen and Pixel: Comics, Materiality, and the Book of the Future. In his introduction, Kashtan writes, “In North America, the academic field of comics studies has coalesced around a very small canon of texts—essentially, Maus, Persepolis, and Fun Home . . . plus works by a few other ­artists, such as Lynda Barry, Chester Brown, Chris Ware, and Joe Sacco” (12). He goes on to explain that scholarly work on autobiography, journalism, and history has come to dominate comics studies because “Texts like Maus, Persepolis, and Fun Home are easy for literary scholars to appreciate, and the issues they address are already central topics in literary studies” (13). These are, moreover, texts that lend themselves well to methodologies that center on close reading. With literature as the home discipline of the majority of scholars in comics studies, questions of canonicity have remained at the forefront as scholars have posited comics studies as an extension of literary studies. Such work positions comics studies within the respectability and legitimacy of literary studies in the context of universities that remain strongly disciplinary in structure. Such attention to which comics are worthy of study can be clearly seen in Hillary Chute’s Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere. Chute’s book was one of the most high-profile releases in comics studies in 2017, aimed as much at a general public as it was at other comics scholars. In answering her titular question, Chute makes an argument for the valuation of a particular kind of comic based around the figure of the auteur, with such auteur comics defined as “a high literary form created by a single ­artist,” a formulation that is, of course, consistent with approaches derived from literary studies (75). For Chute, the apotheosis of auteur comics occurred with the underground movement. She writes, “The comics produced in the underground, which were created with the complete artistic and intellectual freedom to represent an artist’s personal

Comics Studies as Interdiscipline   659 vision, established the field of comics for adults” (20). Throughout the book, Chute expands on her argument that auteur comics represent the most fully developed comics for adults as she ranges across comics that focus on many subjects, including war, disaster, sex, cities, suburbs, and so on, making specific arguments for which comics merit serious consideration. In the section titled “Why Illness and Disability?” for example, Chute connects Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary to Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half, calling both “crucial works in the comics canon” (240). While I admire Chute’s wide-ranging and careful work which focuses productively on both word and image, in its concern with canon formation, Why Comics? is clearly a text that seeks to legitimize comics (and comics studies) by drawing on the discipline of literature rather than the interdiscipline of comics studies. Beaty and Woo argue that from the beginning, the idea of canon formation has been central to comics studies, writing, “Despite the form’s dubious and marginal origins, notions of quality, greatness and exemplarity have become so entrenched in the stand­ ard operating procedure of comics scholarship that they—and the biases they introduce—disappear into the background” (15–16). Of course, such a focus on “greatness and exemplarity,” foundational ideas in literary study, makes sense as the field develops, with scholars trying to make both explicit and implicit arguments to colleagues, university administrators, and the general public about the value of comics. That is, the process of building a canon is not only a practice that derives from concerns in literature departments but is also about attempting to legitimize the field of comics studies. If we are to move toward real interdisciplinarity, however, it is time to move beyond such overriding concerns with promoting specific texts as part of a “comics canon” and to move toward a greater degree of self-reflection within comics studies about our methodological approaches. In other words, we need to not only move beyond the continuing effort to create a “comics canon” but also stop assuming that literature departments are only concerned with the kind of literary aesthetic that values texts such as Maus, Persepolis, Fun Home, and Jimmy Corrigan, as Beaty and Woo do in The Greatest Comic Book of All Time. Instead, we need to productively and reflectively draw on literature’s concern with texts, narrative, and the canonization process in conjunction with in­ter­dis­ ci­pli­nary endeavors such as book history and media studies and methodologies of the home disciplines of other scholars within comics studies.

Comics Studies and Self-Reflection In thinking of how we might push comics studies beyond a limiting preoccupation with canon formation and toward a focus on interdisciplinary methods, let me quickly examine the ways in which the practice of self-reflection has altered my own stance toward research in comics studies. In my 2013 book, Graphic Encounters: Comics and the Sponsorship of Multimodal Literacy, I wrote that comics are “media that use a combination of sequential art and text in order to create narrative meaning for the audience. This

660   Dale Jacobs combination of words and images—multimodality—works to create meaning in very particular and distinctive ways; in a multimodal text, meaning is created through words, visuals, and the combination of the two in order to achieve effects and meanings that would not be possible in either a strictly alphabetic or strictly visual text” (Jacobs, Graphic Encounters 5). While I also focused on form and on comics as a medium (or, to be more exact, multiple forms of media, including comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels), my disciplinary biases as someone trained in composition and rhetoric and housed in an English department dominated by literature scholars are also apparent; my definition of comics both supported my methodological choices and reflected my location within the university. I focused on narrative both because it figures prominently in my departmental context and because I found it a productive avenue of inquiry. In addition, I looked to the concept of multimodality because of my own background in composition and literacy studies and the place multimodal composing had come to occupy in these related fields over the last twenty years. This attention to multimodality led to me to concentrate on formal considerations and the ways in which comics could be seen as a medium of communication and individual comics as sites of literacy. In contending that comics are a medium, however, I was only using that idea insofar as it supported my thinking at the time about questions of multimodal literacy.1 While, in retrospect, I can see close connections to the concept of media literacy—what the National Association for Media Literacy Education calls “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using all forms of communication” (“Media Literacy Defined”)— this definition was, in Hatfield’s terms, tactical and did not productively address the full implications of thinking about mediality or the questions that media studies might introduce to my thinking about comics. My work did not address the question, as Benjamin Woo asks in the first of his ongoing columns for Flow: A Critical Forum on Media and Culture, “What would it mean to consider comics as media, and what might we gain by drawing comics studies and media studies into closer alignment?” (par. 4). I also realize now that in examining how comics use particular multimodal affordances, my work had much in common with that part of media studies that has come to be known as transmedial narratology, described by Jared Gardner and David Herman as “a framework for studying narrative across media” that focuses on “how the constraints and affordances associated with particular media may affect the design and interpretation of narratives” (5). Methodological approaches such as transmedial narratology ask us to examine how comics work as comics but should also ask us to go beyond formal considerations and pursue other aspects of media studies as well. These other aspects of media studies would, as several scholars have argued, push comics studies to more seriously consider the publishing and reception of texts. Attending to media studies means “accounting for seriality, circulation, and the fact that most comics are not remarkable or even that good” and that such an accounting points toward “a different mode of reading and a different method for apprehending comics as eighty years of output from a cultural industry” (Woo par. 7). In a similar vein, Daniel Stein writes in “Superhero Comics and the Authorizing Function of the Comic Book Paratexts,” “While the past

Comics Studies as Interdiscipline   661 few decades have seen an astonishing boom in comics theory and criticism, questions concerning the serial creation, publication, and reception of comics have rarely been at the center of analysis” (155). These kinds of approaches, especially in conjunction with book history, complicate our thinking about narrative, publishing, and culture in relation to comics.

Book History: Comic Books as Texts, Objects, and Sites of Transaction Book history treats books—as well as periodicals—as texts, material objects, and sites of commercial and cultural transactions and does so without regard to the perceived “value” of the text within a specific canon. Both approaches push us to acknowledge and contextualize the ways in which comics exist within the transactional sphere of ­commerce. Leslie Howsam offers a useful overview of the central ideas: literary scholars look at a book [or periodical] primarily in terms of text, while ­bibliographers are focused mostly upon the material object. Those two sides of the biblio-coin cannot, of course, be separated; but one can face up while the other remains down. Historians, while conscious of text and object, tend to see the book more in terms of a transaction: the biblio-coin is used for exchange. The transaction occurs in a communicative relationship between and among individuals, groups and generations of human beings—readers, writers, editors, printers and so forth. The transaction is both commercial and cultural. (18–19)

While a particular methodology will come to the fore at certain times, scholars who engage in truly interdisciplinary book history work need to balance all of these ways of knowing rather than defaulting to their own home discipline and their attendant biases. How might work in comics studies be enriched by this kind of interdisciplinary thinking? Let me return to Why Comics? as a way to briefly explore this question. In the book’s coda, Chute writes, “Comics is a form that has always existed at the boundary of art and commerce,” nicely summarizing this idea, which is central to both book history and media studies (399). The problem, however, is that outside this one instance, situated at the end of the book in a paragraph in which she compares the work-for-hire model with the creator-owned model, Chute very rarely addresses the ways in which comics are objects of commerce (and then only in anecdotes such as the story about Robert Crumb selling copies of Zap #1 from a baby carriage in the Haight). Rather, she approaches the comics she writes about only as texts, divorced from the material and commercial contexts in which they were created. In doing so, she is, of course, working from methodologies that are derived from her background in literature. In Why Comics? the side of the coin facing up is clearly the textual, yielding thoughtful analysis of the

662   Dale Jacobs chosen works but missing the ways in which these comics can also be viewed as objects and sites of transaction (both cultural and commercial). What would happen if she were more self-reflective about her methodologies and considered the ways in which specific methods can both illuminate and obscure? What if she moved beyond the excellent ­textual arguments she makes and began also to address these comics in the more complex ways toward which book history and media studies point us? A three-pronged approach based on examining comic books as texts, objects, and sites of transaction offers scaffolding on which the interdiscipline of comics studies might be constructed. As I have proposed, “what if we begin by thinking about comics as texts we might interpret (as literature scholars, art historians, linguists, or theorists of the comics form might), material objects that we hold in our hands (as librarians, archivists, or scholars of material culture might), and as cultural transactions (as literacy scholars, communication scholars, political scientists, rhetoricians, sociologists, or historians might)”? (Jacobs, “Text, Object, Transaction”). What if we paid more attention to the idea that, as Chute notes, comics exist “at the boundary of art and commerce”? What would it look like if we moved beyond our disciplinary training and our own situatedness in the university in order to embrace the diverse set of methodologies implied in a text/object/transaction model? In the next section, I use my 1976 Project to argue that combining the book history model that emphasizes text/object/transaction with a media studies focus on seriality, publication, circulation, and reception allows us to ­utilize interlocking methodologies that, when directed specifically toward comics, can provide an effective framework for comics as an interdiscipline.

Overview of the 1976 Project Though 1976 was a year in which the industry was rapidly losing readers, it was, in other ways, a typical year in comic book publishing. Comic books were still bought mainly by children and adolescents and were distributed mainly through newsstands, drugstores, grocery stores, and similar retail outlets. By 1976, market forces had reduced the number of comic book publishing companies to just seven: Marvel, DC, Archie, Gold Key, Harvey, Fawcett, and Charlton, with Warren (Eerie, Creepy, and other horror titles), EC (Mad) and Major Magazines (Cracked) publishing black-and-white comics in a magazine format. Approximately 2,200 comic books and magazines were published with a 1976 cover date. Identifying the published titles and then collecting and reading that volume of comics made me realize that the questions I needed to ask and the methodologies I had previously used in my comics studies scholarship were inadequate for the subject, scale, and scope of this project. This work required a different approach, or, more accurately, set of approaches, to comics scholarship, a realization that led me to book history and media studies and the specific interdisciplinary approach I have ­outlined here.

Comics Studies as Interdiscipline   663 In order to explore the kinds of questions that might be generated from this approach, I pulled seven comic books with a cover date of August 1976: Woody Woodpecker #152 (Gold Key), Our Army at War #295 (DC), Dennis the Menace #146 (Fawcett), Richie Rich #145 (Harvey), I Love You #119 (Charlton), Daredevil #136 (Marvel), and Life with Archie #172 (Archie). These comic books represent the typical range of what was available on the newsstands in 1976, in terms of both publishers and genres, which run the gamut from funny animal to war, family comedy, children’s comedy, romance, superhero, and teen adventure (in fact, the only major genres from 1976 not represented in these seven comic books are horror, parody, and fantasy). It quickly became apparent that approaching this range of comic books from a single disciplinary perspective was untenable, since doing so would elide the complexity represented in this slice of comic book publishing history. When confronted with a range of books such as those I have highlighted here, I soon realized that the narrow focus on comics and literacy with which I had begun the project would preclude many productive and necessary questions. Without using a truly interdisciplinary approach, I could not really address the question of what can be ­discovered by examining a year in traditional output of the American comic book industry. The 1976 Project shares what Dunst, Laubach, and Wildfeuer call, in their introduction to Empirical Comics Research, “An emphasis on representative corpora that challenges the dominance of impressionistic case studies in comics research” (Dunst et al. 3). They go on to argue for the “integration of case studies, corpus analysis, and reception research into a triangulated framework. . . . Creating feedback loops between them will allow for the formulation of new, and the testing of established, theories, the development of experimental methods, and the integration of disciplinary frameworks into a more fine-grained understanding of comics” (3). The model I am proposing seeks to move toward an integration of disciplinary frameworks by beginning with questions raised by book history and media studies. Again, book history asks me to think about these comics as texts, material objects, and cultural and commercial transactions, while media studies pushes me to examine narrative across media, or transmedial narratology, and the ways in which media (including comics) are continuously remediated on one another. Both approaches demand that I consider the ­commercial context of the publication and reception of these comic books, which includes attention to seriality, materiality, and circulation. Branching out into these areas of inquiry does not take anything away from my earlier approaches but rather adds immeasurably to the ways I view how multimodal literacy operates in the comic books of 1976. Like multimodality, where what is most interesting and productive lies not in what any one specific mode can convey but rather in what the multiple modes can convey in combination with one another, in the interdiscipline of comics studies, what is most productive is what happens when diverse methodologies inform one another. This interdisciplinary approach is what I have tried to take with the 1976 Project, which I will illustrate by considering the seven titles mentioned above and the textual, material, and transactional questions they raise.

