Scott McCloud’s articulation of the universality of cartoon imagery (‘when you enter the world of the cartoon—you see yourself’ [36]) has come under much scrutiny during the years since Understanding Comics first ushered the medium into the spotlight among academics. I am partial to this growing collection of perspectives that seeks to complicate the idea that comics naturally invite readers into their worlds. Gillian Whitlock, in her reading of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, offers one such complication; ‘there can be no simple universality in the associations produced by cartooning across very different relationships’ (977), she writes. Even a cursory survey of the tools, topics, and stylistic and generic choices that cartoonists have employed in their work reveals that comics do not make us all one in our experiences; instead the form (as with any form) exhibits a proliferation of divergent approaches to life—some that pull us in with their imagery and others that seem determined to alienate. Additionally, universalizing claims tend to neglect the medium’s capacity to help readers “re-see” known events or experiences with new points-of-view. Of course, another problem with universalism is that what we understand as a universal worldview tends to be dictated by those who have the power and voice to control the world’s goings-on.

Yet, despite my skepticism of universalizing claims, there is a danger in simplifying or skirting the context in which McCloud made his statement. Indeed, McCloud’s notion of cartoon universality is born out of the fact that our identification with cartoon imagery manifests itself differently than it does in images with their own unique representational indices (photography, film, etc.). That is, McCloud understands comics in terms of how the cartooned image “works” distinctly from other forms of expression. I would like, then, to revisit this matter of how we see ourselves in comics imagery in order to keep the claims for universalism in play, even as we see the need to complicate or even undermine them. To approach the matter, this essay will veer anecdotal and personal, examining in a very limited and specific way how cartoon imagery might move readers to contemplate self, other, and the relations between the two. Despite the individuation of the example, hopefully what I write will have some resonance for others, whether we understand that possible response as a gesture toward universality or not.

If you are familiar with my creative work in comics, you might know that in 2001, my mother was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. Although the cancer went into remission after surgery and chemotherapy, it returned in metastatic form soon after and became very much a part of her life until her death in 2007. Her treatments determined her daily schedule; the taste in her mouth limited her appetite for certain foods; fatigue and fever dictated where she would spend her days—in bed, on the couch, in the garden, out shopping. My mother’s public, “presentable” self was one that worked to conceal the day-to-day decisions and dilemmas that her private self faced. While cancer has entered the popular imagination in more constructive and candid ways than when Susan Sontag drew attention to its ‘[c]onventions of concealment’ (7) thirty years ago, the personal narrative of cancer remains hazy or, as in the case of my mother, anxiously hidden. I remember how she would respond to seeing photographs of herself—images taken by my father at parties, restaurants, or during short trips—with embarrassment or feigned disbelief (‘Do I really look that tired?’), as if determined to keep her sick self separate from her performed self. The photographs seemed to tell her that the public body that she displayed, with its awkward wig and layers of makeup, was not doing its job of disguising her private identity. It did the job just fine, of course; close friends at her memorial service shared stories about how alive and active she was during her last few years while knowing full well the severity of her illness. As Erving Goffman has suggested, our selves are always performing; our performances are our realities. Still, I—like my mom before me—feel uncomfortable looking at the most recent photographs of her in ways that I never felt when we were face to face. There is something about the photographic image that is limiting—that binds us to the particular moment it captures. Standing in front of family and friends, my mother was alive, moving, changing; in the photographs, she is, to use the language of Roland Barthes, ‘condemned to the repertoire of [their] images’ (38).

During our last Thanksgiving together, I was confronted with an image of my mother that was in stark contrast to the photographs that captured her six years of life with cancer. The family had gathered around my cousin’s newly acquired Nintendo Wii to make “mii”s for ourselves to use in play. In constructing cartoon avatars—choosing from a selection of simple head shapes, eyes, noses, hair colors, hairstyles, body types, skin tones, and accessories—we all knew better than to recreate ourselves into anything other than we were; any attempt to give ourselves thicker hair (my balding dad), greater stature (my vertically-challenged cousin), or a smaller nose (my olfactory-enhanced self) would be rejoined with unrelenting mockery, making the initial “fault” seem all the worse. Thus, we made our selves extra bald, extra short, and extra nosey. As McCloud might put it, we were amplifying and simplifying. Of course, I was curious about the mii my mom would construct for herself. At that point, she had been living with cancer for about five years. Given the visible side effects of the treatment she was on at the time (including hair loss and facial discoloration), I (stupidly) wondered whether she would resurrect a self without disease. Indicting my naiveté, she gave her mii short and relatively tamed hair that resembled the coif of her wig rather than choose something akin to the unwieldy mane that she had pre-cancer. She also adorned her mii with large, Jackie O-styled sunglasses that covered much of the mii’s face. The outlandishly-sized glasses would have hidden the effects chemotherapy had on her face, but they also simply jibed with her distinct style; she would have purchased a real version of those glasses. The choices she made that afternoon brought together a private self and a public identity—conflicting but entwined. Among the countless photos of my mom collected in albums and shoeboxes (before cancer, after cancer, during remission, during treatment), not one offered the kind of self-representation that this cartoon version provided; the character was her “mii,” but it was also her “me.” My mother’s revision of her body into this sharply-angled and simplified figure allowed for a representation of self that, unlike those photographs that worked to limit and constrict her, was latent with life.

I don’t mean to diminish the value of the photographs we have (or anyone’s photos of loved ones); nor do I want to overdetermine the impact of what was designed solely for play. Still, in piecing together that cartoonish mii, my mom was able to share some of the dilemmas and realities she faced regarding her illness in ways that I still don’t see in the photographs. The photos we have of my mom serve as a kind of evidence—a testament to her life, actions, appearance. They provide my family and me with a meaningful record and, standing alone as they do in frames on the mantel or the wall, we look to them to see how she was, when she was; they rouse us to remember what she wore, what she did, how she smiled. But the confines of the lens determine that remembrance. Indeed, not only do the photos limit (or “secure,” for a less pejorative connotation) my mom to the repertoire of their images, but they provide the perspective of someone outside looking in—a snapshotter who shares the space of the experience, but is not apparent in how that experience is represented on film. Furthermore, any stranger looking at the photos of my mom would have little idea about the role my dad played as caregiver; his perspective as photographer becomes misunderstood or even commandeered by that of the observing stranger.

Of course, a similar statement could be directed toward the cartooned mii. Anyone not there that Thanksgiving afternoon would have little sense of the particular context that subscribes meaning to it for me. But perhaps that is part of the cartoon’s power (and, with the inclusion of select words, the power of comics narrative). A few years after her death, during a talk I gave at my University, I presented a reproduction of that same cartoon mii together with my mom’s story. My audience—largely students who were well-versed in Wii dynamics themselves—directed expressions of identification and sympathy toward that mii much moreso than toward the photograph of my mom that I had also showed to them; while the photographic image produced varying degrees of emotion, in that manifestation, my mom remained uncomfortably remote and unfamiliar to them. While McCloud’s theories on the universalization that comics imagery offers are simplistic, as “unreal” or cartoonish as the mii was, it allowed my mom to see herself and, years later, allowed others access to her.

In creating a mii that Thanksgiving afternoon, my mom was able to tap into the vocabulary of comics in a way that encouraged sympathy and community on her own terms. I’m almost certain that she would roll her eyes at me if she knew the weight that I had placed on her simply shaped self-display—not because she would disagree with my assessment, but because my mom tried, when she could, to avoid intellectualizing the heavy stuff (or the light, depending on how you look at it). But on most occasions when we would roll our eyes at each other over some subject that the other had put a great deal of store in (isn’t that the way it is with mothers and daughters?), there were many instances outside of the bounds of our relationship that testified to the values each of us defended. In this case, the sympathy generated by my mom’s mii has its parallel in the comic representations of illness, and cancer in particular, that have become thematic mainstays in all manifestations of the comics medium (a catalog of which is constantly updated by Ian Williams and MK Czerwiec on graphicmedicine.org). If my mom’s mii could help me to reflect on the personal dilemmas she faced while living with cancer, I believe that comics and their cartoon imagery in general might offer larger-scale insight into the dilemmas we face when confronted with a number of issues that need universal acknowledgment, if not universal empathy.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland (1994): Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Berkeley.

Goffman, Erving (1959): The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, New York.

McCloud, Scott (1994): Understanding Comics, New York.

Sontag, Susan (1978): Illness as Metaphor, Toronto.

Whitlock, Gillian (Winter 2006): “Autographics: The Seeing Eye of Comics” in Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (965-79).

Mita Mahato is Associate Professor of English at the University of Puget Sound where she teaches courses in Visual Studies and Cultural/Literary Theory. Her scholarly work traces the relationship between narrative and illness, examining contemporary and hybridized media in particular (hypermedia, comics, photo-essays). She is also a collage and comics artist. Her work in comics often using collage and cut-outs in order to draw attention to the material quality of the form and the people and situations she takes as her subjects. To learn more about her larger creative work-in-progress, please visit theseframesarehidingplaces.com.

Vertigo, DC’s adult-oriented imprint, has been repeatedly praised for having ‘fully joined the fight for adult readers’ in the early 1990s (Weiner 2010: 10). It has been noted that this “fight” coincided with the imprint’s ‘adoption of the graphic novel format’ as well as ‘a new self-awareness and literary style’ which ‘brought the scope and structure of the Vertigo comics closer to the notion of literary text’ (Round 2010: 22). However, little attention has been devoted to the very cultural identity of the imprint, even if Vertigo has since its early days engaged in an intro- and retrospective discourse on the American comics form, its history, and the power relations inherent to its industry. This short essay intends to start filling that gap by investigating Vertigo’s archival impulse. It argues that in deploying various rewriting strategies which engage with specific past (comics) traditions, the label has activated a unique memorious discourse that provides a self-reflexive and critical commentary on the structuring forces of the American comics field, its politics of domination and exclusion, and hence its canons.

Inter- and hypertextuality have been central to Vertigo’s cultural identity since its debut. The titles that launched the imprint in the early 1990s (Animal Man, Doom Patrol, Hellblazer, Sandman, Shade the Changing Man, and Swamp Thing), for example, are all reinterpretations of earlier horror and supernatural titles from the DC universe. Of course, the common “reinvention” denominator that characterizes this cluster of titles and the early years of the imprint did not take place in a vacuum. Many comics had paved the way for this before the creation of the imprint in 1993. Alternative comics from the 1980s such as Love and Rockets and The Rocketeer, for instance, were very influential re-imagined sci-fi comics. Superhero texts such as Watchmen (1986-1987) and The Dark Knight Returns (1986) also engaged in genre revision and, in so doing, problematized issues of continuity as well as complicated the mythology of long-running series and/or characters (cf. Klock 2002). However, as Round (2010) has argued, proto and early Vertigo comics differed from revisionist superhero titles of the 1980s and their “grim and gritty style.” The titles that launched the label were ‘reconceived […] not simply as “more realistic” superheroics,’ but instead as texts offering ‘mythological, surreal, religious, and metafictional commentaries on the comics medium and industry’ (Round 2010: 16). Round maintains in fact that these early Vertigo series ‘absorbed and subsumed their previous [DC] incarnations’ (2013: 327) and that therefore ‘[t]he notion behind Vertigo was one of redefinition’ (ibid.).

I couldn’t agree more. However, I wish to point out that because all of these early Vertigo comics revolve around what I prefer to describe as “rewriting” [1] insofar as they dislocate characters from their original contexts and rearticulate them into new ones that notably explore horror and the occult as well as mix self-reflexivity with generic subversion, they brought coherence and credibility to the label’s editorial project. The fact that the Vertigo label was retro-actively applied to, for example, texts such as Alan Moore et al.’s Swamp Thing (1984-1987) and the first 46 issues of Sandman (1989-1993) is not innocent since these series carried the seeds that would later establish the cultural identity of the imprint, namely subversive rewriting strategies, metafictional elements, and an illogic of fantastic and uncanny worlds semantics. In fact, taken together, the early Vertigo titles’ obsession with specific past (comics) traditions and the de- and/or reconstruction of these traditions founded the label’s poetics of demarcation through a particular politics of commemoration. Although sharing some similarities with the movement of revisionist superhero narratives, this politics of commemoration highlights the imprint’s willingness to engage with inter- and hypertextual strategies beyond the superhero genre. Since its debut, the label has indeed combined its revisiting of the DC archive with a fascination for the heritage of the pulps and the cherishing of Gothic tropes and motifs, a polymorphous (postmodernist) rewriting ethos that still animates the cultural identity of the label today.

Vertigo’s revisiting of the DC archive, for instance, can be seen in the imprint’s reinterpretations of the House of Mystery (2010-2011) and House of Secrets (1996-1998) DC anthologies, its reprises of old series and/or characters (Unknown Soldier (1997, 2008-2011), Haunted Tank (2009), Uncle Sam (1997), as well as the series of titles published under the sub-imprint “Vertigo Visions” (1993-1998)), or else in the satire of the war comics Our Army at War in Rick Veitch’s Army@Love (2007-2008). The label also clearly reclaims the cultural heritage of the pulps with its strong focus on popular genres. Serial narratives such as Sandman Mystery Theatre (1993-1999), 100 Bullets (1999-2009), and Scalped (2007-2012), the whole “Vertigo Crime” sub-imprint (2009-2011), and the collections of short graphic stories Strange Adventures (2011) and Time Warp (2013) clearly resonate thematically or otherwise with many successful pulp genres such as science fiction and crime stories, as well as with pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories, Marvel Tales, and Spicy Detective.[2] Finally, the imprint’s fascination for terror and horror stories can be observed in numerous titles such as Sandman (1989-1996) and its many spin-offs, In the Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe (2003), Industrial Gothic (1995-1996) and The House on the Borderland (2004) which is adapted from William Hope Hodgson’s 1908 eponymous supernatural horror novel. More specifically, these Vertigo texts and others articulate many of the dominant features of Gothic fiction such as the fragmentation of identity, the blurring of the boundaries between fiction and reality, the interplay between the supernatural and the metafictional, and finally the presence of ghosts and doppelgängers.

As suggested earlier, the implications of these rewriting strategies and the archival impulse behind them should not be underestimated. As Henry Jenkins reminds us in a recent essay exploring the archival, the residual, and the ephemeral in Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004): ‘collections and stories are both ways of managing memory’ (2013: 303). Therefore, according to Jenkins, processes ‘(re)performing this memory work’ (ibid.) should not and ‘cannot be separated from […] the formation of canons of comics’ (2013: 302). In other words, Vertigo’s rewriting and archival ethos functions as a memorious discourse, a discourse that is able to disrupt the canon-formation practices that permeate the structuring forces of the American comics field. And in distancing itself from the mnemonic and residual strategies adopted by the mainstream and alternative poles of the industry,[3] Vertigo has adopted a subversive middle-ground position in regards to the mainstream/alternative dialectic.[4]

For example, Vertigo revisions of older DC material – including the revisiting of less popular, second-class, or long-forgotten characters and/or series – draw attention to the heritage of mainstream comics beyond the superhero genre. In fact, Vertigo’s’ “archaeological excavation” of previous DC texts that do not belong to the superhero tradition or ambiguously refer to the superhero can be said to function as a specific effort of patrimonialization, one that “writes back” to the canon-making practices of the mainstream industry which, quite unsurprisingly, has relied on its most enduring genre to engage with the history and memory of its publishing lines but, in so doing, has strongly overshadowed other comics traditions and other possible narrative worlds. It is true that this “excavation” has very much depended on the artists’ knowledge of these past comics – which were the ones they read in their youth – and that, therefore, a certain superheroic nostalgia inevitably permeates the comics of Moore, Gaiman, and other early Vertigo writers usually associated with the so-called “British invasion.” Nevertheless, the nostalgic approach of these artists has always been an informed, critical, and self-reflexive one which called into question some of the dominant generic codes of the industry, particularly that of superheroics.

In a similar fashion, the imprint’s fascination with the pulp tradition not only illustrates how Vertigo distances itself from the mainstream press, it also challenges the sometimes elitist and difficult tone and aesthetics of the alternative pole of the industry. The label implicitly mocks, it seems, the alternative artists and editors’ rejection of genre-based comics, and more generally, the denigrating discourse held against pulp fiction and comics.[5] Moreover, in embracing the pulp tradition, Vertigo seeks other allegiances than the ones developed by alternative artists such as Chris Ware and Art Spiegelman who regularly pay homage to early 20th century comics, including Krazy Kat, The Katzenjammer Kids, and Little Nemo in Slumberland. It is true that although they most likely attracted different audiences, both early 20th century strips as well as pulp magazines were deeply commercial and popular. Nevertheless, alternative artists’ recurrent invoking of early 20th century strips is very specific. More often than not, alternative artists focus on the themes of rêverie and (self-)reflexivity that were central to these past cartoonists’ works. Additionally, in recurrently drawing our attention to some of the structuring units of the comics form (panels, pages, strips) as well as in comparing and/or connecting architecture to and with the fragmented nature of comics and (traumatic) memory,[6] alternative artists pay tribute to how early 20th century cartoonists inventively played with moment-to-moment transitions, geometric plotting, and what Scott Bukatman describes as the ‘mapping of spatio-temporal illogic’ in discussing Krazy Kat (2012: 45, italics in the original). In contrast, Vertigo comics’ intertextual engaging with the pulp tradition revolves around the exploring of genre boundaries, “cheap thrills,” and provocative as well as exploitative storytelling techniques. Thus, at the risk of generalizing, whereas alternative artists ‘aim at giving their works,’ as Jeet Heer puts it in discussing Chris Ware’s comics, ‘a pedigree and lineage’ that is arguably rooted in formal experimentation and aesthetic innovation (2010: 4), in focusing on violence and in re-exploring crime- as well as sci-fi-related contents with self-reflexive twists, Vertigo comics not only acknowledge the populist and sensational origins of comic books, but also ironically play with and comment on the “low-brow” status marker that is often associated with the pulp tradition. Arguably, Vertigo’s cherishing of pulp themes and aesthetics may also be read as a reaction against alternative comics’ ‘dominant narrative modes,’ i.e. ‘tragedy, farce, and picaresque’ (Hatfield 2005: 111), and how in favoring these modes, the alternative pole of the industry may have emphasized its elitist and highbrow tone and aesthetics, thereby ‘sustain[ing] some of the hierarchies of literary and artistic value that have long marginalized comics,’ as Marc Singer puts it analyzing Ware’s oeuvre (2010: 29).

Finally, Vertigo’s Gothic inclinations also participate in the label’s specific logic of commemoration and attendant politics of demarcation in regards to the mainstream/alternative dichotomy. After all, the politics of canon-making, according to Harold Bloom, imply ‘strangeness [and] uncanny startlement rather than a fulfillment of expectations’ (1994: 3). Vertigo’s de- and reconstructionist take on many popular genres as illustrated in titles such as Animal Man, Flex Mentallo (1996), and Fables (2002-) certainly echoes the idea of transgression that is so characteristic of the Gothic. So too does the thematization of monstrous excesses, masking, and the carnivalesque in narratives such as Preacher (1995-2000) and Enigma (1993). The ‘spectral trope of haunting’ so characteristic of the Gothic, Round contends (2012: 336), is also reminiscent of the strategy of ‘retconning’ at work in titles such as Sandman and Swamp Thing (2012: 338). She defines retconning as ‘retroactive continuity, whereby past events are expunged or characters’ parameters reformulated’ (ibid.). More generally, however, her argument speaks to how countless Vertigo texts – be they inspired from older DC material, pulp fiction, and/or other traditions – are haunted by “ghostly visitations.” In other words, many Vertigo comics operate as “counterfictions” that oddly transform the idea of Gothic enclosure, i.e. the haunted house. Moreover, the multi-path and branching plots narrative strategies that Vertigo series such as Jack of Fables (2006-2011), The Unwritten (2009-), and Air (2008-2010) articulate find echo with the recurrent use of sinuous and cryptic settings such as labyrinths, catacombs and castles in Gothic fiction. More specifically perhaps, the sometimes complex and multi-layered rewriting strategies that these series and other Vertigo comics activate can be said to function as “(inter)textual ruins” that metaphorically resonate with the Gothic’s cherishing of maze-like, decaying, and/or devastated settings and locales. Following that logic, it should come as no surprise that the protagonists of Jack of Fables, The Unwritten, and Air find themselves lost or trapped in unknown countries and/or forgotten territories, “other” narrative dimensions, and/or alternate (literary) realities. Thus, the logic of possible worlds that characterizes these and countless other Vertigo comics is reminiscent of the ways in which Gothic texts metaphorically explore the boundaries between the real and the fantastic on the one hand, and of how the Gothic generally evokes the transgression of a unique, coherent, and self-contained reality on the other. In short, these and many other Vertigo comics epitomize a form of postmodernist ontological instability that presents itself, as Brian McHale would have it, as ‘an anarchic landscape of [fictional and textual] worlds in the plural’ (1987: 37).

Last but not least, historically speaking, Vertigo’s redeployment of Gothic tropes and themes also seems to directly resonate with the cherishing of zombies and other monsters of the ill-fated company of the 1950s: EC Comics. And in paying homage to EC while promoting what one might describe as “the return of the repressed,” Vertigo implicitly criticizes the censorship initiated by the Comics Code and, a fortiori, how mainstream comics became the “victims” of their own normative imprisonment.

Against the background of these observations, it is possible to argue that the label may well have revived the Gothic tradition in comics to highlight how, according to David Punter (1996), the Gothic develops itself in response to social trauma – read here not only the cultural stigma that genre-based comics creators, fans, and readers have suffered from, but also the ways in which both the mainstream and alternative spheres of the American comics field may have reductively formatted the industry, or at least, consolidated the agendas characterizing both ends of its spectrum. To put it somewhat differently, Vertigo’s cherishing of Gothic themes may be read as a kind of “testimonial literature,” one that makes use of ghosts, monsters, and uncanny storyworlds to ironically expurgate the demons haunting some of the past and possibly traumatic ‘“symbolic handicaps” that have contributed to the devaluation of comics as a cultural form’ (Beaty 2012, 19).

By way of conclusion, one could certainly evoke how Vertigo’s poetics of rewriting and politics of commemoration challenge Thierry Groensteen’s claim that comics is an ‘art without memory,’ an art that ‘gladly cultivates amnesia’ (2006: 67, my translation). It is in fact both surprising and interesting to note that Vertigo’s rewriting ethos seems to perfectly embrace Spiegelman’s archive-minded understanding of comics. The alternative artist and editor has indeed claimed – when asked in Angoulême last year to provide his short history of the comics form – ‘the future of comics is in the past’ (Spiegelman 2012, video). Obviously though, not any past. In recurrently paying homage to the DC archive beyond the superhero, the pulp tradition, as well as Gothic fiction, Vertigo has refashioned a certain historical and canonical matrix of comics which self-reflexively engages with the shifts in the meanings of cultural hierarchies both within and outside what Bart Beaty, drawing on the work of Howard S. Becker, has called ‘a comics world’ (2012: 8).

In having developed this specific memorious discourse for over 20 years, however, one might wonder if Vertigo has not commodified the strategies of rewriting that are part and parcel of its cultural identity. In adopting an ambiguous middle-ground position in regards to the mainstream/alternative dialectic, Vertigo has in effect very much developed an endogenous-spirited mind. The label’s logic of commemoration has indeed been closing in on itself, as is exemplified in the recent cover for the anthology Vertigo Essentials (2013) reproduced below. This cover portrays several popular characters from well-known Vertigo series gathered in a library – the archival space par excellence – and reading either the works they feature in or other famous works published under the Vertigo banner. Thus, although the label may have attempted to ‘redefine’ the medium (cf. Round 2010) in constructing its own canon – thereby both corroborating and sustaining the idea that ‘comics cannot be legitimated in the absence of canonical works’ (Beaty 2012: 9) – it has done so in a very subjective fashion. In other words, Vertigo’s archival impulse can be read as a specific memorious discourse, but one that contains criticism within a set of prescribed paradigms that reproduce some of the same prejudices that the label seems so keen to call into question and subvert.

Ryan Sook’s cover for the anthology Vertigo Essentials, 2013. ™ and © DC Comics. Used with permission.

Works Cited

Beaty, Bart. Comics vs. Art. Buffalo, London, and Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.

Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. London, New York, and San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994.

Bukatman, Scott. The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2012.

Dony, Christophe. “Reassessing the Mainstream vs. Alternative/Independent Dichotomy, or, the Double Awareness of the Vertigo Imprint.” In Christophe Dony, Tanguy Habrand, and Gert Meesters (eds.). La Bande Dessinée en Dissidence: Alternative, Indépendance, Auto-édition / Comics in Dissent: Alternative, Independence, Self-Publishing. Liège : Presses Universitaires de Liège, forthcoming.

Dony, Christophe and Caroline Van Linthout. “Comics, Trauma, and Cultural Memory(ies) of 9/11.” In Joyce Goggin and Dan Hassler-Forest (eds.). The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature: Critical Essays on the Form. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. 178-187.

Dony Christophe, Tanguy Habrand, and Gert Meesters (eds.). La Bande Dessinée en Dissidence: Alternative, Indépendance, Auto-édition / Comics in Dissent: Alternative, Independence, Self-Publishing. Liège : Presses Universitaires de Liège, forthcoming.

Groensteen, Thierry. La Bande Dessinée: Un Object Culturel Non Identifié. Angoulême: Éditions de l’An2, 2006.

Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.

Heer, Jeet. “Inventing Cartooning Ancestors: Ware and the Comics Canon.” In David M. Ball and Martha Kuhlman (eds.). The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. 3-13.

Jenkins, Henry. “Archival, Ephemeral, and Residual: The functions of Early Comics in Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers.” In Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon (eds.). From Comics Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2013. 301-324.

Klock, Geoffrey. How to Read Superhero Comics and Why. New York: Pantheon, 2002.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. 2nd ed. Harlow: Longman, 2010 [1996].

Round, Julia. “‘Is this a Book?’ DC Vertigo and the Redefinition of Comics in the 1990s.” In Paul Williams and James Lyons (eds.). The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. 14-30.

—. “Gothic and the Graphic Novel.” In David Punter (ed.). A New Companion to the Gothic. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2012. 335-349.

—. “Anglo-American Graphic Narrative.” In Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon (eds.). From Comics Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2013. 325-346.

Singer, Marc. “The Limits of Realism: Alternative Comics and Middlebrow Aesthetics in the Anthologies of Chris Ware.” In David M. Ball and Martha Kuhlman (eds.). The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. 28-44.

—. Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2012.

Smith, Erin A. “Pulp Sensations.” In David Glover and Scott McCracken (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 141-158

Spiegelman, Art. “Une histoire personnelle de la bande dessinée.” Le Musée privé d’Art Spiegelman, Angoulême: CIBDI. October 25th, 2012. [Accessed on March 2nd, 2013]. URL <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRIASI8PAD0&list=PLJWCjsENkVUzDAjJCIefndyJgDpA7OLQu&index=1&gt;.

Christophe Dony is conducting doctoral research on the functions of inter- and hypertextuality in American comics at the University of Liège, Belgium. He is a member of ACME – an interdisciplinary research group dedicated to comics scholarship – with which he has contributed to the volume L’Association: Une utopie éditoriale et esthétique (Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2011). He recently co-edited Comics in Dissent: Alternative, Independence, Self-Publishing (Presses Universitaires de Liège, forthcoming) and Portraying 9/11: Essays on Representations in Comics, Literature, Films and Theatre (McFarland, 2011). His articles have notably appeared in The International Journal of Comic Art, The Comics Grid, and Studies in Comics.

[1] – Applying the term ‘rewriting’ to an art form with a strong visual component has its limits. Nevertheless, as I am primarily interested in the literary ramifications and intertextual influences pervading the poetics and politics of the imprint, I saw it fit to stick to the term. Moreover, it should be pointed out that a majority of Vertigo titles are scriptwriter-driven and/or are often borne from a writer pitching a story to the editorial staff of Vertigo – the artwork thus being often relegated in second position in the industrial process. This being said, by no means do I contend that Vertigo titles do not allude to, refer to, or quote other works visually. In fact, I would encourage scholars to carry out research examining the ‘aesthetic kinship’ or ‘iconographic genealogy’ permeating the visual styles of Vertigo artists.

[2] – The titles of these collections of graphic short stories also engage with DC’s back catalogue. Strange Adventures was the title of DC’s first science-fiction series which started in the 1950s. Likewise, Time Warp was a short-lived mini-series published by DC between 1979 and 1980.

[3] – For a critical exploration of the highly connoted terms “mainstream” and “alternative” and how their use and implications vary across both time and space in specific comics markets and fields, see Comics in Dissent: Alternative, Independence, Self-Publishing (Dony, Habrand, and Meesters, forthcoming).

[4] – As Marc Singer has observed in discussing the works of Grant Morrison, Vertigo ‘[has] sought to occupy the space between superheroes and alternative comics’ (2012: 21). The label, Singer contends, has ‘carve[d] out [an] interstitial market […] within the comics industry,’ a market ‘that fell between younger and older readers, new and familiar genres, mainstream content and independent creative practices’ (2012: 27, emphasis added). For a fuller discussion of the hybrid identity of Vertigo in regards to the mainstream/alternative dialectic, see Dony, forthcoming.

[5] – It has indeed been well recorded that the pulps of the early 20th century, as well as the dime novels of the late 19th century from which they developed, were ‘banned from public libraries, scorned by respectable periodicals, and widely held to feature stories that were commodities rather than works of art’ (Erin Smith 2012: 145). Unsurprisingly, similar charges have been pressed against the comics form during most of the 20th century: comics have been criticized for their lack of cultural relevance and aesthetic creativity.

[6] – The parallels between the fragmented construction of a comics page/work and architecture is most visible in Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers and, quite unequivocally, in Ware’s Building Stories. For more insights on the possible correspondences between the breakdown of the comics page/work and the structure of (traumatic) memory and how both re-collect and re-member fragments, see Dony and Van Linthout (2010).

Many critics and reviewers have hailed the comics of Chris Ware as a form of modernist cultural practice, with comparisons being made to canonical modernist writers such as James Joyce, Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett, John Dos Passos and Gertrude Stein.[1] As Kuhlman and Ball have pointed out (x, xviii), critics have repeatedly identified Ware’s affinities with modernism: his theory of impersonality (Sattler), his use of repetition and interrupted narratives (Goldberg), the themes of alienation and commodity culture in his work (Prager), the interaction between memory and circularity (Bartual) and the presence of a modernistic, melancholic masculinity in the anthologies edited by Ware (Worden, ‘Shameful’; see also Worden, ‘Modernism’s Ruins’). This essay extends the modernist framework that has previously been used to analyse Ware’s work, with a specific focus on the Civil War battle scene in Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000).[2] I will relate this scene’s formal features to a group of writers who are sometimes placed under the sign of modernism, albeit as an early outpost: the literary impressionists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.[3] Tamar Katz summarises as follows:

[Proponents of literary impressionism] voiced the idea that existing conventions of representation were inadequate to capture the world’s complexity[.] [I]mpressionist fiction delivered this critique by suggesting a rift between conventions of realist representation and the subject’s perceptions, as well as between realist conventions and the simultaneity of the object world. […] In thus focusing modernist fiction on the perceptual processes of the subject, impressionism draws attention to the problematic nature of subjectivity. (5) [4]

By reading Ware’s work in relation to these concerns, and making connections to writers such as Joseph Conrad and Stephen Crane, I hope these brief notes will show some of the impressionistic impulses in Jimmy Corrigan.

However! I’ve got two reservations about this approach, so I want to be careful if I’m going to pursue such connections. The first note of caution is that, while the tendency to relate Ware to modernism has produced some terrific and intelligent insights into his work (as the above references indicate), on some occasions constructing Ware as a comic-book modernist seems tied up with the habit of fitting comics into established hierarchies of cultural value in order for them to appear credible and worth commenting on. To take Peter Schjeldahl’s 2005 article on graphic novels:

[G]raphic novels are a young person’s art, demanding and rewarding mental flexibility and nervous stamina. […] The difficulty of graphic novels limits their potential audience […] but that is not a debility; rather, it gives them the opalescent sheen of avant-gardism. Avant-gardes are always cults of difficulty—Cubism, ‘The Waste Land’—

After making this point, Schjeldahl emphasises the ‘difficulty’ that runs through the art of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the poetry of T. S. Eliot, and the comics of Chris Ware. Why? To encapsulate a moment in which, to quote the article’s subtitle, ‘Graphic Novels Come of Age’. Schjeldahl’s article appeared in The New Yorker, so (unlike most of the pieces mentioned above) he’s not writing in a peer-reviewed academic journal or edited collection – but then, neither am I. As I continue this hybrid of academic article and blog, it’s worth asking (if only to myself) whether tracing affinities between Chris Ware and literary impressionism risks inviting in that unwanted dinner guest, the “Comics Grow Up!” cliché.

