The C-S Post

Representations of Savagery and Civilisation in Girl Genius

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 22:50:41 GMT

Visions of gaslamp fantasy

Girl Genius is an ongoing webcomic by Studio Foglio (Phil and Kaja Foglio) which was first published in the early 2000s. One of the main themes of the story is the tension between civilisation and savagery. It makes extensive use of its steampunk-like setting and absurdist humour to explore these concepts. The story follows Agatha Heterodyne, the heiress of one of the most infamous families of mad scientists (called ‘sparks’ in the comic) on her quest to reclaim her family name and deal with the issues that arise because of this.

The best representations of savagery found in the comic are almost certainly the Jägers. The Jägers are constructs (artificial, or heavily modified beings), and initially, they are depicted as violent, somewhat dumb, and monstrous, even cannibalistic beings. This is very much emphasised by their visual appearance (see picture below). In many ways, they embody the traditional tropes and representations of ‘savages’ found throughout literature and the media, which damage and distort the image of those ethnicities that the depicted ‘savages’ are supposed to reflect. Michael Green discusses the effects of this kind of representation in his article “Images of Native Americans in Advertising: Some Moral Issues” when he argues, “The image of the Bloodthirsty Savage and of the Civilizable Savage needing to be civilised by a supposedly superior culture denies humanity to the Native American by playing upon this image of their supposed animal-like existence.” By displaying these traits, the Jägers are set up as extreme caricatures of the ‘savage’, which is, in part, why the later subversions of the tropes are so effective.

At the beginning of the story, the Jägers’ relation to Agatha is somewhat ambiguous, being either uneasy allies or potential enemies. However, as the story progresses, they become her most reliable supporters. This shifts the readers perspective of them from an ‘other’ with no cultural depth, as savages traditionally are in literature, to a people with a complex (though admittedly rather absurd, as with much within the comic) culture, with their own motives and capabilities which far exceed the scope of what is usually allowed by the tropes of the savage. In this way, the comic undermines the concept of the savage, and suggests the idea that any culture seen from another, external one, is perceived as uncivilised, or savage.

The concept of civilisation is equally put into question throughout the comic. Girl Genius leans heavily into the trope of the mad scientist. This trope in itself connects science and logic, qualities that in western thought especially indicate a ‘civilised’ society, to the irrationality and savagery of the human mind. Some of the most famous examples of stories with mad scientists are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and H. G Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau . In both cases, the respective scientist is directly responsible for the creation of a monstrous ‘other’, which also brings into question who the real monster is. Following in this tradition, the Sparks in Girl Genius pioneer the greatest advancements in the science of their world, while also creating and/or performing some of the most monstrous and savage beings or acts. The implication of this is that the level of technology is not necessarily a good indicator of how ‘civilised’ a society or culture is.

By highlighting the ‘civilised’ aspects of savage tropes, and the ‘savage’ aspects of civilisations, Girl Genius blurs the line between them and questions the standards used to measure how ‘civilised’ a society is. This is further emphasised by the cartoonish art style of the comic which caricatures the more absurd aspects of both concepts.

See https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/

A Theory of the Fantastic From Italy – With Comics

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 21:34:39 GMT

Davide Carnevale. Narrare l'invasione: Traiettorie e rinnovamento del fantastico novecentesco, Peter Lang: Berlin, pp. 306, 2022

Though this solid monograph does not primarily deal with the sequential art, its last chapter includes a remarkable reading of two classics of Italian fantastic comics, that is, Dino Battaglia's and Alberto Breccia's graphic adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe respectively, but also briefly discusses more recent works, or better series, Tiziano Sclavi's Dylan Dog and Mike Mignola's Hellboy . The sections focusing on graphic narratives are part of a chapter whose title is “Transmedialità del genere fantastico” [The transmediality of the fantastic genre], hence the analysis deliberately moves across media. No wonder then that the sections on comics are preceded by a discussion of Ridley Scott's Alien and Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds – and one must also highlight the resolutely transnational nature of Carnevale's monograph, straddling across several nations and three languages (English, Italian, Spanish).