664   Dale Jacobs

The 1976 Project: Comic Books as Texts First, I will describe these seven issues and give a brief account of the kinds of textual questions raised by them. What genres are represented, for example, by the seven issues? How does the use of the comics form affect the way we read genre? What themes are being expressed in these books, and how do those themes connect to the genres of the books? Our Army at War #295, for example, tells a very straightforward genre story that fits squarely within the range of war comics of the period and within the expectations of readers at the time. While not quite glorifying war, it also does not take the kind of antiwar stance that comic books such as EC’s Two-Fisted Tales or Frontline Combat did in the 1950s. Richie Rich #145 operates within the genre of children’s adventure/humor but does so through the representation of a child who seemingly has more money than the GDP of most countries. Money holds an odd place in this book, as the Rich family has so much that it hardly seems to matter, while at the same time, money is often a central plot point. In this issue (as is true in all the Richie Rich titles), while Richie is always seen using money for good, he is still incredibly wealthy when others of the cast simply are not, as if it is part of the natural order. Despite his wealth, he, like all the main characters in the Harvey line, is always depicted as decent and nice, doing the right thing in even the most trying circumstances. Like Richie Rich, Dennis the Menace exists in the genre of children’s adventure/humor, but here the underlying purpose tends to be educational, with each issue teaching its readers something, whether about the Olympics, the metric system, or, in the case of issue #146, the history of the American Revolution. Woody Woodpecker, a comic book adaptation of Walter Lantz’s cartoon series, is essentially a children’s adventure comic, with Woody now cast as the hero and upstanding voice of conscience, rather than the troublemaker of the cartoons. The main story in issue #152 sees Woody, Knothead, and Splinter (his nephew and niece) foil a group of cattle rustlers. Few romance comics were still being published by this time, and more would be ­discontinued in 1976 (including most of those published by Charlton, I Love You among them). I Love You #119 is typical of romance comics of the period, focusing as it does on heterosexual love that is always shown to triumph in the last panel of every story. Daredevil #136 is representative of the superhero genre that was being published by both DC and Marvel, though this title fits into the subgenre of the street-level superhero. Within this framework, however, issue #136 begins to tentatively take on issues of both vigilantism and media manipulation. Finally, Life with Archie was unlike most books in the Archie line that focused on teen humor, in that it attempted to tell action, crime, and even superhero stories using the Riverdale cast, stories that Beaty describes in Twelve Cent Archie as “attempts to make Archie something that he is not . . . forced, arbitrary, and fundamentally at odds with the characterization that is established in the other books” (192). This particular issue

Comics Studies as Interdiscipline   665 f­ eatures a Bicentennial story in which Archie falls into a daydream while looking at the Declaration of Independence on a school field trip to Washington, D.C. This daydream puts him back in time (at least in his mind, as we find out at the end of the comic), and what follows are highlights of American revolutionary history. Even in this very small sample, not only are there multiple genres, but the ways in which genre is employed is sometimes straightforward and sometimes complicated. At the level of text, we can, of course, ask a number of questions that are familiar from previous work in comics studies and also begin to push us to see comic books as material objects that are enmeshed in cultural and commercial transactions. What can be said about the artists’ lines/styles, the use of color, the way the pages are composed, or how lettering is deployed? What can we learn from close readings of these comics from a multimodal perspective? From the perspective of theorists of the form such as those noted above? From the perspective of transmedial narratology? How might we use each of these approaches to begin to examine Life with Archie, Our Army at War, Richie Rich, or Daredevil? What would be the similarities in the way we examined each comic book? The differences? Why? What would be the goals in performing these kinds of close readings? Does the genre of the comic book or the intended audience affect how and why those close readings might happen and the purposes for which they might be done? What happens if we consider genre within the context of rhetorical genre theory in which “genre not only responds to but also constructs recurring situation” and “[a]s our constructions of situations change and new situations begin to recur, genres change and new genres develop” (Devitt 578–579). How might close readings of these texts help us to think about the relationship between these genres and the situations in which they were published and about the relationships that exist between creators and readers within these genres? How might such readings help us to think about depictions of the Bicentennial, war, capitalism, or vigilantism within the context of the genres used in 1976? Close textual analysis, a staple in comics studies to this point, is something we do well as a field. While I am cognizant of and sympathetic to critiques of this kind of work, as seen in books such as Empirical Comics Research, it seems to me that close reading is a valuable tool, especially when we continually question why and to what end we are doing such readings, problematizing our practice, and placing it within a larger project that also embraces other methodologies and other types of questions.

The 1976 Project: Comic Books as Material Objects So how do we place close textual analysis within a larger context? How can a view of comics as texts be related to other concerns? If we ask how the comics form is used in each of these instances, for example, we are certainly asking a question at the level of text but also implicitly asking about these comic books as material objects, an approach that includes ways of thinking from librarians, archivists, and scholars of material culture. As Kashtan argues, “materiality is at work when the physical and technological forms of a media text impact the reading experience and when the physical and technological

666   Dale Jacobs forms of a media text are shaped by the desire to produce a specific type of reading ­experience” (6). How does the particular comic book form affect how people read it? What type of specific reading experience is produced? Does that change depend on genre? On audience? How is our reading different if we encounter a narrative in single issues (as I did with most of the comics from 1976), in collected print form (as I did with the 1976 material from Savage Sword of Conan and much of the 1976 Amazing SpiderMan), or in digital form (as I did for issues such as Daredevil #131, the first appearance of Bullseye, which today can sell for $400 to $800 depending on the condition)? How is the experience of reading comics printed on newsprint (as they were in 1976) different from reading comics printed on glossy paper (as they often are now)? How are the senses engaged in reading comic books such as I Love You or Woody Woodpecker, a question Ian Hague points us toward in Comics and the Senses: A Multisensory Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels? As Hague writes, “comics are not simply static objects that can be considered from an atemporal perspective. They change and are changed over time, modifying the space they occupy as they are being read” (5). How do these changes affect readers or the communities in which readers are engaged? Again, what happens when we consider different audiences (as we would have to do with these two comics)? What happens when the content of comic books is read in digest form, as was the case with some Archie comics in 1976? What about when the material form is oversized ­ten-by-fourteen-inch editions, such as those published by both Marvel and DC? Or in magazine form, such as Eerie or Creepy published by Warren, Cracked published by Major Magazines, or Savage Sword of Conan or Deadly Hands of Kung Fu published by Marvel through its Curtis imprint? These material and textual considerations are imbricated in commercial transactions as publishers attempt to ascertain what will sell and how best to cater to the tastes of their readers. Questions of materiality affect the presentation of the text and the way it is encountered by readers and the variety of transactions that occur in and around comic books, between, for example, readers and publishers or publishers and creative teams.

The 1976 Project: Comic Books as Sites of Transaction These transactional aspects of materiality begin to come into focus when we consider the various kinds of paratexts that accompany these different material forms of comics. Paratexts are elements such as the cover, title, letters pages, advertisements, editorials, and so on, that exist outside the diegetic world of the story and “what enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public” (Genette 1). Do paratexts such as advertisements, covers, and letters columns in single-issue comics provide a different frame for the narrative from paratexts such as retrospective introductions, back-cover blurbs, and bonus material (such as scripts and thumbnails) in collected editions? What is the relationship between the paratexts in and the genre of a comic book, and how do both relate to the perceived audience? What ­happens if we compare the paratexts—including covers, advertising, and letters ­columns—in I Love You #119 with those

Comics Studies as Interdiscipline   667 in Daredevil #136 or Life with Archie #172? How were the companies attempting to sell these comic books through their use of covers, the main element in determining whether a book would even get picked up off the shelf? To what audiences were they marketing these comic books? Did a letters column exist, and if so, who was writing in and to what purpose? What kinds of products were being advertised in each of these issues, and to whom were these advertisements directed? Performing such analysis across a month of titles from 1976 would help us to think about the relationships created by the publishers between paratexts and genre, provide a glimpse into the cultural context of 1976, and begin to form a picture of the readership for that year. The commercial and cultural transactions I have been describing center on these commercially available comic books and happen in what Howsam calls “a communicative relationship between and among individuals, groups and generations of human beings—readers, writers, editors, printers and so forth” (19). This kind of thinking necessarily urges us to go beyond an auteur model and to consider the much larger sphere of people involved in the creation, publication, distribution, selling, and reception of comics in whatever form they appear. We might ask how commercial considerations affect artistic choices. How do publishers, editors, distributors, artists, writers, colorists, letterers, and others interact to produce and distribute comics? Attention to this larger sphere of transactions means that posing what at first seems like a straightforward question becomes problematized in productive ways. We might, for example, ask what can be said about the artists’ lines/styles, their use of color, the way they compose the pages, how they integrate word and image, and how they deploy lettering in the seven issues mentioned earlier. An approach based on close readings within an auteur model would, of course, have much difficulty in approaching such a question, because the labor of ­creating each comic has been divided up in ways that necessarily ask us to think about comic books as sites of commercial transactions. This small sampling of titles from August 1976 makes it clear that questions around the creation of comics are complicated when examining a corpus such as the one that makes up the 1976 Project. Whether or not the creators were credited (or in some cases who was credited) within the comic book at the time of publication should lead to explorations of the relationship between the comics creators and both publishers and readers.2 Were the names of the artists and writers an aid in selling Daredevil and Our Army at War, or had that simply become the convention at Marvel and DC by 1976? Did readers pay attention to the creative teams of the books? Did it make more difference in a serialized comic book like Daredevil than it did in comic books that featured standalone stories? Can we find evidence of this attention in the letters pages? Why were the editor, inker, colorist, and letterer all credited at Marvel but at none of the other companies? Were artists and writers of Woody Woodpecker and Richie Rich seen as interchangeable by their respective publishers? By their readers? Is the cultivation of a house style even more pronounced in these titles than it was at Archie Comics? In signing their stories, did artists for I Love You make a connection with the readers? Why were they not credited? Is the variance in art styles subservient to the recurring themes and plots? What cachet did Hank Ketchum’s name still carry for readers of Dennis the Menace in

668   Dale Jacobs 1976? Is the art in this book seen by the publisher strictly as a replicable commodity? What is it about individual artists for the Archie titles that makes it possible for them to be easily identified, as seen in the Grand Comics Database entry for Life with Archie (and many other titles)? All of these questions are examples of thinking transactionally and relationally, within both a commercial and a cultural context, and all are questions that complicate a purely textual examination. In the model I am proposing, the interdiscipline of comics studies begins with this tripartite approach adapted from book history, an approach that asks us to consider comics as texts, material objects, and the locus of commercial and cultural transactions. While one of these ways of knowing and its attendant methodologies may be foregrounded at any given moment, to be truly interdisciplinary, all of these strands should inform the work of comics studies scholars in order to advance the field in all its in­ter­ dis­ci­pli­nary complexity. Using the model I have proposed opens up many possibilities. What, for example, if I were to examine these texts through the lens of symbolic capital, following the example of Beaty and Woo in The Greatest Comic Book of All Time? Or if I performed the kind of analysis that Alexander Dunst and Rita Hartel describe in “The Quantitative Analysis of Comics: Towards a Visual Stylometry of Graphic Narrative”? What if I incorporated these approaches into the kind of model I have described here that begins with questions that arise from book history? What if I paid attention to the questions and methodologies from someone like Matthew J. Costello in his book Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America in order to think about contemporary political or social cultures in the comic books of 1976? Or about comics and youth culture, as Bradford  W.  Wright does in Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America? What if I use a variety of approaches to examine all the ways the comic books of 1976 might fit into comics history, American cultural history, and the history of publishing? How might these methodologies and ways of knowing inform each other? After all, we must, as Hatfield writes in “Comics Studies, the Anti-Discipline,” be able “to step back far enough to see where our individual disciplines can work together, and what they can contribute to a truly in­ter­dis­ci­pli­ nary project of knowledge-making” (xix). What I have endeavored to offer here through a brief discussion of the 1976 Project is what I see as examples of the kinds of thinking and the resulting questions that might push us toward “a truly interdisciplinary project of knowledge-making,” toward comics as an interdiscipline.

Notes 1. For a fuller tracing of these definitional questions in relation to interdisciplinarity in comics studies, see Jacobs, “Text, Object, Transaction.” 2. Daredevil #136 lists Marv Wolfman as writer/editor, John Buscema as guest artist (also clearly the cover artist, though this is uncredited), Jim Mooney as embellisher (inker), Joe Rosen as letterer, and Michele Wolfman as colorist; here, five people contributed to the ­creation of the comic’s narrative. Our Army at War #295, on the other hand, has a signed cover by Joe Kubert, with the main story credits to Robert Kanigher for script and Frank

Comics Studies as Interdiscipline   669 Redondo for art. Are we to assume that Redondo inked and lettered his own work? What about the coloring and the editing? I Love You #119 has no listed credits but does include artists’ signatures for each of the first two stories (Nieto for the first and Nicholas/Alascia for the second). From this information, volunteers at the Grand Comics Database have surmised that Enrique Nieto penciled and inked the first story, Charles Nichols penciled and Vince Alascia inked the second story, and Art Cappello penciled and inked the third story (based on the signed cover and its similarity in line to the third story); they have offered no guesses regarding script, colors, or lettering. Life with Archie #172 includes no credits, but full credits are listed at the Grand Comics Database (script Frank Doyle, pencils Stan Goldberg, inks Jon D’Agostino, colors Barry Grossman, and letters Bill Yoshida), indicating that records were kept and that there was enough interest on the part of a researcher to discover this information. Both Woody Woodpecker #152 and Richie Rich #145 include no credits whatsoever; neither are any credits listed in the Grand Comics Database. The cover of Dennis the Menace #146 includes the paratext “By Hank Ketchum” below the title, but Ketchum was not responsible for the interior writing or art; the only credit listed is that the character was created by Hank Ketchum.

Works Cited Beaty, Bart. Twelve Cent Archie. Rutgers UP, 2015. Beaty, Bart, and Benjamin Woo. The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Chute, Hillary. Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere. HarperCollins, 2017. Costello, Matthew  J. Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America. Continuum, 2009. Davis, Blair, et al. “Roundtable: Comics and Methodology.” Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, vol. 1, no. 1, 2017, pp. 56–74. Devitt, Amy. “Generalizing about Genre: New Conceptions of an Old Concept.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 44, 1993, pp. 573–586. Dunst, Alexander, et al., editors. Empirical Comics Research: Digital, Multimodal, and Cognitive Methods. Routledge, 2018. Dunst, Alexander and Rita Hartel. “The Quantitative Analysis of Comics: Towards a Visual Stylometry of Graphic Narrative”? Empirical Comics Research: Digital, Multimodal, and Cognitive Methods, edited by Alexander Dunst et al, Routledge, 2018, pp. 43–59 Gardner, Jared, and David Herman. “Graphic Narratives and Narrative Theory.” SubStance vol. 40, no. 1, 2011, pp. 3–13. Genette, Gerard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Translated by Jane  E.  Lewin, Cambridge UP, 1987. Hague, Ian. Comics and the Senses: A Multisensory Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels. Routledge, 2013. Hatfield, Charles. “Comics Studies, the Anti-Discipline.” The Secret Origins of Comics Studies, edited by Matthew Smith and Randy Duncan, Routledge, 2017, pp. xi–xxii. Howsam, Leslie. “The Practice of Book and Print Culture: Sources, Methods, Readings.” The Perils of Print Culture: Book, Print and Publishing History in Theory and Practice, edited by Jason McElligott and Eve Patten, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 17–34. Jacobs, Dale. Graphic Encounters: Comics and the Sponsorship of Multimodal Literacy. Bloomsbury, 2013.