Before I provide an answer to that query, the work of other Ware scholars prompts a second note of caution in my head, and another question: what is Ware’s attitude towards modernism? This is discussed in a thought-provoking chapter by Marc Singer in the edited collection The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking (2010). Writing about the comics anthologies that Ware has edited, Singer reads him as positioning alternative comics between the crass commercialism of the superhero genre and the pretention and abstraction of modern art. Quoting from Ware’s introduction to The Best American Comics 2007, Singer writes that in ‘Ware’s telling, modernism and its successors “all but stomped out the idea of storytelling in pictures,”’ (36) and Ware’s friend Dave Eggers points out ‘Ware looks fondly back to a time before modernism crushed almost all of art’s flourishes, eccentricities, and organic forms.’ (316) In 1991 Ware became a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, where his desire to draw comics drew the disdain and mockery of his tutors (Raeburn 12). Not that Ware wanted comics to be accepted by the ruling orthodoxy of the art establishment, seeming ‘almost grateful for this expulsion, treating it as a fortunate fall that exempted comics from the abstractionist and conceptualist bent of twentieth-century art.’ (Singer 36) As Bart Beaty notes, Ware’s preference is for representational art in comics, ‘a strategy that he feels was driven from the other arts by the demands of modernism’ (222). In another chapter from The Comics of Chris Ware, Katherine Roeder continues the theme of Ware’s problematic relationship with the art industry. Appropriately enough, given Ware’s experience with the tutors at the Art Institute of Chicago, a ludicrous, leering art teacher [5] in The ACME Novelty Library #17 illustrates Ware’s ‘distaste for contemporary art’ (Roeder 74). Given the teacher’s pretentious mimicry of Marcel Duchamp, the avant-garde artist famous for turning everyday objects into art exhibits, it seems fair to see this character as a way of satirising the conceptual art that Duchamp pioneered and inspired (Roeder 66-69).[6]

The above paragraph should explain my wariness about reading Ware’s comics in light of literary impressionism, a cultural movement with modernist shadings. But let’s not close the laptop and get back to marking just yet. While the concept “modernism” arches over literature, painting, sculpture, dance, photography and filmmaking (and so on), Singer, Eggers, Beaty and Roeder all seem to be using the term specifically in relation to the visual arts. Where literary modernism is concerned, Ware seems more receptive, and last year he chose Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) as his favourite book (Greenstreet).[7] Furthermore, I’m not sure how fully we can establish Ware’s resistance to modernist visual art, since Cubist painter Pablo Picasso provides one of the epigraphs to Ware’s Building Stories (2012), a ‘graphic novel’ composed of fourteen comics in a box. Is Ware even that opposed to Duchamp’s conceptual provocations? He cited the avant-garde artist’s ‘Museum in a Box’ as an inspiration for Building Stories (Kaneko and Mouly).

Faced with these apparent contradictions, an obvious conclusion would be that “modernism” is being deployed in varying ways to construct different constellations of creative practice. Because the term has this slippery meaning, when Ware, his friends and his critics refer to his hostility towards modernism it can be difficult to ascertain which type of modernism is causing the problem. Drawing on Singer, Roeder and Beaty, it seems fair to summarise that Ware’s objection is to the empire of abstract, non-representational art that extended over the American art establishment (its histories, exhibitions and teaching institutions) in the century after Duchamp’s earliest pieces. In addition, Ware’s suspicion is not towards Duchamp himself. Rather, the object of Ware’s satire is the disproportionate amount of attention that critics and curators invest in Duchamp’s derivative successors. Ware’s greatest mockery is reserved for those artists who sideline technical skill and elevate bare appropriation (of images and of prefabricated objects) into an art-form.

Bearing in mind, then, that Ware’s resistance to modernism is more like a resistance to the pretentiousness and seeming lack of craft in some forms of conceptual art, in this essay I’ll be emphasising literary impressionism as a way to address Ware’s comics. It gives us a way of talking about Ware’s experimentation, the demands his comics make on readers, but in terms of his attempt to engage formally with sensation, memory and psychological verisimilitude. Further, an interpretative framework of literary impressionism fits Jimmy Corrigan’s themes and content: significant portions of the narrative are set in the 1890s and Ware has expressed his admiration for the culture of the very early twentieth century.[8] Going back to the question raised by my first hesitation, there are gains as well as dangers in tracing similarities between comic creators and canonical literary figures. These comparisons can enhance our understanding of Ware’s command of technique and the ethical implications of his formal play. They don’t have to be the fealty that must be paid to write about comics; they can give us additional ways of reading and enjoying Ware’s comics, and Jimmy Corrigan specifically.

Fig. 1. Image used with the permission of the artist.

The sequence I am going to analyse is on pages 100 and 101 of Jimmy Corrigan (fig. 1 and fig. 2).[9] The layout and content of the panels on pages 99 and 102 (woodland scenes featuring a red and white bird) virtually mirror each other, bookending the battle scene and seemingly setting it aside from Jimmy Corrigan’s narrative with twin moments of quiet pastoral contemplation. As we read page 100 it takes a little while to realise it is the 1860s and we are watching an episode from the American Civil War (1861-65) – the last panel in which we were anchored in a specific time and place was on page 98, when we knew it was the 1980s and we were in Waukosha, Michigan.

Fig. 2. Image used with the permission of the artist.

The first human presence in this scene is in panel three of page 100. The first panel on the page is a smaller and differently coloured version of the first panel on page 99, with a cursive caption that finishes the sentences begun in the previous panel: ‘A chill morning in April / moist with the scent of settling peach blossoms.’ Ware’s language (touching on the temperature, the moisture in the air and the smell of peach blossom) and the soft, changing colours of pages 99-100 (evoking the meandering light of daybreak) bear out the immersive intentions that Conrad declared for his fiction in 1897. Conrad wrote that if fiction’s appeal to temperament is to be effective, then it must be an impression conveyed through the senses[.] [All art] appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its high desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. (Preface 280)

Ware is working in words and images, not just ‘written words’, so there’s a limit to the applicability of this quotation, but I trust the general point stands: the slow pace and Ware’s ‘appeal through the senses’ accumulates into a multidimensional impression of the American countryside rising from sleep.

The second panel on page 100 is an overhead view of leaves lying on the ground and the third is identical – except for a human hand sitting on top of the fallen foliage. Given the bucolic impression up to that point, the sudden apparition of the hand, appearing without comment, speed-lines or flowing blood, has the surprising effect of a cinematic jump-cut. But readers who have followed the plot so far may not be too disturbed by its appearance, since it echoes an earlier moment when William Corrigan gave his son James a hand broken off a statue at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition (where William is working as a glazier). So maybe the hand on page 100 is another piece of statuary? The potential horror of the severed body part is not enforced by the following panel, the last in the row, which is cheerfully alliterative. This fourth panel introduces ‘A Party / of freshly breakfasted bookbinders, barbers and bottlemakers’. However, as the eye tracks down and left to the first panel on the second row, we are unambiguously in the throes of war: this party of small businessmen is revealed to be a company of soldiers being ‘blown to pieces.’ There is no attention-grabbing punctuation or hysterical exclamations, only a “Waresque” deadpan delivery. The understated appearance of the hand, uncommented on as the progression of panels moves on to herald the party of small businessmen, invites readers to double-take; when panel five on page 100 is read, retrospective awareness makes the status of the hand legible. This is no statue.

Let’s see a more elaborate instance of the retrospective reading process. There are two time periods interwoven in this scene, the April morning in which the fighting is taking place and three panels interrupting the temporal and spatial unity of the battle scene. These three panels depict a dimly-lit pair of trees with two animals beneath, clearly at night with rain coming down. With a little effort we can connect the trees in the two time zones and be confident this is the same geographical location, but at a different moment in time. Eagle-eyed readers might identify the two animals illuminated by a flash of lightning as pigs. But as we read through (for the first time) we have to entertain a suspended closure of meaning, we have to hope that the relation between parts will be revealed – and it is, on the verso of the page. Before we turn over, the cursive narration tells us ‘Only one unlucky hero will be left to see / by the light of a midnight thunderstorm’, and it concludes on page 101 ‘the chewed-up bits of his company / swollen and split in the rain / and fed upon by hogs / freed from the surrounding farms.’ Now the import of those three panels is clear, and the rhythm of the build-up maximises the horror and the slow, grim realisation of what fighting and dying in the Civil War entails. To borrow a term from Conrad scholar Ian Watt, this is delayed decoding – an image is first offered in an indirect manner, perhaps half-seen, or only perceived through a sound-effect – but the incident is revealed in fuller detail retrospectively (270).[10] Certainly, Ware is using another literary technique to make the reader work that little bit harder. But it’s not stylism for the sake of stylism. This technique speaks to the trauma of the ‘unlucky hero’ watching as his fallen comrades provide a macabre night-time dinner for the escaped hogs. Perhaps the images of battle are the projection of the ‘unlucky hero’ who cannot break out of the trauma inflicted during the fighting, a soldier compelled to repeat the violence inside his head. As Roberto Bartual has written of Ware’s comics, ‘memory can […] produce a state of paralysis [that] frequently makes us go against our survival instincts, neutralising our power of action and becoming dwellers of our own remembrances.’ (66) In relation to pages 100-01 of Jimmy Corrigan, the present has not been permanently banished, since the three panels show the midnight thunderstorm breaking into the inner world of the unlucky hero, but this intermittent intervention of the present does not decisively interrupt the repetition of the fighting. Thinking about verb tenses, the future perfect of ‘one unlucky hero will be left to see’ grammatically suggests that the hogs have yet to start eating the dead soldiers, even though the reader has already seen the porcine feast. The violence has already subsided, since we have seen the pigs on page 100 and the aftermath of the battle on page 101, and the cursive narration has told us what will happen to the bodies of the fallen, but it is still going on in the mind of the company’s sole survivor, someone yet to move psychologically into the present. That present flickers on the edge of consciousness, and leaves its mark like the afterimage of a lightning strike, but is kept at bay (the last panel on page 101 appears to take place after the fighting but before nightfall). The surviving soldier may be William Corrigan, who tells his son that he lost the middle finger on his right hand capturing a Confederate soldier during the battle of Shiloh, where 3,744 men were killed. In the last panel of page 100 the ‘unlucky hero’ shoots the same finger off, in order to be invalided out of further combat. This figure seems to be the last member of the company left alive, in the right-hand corner of page 101. Pages 100-101 are set in April, the same month that the battle of Shiloh took place.[11] I would argue that the cursive narration not only reflects William Corrigan’s psychological shock, it conveys the way he reshapes the story of his missing finger in front of his son (and presumably others too). The new identity that William narrates for himself is one of noble self-sacrifice, turning himself into an ‘unlucky hero’. Ware’s choice of language puts me in mind of the narrator of Henry James’s novella Daisy Miller (1879), whose description of the young man Winterbourne invites readers to be sceptical of his character and conduct, even though the words are superficially diplomatic: ‘when certain persons spoke of him they affirmed that the reason of his spending so much time at Geneva was that he was extremely devoted to a lady who lived there—a foreign lady—a person older than himself.’ (8-9) ‘Extremely devoted’ indeed; ‘unlucky hero’ indeed.

Still, if Ware gives us the subtle clues to see through William Corrigan’s deception, he is compassionate about the conditions that led him to shoot off a finger. Ware’s portrayal of military conflict embodies why the American Civil War was so shocking and traumatising for the soldiers who experienced it. Brought up on a diet of weekly British war comics in the 1980s, there’s something eerily detached about this battle scene for me. It breaks with several conventions of Anglophone war comics, since there are neither speed lines to indicate flying bullets nor words written outside speech balloons to signify explosions. Abandoning these techniques conveys the speed of the fighting and its psychological trauma. The American Civil War pioneered new technologies of mass killing, notably the use of machine guns (Ellis). On Ware’s pages the soldiers are depicted as simply coming apart; the wave of bullets is so complete that it would be meaningless to depict individual projectiles. This chimes with the depiction of warfare in Stephen Crane’s Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895), which also declines to iterate the continual presence of bullets in the air. They are assumed to be there and they constitute the medium which the soldiers inhabit. This is a lethal ambient environment but, in an era of automated weapons, the presence of gunfire is so constant it has formed the unremarkable texture of war. In addition to the cursive narration adding information to the scene, a second layer of prose narration is added as an exegesis to the unfolding events. This second layer of narration describes the absent sounds of the battle, but places them within the thought balloons of the combatants. This gives the impression the soldiers perceive the noise of the war as something emanating from inside their heads. Once more we appear to see combatants retreating into a psychological interior to escape the violence, but the cacophony of modern war has entered that solipsistic world with them. Psychologically as well as physically, we are seeing the barriers of the self ruptured amidst the bloodshed of the American Civil War.

Earlier, we saw Chris Ware saying that modernism and its successors ‘all but stomped out the idea of storytelling in pictures’ (qtd. in Singer 36). The scene just analysed requires patience and dexterous reading, but the challenges it presents abide by Ware’s impulse to tell a story in pictures. For these reasons, literary impressionism strikes me as an appropriate reference point for this episode in Jimmy Corrigan: as a cultural movement, literary impressionism was an augur for interwar modernism, but its practitioners are far more grounded in the narrative structures and formal expectations of nineteenth-century popular genres than the more experimental and conceptually driven texts of the modernist canon (see Fagg). I like the above reading, and I think we’ve gained some insights into Ware’s comic by way of this literary comparison, but I’ve only mentioned a handful of pages. Does the comparison work for the rest of Jimmy Corrigan? Does it work for other comics by Chris Ware? Does it affect our reading of the Paul Cezanne poster in the hospital waiting room in Jimmy Corrigan, seeing as Cezanne exhibited paintings with the Impressionists but is generally thought of as a Post-Impressionist? I’ll be interested to see what others think…

Many thanks to David M. Ball and Ian Hague, for offering comments on earlier versions of this essay, and to Chris Ware, for granting permission to reproduce two pages from Jimmy Corrigan.

Works Cited

Ball, David M. ‘Chris Ware’s Failures.’ Ball and Kuhlman 45-61.

Ball, David M., and Martha B. Kuhlman, eds. The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2010. Print.

Bartual, Roberto. ‘Towards a Panoptical Representation of Time and Memory: Chris Ware, Marcel Proust and Henri Bergson’s “Pure Duration”.’ Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art 1.1 (2012): 48-68. Web. 21 Aug. 2013.

Beaty, Bart. Comics Versus Art. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. Print.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1902. London: Penguin, 1995. Print.

—. Preface. The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. 1897. Rpt. in Heart of Darkness. By Joseph Conrad. Ed. Paul B. Armstrong. 4th ed. New York: Norton, 2006. 279-82. Print.

Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. 1895. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1975. Print.

Eggers, Dave. ‘Chris Ware.’ Masters of American Comics. Ed. John Carlin, Paul Karasik, and Brian Walker. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. 308-17.

Ellis, John. The Social History of the Machine Gun. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1986. Print.

Ezard, John. ‘Cartoon Novel in the Frame for Guardian Book Award.’ The Guardian 7 Nov. 2001: 13. Lexis Nexis. Web. 19 Dec. 2006.

Fagg, John. On the Cusp: Stephen Crane, George Bellows and Modernism. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2009. Print.

Gilmore, Shawn. ‘Public and Private Histories in Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan.’ Ball and Kuhlman 146-58.

Goldberg, Myla. ‘The Exquisite Strangeness and Estrangement of Renée French and Chris Ware.’ Give Our Regards to the Atom Smashers! Writers on Comics. Ed. Sean Howe. New York: Pantheon, 2004. 204-07. Print.

Greenstreet, Rosanna. ‘Q&A: Chris Ware.’ The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 12 Oct. 2012. Web. 21 Aug. 2007.

James, Henry. Daisy Miller. 1879. London: Penguin, 1995. Print.

Kaneko, Mina, and Françoise Mouly. ‘Chris Ware’s Big Box of Melancholy.’ The New Yorker. Condé Nast, 7 Sept. 2012. Web. 21 Aug. 2013.

Katz, Tamar. Impressionist Subjects: Gender, Interiority, and Modernist Fiction in England. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 2000. Print.

Kidd, Chip. ‘Please Don’t Hate Him.’ Print 51.3 (1997): 42-49. Print.

Kuhlman, Martha B., and David M. Ball. ‘Introduction: Chris Ware and the “Cult of Difficulty”.’ Ball and Kuhlman ix-xxiii.

Matz, Jesse. Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print.

Nissen, Beth. ‘A Not-So-Comic Comic Book.’ CNN.com. Cable News Network, 3 Oct. 2000. Web. 4 Apr. 2007.

Parkes, Adam. A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. Oxford Scholarship Online. Web. 19 Aug. 2013.

Prager, Brad. ‘Modernism in the Contemporary Graphic Novel: Chris Ware and the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’ International Journal of Comic Art 5.1 (2003): 195-213. Print.

Raeburn, Daniel. Chris Ware. London: King, 2004. Print.

Roeder, Katherine. ‘Chris Ware and the Burden of Art History.’ Ball and Kuhlman 65-77.

Sattler, Peter R. ‘Past Imperfect: “Building Stories” and the Art of Memory.’ Ball and Kuhlman 206-22.

Saunders, Max. ‘Literary Impressionists.’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, n.d. Web. 17 Aug. 2013.

Schjeldahl, Peter. ‘Words and Pictures: Graphic Novels Come of Age.’ The New Yorker. Condé Nast, 17 Oct. 2005. Web. 5 Sept. 2013.

Singer, Marc. ‘The Limits of Realism: Alternative Comics and Middlebrow Aesthetics in the Anthologies of Chris Ware.’ Ball and Kuhlman 28-44.

Ware, Chris. Building Stories. London: Cape, 2012. Print.

—. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. New York: Pantheon, 2000. Print.

—. ‘Q and A with Comicbook Master Chris Ware.’ Time.com. Time, 1 Sept. 2000. Web. 5 Sept. 2013.

Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. London: Chatto & Windus, 1980. Print.

Worden, Daniel. ‘On Modernism’s Ruins: The Architecture of ‘Building Stories’ and Lost Buildings.’ Ball and Kuhlman 107-20.

—. ‘The Shameful Art: McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Comics, and the Politics of Affect.’ Modern Fiction Studies 52 (2006): 891-917. Print.

Paul Williams is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature in the Department of English at the University of Exeter. He finished his PhD in 2005 and subsequently filled a variety of teaching roles, notably Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Plymouth. He has been at the University of Exeter since 2008, first as a Teaching Fellow, and as a Lecturer since Sept. 2010.

[1] – See Ezard; Goldberg; Kidd; Nissen; Ware, ‘Comicbook Master’.

[2] – Where texts have been serialised and then published later in one volume, dates given are for the first collected edition.

[3] – Literary impressionism refers to a group of writers who were biographically linked, but their coherence as a movement was loose and only stressed by some of its members late in the day. Max Saunders’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography puts the focus on Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad and Stephen Crane, but other literary impressionists are available. Notable twenty-first-century works of criticism include Tamar Katz’s Impressionist Subjects: Gender, Interiority, and Modernist Fiction in England (2000), John Fagg’s On the Cusp: Stephen Crane, George Bellows and Modernism (2009), Adam Parkes’s A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing and Jesse Matz’s excellent Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (2001).

[4] – I’ve used Katz’s summary here as a shorthand for my thinking about literary impressionism, but pinning the term down has proved difficult for well over a century. Parkes argues that the ‘term “impressionism” may be slippery, confusing, and contradictory, but such untidiness was intrinsic to the role it played in modernist aesthetics and in the literary and cultural battles of its time. Literary impressionism was partly about this problem [of definition].’ (10)

[5] – As Roeder comments, there is a degree of self-mockery in calling the teacher ‘Mr Ware’ (66). She notes the Mr Ware character is used to lampoon pop artist Roy Lichtenstein (66), and Bart Beaty comments ‘pop art has become the primary locus of ressentiment for cartoonists. Thus, in an untitled strip published in the back of the Uninked catalogue (2007), which he edited, Chris Ware depicts his disdain for the art world generally by focusing on pop art specifically.’ (55)

[6] – Roeder records further instances of Ware deriding the thoughtlessness of Duchamp’s readymades (74).

[7] – Ware named Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878) as well as Ulysses.

[8] – ‘I just prefer the craftsmanship and care and humility of design and artifacts [sic] from the earlier era. […] There seems to be a sort of dignity to the way we were creating the world a hundred years ago’ (Ware, ‘Comicbook Master’).

[9] – I have determined pagination for this scene by counting back from the two pages (206-07) in the comic which are given numbers.

[10] – To take an example from Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1902), where delayed decoding gives added impact to Conrad’s critique of the inhuman and racist regime running the Belgian Congo: ‘A slight clinking behind me made me turn my head. Six black men advanced in a file, toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their loins, and the short ends behind wagged to and fro like tails. I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope; each had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain whose bights swung between them, rhythmically clinking.’ (33)

[11] – Shawn Gilmore also reads the fighting as the battle of Shiloh (151).

As an educator, I’m always looking for new ways to engage students. As someone who teaches philosophy at a large state school—in fact, at a prototypical American Research University—I’m always trying to convince college students that my subject matter is truly relevant, to their lives and to their budding careers. At the very least, I try to make philosophy fun. And one of the tools that I have developed to help achieve these goals is to use visual arts, especially non-traditional arts like comics, in the classroom.

So, the rest of this post is going to be about what I’ve observed from using comics in the classroom. I’m going to focus on two main things: one positive, and one less so. I think that both of these observations are worth taking seriously.

Fun things first: many college students love popular culture, and comics are a part of that. Part of my academic work (writing papers, giving talks) is in the philosophy of comics and video games. Whenever students discover this less-stuffy side of my academic life they are inevitably shocked and excited. I can’t tell you how many times students have come up to me after class to say something like “so, I was looking at your website; do you really go to Comic-Con every year?” or “did you actually write those papers about Halo and Zelda?” I can just see my cool points accruing. (Of course, using terms like ‘cool points’ makes them plummet.) Regardless, the fact that I do this kind of work makes my students more enthusiastic about me, and my classes.

Now, on to the less positive observation: the students who get excited about this, and come up to me after class to talk about it, are always male. Always. Not once has a female student remarked on these subjects to me. This worries me. Specifically, I worry that this means that comics and video games are exciting, fun, and popular topics—but that this is generally true mainly in an area that might be called male pop culture, rather than pop culture more broadly.

Perhaps now is the time to state explicitly that I myself am female. So I know that comics can appeal to women! I find them appealing. But I also know that I’m something of an anomaly. As was mentioned above, I go to Comic-Con every year, and I usually participate in the Comic Arts Conference held there. That’s a gathering of comic arts scholars that happens within the larger Comic-Con—talks are held, posters are presented, and panels discuss (please see this for more information about the wonderful CAC). For the last three years I have given a poster at the conference. And in those three years I have had many wonderful conversations about my presented work, with attendees from the larger con who have come by to check out the comic scholarship. But once again, most of my partners in this kind of dialogue have been male.

There could be, and no doubt are, many explanations for these gendered observations. I could be an unreliable observer—perhaps my actual experience has been one in which I spoke to equal numbers of men and women, but I have misremembered it as gender-imbalanced. Or, my experience could simply be an unrepresentative sample—perhaps I have recalled my experiences correctly, but my experience itself has been unusual, coincidentally imbalanced. Or I could be choosing topics or presenting my work in a way that itself generates the imbalance—selecting for male interest and female disinterest, despite equal amounts of general interest in comics from both genders.

However—and sadly, I think this is the most plausible option—the explanation for my observations of a gendered experience within comics culture could simply be that, at least in American popular culture, comics culture tends to be predominantly male. In other words, within the wider “male pop culture” there exists a narrower field of male comics culture. And by “male comics culture” I mean something like: the majority of comic book fans are male, and correspondingly, content created by the comics industry is chiefly driven by this (perception of a) largely male audience.

Quick caveat: I just want to reiterate that my experience is a very American one. Mainstream American comics are superhero comics—and this is a particularly male strain of comics, in terms of its characters and creators and readers. It should be noted that, in other traditions (for example, Japanese comics), what counts as mainstream is different (i.e., manga), and this can give these comics cultures a different feel (for instance, as gender-balanced, or even predominantly female).

And now a qualifier of the caveat: this restriction of the scope of my claim about comics culture does not mean that this post applies only to the use of American comics within American classrooms. There’s a wider lesson here, about teaching more generally—a lesson which says that it’s important, when making an appeal to popular culture of any particular kind, to pay attention to whether that appeal is an inclusive or an exclusive one, and if it’s exclusive, to try and remedy that somehow. More on this in a bit.

Ok, one thing I could do next is to try and argue that this male comics culture really exists within the wider American popular culture, and/or explain why it exists. But I’d rather skip that part. I think that this is a place where a lot of ink has already been spilled (see this for discussion of a recent case; or see the classic Women in Refrigerators), and I’m not sure how productively. I’d rather talk instead about how to handle this rather unfortunate circumstance.

Of course, one thing to do about the situation is to try and change it for the better. And thankfully, there are a lot of impressive people working effectively on that angle. Check out the graphic novel Fun Home or comics like The Sandman: A Game of You or books like Pretty in Ink or websites like Has Boobs, Reads Comics or conferences like GeekGirlCon… just to name a few positive examples.

Obviously, there is a lot of effort going towards positive change, and that’s great. But there’s another dimension to the problem that also needs attention—and that’s the fact that we still need to know how to cope with the current situation, whilst also trying to change it for the better.

To restate the problem itself: I like to use tools from pop culture to increase student engagement in the classroom. But I worry about drawing from sources, like comics, that might appeal differently (or not at all) to some groups of students rather than others.

In fact, this worry is similar to one that I have with respect to the use of some very common examples in philosophy. For instance: slavery; the Holocaust; rape; domestic violence. I call these kinds of cases example tropes. This is because they are cases that come up very frequently in ethical discussion. Want to explain to students why cultural relativism is wrong? Bring up slavery, or the Holocaust. Want to discuss consent? Mention rape. How about diminished agency? Talk about victims of domestic violence.

The problem with these particular example tropes is that certain groups of people—namely, those belonging to the demographic consisting of standard victims for these offenses—tend to experience the mentioning of these cases differently than those who are not in that demographic. Mentioning these cases can alienate and discomfort the listener from that particular demographic; they can also elicit stereotype threat.

(Stereotype threat is the risk of diminished performance in a particular area by someone who is the victim of a negative stereotype about their abilities in that area. Demonstrations of stereotype threat include diminished performance by women on math tests after having to note their gender; or, diminished performance on standardized tests by African Americans after having to note their race. Basically, stereotype threat is activated when you remind the victim of a common negative stereotype of that stereotype before testing their acuity in a related area. To learn more about stereotype threat, please see this.)

I try to be very careful about using certain example tropes in the classroom—particularly, the ones that may activate stereotype threat in certain groups of my students. Sometimes, I just can’t avoid using a certain case, because it comes up in a particularly famous or important philosophical piece (after all, they are tropes). When this happens, I try and make sure to include a discussion about example tropes and stereotype threat during my discussion of the case itself and the ethical issue it is being applied to.

Now, returning to the issue of using comics to teach philosophy: I think that a similarly cautious and reflective approach can help to address the risk of using comics in the classroom, given their place in male pop culture.

More expressly, I have developed three distinct ways of handling the problem:

1. Use innocuous images and examples from visual arts without the male pop culture association.

2. Use comics and graphic novels that should have broad un-gendered appeal, if introduced along with efforts to overcome the general male comics culture association.

3. Use comics and graphic novels even if they might have a strikingly narrow range of appeal, but also treat this as an opportunity to have a discussion about things like gendered associations in pop culture, stereotype threat, and implicit bias.

About option 1: I have used this strategy to great effect when teaching paradoxes. Interestingly, I find that paradoxes are often difficult for students to grasp when explained in written or verbal form. But when some sort of visual aid accompanies this kind of explanation, students immediately get the idea.

For example, I frequently use the duck-rabbit and old woman-young lady images to explain the idea of contradiction itself. A contradiction occurs when something both is and isn’t the case at the very same time. Now look at the figures below:

Figure 1. The duck-rabbit (image in the public domain; originally printed in the 1896 Popular Science Monthly).

Figure 2. The old woman and the young lady—hint: the old woman’s nose is the young lady’s chin (image in the public domain; originally printed as a German postcard in 1888, unknown illustrator).

Each of these pictures are of both one thing and another at the same time—and that’s a contradiction! Usually something is a duck, or a rabbit, but not both. And it’s not possible to be both a young lady and an old lady at the same time. But these pictures are both things at once: they are contradictions.

I’ve also used a light-to-dark color bar to explain the Sorites Paradox; and I think that M.C. Escher’s Möbius Strip II (Red Ants) perfectly illustrates the general concept of a paradox. Whenever I use these sorts of visual aids to help explain an idea, students that have been puzzled up to that point suddenly get it. (And as all teachers will know, that’s an incredibly satisfying moment.)

But moving on to option 2: I think that there are a lot of great comics and graphic novels out there that should have broad appeal. Two of my favorites to use in the classroom are Logicomix (for teaching logic and the history of philosophy) and Asterios Polyp (for teaching aesthetics and critical theory). But when I teach using these graphic novels, I make sure and incorporate something of a primer on reading comics into the discussion. I do not assume that everyone in the classroom is familiar with the culture; rather, I try and make the topic generally accessible regardless of prior level of familiarity and interest.

Finally, about option 3: in my experience, this is the trickiest one to handle in the classroom. However, I find it well worth the effort—at least in part because underrepresented students who have felt marginalized in the past tend to give, in my experience, extremely positive feedback (often in person) after having had these issues addressed (in the classroom).

Studies have suggested that there are various methods with which one can help students to overcome stereotype threat in the classroom. For instance, just learning about the existence of stereotype threat helps students begin to overcome it. Additionally, asking students to reflect on and write briefly about what matters to them prior to taking a test diminishes traditional gaps in performance (between men and women in math and physics, for example).

As I mentioned above, whenever I simply can’t avoid using an example trope that I think is particularly likely to activate stereotype threat in the classroom, I then introduce the term and conduct a discussion of stereotype threat with the class. And when I initially use comics with a group of students, I first ask them to recall a positive encounter with a comic. I have the students write or talk about their pleasant personal experiences first, in order to increase the chance of each student relating to and engaging with the topic, before moving on to using comics as a part of the lesson.

These are just a few of the ways that I have tried to mitigate exclusivity while encouraging engaging and inclusive teaching with comics within the philosophy classroom. In sum, these tools have enabled me to use comics in the classroom in just the sort of cautious and reflective way that I think is crucial to overcoming risks of selective appeal, gender bias, and stereotype threat. I get the pleasure of teaching with comics, minus the hazards. Happy teaching, everyone!

Work Cited

Bechdel, Alison. 2007. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston: Mariner Books.

Berlatsky, Noah. 2013. “Some of the Greatest, Most Popular Comic Books Are Feminist.” The Atlantic, August 13. http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/08/some-of-the-greatest-most-popular-comic-books-are-feminist/278593/

Dooley, Michael. 2013. “Taking Comics Seriously: for Insight, Inspiration, and Creative Transformation.” Print, July 10. http://www.printmag.com/comics-and-animation/comics-arts-conference/

Doxiadis, Apostolos, Papadimitriou, Christos H., Papadatos, Alecos, & Di Donna, Annie. 2009. Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth. New York: Bloomsbury.

Gaiman, Neil. 1991. The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You. New York: DC Comics.

GeekGirlCon, Founders. 2011–Present. “GeekGirlCon” (annual conference). GeekGirlCon. http://www.geekgirlcon.com

Mazzucchelli, David. 2009. Asterios Polyp. New York: Pantheon Books.

Pantozzi, Jill. 2008–Present. “Has Boobs, Reads Comics” (blog). The Nerdy Bird. http://www.thenerdybird.com

Robbins, Trina. 2013. Pretty in Ink: North American Women Cartoonists 1896–2013. Seattle: Fantagraphics.

Simone, Gail. 1999. “Women in Refrigerators.” Women in Refrigerators, March. http://lby3.com/wir/

Stoessner, Steven, Good, Catherine, & Webster, Lauren. Undated. “What is stereotype threat?” Reducing Stereotype Threat. http://www.reducingstereotypethreat.org/definition.html

Joyce C. Havstad is a graduate student (ABD) in the Philosophy Department and Science Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego. She specializes in the philosophies of biology, chemistry, and science, as well as in biomedical, environmental, and research ethics. She also loves to do work in feminism and various areas of non-traditional aesthetics, such as the philosophy of mass art and pop culture studies. You can find out more about her work in pop culture studies at www.philady.com, and about her other academic scholarship at www.joycehavstad.com.

Comics studies is a young field in more than its academic standing. With the flourishing of comics production at the moment, it is also young in terms of its texts and its creators.

Many of the texts we work on are less than thirty years old, and in the case of my research they are often less than fifteen years old. With the obvious exceptions of certain established creators, for many of these texts the list of secondary works discussing them is quite short. There are countless comics to choose to write about, and it is easy to find comics that have never been discussed in an academic publication before at all. While comics studies has in many ways been reluctant to establish a canon of the comics we should all know, due to the choices scholars make in the texts they write about, if we were to gauge worthiness or canonicity by what is most often discussed, that canon is quite clear: a quick look at the comics and graphic novels most often discussed in journal articles and books shows the same names cropping up again and again–most notably Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, Joe Sacco, and the British auteurs Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. In the case of newer artists, the only secondary literature available is most often interviews with the cartoonist, writer, or artist in venues like The Comics Journal. But even in that department, the lists of interviews will only be more impressive for established cartoonists.

The numbers of interviews with creators in works cited lists of academic writing also points to two more points regarding comics studies. First, as scholars we do often include interviews in our secondary reading, sometime even conducting them ourselves as part of our research, and secondly, many of the authors and artists we write about are living and thus available to be consulted in analyses of their work. But I think it is notable that comics scholars make a use of the creators as a resource. My own background is in English studies, mainly contemporary literature, and for better or for worse, during my studies I never thought of contacting Toni Morrison or Bret Easton Ellis for the research papers I wrote. As a contrast, on a comics studies discussion list that I am a member of, when a debate about the best ways to interpret certain finer points about a work gets heated, a tie-breaker of sorts is often “why don’t you ask the author?” In many cases, one could indeed do that, since the comics are recent enough and the creators still with us. Of course, in my view, the creator’s answer would not necessarily settle any point of interpretation definitively–it could settle certain facts, like when a comic was first made, matters of what inspired a work, or conscious references the author/artist was including. But in terms of what a work means…the creator’s insight would be only one amongst several.