A particularly interesting feature of these interpretations of comics is that they exemplify Carnevale's own theory of the fantastic genre, which strives to differentiate the works written, drawn, or shot in the 20 ^th century from those of the 19 ^th – it is an ambitious attempt to go beyond Tzvetan Todorov's theoretical assessment of the fantastic (which the author deems acceptable for 19 ^th century texts, but ill suited to those of the following periods), and present us with a viable theory of 20 ^th and 21 ^st century fantastic literature, cinema, and comics, based on the key concept of invasion. Suffice it to say that the new fantastic is best represented, according to Carnevale, by the enigmatic short stories written by Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar, totally free from the traditional fantastic devices of such 19 ^th century authors as Bram Stoker or Poe.

The section devoted to comics is aimed at presenting readers with specimens of post-modernist fantastic (graphic) fiction, to be understood as what comes after the modernist fantastic of Cortázar or Buzzati: Sclavi and Mignola are representatives of a period in which borderlines between genres are highly porous, and hybridization propels narratives. One might have liked to see Dylan Dog and Hellboy compared to extreme products of such a trend as Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen , Gaiman's Sandman , o Grant Morrison's bewildering Nameless – but Carnevale has understandably defined rigorous temporal limits to his research, and those works fall outside them.

The section on Breccia and Battaglia is more strictly focused on issues of transmediality, that is, how the two comics artists managed to visualize the purely verbal texts by Poe and Lovecraft (a particular difficult challenge when we think that the latter theorized his poetics as based on the impossibility of representation), and offers interesting insights on the solutions devised by the two authors, with remarkable comments even on the minutest details of their technique.

All in all, one hopes that Carnevale will write a book specifically focused on fantastic comics. It might well be a precious contribution to comics studies.

An Introduction to Native American Comics

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 21:00:46 GMT

Your new binge-reads

Some comic book shoppers can have store employees pull titles the customer regularly reads and hold them until the shopper comes to the store to pick up their books. I used to do this when I lived closer to a comic book store and could readily stop there to bring home my stack of stories. This service makes shopping easier because customers like me don’t have to hunt around for the latest issues we’re reading and risk the sad discovery the one issue we need is sold out, leaving us with a gap in our story arcs. But if we only go to the store to pick up our holdings and we don’t take the time to browse, we might not discover titles, authors, anthologies, and other texts that are interesting and wonderful. Now, personally, I don’t know anyone who goes straight to counter to pick up their monthly pulls and who doesn’t take the time to browse (do such people even exist?), but even the most diligent shopper might have trouble discovering a great array of graphic narratives written, illustrated, or published by First Nations/Native American authors. In this post, I’d like to introduce you to a few titles and an online store where you could purchase some of these titles if you’re intrigued.

Michael Sheyahshe’s Native Americans in Comic Books is a great academic starting point. In this text, Sheyahshe traces the history of depictions of Native Americans in the comics medium across decades. He does so to show the progression in these portrayals, from the terribly stereotypical to the heroic. It’s helpful, but not necessary, to have this grounding in order to appreciate the many new titles, authors, illustrators and heroes today’s First Nations and Native American creators are generating.

One fun series is Arigon Starr’s Super Indian . This title is full of humor that will appeal to adults and children alike. Character Hubert Logan becomes Super Indian after he eats government commodity cheese tainted with “rezium,” which grants him superpowers. He, his friends, and his dog, Diogi (who also ate the tainted cheese) team up to fight villains such as Blud Kwan’tum and Wampum Baggs. You can enjoy some of Starr’s other artwork on the Pop Culture Classroom website, where she contributes educational comics to its Colorful History collection on Native American issues like the Ludlow Creek Massacre and Chief Ouray’s leadership.

Marvel Comics offers titles that highlight Native American characters and creators with its Indigenous Voices and Heritage collections. These two video trailers provide an overview of the the characters as well as the writers and illustrators in the collections, along with their tribal identity. Although comics and graphic narratives by and about Native Americans is a booming industry lately, it’s still a somewhat small creative world. In the Marvel collections and elsewhere, you will see many names repeatedly: Starr, of course, and Darcie Little Badger, Stephen Graham Jones, Rebecca Roanhorse, Roy Boney, Jr., Weshoyot Alvitre, Jeffrey Veregge and Elizabeth La Pensée, to name a few. Most of these creators have written their own books or contributed to other anthologies besides the Marvel collections, like Alternate History’s Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collections 1-3 . Either the Marvel collections or the gorgeously illustrated and printed Moonshots will introduce you to writers and artists you might want to follow up on separately later.