670   Dale Jacobs Jacobs, Dale. “Text, Object, Transaction: Reconciling Approaches to the Teaching of Comics.” With Great Power Comes Great Pedagogy: Teaching, Learning, and Comic Books, edited by Susan Kirtley et al., UP of Mississippi, 2019. Kashtan, Aaron. Between Pen and Pixel: Comics, Materiality, and the Future of the Book. Ohio State UP, 2018. “Media Literacy Defined.” National Association for Media Literacy Education, 10 Mar. 2017, namle.net/publications/media-literacy-definitions. Michele Wolman, colorist. Daredevil, the Man without Fear! #136, Aug. 1976, Marvel Comics. Stein, Daniel. “Superhero Comics and the Authorizing Function of the Comic Book Paratext.” From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of  Graphic Narrative, edited by Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon, De Gruyter, 2013, pp. 155–189. Woo, Benjamin. “Comics Aren’t Literature, and That’s Fine.” Flow: A Critical Forum on Media and Culture, 30 Oct. 2017, https://www.flowjournal.org/2017/10/comics-arent-literature. Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.

chapter 38

Com ics St u die s as Pr actition er-Schol a r Damian Duffy

672   Damian Duffy

Comics Studies as Practitioner-Scholar   673

674   Damian Duffy

Comics Studies as Practitioner-Scholar   675

676   Damian Duffy

Comics Studies as Practitioner-Scholar   677

678   Damian Duffy

Comics Studies as Practitioner-Scholar   679

680   Damian Duffy

Comics Studies as Practitioner-Scholar   681

682   Damian Duffy

Comics Studies as Practitioner-Scholar   683

684   Damian Duffy

Comics Studies as Practitioner-Scholar   685

Works Cited Al-Jawad, Muna. “Comics Are Research: Graphic Narratives as a New Way of Seeing Clinical Practice.” Journal of Medical Humanities, vol. 36, no. 4, 2015, pp. 369–374. Brandl, Mark Staff. Metaphor(m): Engaging a Theory of Central Trope in Art. 2011. University of Zurich, PhD dissertation. Carpenter, B. Stephen II, and Kevin Tavin. “Drawing Together or Reflections on How (Not) to Edit Graphic Novels in Art Education.” Visual Arts Research, vol. 38, no. 1, 2012, pp. v–x. Collver, Jordan, and Emma Weitkamp. “Alter Egos: An Exploration of the Motivations, Perspectives, and Identities of Science Comic Creators.” Journal of Science Communication, vol. 17, no. 1, 2018, pp. 1–22. Duffy, Damian. Educational Hypercomics: Learners, Institutions, and Comics in e-Learning Interface Design. 2016. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, PhD dissertation. Duffy, Damian. “Keeping It (Hyper)Real: Autobiographical Fiction in 3-D.” Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, edited by Michael A. Chaney, U of Wisconsin P, 2011, pp. 260–264. Farthing, Anthony, and Ernesto Priego. “ ‘Graphic Medicine’ as a Mental Health Information Resource: Insights from Comics Producers.” The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, vol. 6, no. 1, 2016, https://www.comicsgrid.com/articles/10.16995/cg.74/.

686   Damian Duffy Figueiredo, Sergio C. “The Rhetorical Invention of Comics: A Selection of Rodolphe Töpffer’s Late Reflections on Composing Image-Text Narratives.” ImageTexT, vol. 8, no. 4, 2016, n.p. Department of English, University of Florida, 15 Oct. 2018, http://imagetext.english.ufl.edu/ archives/v8_4/figueiredo/. Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford UP, 2012. Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. UP of Mississippi, 2005. Home page. Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, 2018, http://bccb.ischool.illinois.edu. Helms, Jason Muir. “Is This Article a Comic?” DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 4, 2015, http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/4/000230/000230.html. Kashtan, Aaron Jacob. “Materiality Comics.” DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 4, 2015, http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/4/000212/000212.html. Kuttner, Paul, Nick Sousanis, and Marcus Weaver-Hightower. “How to Draw Comics the Scholarly Way.”  Handbook of arts-based research, edited by Patricia Leavy, Guilford Press, 2017, pp. 398–422. Kunzle, David. “Preface.” Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips. UP of Mississippi, 2007. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. U of Chicago P, 2008. Mickwitz, Nina. Comics and/as Documentary: The Implications of Graphic Truth-Telling. 2014. University of East Anglia, PhD dissertation. Salter, Anastasia, Roger Whitson, and Jason Helms. “Making ‘Comics as Scholarship’: A  Reflection on the Process behind Digital Humanities Quarterly (9)4.” Kairos, vol. 23, no. 1, 2018, http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/23.1/inventio/salter-et-al/index.html. Sousanis, Nick. “Behind the Scenes of a Dissertation in Comics Form.” DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 4, 2015, http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/4/000234/000234. html. Weaver-Hightower, Marcus B. “Losing Thomas & Ella: A Father’s Story (A Research Comic).” Journal of Medical Humanities, vol. 38, no. 3, 2017, pp. 215–230. Woo, Benjamin. “Erasing the Lines between Leisure and Labor: Creative Work in the Comics World.” Spectator, vol. 35, no. 2, 2015, pp. 57–64.

Index

A Game for Swallows: To Die, to Leave, to Return (Abirached)  336, 342–344, 346, 349 A la recherche du temps perdu, adaptation of (Heuet) 615 A true discourse. Declaring the damnable life and death of one Stubbe Peeter  56, 58 Aaron, Jason  402–403, see also Thor (Aaron) Abadzis, Nick  332 Abbas, Ackbar  535 Abdelrazaq, Leila  76, 84, 87 Baddawi  76, 84–87, 90 Abel, Jessica  5, 26, 425 Abina and the Important Men  270, 274–282, 289 auto/biographics of  279–280 autographic rendering of  275–276 historical context of  276 omniscient narrator of  274, 277, 278–279 storyline of  275, 280 visuals of  277–278 Abirached, Zeina  336–338 artistic identify of  353–354 epigraph opening novel of  354 fiction in the graphic novel and  349 I Remember Beirut  342, 343, 346 knitting, metaphor of  340, 341–342 ornamentation, meaning of  343–344 Paris is not a Deserted Island  346, 347–348 Tintin, reworking of  346 see also A Game for Swallows: To Die, to Leave, to Return (Abirached); Le Piano Oriental (Abirached) Abrams, Marty  517–519, 529 academic discipline of comics studies  6–7, 11–13, 115 Australian comics  218–219 programs for  650–652

“Ace Bandage” (Engelberg)  321–322 acronyms 47–48 action figures  510–533 accessories for  510, 514 Captain Action  517–518 clothes of  515–516 collectors, marketing to  527 high concept franchise toys  519–522 history of  512–515 and Marvel comics  520–521 playable objects, traits of  510–511 postwar gender-performing toys  515–519 redubbed 1990’s media  522–526 retro marketing of  526–528 risqué toy lines  523–524 Superman 514–515 Walt Disney products  513–514 of women  519 Action Girl Comics  420–426, 429, 430–432 Action Girl Newsletter 427–431 action-to-action transitions  502, 506 Adams, Eddie  210 Adlard, Charlie  586 adolescents, writing for  458 Adventures of Buck Rogers, The 218 Adventures of G.I. Joe 516–517 advocacy comics  647 Aeschylus  284, 288 aesthetics 222 in comics criticism  575–577 in Rat Queens 581–587 Aesthetics of Comics, The (Carrier)  576 aetiology 19 affrontier, crossing the  335–338 African American characters in comics Black Panther  554, 557–558, 566 Room  222, 560, 561–564, 566 stereotypes in  447, 558–559, 566–567

688   index Afro Samurai (Okazaki)  29–30 Ages of Man, The  64, 65 Ahmed, Maaheen  484 Ahmed, Sara  360, 383 Air Pirate Funnies (O’Neill)  330 Aja, David  333 Akman, Ayhan  175 al-Ali, Naji  85–86, 207 Al-Jawad, Muna  683 Alanguilan, Gerry  332 Aldama, Frederick Luis  256, 266, 577, 651 “Alf Biggett, Wog Spotter” (Dziatlek)  224 “All Men Are Bastards” (Thorne and Thorne) 227 Allegory of the Cave, The (Plato)  476, 484 Allen, Brooke  465–466 Alonso, Axel  388 alternative comics  217, 430, 538, 576, 632–634 Australian comics  224–227 radical comics  217, 229–231, 234, 420–421, 430 retailers’ failure to stock  420–421 Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (Hatfield) 632–634 Amanat, Sana  390 Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, The (Chabon) 526 Ambassadors, The (Holbein)  124–125 American Born Chinese (Yang)  269, 569 American Comic Book Chronicles (Wells)  553 American Sign Language (ASL)  24 American Splendor (Pekar)  256 Amor, Rick  231 amphibiousness of comics  679 analogy 473–474 in Still Life Las Vegas  476, 479–480, 485 anamorphism  474, 476, 477–487 Anatomie of the English Nunnery and Lisbon, The (Robinson)  62–64 Anderson, Benedict  348 André, Christophe  265 Andrews, Barry  220 anglophone comics readers  53 animals in comics  326–334 to comment on human traits  330–331 consciousness of  331

funny-animal comics  328–330 in the superhero genre  327–328 speech, effect of lack of  331–332 animation and comics  95 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)  48–49 Annan, Kofi  173 anticartoon action  206–209 Australian legislation  219 campaigns of  220 Archie Comics  644, 645, 667–668 architecture as city identity  535 in comics  541, 549 Are You My Mother? (Bechdel)  83 Armory Show of 1913  96, 99–101 Arresting Development (Pizzino)  632 art, comics as  94–114 Ad Reinhardt works  105–110 Armory Show of 1913  99–101 history of, early  94–99 Museum of Modern Art in New York 101–105 single-panel comics  133 Art, Perception, and Reality (Gombrich)  55 Art International 94–95 arthrology 79 artificial intelligence and communication  16 artificial languages  21–22 asexual characters  607 Ashcan School  95, 96 Asian and Asian-American characters in comics 558 Asprey, Bill  137 Asterix (Goscinny and Uderzo)  xv, 55 Atwood, Margaret  190, 200, 607 Au travail (Josso Hamel)  158 Au Yeung, Craig  537 Aunty Acid 137 aura in cartoons  122–123, 128 Austen, Jane  313 Australia: Lucky for Some (Cane)  232 Australian Comic Collector, The 225–226 Australian comics  216–237 academic studies 1950-1970  218–219 alternative comics  224–227 educational 231–234 genre boundaries, pushing  228–231

index   689 history of  220–222 underground comics  222–224 Australian Popular Culture 220 auto/biographics 269 Abina and the Important Men 279–280 central features of  271–272 ethics of reading  273–274 in the classroom  271 see also Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth auto/biography, relational  282 autobiographical comics  269 egocentrism, charges of  349 origin of  612 see also memoir in comics Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, The (Stein) 95–96 autofiction, memoir as  473–474 autographics  268–270, 275 avant-garde comics  106 Aydin, Andrew  269, 332 B., David  645 Bá, Gabriel  xv Bachelor Father 558 Baddawi (Abdelrazaq)  76, 84–87, 90 Baetens, Jan, 80  82 autobiography and comics  349 Baker, Josephine  354 Baker, Kyle  569 Baker, Martin  438 Bakhtin, Mikhail  165 Bakhtinian laughter  165–189 Bonil’s marked figureheads  179–186 El-Adl’s woman  173–179 Gado’s cartoons on corruption  167–173 Baku, Yumemakura  30 Bandai  524, 525 Banta, Martha  186 Barbie and Ken 516 Barbie (doll)  516, 518 Barefoot Gen (Nakazawa)  269 Barker, Martin  638 Barks, Carl  329, 568, 569 Barlow, Fil  226 baroque style grid  9 Barr, Alfred  102 Barrie, J. M.  438

Barrier, Michael  555 Barry, Lynda  5, 658 Barthes, Roland  39 Camera Lucida  121, 476 Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes  473–474, 487 Bate, Jason  180 Bateman, John  32, 33 Bathroom Girls (Mojica)  423, 432–434 Battaglia, Dino  613 Bayeux Tapestry  xii, 55 Bayou (Love)  270 Bealer, Tracy  527 Beano  55, 450–453 war effort in  452 Beast in the Jungle, The  370 Beaty, Bart  7–8, 98, 257, 577, 586 alternative comics and  538 Comics Versus Art 94 Greatest Comic Book of All Time, The 568, 658, 668 studies of comics and  644, 645, 649, 658, 659, 668 Twelve Cent Archie 664 Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s 635 Beauty and the Beast  358–359, 369, 370–373 plot of  370–371 Bechdel, Alison  76, 82, 87, 256 Are You My Mother? 83 Dykes to Watch Out For  502–503, 645–646 see also Fun Home (Bechdel) Beck, Rose Marie  169 being there and reading  47–52 Beirut, in French comics  337 Bell, John  6 Bellows, George  99 Bender, Lauretta  5 Bendis, Brian Michael  393 Benjamin, Walter  123, 150–151, 200 Bentley, Philip  216, 225 Benton, Mike  633 Berger, Arthur Asa  510 Berger, John  124, 330, 648 Bergson, Henri  484 Beringer, Alexander  633, 638 Berland, Eti  464

690   index Berryman, Clifford K.  211 Best We Could Do, The (Bui)  262 bestial ambivalence  328, 329 Between Pen and Pixel (Kashtan)  632, 658 Beuthien, Reinhard  516 biased perception  210 Big Bad Beetleborgs 525–526 “Big Two” publishers  6 “Big Weenie”  419–420 Bild Lilli (Beuthien)  516 Bildungsroman 269 Fun Home 500–501 My Favorite Thing Is Monsters 493–495, 497 Persepolis, 505 bilingualism 340 Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (Green)  256, 659 Binswanger, Lee  419 biographical comics  269, see also auto/biographics bisque figures  513–514, 528 Bitch Planet (DeConnick)  589–590 change, inspiring  605–609 comic book publics of  600–605, 609 engagement with readers in  605–606 feminist exploitation in  590–596 resources in  605 black-and-white comics  420 black characters in comics, see African American characters in comics Black Comics 390 black frame in comics, development of  54–55, 59–60, 62, 72 Black Panther  554, 557–558, 566 Blackbeard, Bill  6 Blackhawk (Eisner)  569 Blaire, Alison, see Marvel’s Dazzler Blake, William  60 Blakely, W. Paul  5 Blanco (Manouach)  157, 158 bleed panels  299, 300, 304 BloodBros 37 Bloom, Harold  339, 340, 344 Bocage, Angela  419, 420–421 Bongco, Mila  252 Bonil (Xavier Bonilla)  xviii, 165, 179–186