The Conversations series by the University of Mississippi Press exemplifies the importance of interviews to research in comics: these books collect interviews with prominent comics creators, ones who have been discussed and interviewed often enough to allow for a selection to be made. There are 16 volumes in the series as I write this, including most recently one on Chester Brown–and none of these 16 are about women, I am sad to say, though I may have heard that a volume on a female cartoonist is in the works. It appears that comics scholars are interested in how cartoonists and comics authors perceive their own work. Maybe it is because the trace of the hand of the artist is so evident when you read a comic, allowing for the sense of a personal connection with the creator. Perhaps that is the reason why we (well, I as least) like to get our personal copies of graphic novels signed by their cartoonists, and why scholars want to include them in our conversations about their work. The recent Comics Forum theme month on Comics and Cultural Work shows another approach to making room for comics creators in comics studies, in this case by demonstrating the importance of being aware about how comics are made, the conditions under which they were created and circulate, or even just the basic awareness of the fact that there is a long process behind how the book we read comes to us.

If comics studies ever starts regularly publishing critical editions, like the recent Daniel Clowes Reader, edited by Ken Parille, this kind of information should certainly be included. And yet, does it make a difference to the interpretation of a work whether it was first put out into the world as a webcomic, and was only subsequently picked up by a publisher? Does it change our analysis of a work that one knows whether its creator had a day job or was a full-time cartoonist (see for example Kochalka and Brown in Conversation #2, as discussed by Paddy Johnston a few weeks ago). Until recently I would have said no, the work stands on its own, and while such contextual information can be interesting, it would not affect the work itself.

Then I finished reading Linda Medley’s Castle Waiting, Vol. 2. The final chapter begins with a scene where Jain, the main protagonist of the series, is in the castle library reading a story to her son Pindar to soothe him to sleep. She cuts the story short when Pindar has dozed off and finds herself surrounded by a crowd of sprites, engrossed by the story and angry she won’t finish it for them (443). They love the story so much that they threaten to attack the woman reading it and the library she takes care of out of disappointment in not hearing the rest (446). The situation is resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, but it reminded me of the troubled publication history of Castle Waiting, which had proceeded in fits and starts, had been repeatedly shelved, and in a most dramatic twist saw Vol. 2 prematurely published in 2010, unfinished and without Linda Medley’s name on it, to indicate that she had not agreed to this publication. Whatever the underlying conflicts were, it seems that Medley and her publisher were able to resolve them, and in 2013, Castle Waiting Vol. 2: The Definitive Edition came out. It is not necessary to know this backstory to enjoy the series, and indeed I know none of the details; and yet the little I do know gives the scene where Jain is attacked by the sprites an extra poignancy, since it may well represent emotions felt by Medley herself as she was trying to write this story. Here she was, having dedicated years of her life to creating a delicately drawn, beautifully realized world, and at the same time she had to deal with publishers setting terms for her work and fans getting impatient to hear what would come next. She may well have felt as ambushed as Jain did for doing nothing more than telling a story that people loved.

Figure 1, from Castle Waiting, volume 2 by Linda Medley. Image used with the kind permission of the publisher.

This story demonstrates that the material conditions and cultural work of comics, in this case Medley’s personal experience of getting her work published, are not interesting merely as background knowledge, but can be central to comics analysis. These conditions can indeed open new doors for textual interpretation. But I will not probe Linda Medley for an answer about the possible real-world origins for this scene. I think the interpretation can stand on its own, and in any case, I would be too star-struck to ask if I ever did meet her. Which again raises the question of involving authors directly in discussions of their work. Some creators have gone on record in depth about how they created their works. Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus is an extreme and very impressive example of this. But this is not always necessary or even desirable. It can be problematic to rely on authors for answers about their stories: they may not actually know why they made certain choices in the work, or their answers may be so prosaic as to not really add any valuable knowledge. They may be resistant to discussing these kinds of questions, as reported reactions from Lynda Barry and Alison Bechdel during the symposium Comics: Philosophy and Practice demonstrate. And in some cases, questions could become so personal that it would be impossible to ask them. For example, Lynda Barry mentions in One Hundred Demons that parts of these stories are real while other parts are made up. She labels them “autobifictionalography” (5). While possibly interesting, it would be impertinent, even painful to ask which particular events were real and which were not, especially in reference to a story like “Resilience,” which deals with childhood sexual abuse. And would knowledge of where fact ends and fiction begins in any significant way add to interpretations of that text? On page 5, Barry answers a multiple-choice question she set herself, “Are these stories □ true or □ false?” by checking both boxes, and I think we can leave it at that.

References:

Barry, Lynda. One Hundred Demons. Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 2002.

Brienza, Casey. “Comics and Cultural Work: Conclusion” Comics Forum, December 30, 2013. http://comicsforum.org/2013/12/30/comics-and-cultural-work-conclusion-by-casey-brienza/

Brown, Jeffrey and Kochalka, James. Conversation #2. Marietta: Top Shelf, 2005.

Comics: Philosophy and Practice. University of Chicago. Chicago, IL, May18-20 2012. http://graycentercomicscon.uchicago.edu/

Grace, Dominick, and Eric Hoffman, eds. Chester Brown: Conversations (Conversations with Comic Artists). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013.

Johnston, Paddy. “Comics and the Day Job: Cartooning and Work in Jeffrey Brown and James Kochalka’s Conversation #2.” Comics Forum, December 16, 2013. http://comicsforum.org/2013/12/17/comics-and-the-day-job-cartooning-and-work-in-jeffrey-brown-and-james-kochalkas-conversation-2-by-paddy-johnston/

Medley, Linda. Castle Waiting, Vol. 2: The Definitive Edition. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2013.

Parille, Ken, ed. The Daniel Clowes Reader: A Critical Edition of Ghost World and Other Stories, with Essays, Interviews, and Annotations. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2013.

Spiegelman, Art. MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus. New York: Pantheon, 2011.

Barbara Postema is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre at Ryerson University in Toronto, funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is working on a book project about silent comics. Postema has presented on comics at numerous conferences, including the MLA, PCA, and ICAF, and is currently serving on the Executive Committee of the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics (CSSC/SCEBD). She has published articles in the International Journal of Comic Art and elsewhere, and her book Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments came out with RIT Press in 2013.

At the University of Lincoln, Professor Jane Chapman and her team of researchers have been funded by the AHRC to explore the cultural impact of comics produced during and about the World Wars. Two exhibitions are planned – one on World War One comics in 2014 & one on Second World War comics, 2015, both at London’s Cartoon Museum – as well as two monographs on the subject. Other outcomes already include conference papers and journal articles published in Australia and the UK (see below for links). In addition, further funding was secured from the AHRC’s International Placement Scheme for the project’s two PhD students to spend six months each at the Library of Congress in Washington DC, where they were able to utilise the library’s extensive comics archive material.

The team are conducting transnational comparative research with an emphasis on comics produced during the World Wars that provide a valuable cultural record. The premise of the project is that comics can offer a popular record of attitudes, feelings & character types during the world wars. As Kemnitz (1973) and Witek (1989), have pointed out, both comics and cartoons can be valuable primary historical sources; with the impetus added by the forthcoming anniversaries of the wars the hope is that the project will lead to a broader understanding of this viewpoint in relation to the former.

Fig.1 – Trench publication Ca ne fait rien 18 September 1918 – Courtesy of Australian War Memorial

For the First World War there are significant new findings on how early comic strips may be viewed as a prevenient form of citizen journalism. For instance, the team have discovered over 100 soldier proto comics, multi-panel cartoons, created and published by British, Canadian, Anzac and American soldiers in trench publications (their own amateur newspapers). As these were subject to less censorship than many other forms of wartime communication, the soldiers were able to use the publications to safely give vent to any grievances and complaints (Fuller, 1990, p.19). Common themes, such as disrespect for authority, dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war and the poor standards of food and medical support have been discovered in the proto comics across all nationalities. Not only did trench publications allow expressions of feelings otherwise frowned upon, they also kept up morale with their humour and inspired a feeling of comradeship. As a record they provide an immediacy and collective account of the soldier’s world which accounts written, or drawn, after the event cannot rival. Since the audience was often intended to be other soldiers (and families back home) the recognition factor was the major selling point, meaning researchers may presume high levels of accuracy in their depictions.

Sharing a similar role to trench publication comics was, in the labour movement, what team researchers refer to as the ‘gullible worker’ – a character which appeared internationally in socialist and trade union newspapers, primarily in North America and Australasia. On these continents such publications were pioneers, quickly utilising comic strips as an accessible method to educate their readers about capitalism and the causes of war. At the same time they provided a collective catharsis by allowing readers to let off steam about unenlightened fellow workers. These ‘foolish worker’ comic characters who always believed what the capitalist newspapers and their employers told them, became household names and spread far beyond the confines of their countries and organisations of origin. As a cultural record, not only do the strips show how activists viewed historical factual events (they gave details of elections, newspapers and strikes) they also depict how socialists regarded their fellow workers and themselves. As with the trench publications the newspapers were often largely written by unpaid reader correspondents and thus show the strips as being a consistently democratic, grassroots medium for social groups.

Fig 2 – ‘Gullible worker’ Henry Dubb, 1915 – Courtesy of Eugene V. Debs Collection, Cunningham Memorial Library, Indiana State University

A third area of research on the First World War is the analysis of the popular adaptation to ‘total war’ made by ‘father of the British strip cartoon’ (Frank 1951), W.K. Haselden, in the Daily Mirror. Haselden’s almost chronological account of the events of the war as seen from a British home-front perspective is being analysed, as well as his portrayal of heroes and villains, such as the immensely popular Big and Little Willie – Kaiser Wilhelm and his son the Crown Prince.

The team’s Second World War research, using comparative methods, aims to contribute to a widening of the understanding of the role and usages of comics, by focusing on a diverse and more inclusive range of social groups, such as women as comics characters, POWs and labour organisations. This conflict, when women were directly recruited into the armed forces for the first time, saw the emergence of female comic strip characters in new, more active roles, acting alongside men, both in and out of uniform. The team are scrutinising what insights comic books can offer relative to discussions of contemporary attitudes towards the presence (and action) of women in the theatre of war.

One of the project monographs will focus on comics, trauma and the Holocaust. Researchers are looking at the way in which eye witness accounts and personal testimony interact with elements of illustrative fantasy in order to represent events that are ‘un-representable’ such as the Holocaust and Hiroshima. The team are also engaging with literary criticism’s trauma theory and contemporary cross cultural understandings of Post-Traumatic Stress. Building on the existing important and extensive scholarship relating to Maus (Spiegelman, 1986) the team have sought further examples of survivor accounts including Barefoot Gen (Nakazawa, 2004) and Paroles d’etoiles (Guéno & Le Tendre, 2008) that raise issues of testimony and memory.

Fig 3 – Paroles D’Etoiles (2009) – Courtesy of Soleil Productions

Further chapters will analyse depictions and references to the persecution and extermination of Jews and other, often overlooked, minorities within Second World War US comic books. This investigation pertains to the historiographical discussions of US governmental and popular awareness of the Holocaust.

Throughout the project research has underlined the omnipresence of propaganda as an influence on comics in both World Wars. Thus areas of investigation include not only the roles of government in this area, such as the First World War U.S. Bulletin for Cartoonists and newsstand collaborations between the US government and commercial publishers (see Graham, 2011) but also comic strips of political groups, such as the Communist Parties (CPs) of the USA and Great Britain during the Second World War. While some work has been done on the prolific comic strip output of the CPUSA (see for example, Brunner, 2007) the British party’s Second World War comic strips have hitherto remained unexplored. Thus it is possible to chart the Communists’ commitment to ‘total war’ and the everyday realities that this entailed through the comic strips of the Daily Worker’s ‘Front Line’.

Fig 4 – Darlan – The Front Line comic strip in the Daily Worker 14 December 1942 – Courtesy of the Morning Star

The project team contend that the heroes and villains theme assumes a particular significance in relation to propaganda in the Second World War, focusing on how characters are represented in comics and the cultural significance these representations had as vehicles for wartime entertainment and propaganda.

Humour and its role in comic strips is also an on-going strand of research – whether recognising the incongruity of soldiers’ everyday life or engendering a feeling of superiority amongst socialists, who could scorn the ‘gullible worker’, it is clear it helped to bind groups together (‘T Hart, 2007:6).

As the above article is a record of work in progress, any conclusions about the significance of the project’s findings for comics studies still need to emerge. Nevertheless the existence of recurring themes during the World Wars and of specific aspects of comics as a record of mentalités (Hunt, 1989) both suggest that further research could contribute to discourses within comics studies.

Links

‘A Cultural Record’ research showcase

https://www.lincoln.ac.uk/home/research/researchshowcase/comicsandtheworldwars/

The project webpages:

http://lcrj.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/comics-and-the-world-wars/

http://lcrj.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/comics-and-the-world-wars/summary/

http://lcrj.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/comics-and-the-world-wars/comics-team/

Research Articles

‘Multi-panel comic narratives in Australian First World War trench publications as citizen journalism’, a journal article by Jane Chapman and Daniel Ellin. [PDF, available via the Comics Forum Digital Text Archive]

First published in the Australian Journal of Communication (39: 3), 2012.

‘Representation of female war-time bravery in Australia’s Wanda the War Girl’, journal article by Professor Jane Chapman. [PDF, available via the Comics Forum Digital Text Archive]

First published in The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture (1: 2), Bristol: Intellect. http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/ajpc/2011/00000001/00000002/art00004

For further information on publications please see The Lincoln Repository [http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/]

Video

Professor Jane Chapman speaking on ‘Comics and the representation of female war-time bravery in Wanda the War Girl (Australia) and Paroles d’etoiles (France).’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h3F63XYBKM&feature=mfu_in_order&list=ULhttp://

Works cited:

Barker, Martin (1984) A Haunt of Fears, Pluto Press, London

Blake, B. B. (2009) ‘Watchmen: The Graphic Novel as Trauma Fiction’ Interdisciplinary Comic Studies, 5, 1. http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v5_1/blake/ Accessed 12.11.13

Brunner, E. (2007) Red Funnies: The New York Daily Worker’s ‘Popular Front’ Comics, 1936-1945. American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism and Bibliography, 17(2), pp. 184-207.

Fuller, J.G. (1990) Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies 1914-1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Graham, Richard L. (2011) Government Issue: Comics For The People, 1940s-2000s, New York: Abrams ComicArts.

Guéno, J.P. and Le Tendre, S. (2008) Paroles d’étoiles: Mémoire d’enfants cachés (1939-1945). Toulon: Soleil.

Hunt, L. (ed.) (1989) The New Cultural History. Berkeley and London: University of California Press.

Johnston, I. (2001) On Spiegelman’s Maus I and II. http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/introser/maus.htm

Kalmierczak, J. (2005) Raymond Williams and Cartoons: From Churchill’s Cigar to Cultural History. International Journal of Comic Art, 7(2 Fall/Winter), pp. 147-163.

Kemnitz, T.M. (1973) The Cartoon as a Historical Source. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 4(1), pp. 81-93.

Kusek, S. (2011) ‘Retelling Trauma through Panels and Word Bubbles (Revisited)’ A Life in Panels http://alifeinpanels.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/retelling-trauma-through-panels-and-word-bubbles-revisited/ Accessed 12.11.13

Men of Anzac (2010) The Anzac Book. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press Ltd.

Nakazawa, K. (2004) Barefoot Gen, Vol. 1: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima. San Francisco: Last Gasp. The story was originally serialised in 1973.

Roberts, Frank C. (1951), Obituaries from the Times, Newspaper Archive Developments Limited.

Scully, R. and Quartly, M. (eds) (2009) Drawing the Line: Using Cartoons as Historical Evidence. Monash University ePress.

Spiegelman, A. (1986) Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History. Pantheon.

‘T Hart, M. (2007) Humour and Social Protest: An Introduction. International Review of Social History, 52, pp. 1-20

Witek, J. (1989) Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman and Harvey Pekar. Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi.

Anna Hoyles is the research assistant on the, AHRC funded, ‘Comics and the World Wars’ project at the University of Lincoln. Her main areas of interest are labour movement comic strips of both world wars and charting the changes within comics during the Second World War. She is also writing a PhD on the journalism of the Swedish syndicalist writer Moa Martinson.

Tintin at 85 was a one-day symposium at UCL, scheduled for the 85th anniversary of Tintin’s first appearance in Le Petit Vingtième. Organisers Tyler Shores and Tom Ue had been working on a forthcoming academic book on Tintin for a year before the conference, pursuing a personal interest in Tintin, before being inspired to put together a conference after meeting with Moulinsart, the Hergé foundation. This meeting inspired Tyler and Tom to organise a conference which would interest scholars from various disciplines, fans of the Tintin series and the growing number of Tintinologists. In its bringing together of these communities, the symposium was the first of its kind in Anglophone scholarship. With the broad aim of examining and celebrating Tintin’s cultural legacy, the conference attracted a number of international scholars and, most notably, Tintinologist Michael Farr. Farr has written numerous books on Tintin, many of which are in-depth studies of the characters, and he has translated works from Francophone scholarship into English, including those of comics scholar Benoît Peeters.

I was captivated by Farr, whose own career somewhat mirrors that of Tintin – he spent much of it as a reporter in various European countries including Belgium, where he got to know Hergé personally. In fact, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Farr’s appearance and demeanour are a portrait of how Tintin might have looked were we permitted to view him ageing beyond his teens and into a warm, fatherly intellectual. Farr’s talk was a retrospective which suited the aim of celebrating Tintin’s 85th birthday well – he showed numerous photographs and magazine cuttings from Hergé’s personal papers which had been used as photo references for some of the most famous Tintin images, as well as pointing out numerous intricacies and intrigues, such as the origin of Tintin’s trademark quiff (a rush of wind from a car chase which Hergé enjoyed drawing so much he decided to make it a permanent fixture) and that Hergé was apparently something of a reckless driver.

Farr’s enthusiasm for Tintin was infectious and was indicative of the space that Tintin occupies in contemporary culture. He also commented numerous times on the audience’s intelligence and knowledge of Tintin, declaring every one of us to be a Tintinologist and remarking, quite rightly, that the conference’s turnout (around sixty attendees) was exceptional. He thought the turnout to be indicative of Tintin’s endurance and timelessness, but also of growing scholarly interest in Tintin, as evidenced by courses taught at the conference’s host university UCL, but also at other European and North American institutions.

The following panel sessions ran concurrently, so I could only attend two out of the four on offer. The first panel I attended, ‘Tintin in the World,’ featured a presentation from India via Google Hangout, which worked well despite technical difficulties and helped to foster the conference’s international feel and thus the idea of Tintin as a cultural figure with true international appeal. Independent researcher Subhayan Mukerjee presented his research on “Tintin and Contemporary Politics”. He was followed by Niall Oddy, a PhD student from the University of Durham, presenting on ‘Tintin and European Identity’, and Dr Hugo Frey from the University of Chichester with an analysis of intertextuality entitled ‘L’Affaire Tournesol: fragments from the mirror or key meta-text’. Of these three presenters, Frey has written extensively on comics and graphic novels, but the other two were pursuing a personal interest in Tintin – Oddy is currently pursuing a PhD in Renaissance literature, while Mukerjee informed us of his background in Computer Science. Mukerjee was also not the only independent researcher on the programme, an indication that Tintinology as a discipline has matured outside the academy as much as within.

The rest of the conference continued in a similar fashion. In the afternoon I attended the “Sight and Sound Panel,” which brought Tintin up to date with analysis and comment on the 2011 Spielberg adaptation. I learned, through Benjamin Franz’s paper (entitled ‘Raiders of the Unicorn: Assessing Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin for the World Audience’), that Hergé had met with Spielberg shortly before his death, and had always hoped that Spielberg would adapt his work, having admired Indiana Jones. Franz’s paper was followed by an intricate literary analysis from Shani Bans entitled ‘“Hello!… Hello!… Are you receiving me?”: Correspondence in Hergé’s Tintin’, which drew significantly on Derrida. The panel concluded with a close-reading of John Williams’ score for the Spielberg adaptation from Ariane Lebot, a PhD student in the Film department at NYU, entitled ‘Hearing Tintin’s Feats and Characters: John Williams’ Score for The Adventures of Tintin’. These papers all continued the conference’s showcasing of Tintin’s wide appeal for scholars across many disciplines, and once again all the scholars were clearly lovers of Tintin, delighted to be at a conference where they could pursue a personal interest in Tintin and Tintinology.

The keynote lecture was given by Royal Holloway’s Dr Eric Langley, whose primary research interests are in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, though he has previously given conference presentations on Hergé. His talk was a highly engaging romp through analyses of the florid, alliterative outbursts which are a huge part of the character of Captain Haddock. Despite it being a celebration of Tintin’s birthday, the show was perhaps stolen by Haddock, whose peculiar, alcohol-soaked insults were given on slips of paper to members of the audience to throw at Langley before he subjected them to Bakhtinian readings in celebration of Haddock’s vibrancy as a character and thus of the vibrancy of the Tintin canon as a whole.

The proceeds of the conference were donated to The Art Room, a charity which offers support to 5-16 year olds with emotional and behavioural difficulties, chosen by Tom Ue and Tyler Shores because of Hergé’s commitment to children’s charities and causes. Representatives from The Art Room were on hand throughout the day to answer questions and to promote their significant work in providing therapy for children through art, and I was glad to hear of their mission and to support them by attending the conference.

The conference gave Tintin a memorable 85th birthday celebration, and certainly succeeded in its stated aim of bringing together “an international ensemble of scholars, fans, and Tintinophiles” (Shores). The quality of the papers was indicative of Tintin’s enduring popularity, but also of his success across various media – a significant amount of critical attention was paid to the 2011 Spielberg film adaptation, for example. Whilst Tintin is of significant interest to comics scholars such as myself, it was refreshing to attend a conference focused on one enduring character who has inspired a significant fan culture and his own area of scholarship independent from comics studies but still related to it.

References:

Shores, Tyler. 2013. “Tintin Conference, London 2014.” http://www.tintinconference.org/ [accessed Feb 2, 2014].

Paddy Johnston is a doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex, currently working towards his PhD in English. His thesis is entitled ‘Working With Comics’ and will examine what it means to work as a cartoonist, with attention to art pedagogy, materiality and the influence of literary modernism. He has given papers at the Transitions 4 symposium in London and the Comics and the Multimodal World conference in Vancouver and has been published in The Comics Grid journal and is a contributor to the comics blog Graphixia. He is also a cartoonist, singer/songwriter and writer of fiction for the One Hour Stories podcast.

As regular readers of Comics Forum are aware, the site recently featured a Themed Month which sought to examine comics as cultural production. The issue looked first at the work of comic book authors (Woo 2013) and ended with an autobiographical account of one scholar’s experiment as a comic book retailer (Miller 2013). In the following article I hope to continue to chart the life of a comic book by examining one particular comic after sales as it is read not by academics, but by a much larger demographic of comic book consumers: teenagers, specifically, Indonesian teenagers.

There has been a debate concerning the role of comics in language acquisition and literacy which can be traced back to the 1950s when Frederic Wertham, among others, argued that comics cause retardation of reading ability (Wertham, 1954). Many modern scholars argue that comics serve as a gateway to literacy (see, for example, the Canadian Council for Learning website, 2013).[1] This article will document my experience and observations as a teacher who uses Art Spiegelman’s Maus in the Indonesian classroom with advanced English-learners. I will describe how I prepared the students to read Maus, the concepts and history which I taught alongside the text, and what the students themselves brought to, and drew from the work.

I have recently had the pleasure of working with a group of year 10 (age 15 to 16) students at an international school in Jakarta. Thanks to the flexible nature of the International Baccalaureate English A Middle Years Programme I was free, within certain broad boundaries, to choose texts for study in class. Having grappled with Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winning Maus for what is now five years as a part-time postgraduate student, I was confident that it would yield rich analysis, challenge some of my students’ assumptions concerning literature and comics, and, I hoped, hold their attention for a full unit.

The students I teach are mainly Catholic and of Chinese descent, making them members of a (in the case of these students, relatively wealthy) religious and ethnic minority group in Indonesia. The school has a rigorous entrance exam which assesses, among other factors, English language ability. The majority of classes are taught in English rather than the students’ first language, Bahasa Indonesian. Whilst the school does offer English classes of the language acquisition type, the class with whom I read Maus represent the upper tier of English-ability in their year-group. The course I am teaching them, namely MYP English A, is the same English class that the International Baccalaureate Program offers for native English speakers.

The main narrative of Maus centres upon Vladek, a Polish Jew living during the Second World War. There has been some discussion amongst critics concerning the propriety of using Maus as a means to introduce school children to the Holocaust. Halkin (1992) argues that Spiegelman’s non-realist approach and his use of the comic book form might offer students an erroneous view of his subject. I disagree with Halkin’s dismissal of the comic book medium, but I was eager to ensure that Maus was not the only means by which my students came to understand the Second World War. This era of twentieth century European history is not treated with the same detail in Indonesian schools as it is elsewhere in the world.[2] It is further the case that my students knew very little about Jewish culture and history. As such, prior to reading the text I felt it was necessary to give them a short research assignment concerning the Second World War and to show them clips from the film Schindler’s List.

The students were very happy to learn that we would be studying a comic book in the upcoming unit, having never studied a comic in an academic context previously. As is the case with many Indonesian teenagers, they were all familiar with (if not active consumers of) translated manga.[3] Many of them reported that they felt they were somehow ‘cheating’ by studying a comic. Due to both the local preference for manga over English-language comics and language barriers, the cultural turn which began the course toward mainstream legitimacy for the comic book medium in American and Europe in the mid-1980s clearly did not reach Indonesia on the same scale. My decision to introduce a comic book to the classroom afforded an unprecedented level of enthusiasm from my students, but I was also conscious that I ran the risk of inciting criticism from parents if they shared their son or daughter’s perception of comics as a ‘low’ medium. Fortunately, no such problems arose.

Manga for sale in an Indonesian bookshop. Photograph by Philip Smith.

The novelty of studying a comic book persisted long after my students realised that Maus is dissimilar from the majority of comics they have read in the past (and, occasionally, on their laptops during class when the teacher’s attention is elsewhere). When asked what they like about the comic most students replied that they liked the funny animals drawing style and the way in which the story is told (Spiegelman uses narrative layers organised in what might be called a ‘Chinese-box’ (Genette, 1983, 238) structure). Even the students who are normally resistant to reading assignments were eager to begin this text. On several occasions I noticed students (who imagined themselves unobserved) reading ahead after the class had moved to another task. When I reminded a student that he had failed to read a text studied earlier in the year to its conclusion and advised that he should start the assigned reading early he replied that he would have no difficulties reading this book in its entirety. This was different, he explained; ‘it is Maus!’

During the reading process I invited students to reflect on their reactions to the book in terms of their own experiences. My initial suspicion had been that the students might draw (perhaps problematic) parallels between the experiences which appear early in Maus, in Poland during the early stages of the Second World War, and the tumultuous history of Chinese Indonesians in the mid and late twentieth century. Chinese Indonesians were the main groups targeted in Suharto’s anti-Communist purges of the 1960s and by certain groups in the aftermath of Japanese rule in the late 1940s. The economic crisis which struck Indonesia in the late 1990s resulted, in May 1998, in riots and once more Chinese Indonesians were the largest of the groups targeted. The death toll of the riots has been estimated around 1,000 and was accompanied by numerous reports of rape and damage to property.[4]

There is relatively little systematised wide-scale acknowledgement of the racial violence which has taken place in Indonesia compared to that which we see in art, literature, and history which concerns the Shoah, but my experience has been that the events of the late 1990s is often informally remembered and acknowledged within Chinese Indonesian communities. In a separate assignment, for example, one student had told me that during the riots (when he was an infant) he was sent overseas with his mother and siblings whilst his father stayed in Jakarta to guard the house. I suspected that my students might find some resonance between the incidents of wide-scale racially-motivated violence, public beatings, and atmosphere of fear which took place in Jakarta in the late 1990s and Vladek’s description of life for a Jew in Poland during the early days of Nazi rule.

Despite the potential for parallels to be drawn, very few students suggested that Vladek’s experiences might rhyme with those of their parents. One student stated that whilst he felt sympathy for Vladek and the other Polish Jews who appear in Maus, he found that the events described in the comic were too removed from his own life for him to truly empathise. He went on to comment that he felt that he was unlikely to ever encounter such circumstances personally. The few students who did read their own family history into the events did so tentatively. Another student wrote that Maus reminded him of the stories which his father had told him concerning the riots. The student then hastened to add that he was just a baby at the time so he could not comment on the actual similarity between the events.

Hammond’s (2012) work with American high school students suggests that the visual literacy required to understand comics is a learned skill and that readers who are unfamiliar with comics may struggle to understand both the flow of the narrative and the iconography used. My students encountered no barriers related to the visual language of comics when reading Maus due to their previously mentioned familiarity with translated manga. Initially some did struggle with the reading direction (‘unflipped’ manga reads right-to-left rather than left-to-right). The major challenge for many was the density of Maus. Many of the students reported that they had initially found Maus hard to read because of the high level of detail in the images, the volume of dialogue on each page and the non-standard English spoken by Vladek. This reaction is certainly not without precedent; the Japanese translation of Maus was printed in a larger format in order to make it more accessible to readers who are familiar with manga (see Spiegelman 2011, 152). All of those students who reported initial difficulty found that after a few pages they became accustomed to the style and could read it easily (albeit at a slower pace than they might read manga at home).

The student’s familiarity with manga provided easy examples when illustrating some of the key concepts in comic book auto-criticism of relevance to Maus¸ particularly Scott McCloud’s (1994) concept of the Icon. Although they did not know the term, the students were immediately familiar with the manga trope of Iconic heroes and detailed villains and, once they understood McCloud’s argument, could readily apply this theory to Maus.

The most striking aspect of Maus is Spiegelman’s decision to use theriomorphic representations of human characters in his depiction of the Shoah. In contrast to many academic critics, without exception the students found this artistic decision to be unremarkable. When presented with stimuli such as an image of Mickey Mouse, the Passover Haggadoth, and Nazi-era anti-Semitic propaganda posters which depicted Jews as vermin, the students were able to engage in an intelligent discussion concerning possible reasons for Spiegelman’s artistic choices, but my suspicion is that the funny animal genre would not have prompted comment without these stimuli. One possible reason for this might be the prevalence of animal characters with human characteristics in other media they have consumed.

Many of the students were highly sensitive to other devices at work in Maus, particularly the fact that Vladek should not be read as an entirely reliable commentator [5]:

By being saved [Vladek] sees the ordeal in a brighter way so that’s why he thinks that he lived a happy life after the war, but what about the others who didn’t? They’ll, [sic] of course, won’t be able to have a happy ending because they aren’t here with us anymore.

Student 1, 2013.[6]

In the ensuing class discussion the students reached a consensus that Vladek’s broken English and antisocial behaviour in the framing narrative of Maus influences the way in which we, as readers, approach his testimony as depicted in the main narrative.

Whilst the students did deploy some critical language when discussing the text, their responses were often refreshingly emotional rather than analytical. One student stated that ‘[a]fter reading Maus, I realize that I couldn’t take any morale lesson from it […] Maus told me about bad things that the NAZI done, but also bad things that Vladek done in order to survive the war [sic]’ (Student 2, 2013) Another, similarly, stated that ‘Maus showed that what the Nazis did was a great, great tragedy, and the survival of a main character of a book does not make the tragedy less cruel, neither does it gives the story a happy ending’ (Student 3, 2013).[7] These comments, perhaps more than the academic discourse in which I have participated over the last five years, assured me of the powerful impact which Maus can have upon its readers.

Overall I felt that the introduction of Maus into the Indonesian classroom was a success. My experience may not be universal, however. As previously stated, these students are a group with a high level of English and some experience with the comic book format. I would not necessarily recommend that teachers use Maus with a group of weaker English-ability students or those approaching a comic book for the first time. In the classroom environment I have described students responded positively to the text, in many cases they had an emotional reaction to the events depicted, and they were able to articulate that affect and point to the stylistic strategies which led to those conclusions. Their experience with translated manga had primed them to enjoy reading comics and equipped them with a degree of visual literacy. I drew two central lessons from the experience; I had direct experience of Maus’ appeal for a non-academic audience, and I learned that some teenage readers are already attuned to literary techniques at work in comics.

Works Cited

Banner, Gillian. 2000. Holocaust Literature: Schulz, Levi, Spiegelman and the Memory of the Offence. London: Vallentine Mitchell.

Canadian Council on Learning. 2013. ‘More than just funny books: Comics and prose literacy for boys’. Lessons in Learning 2013. Accessed 22 March 2013. http://www.ccl-cca.ca/.

Chute, Hillary. 2009. ‘History and Graphic Representation in ‘Maus’.’ A Comics Studies Reader. Ed. Heer, Jeet and Worchester, Kent. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 340-362.

Geis, Deborah R. 2003. ‘Introduction.’ Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman’s “Survivor’s Tale” of the Holocaust. Deborah R. Geis ed. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 1-11.

