Comics

Barbara Postema

Foreword

In the early 2000s, when I was writing my Ph.D. dissertation, there was a very short period of time when I had the feeling that I had read absolutely everything related to comics that was in any way relevant to my topic. This may not have quite been true even then, but since then, it has become just about inconceivable to achieve this sense that one has exhausted all the possible readings. Since 2000, almost everything about comics studies has increased. We have more conferences, more journals, more books and book series, and most importantly, there are more new scholars taking up the banner of comics studies, and trying out more and new approaches, writing about more and new comics, in more and diverse ways.

For a time, the field may have been a bit of an “old boys’ club,” not because people were particularly old or all boys, but because it tended to be the same group of people you would encounter at the annual gathering(s) and the same names you would see on editorial boards and book covers. Truth be told, I have quite enjoyed being part of this club, catching up with comics studies friends at conferences and looking forward to reading books by people I know. But as the field has expanded, this has shifted too, so that one now meets new people at every conference, and reads new names in all the venues where comics scholars circulate. Though, in my experience, comics scholars continue to be a welcoming bunch, still happy to see people wanting to join the club.

This current volume includes some people whose names have been around in comics studies circles for ten years or more, but also plenty of new ones. Similarly, the bibliographies are getting more varied and diverse as well. There was a time when one could not publish something about comics without mentioning McCloud, Eisner, and Harvey. But the field is now big enough and established enough that not every publication has to rehearse the “founding” texts and moves, nor does each publication have to protest too much the seriousness of the endeavor, by defending their choice to write about comics. This has created space for the field to focus attention in new areas, and, increasingly, for scholars to join from places outside of the United States and France, where much of the early scholarship was produced. In the process, the discipline is becoming more diverse, more international, and more multicultural.

One area where, unfortunately, comics studies has not grown as much as elsewhere is in terms of a solid foothold within the university. While there are now more courses being taught on comics (often with “graphic novels” in the course titles), more library collections of comics, and even more programs where students can get a degree related to comics, this has not translated into the establishment of any comics studies departments, nor has there been much of an increase in academic positions that are explicitly in comics studies. Where some decades ago film studies was able to translate its growth into not just programs, but also professorships and even departments, comics studies seems to have suffered from poor timing, rising at a time where the fortunes of academia seem to have been steadily declining, and as a result certain kinds of academic recognition and establishment have remained elusive.

This marginality is also perceptible in the biographies of many comics scholars, including contributors to this volume. The title “independent scholar” is encountered regularly in comics studies, evidence of the precarious nature of the positions many of us hold, unsupported by an academic appointment of even the most tenuous nature. Others among us are able to list a university affiliation, but this may cosmetically conceal the fact that these affiliations are based on temporary contracts or positions without a research component. Yet even these tenuous academic links can be something to cherish. Many of the people we once encountered regularly at the annual conferences, and whose contributions we anticipated, have left academia for other, more steady or more rewarding employment. This same thing happens in other fields and disciplines too, of course, but I have a sense that in comics studies it has been more pronounced since we have experienced such a growth of the interest of (graduate) students enthusiastically taking up the discipline, without an increase in institutional support forthcoming at higher levels in the academic career ladder. Despite such difficulties, the field remains active and innovative.

The current collection represents the span from topics that have long since been of interest in comics studies, such as form and genre, to areas that have been growing in importance over the last few years, including materiality and intermediality, in the form of the intersections of media. Furthermore, all four sections of the book show the depth and breadth of the field in the selection of approaches, which includes creative practice as scholarship, but also notably of primary texts that contributors have chosen for scrutiny. Some titles may seem like established favorites, such as For Better or For Worse, Smile, Watchmen, and From Hell. But For Better or For Worse, by Lynn Johnston, is not your standard newspaper comic strip fare, as it was created by a woman representing a slightly autobiographical family developing in real time. In addition, this is a series that has not had much academic study devoted to it, despite its widespread circulation. Smile has similarly been overlooked in scholarship, despite (or would it be because of?) being a bestseller. From Hell and Watchmen have had more study devoted to them, but this volume showcases new perspectives on the works. Many of the other primary texts discussed in this volume are less well known and may be introduced to scholarly audiences here for the first time, or at least with new perspectives. The primary texts are diverse, coming from across the globe, and in some cases are not (yet) available in English.