Rafael Correa, comics with  180–183 statues in  184–186 Bonvillain, Tamra  584 Bonzo the Dog (Studdy)  514 book-blocks  56, 59–60 book-object (“livre-objet”)  336, 344 books history of  657, 661–663 illustration and comics  438, 439 Boondocks, The (McGruder)  125–126 Booth, Wayne C.  313 Borgfeldt, George  513–514 Bors, Matt  203, 213 Borschke, Margie  149 Bosanquet, Eustace F.  66–67 Bostantzoglou, Chrysanthos Menti (“Bost”) 207 Boxer Protocol  304 Boxer Uprising  293–298, 301 Boxers and Saints (Yang)  269, 293–307 color schemes in  299, 302 duality in  299, 301 inspiration for  293–297 lessons in  304–306 story of Boxers 297–300 story of Saints 299–305 structure of  294–295 visual elements of  297–298, 300, 302, 304 Bradley, William H.  199 Braga, Laura  380, 381 braiding, metaphor of  341 Braidotti, Rosi  467 Brainard, Joe  344 Brandl, Mark Staff  673–674 Brannigan, Augustine  220 breast cancer  311–312 in Thor (Jason Aaron’s)  404, 415 memoirs on  320 see also Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person (Engelberg) Breccia, Alberto  614, 617–620 BrickBrickBrick (Laliberte)  148–149 Brienza, Casey  638 “Brimpers” of Sex Criminals  601, 603 Bringing Up Father (McManus)  514 Brinkley, Nell  634 Broadside 228

index   691 Brooker, Will  633 Brosh, Allie  659 Brown, Chester  658 Brown, Jeffrey A.  554, 638 Brown, Lisa  331 Brown, M. K.  xiv Brownies (Cox)  513 Brunetti, Ivan  5, 94 Bryman, Alan  513 Buckwheat 556 Bucky 556 Buell, Marjorie Henderson  134–136, 139–140, 142 Bui, Thi  262 Bukatman, Scott  326, 575, 633–635 Hellboy’s World 632 Bukowski, Charles  204 Bundiansky, Bob  522 Bunge, Mario  xi Bureš, Karel  242 Burns, Charles  152–153 Busch, Wilhelm  xii, 244, 441, 442–444 studies of comics and  645 Bush, George W.  210 Bush, Larry  165 Buster Brown (Outcault)  327, 447–449, 513 Butler, Judith  458, 462 Bynneman, Henry  64 Cage, Luke  527–528, 645 Cage, The (Vaughn-James)  620–621 Caldwell, John Thornton  5 calendars  64–66, 69 Calvin and Hobbes (Watterson)  121–122, 137 Calvino, Italo  340, 344 Camelot 3000 645 Camera Lucida (Barthes)  121, 476 Campbell, Eddie  227 Campbell, J. Scott  396 Campbell, Miranda  649 Canadian Society for the Study of Comics  650 Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person (Engelberg) 311–325 “Ace Bandage”  321–322 “Disposition of Doctors”  322 “Everything Is My Enemy”  316, 321, 322 “In Perspective”  322–323

irony in, and ethical dimensions of 313–320 “Luck” 322 lyric-narrative hybrid of  320–324 “Nausea” 321 “Something Unpleasant and You”  317–318, 321 “Survivor” 318–322 “The Disposition of Doctors”  322 “The Undead”  322 Cane, Jim  232 Canemaker, John  633 Caniff, Milton  xii, 516 canonization of comic books  645, 658–659 Cap Stubbs and Tippie (Dumm)  331 Capp, Al  327 Capps, Lisa  486 Captain Action action figure  517–518 Captain America against Hitler  211 Captain America replacement  387 Captain Marvel replacement  387 captioned series  242, 244 caricatures  186, 205, 444 anamorphic nature of  476 Bonil’s  180, 182 and children’s literature  440, 442 political 545 racial 555–556 see also stereotypes in comics Carlson, Peter  651 carnivalesque humor in comics  440, 444, 451 Carpenter, B. Stephen II, 681 Carpenter, Stanford  651, 684 Carr, Gerald  228–229 Carrier, David  576 Carroll, Lewis  438 Cart, Michael  463 Carter, Ronald  23 Carter, Steve  229 Cartoon Movement  177 Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice (Brunetti) 94 cartoonists and early comics  5 and history of comics  94–95 perceptions of  121 see also cartoons on comics pages

692   index cartoons on comics pages  115–131, 158 character of  121–122 construction of  120–121 historic neglect of  115–116 lines of  117–119, 122, 126 perspective in  124–126 relation in  123–126 sequence in  126–129 shapes of  119–120 social commentary through  203–214 value of  122–123 Casali, Kim  137 Case, planche, récit (Peeters)  8 Cassirer, Ernst  8 Casterman 336 Caswell, Lucy Shelton  652 cats, in language and comics  19, 326 etymology of  20 Cave, Edward  192 cave paintings of Lascaux, France  326 Cawelti, John G.  250 Censorship: A World Encyclopedia 251–252 censorship of comics  251–252, 438 in the Czech Republic  239–241 Cent mille milliards de poèmes (Queneau) 344 Césaire, Aimé  348 Cestac, Florence  335, 341 La véritable histoire de Futuropolis: 1972–1994 340 Chabon, Michael  526 Chahine, Abdallah  354 Chamberlain, Azaria  230 Chan, Anson  534 Chan, Kwun-chung  548 Chaney, Michael A.  269, 330–331, 440–441 characterization in literary adaptions  616 Charlie Hebdo 207–208 chat windows and comics  36–37, 42–52 Chaykin, Howard  520 Chicago World’s Fair of 1893  196–199 children adult understandings of  439, 440 Australian, and comic books  218–220, 226 Czech Republic  244, 250 as intended audience of comics  457–458, 468

and language, acquisition of  22–23 laughter and comics  439–440 children in comics  437–454 Beano  55, 450–453 and children as primary readers of comics 437–438 commercialized kids  444–453 Der Struwwelpeter, influence of  441–444 media contexts for  437–441 strangeness of  449–452 children’s adventure/humor genre  664 children’s literature and comics  438–439 Charles Hatfield on  437, 457, 468 “Chinese Room” (Searle)  37, 50 Ching, Leo  534 Choi, Sungyoon  474, 483, 486 Christophe (Georges Colomb)  335 Chute, Hillary  90, 123, 151, 462 Disaster Drawn  122, 271 framing narratives  302 Graphic Women  632, 635 hybridity of comics  260–261 on memoir comics  258, 259, 262, 263, 274 on readers of comics  260 on spatial content of comics  264, 272 studies of comics and  633–635, 639, 658–659, 661–662 Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere  658–659, 661–662 citation rates in comics studies  632 most popular  635–639 Civita, César  xiv Clark, J. Spencer  259–260 Clarke, Liz  274–281 Class, Please Open Your Comics (Miller)  270 Classic Comics 268 Classics Illustrated 613 classroom, comics in the  268–274, 289 auto/biographics and  271–272 ethics of auto/biographical reading 273–274 visual literacy  272–273 website for  270 see also Abina and the Important Men; Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth “Cleansing Lady” (Gado)  171–173 Clewell, Tammy  654

index   693 clinamen, symbolism of  338–340, 343, 344, 349 closets, metaphor of  369–373 Clowes, Daniel  227 club comics  238–239, 245, 247 “coarse-grained” animal depictions  331–333 Cobbler Comix 222–223 Cocca, Carolyn  389 code-mixing in Hong Kong  539 codes of authority  252 cognitive poetics of life writing  473–474 cognitive system of language  18 Cohen, Paul A.  295, 296 Cohn, Neil  11, 84 Coletta, Charles  654 collage by Samplerman  155 collection of Emblemes, A (Wither)  67 Collins, Susan  191 Collver, Jordan  680 Colomb, Georges (Christophe)  335 color schemes in Boxers and Saints  299, 302 in Le Piano Oriental 345 in medium-specific literary adaptions  617 Columbia, and political editorial cartoons 190–202 Chicago’s World’s Fair  196–199 in the Gilded Age  197 in the nineteenth century  195–196 “Pardon/Franchise” 194–195 post-Civil War  193–195 Columbus, Christopher  192 Comella, Lynn  605 Comet, The 218 Comic Action Heroes/Pocket Heroes (CAH) 518 Comic Art in Museums (Munson)  98 Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Wright) 668 Comic Cons Research Project  649 Comic Studies Society (CSS)  632, 649, 650, 672, 684 Comics, The (Waugh)  55 Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form (Miodrag) 77 Comics and Narration (Groensteen)  77

Comics and Sequential Art (Eisner)  17, 132, 634 Comics and the Senses: A Multisensory Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels (Hague) 666 comics-based research (CBR)  682 Comics Code Authority  252 Comics in Education website  270 Comics Reporter  402, 403 “Comics Studies, the Anti-Disclipline” (Hatfield)  656, 668 Comics Versus Art (Beaty)  94 “comicsness” 75 communication digital  36–37, 42–52 Internet 32 see also language communication theory  12–13 community pages  590 computers and comics  340, 344 con-langs 22 Conan (Howard)  577, 578 Connell, W. F.  219 Connerton, Paul  475 Conrad, Robert  559 Contract with God, A (Eisner)  493 conventional page layouts  8, 78, 82, 83 conventions and conferences  651–652 Coogan, Peter  575 Cook, Pam  593–594 copperplate intaglio images  59–60 Corman, Roger  591–593, 595 Correa, Rafael  179, 180–183 Corto Maltese series (Pratt)  346 Costello, Matthew J.  668 Coupe, W. A.  208, 211 Couperie, Pierre  55 Courtship of Eddie’s Father, The 558 Couser, G. Thomas  273 Cox, Palmer  513 Craig, Robert T.  12–13 Crain, Patricia  439 creatorship and cartoons  117–119 Cremins, Brian  452 Crenshaw, Kimberlé  497 Crisis on Infinite Earths 521 Crucifix, Benoît  484

694   index Crumb, Robert  94, 98, 263, 613, 614 Fritz the Cat 329 studies of comics and  645 Zap Comix 256 cultural contexts  85–86, 89 “Cultural Explosion” (Siuhak)  542 Cultural Revolution in China  549 cultural techniques  75–76 Curie, Marie and Pierre  269 curtains  62–64, 69 Curtis, Neil  231, 408, 413 curved surfaces  124–126 cuteness, aesthetics of  581, 582, 584, 586 Czech Republic comics  238–251 censorship of  239–241 classical literature, use of  251 Czech Youth Union  241–242, 244 meek and submissive comics  247–250 parodies 250 speech bubbles in the  242–247 Czech Youth Union  241–242, 244 D’Agostino, Anthony Michael  360, 462 Dahlgren, Peter  609 Daigle, Kay  23 Daigle, Matt  23–24 Dalrymple, Louis  197 Daly, Bob  222 “Dance of Freedom” (El-Adl)  177–179 Danielewski, Mark  475 Daredevil  577, 664–665, 667 Dark Knight Returns, The 646 “Dark Phoenix Saga”  358 Darkroom (Weaver)  265–266 Darnton, Robert  12 Darwish, Mahmoud  354 Daumier, Honoré  205 Dauterman, Russell  403, 406–407 David Zwirner Gallery  105, 106, 108 Davis, Blair  656 Davis, Jim  154 Davis, Michael  432 Dazzler, see Marvel’s Dazzler “Dazzler: The Movie”  366–370, 374 Dazzler Thor  379–380 DC comics aesthetics of  576

Crisis on Infinite Earths 521 see also specific comics titles de Certeau, Michel  152 De Kosnik, Abigail  151, 154 De Landro, Valentine  594, 595 Dean-Ruzicka, Rachel  462–463 decks 67–69 DeConnick, Kelly Sue  589, 593, 600 teachable moments from  605–606 on transgender persons  606–607 see also Bitch Planet (DeConnick) decorative page layouts  8–9, 78, 84–85, 88 déhanchement  338–340, 345 Delbo, Jose  569 delinquent reading of comics  159 Delisle, Guy  265 Dell Comics  553–554, 567 history of  554–556 Democratic donkey  206 Denmark xiii Dennis the Menace  450, 664, 667 Denvir, Bernard  94–95 depiction and communication  19–20 Der Struwwelpeter (Hoffmann)  441–444 Der Stürmer (Streicher)  207 Derek, Bo  358, 361–362 Derrida, Jacques  331 DeSousa, Michael A.  211, 646 deterministic grammar, 18 Di Donna, Annie  282, 283, 285–288 Di Liddo, Annalisa  166 dialects 25–26 dialogism, theories of  165 Diana (Regé)  153 Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer (Ledesma)  260, 262 Dickie, Peter  231 Diderot, Denis  12 digital conversation and comics  36–37, 42–52 Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ)  681, 682 Dingbat Family, The (Herriman)  327 Dirks, Rudolph  xii, 96, 98, 99, see also Katzenjammer Kids, The (Dirk) Dirty Plotte (Gregory)  421 Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Chute)  122, 271

index   695 disco and the Dazzler  358–359, 362–365 normative gender categories and  366, 378 discrete layouts  8 Disney, Walt  328 “Disposition of Doctors” (Engelberg)  322 Dispossession 623–625 dissertations on comics  4–5 Ditko, Steve  521 diversity in superhero genre  387–395, 554 of readers  391–392, 458 Divine examples of God’s Severe Judgments upon Sabbath-Breakers  56–59, 69 do-it-yourself (DIY) comics  647 Docker, John  220 Donahue, Troy  559 Donald Duck  329 Dong, Lan  270 Donner, Richard  518 doodle person of Gado  168–173, 186 Dorfman, Ariel  633–634, 639 Dorkin, Evan  427 Doubrovsky, Serge  473 Doucet, Julie  421 Down Under  220, 221 Doxiadis, Apostolos  282–283, 285–288 drag discourses  377–378 drag performance  376–380 dragon, metaphor of  343 Drama (Telgemeier)  464 drawing comics  148–162 act of  118 Engelberg style  315–317, 324 and redrawing  152–154 storyline creation and  150–151 and undrawing  154–159 see also specific comics titles drawing without drawing  148 Drda, Jan, 245 Drucker, Johanna  76, 89 dual nature of comics  257, 264, 684 duality in Boxers and Saints (Yang)  299, 301 Duchamp, Marcel  99–101 Duffy, Damian  651, 672 Dumm, Edwina  331

Duncan, Randy  631, 634, 638, 653, see also Secret Origins of Comic Studies, The (Smith and Duncan) Dungeons & Dragons  573, 578–579, 583 Dunst, Alexander  647, 657, 663, 668 duplication and cartoons  123 Dworkin, Craig  157 Dyer, Sarah  420–431, 434 Dykes to Watch Out For (Bechdel)  502–503, 645–646 Dziatlek, Andre  224 Eakin, Paul John  256, 257 “Earth Revisited” (Puckridge)  223 Eastern bloc comics  253 Ecker, Ullrich  482 Eco, Umberto  633–634, 639 Eddoo, Quamina  275 Eddy, Ian  226 Edgar, Patricia  220 Edidin, Jay  373 editorial political cartoons, see political editorial cartoons educational comics  231–234, see also classroom, comics in the Ehrenreich, Barbara  311, 312, 324 Eichhorn, Kate  426 Eikon Baskilike 64 Eisenstein, Elizabeth  58, 59 Eisner, Will  7, 132, 613, 634 Blackhawk 569 Comics and Sequential Art  17, 132, 634 A Contract with God 493 language and comics  5, 17 literature, comics as  614–615 panels and  493 on reading of comics  38, 260, 265 The Spirit 569 on stereotypes in comics  557 studies of comics and  645, 679 on visual imagery  484 El-Adl, Doaa  xviii, 165, 173–179, 186 Dance of Freedom  177–179 Kanagawa  177, 178 Little Red Riding Hood and “Me Too” movement 175–177 looming male figure of  174

696   index El Refaie, Elisabeth  273, 545 Elder, Will  598 Elliot, Phil  226 Ellis, Grace  462 Elmer (Alanguilan)  332 emblematic images  60, 69 empathy in auto-biographics  273–274 Empirical Comics Research: Digital, Multimodal, and Cognitive Methods (Dunst, Laubrock, and Wildfeuer)  647, 657, 663, 665 Endres, Thomas  517 Engelberg, Miriam  312–315 drawing style  315–317, 324 lyric and narrative  321, 322 see also Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person (Engelberg) “Entangled”  216, 217 Epicurus atomic model  339 Epileptic (B.)  645 Epistemology of the Closet (Sedgwick)  369–370 Erlich, Victor  545 Erll, Astrid  480 Erni, John  535 Esherick, Joseph W.  296 Esperanto 21–22 Espinosa, Frank  xiii Espinoza, Mauricio  261 ethics and irony  313–315, 317, 318, 320, 324 of reading auto/biographics  273–274 Ethics in the Gutter (Polak)  273 ethnic content and artistic choice  335 “ethnoGRAPHIC: Ethnography in Graphic Form” 648–649 Evanier, Mark  555 “Everything Is My Enemy” (Engelberg)  316, 321, 322 “experiencing I” of fictional autobiographies 478 exploitation in films and comics  591–593 Extremely Loud and Incredible Close (Foer) 475 Fabelais, François  440 Fabula 228 fairy tale aspects of Stevenson’s work  455–460, 464 Fake Forensic Science  537–542, 546–547