Some of these authors or texts might be hard to locate in traditional bookstores or even in online sources like Amazon. I used to shop these titles (and shamelessly browse) a store called Red Planet Books and Comics when it operated in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It has since moved to North Carolina and rebranded itself as ATCG (“A Tribe Called Geek”) Books and Comics. While its brick-and-mortar storefront is not yet open, its online inventory is still available for sale on its website. Owned by writer, illustrator, and entrepreneur Dr. Lee Francis, ATCG offers a range of comic books you won’t find elsewhere.

I hope you enjoy these new collections and characters. Some of the best storytelling today appears in First Nation/Native American comic books and graphic narratives. Be sure to browse these links to discover your new binge-reads.

For additional reading, see this Library of Congress blog post , entitled “Native American and Indigenous News and Comics.”

See also: Comics Bookcase, “Comics by Indigenous Creators: A Reading List,” at https://www.comicsbookcase.com/reading-lists-archive/comics-by-indigenous-creators

This is a trailer for Kagagi: The Raven , an animated series that ran in Canada.

A review of Handbook of Comics and Graphic Narrative

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 21:14:07 GMT

A volume edited by Sebastian Domsch, Dan Hassler-Forest, Dirk Vanderbeke. DeGruyter 2021

The editor’s preface begins with quite an ambitious statement: “This handbook combines a systematic investigation of the subject with an overview of the field’s central contexts and themes and a broad selection of close readings of seminal exemplary works and authors.” (p.1) and a short survey of the field of comic studies, which it admits will not be covered systematically.

Like the preface, every chapter, all submitted by different contributors, ends with a bibliography of works cited and a list of further reading suggestions, providing a wealth of information, mostly in English but with some in other languages.

Part 1, titled “Systematic aspects,” is further subdivided into 6 chapters that all have an abstract and a list of keywords, as do all the other chapters in this volume, making the handbook easily accessible.

“Terminology and Definitions” provides a solid methodical approach to the most basic question of all: “What is a comic?”, presenting and analyzing various attempts of defining the medium from different angles: narrative, spatial, and temporal aspects, sequentiality, word-image combinations of the texts themselves, and a wider angle of comics as a cultural practice and its intended readership. A clear definition of the term, however, seems to be elusive; after all, how can you define something that is called a “comic book” but is neither necessarily comic nor a book?

The history and various formats and genres of comics, beginning with sequential images on a 5.200-year-old clay bowl, then focusing on Anglophone examples, is analyzed next. Pioneers of what would become the comic strip and later the comic book are introduced: Swiss Rodolphe Töpffer, German Wilhelm Busch, and American Richard F. Outcault.

The third chapter “offers an overview of the different approaches to the analysis of image-text relations in comics” (p.81), of one of the most important fields of study of comic specific textuality. It focuses on the writings of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Laokoön (1766), Roland Barthes: The Rhetoric of the Image (1964), and W.J.T. Mitchell: The Pictorial Turn (1994). Comics themselves were, of course, most prominently analyzed by Scott McCloud: Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993) and Will Eisner: Comics and Sequential Art (1985).

“Comics Narratology” analyzes the storyworlds of comics and their narratorial strategies, both of writers and fictional characters. The quite substantial list of works cited also includes our founding member Kai Mikkonen’s The Narratology of Comic Art (2017).

“Seriality” examines this key feature of visual narratives, especially comic strips and superhero comics, in all its manifestations.

“Adaptations” in multiple comic and media forms is next, providing a general definition and an overview of adaptations in comics and the different academic approaches in the field of intermediality. This rounds out the first part of the handbook that provides a thorough analysis of the “Systematic Aspects” of comics and provides readers with extensive bibliographies and further readings lists.

Part II: Contexts and Themes is further divided into no less than 13 chapters.

- “Politics” discusses politics in comics and comics in politics, exemplified by Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent and the ensuing self-censorship of comics.

- “World Building” in comics analyzes E.C. Segars’ Thimble Theater and later Popeye, and The Adventures of Tintin and how this series changed over time, especially away from Herge’s early orientalist and often racist depiction of other ethnicities. It also includes Alan Moore’s graphic narrative Watchmen and the creative freedom it enjoyed despite being a considered to be superhero comic given its limited series nature with newly created characters.

- “Life Writing” discusses graphic memoirs, with Art Spiegelman’s Maus as prime example. Graphic life writing here is interpreted as a new form of life writing: “…combining different media traditions into an innovative format that makes it possible to tell familiar stories in entirely new ways” (p. 216).

- “Gender” illustrates the influence of the concept of gender on comics and how it changed over time. To further illustrate this, the following chapter is on “Queerness” and how today queer comics are an important part of the discourse on and the cultural visibility of LGBTQA+.