This volume, in its essays and contributors, shows the vital place of comics studies globally, with academics from all over the world—of many different backgrounds, and having followed numerous paths into and through academia—all finding comics that speak to them and that they want to tell other people about. This volume expands comics studies in numerous ways, both in what it offers readers here, and what scholars will be able to build on in future. This book welcomes new people to the club, but also demonstrates how beautifully this club has expanded and grown.

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank Simon Bacon for suggesting this collection as part of the Peter Lang companions series and for advising on the process; Laurel Plapp and the team at Peter Lang for their patience, advice, and labor; the peer readers who helped us refine the project; Paul Fisher Davies for designing the cover of this volume; and our contributors from all over the world, working at various stages of their careers in diverse sectors, for finding the time and energy to write and revise their work in the post-2020 era.

Madeline B. Gangnes, Aidan Diamond, and Lauranne Poharec

Introduction

“Comics” is a nebulous concept. The word serves as plural noun for physical objects (comic books, graphic novels, collections of short comics and so forth), an artistic medium or mode of creative expression, or an adjective describing a cultural phenomenon or mode of inquiry (“comics cultures,” “comics studies”). From its early days, the field of comics studies has been seen many attempts to define the medium. In 1985, Will Eisner described what he called “Sequential Art” as “a means of creative expression, a distinct discipline, an art and literary form that deals with the arrangement of pictures or images and words to narrate a story or dramatize an idea.”¹ In 1993, Scott McCloud called comics “the Invisible Art,” and laid forth a strict definition for the form that emphasized juxtaposition and sequence without mentioning words as a vital component: “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence.”² For McCloud, text counts as “other images,” as hand-drawn or printed words are presented in comics as visual components. In 1999, Thierry Groensteen explored a “new semiology of comics” that asserted finding a definition is “impossible.”³

As they themselves acknowledge, and as Barbara Postema discusses in the Foreword of this collection, the above theorists are only a few among a large group of scholars who have attempted a definition of the term “comics” (for Groensteen, bande dessinée) as objects, a medium, or a mode of expression or inquiry. Indeed, Bart Beaty questions whether such attempts are necessary.⁴ Comics: A Companion aims to engage with the myriad meanings of “comics” through a wide range of texts and approaches, offering educators, students, and others interested in the field a view of comics’ nuances and complexities. The collection presents comics as physical objects: it incorporates dozens of physical and digital comics texts from around the globe. It presents comics as an artistic medium: it engages with a wide range of artistic styles, formats, materials, and production methods. It presents comics as a cultural phenomenon: it describes the many ways in which comics have shaped, and have been shaped by, their historical, geographical, and cultural contexts.

Comics: A Companion offers a timely intervention into a medium enmeshed in today’s tumultuous political and cultural landscapes: it examines questions of race and representation in a medium that has often promulgated racist caricature and white supremacy; it provides a forum for the international comics community to write against the doctrine of American cultural imperialism; and it spotlights marginalized comics and comics creators that have been so far neglected by Western audiences and the discipline of comics studies. In so doing, this collection expands the field and provides a point of entry for students and scholars looking to read comics from different traditions and from around the globe. Through examinations of genre, context, form, and transmediality, this collection presents both a broad overview of “comics” as a concept and a selection of close readings of individual texts, many of which have been overlooked or underdiscussed in existing scholarship. As such, it offers something of interest and value to both the novice student and the seasoned scholar.