Genette, Gérard. 1980. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Lewin, Jane E. trans. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Halkin, Hillel. 1992. ‘Inhuman Comedy.’ Commentary. 93:2. 56.

Hammond, Heidi. 2012. ‘Graphic Novels and Multimodal Literacy: A High School Study with American Born Chinese.’ Bookbird, 50 (4), 22-32

Lent, John. 1993. ‘Southeast Asian Cartooning: Comics in the Philippines, Singapore and Indonesia.’ Asian Culture Quarterly. Winter. 11-23

McCloud, Scott. 1994. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperCollins.

Miller, Tom. 2013. “My Brief Adventure in Comic Book Retail.” Comics Forum, December 23.http://comicsforum.org/2013/12/23/my-brief-adventure-in-comic-book-retail-by-tom-miller/

Monnin, Katie. 2010. Teaching Graphic Novels: Practical Strategies for the Secondary ELA Classroom. Maupin House Publishing.

Mulman, Lisa Naomi. 2008. ‘A Tale of Two Mice.’ The Jewish Graphic Novel. Baskind, Samantha and Omer-Sherman, Ranen ed. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Purdey, Jemma. 2006. Anti-Chinese Violence in Indonesia, 1996–1999. Honolulu, H.I.: University of Hawaii Press.

Spiegelman, Art. 2003. The Complete Maus. London: Penguin Books.

Spiegelman, Art. 2011. Metamaus. New York: Pantheon.

Student 1, ‘Written task’ 2013. Unpublished work.

Student 2, ‘Written task’ 2013. Unpublished work.

Student 3, ‘Written task’ 2013. Unpublished work.

Wertham, Fredric. 1954. Seduction of the Innocent. London: Museum Press ltd.

Woo, Benjamin. 2013. “Why Is It So Hard to Think about Comics as Labour?” Comics Forum, December 9. http://comicsforum.org/2013/12/09/why-is-it-so-hard-to-think-about-comics-as-labour-by-benjamin-woo/

Philip Smith is in the final stages of his Ph.D with Loughborough University (his thesis has been accepted pending revisions). He teaches at Sekolah Tunas Muda, Jakarta. He is co-editor of the upcoming volume Joss Whedon’s Firefly. He, and a full list of his existing publications, can be found on academia.edu. He endeavours to respond to any email directed to philipsmithgraduate@gmail.com.

[1] – Teachers who wish to bring comics into their classroom may wish to consult Monnin (2010).

[2] – The Second World War is taught as a part of Indonesia’s modern national history; Indonesia (then known as the Dutch East Indies) was occupied by Japan from 1943 to 1945.

[3] – See Lent (1993) for more on the Indonesian comic book market

[4] – For more on the violence in Indonesia in the late 1990s see Purdey (2006).

[5] – See Banner (2000) for an analysis of Spiegelman’s allusions to an ‘alternative version’ of Vladek’s account.

[6] – I have deliberately omitted student names from this work.

[7] – See Geis (2003), Chute (2009), and Mulman (2008) for more on catharsis in Maus and the ethics of Vladek’s survival tactics.

Comics studies has come a long way in the past few years. Scholarship centered on sequential art is no longer considered beyond the pale of the academy; academic conferences and journals focusing on comics studies are multiplying; more and more books are being published that take a scholarly approach to the medium. The Comics Arts Conference, one of the first academic conferences dedicated to the study of sequential art, has been instrumental in encouraging this recognition within the academy. By providing a home for comics scholarship, the CAC not only created a forum where individuals scholars could connect to become a larger field, it also helped to grow the profile of comics studies on the academic stage. Today, being a self-described Batman scholar is no longer cause for derision. Or at least, not from fellow academics.

Unfortunately, the legitimacy comics studies has gained inside academia does not seem to be replicated outside it. An obvious recent case-in-point would be Alan Moore’s treatment of Will Brooker in what may or may not be his last interview. Not only does Moore not name the mysterious “Batman scholar” who has questioned the representations of race and gender in his comics, he dismisses those concerns as essentially the whining of an emotionally stunted idiot who can’t understand anything without a caption box. He goes on to imply that comics scholarship as a whole displays a lack of rigor at best and is a waste of time at worst. Of course, Moore’s public persona is famously a curmudgeonly old fart, and Moore could certainly be exaggerating for emphasis here, but I don’t want to dismiss his reaction as extraordinary; instead, it seems to me that Moore’s belittlement of the highly regarded Brooker is emblematic of a larger trend in the public at large to consider scholarship on sequential art dubious and even ridiculous.

These days, when I tell academics that my primary scholarship is on popular culture, and on action films and mainstream comics in particular, I am greeted by envy more than anything else. It is certainly easier to sell a class on superheroes to undergraduate non-majors than a class on hagiography. But when I mention my fields of study to non-academics, the reaction is almost always mystification: something along the lines of “You can do that?” Sometimes the following conversations are inspirational—with people who are excited by the idea that the texts they love are being given analytical attention—but all too often they become a window into the culture wars. The idea that a university professor might do their research on comic books seems to be almost insulting, as though we are wasting our time on trivia when we should be tackling Shakespeare.

Strangely, the analysis of comics is not itself the problem. A quick voyage through the world wide web will find any number of personal blogs devoted to the critical reading of these cultural artifacts. Instead, the problem seems to be locating this analysis specifically within the academy: moving the conversation from the comic book shop to the classroom. Of course, this disdain for comics studies is part of a larger tendency, in the United States at least, to see all scholarly work as inherently a waste of time—unless, of course, that work is in a STEM field. But because comics have such strong roots in mass culture as well as such a history of infantalization and controversy, they function as an obvious flash point for this debate. At this point, the increase in comics studies’ legitimization seems to be rooted in scholarship that defers to the academy’s taste in topics and vocabulary, and which correspondingly tends to take discussions of comics out of the larger world and to locate them in the ivory tower. However, a much more useful direction would be to bring the fans into the academy along with the comics; or rather, to use comics as a tool to break down the distinction between the ivory tower and the public. This kind of conversation is the goal of the Comics Arts Conference.

The CAC was founded in 1992 by Randy Duncan and Peter Coogan, two comics scholars who recognized the need for an annual academic conference focused specifically on the study of sequential art. However, rather than locate their conference within the more traditional setting of a scholarly organization with university support, Coogan and Duncan held the CAC at a major comic book convention. The idea was to facilitate the involvement of comic book professionals and fans, as well as scholars: to create the kind of public humanities setting that refuses the ivory tower metaphor. Con attendees were already having critical discussions about comics in the hallways; the CAC invited those attendees to bring their conversations into the scholarly world of the academic conference.

The first CAC was made possible by the San Diego Comic-Con International; CCI Director Fay Desmond was kind enough to allow the CAC use of one of the Marriott’s conference rooms. The CAC then alternated between CCI and the Chicago Comicon (now Wizard World Chicago) until finally becoming a permanent part of CCI in 1998. CCI was particularly happy to provide a home for the CAC because of its basic educational mission; CCI is non-profit, intended to provide a place for fans and creators to interact rather than solely to function as a venue for marketing and promotion. The CAC is likewise not motivated by profit—in fact, the CAC does not have an operating budget, and unlike the vast majority of academic conferences, does not charge fees of presenters. To do so would be to counteract its mission of bringing together scholars from both within and without the academy; it’s much harder to afford conference fees without a generous university research stipend. Furthermore, CAC presenters receive a badge for the convention as a whole, encouraging presenters to interact with fan culture outside of the CAC. It is very common to hear a presenter mention how something he heard in Hall H the day before made him consider his project in a new light.

Over the years the CAC has helped bring comics studies into the fold of academia by encouraging the creation of scholarly networks in the field, but it has also refused to limit its conversation to those with university positions. Audiences at the CAC—and panels, for that matter—consist not only of other academics but of fans, creators, press, and even gawkers. This heterogeneity allows for a kind of cross-pollination: it keeps scholars from only preaching to the choir. Whereas a typical presentation at an academic conference, even a large one, may find audiences with fewer members than the panel itself, CAC audiences tend to be fairly large, giving our presenters the opportunity to share their ideas on a larger scale. While academic audiences tend to be specialists already in the topic of the panels they attend, CAC audiences tend to be driven by a broader curiosity. As a result, not only do presenters benefit from critical commentary from outside the approaches standardized by the academy, the academy as a whole benefits by demonstrating its relevance to the public. A Con attendee may wander into a CAC panel simply looking for a place to sit, but she may stay when she realizes that the panel is on Batgirl. When she goes on to realize that the particular scholarly approach this panel takes to Batgirl has put into words something she’s been struggling to express, she may discover something not just about comics but about the role of critical analysis in the world at large.

In 2007, the CAC expanded from an annual conference to a biannual one, holding meetings both at Comic-Con and at CCI’s WonderCon. It has also expanded to include myself and Travis Langley as organizers along with Coogan and Duncan, and our composition echoes the interdisciplinary nature of the conference, with backgrounds in American Studies, Communication, English, and Psychology. Our paneling comes from a large variety of disciplinary approaches, including presentations on the neuroscience of the Iron Man suit, the psychopathology of the Joker, the semiotics of graphic narratives, the history of African-American influence on manga, and the postmodernism of Grant Morrison’s work. For the past several years, CCI has brought in a comics professional as a special guest for the CAC; this year’s guest for our WonderCon meeting is Gail Simone, and previous guests have included Seth, David Lloyd, Bill Willingham, and Matt Kindt. These special guests allow the kind of engagement Barbara Postema discusses in her Comics Forum article “The Death of the Cartoonist? Working on Living Creators” as well as giving creators the chance to perform critical analyses of their own.

Just as “nerd culture” has become more and more mainstream in the US, and as Comic-Con itself has seen its profile increase, so comics studies has become a much more common sight within the academy. The CAC exists at the intersection of these two narratives. Our goal is to continue to emphasize the links between the public and the scholarly engagement with sequential art. Happily, we are not the only ones furthering this goal; scholarly programming is appearing on more convention schedules every year, in New York, Chicago, Denver, and Austin, and conventions like GeekGirlCon are centered around critical analysis from both inside and outside the academy. But as we increase the prestige of comics scholarship, let’s remember comic books’ origins in funny books and newspaper strips. This has always been a public medium, and the best analytical work on sequential art will always bring scholars and the public together.

Works Cited:

Ó Méalóid, Pádriag. “Last Alan Moore Interview?” Pádriag Ó Méalóid AKA Slovobooks. 9 Jan. 2014. Web; http://slovobooks.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/last-alan-moore-interview/. 3 Feb 2014.

Postema, Barbara. “The Death of the Cartoonist? Working on Living Creators.” Comics Forum. 24 Jan. 2014. Web; http://comicsforum.org/2014/01/24/the-death-of-the-cartoonist-working-on-living-creators-by-barbara-postema/. 5 Feb 2014.

Kathleen McClancy is the Primary Organizer and Co-Chair of the Comics Arts Conference, and an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Texas State University. The CAC can be reached at comicsartsconference@gmail.com.

Comics Forum is pleased to feature five videos today by the team from Graphixia. The first four videos, under the collected title of ‘Small is the New Big: The Comics Criticism Blog as Small Press Analogue’ comprise the Graphixia panel from the 2013 conference, including in-person presentations from Peter Wilkins, Hattie Kennedy, Damon Herd and Paddy Johnston, as well as off-site videos from Brenna Clarke Gray and David N. Wright. The fifth video ‘Graphixia interviews at Comics Forum 2013′ includes interviews with many of the presenters who participated in Comics Forum 2013. For more from the Graphixia team be sure to check out their website. Many thanks to the team for making these videos available for publication here.

IH

Small is the New Big: The Comics Criticism Blog as Small Press Analogue

Video 1 – Graphixia Comics Forum Conference Panel from Digital Cultures Lab on Vimeo.

Video 2- Graphixia Comics Forum Conference Panel from Digital Cultures Lab on Vimeo.

Video 3 – Graphixia Comics Forum Conference Panel from Digital Cultures Lab on Vimeo.

Video 4 – Graphixia Comics Forum Conference Panel from Digital Cultures Lab on Vimeo.

Graphixia interviews at Comics Forum 2013

Graphixia interviews at Comics Forum 2013 from Digital Cultures Lab on Vimeo.

Featuring: Chloe Brown, Peter Connelly, Troy Lovata, Hannah Sackett, John Swogger and Al B. Wesolowsky

Ancient artefacts, lost archaeological expeditions and ruins long hidden in jungles and deserts have long been part of comics heritage. From the EC Comics clichés of lost pyramids and ancient curses through to the Phantom and Adele Blanc-Sec, archaeology has long served as an inspiration for comics writers and illustrators.

It is only relatively recently that archaeologists themselves, however, have begun to use comics in a professional context. The list of published examples is not long, but includes works like Archaeology: The Comic (Johannes Loubser, 2003) and the archaeological comic ‘zine Shovel Bum (Trent DeBoer, ed., 1997 – present; collected edition, 2004).

This e-panel brings together six archaeologists, all of whom are making comics about archaeology, aimed at a wide range of audiences. Their work explores new ways of using comics as a medium for science communication.

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John Swogger: Page from Llyn Cerrig Bach (CADW – Welsh Government Historic Environment Service; 2014 – in press)

John Swogger: I’d like to thank my five other participants in this e-panel and ask them to briefly introduce themselves.

Chloe Brown: I’m a Fine Arts graduate, currently studying for an MSc in Bioarchaeology at the University of York whilst forming an archaeological illustration business. I’m currently producing my first archaeological comics this summer based on experiences working both in the lab and the field.

Peter Connelly: I’m Director of Archaeology at York Archaeological Trust, and was Director of York’s Hungate excavations for five years and have a wide range of experience in large-scale public archaeology. I’m not a comics creator, but I’ve long been a reader of Silver Age and independent comics

Troy Lovata: I’m Associate Professor of Archaeology at University of New Mexico Honours College. I’ve been a long-time contributor of comics to the archaeological ‘zine Shovel Bum, and I produced part of my PhD defence in the form of a comic.

Hannah Sackett: I received a PhD in landscape archaeology from Leicester University, and am currently developing a project on visual narrative and the reception of museums with Pr. Stephanie Moser at the University of Southampton. I’m the creator of the Archaeological Oddities comics, and I’m collaborating with John Swogger on a graphic novel set in Neolithic Orkney.

Al B. Wesolowsky: I am the retired Managing Editor of the Journal of Field Archaeology and the current Art Editor of the same publication. I received the MFA from the Center for Cartoon Studies, White River Junction, Vermont, in 2009. I have an extensive background in excavation in Texas and the Balkans and I create comics based on my experiences in the field.

John Swogger: And I have been an archaeological illustrator for almost twenty years, working for small archaeological units, museums, excavation projects as a freelance illustrator. I have produced comics for education and interpretation projects in the UK, the Caribbean and the Pacific Islands, and recently presented a paper to the Society for American Archaeology in the form of a comic.

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Troy Lovata: from Shovel Bum #19

JS: I think the first thing to note is how diverse this forum is – I think it’s fair to say that we all represent very different aspects of archaeological practice, and yet have all ended up using – or wanting to use, perhaps – comics in our work. I’d like to start with that point: what is it about comics that seems to fit in with what you do as an archaeologist?

CB: I am exploring ideas about creating work that illustrates some of the scientific approaches employed after the excavation process, which I believe could further progress potential for interdisciplinary research as scientific terminology translated into a visual format could potentially overcome the divide created by academic language. I aim to create comics explaining techniques, such as isotope analysis. Used perhaps as part of a pamphlet or a poster at conferences to allow for quick viewing and facilitate a general understanding by all present of alien techniques and therefore yield greater contribution from more members of the conference.

TL: I’m an archaeologist who decided to write and draw up some of my work in comics format. It’s something I’ve been doing now for a decade and a half. Putting together the 40 plus page comic for my Ph.D. dissertation, done over a dozen years ago, was the biggest project I’ve attempted. I turned research about dog domestication on the Great Plains of North America and cultural ideas of dogs into a comic. That did and didn’t work as planned and a lot of my recent comics have been a couple pages of panels here and there. My book on archaeology hoaxes and recreations from 5 years ago had a whole chapter, on Piltdown [1], done as a comic. Other works have been 1 to 3 page vignettes. I’m not entirely happy with my output, but my position as a faculty member and scholar has demands that keep me from diving into a large project in the same way again. I’m not an illustrator or writer for hire, these projects are my own research and work.

HS: Archaeological Oddities had its origin in a jokey present I made for my partner Andy Jones, while he was researching the Folkton Drums [2] for his last book, Prehistoric Materialities. It was a Tunnocks Teacake box turned into a “Make your own Folkton Drums” set. It had picture of the three Neolithic chalk carvings on the outside, with them saying “We are Family”. This picture stuck in my head, until one day I found myself jotting down a conversation between the three drums. I messed about, working on simplifying the drums and finding a simple drawing style, and made the first Archaeological Oddities. The people I showed it to were really positive, so I kept going. I chose oddities, because I think archaeologists sometime gloss over things that don’t fit into a neat category. An archaeologist once told me that you couldn’t discuss Silbury Hill [3] because you couldn’t categorise it! This stayed with me.

AW: I make comics about my archaeological experiences, and they are autobiographical in nature. Not all my autobio comics are archaeological, though. I find comics to be a very engaging medium for memoirs and reflection. The archaeological ones tend to concentrate on the odder aspects of field work, the occurrences that are familiar to most archaeologists but which seldom make it into any published record or excavation report. Examples include dealing with local workmen, local governing bodies and military, accidents and injury and stays in local hospitals, and working out problems in field analysis.

JS: So there’s are several themes emerging already. One is communication – the idea that there are some aspects of archaeology which are not being communicated at all: for example, the “daily life” stories you’re referring to, Al.

AL: Personalities can loom large in these accounts, and, while the events are episodic in nature, I’m trying to develop an overall narrative about my own professional development and how my views regarding the discipline matured as I was thrust into increasingly directorial positions with administrative tasks (budgets, payroll, banking, vehicles, purchasing, etc.). I make comics because I have stories that I want to tell, and I like the visual component of comics which, I think, adds to readability and general appeal to readers.

TL: For me, archaeology is chock-full of narratives that fit very, very well into a comics format. I think they often they work better there than in other formats common to research and academia. The narratives about past peoples and places are, of course, one set of stories ripe for the showing or telling in comics. But I’m more often engaged with narratives of what archaeologists do and how research is done. Trent de Boer’s Shovel Bum has been a great outlet for my ideas because it’s a comics ‘zine and ‘zines are so focused on the context of creation and experience. My first forays into archaeology comics were sketches in field books—little cartoons alongside the other notes—that recorded and commented on what I was experiencing and how archaeology was unfolding. Things grew from there; which is no surprise considering the significance of reflexivity in the social sciences.

HS: My aim in drawing these kind of “general appeal” comics is to have fun, to entertain myself and hopefully other people, and to encourage people to learn more about archaeology – make them curious. I’ve written a lot of stories, as well as writing academic papers, but I feel that a comic strip is much more inviting than a block of text. Working on these Archaeological Oddities comics is teaching me a lot about how to work with words and images.

Hannah Sackett: Archaeological Oddities No. 1: The Folkton Drums (from Archaeological Oddities, Vol. 1; 2013)

JS: I know that the comics I’ve done about fieldwork in the Pacific and the Caribbean have been used by university professors to show students what they can expect, working on projects in places like that. Most of these comics were originally drawn as public outreach tools – so “general appeal” can certainly cross over to archaeological audiences. But there’s also this idea that comics can be produced specifically to communicate with other archaeologists – even other scientists. Chloe’s point about comics being useful as an interdisciplinary tool is intriguing.

TL: On that point about interdisciplinary uses, the connections between archaeology comics and comics in other sciences are certainly there. There are people—the Larry Gonicks [The Cartoon History of the Universe series, 1977 - 2008], of the world or Jim Ottaviani [Two Fisted Science, 1997; Feynman, 2011, etc.] at GT Labs—who do quite well creating comics relating to a wide range of fields. Those are people who are the connections. I view the comics as akin to the research articles or chapters that I craft as part of my position. I’ve also written, presented at archaeology conferences, and used in classes I teach a fair amount about archaeology and comics. I was interested in comics before I ever became an archaeologist—from childhood on—and that hasn’t stopped just because I earned a handful of degrees in the field.

PC: On the whole I can see no reason why any aspect of archaeology that wouldn’t fit the comics medium. After all archaeology is a very ocular process and profession which would appear to fit with the graphic, sequential art and comic medium. A natural fit with comics may be the processes/“doing” of archaeology and the interpretation of archaeological data. However, if done well I can’t see why the reporting of archaeological facts and data couldn’t incorporate either elements of the comic medium or be entirely presented as a comic. What may hold the archaeological data representation back from the comics medium is the ease with how a written report can be carried out, and how that is accepted.

JS: Yes, I’d like to pick up on some of those practical questions a bit later on. There’s one other theme which Hannah has mentioned: that of education and outreach. Hannah, both you and I have used comics in this way. What is it about comics in particular that make them useful for archaeological education and outreach?

HS: I think the most obvious fit between comics and archaeology is in the areas of public outreach and education, that’s true – to explain sites and archaeology and interpretations. As I mentioned earlier, a comic draws you in better than a block of text, and it will also be more appealing to children and younger people (children love to read speech bubbles!). On a notice board, you can fit more information into a comic than you can into a block of text next to a picture, and I think people are more likely to read it (although some people do have an issue/mental block about comics).

JS: I’ve certainly noticed that when you start using comics as tools to talk about archaeology, you can let the pictures do a lot of the explaining. There’s nothing more frustrating than having to describe in text, visual and spatial relationships – say, between the different layers within a site trench, or different building phases in a structure. But with a comic, you can create panels which show all these things, freeing up your text to do other things. You can also use the panels to build explicit and complex chronological relationships: how what was built in the Neolithic relates to what was built later in the Bronze Age, or how buried objects change through time. These are all things which are often really, really difficult to make clear and concise when using text alone. Comics can be a very powerful communications tool in that regard. And what’s even more interesting is, in using panels, image and text like this, you actually end up “smarting up”, rather than “dumbing down”; I’ve found I can make my comics cover quite complex and sophisticated concepts as a result.

PC: Archaeological narrative can often be cloaked in inaccessible academic phraseology and description. This can be overcome in the comics medium, providing both outreach and wider educational appeal. However, I feel that if archaeological comics are largely produced solely for outreach and wider education then they will never be accepted as rigorous pieces of academic work. There is a danger that archaeological comics could become a handmaiden to the more traditional archaeological report and publication. Something I feel should be avoided.

AW: I think that the use of comics in archaeology for public outreach is in its infancy and is deserving of wide adoption. While archaeology as a discipline has a fundamental infrastructure (e.g., the notions of stratification and stratigraphy [4], the role of context, the importance of spatial documentation, the need for maps and plans and drawn sections, and so forth), expressions of antiquity are usually very localized. Hence, there are localized conventions and practices in archaeology that would be inappropriate in other areas. This localization means, I believe, that comics will need to be localized for most regions, projects, and sites. A reconnaissance in the U.S. desert Southwest would be treated, visually, quite differently from, say, the excavation of a Bronze Age barrow in Sussex or the reconstruction of a Neolithic site in Turkey. There’s not much opportunity for a “one size fits all” approach here, and localized comics for local projects will be the most effective.

JS: It’s interesting to note that I think we’re all very much agreed on one thing: no matter how comics are used in archaeology, it’s the input of the archaeologists that is key. Whether it’s, as Pete says, avoiding educational comics becoming a poor second cousin to the more formal archaeological report; or as Al points out, steering clear of a “one size fits all” approach and concentrating on a more specifically-focused approach to the visuals; or, as Troy mentioned earlier, making sure that the real experiences of archaeological process are present within the narrative.

This brings me back to something Pete raised earlier, and which I’d like to focus on in the second part of our panel discussion: the practicalities of introducing the use of comics into archaeological practice.

Al B. Wesolowsky: Page from Free Flight (unpublished, 2008)

Click here to read part 2 of this panel.

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Chloe Brown is a Fine Arts graduate, currently studying for an MSc in Bioarchaeology at the University of York whilst forming an archaeological illustration business. She is producing her first archaeological comics this summer based on experiences working both in the lab and the field.

Peter Connelly is Director of Archaeology at York Archaeological Trust and a Trustee of the Council of British Archaeology. He was Director of York’s Hungate excavations for five years and has a wide range of experience in large-scale public archaeology. He’s not a comic creator (yet), but has long been a reader of Silver Age and independent comics.

Troy Lovata is Associate Professor of Archaeology at University of New Mexico Honours College. He has been a long-time contributor of comics to the archaeological ‘zine Shovel Bum, and produced part of his PhD defence in the form of a comic. His book Inauthentic Archaeologies: The Public Uses and Abuses of the Past, was published by Left Coast Press in 2007.

Hannah Sackett received a PhD in landscape archaeology from Leicester University, and is is currently developing a project on visual narrative and the reception of museums with Pr. Stephanie Moser at the University of Southampton. She has published papers on the use of land in eighteenth and nineteenth century Buckinghamshire, bronze age rock carvings in Norway, and archaeology in the writings of Lewis Grassic Gibbon. She is the creator of the Archaeological Oddities comics, and is collaborating with John Swogger on a graphic novel set in Neolithic Orkney.

John Swogger has been an archaeological illustrator for almost twenty years, working for small archaeological units, museums, excavation projects and as a freelance illustrator. For ten years he was site illustrator for the Çatalhöyük Research Project in Turkey. He has produced comics for education and interpretation projects in the UK (Bryn Celli Ddu, Barclodiad y Gawres, Llyn Cerrig Bach – CADW), the Caribbean (Archaeology in the Caribbean - Carriacou Island Archaeology Project) and the Pacific Islands (Palau: An archaeological field journal), and has written comics about the use of comics in archaeology to the Society for American Archaeology.

Al B. Wesolowsky is the retired Managing Editor of the Journal of Field Archaeology and the current Art Editor of the same publication. He received the MFA from the Center for Cartoon Studies, White River Junction, Vermont, in 2009. He has an extensive background in excavation in Texas and the Balkans and creates comics based on his experiences in the field.

[1] – Piltdown Man: an archaeological hoax perpetrated in the early twentieth century relating to a discovery of human skull fragments purporting to be evidence of a “missing link” between ape and man. The find was alleged to have been made near Piltdown, East Sussex, UK. The hoax was conclusively exposed in 1953. The identity of the forger has never been discovered.

[2] – Folkton Drums: a collection of highly-decorated carved chalk objects found in association with a neolithic burial site near Folkton, Yorkshire, UK. Their exact purpose is unknown.

[3] – Silbury Hill: a mound near Avebury, UK, dating from the Neolithic period. Its purpose has been the object of much speculation, and various claims for its prehistoric use as a spiritual or ritual centre have been made. Most archaeologists tend to reserve their judgement on the exact role it played during the Neolithic.

[4] – Stratification: the principle that layers within the soil are built up chronologically, thus enabling archaeologists to determine how old something is by how deep it was found in the ground.

Featuring: Chloe Brown, Peter Connelly, Troy Lovata, Hannah Sackett, John Swogger and Al B. Wesolowsky

Click here to read part 1 of this panel.

Ancient artefacts, lost archaeological expeditions and ruins long hidden in jungles and deserts have long been part of comics heritage. From the EC Comics clichés of lost pyramids and ancient curses through to the Phantom and Adele Blanc-Sec, archaeology has long served as an inspiration for comics writers and illustrators.

It is only relatively recently that archaeologists themselves, however, have begun to use comics in a professional context. The list of published examples is not long, but includes works like Archaeology: The Comic (Johannes Loubser, 2003) and the archaeological comic ‘zine Shovel Bum (Trent DeBoer, ed., 1997 – present; collected edition, 2004).

This e-panel brings together six archaeologists, all of whom are making comics about archaeology, aimed at a wide range of audiences. Their work explores new ways of using comics as a medium for science communication.

*               *               *

Al B. Wesolowsky: Page from Trenchant Tales: Of archaeology and the absurd (unpublished, 2009)

John Swogger: Following on from Part 1, where we talked about what makes comics particularly suited to archaeology, I’d like to pick up on something Pete mentioned earlier: writing, artwork, the practice of actually creating archaeological comics.

Let’s start with an obvious question: what authors and writers have influenced you, and how do you see that interest and influence in your own work?

CB: Having read comics/graphic novels since childhood predominantly for leisure but increasingly for an appreciation of the art work, I am aware the impact and staying power of illustrations on the reader. It’s therefore an important resource in education which is yet to be fully exploited. I have been inspired by Tintin growing up, due to the vast range of mysteries covered, and the Sandman novels by Neil Gaiman, because of the depth of the subjects, storyline, development of characters and fantastic art work.

TL: I used to read many more comics than I do now. Simply keeping up with the volume of the new while finding time to revisit what once so engaged me—maybe stuff by Will Eisner or Neal Adams or Mark Schultz—or what I failed to pick up the first time around—for example, mid- to late-1990′s issues of Mad Magazine or half of James Sturm’s graphic novels or a few of Chris Ware’s monumental undertakings—is a job unto itself and I already have a full-time job as a teacher and researcher! These days I find myself dropping by the public library and ploughing through the anthologies they have on hand rather than purchasing piecemeal as things come out. This invariably means I’m slightly behind the times at best. But that seems to just be what happens when you get older. I keep reading comics because they’re so engaging.

HS: I do read comics. I try and read a variety, (I’m not obsessive about superheroes), and I would read even more if I had more money and could buy as many as I liked! I work part-time as a school librarian, so I read comics for children like The Phoenix, The Little Vampire, Tales from Outer Suburbia (Shaun Tan) and Adventure Time (Pendleton Ward), but I also read comics aimed at grown-ups. I really love the Grandville series by Bryan Talbot (in fact I love all his work). I suppose I’ve recently read a number of Jonathan Cape titles, including Days of the Bagnold Summer (Joff Winterhart), Dotter of her Father’s Eyes (Mary and Bryan Talbot) and Please God Find me a Husband (Simone Lia). I also like the SelfMadeHero publications – Sherlock Holmes (Ian Edginton and I.N.J. Culbard) and HP Lovecraft (Edginton, D’Israeli, et. al.) adaptations.

AW: Almost completely alt-comics and small-press offerings. I appreciate the appeal of superhero mainstream comics but never really have followed them. I read Eddie Campbell, Lucy Knisley (who was in my class at the Center for Cartoon Studies 2007–2009), Alison Bechdel, Joe Sacco, the late Harvey Pekar, Seth, Joe Matt, Chester Brown, Lewis Trondheim, and Guy Delisle. I also like David Collier, Kim Deitch, and Rick Geary.

Hannah Sackett: Archaeological Oddities No. 2: Silbury Hill (from Archaeological Oddities, Vol. 1; 2013)

JS: I hear many of the same authors and writers being name-checked here: I’m also in that same Tintin/Pogo/Joe Sacco/Alison Bechdel Venn diagram! Al, is there anything in particular about these kinds of comics creators that has had a direct impact on the work you did for that course?

AW: I note that most all of these do autobio, at least as part of their output – so that’s the immediate link with my work. I especially like Sacco’s work as a comics journalist (that is, not writing about comics but using comics as a medium for recent history and current events), and the travel comics of Knisley, Delisle, and Trondheim. I read collections of older comics, especially those by Roy Crane, John Stanley, Walt Kelly, and Carl Barks. Their range of styles is enormous (Little Lulu vs. Pogo) but their skills at storytelling and pacing are instructive and worth studying. A number of Barks’ Scrooge McDuck stories involve themes from antiquity and he brings a proper sense of wonder in these tales.

I try to bring those qualities to my own comics, to inform readers that archaeology is not just about fabulous discoveries, or being pursued by giant stone spheres or agents of the Illuminati, but more about people trying to carry out field work in places they might never have otherwise visited. Archaeologists have a curiosity about the past and its material culture that is quite at variance from the depictions of, say, the Indiana Jones stories. Our challenge can be to find interesting ways of presenting the realities of field work; my tendency is to concentrate on the human interest side of things, but comics are capable of dealing with most everything on the more scholarly side as well.

JS: And visually?

AW: Pretty much all of those comics have influenced me, not so much for artistic style (I cannot hope to match the drawing abilities of, say, Bechdel, Knisley, or Campbell) but I study how they tell their stories, how they differentiate their characters visually, and how they pace their tales. I like the way the cartoonists present themselves, often as bemused observers willing to go along for the ride (Delisle is very good at this); this approach, I think, generates both interest and goodwill on the part of the reader. The tone is not didactic or rarefied, but more of a “Hello. Want to hear a story?” feeling that makes the reader a participant in the unfolding tale.

JS: What about everyone else? What from your reading lists can you see reflected in your work?

HS: For me it’s the work of Tom Gauld (You’re all just jealous of my jetpack), Adam Murphy’s Corpse Talk and Josie Long’s Alternative Universe that have influenced Archaeological Oddities. One Girl Goes Hunting – the graphic novel about Neolithic Orkeney I’m doing with John Swogger – is more influenced by animation. I’m sure all the Tinitin and Asterix I read as a child have had an influence on me too, and they and The Beano and Mandy started my interest in comics. Comics have had a big impact on the project I’m developing with Stephanie Moser at Southampton University, as the aim is to get children drawing comics about artefacts they have encountered on museum visits.