Falcon Comics 231 falsifiability of theories  10–11 fame, queer politics and  366–369, 373 Family Circus, The (Keane)  136, 145–146 fan-scholars 221 fans in comics studies  5–6, 643–644, 647, 676–677 Fantagraphics Books  420, 492 “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism”  102 fantasy genre  577–581, 585–586 Far Side, The (Larson)  137, 142–144 Farinella, Matteo  680 Farthing, Anthony  683 Fast Arrows, The (Rychlé šípy) 238–241 Czech Youth Union and  241–242 and meek and submissive comics  247 speech bubbles and  242–247 Fatty Finn’s Weekly 218 “favourite age” of children  439 Fawaz, Ramzi  450, 466, 575 on letter columns  601 on superhero comics  360, 362–363, 383 Feiffer, Jules  5 Feininger, Lyonel  96–97, 105 feminism in comics  173–174, 419–436 criticism of  403 in Jason Aaron’s Thor  402–418 rejection of by feminists  421, 422 see also Bitch Planet (DeConnick) feminist anthology comics of the 1980s and 1990s 419–436 afterlives of feminist comics  431–434 collecting, curating, and community building 423–431 Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability (Hogan) 422 feminist exploitation in Bitch Planet and Sex Criminals 590–599 Fenton, William  281, 289 Ferris, Emil  490, 492, see also My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (Ferris) Feuerhahn, Nelly  440, 442 “Few Futurist Fancies” (King)  99, 102 Fey, Tina  210 fictive time  126 50 Cartoons and More on Women (El-Adl) 173–174

index   697 Figueiredo, Sergio C.  678 film and comics  xii, 95, 99 techniques of  265–266 “fine-grained” animal depictions  331–333 Finnane, Mark  220 First Amendment protections  206 Fischer, Jan, 239–241  243, 244 The Sparklings 245–247 Flow: A Critical Forum on Media and Culture (Woo) 660 Flye, The (Bosanquet)  66–67 Foer, Jonathan Safran  475 Foglar, Jaroslav  239–243 on speech bubbles  244–245 Follow the Sun 559 food fight with Trump and Kim (Gado) 167–169 “force field” of cartoons  122 Ford, Harrison  520 Forest, Jean-Claude  228 Foret, Martin  238 forgetting  479, 480–483, 487 models for  481, 482 types of  475 formalism 75 formlines 87–89 Forney, Ellen  263 Forsman, Charles  154 Foster, Hal  578 Foster, Jane, see Thor (Aaron) Foster, John  220, 233 Foster, Norman  538, 544 Fotos, Adam  684 Foucault, Michel  499 Fowler, Tess  579, 584 Fox Comics 226–227 Fox News  397–398 Fraction, Matt  333, 589, 600 on asexual characters  607 teachable moments from  606 see also Sex Criminals (Fraction) Frahm, Ole  545 framelines 88–89 frameworks 53–74 calendars  64–66, 69 convention of  53–54 curtains  62–64, 69 decks 67–69

origins of comics  55–60, 69–73 processions  61–62, 69 staircase  64, 65, 69 wheels  66–67, 69 framing narratives  302 Frank Johnson Publications  218 Franklin, Benjamin  203 Franson, Leanne  425 Frazetta, Frank  579 Freeman, Rosemary  67 French-language comics  335 postcolonial heritage of  335–336, 349 see also specific comics Fresnault-Deruelle, Pierre  78, 79, 83 Frey, Hugo  80, 82 “Freyja and Odin” (Aaron)  404–406 “Freyja and Thor” (Aaron)  411–413 fridging 389 Fritz the Cat (Crumb)  329 Fry, James  432 Fun Home (Bechdel)  76, 81–83, 85, 90, 256, 263 genre and  575 in the classroom  268–269 and My Favorite Thing Is Monsters 491, 500–505 studies of comics and  646, 658 funeral procession for Philip Sidney  61 Fung, Anthony  534, 535 Funko  512, 528, 529 funny-animal comics  328–330 Furie, Matt  333 Futuropolis 335–336 La véritable histoire de Futuropolis: 1972–1994 340 Fvnerall of the Netherlands Peace, The (Jansz)  61, 62 Gabilliet, Jean-Paul  xvi, 132–133 Gabriel, David  391 Gado (Godfrey Mwampembwa)  xviii, 165, 167–173, 186 The Cleansing Lady  171–173 food fight with Trump and Kim  167–169 Trump and Kim: The Morning After 169–171 Gaga Feminism (Halberstam)  366, 368, 369 Gaiman, Neil  645 Galvan, Margaret  421

698   index Garcia, Antero  651 García, Ezequiel  261 Gardner, Jared  99, 117, 118–119, 617, 660 citations of  634, 637–638 on drawn lines of comics  149–151 memoir in comics  257–260 on narrative sense  302 on traumas and comics  262 see also Projections (Gardner) Garfield Minus Garfield (Walsh)  154–155 Gasoline Alley (King)  103 Gateward, Frances  390 Gay, Roxane  461 gekiga manga xiii gender identities  458, 462, 463, 466–467 gender roles/relations in comics  174–175 Columbia 190–200 in Rat Queens 583–586 Marvel’s Dazzler and  366, 375, 378 Generations 400 Genette, Gérard  78, 250, 251 genre in comics criticism  575–577, see also specific genres Gentleman’s Magazine, The (Cave)  192 Georgis, Dina  320 Geradts, Evert  xiv German Democratic Republic  253 German Society for the Study of Comics  650 Gerner, Jochen  156 Getz, Trevor R.  274–281 Ghassan 265 Gheeraerts, Marcus  61 G.I. Joe  516–517, 521–522 Gibbons, Dave  500, see also Watchmen (Moore and Gibbons) Gibson, Mel  484 Gieni, Owen  584, 585 Gilded Age  196, 197, 199 Gill, Joe  569 Gill, Tom  560 Gillam, Victor  197 Gillman, Charlotte Perkins  449 Gillray, James  205, 213 Ginger Meggs 220 Giraud, Jean  xiv Glackens, Louis M.  197 Gladwell, Malcolm  210

Glanzman, Sam  153 Godard, Jean-Luc  620 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  xii Gold Key Comics  553–554, 567 history of  554–556 Golden, Michael  520 “Golden Shower Head” (Zapiro)  181–182 Goldsmith, Kenneth  155, 156 “Golf-the Great Society Sport as Played in Hogan’s Alley” (Outcault)  446 Gombrich, Ernst  55, 115, 116, 118, 576 “Good Ol’ Gregor Brown” (Sikoryak)  153–154 Goodwin, Archie  527, 528 Google Duplex  16 Gopnik, Adam  105 Gordon, Ian  4, 440, 442, 445, 638 Gorton, John  228 Goscinny, René  xv, 645 Gottfredson, Floyd  328 Gould, Chester  645 Grace Jones  361–365 grammar, 18 grammar of comics, see language Grandville, J. J.  326, 330 graphiation 150 graphiation in literary adaptions  617 graphic archiveology  xxii, 149, 151, 154–155 Graphic Canon, The 613 Graphic Encounters: Comics and the Sponsorship of Multimodal Literacy (Jacobs)  659–660 graphic history  275 graphic nonfiction  122 Graphic Novel, The (Baetens and Frey)  82 graphic novels  615 characteristics of  283 page layout in  80 young-adult 455–470 see also specific graphic novels Graphic Women (Chute)  632, 635 Gravett, Paul  xiv–xv, 273 Gray, Brenna Clarke  89 Gray, Harold  514 Great Vowel Shift  21 Great Wave off Kanagawa (Hokusai)  177 Greatest Comic Book of All Time, The (Beaty and Woo)  568, 658, 668 Greek myths and Still Life Las Vegas 476–477

index   699 Green, Justin  256, 659 Green Hornet, The 558 Green Lantern 567 Greenberg, Clement  621 Gregory, Roberta  421 Grennan, Simon  19, 33, 150, 623–625 grids 9 in Fun Home  81–83, 85, 90 planar 124–126 and redrawing  152–153 Griffiths, Antony  56 Griswold, J. F.  101 Groeneveld, Elizabeth  421 Groensteen, Thierry  10, 535, 576 citations of  634, 637–639 Comics and Narration 77 iconic solidarity of  128–129 on narrative drawing  150 on page layout  8–9, 80–82, 85, 90 panels on the page  7 sequence in comics  262 speech bubbles and  41, 42, 45 translating comics  33 see also System of Comics, The (Groensteen) Groth, Gary  420 Growing Up in Public (García)  261 Grrrl, Riot  426 Gudmundsdottir, Gunnthorunn  480–481 Gugi, Sándor  253 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift)  192 Gunning, Tom  126 Guston, Philip  106 Gutenburg, Johannes  56 gutters 297 Guyer, Jonathan  173 Hague, Ian  666 Haida stories  87–90 Halberstam, J. Jack  366, 368–369, 381 Halberstam, Judith  83, 460 Half Men, The (Huizenga)  153 Halifax (Lord)  210 Hall, Stuart  534 Hama, Larry  522 hammer of Thor  402 legacy heroes  387, 400

Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby (Hatfield)  632, 633 Handala 85–86 Handler, Elliott  516 Handler, Ruth  516 Handmaid’s Senators (Matson)  190–192 Handmaid’s Tale, The (Atwood)  190, 200, 607 Hanfstaengl, Ernst (“Putzi”)  211 Hansen, Carla and Vilhelm  xiii Harbor Heroes (Siuhak)  536, 537–549 buildings and robots  536, 538–548 “Cultural Explosion”  542 “Harbor Miracle”  545, 546 “HSBCrazy”  539, 540 hybridity of  538–540 parody in  544–549 politics and nostalgia  542–544 “Round & Loop”  541, 542 “The Symphony of Light”  543 “This Golden Week”  543–544 “Harbor Miracle” (Siuhak)  545, 546 “Hardcore Lady-Types”  462–463 Harlot’s Progress, A (Hogarth)  xii Harrison, Randall P.  205, 646 Hartel, Rita  668 Hartman, Rachel  432 Harvey, Robert  633 Hasbro  516, 518, 522, 528, 529 Hatfield, Charles  77, 78, 535, 577 on alternative comics  576, 632–634 children’s literature and comics  437, 457, 468 on the dual nature of comics  257, 264, 684 studies of comics  632–635, 638–639, 656, 660, 668 Hauwelyck (van Venne)  70 “Having Their Fling” (Young)  207 Hawaiian Eye 558–559 Hawthorne, Nathaniel  182 Haynie, Hugh  211–212 healthcare education in comics  646–647 Heavy Metal 55 Heer, Jeet  638 hegemonic masculinity  389 Heimermann, Mark  457 Heintjes, Tom  134 Heisler, Florence  4 Hellboy’s World (Bukatman)  632

700   index Heller, Meredith  377 Helms, Jason Muir  681 Henderson, Danielle  403 Herb Block Foundation  212–213 Herblock (Herbert Block)  206, 213 Hergé  xii, xiii, 126, 127, 335 aesthetic of  222 studies of comics and  645 see also Tintin (Hergé) Herman, David  331–333, 660 Hernandez, Lea  xiii Herriman, George  105, 327, 645 Heti, Sheila  475 Heuet, Stéphane  615 “High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture” 102 high baroque style grid  9 highly regular grid  9 Hills, Matt  221 Hirsch, Marianne  633, 638–639 Hitler, Adolf  209, 210–211 Hitler in the World’s Cartoons: Fact versus Ink 211 Hobbit, The (Tolkien)  577 Hoffmann, Heinrich  441–444, 447 Hogan, Kristen  422 Hogan’s Alley (Outcault)  133–135, 445, see also Yellow Kid (Outcault) Hogan’s Heroes 557–558 Hogarth, William  xii, 55, 69–72 Hokusai, Katsushika  177 Holbein, Hans  124–125 Hollar, Wenceslaus  67–69 Holmewood, Emile  37–38, 40, 41–47 style of  42–47, 49–52 homophobia in comics  375–376 homosexuality in comics, see queer politics in comics Hong Kong character of  540–542 cityscape of  535–538 comics 536–537 robots of Victoria Harbor  536, 538–548 transfer of power in  534–535 see also Harbor Heroes (Siuhak) Hong Kong Trilogy (Chan)  548 “Hong Kong Trilogy” (Siuhak)  548

Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited (HSBC)  538 Hooky’s Magic Bowler Hat 452 Horne, Donald  232 Horowitz, Katie R.  378 Horrocks, Dylan  77, 227 horror comics in Australia  228, 229 Horton, Ian  638 Horváth, Tibor Cs.  253 Hostage (Delisle)  265 House of Leaves (Danielewski)  475 “house style” of comics  152 How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (Riis)  446 “How to Look at a Cubist Painting” (Reinhardt) 107–109 “How to Look at Modern Art in America” (Reinhardt)  106, 107 How to Read Donald Duck (Dorfman and Mattelart) 634 Howard, Robert E.  577, 578 Howard, Sheena  390 Howsam, Leslie  661, 667 “HSBCrazy” (Siuhak)  539, 540 Huang, Irene  529 Huizenga, Kevin  153 Hulk replacement  387 humanities discipline of comics studies  3 Hume, David  211 Hungary 253 Hutcheon, Linda  542, 545 hybridity of Harbor Heroes 538–540 in Hong Kong comics  536 in memoir comics  260–263 hyper-exteriority and hyper-interiority 123–126 Hyperbole and a Half (Brosh)  659 I Hotel (Yamashita)  475 I Love You  664, 667 I Remember Beirut (Abirached)  342, 343, 346 I Remember (Brainard)  344 I Saw It (Nakazawa)  269 I Spy 557–558 iconicity in cartoons  119–120, 122, 128–129 icons, as images  19

index   701 identification in auto-biographics  273–274 identity fluidity  455–470 Image Comics  522, 581, 586 image sequencing, see frameworks images materiality and  264 and text  204–205 tradesmen of  60 images, communication with  19–20 Imaginary, The (Sartre)  476 Immoral Mr. Teas, The (Meyer)  595 “In Perspective” (Engelberg)  322–323 Incorrigibles and Innocents (Saguisag)  632, 633 index, in images  19 Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society (Davis and Woo)  656 Inkspots  216–217, 225 interdisciplinary comics studies  656–670 interesting, aesthetics of  581, 582, 584, 585–586 International Comics Art Forum (ICAF)  632 International Commerce Center (ICC)  545 International Journal of Comic Art (Lent)  xvii Internet and communication  32 intersectional feminism  490–492, 497, 499, 507–508 intertextual combinations  85, 289, 340–342, 344 in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters 491–492 Rat Queens and  585–586 Iron Man replacement  387 Ironheart  387, 393–395 irony ethics and  313–315, 317, 318, 320, 324 in Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person  313–320 suggestions of  313–314 Iser, Wolfgang  39 iterative principle of Benoît  152 Iverson, Kurt  233 Iwerks, Ub  328 Jackson, Andrew  193 Jackson, Peter  578 Jackson, Ronald  390 Jacobs, Dale, xxii  559–660