This collection begins with a selection of essays related to the material qualities and affordances of comics. We’ve chosen this section as our entry point for the collection because the material form of a comic is the first thing that a reader encounters and interacts with. All media are, naturally, informed and affected by their material considerations. Specific technologies—from pencil and paper to stylus and screen—are employed by comics creators to achieve certain effects, and their work is, in turn, bound by the limits of these technologies. Aaron Kashtan begins this first section, “Comics as a Medium / & Materiality,” with his focus on the materiality of graphic novels for children. In “Raina Telgemeier’s Smile (2010) and the Materiality of Children’s Graphic Novels,” he explains fundamental differences between graphic novels and comic books in service of his analysis of Raina Telgemeier’s Smile. Kashtan’s analysis of the material properties of Smile makes clear how comics’ materiality shapes their content, and how graphic novels for children have become a “specific identifiable artifact” that is found in child-friendly venues. Susan Kirtley’s essay, “Household Items: Imagining Family in Newspaper Comic Strips,” engages a form of comics that dates back to the nineteenth century and which readers of all ages may encounter daily: the newspaper strip. Kirtley offers Lynn Johnston’s For Better or For Worse (1979–2008) as a key example of the ways in which domestic newspaper strips reflect the history and culture of their time and place, and how a longstanding comic strip may change with cultural shifts.

Moving from this early form of comics to one of its most recent formats, Misha Grifka Wander, in “Webcomics: Queer Comics Queered,” describes how webcomics, which are also inexpensive to circulate, and which have the potential to reach massive audiences, diverge from an established tradition of comics production and circulation. His analysis of Hwei Lim’s webcomic, Hero (2010–), shows how the form “blurs the line” that divides comics from other media, exemplifying a “structural queerness” in line with its content. Ian Hague discusses another webcomic (Dash Shaw’s Bodyworld) alongside its print version. Hague explains the fundamental nature of materiality, and how a materialist approach complements an idealist approach to analyzing comics as texts, using Bodyworld as a key example of how a comic’s material form relates to reader behavior, objects’ physicality, and narrative construction. Fi Stewart-Taylor concludes this section by exploring a humble but powerful comics format: the zine. In their essay, “‘Your Black Friend’ (2016): Coalitional Counterpublics in Zines,” Stewart-Taylor presents Ben Passmore’s “Your Black Friend” as an exemplar of how the zine, as a form that can be cheaply created, produced, and circulated, is uniquely positioned to promote coalition-building efforts for social change.

When approaching a comic, it is helpful for a reader to understand its generic conventions and contexts. The purpose of the collection’s second section is therefore to demonstrate some of the generic possibilities of the comics medium through close readings of select texts situated in their generic context. It is unlikely that the average reader will be familiar with all of the diverse comics presented here, which range from a single volume of a 2020 superhero comic to a 1976 collection of queer and feminist observations, fiction to nonfiction to a work that blurs the distinction between the two. Chris Gavaler’s essay, “Meant to Judge: The Vigilante Heart of the Superhero Genre,” works to help redefine the figure of the superhero (and the authors of superhero narratives) beyond the white male archetype. In working to ground the superhero genre’s political underpinning in racist histories of vigilantism in early twentieth-century America, Gavaler exposes a foundational tension between who is allowed to operate as a superhero and what it means to be a superhero. Nancy Pedri’s “Autobiographical Comics: Ellen Forney’s Marbles (2012)” performs an exemplary close reading of Ellen Forney’s graphic memoir of her diagnosis of and struggle with bipolar disorder. Pedri pays careful attention to the ways in which Forney operates—like most graphic memoirists—as both author and subject, the stress between the two roles, and Forney’s own reckoning with this stress as documented in Marbles.