TL: This would be the question that a skilled archaeologist of comic books would use to place me within a stratigraphy and accurately date me! Most of my stuff is clearly the by-product of a pile of poorly archived ‘zines and mini-comics combined with what so engrossed me from teenage times to early adulthood. I suspect most people simply can’t escape the influence of that stretch of years. So, for how my stuff looks and how I think visually, influences would be the Matt Feazell’s of the world on one hand and, on the other, Los Bros Hernandez first run at Love and Rockets or whatever Shawn Kerri and George Trosley had in CARtoons magazine on any given month. Not a single one is a science or archaeology comic per se. Yet shared black and white formats are clearly some of the link between the commercial and do-it-yourself publishers. These are the comics that I consumed and thought, I can do something similar with the tools and skills I have on hand. “I’ve got black pens and white paper, I can do this sort of thing.” When I became an archaeologist I fell back on those tools at various points.

JS: Hergé has been an obvious influence on my artwork, and I include a large number of ligne claire illustrators in that same category of influence, from Jacques Tardi (his Adele Blanc-Sec stories being an obviously archaeological influence, too) to Adamov. But I came to work in that style because it served the need for detail and precision rather than any specific desire to imitate the look of Tintin, per se. Moebius, for similar reasons, has been a big influence on my pen and ink work in archaeology generally. Many years ago, a film-maker described my reconstruction illustrations as “looking as if they had been drawn by Robert Crumb,” because of all the crosshatch-work in my drawings. So there’s that old sixties underground style in there as well – perhaps unsurprising given that archaeological visuals also rely heavily on black and white rather than full colour, and that most archaeological illustrators (myself included) are self-taught.

It seems fairly clear that we’re all leaning in some similar directions. There’s an obvious influence from a broad school of “adventure realism”: Hergé, Tardi, Chester Brown, the Hernandez brothers, etc. But there’s also clearly a lot of influence from the “alternative” side of the fence, both in artwork and approach to story-telling. I think it’s interesting that, with a few notable exceptions, we’re all still very much drawn to less cartoon-y, more detailed artists – and yet also to writers who are dealing with often very nuanced, alternative approaches to their storytelling: Bechdel, the Hernandez brothers, Chris Ware, etc.

This mix sounds very much like a description of archaeology itself: visually often detailed and specific, but dealing with a lot of narrative complexity.

What about some practical advice or observations about the making of archaeological comics?

Troy Lovata: from Shovel Bum #19

TL: More archaeologists should shamelessly read more comics. That’s part of understanding the context I’ve previously mentioned. I’ve been approached a number of times by people wanting to collaborate on a comic or some form of illustration based on a fairly limited background in the field. They saw something in particular they really liked and want it emulated in a presentation of their own research. It’s hard for some of those folks to really express what they’re drawn to or understand why it might or might not work as they expect without more exposure. But this doesn’t mean they should sit and read up until they get the background necessary to be an expert. On the contrary, more archaeologists should also try creating comics, especially hand drawn work. Archaeologists are a fairly visual lot—this should be no surprise as they work so much with physical artifacts and on physical landscapes—and they’ve got great stories to tell. I’ve seen some engaging comics come from simply giving it a shot in very manageable circumstances. Such people aren’t going to put professional illustrators nor professional trained comics creators out of business, but they can nonetheless create valuable narratives. This means producing comics that aren’t necessarily long form. But there are niches needing to be filled by the short, the quick, and the sometimes messy.

JS: I’d like to see archaeological comics actively trying to bring the visual side of archaeological practice, data and interpretation back into the text we already produce. I’d like to see comics that restore the close interrelationship that exists in the field between image and description – regardless of whether this is talking to an external audience as education, interpretation or outreach, or talking to an internal audience as peer-reviewed data. Comics – or if not comics, then the language and lessons of comics – could bring back the sense of connection that exists as archaeological knowledge is created in the field. I’ve always thought it particularly painful to have had the experience of working in the heart of an excavation, standing in the remains of a building and seeing the chronology and building history all around you, and then later flipping back and forward through the publication between plans, plates, finds drawings and text, utterly unable to recapture that sense of connection. I think comics can bring all these disparate kinds of archaeological information together in a way that could give them so much more meaning, both to us as archaeologists, and to our various external audiences. Comics like these could challenge archaeologists to re-evaluate the effectiveness of the voices they currently use when they speak to those audiences.

AW: Yes – slice-of-life stories about field work, illustrating the conditions under which archaeologists work. Also some good introductions to ancient technologies (stone-knapping [1], ceramics, metallurgy, sculpture, architecture, astronomy, agriculture, economics, ship-building, travel) that would be suitable for students or for the general public. Such booklets could easily be site- or project-specific and could be used in reports aimed at a more popular readership. Another topic could be the history of a project, how it was formed and its goals selected, how field work was performed and information gathered, and how concurrent analysis affected the working goals and hypotheses of the project.

CB: It would be exciting to see the illustrative format become accepted as part of the archaeological recording process. An artist’s book created alongside a site report but also, comics produced to complement post-excavation analysis. This would provide a bridge between the post-excavation lab work and the excavator. It might allow issues which arise later – such as contamination of samples – to be eliminated at earlier stages, due to a deeper understanding of individual actions impacts and various protocols.

JS: I think this is an important point, and something which I think is being explored in a number of fields: the use of the comics approach to image and text – ie: bringing them together – in the actual recording of scientific data or designing field or lab protocols. I suggested a few years ago at the Visualisation in Archaeology workshop programme at Southampton University, the use of “airline safety information card” type training tools for field archaeologists to explain new sampling protocols, etc.

CB: And if Illustrating the processes and techniques used throughout the excavation process is done on site, and illustrating scientific processes employed at the post-excavation stage is done in the lab, both would then be useful in an educational context and for outreach programs.

JS: I know that in both medicine as well as in environmental and development working, people are looking at comics as a model for recording fieldwork practice and experience: as an alternative to a purely text-based record. Comics as field journals, which is something I’ve done in the Pacific.

HS: Comics in archaeology do have the potential to be really sophisticated – they can communicate complex ideas in a visually appealing and enticing fashion. I believe that comics should be drawn by people who care about and understand the medium, not just a comic/cartoon-style drawing by designers who don’t appreciate the potential of comics. I do feel, though, that education and outreach are not the limit of what comics can do in archaeology. I think that comics are endlessly versatile and can be used to do anything – to document the experience of being an archaeologist, to look at the process of making artefacts and sites, to explore theoretical ideas. Comics can (and should) find a way!

AW: There can be a didactic component based on a narrative of discovery, elements of fact and fiction (stated as such) can be used in the work, with the goal of using comics to distil and present the theoretical approaches and the findings in a report. As for biography, I can imagine a graphic version of Glyn Daniel’s Some Small Harvest, his autobiography, or Agatha Christie’s memoir Come, Tell Me How You Live. I suppose I view comics as ancillary to the formal report, with the former supplementing the latter and appealing to a wider readership, but not substituting for it.

John Swogger: Page from Barclodiad y Gawres (CADW – Welsh Government Historic Environment Service; 2014 – in press)

JS: I think there are often big gaps between the professional and wider understanding of what it means to be an archaeologist and what it means to do archaeology: gaps between fact and fiction, between data and interpretation, between the professional report and the personal experience. The usual academic approach to publication and presentation in archaeology just doesn’t really suit the ambiguities inherent in these gaps. For example, I’m not sure where would be the best place to work out the various archaeological ramifications of the theories or obsessions of famous archaeologists whose legacies have left lasting impressions on the work of subsequent generations of scholars. These would be stories about clashing personalities, undue influences, questionable motivations. These are also stories which touch on particularly sensitive issues for archaeology: fraud, forgery, obsession. But these are also important stories which should be told. You’re very constrained in academic journals or written biographies, and these would be narratives more full of questions than anything else. Dr. Muna Al-Jawad, a geriatrician and comics creator, has identified comics in medicine as having a role to play in analysing “difficult areas of practice”. Perhaps comics might be a way of looking at some of these “difficult areas of practice” in archaeology?

PC: One interesting observation is that the large majority of comics produced by the main publishing houses are joint productions, e.g., there could be a writer, a penciller, an inker, a colourist, a letterer and an editor all involved with the publication of one issue. Whereas, as far as I am aware, the large majority of archaeological comics have been produced by sole operators. I am aware that the example given above is as much an economies of scale issue as anything else and the large publication house production line could be streamlined to writer and artist. However, there may some weakness in archaeological comics produced by a single person and this may need to be investigated more.

JS: That’s an interesting observation, Pete, and I think fertile ground for another round of discussion entirely. We haven’t talked a lot about the “drawing board” practicalities, if you like, of producing archaeological comics. I think there are a lot of questions about time, training, writing and visual approaches to data and so on, that would be extremely interesting to discuss further at some point.

I’d like to thank my panel colleagues: Pete, Hannah, Al, Troy and Chloe for taking part, and also Ian Hague and Comics Forum for hosting our discussion.

*               *               *

Chloe Brown is a Fine Arts graduate, currently studying for an MSc in Bioarchaeology at the University of York whilst forming an archaeological illustration business. She is producing her first archaeological comics this summer based on experiences working both in the lab and the field.

Peter Connelly is Director of Archaeology at York Archaeological Trust and a Trustee of the Council of British Archaeology. He was Director of York’s Hungate excavations for five years and has a wide range of experience in large-scale public archaeology. He’s not a comic creator (yet), but has long been a reader of Silver Age and independent comics.

Troy Lovata is Associate Professor of Archaeology at University of New Mexico Honours College. He has been a long-time contributor of comics to the archaeological ‘zine Shovel Bum, and produced part of his PhD defence in the form of a comic. His book Inauthentic Archaeologies: The Public Uses and Abuses of the Past, was published by Left Coast Press in 2007.

Hannah Sackett received a PhD in landscape archaeology from Leicester University, and is is currently developing a project on visual narrative and the reception of museums with Pr. Stephanie Moser at the University of Southampton. She has published papers on the use of land in eighteenth and nineteenth century Buckinghamshire, bronze age rock carvings in Norway, and archaeology in the writings of Lewis Grassic Gibbon. She is the creator of the Archaeological Oddities comics, and is collaborating with John Swogger on a graphic novel set in Neolithic Orkney.

John Swogger has been an archaeological illustrator for almost twenty years, working for small archaeological units, museums, excavation projects and as a freelance illustrator. For ten years he was site illustrator for the Çatalhöyük Research Project in Turkey. He has produced comics for education and interpretation projects in the UK (Bryn Celli Ddu, Barclodiad y Gawres, Llyn Cerrig Bach – CADW), the Caribbean (Archaeology in the Caribbean - Carriacou Island Archaeology Project) and the Pacific Islands (Palau: An archaeological field journal), and has written comics about the use of comics in archaeology to the Society for American Archaeology.

Al B. Wesolowsky is the retired Managing Editor of the Journal of Field Archaeology and the current Art Editor of the same publication. He received the MFA from the Center for Cartoon Studies, White River Junction, Vermont, in 2009. He has an extensive background in excavation in Texas and the Balkans and creates comics based on his experiences in the field.

[1] – Knapping: the process of turning a piece of stone into a tool.

Right in the heart of Nina Bunjevac’s comics collection Heartless (2012) we find Zorka, the eponymous protagonist of the five-comic sequence ‘Bitter Tears of Zorka Petrovic.’[1] This is the same intriguing catwoman character who adorns the front and back covers, first displayed behind the wheel of a car and then defiantly riding the back of an unplugged vacuum cleaner. Contrasting these cover images, on the splash page beginning the ‘Bitter Tears’ sequence, we rediscover Zorka, framed—etherized even—in thick black, undergoing an abortion. In this precisely paradoxical ‘pregnant moment’—inducing a temporal narrative cycle that ‘radiates in both directions’ (Wolk 2007, 131) and arousing a heighted sense of ‘Peeping Tomism’ that comes along with reading through the windows of graphic fiction—this image conjures all sorts of human-non-human, funny animal, and ‘not-so-funny animal’ associations [2] (Fig.1). And thus begins a text teeming with ‘alternative tensions,’[3] a tragicomic yet serious satire, where at least one crucial crux—the fantasy of love, lust, and belonging—resides between a comedy of errors on one hand and a tragedy of ideologically grounded ideals on the other.

Fig. 1. ‘Bitter Tears of Zorka Petrovic’ Splash Page (61). Used with permission from Nina Bunjevac.[4] Click to view – reader discretion is advised – image contains abortion related subject matter.

In attempting a reading of ‘Bitter Tears,’ we cannot help but place this work within an alternative comics context. One applicable definition of ‘alternative comic’ follows what Charles Hatfield describes as ‘often denot[ing] satirical, political, and autobiographical elements inherited from [the earlier] underground comix [movement of the late 1960s]’ (2005, 26). Aspects of satire, politics, and autobiography—all challenging aspects of the mainstream tradition—are certainly apparent in Bunjevac’s text. Zorka is not your typical anthropomorphic character, and she stands in opposition to the all-alluring Catwoman of the mainstream. Instantly, Zorka’s character is antithetical to what Roger Sabin identifies as the primary modes of representation open to women, both in mainstream comic genres and also the male-dominated underground mode in which women characters are ‘invariably either plot devices (there to be rescued) or sex symbols (all plunging necklines and endless legs)’ (1993, 221). Thus, Bunjevac’s work shares common themes with certain feminist comics—such as those known as Wimmen’s Comix—that first grew up in reaction to the early male dominated and often misogynistic underground scene, yet also continue to flourish in different realms of alternative and autobiographical comics today.[5] Additionally, Zorka also shares some commonalities with Bunjevac herself (according to Bunjevac), and we must read Zorka in her ‘Canadian Yugoslavian/Yugoslavian Canadian’ context as well.[6]

Indeed, the politics of this text run much deeper than those resonating on a plane of sexist destabilization. In fact, several webs of intersubjectivity become obvious when attempting to attach the “alternative” designation to various aspects of this comic. The more I grappled with the usage of “alternative” here, the more these issues became apparent. Yet the text itself seems to provoke this critical engagement with marginally (and minority) defined identities.[7] To acknowledge problems with this term, I use “alternative” within scare quotes (and imply this usage throughout) because of the obvious contingencies, proliferated here, in that it both denotes a deviation from a “norm” and thus reifies binary and stereotypical divisions in its possible implication of the “abnormal.” This can become further problematic in that what often seems abnormal becomes available to be pathologized or demonized and used as a justified means towards marginalizing and “othering” people, populations, and indeed “things” in themselves. Within a discourse of alterity the challenge becomes, then, finding the means to articulate “otherness” without reinforcing the binaries that underpin hegemony in the first place. In several ways, I think this graphic narrative effectively visualizes and posits questions over why and how “alternative” functions and gets deemed as such. Thus, through this text’s attention to alterity, Bunjevac mines cultural and sociopolitical meanings and subversions of alternative, alternativeness, and, indeed, the idea of having alternatives within interrelated and normative structures.

The story revolves around an unrequited love-triangle involving Zorka, who, in the first scene, telephones the ‘Exotica Fantasy Club’ to contact Chip (also part of the triangle), but she reaches Fay, the front desk clerk (the third in the triangle). Fay, a complicated transgender* character,[8] is also in love with Chip, the ostensible male prostitute and stripper who Zorka tries to contact for most of the story. Almost immediately we have three apparently alternative characters: Zorka, the chain-smoking immigrant catwoman, whose “catness” apparently signifies her ethnic “otherness” (her family is depicted as catpeople as well); Fay, the trans* character, who has both addictive and mother issues (66-7); and Chip, the male stripper, who is apparently bi-/multi-sexual (65). Following this alternative character motif, we can add Chip’s ‘elderly female companion’ (65) to the list, and Mr. Harold T. Garfield, ‘aka Mr. Shit Pants’ (68).[9] Of this group, Chip is the sex object, the apparent star at this mostly alternative/male club, and the seeming embodiment of “Fantasy” itself (Fig 2). Tellingly, Bunjevac only gives him one verbal line in the entire story (when he asks to share Zorka’s joint right before they have sex in the bathroom), yet he embodies an undeniable power despite his voicelessness: for Fay and Zorka he is a physical manifestation of their desire for love.

Fig. 2. Chip at the Exotica Fantasy Club (71). Used with permission from Nina Bunjevac.

Every depicted character is alternative in some way, especially when held up to a narrative standard, such as that traditionally characterized by the white, Western, middle-class, able-bodied, heteropatriarchal male. We might most commonly recognize such characters in ‘ubiquitous chosen-boy’ narratives (Hubel 2005, 18). There are literally multitudes of these characters, one might think of Harry Potter, for example, or, of course, any number of heroes and superheroes in the mainstream comics world. As such, the characters in ‘Bitter Tears’ seemingly perform potential destabilizations against such dominant narratives that continue to be reiterated and cross-culturally consumed. But as soon as we realize that this norm (as embodied by a character) is absent in this text, and begin to applaud this text for representing alternatives, we also come to realize that a variant of its ideological referent and conventional cultural ideals that it stands for is alive and well and functioning through the almost indiscernible, yet insidious character of “Love.”

“Love” assumes its own character in this text; it’s referred to on twenty-two out of twenty-nine of the image-text pages in this story. Sometimes it appears as an iconic image in heart bubbles, sometimes within the whites of Zorka’s eyes, sometimes on her bed sheets or in the shape of her purse, sometimes in reference to ‘heart,’ ‘heartache,’ or ‘heartless,’ and in several other textual examples also relating to Fay as well. The point is clear that “Love” permeates this graphic narrative and takes on a very specific role when the text suggests its ramifications within institutional underpinnings. As the story unfolds through a complex narrative structure of flashback scenes and the scripts of Zorka’s letters that she is writing to Chip, we find out about Zorka’s one night stand with Chip and her attempts to contact him, first because she’s in love with him, and then later her attempts become more urgent when she finds out that she is pregnant. Meanwhile, Fay thwarts every attempt that Zorka makes to contact him and becomes the seeming antagonist, as she prevents Zorka from speaking so-to-speak.[10] Both Zorka and Faye’s actions throughout are in response to their desire for Chip and their desire for what he stands for—capital “L” Love.

With Love established as a norm (and why wouldn’t these characters want it?), this text is intent on punching at the alternative button, and this is reinforced through tensions between audience gaze and the diegetic narrative. On one level we see the alternative typified as a hyperbolic underworld full of taboos, such as, sex, drugs, and rock and roll—an encoding that may now have come to signify its own normative type of “alternative” in the history of underground comics. But the inverted point here—suggested by another level to this alternativeness—is that these characters are not just representing counterculture in the interest of subverting comics norms or performing bawdiness for the sake of bawdiness. As this text also displays, at the level of the narrative, these characters enact such actions (drinking, drugs, etc.) because of feelings of insecurity, and lack of love that they so desire for their personal fulfillment. The seeming comedy is never very far from the tragedy here. The text places both stereotype and subversion side-by-side, skewing the alternative dimensions over whether the comedy resides in the gaze, the tragedy in the diegesis (or is it the other way around?). Yet, the link between them comes back to values built on Love.

The perniciousness of the Love preoccupation builds throughout the story. Perhaps this becomes most apparent when we see that it is inextricably tied to the discourse of an idealized American Dream. The juxtaposition of Zorka’s immigrant working-classness with that of her sister’s acculturated middle-classness noticeably materializes why a normative version of Love is so important for Zorka. Zorka lives in what’s called ‘Settlement City,’ and Mirka, her sister, lives what appears to be a typical middle-class lifestyle as a housewife (Fig. 3). Mirka criticizes Zorka for working in a meat factory (another source of irony since she is also part animal) and for living in Settlement City for the past twenty-years. Mirka wants to set Zorka up with a man—‘one of their own’ she says—both revealing her own biases and suggesting that such a relationship would raise Zorka’s social status in the world. The interdependent text of image and narration is telling and sarcastic here: the narrator relates, ‘In all honesty, Zorka didn’t give a hoot. As a matter of fact – Zorka hated her sister Mirka with a passion. She hated her perfect church-going family, her soccer playing idiot son, that big-shot gangster husband of hers and their new house in the suburbs’ (77). Beyond the explicit sarcasm, the text’s reference to ‘gangster husband’ suggests ambiguities in obtaining and maintaining the suburban lifestyle in the world of Mirka. This point is reinforced when Mirka must hang up the phone because her husband doesn’t like her talking on it. In Mirka’s ideal imaginary, we become aware that she has interpellated her own subordination through interrelated and value laden forms of assimilation. Additionally, even though the narrator tells us that Zorka ‘hates’ her sister and her lifestyle, Zorka’s actions suggest otherwise. Zorka is trying to contact Chip because she clearly desires a very similar type of lifestyle, proceeding from and informed by this heteropatriarchal and middle-class ideal (Fig 4-5). Zorka’s model of Love looks curiously similar to Mirka’s picture-perfect life, which Zorka both professes to ‘hate’ and yet also seems impatient to buy into (albeit, Chip is a clear alternative to the “catman” ideal Mirka wants for Zorka).

Fig. 3. Zorka in ‘Settlement City,’ Mirka in Suburbia (77). Used with permission from Nina Bunjevac.

Fig. 4. Zorka’s ideal of Love (88). Used with permission from Nina Bunjevac.

Fig. 5. Zorka’s ideal of Love continued (89). Used with permission from Nina Bunjevac.

For Zorka, finding a man and the status he confers is suggested to be a questionable promise for happiness. This is evidenced, for example, by the underhand suggestion that Mirka wants to set Zorka up with a man who could be dangerous: apparently he’s had an altercation with his ex-wife and might be a rapist. In this way, the man part of the Love equation is gradually shown to run deeper than just a desire or a fantasy on the part of the seeker. It is also revealed to be a requirement for a form of culturally and socio-politically defined normative femininity. And it comes back to Love as the first step in securing a piece of this status quo. In other words, this specific form of (possibly dangerous) Love becomes metonymic for success and social belonging.

The text goes a step further to comment on the ethno-religious groundings of these ideals as well. In perhaps one of the most telling moment-to-moment sequences of the story, we see Zorka making her abortion appointment. Here, Zorka is displayed in the spotlight, her shadow, perhaps symbolic of another self, is projected behind her. She is under the iconic image of a cross and visibly shaking as she makes the call to arrange her appointment (Fig. 6). Because of her circumstances, and (importantly) her location [11] in the world, the pro-choice decision she makes here appears to be made freely. Yet, when taken together with the text of Zorka’s last letter to Chip, asking him to consider a life with her and their unborn child—her ‘Last Plea’—this image takes on a deeper, darker significance. Her text to Chip reads: ‘We could be so very happy together, you and I and our love-child. I have some money saved up … Not much but perhaps enough for a down-payment on a bungalow’ (89). She continues, ‘I have safe-guarded myself and made an appointment to have the pregnancy terminated – however – I do hope that you’ll see reason and give “us” a chance’ (89). Two key words resonate here: ‘safe-guard’ and ‘reason.’ As Zorka says, she must ‘safe-guard’ herself, but as the story concludes, the text suggests that she’s actually upholding her female honour that would be ruined if she were to have a child out of wedlock. This expectation of safeguarding one’s female honour exemplifies the collision between sociocultural values and politics that emerge over issues of personal free will and choice.

Fig. 6. Zorka makes her abortion appointment (83). Used with permission from Nina Bunjevac.

The sadness of this reality—that the matter of her having a choice is in fact illusory—is immediately both emphasized and undercut on the following page. Zorka turns into a funny animal parody of herself, marching across the top three panels, declaring ‘Ahhh…What a great time to be alive. Free to live my life as I wish…having full control over my body. Yep! Free to go wherever I want… Free to do whatever I want! Free to drink whatever I want… Free to do so whenever I want!’ (84). Again the comedy/tragedy crux is exposed when the idea of freedom becomes lampooned as everything Zorka has just ‘freely’ consumed in the previous panels—pop corn, chips, soda, etc.—returns on her. Instead of marching freely across the page as in the previous sequence, she now runs across the top of the opposing page in order to throw up in the toilet (85). Juxtaposed this way, with her mind thinking one thing while her body does another, Zorka is perfectly framed as a humanimal—‘I think, therefore I am’ on one hand, but also an animal ‘automaton’ on the other.[12] The concept of agency, this text suggests, is a murky one indeed.

Without the conventional and morally required progression of events—love, marriage, child bearing (Fig. 4-5)—Zorka has no alternative choice. Never does she consider another way to have her child. The ‘reason’ and ‘safe-guard’ implication is that she can’t. The matter of the fallacy of her choice is heightened by the image of Zorka’s suffering and sadness and indeed her ‘bitter tears.’ The raw commentary from the narrator here reinforces the violence of her pro-choice no-choice paradox. The text reads:

Zorka will eventually recover from the procedure – which went surprisingly well. She will have spent many sleepless nights, tossing and turning over tear-soaked pillows, contemplating her empty life, and all that could have been – but never came to be… Two weeks after the procedure the bleeding went away – but not the heartache. (93)

Zorka’s tragic ‘heartache’ indicates a detectable contradiction regarding her relationship with Love in the space where ideology coopts the objects of her desire. Zorka herself may have put her finger on this early on in the text, speaking the unspeakable so-to-speak, when she said, ‘Fuck you, Love!’ (74).

In the last four frames of the text, looking out the window (typical of an entrapped or falsely conscious comics character), Zorka asks Mirka about the man she wanted to set her up with. And at first we might laugh—it’s a comedic roadrunner and Wile E Coyote moment in which Zorka appears to be subjecting herself to further torture. But any sort of comedy is immediately undercut as we recall the earlier suggestion that this man is a rapist. Thus, the text ends with a tragic anti-pregnant moment, compared to the pregnant moment we began with: life has literally been sucked out of her; figuratively and cyclically it will continue to be as long as she is chasing the ideological dream and the specific ideal of patriarchal love it’s tied to.

This graphic text resonates among multiple “alternative” platforms in that it portrays marginal and minority characters and taboos indicative of pressing the boundaries of traditional or orthodox norms. In terms of “alternative comics” Bunjevac’s Heartless ironically breeds a new type of catwoman—Canadian, working-class, Yugoslav immigrant—into a subversive tragicomic world, both in the tradition of, yet also moving beyond, previous comics versions. By the end of this hyper-alternative text, the very idea of alternative and its related semblances of freedom and choice become transformed with the revelation of the inherent ideological paradoxes attached to these characters through fantasies of Love. In the end, Bunjevac provides us with windows into enmeshed politics of love and politics of life, provocatively challenging the conventional ‘love conquers all’ —leaving us to contemplate alternatives to the question: who or what is most Heartless here?

Works Cited

Bunjevac, Nina. Heartless: Comics. Greenwich: Conundrum P, 2012. Print.

Bunjevac, Nina. Interview with Robin McConnell. “Nina Bunjevac.” Inkstuds.org, 31 Oct. 2012. Web. 30 Nov. 2012.

Chute, Hillary L. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. Print.

Gravett, Paul. “Nina Bunjevac: Making Comics and Making Peace.” paulgravett.com, 6 Jan 2013. Web. 14 Feb. 2013.

Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2005. Print.

Hubel, Teresa. “In Pursuit of Feminist Postfeminism and the Blessings of Buttercup.” ESC: English Studies in Canada 1.2 (2005): 17-21. Print.

Precup, Mihaela. “Felines and Females on the Fringe: Femininity and Dislocation in Nina Bunjevac’s Heartless.” Between History and Personal Narrative: East European Women’s Stories of Migration in the New Millennium. Ed. Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, Madalina Nicolaescu, and Helen Smith. Vol. 4. Münster: LIT Verlag, 2013. 177-192. Print.

Sabin, Roger. Adult Comics: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 1993. Print.

Witek, Joseph. Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1989. Print.

Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Philadelphia: Da Capo P, 2007. Print.

Laura A. Pearson is a PhD Candidate in the School of English at the University of Leeds, funded by the School of English’s Bonamy Dobrée Scholarship. Her doctoral project combines aspects of zoocriticism—the study of animals, literature, and culture—and interdisciplinary facets of comics studies, looking at animal-human relations and transcultural ecologies in contemporary graphic novels.

[1] – This article is an adaptation from a previous version presented at Comics Forum 2013.

[2] – ‘Peeping Tomism’ and ‘not-so-funny animal’ are phrases borrowed from Joseph Witek’s Comic Books as History; the latter phrase he uses via Richard Gehr (72, 111).

[3] – This phrase alludes to Charles Hatfield’s ‘Art of Tensions’ (32).

[4] – I would like to thank Nina Bunjevac for providing the images used in this article.

[5] – See, for example, Hilary Chute’s Graphic Women. It should also be noted that Bunjevac has talked about a range of influences in her work, including the Black Wave of Yugoslav cinema, which is also very apparent in her work here.

[6] – See Bunjevac’s interview at Inkstuds, for her discussion of the Canadian/Yugoslavian designation. See also Paul Gravett’s article/interview for other examples and www.ninabunjevac.com for her biography and further samples of her work.

[7] – See Mihaela Precup’s chapter for an exploration of Zorka’s ‘in-betweenness’ (178).

[8] – We never find out Fay’s orientation for sure, but the narrator identifies her as ‘she,’ so I will do the same for the duration of this paper. I use “trans*” as a politically inclusive category, though I know there are controversies with such categorizations. It should also be noted that there are obvious Freudian and psychoanalytical undertones that the text suggests in relation to both Fay and Zorka and their family backgrounds. Unfortunately I don’t have space to explore these Oedipal connections here.

[9] – The all-caps typeset of the original text has been changed to be consistent with the text of this paper.

[10] – This complex character surely deserves a paper of her own. I regret I don’t have space to further explore her here.

[11] – The text never spells out the time period or the location specifically. Because of the style of telephones Zorka has on page 77, I am speculating that it’s set in the 1990s. Because of the iconic image of the CN tower that appears in the first story of Heartless, in ‘Opportunity Presents Itself’ (page 12), and because Bunjevac identifies with Zorka’s home in Settlement City (in her Inkstuds interview), I assume the location to be Toronto.

[12] – I am referring to Rene Descartes’s famous postulations here.

[13] – This line is historically attributed to Virgil (70-19 BC) Eclogue X, line 69, ‘omnia vincit amor.’

[Editor's Note: This paper is an adapted version of a conference paper given at Comics Forum 2013.]

The comic market in the Western world today is heterogeneous and complex. However, I suggest it can be divided into three main segments, or groups of readers (see also the American market commentaries Alexander 2014, Alverson 2013): the first segment are manga fans, many of which also like anime and other kinds of Japanese pop culture. The second segment are comic fans in a narrower sense, who, at least in America, read mostly superhero comic books, and other comics from the genres of science fiction and fantasy. These are the ‘fanboys and true believers’ that Matthew J. Pustz writes about in his book Comic Book Culture (Pustz 1999). Finally, the third segment is the general public. These readers are not fans, but only casual readers of comics – mostly so-called “graphic novels”, newspaper strips and collections thereof, and the occasional bestseller such as the latest Asterix album.

If we go back to the 1980s, the Western comic market was structured differently, as there were hardly any manga fans. However, back then, some manga titles were already being translated into European languages and distributed in Western countries. Who were the readers of those early manga translations? It seems likely that these were read by either or both of the other two segments which were already there in the 1980s, the comic fans and the general public.

Indeed, looking at the manga translated in the 1980s, we can distinguish between two types: those titles that were more likely to be read by comic fans, and those more popular with the general public. This distinction is not clear-cut, of course. The first type comprises of science fiction manga – e.g. Akira (Ōtomo 1988-1995), Mai the Psychic Girl (Kudō and Ikegami 1987-1988) – and samurai or ninja manga set in medieval Japan – e.g. The Legend of Kamui (Shirato 1987-1988), Lone Wolf and Cub (Koike and Kojima 1987-1991). The second type consists of manga such as the wartime stories by Keiji Nakazawa (Barefoot Gen and I Saw It, Nakazawa 1980, 1982a, 1982b), a biography of the German poet Heinrich Heine (Heine in Japan, Kita and Ogata 1988), and an introduction to economics (Japan, Inc., Ishinomori 1988, Ishinomori 1989). I hesitate to label these types “fiction” and “non-fiction”, as on the one hand Japan Inc. is mainly fictional and Barefoot Gen is a fictionalised autobiography, and on the other hand some readers of Lone Wolf and Cub have stated that part of its appeal is the factual information about medieval Japan that it conveys – e.g. fanzine reviewer Martin Skidmore: ‘this gradual education to the ancient Japanese way of thinking is, for me at least, another big attraction to the series’ (Skidmore 1988). Let us now take a closer look at one manga from each of these types.

Lone Wolf and Cub by Kazuo Koike and Gōseki Kojima was originally published as 子連れ狼 (Kozure Ōkami) in Weekly Manga Action from 1970–1976. This classic gekiga manga was very successful in Japan and was adapted into several films. In over 8000 pages, it tells the story of samurai Ittō Ogami who is accused of treason by a rival ninja clan. His wife is murdered and he flees with his infant son Daigorō and travels through medieval Japan as an assassin-for-hire.

The first English-language edition of Lone Wolf and Cub was published by the company First Comics, or First Publishing. First Comics was founded in 1983 and tried to find a niche in the American Direct Market. The format of the Lone Wolf and Cub issues published by First was similar to the standard American comic book – 16.8 by 26.1 cm – but was square bound to accommodate a higher number of pages (ca. 60). 45 of these issues were published monthly from 1987 until 1991, which means that about two thirds of the series were left unpublished. Publication ceased when First went bankrupt. It is unclear whether this bankruptcy was due to an increasing cover price for Lone Wolf and Cub (from $1.95 for the first issues to $3.25 for the final issues) and consequently declining sales (Dimalanta 2011), or whether it was due to general financial problems at the company which were unrelated to Lone Wolf and Cub.