- “Science Comics” covers the large field of educational comics, non-fiction and biographies of scientists to science fiction and superhero comics featuring mad scientists. Not to be nitpicking, like a reader of Marvel comics who points out a continuity mistake to win the famous no-prize, but the mad scientist and prominent Batman-foe mentioned on p.258 is called Mr. Freeze and not Dr. Freeze.

- “Postcolonial Perspectives” thematizes the growing field of study of comics originating in postcolonial societies and their publishing circumstances, e.g., Indian or African comics, or comics on postcolonial discourses and topics.

- “DocuComics in the Classroom” promotes graphic documentaries in classrooms to further critical and visual literacy by using Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge as an example. This chapter provides probably lesser-known information on the educational relevance of graphic non-fiction which could be useful for graphic fiction as well.

- Superhero Comics provides a wealth of information but contains a few inconsistencies. For example, it states “The history of superheroes in American comics is commonly divided into three distinct eras” (p. 311) but continues to mention four ages: Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Dark or Iron, which are the commonly used denominations. Likewise, there are “only” three subchapters: Golden Age Batman, which does not really focus on the Golden Age, but provides more of a character study of Batman across time and how the foundations of the Batman mythos were laid; Silver Age, which focuses on Marvel Comics’ Nick Fury as a lynch pin between superhero/science fiction comics and the Cold War spy reality, and his interconnections with the Marvel universe. It provides an interesting case study but it relatively short and almost completely ignores DC Comics. The Bronze Age itself is not specifically mentioned, but the chapter on the Dark Age briefly mentions the Silver Age and Bronze Age, together with the self-censoring CCA.

The handbook’s third section provides close readings of specific texts that have largely already been mentioned in the various contexts shown above. These close readings also provide information about the respective authors and information on the critical reception and legacy of these texts.

- The first text is appropriately The Yellow Kid, one of the first newspaper strip characters in the late 19 ^th century. An in-depth analysis of early comic strips and the concept of seriality they established is also provided.

- Krazy Kat, another pioneering newspaper strip, is portrayed with a bit less detail and with a likewise shorter bibliography, but it is especially interesting in modern contexts, including those of racial identity and queer reading.

- Little Nemo in Slumberland, another essential early newspaper strip, provides another in-depth analysis but what so far has been a chronological order of texts now jumps into the 1970s, omitting close reading of texts from the Golden, Silver and Bronze Age.

- Cerebus: David Sim’s self-published 300 issue (1977-2004) independent comic is well documented here as are the problematic views of its creator.

- A Contract with God, Will Eisner’s canonical graphic novel, is assessed against the background of the establishment of the graphic novel together with a critical look at Eisner’s legacy and his role in the creation of the graphic novel.

- Raymond Briggs’s graphic novel When the Wind Blows from 1982 offers interesting insights on its historical Cold War context, on comics as a means of social criticism, and is, obviously, still very relevant in the face of the current Russian aggression.

- Art Spiegelman’s Maus, needs, I dare say, no further introduction as one of the most canonical graphic novels ever. Already often mentioned throughout the handbook, it here receives an in-depth analysis.

- Robert Crumb, the most prolific creator of underground comics is analyzed next, highlighting this genre of comics.

- From Hell, Alan Moore’s historiographic graphic novel about Jack the Ripper and the Victorian Age, is an interesting choice for inclusion, but as Watchmen and other texts by Moore are referred to throughout the handbook, it further broadens the study of Moore’s oeuvre.

- Neil Gaiman’s 75 issue series The Sandman, likewise, really needs no introduction. Apart from its obvious intertextuality galore, postcolonial and gender aspects are also discussed here.

- Alison Bechdel’s 25 year run of her bi-weekly comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For both expands the scope of the texts analyzed but also returns to the original publication form of the medium. It argues for a critical evaluation of this strip, together with Bechdel’s other lesser-known text Are You My Mother?

- Chris Ware’s critically acclaimed graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth is another well-chosen example for how far this particular medium has evolved: into a “serious” metafictional narrative about loneliness, depression and superhero fantasies, drawn in a cartoonish style, that leaves it up to the reader to decide whether its ending is a happy one or not.

- Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World, a fascinating character study of teenage alienation, takes the graphic novel into another direction that even led to the author being nominated for an Academy Award for his screen adaptation.