James, Henry  370 Jansz, Claes  61, 62 Japanese-American characters in comics  559 Jarry, Alfred  338, 339 Je me souviens (Perec)  344 Jenkins, Christine  463 Jenkins, Henry  12, 221–222, 644 Jennings, John  390, 651, 673, 684 Jerusalem (Moore)  66 Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Ware) 500 Jimmy (Swinnerton)  327 Jodorowsky, Alejandro  xiv John Caldigate (Trollope)  623 Johnson, Brian  649 Johnson, Carol  516 Johnson, Samuel  192, 193 Johnston, Chris  216 Johnston, Claire  593 Jones, Grace  358, 361–365 Jones, Malcolm  56, 67 Josso Hamel, Olivier  158 journalism in comics  647 Just, Peter  222 Kahn, Jenette  521 Kamen, Kay  513, 514, 529 Kanagawa (El-Adl)  177, 178 Kane, Gil  517 Kanter, Albert  268 Kapitan Kloss 253 Kaplan, Jonathan  592–593 Karasik, Paul  613–614 Karp, Etta  4–5 Kashtan, Aaron  632–635, 637, 658, 665, 681 Katz (Manouach)  156–157 Katzenjammer Kids, The (Dirk)  xii, 96, 98, 441 commercialized kids  444–445 Kavanaugh, Brett  190–191 Keane, Bil  136, 145–146 Keats, John  49 Keller, Ulrich  165 Kelly, Walt  329, 556, 568, 569 studies of comics and  645 Kelso, Megan  425 Keppler, Joseph  192, 196–199

702   index Ketchum, Hank  667–668 Kewpie dolls  512 Kick, Russ  613 kid comics  440, see also children in comics Kim Jong Un, editorial cartoons of  167–171 Kimmelman, Michael  104 Kin-Der-Kids, The (Feininger)  96–97 Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaption (Duffy) 672 King, Frank  99, 102, 103 Kirby, Jack  211, 521, 577, 613 Kirchner, Nestor  184–185 Kirkman, Francis  70, 71 Kirkman, Robert  586 Kirtley, Susan  651 kitsch  244, 251 Klingon 22 knitting, metaphor of  340, 341–342, 354 Kochalka, James  432, 676 Kookaburra 218 Kott, Lidia Jean  403 Kotzakidou Pace, Elisabeth  8 Kraus, Jerelle  212 Krazy Kat (Herriman)  327 Kress, Gunther  32 Kronol, James  231 Kuhn, Thomas  3–4, 6, 7 Kuleshov effect  38, 62 Kunka, Andrew  256, 257–258 Kunka, Andrew J.  274 Kunzle, David  56, 576, 633–634, 638–639 Kuper, Peter  614 Kurtzman, Harvey  598 Kuttner, Paul. J.  682 Kyngston, John  66 Là-bas (Tronchet and Sibran)  350 La Guardia, Fiorello  211 La Perdida (Abel)  26 LA Review of Books (Mangles)  86 La Salle, Robert de  197 La véritable histoire de Futuropolis: 1972–1994 (Cestac) 340 Labio, Catherine  535, 541 Ladd Smith, Henry  212 Lady Chicago  196–199 Lady Gaga and Dazzler  365–366, 368–369

Lady Justice  197 l’affrontière 336 Laika (Abadzis)  332 Lakoff, George  674 Laliberte, Mark  148–149 LaMarre, Heather  210, 211 “Landfall” 229–230 Langbauer, Laurie  458 language  5, 16–35 acquisition and modalities of  22–24 artificial 21–22 comics as  23–26, 28, 30, 32–34 defined 18–20 multilingual comics and translations  26–30, 33 natural 20–21 as social interaction  30–32 standard languages and dialects  24–26 visual vocabulary  133 Lantz, Walter  555, 664 Larance, Jeremy  650 Larson, Gary  137, 142–144 Last Gasp  420 Latin America  180–183 Laubrock, Jochen  647, 657, 663 laughter and comics, and children  439–440 Laurier, Eric  648 Law, Lisa  535 Lawrence, Tim  362 Lay, Carol  419 layout of a page  8–10 Lázaro-Reboll, Antonio  632 Lazarus, Ludwick  21–22 Le Brun, Charles  326 Le Piano Oriental (Abirached)  335–357 affrontier, crossing the  335–338 déhanchement  338–340, 345 double page within  344–345 fiction, the detour of  349–354 le tricotage 340–348 multicultural visual-verbal poetry of  354 plot and structure of  337–338, 350–353 le tricotage 340–348 Lebeck, Oskar  556 Ledesma, Alberto  259, 260, 262–263 Lee, Robert E.  194 Lee, Stan  388

index   703 Lefèvre, Pascal  79–80, 542, 650 legacy heroes of Marvel  387–401 all-new, all-different  392–396 condemnation of  396–400 return of the originals  399–400 Leialoha, Steve  520 Lejeune, Philippe  349, 353 Lemire, Jeff  32–33 Lent, John A., xvii  251 Leroy, Fabrice  343, 349–350 Les migrations de Djeha: Les nouveaux immigrés (Saladin)  346–348 letter columns in comics  601, 603, 606–607 Leung, Rainbow  537 Levell, Nicola  88 Levitz, Paul  521 Lewandowsky, Stephan  482 Lewis, John  261, 269, 332 LGBTQ+ as characters in comic books  463–464, 502–503, 594 as readers of comics  458 see also queer politics in comics libraries and comics  652, 653–654 licensed comics, see television adaptations Lichtenstein, Roy  94, 97, 123 museum exhibition of  104 Life with Archie  664–665, 668 life writing  480 Li’l Abner (Capp)  327 Li’l Eight Ball  555–556, 560 Lincoln, Abraham  193 Lindquist, Daryl  216 lines in cartoons  117–119, 122, 126 linguistics and comics  17, 23 Lion King, The 182 Lips Tullian 250 Lipton, Mark  360 literary adaptations in comics and graphic novels 611–627 basic tendencies of  616–622 considerations in  617–619 fidelity to the source  611–613, 623 history of  612–616 medium-specific 617 panels on the page  616–619

resistance to  622–625 source-oriented  616–617, 623 literary nature of comics  3 Little Lulu (Buell)  134–136, 139–140, 142 Little Nemo in Slumberland (McCay)  327, 578 Little Orphan Annie (Gray)  514 Little Pancho Vanilla  560 Little Red Riding Hood and “Me Too” movement (El-Adl)  175–177 Liu, Lydia  50 “livre-objet”  336, 344 Locke, John  438 Logic of the Cultural Sciences, The (Cassirer) 8 Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth 270, 282–289 as auto/biographical narrative  283, 284–288 creators of  282–283 organization of  284, 288–289 theme of logic and madness  284 looming male figure of El-Adl  174 Lord of the Rings, The (Tolkien)  577–578, 585 L’origine (Mathieu)  344 Loudon, John  206 Louis Philippe  I, 205 Love, Jeremy  270 Love Is (Casali)  137 Low, David  208, 210–211 Luborsky, Ruth Samson  65 Lucas, George  519, 529 “Luck” (Engelberg)  322 Lucky the Pizza Dog  333 Lucretius atomic model  339 Lui, Tai-lok  535 Luks, George  96, 99 Lumberjanes (Stevenson)  457, 458, 462–466, 468 Luther, Martin  205 Lynch, George  294 Lypp, Maria  440, 444 lyric and narrative  320–321 lyric images  62 Ma, Eric  535 MacDonald, Helen  333 Mad Planet  427, 430

704   index Madden, Matt  5, 344, 621–622 Madison, Ira  III, 358, 383 Magic Lollypop, The 451 “Magic Sphere” in Wonder Woman  642, 643 Malaak: Angel of Peace 26 manga  xiii, 87–88 Mangles, Alex  86–87 Manouach, Ilan  156–158 Manovich, Lev  154 Mansah, Abina, see Abina and the Important Men Many Lives of Batman, The (Pearson and Urricho) 635–636 Marbles (Forney)  263 March (Lewis, Aydin, and Powell)  261, 269, 332, 646 Maresca, Peter  99 Marey, Étienne-Jules  99, 326 Marion, Philippe  150, 617 Markstein, Don  137 Marratto, Scott  118–119 Marrone, Daniel  484 Marston, William Moulton  642, 643 Martell, Nevin  137 Martin, Trevon  461 Marvel comics action figures and  520–521 aesthetics of  576 fans of  601 legacy heroes of  387–401 Super Heroes Secret Wars 521 see also specific comics titles Marvel’s Dazzler  358–386 derby culture of  374–376 drag performance and  376–380 fame, excess, and the politics of visibility 365–369 Grace Jones and disco origins of  361–365 introduction in X-Men 363–364 Lady Gaga and  365–366, 368–369 mutant pride  380–383 punk aesthetics and  378, 380 queer fan base of  360–361 queer reading practices  359–361 solidarity, limits of  380–383 strange heterosexualities and weird romance 369–373

masculinity and power in superhero comics 388–392 Masereel, Frans  xii “Mask of the Red Death” (Poe)  617, 618 mass distribution of comics  60 material objects, comic books as  665–666, 668 materiality in memoir comics  264–266 Mather, Jeffrey  535 Mathews, Gordon  535 Mathieu, Marc-Antoine  344 Matson, R. J.  190–192, 197 Mattel  516, 521, 523, 529 Mattelart, Armand  633–634, 639 Matthey, Pascal  155 Mattotti, Lorenzo  614 Mauldin, Bill  211, 516 Maus (Spiegelman)  122, 256, 258, 260 as “funny animal” comic  329–330 genre and  575 in the classroom  268–269 and My Favorite Thing Is Monsters 491, 497–499 studies of comics and  644, 646, 658 undrawing of  156–157 Max und Moritz (Busch)  xii, 441, 442–444 Mazzuchelli, David  613–614 McAllister, Matthew P.  636, 638 McCarthy, Michael  23 McCarthyism 206 McCay, Winsor  200, 327, 578 McCloud, Scott  xii, 270 on cartoon figures  115–116, 123–124 citations of  633–634, 637, 639 closure, notion of  168 on comics scholars  6, 7 gutters 297 on iconic figures  119 language and comics  5, 17 nonfiction in comics  258, 259 on pictures  86, 560 on readers of comics  38–40, 260, 392 sequence in comics  77, 132, 204, 262, 493 studies of comics and  648, 679 on transitions  502 see also Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (McCloud) McFarlane, Todd  522, 529

index   705 McFarlane Toys  522–524 McGruder, Aaron  125–126 McGurl, Mark  575 McLean, Neil  223 McManus, George  514 McMillan, Graeme  403 McPhee, Hilary  220 “Me Too” (El-Adl)  175–177 Medhurst, Martin J.  211, 646 medium-specific adaptations  617 Medlej, Joumana  26 meek and submissive comics  247–250 Mego’s action figures  518–519 Meier, Stefan  xvi memoir in comics  256–267, 274 autofiction 473–474 breast cancer  320 challenges of  256–259 hybridity 260–263 materiality 264–266 memory’s unreliability and  474–475, 487 reclaiming 259–260 studies of comics and  645, 646 see also specific comics memory and memoir  474–475, 487 Mendes, Melissa  154 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  116, 118 Meskin, Aaron  75 metacomics  672, 683 metaleptic disruption  62–64 metaphor(m)  673–675, 677, 679, 684 metonymic relation  78 metonyms 48 Meyer, Christina  633, 638 Meyer, Helen  568 Meyer, Russ  595 Mickey Mouse  328, 331 licensing products of  513 Mickwitz, Nina  684 Might Morphin Power Rangers (MMRP), 524–525 Mighty Thor, The  404, 406, 417 Migrations of Djeha: The New Immigrants (Saladin) 346–348 Miller, Ann  349, 353 Miller, Frank  26, 577 Miller, Matthew L.  270

minicomics and action figures  523–524 Minotaur Books  225 Miodrag, Hannah  55, 77 mise-en-abîme  339, 342 Mitchell, W. J. T.  639 Mizuki, Shigeru  539 Modern Language Association (MLA)  632 modernist art and comics  95 Moebius, see Giraud, Jean Mojica, Yvonne  423, 432–434 Molina, Jorge  403, 408, 412–413 Monkey and Tortoise (Rizal)  xii Monroe, Harriet  199 Montaigne, Michel  331 Moon, Fábio  xv Moore, Alan  66, 645, see also Watchmen (Moore and Gibbons) moral arguments against comics  5, see also censorship of comics Moreno, Lenin  185 Morey, Elwyn  219 Morrison, Grant  645 Morsi, Mohammed  173 mosaic, metaphor of  343 Motherhood (Heti)  475 motivated cognition  210 Motte, Warren F.  339–340 Mouly, François  468 Moura, Pedro  155, 157 “moving script” of Benjamin  150–151 Mr. Fish  208 Ms. Marvel replacement  387 Muhammad, drawings of  207–208 multicultural comics  354 multilingual comics and translations  26–30, 33 multimodal literacy  660 multimodal publications  33, 473–476, 483 multimodality  672, 678 and studies of comics  660, 663 see also Still Life Las Vegas (Sie) Multiversity Comics 89 Mulvey, Laura  260, 593 Munch, Edvard  191 Muñoz, José  xiv Munson, Kim  98 Murkowski, Lisa  191 mutant pride  380–383

706   index Muybridge, Eadweard  99, 326 Mwampembwa, Godfrey, see Gado (Godfrey Mwampembwa) My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (Ferris) 490–509 cultural resources in  501–502 form and structure of  492–497 Fun Home, influences of  491, 500–505 and intersectional feminism  490–492, 497, 499, 507–508 intertextual analysis of  491–492 Maus, influences of  491, 497–499 Persepolis, influences of  491, 505–507 story of  490–491 “Myth of Superman” (Eco)  634 Nabokov, Vladimir  49 Nakazawa, Keiji  269 “Naked Shack” (Burns)  152–153 Nama, Adilifu  554 Napoleon Bonaparte  205 Naraghi, Dara  xv “narrating I” of fictional autobiographies  478, 479 narrative and lyric  320–321 narrative images  62 narrative information  7–11, 69, 273, 302 drawing 150 Narrative Structure in Comics (Postema)  9 Nassar, Yusuf  207 Nast, Thomas  192, 197, 213 editorial cartoons of  193–195, 205, 206 Nat Turner (Baker)  569 national languages  24–25 nationalist history in comics  55 natural languages  20–21 “Nausea” (Engelberg)  321 navigated spaces in comics, see reading spaces NC tattoos  601, 607–608 New Funnies 555–556 New People, The 559–560 Newbigging, Martha  684 Newman, Paul S.  569 “next issue” boxes  653, 654 Ngai, Sianne  574, 581, 582, 585, 586 on zaniness  583, 584 Nib, The 213