A distinctive feature of this edition was the cover images, which for the first few issues were drawn by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley. Frank Miller also provided introductions to these issues, which indicates how important the endorsement of a popular American comics author must have been for American comic fans. Perhaps the most interesting of these introductions is the one for issue #3 from July 1987. In it, Miller uses the word ‘manga’ and explains what manga are: ‘They sell millions of copies to Japanese of all ages and both sexes, and offer an astonishing diversity in subject matter.’ – as opposed to US comics, one is tempted to add. Miller goes on: ‘This segment, in particular, has as its focal point the premeditated murder of a priest. Since the priest is Buddhist, not Christian, it’s not likely to draw fire from our right-wing evangelists, but pro-censorship liberals are sure to find it morally and politically incorrect, just as they are certainly not going to read it deeply enough or carefully enough to understand its profoundly Buddhist philosophical underpinnings.’ This sounds almost as if Miller, who at that time was also involved in a debate around rating systems and censorship in comics (The Comics Journal 1987), was talking about his own experiences in the US comic industry.

It is also interesting to read the letter pages in Lone Wolf and Cub, which started in issue #6 from October 1987. Of course, we have to be careful when analysing letters to the editor printed in comic books, as they are known to have been carefully selected, if not forged entirely. At best, letters tell us what the editors want the readers to think that the other readers think. Still, the letters in Lone Wolf and Cub reveal a close affiliation with comic book fandom. In the aforementioned issue, a reader named Walter M.B. Spiro says: ‘The last couple of years have been exciting one[s] for comic collectors like myself. After suffering through the 70s it is a joy to look forward to that next issue of not just one but numerous titles.’ Another reader, who calls himself Paladin, writes: ‘The idea of a kid with the assassin is intriguing… much like it must have been when Robin was first introduced in Batman’. A reader named C. Coleman simply says: ‘I am a follower of the genius, Frank Miller.’

Lone Wolf and Cub also made it to the front page of the Comics Buyer’s Guide #708 in June 12, 1987. A short article with the headline ‘First sells out “Cub” edition #2′ reports that the first issue of Lone Wolf and Cub had sold out not only in its first but also in its second printing, and went into a third printing. The combined sales of those two first printings were 110,000 copies, which at that time was not an extraordinarily high number. However, this CBG article shows that the comic book industry was watching closely how Lone Wolf and Cub was performing on the market.

Several comic magazines and fanzines reviewed Lone Wolf and Cub when it first came out. In one of them, the British fanzine FA, formerly Fantasy Advertiser, Martin Skidmore writes: ‘At last, in the last year or two, a few Japanese comics have made it into the English language. Maybe you’ve read Marvel’s Akira, or one of Eclipse’s titles – Mai, Kamui or Area 88 – or even the subject of this article.’ (Skidmore 1988)

Here Skidmore mentions other manga published in the US, which probably would not have been possible in the Lone Wolf and Cub letter pages, and links them together on the basis of their Japanese origin. However, Skidmore continues: ‘So, with a little interest developing in Japanese comics, largely due to Frederik Schodt’s magnificent, invaluable Manga! Manga! as well as the Miller connection, it was inevitable that American publishers would become aware of the huge, rich, diverse collection of material, and want to translate some of it.’ Here, too, Frank Miller is seen as an important link between manga and US comic fandom.

Even a mainstream newspaper mentioned Lone Wolf and Cub once. The Pittsburgh Press from January 13, 1988, ran an article in their finance section with the headline ‘Comic book collecting a serious investment’. The article starts like this: ‘Here’s an investment that is slower than a speeding bullet but might in time bring super returns and pay your kid’s college tuition. Collect comics – Superman, Archie, the new Japanese import Lone Wolf and Cub, or any of hundreds of others both old and new.’ Here, Lone Wolf and Cub is lumped together with original American comics like Superman and Archie. It is only recommended as an investment, not for reading. Its content, quality and “Japaneseness” do not matter much here (even though it is characterised as a ‘Japanese import’), and no connection to other manga is made.

Let us now move on to an example of the second kind of manga, those translated for the general public. Japan Inc. by Shōtarō Ishinomori was originally published as マンガ日本経済入門 (Manga Nihon Keizai Nyūmon) in three volumes from 1986–1988. It is a fictional story about two young managers in a Japanese company which is struggling with various economic problems. This comic is interspersed with occasional text sections explaining economic facts and theories. It was translated into English by the University of California Press in 1988 and into French by the publishing house Albin Michel in 1989, only the latter of which could be regarded as a comics publisher.

Shōtarō Ishinomori: pp. 40-41 from Japan GmbH. © 1989 Verlag Norman Rentrop.

My focus is on the German edition here, which was published as a paperback book of 20.8 by 14.7 cm under the title Japan GmbH – Eine Einführung in die japanische Wirtschaft (‘Japan Inc. – an introduction to Japanese economy’). Out of the three original volumes, only the first was translated into German. However, the fact that the German edition came out only three years after the original publication meant that it still had a certain timeliness. After all, the West was very much interested in Japanese economics in 1989, two years before the Japanese bubble economy burst. The publisher of Japan GmbH was Norman Rentrop in Bonn, who had published economics, business and management non-fiction before, but no comics. Another unusual aspect of Japan GmbH was its cover price of DM 49.80 (approximately € 25), which might have been adequate for an economics textbook, but was quite high for a 320 page black-and-white comic and thus not attractive for comic fans.

Shōtarō Ishinomori: Japan GmbH, front cover. © 1989 Verlag Norman Rentrop.

The text on the back cover of Japan GmbH (pictured below) also betrays an orientation towards businesspeople rather than comic fans: ‘Japan, for many still an unpredictable economic competitor in the Far East, has become a leader on the world market through consistent technological and economic development. At the same time, the sons of the samurai have developed an economic structure and a way of thinking that is inscrutable for Europeans and Americans. However, insight into the Japanese economy is essential, as Japan is also an interesting sales market’ (my translation).

Shōtarō Ishinomori: Japan GmbH, back cover. © 1989 Verlag Norman Rentrop.

The introduction to Japan GmbH takes a similar direction. Peter Odrich, a journalist and an expert on economics and Asia, starts by explaining what manga are and what significance they have in Japan, but he then goes on to interpret the content of Japan GmbH in the context of the significance of economics in Japanese society.

Japan GmbH had significantly less impact on the German-language comics scene than Lone Wolf and Cub on the English-language scene. One of the most important German comics magazines of the late 1980s and early 1990s was Rraah!, which was founded in 1987. Therefore, it was already established when Japan GmbH was published in 1989 and could have reviewed it. However, Japan GmbH was not even mentioned in Rraah! until 1994, in an overview article of all manga available in German at that time (“Mangas auf Deutsch” 1994, 25). However, the coverage of the German-language comics market was generally exhaustive in Rraah!. Even the first German translation of Lone Wolf and Cub (Koike and Kojima 1989), which appeared in an issue of a rather obscure comic anthology magazine named Macao, can be said to have received more attention, as it was briefly reviewed in Rraah! (Rraah! 1989, 30). This is another sign that Japan GmbH was largely ignored by the comics scene.

Interestingly, Japan GmbH was mentioned in the mainstream news magazine Der Spiegel (“Boss beim Sado” 1987). The article is from 1987, which means that it does not refer to the German translation, which was not published until two years later, but to the original Japanese edition. The title of the article, ‘Boss beim Sado’, alludes to a relatively insignificant scene in the manga in which a manager has sadomasochistic sex with a prostitute. This angle makes this article part of an ongoing tendency in the media to portray the Japanese as sexually deviant, not unlike the recent initial media coverage of an alleged Japanese “eyeball licking” fetish trend (Hornyak 2013). Thus the Spiegel article is a sensationalist news item rather than a balanced review of Japan GmbH.

To conclude, this comparison of the first English edition of Lone Wolf and Cub and the German edition of Japan Inc. and their respective reception shows that some manga translations were made for and read by comic fans, whereas others were made for and read by the general public. It seems likely that the first generation of manga fandom grew out of the former group, the comic fans. Looking at the following growth of the Western manga market, the successes of the late 1980s were dwarfed in comparison with the hit series of the 90s (Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon), and even more so later in the early 2000s (Naruto, One Piece, Bleach – cf. Alverson 2013), but these titles had the advantage of falling on fertile ground, as a manga fandom had already been established. Perhaps the necessary factor for manga readers to develop into manga fans was the devotion of comic fans to the medium. Consequently, to this day, some people say that Lone Wolf and Cub is the manga title that has ‘kicked into overdrive the manga craze in the United States’ (Voger 2006, 40).

Works Cited

Alexander, Jed. 2014. “The Future of Comics: A Casual Readership.” Jed Alexander, January 22. Accessed April 10, 2014. http://jedalexander.blogspot.de/2014/01/the-future-of-comics-casual-readership.html

Alverson, Brigid. 2013. “Manga 2013: A Smaller, More Sustainable Market.” Publishers Weekly, April 5. Accessed April 10, 2014. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/booknews/comics/article/56693-manga-2013-a-smaller-more-sustainable-market.html

“Boss beim Sado.” 1987. Der Spiegel 31 [July 27]: 111. Accessed April 1, 2014. http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13525459.html.

Dimalanta, Zedric. 2011. “A Look Back on Lone Wolf and Cub.” The Comixverse (Leaving Proof 34), July 8. Accessed April 1, 2014. http://thecomixverse.com/2011/07/08/leaving-proof-34-walking-the-assassins-road-a-look-back-on-lone-wolf-and-cub/.

“First Sells Out ‘Cub’ Edition #2.” 1987. Comic Buyer’s Guide 708:1, June 12.

Hornyak, Tim. 2013. “Blind spot: How a hoax about eye licking went global.” CNET, August 8. Accessed April 10, 2014. http://www.cnet.com/news/blind-spot-how-a-hoax-about-eye-licking-went-global/

Ishinomori, Shōtarō. 1989. Japan GmbH. Eine Einführung in die japanische Wirtschaft. Bonn: Rentrop.

Ishinomori, Shōtarō. 1988. Japan Inc. An Introduction to Japanese Economics. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kita, Kyōta and Keiko Ogata. 1988. Heine in Japan. Ein ‘Dichter der Liebe und Revolution.’ Düsseldorf: Verlag der Goethe-Buchhandlung.

Koike, Kazuo and Gōseki Kojima. 1987-1991. Lone Wolf and Cub. Chicago: First Comics.

Koike, Kazuo and Gōseki Kojima. 1989. “Der Wolf und sein Junges.” Macao 5.

Kudō, Kazuya and Ryōichi Ikegami. 1987-1988. Mai, the Psychic Girl. Forestville: Eclipse / San Francisco: Viz.

“Mangas auf Deutsch.” 1994. Rraah! 28:25-26, August.

Metz, Robert. 1988. “Comic Book Collecting a Serious Investment.” The Pittsburgh Press 104(200): B7, January 13. Accessed April 1, 2014. http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=oHQdAAAAIBAJ&sjid=RWMEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6210%2C4807103.

Nakazawa, Keiji. 1980-1981. Gen of Hiroshima. San Francisco: Educomics.

Nakazawa, Keiji. 1982a. Barfuß durch Hiroshima. Eine Bildergeschichte gegen den Krieg. Reinbek: Rowohlt.

Nakazawa, Keiji. 1982b. I Saw It. The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima. San Francisco: Educomics.

Ōtomo, Katsuhiro. 1988-1995. Akira. New York: Epic.

Pustz, Matthew J. 1999. Comic Book Culture. Fanboys and True Believers. (Studies in popular culture.) Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Rraah! 8, August 1989.

Shirato, Sanpei. 1987-1988. The Legend of Kamui. Forestville: Eclipse / San Francisco: Viz.

Skidmore, Martin. 1989. “Overview: Lone Wolf and Cub. The First Eleven Issues.” FA – the Comiczine 104, July. Acessed March 31, 2014. http://comiczine-fa.com/?p=3905.

The Comics Journal 118, December 1987.

Voger, Mark. 2006. The Dark Age. Grim, Great & Gimmicky Post-Modern Comics. Raleigh: TwoMorrows. Accessed April 1, 2014. http://books.google.de/books?id=5IYEoDPztHEC.

Martin de la Iglesia studied Art History and Library and Information Science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In 2007 he wrote his Master’s Thesis in London on the reception of US comics in the United Kingdom. Currently he is a PhD student at Heidelberg University (dissertation topic: the early reception of manga in the West). At the same time he works as a librarian in Göttingen, Germany. His research interests include comics, art geography, reception history and aesthetics, and art historical methodology. All of his publications are available as Open Access. He blogs at http://650centplague.wordpress.com/

Brooklyn-based autobiographical cartoonist Julia Wertz published her first graphic novel, Drinking at the Movies, through Three Rivers Press, an imprint of Random House, during a brief period which she depicts in her second book, The Infinite Wait, as something of a minor boom in interest in comics from mainstream book publishers. However, once this period was over and the sales of Drinking at the Movies had proved lower than expected (in the words of Wertz’s publisher, ’these numbers would be great if it was with a smaller comics press, but since it’s with a major publisher whose standards are much higher…’) (Wertz 2012: 91), Wertz found herself dropped from her publisher. The Infinite Wait was published in 2012 by Koyama Press, a Canadian small press. Wertz is more comfortable with this arrangement, as evidenced by her autobiographical stories’ portrayals of events. Drawing herself writing to Annie Koyama, publisher of Koyama Press, she says ‘I just want to be with my people,’ (Wertz 2012: 93) the implication being that mainstream book publishers, despite their ability to pay her enough money to enable full-time cartooning, are not a home for the work of an alternative cartoonist. This article will explore the relationship between small presses and alternative comics, with Wertz’s two graphic novels and their publishing background as a case study, examining Wertz’s above implication that her work is best suited to being published with a small press.

Drinking at the Movies is a typical alternative autobiographical comic. It tells the story of Wertz’s first year in New York, moving over from a mostly comfortable life in San Francisco for a change of scene, a period in which she was also breaking into the world of alternative comics and small presses with her first book, The Fart Party, published by Baltimore-based comic shop and small press Atomic Books in 2007. The majority of Drinking at the Movies is composed of short anecdotes, punctuated with acerbic and often puerile humour, even when dealing with serious subjects such as divorce, alcohol abuse, financial difficulty and health problems. In its candid portrayal of trauma and heavy subject matter, Wertz’s work draws upon existing traditions of graphic memoir as established by the works of Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel (to name but two of many cartoonists), but doesn’t take itself too seriously. The book ends with Wertz settling in New York permanently, and The Infinite Wait, in part, picks up where Drinking at the Movies ends and covers the transition to Koyama Press.

The front page of Koyama Press’ website states that its ‘mandate is to promote and support a wide range of emerging and established artists. Projects include comics, art books and zines.’ (Koyama, 2014). A search on the ‘Wayback Machine’ internet archive [1] (2014) reveals that this mandate was placed on the site in 2013; until this point, the homepage’s text read ‘Koyama Press was founded in 2007 to sponsor projects with emerging artists. The rationale behind the enterprise is to fund a project with the intention to promote the artist. Ideally there will be a product to sell to create revenue.’ (Koyama, 2010). Koyama Press’ aim, therefore, has been to support artistry ahead of profit from its initial conception, and this explains Wertz’s desire to publish with Koyama and Koyama’s acceptance of The Infinite Wait. a book which Wertz found was not easy to sell to major publishers due to its focus on telling the story of her diagnosis of systemic lupus, a narrative which she was not willing to compromise on, as evidenced by the written introduction to The Infinite Wait. ‘The book I really wanted to do,’ Wertz writes, ‘centered around my diagnosis of systemic lupus when I was 20. But when I finally decided to make it, I was told by industry types that “a book about lupus would not have mass appeal,” despite the 1.5 to 2 million lupus patients in the U.S. alone.’ (Wertz, 2012: 3). Earlier in the introduction she puts this in more polemical terms, stating that ‘large publishers don’t like to dabble in the absurd unless the author is a proven bestseller.’ (Wertz, 2012: 13).  Koyama Press’ willingness to ‘dabble in the absurd’ and to support the artist’s vision over the potential for sales, therefore, can be assumed to be a major factor in Wertz’s decision to publish with Koyama Press.

The Infinite Wait is written and drawn in the same visual style as Drinking at the Movies, and is still rife with the crass humour, profanity and painfully honest depictions of her failures that readers have come to expect from her previous works. However, there is a marked maturity and refinement to it, as she continues to explore the larger themes she began to touch upon in her first graphic novel. The central story concerns her Lupus diagnosis and the remaining two are shorter anecdotes about jobs and libraries. The book concludes with her finding Drinking at the Movies in the catalogue at her hometown’s library, despite thinking herself too “indie” to be there. The two books she published before Drinking at the Movies, volumes one and two of The Fart Party, would most likely have been too indie to be found in a local library. Quite aside from their rawness and their more obviously puerile content, which can be seen in a section called “Museum of Mistakes” on Wertz’s website, these books were initially self-published as mini-comics before being collected into books by Atomic Books. These two books are now out of print and difficult to acquire, but a retrospective collection is due to be released later this year.

In her career Wertz has gone from self-publishing mini-comics to publishing books with a small press, to publishing graphic novels with a mainstream publisher. This would seem, initially, to be a linear and unsurprising progression. However, after moving upwards to Random House with a contract enabling her to become a full-time cartoonist, Wertz broke the linearity of this progression by choosing to publish with Koyama Press. There are a number of works in comics scholarship which can contextualise Wertz’s publishing choices through their discussion of alternative comics and explain Wertz’s break from this progression.

Douglas Wolk’s book Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean sets out a somewhat radical dichotomy which is returned to throughout its essays on various creators. What he proposes is that there are “art comics” and “mainstream comics,” perhaps an oversimplified view of comics, but a useful one and one which suggests a context into which Wertz’s work fits. Wolk is quick to point out that he is not making a value judgement when he refers to “art comics,” but rather that he is using the word “art” to distance a certain type of comics from the many comics produced within the genre-driven mainstream. Art comics, he says, ‘privilege the distinctiveness of the creator’s hand, rather than the pleasures of the tools of genre and readerly expectation.’ (Wolk, 2007: 30) For Wertz, the distinctiveness of her hand is key, as she provides a rare combination of candid autobiography and puerile humour from a feminine perspective, and is single-minded in her desire to retain control over her narrative, evidenced again by the introduction to The Infinite Wait, in which she states ‘I hate it when anyone tries to be the boss of me, it will only ensure that I will do the opposite of what they say.’ (Wertz, 2012: 3). What also characterises Art Comics, according to Wolk, is auteurism – the emphasis and focus on the creator and the creator’s realisation of their artistic vision, as distinct from the “assembly line” production methods of the mainstream, with its history of “work-for-hire” contracts and deadline-based business. Although what Wolk would refer to as mainstream comics [2] do now have much more of a focus on creators, they are still made by numerous workers in a corporate setting and, as Wolk reminds us, under constant deadline pressure. This is not to say that art comics will be free of deadlines, but these are likely to be fewer and further between than those of the mainstream publishers.

The works Wolk calls “art comics” can be understood as a similar, if not the same, category of comics as those labelled “alternative comics” by Charles Hatfield in his book of the same name, although Hatfield’s definition assumes comics are a literary form, rather than engaging with them as art as Wolk does. The heart of both their definitions points toward the individual freedoms which characterise alternative comics, such as freedom from commercialism or corporate structure, which can be traced back to the underground comix revolution that began in the sixties, spearheaded by Robert Crumb’s self-published comics in homage to the satire of MAD magazine. Hatfield also uses the term “auteurism,” writing of the underground comix that they ‘introduced an “alternative” ethos that valued the productions of the lone cartoonist over collaborative or assembly-line work. In essence, comix made comic books safe for auteur theory: they established a poetic ethos of individual expression.’ (Hatfield, 2005: 16). Alternative Comics analyses Art Spiegelman, the Hernandez brothers and Justin Green, all of whom fit into both Wolk’s category of “art comics” and Hatfield’s view of alternative comics as an auteur-driven product of the underground comix movement. Hatfield also suggests that as an “emerging literature,” they are still growing and developing, a viewpoint which Douglas Wolk shares, saying they are improving in quality and number with a steep curve. Hatfield called his study a ‘progress report’ (Hatfield, 2005: xv) in its introduction and, indeed, since the book was published in 2005 alternative comics has continued to develop, with Wertz’s works and the publishing of Koyama Press being just one example of such a development.

Hillary Chute’s Graphic Women also supports the idea of alternative comics as a product of the underground comix movement, and traces the thread of freedom and auteurism through from the sixties to the recent works of Alison Bechdel, Marjane Satrapi and Aline Kominsky-Crumb, all of whom have contributed to the emergence described by Hatfield – Satrapi and Bechdel, in particular, have won or been nominated for various literary prizes, while Kominsky-Crumb is credited with ‘expand[ing] [comics] to include the texture of women’s lives’ (Chute, 2010: 20). ‘The underground,’ Chute writes, ‘shifted what comics could depict (its purview, its content) and, crucially, how it could depict. The underground saw its rigorous, unprecedented experiments in form as avant-garde; without the considerations of commerce, comics was liberated to explore its potential as an art form.’ (Chute, 2010: 14) This liberation provided the space for the growth of auteurism acknowledged by Wolk and Hatfield, and also, Chute reminds us, opened up alternative comics as a space for women’s narratives, evidenced by those that followed such as Wertz’s two graphic novels.

Randy Duncan and Matthew Smith’s The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture also engages directly with the idea of auteurism as one key to the development of comics as an art form, borrowing the term from film theory exactly as Wolk does and offering Harvey Kurtzman as one such example of an auteur alongside Alan Moore (Duncan and Smith, 2009: 118). Moore’s status as an auteur is useful here, as I do not wish to imply that an auteur cannot exist in the mainstream; an auteur can, of course, exist in any sphere of artistic production. Rather, I wish to show that a desire for auteurism is often a key reason a cartoonist will choose to publish with a small press, and a driver of the close relationship between alternative comics and small presses, with Wertz’s work as a case study. Although Duncan and Smith give examples of auteurism within mainstream comics, they acknowledge shortly after that mainstream comics have ‘traditionally relied on character-driven marketing based on the readers’ recognition of the property more than the creative personnel who produced it,’ (Duncan and Smith, 2009: 120) reinforcing the idea established by Wolk, Hatfield and Chute that alternative comics grew from the underground comix movement into a space for individual expression, free from commercial imperative, which celebrates individuals and thus promotes auteurs.

For Wertz, these values are key, and are the reason she chose to return to a small press after publishing with Random House. Wertz’s return to a small press can be read as a rehabilitation that came in tandem with her own entry into a rehab facility in 2010 immediately after she published Drinking at the Movies, hence the title of this article. The written introduction to The Infinite Wait is enlightening regarding the necessity of a rehabilitation. In short, Wertz writes that the idea for writing a book about her Lupus diagnosis was seen as risky by Random House, and goes on to explain the decision to publish with Koyama Press as being one driven by their willingness to take risks and to give her control over her work. Her assertion that ‘large publishers don’t like to dabble in the absurd unless the author is a proven bestseller’ (Wertz, 2012: 3) is based on her experience with Random House, but she does not specify, allowing the statement to cover all large publishers. For Wertz, the dichotomy is between large book publishers and small presses, rather than the divide between small presses and genre-driven mainstream comics publishers established by Wolk. However, the perceived negative aspects of publishing with a book publisher such as Random House are the same as those attributed to mainstream comics publishers in the text I have discussed above: what Chute refers to as ‘considerations of commerce’ (2010, 14).

Wertz uses the term “alternative comics” herself and is clearly aware of her work being alternative, or indie – she goes to lengths to define herself as so, setting herself up as indie now that big publishers no longer perceive indie graphic novels as a ‘hot new thing’ (Wertz, 2012: 93). However, the key sentence in the introduction to The Infinite Wait is ‘I refuse to be told what to do by people I don’t know regarding how to create something that will appeal to the masses I’ve never met.’ (Wertz, 2012: 3) This is central to Wertz’s decision to publish with Koyama Press rather than to pursue a compromise with Random House, despite the greater potential for financial reward that Random House may have offered. Wertz’s bold statement of refusal echoes Hatfield’s idea of a ‘poetic ethos of individual expression,’ which is also echoed in Koyama Press’ mandate. For Wertz, whose drive to publish a narrative about her Lupus diagnosis and unwillingness to compromise her own vision led her to leave a mainstream publisher, this ethos is the heart of alternative comics, and as this ethos was not fully realized for her until she found a home at Koyama Press, it is clear that the small press was a significant factor in this decision and that there is thus a relationship between small presses and alternative comics, based on the shared idea of celebrating the auteur cartoonist which was established by the underground comix movement and has continued to run through alternative comics as they have developed.

Wertz is, of course, just one example of an alternative cartoonist whose work finds its most comfortable and logical home with the small press. This fact does not mean that a mainstream book publisher, or indeed a mainstream comics publisher, could not provide a home for an auteur cartoonist or help them realise their work and their vision in a satisfactory fashion. Maus, which Chute desrcibes as a text absolutely essential to the development of alternative comics, was published by Penguin, and the works of Alison Bechdel and Marjane Satrapi she analyses were published by mainstream book publishers. Alan Moore is, as Duncan and Smith remind us, one of the most notable auteurs in the history of comics as an art form. But Wertz’s sense of comfort in publishing with Koyama Press, evidenced throughout The Infinite Wait, is indicative of the small press’ ability to help creators of alternative comics fully realise their vision for a comic, and that cannot be underestimated.

Works Cited

Chute, Hillary. Graphic Women. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

Duncan, Randy and Smith, Matthew. The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture. New York: Continuum, 2009.

Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.

Koyama, Annie. “Koyama Press.” Accessed 21st April, 2014. http://koyamapress.com/

Koyama, Annie. “Koyama Press.” Accessed 9th June, 2010. http://koyamapress.com/

“Wayback Machine Internet Archive.” Accessed 4th May, 2014. http://archive.org/web

Wertz, Julia. Drinking at the Movies. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2010.

Wertz, Julia. The Fart Party. Baltimore: Atomic Books, 2007.

Wertz, Julia. The Infinite Wait. Toronto: Koyama Press, 2012.

Wertz, Julia. “Museum of Mistakes.” Accessed 21st April, 2014. http://juliawertz.com

Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2007.

Paddy Johnston is a doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex, currently working towards his PhD in English. His thesis is entitled ‘Working With Comics’ and will examine what it means to create cultural work as a cartoonist, with attention to art pedagogy, materiality, colour, digital comics and the influence of literary modernism. He has recently given papers at the Transitions 4 symposium in London, Comics Forum and the Comics and the Multimodal World conference in Vancouver and has been published in The Comics Grid journal and is a contributor to the comics blog Graphixia. He is the creator of the webcomic Best Intentions and is also a singer/songwriter and writer of fiction for the One Hour Stories podcast.

[1] – A website which periodically archives all other webpages, allowing users to browse the past content of a given website.

[2] – Wolk provides a more detailed summary of his divisions on pages 47-48 of Reading Comics, with the mainstream described thus: “The first is the mainstream: the majority of comics from long-running superhero publishers DC and Marvel, both of which make a lot of their profits from characters and franchises rather than directly from particular creators’ work. A handful of smaller companies like Image and Dark Horse also publish some comics with the tone and style that mark them as mainstream; in most cases, the particular cartoonists who work on projects like Conan and Spawn are, again, less important than their characters and concepts.” (Wolk, 2007: 47)

[EDITOR'S NOTE: This article was updated on the 17th of September to correct a factual error.]

1. Introduction

Asteroid Belter: The Newcastle Science Comic is a 44-page, newsprint, 10000 copy print run comic for the British Science Festival 2013 hosted by Newcastle University, England. It was produced as collaboration between a total of 76 artists, writers and scientists, led by our editorial team: Lydia Wysocki, Paul Thompson, Michael Thompson, Jack Fallows, Brittany Coxon and Michael Duckett. The comic sought to put university science research and concepts into the hands of children in a way that is meaningful, interesting, and inspiring to them. We did this by supporting scientists and comics creators to work together and increase each party’s understanding of the value of the other’s work. This article first outlines how we made Asteroid Belter, where we locate it in the wider field of comics, and then goes on to identify what we can and cannot show as evidence of its success.

2. What it is and how we made it

The foundations for Asteroid Belter were laid with the Paper Jam Comics Collective (PJCC), based in Newcastle upon Tyne. The PJCC formed as a social group for comics creators and fans in Newcastle to meet up and discuss comics and quickly became focused on creativity, both individually and as a group. There are many comparable comics groups across the UK (for example, the Manchester Comic Collective, the Bristol Comic Creators) and members soon began working together to create comics. The group has produced ten anthologies of varying degrees of professionalism on a range of themes, sold at events such as gallery launches, gigs and DIY markets.
Lydia Wysocki, a PJCC member and Newcastle University member of staff, was approached by the University’s Engagement team who were preparing to host the British Science Festival in 2013 (BSF13) to see if there would be any interest in working together to produce a comic as part of BSF13. The BSF, the British Science Association’s flagship event, is ‘one of Europe’s largest celebrations of science, engineering and technology’ (BSA 2014). The overall aim of the BSA is to advance the public understanding, accessibility and accountability of the sciences and engineering in the UK, with a broad view of which subjects are considered science. Whilst there are specific educational elements within the BSF, particularly its Young People’s Programme, it is not a direct extension of the National Curriculum in science and involves broad range of activities.

When Lydia brought the idea of a BSF13 comics project to PJCC it was met with enthusiasm. It was also clear that the structured nature of what would become Asteroid Belter in terms of project management, content, and presentation, meant this project was already different from PJCC’s participative nature. We decided to establish a special projects unit with invited members from PJCC. This meant we could work with Newcastle University to resource and deliver an ambitious anthology project, to establish a project management structure that would work for us, and to continue enjoying PJCC meetings.

Discussions with the Engagement team helped determine format and processes. Funding from Newcastle University’s Ignite small grants scheme was itself innovative as part of BSF13. As one of the first and largest projects funded in this way our project management was by necessity innovative, finding ways to work collaboratively and align this with NU’s reporting mechanisms. Choosing an anthology format meant we could include diverse styles (Smith, 2014) and content to increase the likelihood of readers engaging with at least some of the comic’s content as a pick ‘n’ mix approach. Establishing each page as a subproject maximised opportunities for many scientists and comics creators to have meaningful involvement in and ownership of the project. Staggered start dates for 8-week subprojects with editorial checkpoints mitigated risk around adherence to brief and deadlines. This structure helped us plan the time and skill commitment of Asteroid Belter and identify appropriate rates of pay against industry standards and Newcastle University’s pay scale. Sharing test printings with the Engagement team, and through them the Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Executive Board, demonstrated our progress and aligned Asteroid Belter with Newcastle University structures. Our experience of comics projects helped us find suitable printers and work with them to quote for test and final printing costs.

We broke the initial tasks of beginning the comic into the following steps:

- Approach comics creators to see if they would be interested in taking part in the comic – this involves sending some individual invitations, and an open call promoted online and at Thought Bubble 2012.

- Discuss the project with scientists at a Newcastle based SUPER MASH UP event, where we gave a brief overview of how we saw the project working and gave an introduction to comics to those unfamiliar with the medium; we followed up by email and phone with contributors unable to take part in the SUPER MASH UP in person.

- Ask all scientists and comics creators (whether artists, writers, or sole creators) to fill in the same expression of interest form to give us an overview of their work and any initial ideas they might have.

- Match comics creators with scientists as page teams, and assign each team a page editor to establish communication between scientists and comics creators. This was done in editorial “stables”, with each page editor having an overview of 5 or 6 pages.

As a pilot project we worked with three comics creators to produce a three-page activity pack to be distributed to Newcastle University’s partner schools in preparation for BSF13. The school activity pack was worthwhile in its own right, as a set of worksheets exploring the difference between science fact and science fiction, and as a pilot phase for our processes and outputs. Feedback from schools helped adjust guidelines for artists/writers. This feedback continued in reviewing draft artwork and test printings among editors and with one editor’s class of 8 year olds. The school activity pack was also important to the participative elements of Asteroid Belter: the third worksheet was a comics creation challenge, the prize for which was publication in our comic. We also held an open call for online submissions to be shared through our blog, to invite contributions from creators unable to take part in the printed comic. On our launch day we took over Newcastle City Library with structured comics workshops and drop-in activities for children and families, and ran pre-launch comics making activities at BBC The One Show’s summer festival in Gateshead. This participative focus was important to us. We agree with Green (2013) and Williams (2013) that both reading and creating comics matters, particularly for students’ understanding of medical issues: Green’s point about students becoming ‘more careful observers’ (Green 2013, p. 474) and Williams’ discussion of the accessibility of comics as medical narrative (Williams 2013, p. 27) are particularly relevant here. We extend this to our broader scientific as well as medical content, and beyond students and health professionals to the wider public.

It is worth noting that whilst some scientists involved in the project had used comics in their work before, often as a tool of public engagement, the majority had not had this experience. Some comics creators had worked on commissioned educational projects before, but again this was a minority. In neither case did we specify that contributors had to have worked on comparable projects before, and our contributors included undergraduate and postgraduate student scientists and artists/writers. EPIC THEMES in AWESOME WAYS was our terminology for mixing huge themes in science research (including explosions, time and travel, and hidden messages) with comics structures and tropes (including biographies, stories, and diagrams). This helped researchers connect with comics creators who otherwise had little shared professional language (Mercer 2000), to generate, maintain, and channel awesome levels of enthusiasm.