- While Ghost World was adapted to the screen, Martin Rowson’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman goes the other way as it adapts Lawrence Sterne’s 18 ^th century novel.

- Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis a graphic Bildungsroman is another example of life writing and a strong political statement against the misogynistic regime in Iran, told in a stripped-down drawing style that amplifies the meaning and message of its pictures.

- The final text analysed in the handbook is Grant Morrison’s mini-series Flex Mentallo, which offers an interesting view into Morrison’s unique imaginative way of creating comics, including his semi-autobiographical history of comic books Supergods. Morrison’s equation of his own life with the history of comics reflects once more on what has been said so far, but some of his more conventional texts, like New X-Men or Batman could have been included too.

These exclusions, of course, could start a discussion about why certain texts and authors—for example Mike Mignola, Scott Snyder, Jonathan Hickman, Eric Powell, or Garth Ennis—have been omitted and why texts from the Silver Age or Bronze Age play no real role in the close reading section. Likewise, European graphic fiction like the Franco-Belgian bande dessinée, besides Tintin, could also have been included more, yet the texts analyzed nevertheless present a well-chosen overview of Anglophone graphic fiction together with a thorough overview of the different theoretical approaches. In a way, the impossibility of including every important text or sub-genre only proves how wide the field of comics and graphic narratives has become. Bearing this in mind, this handbook of no less than 600+ pages is a valiant effort. There is, however, one misgiving in that there are very few illustrations throughout the book, which often makes it difficult to follow the argument if you have not read the text being analyzed.

Ultimately, one must concur with its back cover quote:

“It will prove to be an indispensable handbook for a large readership, ranging from researchers and instructors to students and anyone else with a general interest in this fascinating medium.”

Disrupting the Frame(s): Ruptures in Science-Fiction/Fantasy Comics

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 23:10:48 GMT

Our panel at the SFRA-GFF Conference “Disruptive Imaginations” in Dresden, Germany

The joint annual conference of the Science Fiction Research Association (which usually holds its events in the United States) and the German Gesellschaft für Fantastickforschung (that is, the Society for the research on the fantastic) took place in Dresden from August 15 to 19, 2023. As usual, it was a large-sized event, with up to eight parallel sessions and more than a hundred presenters. Intermediality/Transmediality are an important aspect of science-fiction and fantastic studies, as the sfnal imagination is vehiculated by printed literature but also movies, tv series, illustrations, toys and, as we all know, comics. No wonder that the ICLA Research Committee on Graphic Literature and Comics Studies submitted a proposal for a panel devoted to SFF comics, called “Disrupting the Frame”, which was promptly accepted by the organizers of the conference.

The panel was chaired by Lisa DeTora (Hofstra University) and Umberto Rossi (Sapienza University of Rome), and featured seven presentations. Lisa opened the first session, on August 16, with her paper “Rupturing the frame: Nonbinary Identification in Two Speculative Graphic Narratives”, which read Tillie Walden’s On a Sunbeam (2018) and Molly Knox Ostertag’s The Girl from the Sea (2021), as comics that attempt to disrupt dominant and stereotyped cis-gendered heteronormative romantic narratives as well as certain genre conventions of SF and fantasy.

Davide Carnevale (Sapienza University of Rome) presented his paper “Fantastic Language and Layout Disruption In Dino Battaglia’s Adaptations”, dealing with the Italian master’s comics based on Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, achieving a full-fledged deconstruction of the sequentiality on which the spatial and temporal order within the comic normally rests.

Tiziano De Marino (Sapienza University of Rome) dealt with Alan Moore’s most unconventional graphic narrative, which is not an easy task, in his presentation “The Fall of Civilisation: Wellsianism in Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen ”. He demonstrated that Moore’s League testifies an intertextual devotion towards Wellsian novums which have long influenced all SF imagination, but also bears the mark of Wells’s primary intellectual concerns: the rise and fall of empires, the disruptive force of supreme authority, and the possible subversion of the same body politic.

The first session of our panel ended with “The Life Aquatic in Low : Ecological Disruption as Political Allegory”, by Michael Larson (Keio University), focusing how on the drastic environmental and social disruption of Low , and the text’s depiction of the Anthropocene or post-human, draws an equivalence between the end of American hegemony and the end of the world; so that the text seems to suggest the loss of a Western sense of futurity. Such a framework does not necessarily cast Low as reactionary—rather, this formulation puts it in context with the sense of fatalism permeating our politics and culture.