Nimona (Stevenson)  455–462, 466–467 978 (Matthey)  155 1976 Project  657, 662–668 material objects, comic books as  665–666, 668 sites of transaction, comic books as 666–668 texts, comic books as  664–665, 668 Nocenti, Ann  372, 374 Nochlin, Linda  422 Noirs (Manouach)  157 “Non-Compliants” of Bitch Planet 601–603 nonfiction comics  258, 259, 646, see also memoir in comics Noomin, Diane  419 Nosek, Pavel  248 nostalgia 526 and consumer patience  529 sales focus of  527–528 Nouveau Réalisme  xiv “novelization” of Bakhtin  166, 168–169 Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (Duchamp)  99, 100 parody of  101 Nyberg, Amy  639 Nyong’o, Tavia  378 Obscure Cities (Peeters and Schuiten)  622 Ochs, Elinor  486 O’Connell, Sheila  56 “Odinson, Freyja, and the Heroes Arrive” 413–416 Oesterheld, Héctor Germán  xiv, 207 Of the Standard of Taste (Hume)  211 Official Marvel Comics Try-Out Book, The  152, 153 offset grid  9 Okazaki, Takashi  29–30 Olszewski, Piotr J.  223 O’Malley, Bryan Lee, xiii O’Neil, Rose  512 O’Neill, Dan  330 onomatopoeia 18 op de Beeck, Nathalie  270 Oresteia (Aeschylus)  284, 288 Oriental Piano, The, see Le Piano Oriental (Abirached)

index   707 origins of comics  55–60, 69–73 autobiographical 612 superhero genre  575, 612 ostentatious layouts  9 Oubapo  336, 344, 345, 621–622 Oulipo  336, 339, 344, 345, 621 Our Aesthetic Categories (Ngai)  574 Our Army at War  567, 664–665, 667 Our Gang Comics  555, 556 Outcast 225 Outcault, Richard F.  72, 133–134, 446–448 action figures  513 black characters of  447, 450–451 Buster Brown  327, 447–449, 513 Hogan’s Alley  133–135, 445 Tige, pit bull terrier  327, 447 see also Yellow Kid (Outcault) Oyola, Osvaldo  369 Oz magazine  222, 223 Pack of Knaves, A (Hollar)  67–69 Padilla, Ricardo  651 page edges  345 page layout  76–77 approaches to  80 fundamental studies of  78–79 Groensteen on  8–9, 80–82, 85, 90 in Baddawi  84–87, 90 in Fun Home  81–83, 85, 90 Peeters on  78, 79, 82, 84, 88 see also reading spaces Palestine (Sacco)  265 palm tree in Bonil’s comics  180–183 Panel by Panel (Ryan)  220–221 panels on the page  157, 493 bleed  299, 300, 304 conventions of  53–54, 56, 59, 60, 69–70, 72 in literary adaptions  616–619 lack of  493 and narrative information  7–11, 69, 273 see also frameworks Papadatos, Alecos  282, 283, 285–288 Papadimitriou, Christos H.  282–288 Papandreous, George  207 Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaption (Duffy)  672

Paraskevas, Colin  216 paratexts 666–667 “Pardon/Franchise” (Nast)  194–195 Paris is not a Deserted Island (Abirached)  346, 347–348 parody  101, 250, 544–545 in Harbor Heroes 544–549 Partridge Family 560–561 pattern books  58–59 Peanuts (Schulz)  126–129 Pearson, Roberta  635–636 pedagogical comics  274–282 Peeters, Benoît  8–10, 535, 622 iterative principle of  152 on page layout  78, 79, 82, 84, 88 Pei, I. M.  538 Pekar, Harvey  256 Pepe the Frog  333 Perec, Georges  339–340, 344, 345 Perez, George  521 Peripheral Visions (Rogers)  211 Perloff, Marjorie  151 Persepolis (Satrapi)  122, 256, 263, 264 genre and  575 in the classroom  268–269 and My Favorite Thing Is Monsters 491, 505–507 studies of comics and  646, 658 perspective in cartoons  124–126, 322–323 Peter, Henry G.  153, 642, 643 Peterson, Richard A.  6 Phantastique 229–231 Phantom, The 218 Pharoah Phunnies 223 Phelan, James  477–478 phenomenology 116 Philipon, Charles  205 Philippines xiii photo-referenced characters  560–562 photography, nature of  121 Picasso, Pablo  95–96 Pictorial Social Studies 231 Picture Theory (Mitchell)  639 Picturing the City (Zurier)  95 Pien, Lark  293, 299 Piepmeier, Alison  426 Pinsent, Ed  226

708   index Pizzino, Christopher  159, 576, 633–635, 637 Arresting Development 632 planar grids  124–126 Plato  476, 484 plausible texts  4 Poe, Edgar Allan  617–620 poems, comics  148 Pogo (Kelly)  329 Poindexter 223 Polak, Kate  273 Poland 253 politeness and politeness strategies  31 political body in comics Columbia 190–200 Latin American  180–183 women as symbols  174–175 political editorial cartoons  165–189 Bonil’s marked figureheads  179–186 caricatures 545 Columbia and  190–202 El-Adl’s woman  173–179, 186 Gado’s cartoons on corruption  167–173, 186 readers of comics and  165–166 of Thomas Nast  193–195, 205, 206 political intent and artistic choice  335 politics of location  76, see also reading spaces poor, experiences of, in comics  446 Popper, Karl  10 Porcellino, John  432, 676 Pore Lil’ Mose 446–447 porn in the woods  603 post-Civil War  193–195 postcolonial heritage  534 French-language comics  335–336, 349 l’affrontière, crossing the  336–338 Postema, Barbara  9, 10 Potts, Mark  213 Powell, Bob  517 Powell, Nate  269, 332 practitioner-scholars in comics studies 671–686 Prague Spring  247 Pratt, Hugo  xiv, 346 Preston, Diana  294 Pride and Prejudice (Austen)  313 Priego, Ernesto  683

Prince Valiant (Foster)  578 print coordinating powers of  70 early period  69 as mass medium  58–59 Printing Revolution, The (Eisenstein)  59 “privileged age” of children  438 probabilistic grammar, 18 Procession of the Knights of the Garter (Gheeraerts) 61 processions  61–62, 69 Proctor, William  638 Prodigall Son Sifted, The 70–72 productive page layouts  8, 78, 88 program era  575 Projections (Gardner)  99, 151, 634, 637–638 Prokůpek, Tomáŝ  248, 249 Prynne, Hester  182 Public and Private Life of Animals, The (Grandville) 330 publics, comics generating  600–605, 609 Puck 196–198 Puckridge, Jon  223 punk aesthetics  378, 380 Purcell, JoAnn  684 Pustz, Matthew  304 Putin, Vladimir  180 Pyle, Ernie  516 quadrillage 82 quality popular comic book  577, 586–587 “Quantitative Analysis of Comics: Towards a Visual Stylometry of Graphic Narrative” (Dunst and Hartel)  668 Queer Art of Failure, The (Halberstam)  381 queer politics in comics  358–386 drag performance and  376–380 fame, excess, and the politics of visibility  365–369, 373 Grace Jones and disco  361–365 homophobia and  375–376 punk aesthetics and  378, 380 queer reading practices  359–361 solidarity, limits of  380–383 strange heterosexualities and weird romance 369–373 “queer retrosexualities”  359–360

index   709 queerness in superhero genre  360–362, 379, 382–383, 461–462 in X-Men  360, 362–365 Queneau, Raymond  344 Quenya 22 Rabbi’s Cat, The (Sfar)  350 race in comics and action heroes  518–519 stereotypes of  446–447, 450–451, 555–556, 558–559 television adaptations and  553–554, 556–560 white men as superheroes  388–392 radical comics  228–231, 234 alternative comics  217, 229–231, 234, 420–421, 430 Radioactive: A Tale of Love and Fallout (Redniss) 269 Radway, Janice  423, 426, 431 Raemaekers, Louis  206 Rake’s Progress (Hogarth)  69–70 Ramirez, Michael  210, 212 Rampton, Martha  417 Rasmus Klump (Hansen and Hansen)  xiii Rasmussen, Anders Fogh  207 Rat Queens (Wiebe)  573, 578–588 and aesthetic categories  581–587 cuteness in  581, 582, 584, 586 fantasy genre and  578–581, 585–586 intertextual relationships of  585–586 zaniness in  581, 583–586 Ratcliff, Carter  94, 95 Rats 223–224 RAW Junior (Mouly and Spiegelman)  468 Rawle, Graham  475 readers clubs in the Czech Republic  239, 241 readers of comics  260–261, 264–265, 392 anglophone 53 children as  437–438 diversity of  391–392, 458 engagement with  605–606 identification with cartoon figures  115–116 letter columns  601, 603, 606–607 LGBTQ+ 458 meaning creation by  38–40

political cartoons  165–166 publics of  600–601 and speech bubbles  38–52 women 458 Reading Comics 252 reading protocols  75, 78 reading spaces  75–93 location of  79–90 page layout, studies of  78–79 politics of location and  90 sequence versus space  77 reclaiming in memoir comics  259–260 Red: A Haida Manga (Yahgulanaas)  76, 87–90 Redniss, Lauren  269 redrawing comics  152–154 Reed, Maureen  185 referents in cartoons  121–122, 125 “Refugee Comics” (Rifkind)  273 Regards from Serbia (Zograf)  259, 263 Regé, Ron Jr.  153 regular page layouts  8–9, 82 Reinhardt, Ad  105–110 Reinhardt exhibition of 2013  105–110 Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form (McCloud)  633–634 relational auto/biography  282 religion in comics  299–300 remixing comics  155, 158 Renegade Press  420 reparative readings  358 repetition in cartoons  129 replacements in Marvel Comics, see legacy heroes of Marvel reproduction and aura  122–124 reproductive temporality  83 Republican elephant  206 rescue reading  274 Reynolds, Nedra  417 Reynolds, Richard  638 Rhetoric of Irony, A (Booth)  313 rhetorical layouts  8, 9 rhetorical pages  78 rhythm in literary adaptations  618–619 Ricardou, Jean  620 Rice, Jamie  411–412

710   index Rich, Adrienne  76, 90 Richards, Dave  402 Richie Rich  664–665, 667 Rifkind, Candida  269, 273 Riis, Jacob  446 Rizal, José  xii Roach, Hal  556 Robbe-Grillet, Alain  620 Robbins, Trina  xiv, 419, 425, 633–634 Robial, Etienne  335 Robinson, Stacy  684 Robinson, Thomas  62–64 robots of Hong Kong harbor  536, 538–548 Rocketo (Espinosa)  xiii Rogers, Rob  213 Rogers, VC  211 Roh, David  545 Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (Barthes)  473–474, 487 roller derby  359, 374–376 romance comics genre  664 strangeness of the stories of  369, 370 Romero-Jódar, Andrés  484 Romita, John Jr.  152, 153, 361, 527 Ronin (Miller)  26–28 Room  222, 560, 561–564, 566 Rose, Barbara  106 Rose, Flemming  207 Rothman, Stephanie  593–594 Round, Julia  258, 260 on readers of comics  261, 264 “Round & Loop” (Siuhak)  541, 542 “Roundtable: Comics and Methodology” (Davis and Woo)  656 Royal, Derek  266 Rudah, Sharon  xiv “Rude Descending a Staircase (Rush Hour at the Subway)” (Griswold) 101 Rupprecht, Philipp (“Fips”)  207 Rusek, Adam  253 Russell, Bertrand  270, 282–288 Russell, Catherine  151 Russell, P. Craig  521 Ryan, Jack  516 Ryan, John  220–221, 225, 231 Ryan, Marie-Laure  486

Saban Entertainment  524, 525–526, 529 Sabin, Roger  576 Sacco, Joe  203, 265, 647, 658 Saga (Vaughan)  586 Saguisag, Lara  468, 633–635, 637–638 Incorrigibles and Innocents 632–633 Saint-Ogan, Alain  335 Saints and Boxers (Yang), see Boxers and Saints (Yang) Saladin (Slimane Zeghidour)  346–348 Saler, Michael  600–601 sales of comic books alternative feminists comics  430 diversity of readers  391–392 nostalgia focus of  527–528 Thor replacement and  403–404 Saltzman, Esther Bendit  612 Sampayo, Carlos  xiv Samplerman  155, 156 Sartre, Jean-Paul  476 Satire on Stone: The Political Cartoons of Joseph Keppler (West)  633 Satire Paradox  210 Satrapi, Marjane  257, 259, see also Persepolis (Satrapi) Sattler, Peter  99 Saudek, Kája  248, 250, 253 Saunders, Ben  651 Saunders, Norman  517 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne)  182 scene-to-scene transitions  502, 506 Schelly, Bill  647 Schmarc, Vit  249–250 Schodt, Frederik  638 scholar-fans 221 Schuiten, François  535, 541, 622 Schulz, Charles  126–129, 645 Scott, Darieck  360, 450, 466 Scott, Joan W.  272 Scott, Randy  652 Scream, The (Munch)  191 Searle, John  37, 50 second-degree comics  251 Secret Identity Crisis: Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America (Costello)  668 Secret Origins of Comic Studies, The (Smith and Duncan)  631–632, 635, 638–639, 642

index   711 Seda, Dori  419 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky  358, 369–370 Seduction of the Innocent (Wertham)  634 Segal, Judy Z.  311–312, 315, 320, 324 Šejić, Stjepan  579, 583 self-referentiality of cartoons  123–126 self-reflection and comics studies  659–661 self-regulation and self-censorship  241–255 classical literature, use of  251 the Czech Youth Union  241–242 effects of  251–253 meek and submissive comics  247–250 parodies 250 and speech bubbles  242–247 semiotic communication  32–33 Senghor, Léopold  348 sequence in comics  126–129, 262 materiality and  264 McCloud on  77, 132, 204, 262, 493 single-panel  132–133, 138–139, 141–144 sequence versus space  77, 78 sequential art, Eisner on  17, 132, 635 Series of Unfortunate Events, A (Snicket)  458 75 Personal Sketches of Paintings (Reinhardt) 109–110 Sewell, Edward H.  638 Sex and the City 144–146 sex comedies in films and comics  591, 593, 595, 596–598 Sex Criminals (Fraction)  589–591, 604 change, inspiring  605–609 comic-book publics of  600–605, 609 engagement with readers in  606 feminist exploitation and  590–591, 595–599 sex positivity  605 Sfar, Joann  350 Shahani, Nishant  359–360 shapes in cartoons  119–120 Shapiro, Jonathan (“Zapiro”)  181–182 She-Romps  602–603, 605 Shepheardes Calender, The (Spenser)  64–66 Sheringham, Michael  349 Sherwood, Don  560–561 Shin Takarajima (Tezuka)  xiii Shooter, Jim  358, 374–375, 521 Showa: A History of Japan (Mizuki)  539

Shuster, Joe  xii, 514–515 Sibran, Anne  350 Sie, James  474–489 analogy and  476 anamorphosis  474, 477–487 memory and  474–475 visuality and tellability in model of forgetting 483–487 see also Still Life Las Vegas (Sie) Siegel, Jerry  xii, 514–515 Siegert, Bernhard  82 Sienkiewicz, Bill  521 signifiers in cartoons  121–122, 125 Sikoryak, Robert  153–154 Simba, from The Lion King 182 Simmonds, Posy  614 Simon, Joe  211 Simone, Gail  389 Simonson, Walter  520 single-panel comics  132–147 Bonil’s marked figureheads  179–186 as comics  138–146 efficiency of  139–141 El-Adl’s woman  173–179 Gado’s political cartoons  166–173 sequentiality and  133, 138–139, 141–144 United States history of  133–138 Yellow Kid 133–134 Sino-British Joint Declaration  534 sites of transaction, comic books as  666–668 Siuhak  536–539, 549 “Hong Kong Trilogy”  548 see also Harbor Heroes (Siuhak) skimmers 165 Sloan, John  99 Small, David  258, 264 small-press comics  149, 234 Smith, Greg M.  631 Smith, Ladd  213 Smith, Matthew  631, 634, 638, 651, see also Secret Origins of Comic Studies, The (Smith and Duncan) Smith, Sidonie  274 Smolderen, Thierry  xii, 69, 72, 327, 439 smudged kitsch  244 Snicket, Lemony  458 social change, comics as vehicles for  590