From the start of this science comics project we were clear that the science and the comics were of equal value. We are aware of other projects using comics (for example Magreet de Heer’s Science: a Discovery in Comics, and Leeds University’s Dreams of a Low Carbon Future), as a format to communicate science. Asteroid Belter is fundamentally different because we wanted to see what happens when comics and science collide: neither the comics nor the science element is in service to the other. Treating each page as a sub-project maximised the opportunities for many contributors to have meaningful involvement in and ownership of the anthology. Scientists were involved throughout the project first as sources of inspiration and information, and on an ongoing basis as consultants for the accuracy of each comic. This also gave comics creators scope to explore a manageable piece of science research rather than attempting to fit their contribution into a longer narrative. Within each scientist/comics creator team it was the comics creator who led the creative process with the editor keeping this on track with the larger aims of the anthology: this required trust from all members of the project team. This structure was our way of ensuring a final comic that was a comic, not an illustration of research findings or a colourful textbook (figure 1).

Figure 1 Ian Mayor and Will Campbell, extract from ‘Time Travel is Awesome’ in Asteroid Belter: The Newcastle Science Comic. Newcastle: 2013.

The page editor role was an interesting one. We remain aware of key issues in the comics field, particularly around diversity in our choice of contributors and the content and characters they produced (Havstad 2014). Specific issues we discussed in editorial meetings included gender, race, age, dis/ability, and professional experience in publishing comics. We did not set quotas for who should participate or what they should create, other than specifying which scientific research each page would cover. We do not claim Asteroid Belter as a flawless example applying this in practice, but are proud of the comic we created and confident that we did our best to understand and act on issues within this project.

3. Our evidence that Asteroid Belter worked

Asteroid Belter is a project firmly rooted in comics practice. We are mindful of relevant research and theory from comics scholarship (as cited in our list of references), and also from our backgrounds in librarianship and education. Whilst aware of comics projects set up as research projects with clear ontological frameworks and research questions, we cannot overstate that we chose a well-informed focus on practice. This limits what evidence we can present of Asteroid Belter’s success. We did not set out to test a hypothesis. Comics scholarship includes many calls for increased evidence, particularly statistical evidence, of the extent to which comics work in education (for example, Caldwell 2012). Tempting as it is to look back and construct an argument for what we could have proven, we will instead present the evidence that emerged from our project and highlight what this does and does not reveal.

It is also worth noting that much of the ‘comics in education’ debates and literature focus on formal education systems, as schools. Moeller (2011) is a particularly strong advocate for the inclusion of graphic novels into the school curriculum. Spiegel and colleagues’ (2013) focus on engaging teenagers with science emphasises a need to ‘engage all teenagers, even those with low science identity’ (Spiegel et al. 2013, p. 2309), but their study focusses on students enrolled in ninth and tenth grade biology classes. We respect the work of these examples but note that they are all bounded by the structures and limitations of formal education systems. This is not to belittle the effort involved in including comics in formal education systems: Laycock’s (2013) discussion of how librarians and teachers have needed to be ‘opportunistic and largely self-driven in their acquisition of knowledge and skills regarding graphic novels’ highlights this. The School Library Journal has a dedicated graphic novel section that supports this professional community, particularly through the work of Brigid Alverson.

Asteroid Belter’s position as part of BSF13, not within a school system, meant we went outside the existing UK school system. We also considered what might be possible beyond existing school structures, informed by more radical educational thinkers (Neill 1970; Vygotsky 1978). This is ideologically interesting but, at a more practical level (and resisting a diversion into discussion of schools and other forms of education), makes evaluation of Asteroid Belter tricky. It was not possible to track which individuals read our comic and as we will show, difficulties in identifying the demographics of our readers make us unwilling to use an artificial matrix to select a sample group. This section first considers what evidence we gathered as evidence of participation, public engagement, and readership, then presents considerations relevant to what readers and other key individuals took from the project.

A. Evidence of participation in creating the comic

We received 112 expressions of interest in participating in creating the comic and were able to invite 74 people to take part in creating the comic, all of whom are credited in in print and online. We were easily able to find replacements for the two comics creators who withdrew from the project because of other commitments; no scientists dropped out of the project. As this was our first large-scale edited anthology project, and without access to data on comparable anthology projects’ participation rates, we do not know how these numbers compare to the field. We were pleased to receive interest from more than enough people to create a substantial anthology. It is worth noting that our call for contributors was open to all, regardless of whether we knew them prior to this project or whether they had previously undertaken comics work that was educational, based on science, or published (we were later asked by our funders to prioritise contributors from the North East of England). Receiving expressions of interest from people we did not know is evidence that word spread about our project.

The fact that we delivered a collaboratively-produced comic is evidence that our project succeeded, and this is further supported by positive comments we received from contributors about their involvement in the process of creating Asteroid Belter, for example:

It is a really fantastic project, and really well managed too! [We] are proud to be a part of it, and I hope it continues to be a feature of the BSF for years to come!

and comments from scientists who had not previously been involved in making comics, for example:

I think it’s fantastic and had to struggle hard to stop reading it this morning, so I could do some work.

Academic staff involvement in public engagement projects is typically part of a diverse and full workload, so our evidence of success is the fact that the project delivered a completed comic and that this was received well by participants

B. Evidence of public engagement

The overall evaluation report of BSF13 covered all aspects of the Festival and included interviews with adults whose children took part in our Asteroid Belter launch day events. The report’s overall findings were positive, for example that 94% of visitors [respondents] indicated that they thought the quality of the content of their event was ‘Excellent’ or ‘Good’. [587 individuals (25% of total visitors to ticketed events) who submitted a completed questionnaire; number of total unique visitors was in the region of 19000]. We are cautious in how far we can apply these headline findings to our comic. The fact that Asteroid Belter was mentioned without prompting evaluation interviewees and is noted in this overall evaluation is positive news, particularly as this was the first time a comic was created as part of the BSF. The BSF13 evaluation’s necessarily high-level focus on footfall and satisfaction means we now turn to other indicators for a closer look at who read Asteroid Belter and what they said about it.

C. Evidence of readership

Six months after our September 2013 launch, approximately 9850 of the 10000 printed copies of Asteroid Belter have been distributed. Some two thirds of these were given to participants in the Young People’s Programme of the BSF13. A further 1250 copies were picked up from distribution stands at Newcastle City Library, 600 copies distributed at Thought Bubble and Comics Forum Conference 2013, over 250 copies at Travelling Man Newcastle (and more through other comics retailers in the UK), and others in response to requests from local schools and youth organisations for additional copies. Asteroid Belter is free to read online and has been accessed 2,487 times since its launch. We recognise that giving away a free comic means we are not able to compare this to sales figures of other titles. We also note that we did not struggle to distribute these copies, and in many cases were asked for additional copies.

Having shown that Asteroid Belter found readers, the demographics of this readership are difficult to identify. Demographic data in the BSF13 evaluation report includes a note that approximately half of respondents had a professional reason for attending BSF13 (as students, teachers, or science sector professionals), with the other half of respondents identified as individuals with a general interest in science. Whilst this points towards a self-selecting audience group of people interested in science or otherwise connected with education or NU, this is not to detract from the response from our readers which was overwhelmingly positive.

These attendees are not representative of the general public, but nor are they a full picture of our readers. Getting university researchers to connect with 8-13 year old children as a valid and viable audience for their research was important as this age group is key to, yet often overlooked by, student recruitment and Widening Participation agendas. Though primarily a public engagement project this link with Widening Participation matters. Of the local primary and secondary schools who were given copies of Asteroid Belter at BSF13 and/or whose teachers contacted us for additional copies, some were in postcodes in the lowest quintile of participation in HE (POLAR, 2012). Before getting carried away praising Asteroid Belter’s success in engaging young people from low participation neighbourhoods with university-level science research (Newcastle University is recognised nationally for its work on widening participation in HE) we must note that other schools were in postcodes in the highest quintile of participation in HE. This is a complex picture.

4. Why this matters

We have established that Asteroid Belter engaged scientists and comics creators in the creation of a science comic, with both science and comics equally valued, and that the successful delivery of this project engaged members of the public in science and comics. We now turn to consider what readers took from the comic.

The communication of scientific concepts and research to readers is central to Asteroid Belter. That said, we were clear that Asteroid Belter should not be an educational textbook disguised as a comic. We made a conscious decision not to identify specific learning outcomes either for the anthology as a whole or for each individual comic, instead focussing on exploring what would happen when science and comics, as one of our editors put it, ‘collided’. This suggests two possibilities: a focus on learning outcomes and a focus on satisfaction.
Work by Ching and Fook (2013), Spiegel (2013), and others, has evaluated the effectiveness of comics they commissioned to communicate specific learning outcomes. This focus on comics as a method of communication suited their purposes but would not be directly transferable to our practice-based project. Asteroid Belter’s broad target age range, diverse science content, and deliberate lack of alignment with the National Curriculum priorities meant we could at best have tested whether a sample of our readers said that they had learned ‘some stuff’. This would be far from satisfying. Developing and validating effective research instruments to address this more systematically was beyond the scope of this practice-based project and, for us, could well have detracted from the fun of making and reading the comic. Quantifying the amount of enthusiasm conveyed by the comic would point towards a focus on readers’ professed satisfaction with the comic, which in turn raises questions around the validity of how to ask young readers “do you like this free comic we made for you?” With the appropriate rigour this could however be a fascinating area for further research, whether academic or market research, but was not the focus of our project.

A perennial issue in education research is that of whose opinions are valued. Is it children, parents, educators, or others who are best placed to decide whether a (young) person is learning? Educational experiments with child-led schools (Neill, 1970) and self-organised learning (Mitra and Rana, 2001) are interesting counterpoints to curricula prescribed by experts and governments. For brevity, we summarise our view on these educational debates as follows: young people’s views on their learning are valid, and the role of more experienced others (Vygotsky 1978) in guiding their learning is important. In this context we note that we received unsolicited positive comments from the Service Manager (Children and Young People) of Newcastle Libraries, the Education Director of the British Science Association, and the Head of Quality in Learning and Teaching at Newcastle University. These are all individuals whose roles are relevant to our project: their opinions are encouraging and we are grateful for their support, and if we had been conducting a research project we would have probed their opinions further. We are particularly happy about having seen children reading Asteroid Belter and drawing their own comics (figure 2) – and frustrated that, having spotted children doing this, the official photographer had to interrupt them to ask their parents to sign photo release forms, then ask children to pose exactly as they had been. This email from the parent of our first reader is something we are particularly proud of, so is something we share here both to show off and to indicate the richness of data that might be available for others to investigate:

Just a note to tell you how much [my daughter] absolutely LOVED the comic. Seriously loved it! She’s just gone five and I wondered if the content might lose her a bit but I was wrong! We read it from cover to cover on the metro coming home and she had lots of questions about tricky things like cancer cells but at the end she exclaimed ‘mammy that was fascinating!’ Now that’s endorsement! She wriggled through Disney’s Monsters University earlier in the day but was glued to your comic. A scientist in the making I hope!

Figure 2 photo of children drawing at our launch day events at Newcastle City Library (photo courtesy of Newcastle University).

We earlier noted questions around the validity of asking children whether they liked our comic. Future research to investigate whether our readers went on to study and work in science and science communication could be illuminating, particularly if we were able to compare this to regional and national data on work and study. All this however assumes academic progress as an indicator of engagement with science: the BSF13 evaluation report’s category of ‘individuals with a general interest in science’ notes that engagement with science can be distinct from work or study in the field. There are further questions of the extent to which we could attribute any findings to Asteroid Belter. We also note that aspects of the BSA, City Library, and Newcastle University’s work necessitate a focus on marketing and footfall. Similarly, whilst we appreciate our positive reviews from the comics press (we were interviewed by Graphixia and Comics Beat, and reviewed by Forbidden Planet and Starburst Magazine), we cannot equate these to research evaluation of our project. Whilst pursuing this as research could be fascinating, our approach is to be aware of these larger issues as we focus on the practice of making comics.

5. Conclusion

The Asteroid Belter project has been an enjoyable one, and has raised questions and opportunities for further research. Planning and editing the comic was approached in a thorough fashion, and resulted in a finished product produced to professional standards and contributors who were paid accordingly for their work. As our project was focussed on comics practice it is difficult to draw firm conclusions about its educational value. There are encouraging signs that Asteroid Belter was received positively by its intended audience of 8-13 year olds, their families and teachers, and also by comics readers and creators, and colleagues in key educational roles. We have demonstrated that there is an audience for science comics in which both science research and comics are equally valued, rather than more prevalent models in which comics are a vehicle for the delivery of science. Our future projects will take into account the issues included in this article, and we invite others to make use of our experience.

References

BSA: British Science Association [website], ‘About the British Science Festival.’ http://www.britishscienceassociation.org/british-science-festival/about-festival

Caldwell, J. (2012). ‘Information comics: An overview.’ Professional Communication Conference paper, Orlando, FL. Available online: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6408645&url=http%3A%2%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F6391318%2F6408590%2F06408645.pdf%3Farnumber%3D6408645

Ching, H.S., and Fook, F.S. (2013). ‘Effects of multimedia-based graphic novel presentation on critical thinking among students of different learning approaches.’ Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technologies, 12 (4), pp. 56-66.

Flo-culture (2014). British Science Festival Newcastle 2013: Evaluation report. Newcastle University and the British Science Association. Available online: http://www.britishscienceassociation.org/british-science-festival/evaluations-previous-festivals

Green, M.J. (2013). ‘Teaching with comics: A course for fourth-year medical students’ Journal of Medical Humanities, 34, pp. 471-476.

Havstad, J. (2014). ‘Using comics to teach Philosophy, inclusively.’ Comics Forum, available online: http://comicsforum.org/2014/01/17/using-comics-to-teach-philosophy-inclusively-by-joyce-c-havstad/

Laycock, D. (2013). ‘Keep watering the rocks.’ Comics Forum, available online: http://comicsforum.org/2013/09/20/keep-watering-the-rocks-by-di-laycock/

Mercer, N. (2000). Words and minds: how we use language to think together. London: Routledge.

Mitra, S., and Rana, V. (2001). ‘Children and the internet: experiments with minimally invasive education in India’. British Journal of Educational Technology, 32 (2), pp. 221-232.

Moeller, R.A. (2011) ‘“Aren’t these boy books?”: High school students’ readings of gender in graphic novels.’, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 54 (7) pp. 476-484.

Neill, A.S. (1970). Summerhill: A radical approach to education [New Impression edition]. London: Penguin.

Participation of Local Areas [POLAR], (2012). Map of young participation areas [online map]. Available online: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/whatwedo/wp/ourresearch/polar/mapofyoungparticipationareas/

Smith, P. (2014). ‘Maus in the Indonesian classroom’. Comics Forum, available online: http://comicsforum.org/2014/02/18/maus-in-the-indonesian-classroom-by-philip-smith/

Spiegel, A.N., McQuillan, J., Halpin, P., Matuk, C., and Diamond, J. (2013). ‘Engaging teenagers with science through comics.’ Research in Science Education, 43, pp. 2309-2326.

Ujiie, J & Krashen, S. (1996) Comic book reading, reading enjoyment and pleasure reading among middle class and chapter 1 middle school students. Available at: http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/comicbook.pdf

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. [eds. M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S Scribner, E. Souberman]. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press.

Williams, I.C.M. (2012). ‘Graphic medicine: comics as medical narrative.’ Medical Humanities, 38, pp. 21-27.

At first sight, the relationship that architecture has with comics seems to be obvious and inarguable. According to Frank Lloyd Wright ‘architecture is life; or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived’ (Baker 2008, 117).

As comics is a medium that usually portrays human life through its characters, the representation of architecture will help the reader/viewer to understand the characteristics of the characters, since architecture is an interface created by Man to make the world fit to his needs and routines. However, the relationship that architecture has with comics is not limited to obvious representations of it in comics; it is also present in depictions of its creative process and even in the similarity between the experiences of the comics reader and the user of architecture. According to Buchet (2013), the architect can be compared to a strip cartoonist: when he draws a museum or even an airport terminal, there is an implicit narrative that the visitor reads when attending these places.

In this article I will enumerate four instances where architecture is present in comics and explain the different scopes and effects of its presence.

1. Comics where architecture is the main subject and the main reason for their creation.

In this case, comics is the chosen medium to communicate ideas of architectural projects and theory of architecture to a wide-ranging audience, composed of specialists and non-specialists. The choice of the comics language to communicate architectural ideas is related to its combination of images and words, which is common to architectural drawings. According to Syma and Weiner (2013): ‘visual narratives like comics and graphic novels show that they hold possibilities for communication that are unique, exactly because they combine the regimens of art and literature’ (187). The image in comics summarizes a description that would be extensive if it was written in other media and according to Scalera (2011, 74), ‘words are placed strategically and artistically to complement and guide the flow of the artwork’.

But what makes comics special relative to the technical drawings of architecture are the sequentiality that allows the reader/viewer to see the contiguous panels almost simultaneously with the vignette that is being read and the possibility for the reader/viewer to control the speed of the reading (and the knowledge apprehension). If architectural drawings are organized by scale, from the largest to the smallest, the vignettes in comics are organized by time. As such, comics could be a great media to understand the partial chronologies that are implemented in any plan (Bartual 2013) because it allows the creator to show the interaction that inhabitants have with the drawn architecture by time sequence. In architectural plans and sections, the functions of the drawn spaces seem to be abstract areas at the first glance.

Bjarke Ingels, author of the archicomic Yes is More confessed that before applying for architecture he wanted to be a comic artist. Apart from his assumed passion for comics, he chose comics as a medium to communicate some of his architectural projects because rather than showing the final results, the Bjarke Ingels Group studio ‘wanted to show the concerns and demands, conflicts and contradictions that shape our cities and buildings into what they are.’ [1]

Figure 1: Pages 68 from the book Yes is More. A sequence of axonometries in the top of the page shows the different stages of the building volume-shapes until reaching its final shape.
Credits: Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). Used with permission from BIG.

During the book, architecture is shown by schemes, technical drawings, models, photos and renders supported by text that links these images. The book consists essentially of an illustrated monologue addressed to the readers, in which the architect is the narrator and sometimes a character. The texts from Yes is More do not depend on the images to be understood, unlike its images which depend on the text to make sense and add new architectural information to them.

The biggest part of the narrative happens in flash-back; project decisions that were taken during the architectural conception are explained by the architect in diegetic time, however, the images that are exhibited in the book were produced during the project´s development process, that is, in the past. As such, the text of the book obeys a time sequence that is typical for comics; however images are shown just to illustrate the projects that are described in the text. For this reason, the idea developed by McCloud (1994, 100) that time and space in comics are one and the same is not applicable to this case.

As happens with photography, the abundant use of realistic renders produced in computer software to show the created spaces in perspective, beyond abolishing the authors’ emotions, experiences and the characterization that the space could have if it was inhabited also abolishes the time duration that McCloud (1994, 102) refers to in Understanding Comics, conferring the idea of eternity upon the depicted architecture. According to Hatfield (2005, 52), synchronism, in which a single panel represents a sequence of events occurring at different “times”, offers images that can make sense only within a static medium. This sequence of events to which Hatfield refers is absent in these architectural renders because there is a lack of motion lines and other ideographic shorthand to denote movement.

Figure 2: Page 20 from the book Yes is More. This page shows the environment lived in the architectural design studio. Credits: Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). Used with permission from BIG.

However, these images belong to a logic defined by the architect to help the reader to build in their mind a model of the project through which he can understand the volume, the colors and the main concept of the project. Actually, this strategy used by Ingels is similar to a usual conversation between the architect and his client.

In this specific case we can conclude that comics as a medium was adapted to serve the architect´s goals and this justifies why the author uses the term “Archicomic” to differentiate his book from conventional comics. After reading this book, we feel that the potentialities that comics has to communicate were not fully explored.

More than explaining the project´s development process, comics could be used to forecast the interaction that the inhabitants will have in the created architectures by presenting narratives where the inhabitants are the main characters. However the methodology used here, collecting images that were created during the project´s development and articulating them with the text, does not allow Ingels to do that. In a comic book that has as the main scope explaining architectural projects we could expect that the drawn scenario representing the created spaces would be the main element responsible to simulate sequentiality, similarly to the narrative time in films (Harvey 1996, 176), but this does not happen here.

However the book also explains efficiently the project choices by sequences of axonometries [2] that show the transformations of the volumes during the project, the environment lived in the studio during the project and even the constraints of all architectural stages.[3] Such benefits can be considered a great argument for the creation of new archicomics.

Figure 3: Pages 26 and 27 from the book Yes is More. Credits: Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). Used with permission from BIG.

2. Comics whose authors use the project based methodology of architecture to create fictional scenarios that fit to the actions and characteristics of the characters.

Some comics’ authors that create science fiction series have a creative attitude that is similar to that of architects: they select and discard the existing things to create something new. Consequently, the created architecture that belongs to these scenarios is the sum of elements from architectures that already exist in reality.

The project methodology includes scientific research, building models of the created cities and drawing subtitled plans and sections of the buildings that contribute to the coherence and sequentiality of the represented diegetic scenario and to the naturalness of the interaction of the characters in the scenario. As the authors have the freedom to create a new architecture, they often use it as a metaphor to characterize a society, a regime, etc. (Lefévre, 157). Sometimes these comics also work as myths that are created to stimulate interventions in the contexts where they were created. According to Georges Sorel, “we act politically according to myths of the future which may never materialize literally, but which motivate us nonetheless into productive action”. (Birenbaum 1988, 188) In the series Le Cycle de Cyann by Bourgeon and Lacroix, a new universe was created. Fortunately, the created places are not comparable with the real ones; however it is a representation of how our world could be in the future if we do not try to change it.

For example Marcade, from the book Les Couleurs de Marcade, is a capitalist city where even the right to privacy is paid for and consequently all human actions are supervised. The people pretend to conform to this situation; however they do not feel comfortable with the public exposure of their intimate lives. In terms of its architecture, the city is built on a limited platform above the soil that is supported by pillars. Below the platform, a set of clouds covers the soil, on which people do not know what happens.

This architectural attitude is reminiscent of the city upon columns, created by Eugéne Hénard (a visionary urbanist) and one of the five points for a modernist architecture, enumerated by Le Corbusier. For Le Corbusier, beyond the use of pilotis [4] to liberate the soil from construction and allow the free circulation of people and vehicles, modernist architecture should have free design of the ground plan, horizontal windows, free design of the façade and roof garden. If pilotis were used by Corbusier to allow the freedom of movements, in Marcade they are used to trap people in a limited area.

The use of pillars in buildings confirms that the created planets in the series have an identical gravitational force to Earth. The science fiction essence of the series is mainly given by the clothes and bizarre hairstyle fashion, the animals’ bodies (but not their vital systems), the different names given to things, the vehicles and the shape of the buildings. According to Bourgeon, the scenario should be narrative and this example proves it very well [5], because it helps us to understand the regimen of Marcade and its inhabitants´ behaviors.

For the reader/viewer that certainly has experienced better places to live, he can easily speculate that the soil represents a utopian place in which all the Marcade inhabitants would wish to live if they knew of its existence and the clouds an element that serves to instill fear in people and that they wish to avoid. From this point of view, the architecture in this study case does not serve to protect its inhabitants as it should do in reality and as its inhabitants think: architecture is no more than another instrument created by someone who wants to isolate people from the rest of the world to control them and impose a dictatorship.

This importance given to the scenario is possibly influenced by Bourgeon’s previous creation of historic novels like Les passagers du Vent, where the accuracy and realism of the scenario make the reader understand that the narrative is about the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century. His previous experience in creating historic novels made him understand that a logical and accurate representation of the scenario is indispensible to make the narrative credible, independently of the series´ genre. If in historical novels a previous work of research is required to have sufficient elements to represent the scenario coherently, in science-fiction the elements used to support the representations of the scenarios need to be created. Bourgeon and Lacroix chose to materialize the created cities by constructing models to facilitate the visualization of the created scenarios.

Despite the attention given to making the characters’ actions and proportions correspond to the created scenarios and the fact that the newly created objects have similar characteristics to the real ones, they are detached from reality by the new designations attributed to things.This detachment obliged the authors to create a special book which is a compilation of all research work and a glossary that is intended for use by the readers to facilitate their reading process by explaining the fictional elements and comparing them with the real ones.

The places which were represented in this study case are mostly dystopian. Dystopias can only be understood as such if the reader-viewer has ideas of utopias. In response to the dystopias presented in comics, the reader/viewer generates a mental construction of an ideal place, to escape from these represented spaces.

3. Architecture in comics as a representation of the reality, framing the narrative in a certain real spatio-temporal context.

In some series, the representation of real architecture in comics can assume a pedagogical function, allowing the reader/viewer to acquire knowledge from architectural history, even if he does not have intentions to learn. Great examples of such titles can be found in the Les aventures d´Alix [6] and Vasco [7] series, where architectural representations are accurate and texts are sometimes extensive and very informative about the historical facts. However, sometimes the pedagogical role is simply to prompt the reader/viewer to research more widely about architecture, even if the architecture represented in the scenarios has some inaccuracies and indicates a lack of knowledge. Asterix, in the genre of humor, is a great example of this.

In the first example, authors like Jacques Martin and Gilles Chaillet must undertake exhaustive research that includes travelling to the represented places and the study of some specialized bibliography. When the represented places are currently in ruins, they are reconstructed in their representations as if they were inhabited, and sometimes the images that the comics’ authors create of these buildings in ruins are the only existing representations of those places.

According to Desrochers (2006, 189) westerners’ perceptions of ruins have changed since the Second World War, and the worsening of environmental problems became a subject of appropriation instead of an enchanted memory from a distant culture. But what is the enchanted memory to which Desrochers refers? Westerners have not lived in the period when the buildings were built: the memories are limited to those which historians have imagined and have articulated based on the traces of which they have no memory. The authors of comics in the historical genre, as well as historians, interact in the process of constructing memories, by the chaining together of the images and the narrative.

Apart from the representation of the unknown, according to Lefévre (2009, 157) some authors ‘use stereotypical icons (like the Statue of Liberty for New York or the pyramids for Egypt) because such famous buildings or monuments can be easily recognized by the readers.’ By recognizing these stereotypical elements, the reader/viewer also assumes that the narrative happens in the city where these icons belong in the reality, even if there are other elements that were created by the author.

The representation of old buildings in comics can also affirm desire on the part of the author to generate respect for these buildings and is not necessarily used to build new patrimony or to give an opinion about ancient architecture and urbanism. As we can see, the representation of architecture from the past could have a pedagogical role, but it also could communicate the author´s desire for an intervention in the views of the audience.

4. Authors that avoid the representation of architecture in comics.

When spatio-temporal coordinates are not needed to understand the narrative the absence of architecture may emphasize the characters’ actions. Some funny comic strips like Peanuts or Garfield invest in minimal or absent architecture, because it does not add relevant information to the narratives. (Lefévre 2009, 157)

However when the absence of architecture occurs in a scenario that aims to exist as an empty place, without an adaptation to Man, and the main characters are humans, the role of architecture should be more important than it seems at first glance. Man has a symbiotic relationship with architecture: Man needs architecture to protect him; however architecture needs Man to be built and to acquire history. When architecture is absent, that means that there is no history of Man in the place and a human visitor should feel lost in this place.

In the Le monde d´ edena series by Moebius, these kinds of scenarios are very frequent. In the second book of the series, Les Jardins d´ edena, the main characters are sent to a garden that is similar to the Christian Garden of Eden, something that is alluded to by the book’s name. This garden has sufficient resources to guarantee the inhabitants´ subsistence, however as the characters always lived in a world where all is transformed to fit to them, even the food, the characters feel uncomfortable in this place. This episode makes us think about the role of architecture in our lives and how we are currently dependent on it.

As the series also occurs in a series of dream stages, the occasional absence of architecture could be related to the contrast between the immateriality and abstraction of the dreams with the rigidity and materiality of the architecture. As such, we can think about the representation of architecture in comics as a way to make a narrative more plausible and grounded in reality.

*             *             *

Having analyzed four instances where architecture is present in comics, we may conclude that architecture is present in comics as it is present in reality. When it does not appear, the reader finds its absence strange because the actions of the real people and the characters are adapted to the space they are attending, just as space is created and adapted to the actions of Man. This justifies the choice of using the same methodology that is used in architectural projects to create scenarios for science fiction comic books.

As comics are usually composed of panels that frame characters actions and architecture frames human actions, the choice of comics as a medium to explain architectural projects has some potentialities that seem not to have been fully explored yet. However, examples like Yes is More have some strong points that may indicate directions for further exploration in future attempts.

References

‘Bjarke Ingels’ Denmark.dk : The official site of Denmark [Accessed 12th December, 2013] URL http://denmark.dk/en/meet-the-danes/great-danes/architects/bjarke-ingels/

Baker, W., 2008. Architectural Excellence in a Diverse World Culture. Victoria: Images Publishing.

Bartual, Roberto. ‘Architecture and comics: Jimenez Lai’s Citizens of No Place’ The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship. [Accessed 15th November, 2013] URL http://blog.comicsgrid.com/2011/08/citizens-of-no-place/

Birenbaum, H., 1988. Myth and Mind. University Press of America.

Bourgeon, F. and Lacroix, C., 1997. La Clédes Confins.Bruxelas : Casterman.

Bourgeon, F. and Lacroix, C., 2007. Lescouleurs de Marcade.Porto: Asa.

Buchet, Alex. ‘Strange Windows: Draw Buildings, Build Drawings (part 1)’ The Hooded Utilitarian : A pundit in every panopticon. [Accessed 15th November, 2013] URL http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2010/09/strange-windows-draw-buildings-build-drawings-part-1/#sthash.Vwa67oXv.dpuf

Choay, F., 2002. O urbanismo: utopias e realidades: uma antologia. São Paulo : Editora perspectiva.

Costin, Aaron. ‘Reading Drawings: Architecture and Comics’ The Hooded Utilitarian : A pundit in every panopticon. [Accessed 15th November, 2013] URL http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2010/09/reading-drawings-architecture-and-comics/

Harvey, R., 1996. The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi.

Haslé, Brieg. ‘Entretien avec François Bourgeon’ Auracan.com [Accessed 14th December, 2013] URL http://www.auracan.com/Interviews/interview.php?item=121

Hatfield, C., 2005. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi.

Hockings, P., 2009. Principles of Visual Anthropology. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Ingels, B., 2009.Yes is more : An archicomic on architectural evolution. Köln : Taschen.

Lefévre, P., 2009. The Construction of Space in Comics. In: Heer, J. and Worcester, K. A Comics Studies Reader. Mississipi: University Press of Mississippi,157-162.

Mackay, J. and Sirrup, D., 2013.Tribal Fantasies: Native Americans in the European Imaginary, 1900-2010. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Madge, J. and Peckham, A., 2006. Narrating Architecture: A Retrospective Anthology. New York: Routledge.

McCloud, S., 1994.Understanding Comics : The invisible art. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

Moebius, 1992.O mundo de Edena: os jardins de Edena. Lisboa : Meribérica-Liber.

Scalera, B., 2011. Creating Comics from Start to Finish: Top Pros Reveal the Complete Creative Process. Ohio: Impact.

Syma,C and Weiner, R., 2013. Graphic Novels and Comics in the Classroom: Essays on the Educational Power of Sequential Art. Jefferson: McFarland.

Renata Rafaela Pascoal holds a MA in Architecture from the Universidade de Coimbra. She has presented papers at several international conferences as an independent researcher, and her field of interest in research includes comics, architecture, videogames and pedagogy. Apart from research, she also works as an illustrator, graphic/web designer and animator. For more information, you can visit her website at http://renatta.pt.tl

[1] Information obtained through e-mail interview.

[2] Similarly to perspective, axonometries are projections that simulate three dimensionality through a bi-dimensional drawing. Axonometries differ from perspective in its method of construction: if perspectives are constructed through one or more vanishing points that belongs to the same horizon line; the visual construction rays in axonometries are parallel, vanishing to no point or to a point located infinitely far away.

[3] Constraints are considered to be all the factors that obligate the architect to make certain options during the project. The program, the legislation, the place on which the building will be built (its dimensions, inclination, orientation, etc,..), the available budget, the costumes, etc. are a few examples of these constraints.

[4] Pilotis are supports of reinforced concrete such as columns and pillars that are used in the ground level, allowing the use of this level for circulation, gardens and other uses.

[5] Interview made by Pierre Dharréville and available at  http://www.humanite.fr/node/298676

[6] Les Aventures d´Alix is a French series created by Jacques Martin (1921-2010). According to Miller (2007, 19), this author used the clear line style from the École de Bruxelles, similarly to well-known authors like Hergé and E.P.Jacobs.

[7] Vasco is a French series created by Gilles Chaillet (1946-2011), one of the disciples of Jacques Martin. He also drew two albums from the series Les Voyages d´Alix that was created by Martin.

This paper looks at a few experiments on comics-storytelling in digital comics. The paper starts with introducing aspects from media psychology and research on technical documentation to look into the narrative and graphic structure of comics and touches on the characteristics of digital media before focusing on specific examples in more detail.