Due to some technical problem at the beginning of the session, and the need to accommodate four presentations in a 90’ slot, we did not have time to have a discussion at the end of the first session, but since the second was to take place right after the first, with the coffee break in between, we told attendees that the Q&A would take place at the end of the second session. Unfortunately, not all those who had attended the first four presentations could take part in the second session, which deprived us—alas!—of the precious reactions of part of the audience.

The second session began on time, with Umberto’s presentation “Nothing is Real: Ontological Disruption in Morrison and Burnham's Nameless ”. This comic is complicated by ontological uncertainty, caused by the interaction of (at least) two levels of reality, which disrupts reading protocols shared by the authors and the reader, but Mikkonen & Braithwaite’s concept of figural solidarity may explain how readers manage to navigate this highly sophisticated graphic narrative.

Stefan Soler (Stanford University) presented on “ El Eternauta or the Modern Odysseus: Between Tourists and Vagabonds”, analyzes all the different versions of El Eternauta to examine the ways in which Victor Oesterheld recreated his time-travelling character as a reaction to contemporary political events. Stefan allowed us to see how tourists and vagabonds portray the global and local disruptions produced by major historical and political events, such as the Cold War or the different dictatorships that took place in Argentina and Latin America.

Due to a canceled flight, the last presenter, Stefan Buchenberger (Kanagawa University) could not be with us, but the text of his presentation was read by Lisa while Umberto dealt with the PowerPoint frames that came with it. Stefan’s presentation dealt with Kieron Gillen’s ongoing series Über (2013- 2018), set in an alternate reality in which Nazi Germany discovers a method to create superhumans who turn the tide of the war shortly before it did end in actual history. This presentation showed how Gillen mixes both superheroes and historical figures to create a dystopian alternate reality that depicts one of the greatest disruptions in the history of humankind: war, in all its horror and brutality.

All in all, this was a rich panel with stimulating presentations that elicited interesting comments and questions from the audience. We hope its presentations will be included in the edited collection of essays on global SF comics to be published in the World Science Fiction Studies series by Peter Lang, an ongoing long-term project of our Research Committee.

Historiographics: Framing the Past in Comics - June 15-17, 2023

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 22:05:36 GMT

A review of the international conference held in Munich

Expertly organized by Dr. Charlotte Lerg (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität) and Dr. Johannes Schmidt (University of Flensburg), and held at the Amerika Haus in Munich, the Historiographics conference attracted scholars from a number of European countries (Italy, France, Czech Republic, Poland, Romania), as might be expected, but also researchers from places as far away as Australia and India, and even, of course, from the United States. As an American academic, it was humbling for me to meet specialists in American studies from Germany, Romania, and Poland, among other places. The mix of historians, Germanists, Americanists, and comparatists sparked lively exchanges over our thoughtfully curated and ecologically friendly lunches (using all glass containers! Why can’t we Americans do that, too?). Given that there were three simultaneous streams of panels, it’s not feasible to cover them all, but I’ll give some highlights from Hillary Chute’s keynote “Comics at the End of the World,” the tour of the National Socialist Documentation Center, and the history in comics workshop that followed.

Comics at the End of the World

Hillary Chute (Northeastern University) opened by citing Art Spiegelman (quoting English writer Robert Harris): “History is far too important to leave to the historians.” The times require other methods of reaching audiences given that “there is an appetite for visual storytelling worldwide” on the one hand, and yet we are overwhelmed by increasing polarization and misinformation, on the other. Last year in the US, Art Spiegelman’s Maus was banned by a Tennessee school board, catalyzing another debate about censorship, fiction vs. nonfiction, and confirming that comics continue to be a relevant medium for posing questions about truth and justice. “This is disturbing imagery,” he commented in an interview, “But you know what? It’s disturbing history.” In a timely coincidence, last fall Chute published Maus Now , which examines the now canonical texts from a variety of disciplines and national perspectives. But the subject of her talk was not Maus as such. She asked how comics might productively intervene in this bewildering contemporary moment, and developed three thematic strands that speak to our current “state of emergency” in 2023:

--The struggle for Black rights

--The COVID pandemic

--The war in Ukraine

From the title, historiographics (coined by Kate Polak, who was also in attendance), Chute excavated how—“graph”—from the Greek, which means to “draw” but also to “scratch”—associates the act of writing with carving a wound in the body. Increasingly in comics studies, there is an interest in the “embodied” quality of the line, as flowing from the subjective viewpoint of the cartoonist (see also Comics and the Body by Ezster Szep). Then there is “historiography,” which emphasizes how history is constructed, and from whose perspective.