Next, in “Comics Journalism: Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020),” Kenan Koçak analyzes Paying the Land as an innovative comic in the tradition of New Journalism, and as a work that epitomizes the standards of comics journalism Sacco himself, as its foremost practitioner, set forward. Koçak’s analysis is particularly informed by comics journalism’s investment in documenting and commenting on what has been neglected by more mainstream reportage. In “A History of Horror Comics and the Creation of a Horror Aesthetic in Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell (1989),” Erica McCrystal reads From Hell, a work that speculates on the identity of Jack the Ripper and restages his murders, as a horror comic operating in the tradition of literary horror and Gothic tropes and situated in the history of the American industry-mandated censorship under the Comics Code Authority. Foreshadowing the dominance of American cultural exports, McCrystal further illustrates how the history of horror comics in the United States and the United Kingdom have been closely intertwined. Finally, in “Roberta Gregory’s Dynamite Damsels (1976) and Feminist Hope,” Małgorzata Olsza examines Dynamite Damsels as a comic deeply embedded not only in the underground comix movement, but also in the tradition of women’s and feminist activism that the medium made possible in the 1970s. Olsza thus locates Dynamite Damsels’s political commentary (and its political power) in the tension between the aspirations and limitations of second-wave feminism.

Once a reader understands the material and generic considerations of a comic, their appreciation and engagement may be magnified by a broader consideration of the variations in form and content across different regions and cultures. Therefore, the essays in the third section of this collection consider comics from across the globe, and situate them within their broader socio-political, historical, cultural, and geographical contexts. By focusing on the representation of childhood memories in autobiographical comics within the broader contexts of their production, the first three essays in this section all demonstrate how comics function as mirrors for creators and the historical, material society they are part of. Barkuzar Dubbati’s essay, “Memories of War in Zeina Abirached’s Graphic Memoirs,” suggests that Zeina Abirached, in deciding to feature ordinary events within the extraordinary context of the Lebanese Civil War, created two comics that complicate the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary as it relates to the experiences of war, and its representation as memories. Next, in “A Red Cat in the Black Sea: War, Colonialism, and Revolution in Joann Sfar’s La Traversée de la Mer Noire (2023),” Fabrice Leroy offers an overview of the Franco-Belgian comics tradition (bande dessinée) to frame his analysis of comics by Joann Sfar. Leroy identifies Sfar as a unique voice in the tradition who approaches historical fiction through a mix of factual accuracy, particular aesthetic techniques, and whimsy. In “Contemporary German Comics and East German Memory,” Elizabeth Nijdam argues that Mawil’s Kinderland, alongside other, more traditional, archival materials can turn into “a veritable archive and object history of East German materiality.”

The next three essays in the collection’s third section exemplify how, for many people, comics have also become empowering socio-cultural tools and means of self-expression. Bruce Mutard, through a comics-form study of Pat Grant’s Blue (“True Blue: On the Challenge of Making Comics in Australia”), examines the ecology of comics creators in Australia and how these creators sustain themselves and their practices through alliances with academia, national arts grants, and a determination to tell stories reflective of their own experiences. Then, in “Comics as an Instructional Tool for Sex Education in Indian Classrooms,” Partha Bhattacharjee and Priyanka Tripathi detail how comics are used in India to teach sex education. Cathy Thomas, on the other end, proposes in her essay, “Steups: A Caribbean Cultural Sound Cue in Hardears (2021),” that African diasporic comics such as Hardears use the visual and textual rendition of onomatopoeia to invoke and celebrate Caribbean life in its diversity. This section concludes with two essays that expose the more questionable, or even negative side of comics: how they are used as ideological instruments of control or oppression. In her essay, “‘Coco, Vicuñín and Tacachito’: The Catholic Church, National Identity, and Territory,” Carla Sagástegui Heredia demonstrates how between 1953 and 1968, the Catholic Church of Peru published Avanzada as a means to propagate its moral teaching to children—thus serving as a missionary tool. Lastly, Brandon Murakami problematizes the depiction of race and gender in the Japanese manga series The Promised Neverland. In “Even More Monstrous Because of Her Skin: The Promised Neverland (2016–2020),” Murakami ultimately exposes the series as riddled with monstrous-feminine tropes and anti-Black views.