It can be said that a lot of digital and analogue comics constantly experiment on formal and narrative options. This is most obvious where elements of other narrative media get included (see Dittmar 2012 for a more thorough discussion of digital comics). The growing spectrum of forms offers more and more areas to use comics for: not only fictional but also non-fictional issues are communicated increasingly often in comics. For instance, maintenance manuals and assembly instructions for all kinds of artefacts are provided in sequential images more and more (see Schwender 2007, also: Jüngst 2010) – they are much easier to read than descriptive texts, as no translation of text into visual information is done, but the artefact in question and its parts are depicted and can be recognised easily.

Digital Comics Experiments

Obviously, not only digital comics but also analogue forms constantly experiment on and expand formal and narrative options. But in digital comics elements of other narrative media can be included quite easily as long as they are available as digital information as well. Also, distinct presentation media can be employed, like smartphones with their specific screen formats and standard image resolutions.

Two screens taken from Tom Wallgren’s “Urgent Delivery”

Tom Wallgren wrote and produced “Urgent Delivery” during a comics-course at Malmö University specifically to be read on smart-phones. The format of the images is adjusted to make the most of these screens – and accordingly, their size limits options for juxtaposed pictorial sequence. The dramaturgical development is built around this peculiarity: Almost all images are placed one per screen and only a few double images are used in the story. These combine our experience of split-screen from film with the diagonal frames between images in mainstream action comics. The story makes the most of each individual stage – images use the options of light and colour-intensity that only a screen can guarantee. To achieve the same colour-qualities in print would be quite expensive (starting with the need for high quality glossy paper).

The example below by Oscar Lagerström Carlsson and Felix Strandberg, also from one of our comics-courses, allows the reader to choose the narrative perspective onto the story. In this example, it is not the visual plane that is changed but the textual content – the reader can select whether to read the story with accompanying narrator’s comments or with direct speech of the depicted figures included. A blend of the two is also possible, adding a more text-centred version to the two image-centred narrations. In the result, three different modes are offered: the first showing all dialogue and conversations of the figures with each other, the second being an internal monologue, in which the main figure’s perspective is used as the narrator’s voice for the story, and a third in which the previous two forms are added onto each other. Each results in quite a different experience of the narration, without using different images at all.

Oscar L. Carlsson & Felix Strandberg allow for different narrative settings for the same visual material – here: [selectable narrator:dialogue]

The second text-perspective offered by Oscar L. Carlsson & Felix Strandberg in their comic: [monologue: first-person narrator]

The combination of the two previous text-layers by Oscar L. Carlsson & Felix Strandberg: [first-person narrator & dialogue combined]

Beyond Comics Definitions

Experiments on narrative forms partly challenge and even change established definitions of what comics are and what might easiest be described as mixed media storytelling. It has to be asked whether the established definitions of comics are fitting for the various forms of digital and web-comics or whether we are witnessing the establishment of a new literary form, which is neither film nor comic nor audio storytelling. Computer-based forms of comics that allow for readers’ choices in the development of narration (i.e. interactivity) usually switch easily (and often) between push and pull aspects of the medium (readers have to choose actively to be able to read further).

If we describe comics in the abstract for a moment, we can describe images as a blend of para-social and socio-culturally coded information, while written texts consist only of socio-culturally coded visual information. Some signs are understood without having to learn their meaning; basic emotions (fear, happiness, anger and despair) for example are understood by all humans in all the world, while other codes and messages depend on cultural learning – languages and writing for example: The difference between pre-social and socio-cultural recognition (for details see e.g. Berghaus 1986 and Boehm 1994, esp. 325 ff.). The visual rhetoric of comics can use elements from all kinds of codes and other visual depictions, even empty spaces. For the reader these need to be de-codable, otherwise the story can get misunderstood – or is not understood at all.

The structural basis for comics-storytelling is rather simple, while the difficulties are given in the interweaving (“tressage”, Groensteen 1999). It turns out to be slightly more difficult to describe the way in which images relate to other images. The way relations are constructed between individual places in the narration (“la spatio-topie”) and between narrative elements and themes (“l’arthrologie”) (Groensteen 1999). As Helena Magnusson summarised: ‘The first is about spatial relations, the second about semantic relation’ (Magnusson 2005: 42) – within each specific comic. The linearity or non-linearity of relations between events is crucial: it gives structure to the story itself, this in turn causes decisions on how to interrelate scenes and figures’ appearances within the narration.

This might sound more complicated than it is, but keep in mind that every comic is constructed from elements that are placed on various structural layers that are overlaying each other. These are comparable to “cells” – transparent sheets – in analogue animation film, but do not separate into different stages within a movement (e.g., the different positions of the leg in movement). Instead, the different layers are separated according to their internal visibility, i.e. within the narration: the images themselves, images inserted into images, texts written into images (e.g. sound-words), texts in frames (comments by narrator) and as a different group which is visually related quite closely: texts in bubbles. These can be separated into representations of speech and into thoughts. And if we understand the elements of comics storytelling to be placed on separate layers, we can more easily understand the potential of each of these elements within the construction of a story.

The smallest unit in comics-storytelling is the individual image that is limited by its frame (see Dittmar 2011 for a more detailed discussion of units in comics storytelling). There always are frames, only some of them are not decorated – but each image stops somewhere in some specific manner or style. The narrative development – the dramaturgy – of each comic is built from sequencing frames: They allow for narrative punctuation of the story, for visualising rhythm and structure of events.

Accordingly, the composition of each image has to be analysed or planned. Also, the style of drawing (or other graphical production methods) is crucial for the narrative and the construction of atmosphere: The depicted lighting conditions, the colouring, the choice of tools and reproduction media. And of course the point of view (incl. tilted and other framings) chosen for each individual image and sequence. Each page is an image containing several images – all the different names for full pages relate to concepts of comics-structure: the page as “hyperframe” (or “hypercadre” in Peeters 2003), “meta panel” or “super panel” (Eisner 2004), etc.

The depiction of physical environment does of course offer all the pictorial information on the placement of figures in whatever surrounding, while sounds can become physical (figures are hurt by sound, sometimes), but usually are on a separate layer, close to the speech balloons that represent direct speech. Thoughts are separate from these again, readers understand them to be visualised for their benefit, they are usually not imagined to be readable by the other figures within the comic, just like narrator’s comments, which are rather textual information that is framing the image in question and relating it to other aspects of the narration (Dittmar 2011: 179-182). Each of these layers is representing specific aspects of the situation and all of them do have their specific properties – as can be seen in comics which leave out one of these layers to tell their story with a distinct reduction of information.

On a more media-specific level, it has become obvious that the boundaries between comics and multimedia or even games are blurring (see e.g. Goodbrey 2014 for a discussion of this development). Comics’ definitions so far (e.g. in Groensteen, Carrier, McCloud; see Dittmar 2011 for a detailed discussion of comics definitions) do allow for, but do not discuss the consequences of floating or flexible page layouts for the dramaturgy of stories. Digital comics can follow these conventions or break them by introducing a different pacing of story-arcs that would not fit on printed formats. Decisions about the number of images and their placing and style are crucial for the storytelling style of each comic as each new page works as a meta-panel (or meta-image) that consists of all its individual images and combination of their designs (“mise-en-page”). Digital comics can allow for floating images on the page and variability in image-sizes. As a result, content of a page no longer sets the narrative structure of comics for each reader, but each gets to see a different depiction of the page according to the individual settings of the browser. The discussion about the applicability of classes of page styles cannot be repeated here, but remember the basic forms of page styles as either regulated or constant, as decorative, as rhetoric, or as productive (cf. Peeters 2003). Defining styles helps to discuss the frame-structure not only of each page, but also of the full comic (strip or album alike). These can be seen as a multiframe (“multicadre”, “multicadre feuilleté”: van Lier 1988) which is the comic‘s skeleton (Magnusson 2005).

It might be necessary to point out that printed and similar comics do cause different comics definitions than digital comics do. Definitions for digital comics are deducted from and related to the “classic” definitions, of course, but as medial demands and options are distinctly different with digital media, definitions have to adjust. The ongoing debate on digital comics is doing just that: it is testing established theories (comics definitions amongst other issues) to adjust them to describe current practices in digital comics.

To include hidden text that is shown when the mouse-pointer is dragged over it (the “alt-function”) seems not to be a challenge to comics-definitions. But including sounds, spoken texts, and music as accoustic and not as visual information causes a problem, as non-visual information is added. Is a comic still a comic if it includes moving images or sound-bites? Can it be a film, if the reader determines her/his individual speed of reading – especially if the images are placed juxtaposed? Karl-Johan Thole suggested on the current course on “Digital Comics” at Malmö University the following condition to mark the boundary between digital comics (which possibly include animated images) and animation film: ‘The reader should be able to look at the picture at any time of the animation and take in the whole meaning of the picture. So that the reader can read the comic without having to stop to watch a longer animation play’.

This condition limits the extent to which animated content can get included into a comic without turning it into film. From looking at many of the comics that are published on the internet, it is obvious that animated sequences of up to a minute are quite popular with the makers of these stories. But does this turn them into comics with short film sequences – or rather into stories told in multimedia? From a film perspective, most of the information and action in these stories is given in the comics-sections, while the animated bits mostly add atmosphere to the story, but only limited story-development.

Advanced interactivity might turn digital comics into games

Not only digital but also analogue comic-formats constantly experiment on and expand formal and narrative options. New options arrive with our changing uses of all kinds of media. They all result in options to tell stories in new or different ways. Especially with digital comics, elements of other narrative media get included; moving images or sound effects are interlinked with the dramaturgical development of the story. Also, distinct presentation-media are employed, for example mobile phones that are used as computer-and-screen-units in connection with the internet (not as phones, obviously). Often, interactivity is a crucial quality, e.g. visual planes can be selectable, or perspectives onto the story and its development – this area is closely linked to developments of games and might be rather more than multi-medial storytelling or digital comics. With growing interactivity the intended narrative sequence and dramaturgy gets communicated less safely, as the reader turns into a user that decides on the sequence of events and even on what might happen and what not. And when that stage is reached, we no longer talk about literature, but about games.

Sources

Berghaus, Margot (1986): “Zur Theorie der Bildrezeption. Ein anthropologischer Erklärungsversuch für die Faszination des Fernsehens.” in: Publizistik Jg.31, Heft 3-4: 278-295.

Boehm, Gottfried (1994): Was ist ein Bild? München: Fink.

Carrier, David (2000): The Aesthetics of Comics. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Dittmar, Jakob F. (2011): Comic-Analyse. Konstanz: UVK.

Dittmar, Jakob F. (2012): “Digital Comics” in: Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art (SJoCA), Winter 2012; 82–91.

Eisner, Will (2004): Comics and Sequential Art. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press.

Goodbrey, Daniel Merlin (2014): “Game Comics: An Analysis of an Emergent Hybrid Form” in: Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Vol 5, Issue 4.

Groensteen, Thierry (1999): Système de la Bande Dessinée. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Jüngst, Heike Elisabeth (2010): Information Comics. Frankfurt et al.: Peter Lang.

Magnusson, Helena (2005): Berättande Bilder. Göteborg & Stockholm: Makadam.

McCloud, Scott (1993): Understanding Comics. New York: Harper Collins.

Peeters, Benoît (2003): Lire la Bande Dessinnée. Paris: Flammarion.

Schwender, Clemens; Ulrich Bühring (2007): Lust auf Lesen. Die lesemotivierende Gestaltung von Technischer Dokumentation. Lübeck: Schmidt-Römhild.

Van Lier, Henri (1988): “La Bande Dessinée, une Cosmogénie Dure” in: Bande Dessinée, Récits et Modernité. Colloque de Cerisy. URL (16.09.2014): http://www.anthropogenie.com/anthropogenie_locale/semiotique/bande_dessinee.pdf

Jakob F. Dittmar studied British Studies, Religion, et al. in Oldenburg and Exeter. PhD in science of arts in Essen. Venia legendi and facultas docendi in media science on comics-analysis and on en-passant-media at TU Berlin. Assoc. prof. and senior lecturer at the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University.

A report on the Symposium at the Ohio State University on Charlie Hebdo and the terrorist attacks of January 7^th 2015

The Charles Schulz auditorium, just above the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library at the Ohio State University (OSU), served as the venue of a mini-symposium on 19 February 2015 on the attack against Charlie Hebdo. This is a place where comics is in the air, and so is the need for dialogue: as event organizer Jared Gardner, professor at the Department of English & the Film Studies Program, highlighted, the symposium was called into being by the need to have a conversation and to share learned opinions on events that have stirred debates in society, in academia, and in the comics community. Conversation is what makes universities necessary, added Gardner, and it was in this spirit that he invited scholars with different perspectives and backgrounds to discuss the events of January 7^th.

The symposium started with a lecture by Mark McKinney, professor of French at Miami University, co-editor of European Comic Art, and author of The Colonial Heritage of French Comics and Redrawing French Empire in Comics. The subsequent roundtable helped us to see the magazine and the terrorist attack as complex cultural phenomena that can be approached and interpreted very differently between disciplines. The participants were Daniele Marx-Scouras, from the Department of French and Italian, OSU; Youssef Yacoubi, from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, OSU; Erik Nisbet, School of Communication, OSU; and Caitlin McGurk, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library.

Mark McKinney’s lecture, entitled “Race, Religion and Charlie Hebdo,” served as a detailed and visually demonstrated defense of Charlie Hebdo against attacks of racism. McKinney argued for interpreting the magazine in the French, more closely in the Parisian, context where it came from; he introduced us to the history of the magazine, and showed us an array of works by various Charlie Hebdo cartoonists that demonstrate their sensitivity to issues of religion and race. McKinney showed that the main focus of the magazine’s satire was not religious; rather, it featured a vast array of social and political topics. From the various examples that McKinney showed us let me mention Luz’s (Rénald Luzier) anti-racist cartooning, and his satirizing the French far right and Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Charlie Hebdo’s stance towards religion is not easy to judge outside of context. One particularly ironic comic strip created by artists working for the magazine represents Catholic fundamentalists protesting against a certain blasphemous theatrical production and Muslim fundamentalists demonstrating in support of the Catholics. This strip allows insight into the magazine’s general view of religious fundamentalism, be it Christian or Muslim, as essentially similar, harmful and aggressive. McKinney claims that the magazine was a lot more disrespectful and harsher in its treatment of Catholicism than in its treatment of the Islam, its criticism forever backed by faith in the freedom of expression. In 2011, Charlie Hebdo was attacked; the office was firebombed, and the cartoonists received death threats. The spark for the attack was the magazine’s “Charia Hebdo” issue published on 2 November 2011, which listed Muhammed as one of its editors. In response to the Libyan politician Mustafa Abdul Jalil’s statement that Libya would adopt sharia as basis of its lawmaking, the cover, drawn by Luz, featured a cartoon of the prophet saying: “100 lashes of the whip if you don’t die laughing.” The magazine also had repeated lawsuits involving both Catholic and Muslim communities, yet a court ruled that Charlie Hebdo appears to be free of any deliberate attempt to offend Muslims as a group. Moreover, two editorials highlighted that Muslims themselves are the major victims of fundamentalism, while the cartoonist Cabu’s (Jean Cabut) works can clearly be inserted in the history of anti-racist cartooning in France. The fact that Cabu was aware of the touchiness of satirical cartooning is reflected by his question in his last publication: “Can one still laugh about everything?”

Finally, in a revealing twist, McKinney inserted Charlie Hebdo in the context of some explicitly racist far right French cartoons, shedding new light on the various images that have been introduced to us either by him or by any website in the past month. Attacking post-colonial minorities has been a favorite topic of far-right cartoonists since the 1980s. Political cartoonist Chard (Françoise Pichard), whose comics have been published in far-right weeklies, is a mouthpiece for homophobic ideologies. In the name of a homogenous white conservative society she racializes minorities in a way that lets her get away with it – and she never satirizes Catholics.

The roundtable that followed the lecture was a really productive and engaging discussion of cultural heritage, minorities, literary traditions and the exhibition commemorating the artists of Charlie Hebdo in Angoulême. Daniele Marx-Scouras argued that the attack against the French satirical magazine should not be discussed in isolation, but in relation to Western foreign policy in the Middle East. Her provocative question, why is it this event that got media coverage, and not others, was left unanswered. She also raised the issue of the French citizenship of Lassana Bathily, the Malian grocery worker who saved a great number of lives: in her interpretation the gesture of giving him citizenship on the 20^th of January shows a model of how the majority imagines the successful integration of minorities: one has to risk one’s life to earn acceptance.

In his fascinating ten minutes Youssef Yacoubi was looking for manifestations of the incomprehensibility of Eastern and Western cultural traditions – the differences in conceptions about certain things – highlighting three fields of tension: humor, the understanding of violence (based on Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh’s Writing of Violence in the Middle East,) and the crisis of knowledge within the Islamic tradition. This crisis touches upon the most cardinal issues, such as authority, representation, and  freedom. As humor is an area where these issues meet and clash, Yacoubi asked if we are all equal before humor – and answered by drawing a distinction between satire, the humor of the elite of society; and the humor of the immigrant, which aims at mobilizing the energy of marginalization to satirize his/her own community as well as the broader society. Quoting the Syrian poet Adonis, Yacoubi went on to discuss differences in the Western, post-enlightened perceptions of violence and the heritage of Islam. “I am the hour of dreadful agitation and shaking loose of minds,” wrote Adonis. “This is what I am: Uniting strangeness with strangeness” – are the final lines of Adonis’s poem, giving voice to the degree of incomprehensibility involved in dialogues between East and West. At the end of his talk, Yacoubi argued for what he called intellectual patience in this present time of tension, the practice of resisting one’s first emotive response.

The next speaker, Erik Nisbet examined the media event of the attack and the phenomena of islamophobia and anti-Americanism from a social scientist’s perspective. In strong opposition to McKinney’s lecture, he argued that Charlie Hebdo was a victim of and a vehicle for the alienation and not the acculturation of minorities. Yet we should not forget that media provide a reflection of society, and Charlie Hebdo channeled the expectation existing in French society that anyone can be a Frenchman, but they have to accept French culture (even if French culture is criticizing one’s original culture.) Nisbet also called attention to the fact that Charlie Hebdo satirized all religion, in a country where the free expression of religion is limited for certain groups, for example the wearing of the headscarf in an educational setting is forbidden by law. He also highlighted the importance of considering the social status of Muslim minorities in France and in the EU: in France 5-10% of the population is Muslim, however, the proportion of them in prisons is much larger. Similarly, Nisbet problematized the ethos of satirizing all religion by stating that there exists a difference between satirizing the religion of power, i.e. Catholicism, and the religion of a minority (the history of racial tension and struggle was elaborated on by many speakers of the event.)

Caitlin McGurk, the last participant of the roundtable, talked about her personal experiences at the Angoulême International Comics Festival, where an exhibition was put up in just ten days to commemorate the dead cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo. McGurk had the luck to talk to one of the organizers of the exhibition, who told her that he was really frustrated by the hysteria over the magazine. Four weeks before the attack no one cared about Charlie Hebdo; they were on the outs, they were not considered stable and had serious financial problems, and now people seem to be too fond of it.

In his closing remarks Jared Gardner projected a Charlie Hebdo cover that shows a person with oil in one of his hands and fire in the other, while a textual insert labels the drawing as “The origins of humor.” As Gardner showed, putting the two together might be a good joke, but its first victim is bound to be the joker himself. The cover suggests that the artists of Charlie Hebdo understood that humor and satire are related to the Molotov cocktail in more than one ways. The cartoonists were aware that  their work could have the potential to blow things up, even themselves. Similarly, the cover the magazine appeared with after the 2011 attack, a cover showing a person in a Charlie Hebdo T-shirt kissing a Muslim person, can be interpreted as a hint at the relationship of mutualism between free speech and terrorism or violence. These covers and interpretations complicate some of the immediate and heated reactions articulated directly after the attack and call for a re-examination of the perception of the magazine as well as the attack against it.

Eszter Szép is a PhD student at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. She earned her M.A.s at the same institution in English Language and Literature (2008) and in Hungarian Language and Literature (2010). Her research focuses on vulnerability, materiality and the role of touch in 21^st century graphic narratives. Eszter is an active member of the really small yet devoted Hungarian comics community, is a board member of the Hungarian Comics Association, and is one of the organizers of the International Comics Festival Budapest. With her reviews, interviews and lectures she tries to raise the acceptance of comics in Hungary.

Background

Denmark and Greenland have, for a long time, been historically connected; in 1721 the Danish/Norwegian priest and missionary Hans Egede travelled to Greenland in search of the Norse. He didn’t find them, as the Norse had disappeared at the start of the 15^th century. He did however find the Inuit, and he focused his missionary activities on them instead. In 1728, Egede founded the colony Godthaab (which is now known as Nuuk, the capital of Greenland today), and until 1953 Greenland was considered a Danish colony. In 1953, Greenland became a part of the Danish realm under the constitution of Denmark. Greenland received Home Rule Government in 1979, and in 2009 this Home Rule Government was extended to Self Government – although the Danish monarch is still the head of state in Greenland. Since the 19^th century, Danish (and later also Greenlandic) scientists have been working in Greenland, documenting everything from archaeology, anthropology and language, to geology, biology and glaciology.

Introduction to the graphic novels

In 2006 the SILA – the Arctic Centre at the Ethnographic Collections in the National Museum of Denmark – won a prize for the most dynamic research community. The archaeologists and historians at the department discussed how to use this money, and they came up with the idea of asking the artist Nuka K. Godtfredsen whether he was interested in making four test pages – each page representing one of the migration periods in the prehistory of Greenland. Nuka accepted, and these four pages led to the idea of making four graphic novels, in a cooperation between Nuka, the National Museum of Denmark, the schoolbook publisher Ilinniusiorfik in Greenland, and the Greenlandic newspaper Sermitsiaq.

In 2009 the first book, The First Steps, was published. The First Steps is about the first migration from Canada to Greenland 4500 years ago by a group of people named “the Independence people”. The comic book was made in a cooperation between Nuka and the researchers Dr. Bjarne Gronnow and Mikkel Sorensen. The Independence people lived approximately around 2200 BC, and they travelled from Northeast Siberia, through Alaska and Canada, to the Northeast coast of Greenland. The Independence people did not use kayaks or dog sleds like the Inuit. Instead, they were hunters living off musk ox, seals and fish.

In The First Steps Nuka used the archaeological findings as a starting point, making up his own story about the boy Nanu (a name that means “polar bear”). After a vengeful attack on his group, Nanu and his family travel east to the unknown land (Greenland). However, the lack of food and bad ice conditions cause most of the family members to die. Later on in the book, Nanu – who is now a grown up man – successfully travels to Greenland, where he settles and meets one of the other migrant groups, the Saqqaq people.

The book received great reviews, and because of this positive response the publisher and the researchers agreed to create one more book. Three years later, in 2012, the second book, The Ermine, was published. This book is about the pre-Inuit “Dorset-people” – named after the findings at Cape Dorset, Baffin Island – and it is set in the 12^th century. In Greenland there are three different migrations of the Dorset, which took place between 800 AD – 1300 AD. The book The Ermine is about the last of these Dorset-migrations and it is set in the North of Greenland. The story, which was written by Nuka and the archaeologist Martin Appelt, mainly focuses on shamanism. In the story the reader follows a Dorset woman that travels from Canada to Greenland while, at the same time, the book shows her transformation from being a depressive and strange woman to becoming a shaman.

As with the first book, the story was based on archaeological finds and theories. For instance, archaeological discoveries have shown that the Dorset people had a certain way of placing the stones in the middle of the tent. They also had some form of trading with the Norse, as certain elements from Norse culture – like pots – were found in the Dorset settlements in the north of Greenland. Both of these examples, the placement of stones and the trade relations with the Norse, are shown in figure 1a (sketch) and 1b (p. 10 in the book). Other archaeological findings are from the Dorset culture. The archaeologists have found a lot of figures cut out from bone, which seem to represent the Dorset themselves. A figure like this is shown in the drawing in figure 2 (p. 51 in the book).

Figure 1a

Figure 1b: These drawings show the trade between the Dorset people and the Norse. The pot shown is based on archaeological finds from Avanersuaq (North Greenland).

Figure 2: The figurine shown in the upper left corner is based on an archaeological discovery

At the moment, Nuka is working on finishing the last pages of the third book, The Gift, which will be published in 2015 (see figure 3). This third book is set in the 18^th century and it tells the story of European and Inuit whale hunting in Greenland, their trade, and the European mission. The story is based on the family saga of “Qajuuttaq”, which is told from generation to generation in Greenland. The main character, the Inuk (singular of Inuit) Qajuuttaq, grows up in the area around the colony Godthaab. He lives with his family, and now and then they visit the colony and Hans Egede. Hans Egedes’ son Niels tells Qajuuttaq about the different European traders and whale hunting ships. When Qajuuttaqs’ parents die of the smallpox, Qajuuttaq cuts out a tiny kayak as a gift to put on top of their grave. When he goes whale hunting and trading with other Inuit, Qajuuttaq trades with another Inuit man, named Asaleq. Asaleq gives him the tiny kayak that Qajuuttaq made for his parents’ grave and it becomes clear that Asaleq has stolen the gift. An angry Qajuuttaq kills Asaleq and flees down South. When, during one of the winters, a Dutch whale hunting ships sinks, Qajuuttaq saves the sailors by allowing them to stay in his small settlement. Among the sailors are the captain and his son, Emiel. Emiel and Qajuuttaq strike up a friendship and the Inuk teaches the boy some Greenlandic, as well as how to sail the kayak. In the spring, the Dutch sailors get the chance to go back to Europe, and Qajuuttaq gives the tiny wooden kayak to Emiel. Qajuuttaq is still followed by the sons of the killed Asaleq, and he therefore continues down the coast to the South of Greenland. At the end of the story, Qajuuttaq dies an old man. Shortly after his death, Emiel returns to Greenland, trying to find Qajuuttaq in order to give back the tiny kayak. He finds his grave and puts the kayak on top of it. The gift thus returns to its maker.

All three books are published in Greenlandic, Danish and English (The Gift will be published in all three languages around summer 2015), and in the spring of 2015 the first book, The First Steps, will be published in Japan.

Figure 3: An example from The Gift. Nuka holds up a photograph taken in the Nuuk Fjord. As you can see, Nuka has redrawn the landscape, adding an umiaq (the boat in which women and children travelled) and kayaks (with the men) around it.

The process

The first two books, The First Steps and The Ermine, were based primarily on limited archaeological findings and research, so that Nuka had the possibility of using his own fantasy for substantial parts of these two stories. Because of the “holes in the knowledge” about these ancient peoples, the researchers do not know the exact details about everyday life, such as their clothing and daily activities. These gaps in knowledge also influenced the cooperation with the researchers, because when Nuka asked questions about the daily lives of these ancient people, the researchers had to take another look at their theories and discuss the details again. For instance, Nuka used his own fantasy for the drawings of the clothes and tents of the Independence people. Scientists haven´t found any remains of their clothes, nor do they know much about the exact design of the tents. However, they do know which animals were hunted and they have found some remains of the tents. In The First Steps, p. 22 (figure 4), the drawings show a combination of exact archaeological knowledge and fantasy. On the one hand, the clothes are “made up” by looking at the types of fur available at the time (combined with the hunting weapons), and by tracing how more recent inhabitants of the Arctic make their clothing. On the other hand, the drawings of the lashing of the bows are based on exact knowledge about these weapons. Another example is the way in which the scenes of shamanism are shown in The Ermine p. 28-29 (figure 5a & b): Here you see Nuka’s interpretation of the angakkoq (the shaman) receiving a new “helping spirit”. The pages preceding this scene show the killing of a grizzly bear. Because of the very close relationship between the ancient peoples of the Arctic and nature, the shaman asks the dead grizzly bear if it can forgive him for killing it. In the evening the shaman travels with his spirit, meeting and then becoming the grizzly bear, after which he returns to his own body. Of course it is not possible to find archaeological evidence for this kind of spiritual travelling, but the archaeologists have found a lot of figures showing this type of religion.

Because the third book, The Gift, takes place in the 18^th century, the researchers know a lot about the details of the different events that took place. They have texts and findings that give a lot of information about clothing, ships, houses and the mission, as well as the techniques of whale hunting used by the Europeans and the Inuit. With this huge knowledge as starting point the process has been much stricter than that of the first two albums.

Figure 4: This hunting scene shows a mix of archaeological finds (the bow and arrow), and Nuka’s imagination (the clothing).

Figure 5a

Figure 5b: These drawings show two pages from The Ermine, demonstrating that the Dorset people believed in shamanism.

How the third book is made

It is a long and demanding process to make this kind of graphic novel. In the summer of 2012, Nuka began researching this particular period in Greenland. Dr. H.C. Gullov from the National Museum of Denmark created a list of the most important historical sources, archaeological findings, and events from the 18^th century in Greenland. This became a long list of things that Nuka could choose from during the creation of his story. However, the list of resources, specific years and historical figures was so complex, that Nuka and I decided to create the story together. Since 2004, Nuka and I have been working together, creating different kinds of children’s books, comic books and articles that, directly and indirectly, tell about Greenlandic culture and nature – as well as dealing with basic life as a human. These human themes also form an important part of our children’s books. Even though there are obvious differences between children in terms of their culture, language and climate, we explore basic necessities; all children need their parents and a safe environment, and children use their imagination to play, learn, and fantasise. So, as partners in private and as colleagues in these creative projects, I (having a master’s in Arctic Studies and being a writer) tried to help Nuka to understand the academic way of working and talking. The next step was to transform the academic knowledge into drawings and text bubbles.

In the third book we tried to combine the many sources with the findings, making a coherent story by filling the gaps in knowledge with imaginary people and events. We needed to make an imaginative story based on facts and put into a frame of disseminating archaeological and historical knowledge. The archaeologists and historians know a lot of details from the diaries of the Egede-family, the remains from the houses (both the Danes and the Inuit) and elements from daily life, like clothing and trading goods. What we didn’t know about in detail was the Inuit way of thinking. All the written materials are from European missionaries, traders and whale hunters. And on top of this, it was forbidden to trade with the Inuit. Archaeologists have found remains of, and documentation on European trading goods among the Inuit, like the beads known from the modern traditional national clothing in Greenland. But as this barter was illegal, no one has written about it in the official logbooks (see figure 6a & b).

Figure 6a

Figure 6b: Two drawings from the third book, The Gift. One of the aims of this book is to show meetings between different cultures. These drawings show an encounter between the Inuit and the Dutch whale hunters.

Professor Pauline Knudsen from the National Museum of Greenland gave us the idea of using one of the many oral stories about the family saga of “Qajuuttaq”. With this story and its main character as starting point we slightly changed the historical period in which it is set, while adding some well-known historical figures and strictly following the historical facts of the specific years, places and finds. This storyline went back and forward between us and Dr. Gullov, until the text was ready. In the summer of 2013, Nuka and I visited Greenland for three weeks travelling around in the areas where the story takes place, so that we could take pictures and visit the places where the protagonist of the story “lived”. During this journey we used the opportunity to offer free workshops for children and to give lectures about the project in the local communities.

Since then Nuka has been working on sketches with pencil, colouring the drawings with watercolour painting and writing texts in the bubbles (figure 7). Everything is made by hand, except for the texts, which are made in the computer in order to change the languages. This handmade quality means that it takes about one month to make two pages. Nuka and I have made a short video showing how he works on the creation of one page.

Figure 7: An example of the drawing process. Nuka has drawn the sketch on watercolour paper, after which he covers certain areas with tape and colours in the rest.

Now, the third book is almost finished, and because of the success of the first two books, the Greenlandic publisher and the National Museum of Denmark have already agreed to make the final, fourth book. This last book will be about the Norse settlements in Greenland (people coming from Iceland) at the end of the 14^th century. As in the third book, the researchers know a lot about these people and their way of living, and because of this high level of knowledge, Dr. Jette Arneborg (researcher at the National Museum) and I have already begun writing the storyline. In order to show some of the newest results of the archaeology and climate research, the story of the Norse takes place at the end of their time in Greenland. For many years it has been discussed how and why the Norse disappeared from Greenland, and because the scientists now have quite a good idea about the combination of different reasons why they disappeared, this will be the main focus of the story.

The archaeologists have a lot of findings from the Norse. Taking these findings as a starting point, I have written a story about a Norse woman, Bjork, and her family. Her husband, Bjarne, travels with a group of men to the North of Greenland to trade with the Inuit coming in from the Northwest (Canada). Bjarne violates some of the most important religious rules, which negatively influences his relationship to Bjork. She starts to doubt her marriage to Bjarne and travels to Norway on a pilgrimage. As Catholics in the Middle Ages the Norse lived in a very strict and religious society, and in the story it has been my aim to show two sides of this fact. It shows how difficult it must have been to live by strict Catholic rules in a country far away from everything that is familiar and in a climate getting colder and colder, and it shows what it is like to meet people from a completely different culture (the Inuit). The story will be about survival in the Arctic, meetings of cultures, religion, and the doubt about one’s own actions and choices; all of this put into the frame of the archaeological findings from the Norse.

The book is to be published in a couple of years.

Nuka K. Godtfredsen was born in Narsaq, Greenland, 1970. He is an autodidact artist now living in Copenhagen. He has made a lot of illustrations for books and stamps, and his work has been shown at different exhibitions in e.g. Alaska, Iceland, The Faroe Islands, Sweden and Denmark.

Lisbeth Valgreen was born in Copenhagen, has a master in Arctic Studies from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark and Nuuk, Greenland. She has written several children’s books and articles.

Fig. 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8:  © Nuka K. Godtfredsen & National Museum of Denmark

Fig. 3 & 9  Photo: © Nuka K. Godtfredsen