712   index social commentary through cartooning  203–215 and anticartoon action  206–209 efficacy of  204, 212 image-text interdependence  204–206 influence of  209–213 social interaction, language as  30–32 social problems  4 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)  6–7 Society is Nix (Maresca)  99 solidarity, limits of  380–383 Solo, Han  520 “Something Unpleasant and You” (Engelberg)  317–318, 321 source-oriented adaptations  616–617, 623 Sousanis, Nick  5, 7–8, 273 studies of comics and  644, 648, 649, 679, 682 spanked kids  444–445, 447–449 Sparklings, The (Jiskrovci) (Fischer)  245–247 Sparling, Jack  560, 569 spatial navigation in comics, see reading spaces spatio-topia of comics  79, 129, 150 specificity in cartoons  119–120 speech act theory  31 “Speech Bubble” (Holmewood)  37–38 reading  40, 41–47, 49–52 speech bubbles  36–52, 79, 204 in the Czech Republic  242–247 in Thor 407–408 from parrot  327 reading  38–40, 47–52 Spence, Robert and Philip  441–444 Spenser, Edmund  64–66 Spider-Man replacement  387 Spiegelman, Art  xii, 94, 98, 206, 468 animals in comics  329–330 studies of comics and  645 see also Maus (Spiegelman) Spiegle, Dan  569 Spielberg, Steven  620 Spiers, Miriam  88–89 Spirit, The (Eisner)  569 Springer, Frank  569

“St. George Triumphant and the Prophet Iliou” (Bost)  207 Stahl, Walter, see Still Life Las Vegas (Sie) staircase  64, 65, 69 standard languages  24–25 Stanley, John  568, 569 Staples, Fiona  586 Star Trek  562, 564 Star Wars comics  520 merchandising 519–521 Starlin, Jim  521 Statue of Liberty  197, 200 statues in Bonil’s comics  184–186 Steedman, Carolyn  439, 440 Steedman, Pete  228 Stein, Daniel  660–661 Stein, Gertrude  95–97 Steinlen, Théophile-Alexandre  326 Steranko, Jim  5 stereotypes in comics  557 female characters in superhero genre  389 of racial identity  446–447, 450–451, 555–556, 558–559 see also caricatures Stevens, Colin  231 Stevens, Connie  559 Stevenson, Noelle  455–468 Lumberjanes  457, 458, 462–466, 468 Nimona  455–462, 466–467 Stewart, John  567 Still Life Las Vegas (Sie)  474–487 forgetting in  479, 480–483, 487 images and memory  484 story and stucture of  478–483, 485, 486–487 Stitches (Small)  258, 264 Stokes, Miles  373 Storr, Robert  106 story shuttle  85 strangeness in comics of children  449–452 heterosexualities and weird romance  369–373 of romance stories  369, 370 Strathie, Andrew  216 Streetwize Comics 232–234 Streicher, Juliius  207

index   713 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The (Kuhn) 3–4 Struwwelpeter (Spence and Spence)  441–444 Studdy, G. E.  514 studies of comics  3–15 academic development of  6–7, 11–13 academic programs for  650–652 cited works, most popular  635–639 cross-fertilization and  649–650 emerging areas of  646–649 fandom and  5–6, 643–644, 647, 676–677 future of  642–655 historically 4–5 in the United States  631–641 institutional infiltration, need for  650–652 interdisciplinary 656–670 language in  22 methodology 632–633 multimodality  660, 663 neglected comics of television adaptations 568–570 post-2000 works on comics  634–635 as practitioner-scholar  671–686 pre-2000 works on comics  633–634 and self-reflection  659–661 the state of the field  658–659 theory, role of  8–11 use of comics in  647–648 value of  653–654 subject-to-subject transitions  502, 506 Sullivant, T. S.  326 Summit of the Gods (Baku and Taniguchi)  30 Sun, The (Masereel)  xii Sunstone (Šejić)  583 Super Gals  519 Super Heroes Secret Wars 521 “Superhero Comics and the Authorizing Function of the Comic Book Paratexts” (Stein) 660–661 superhero genre  664 animals in  327–328 diversity in  387–395, 554 Fawaz on  360, 362–363, 383 Nimona as  462 origin of in comics  575, 612 queerness in  360–362, 379, 382–383, 461–462 sexism in  395–396

spin-off characters of  392 stereotypical female characters in  389 studies of comics and  645 white men with power of  388–392 Superman (Siegel and Shuster)  xii action figures of  514–516 surfaces, curved  124–126 “Survivor” (Engelberg)  318–322 Swahili 22 Swift, Jonathan  192 Swinnerton, James  327 swiping  152, 153 symbolism of language  18–20 “Symphony of Light” (Siuhak)  543 System of Comics, The (Groensteen)  78–79, 150, 634 braiding, metaphor of  341 Tabachnick, Stephen E.  270, 612 tabular systems of pages  78, 84 Tallarico, Tony  560, 568 Tammany Hall  205 Tango (Pratt)  346 Taniguchi, Jirô  30 tapestry, metaphor of  342–343 Tardi, Jacques  613, xiv tatreez 84–87 Taussig, Michael  648 Tavin, Kevin  681 taxonomy of layouts  9 Taylor, C. J.  199 Teaching Comics and Graphic Narratives: Essays on Theory, Strategy and Practice (Dong) 270 Teaching the Graphic Novel (Tabachnick)  270 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 420 television adaptations  553–572 Dell and Gold Key Comics, history of 554–556 forgotten comics of  567–570 race in comics  553–554 racial diversity in  556–560 social and cultural issues in  562–567 style of  560–562 Telgemeier, Raina  464 “Tell-Tale Heart” (Poe)  619–620 tellability and memory  483–487

714   index Telnaes, Ann  213 Terms and Conditions (Sikoryak)  154 Terry and the Pirates (Caniff)  xii Tetsuwan Astro (Tezuka)  xiii text comics  244 text images  204–205 text messaging and comics  36–37, 42–52 texts, comic books as  664–665, 668 Tezuka, Osamu  xii, xiii, 222 That Deaf Guy (Daigle)  23–24 Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings (Bynneman) 64 Theisen, Nicholas A.  638 “thematic Disneyization”  513 Theory of Narrative Drawing, A (Grennan) 150 third wave feminism  413, 421, 427 30 Cases of Major Zeman (Weigel)  248–250 This Book Contains Graphic Language (Versaci) 635 “This Golden Week” (Siuhak)  543–544 Thomas, Grant  684 Thomas, Roy  520, 578 Thor  378–380, 407–408 replacement of  387, 403–404 Thor (Aaron)  402–418 criticism of  403 feminist alliance of heroes in  415–417 “Freyja and Odin”  404–406 “Freyja and Thor”  411–413 “Odinson, Freyja, and the Heroes Arrive”  413–416 origin story of  406–407 “Thor and Crusher Creel”  409–410 “Thor and the Hammer”  407–408 “Titania and Thor”  409–411 “Thor and Crusher Creel” (Aaron)  409–410 “Thor and the Hammer” (Aaron)  407–408 Thor Odinson  404, 405, 413–414 Thorne, Stuart and Tony  227 Tige, pit bull terrier (Outcault)  327, 447 Tilley, Carol L.  268 Tintin (Hergé)  xiii, 346, 441, 646 humor of  440 Tintin in America  126, 127 tipped-in images  58–59

“Titania and Thor” (Aaron)  409–411 Tolkien, J. R. R.  22, 577–578, 585 Tolmie, Jane  483 Tolstoy, Leo  48–49, 210, 211 toothless satire  210 Töpffer, Rodolphe  xii, 55, 72, 335, 576 cartooning of  115, 126, 678 on graphic novels  615 Torres, Angelo  560 Total War 568 Toy Biz  527–529 toys, see action figures Traces en cases (Marion)  150 Trajan’s Column  55 trans persons  381–382, 594, 606–607, see also queer politics in comics transitions 502 translations 33 English to Swedish  26–28 Japanese to English  29–30 traumas and comics  262 Trengove, Martine  226 tressage  81, 84 Trettien, Whitney  67 Trillium (Lemire)  32–33 Trillo, Carlos  xv Triumphs of Gods revenge against the Crying and Execrable Sinne of Murther, The  56, 57, 59–60, 64, 69 Trollope, Anthony  623 trolls, Internet  396–398, 408 Tronchet, Didier  350 Troutman, Phillip  10 Trump, Donald  397, 605, 607–608 editorial cartoons of  167–171 Trump and Kim: The Morning After (Gado) 169–171 Tullis, Brittany  457 Tumblr 154 Turing, Alan  288 Turner, Kathleen J.  646 Tuska, George  517 Twain, Mark  196 Tweed, William M. (“Boss”)  205 Twelve Cent Archie (Beaty)  664 typefaces 203

index   715 Uderzo, Albert  xv Uncle Sam  199–200 uncreative writing  155, 156, 158 “Undead” (Engelberg)  322 underground cartoonists  94 underground comics  222–224 Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (McCloud) 633–634 on cartoons  115–116, 158 on comic form  270 on comics versus graphic novels  203 on panels  54, 157 on pictures  560 sequence in  77, 132 on single-panel comics  138–139 studies of comics and  648 undrawing comics  154–159 Unflattening (Sousanis)  273, 648, 679 United States and Australia, comics industry in  218–219, 222, 224, 226 comics studies in  631–641 single-panel comics, history of  133–138 underground comics in 1980s  222–224 Unlucky Citizen, The (Kirkman)  70, 71 unoriginal genius  151, 159 Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s (Beaty) 635 Upchurch, Roc  579, 583, 584 Uprising (Feininger)  105 Urricho, William  635–636 validation from variation  126–129 Vampire (Carr)  228, 229 van Venne, Adriaen  70 variation in cartoons  126–129 Varnedoe, Kirk  101–105 Vaughan, Brian K.  586 Vaughn-James, Martin  620–621 vernacular dialects  25 Versaci, Rocco  635 villains as necessary characters  459–461 Villavicencio, Fernando  179 Virilio, Paul  40

Visaggio, Magdalene  380, 381 visibility, queer politics and  365–371, 373 visual literacy, comics in the classroom  272–273 visual vocabulary  133 visuality and memory  483–487 vocabulary of comics, see language Vodicka, David  226 volvelles  67, 69 Wachs, Benjamin  403 Wales, James Albert  197 Walker, David  220 Walker, Mort  5 Walking Dead, The (Kirkman)  586 Walsh, Dan  154–155 Walsh, John  268 Walsh, John A.  647 Walt Disney licensing products  513–514, 529 Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories 555 Walters, Barry  362 Walton, Robert  70 war comics genre  664 Ward, Lynd  xii Ware, Chris  xii, 98, 344, 541, 658 Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth 500 Warhol, Andy  97 Warner, Charles Dudley  196 Warner, Michael  600, 602 Wart’s Epic 228 Watasin, Elizabeth  423, 425 Watchmen (Moore and Gibbons)  xvi–xvii, 204, 500, 646 Waterman, Des  230 Watson, Julia  635 Watters, Shannon  462 Watterson, Bill  121 Calvin and Hobbes  121–122, 137 Waugh, Coulton  55, 633–634, 636–637 Ways of Seeing (Berger)  124 Weaver, Lila Quintero  259, 265–266 Weaver-Hightower, Marcus B.  682, 684 webcomics in Baddawi (Abdelrazaq)  84 Wee Willie Winkie’s World (Feininger)  96–97 Weekes, Trevor  225

716   index Weigel, Jaroslav  248–250, 253 Weiner, Robert G.  268, 638 Weird Tales  229, 578 Weitkamp, Emma  680 Well, Orson  xii Wells, John  553 Wells, Paul  328, 331 Wertham, Fredric  5, 634, 636, 639 West, Richard Samuel  632–633 Western Publishing  554–556 Weston, Stan  516 What Is Art? (Tolstoy)  210 “What Were Comics?”  7, 644 wheels  66–67, 69 Whitbrook, James  406 White, Brett  403 White, Michelle  89 white supremacists  397–398 and superhero genre  388–392 Whitlock, Gililan  268 Whitson, Roger  681 Whitted, Quina  270 Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere (Chute)  658–659, 661–662 Wiebe, Kurtis J.  573, 577, 583, 584, see also Rat Queens (Wiebe) Wild & Woolley Comix Book 223 Wildfeuer, Janina  32, 647, 657, 663 Williams, Ian  651 Williamson, Al  520 Wilson, Matthew  403, 406 Wilson, Tom  137, 140–142 Wimmen’s Comix  419–421, 425 Witek, Joseph  9–10, 569 citations of  633–634, 639 on photoreferenced characters  560–562 reading protocols of  75, 76–77, 80 studies of comics and  645 Wither, George  67 Wolfman, Marv  521 Wolk, Douglas  615 Wolverine replacement  387 Woman’s World (Rawle)  475 women action figures of  519 as readers of comics  458 as subjects of comics  173–179, 190–191

as symbols of political body  174–175 see also feminism in comics; specific comics titles Women and Economics (Gillman)  449 women-in-prison genre  591, 593 Wonder Woman  153, 642 Woo, Benjamin  152, 568, 577, 586, 668 Flow: A Critical Forum on Media and Culture 660 Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society 656 media, comics as  660 self-publishing comics  676, 677 studies of comics and  644, 647, 649, 656, 658, 659 Wood, Wally  517 Woody Woodpecker  664, 667 Woolf, Michael Angelo  445, 446 Woolley, Pat  222–224 Worcester, Kent  638 word balloons, see speech bubbles wordless comics  250 words, tradesmen of  60 Workwize 233 World’s Greatest Super Heroes (WGSH)  518 Worsham, Lynn  413, 415, 417 Wright, Bradford W.  633–634, 668 Wright, Rebecka  419, 420–421 Wyeth, Ezra  219 X-Men 462 and queerness  360, 362–365 Yahgulanaas, Michael Nicoll  76, 82, 87–90 Yamashita, Karen Tei  475 Yang, Gene Luen  293–294, 301, 303–304 American Born Chinese  269, 569 on comics  302 duality of  299 see also Boxers and Saints (Yang) “Yellow Kid and his New Phonograph” (Outcault) 327 Yellow Kid (Outcault)  441, 445–446, 513 humor of  440 in history of comics  55 as single-panel comic  133–134 Yellow Peril  294

index   717 Yeoh, Brenda  534 Yeung, Hok-tak  537 Young, Arthur Henry (“Art”)  207 Young, Paul  577 young adult graphic novels  455–470 Lumberjanes  457, 458, 462–466, 468 Nimona  455–462, 466–467 Young Harris College comics donation 647–648 Young Lawyers, The 564–566 Yugoslavia xiii Z-Path 84 Z pattern framework reading  53 Zanettin, Federico  xvi–xvii zaniness, aesthetics of  581, 583–586

Zap Comix (Crumb)  256 Zapiro (Jonathan Shapiro)  181–182 Zdarsky, Chip  598 Zeck, Mike  521 Ziggy (Wilson)  137, 140–142 Zimmerman, George  461 Zine Collection at the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University  423, 431 zines  425–428, 431–434 Zodiac Man 65–66 Zograf, Aleksandar  259, 263 Zorbaugh, Harvey  5 Zullo, Valentino  654 Zuma, Jacob  181 Zurier, Rebecca  95