Some prominent American historians—Paul Buhl, Ibram X. Kendi, Timothy Synder, Howard Zinn, and Rebecca Hall—have, in recent years, had their work adapted to comics form to bring their work to a larger audience. Chute lingered on the example of Rebecca Hall’s Wake: The Hidden History of Women Slave Revolts , noting how she brings archival evidence into the narrative (notably by including slave ship diagrams) to lend authenticity and credibility to the stories of women who otherwise would be absent from the historical record. Where the historical record ends, Hall employs Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation,” and imagines what their stories might have been . Transitioning to images from the war in Ukraine, many of which are now disseminated over Instagram, Chute discussed the work by Yulia Vus (who was also published in the Washington Post). Chute ended with a preview of the cover of Nora Krug’s latest project: a book of stories on Ukraine to be published this fall titled Diaries of War . By slowing us down, by making us attentive to the embodied nature of the drawn lines, comics help us “learn to see, as well as see to learn.”

And we did see and learn at The National Socialist Documentation Center (NS-Dokumentationszentrum). Our guide, Nathalie Jacobsen, explained that it is not a “museum” (to discourage idolatry of objects), but a documentation center . The tour was detailed, comprehensive, interactive, and devastating—at least it was for me. Jacobsen started by stating that “It didn’t have to be like this.” Our little group was huddled in front of a 6ft high reproduction of a black and white photo of German soldiers. Dead bodies—some covered by tarps, some partially exposed—were strewn around a large pit; I couldn’t help thinking of the cover of Chute’s Disaster Drawn , which shows blindfolded prisoners in Srebrenica getting shot and dropping into a mass grave (a page from Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde ). Slowly, methodically, Jacobsen built up the argument of how the Germans had been injured and humiliated by WWI, and how Hitler effectively manipulated this sense of injury and discontent to his advantage through the use of stagecraft, radio, cinema, and carefully orchestrated imagery. She described Hitler’s failed putsch of 1923 (in my traumatized American bubble, I thought about Jan 6, 2021 and the attack on the US capital). In 1933, Germans began to call Hitler “der Führer.” The National Socialist party began winning larger majorities, and Hitler was appointed Chancellor. “Democracy is fragile,” Jacobsen warned. We diligently took notes.

The following day, under the direction of Sheree Domingo, we worked on various exercises from Lynda Barry to warm up. Everyone got to draw themselves as Batman (always a plus). Through free-writes, image inventories, and playful copies, we assembled elements of our mini-historiographies. Gradually images and ideas from the prior day appeared in image-text pairings and ideas began to coalesce on the white boards as we taped up our examples. We wrote scripts, made grids, and worked on page layouts. I ran out of time. As a Comparative Literature person, I got bogged down in swathes of text and nuance; the graphic designers did much better. We pledged to finish our pages. The last hour of the workshop was weirdly interrupted by the pounding sounds of the rock band Kiss, who were performing only a few blocks over. Hearing the rhythmic chanting was uncomfortably surreal as we struggled to process our hours studying the rise of National Socialism. When I got home, I looked up Gene Simmons, the bass guitarist and tongue-wielding central figure of the group—he was born in Israel, and his mother was a Holocaust survivor.

Historical comics in Munich

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 20:56:29 GMT

About HistorioGraphics, international conference on historical comics

We were there. Four members of our Research Committee, taking part in an important conference on historical comics, HistorioGraphics, which took place in Munich, Germany from June 15 to June 17. As you will be able to see by visiting the conference website

https://historiographics.com/

it was a huge event, with plenary lectures and parallel sessions, with quite a few participants. Our Research Committee organized one of the panels, "History and the City", with presentations by Alice Balestrino, Umberto Rossi, and Paolo Simonetti, dealing with such comics artists as Nora Krug, Art Spiegelman, Will Eisner and Chris Ware—an (almost) all-American panel by a trio of Italian scholars, which seems to us in tune with the comparative, that is, transnational approach which characterizes the activity of the ICLA. Another member of our RC, Marek Paryż, presented a paper on Hugo Pratt, Milo Manara and Jacek Widor—a genuinely comparative effort, in a panel on "Contact" narratives that deserved attention.

Given the fact that the conference was hosted and supported by the Amerikahaus, a centre for American Studies in Munich, and the Nazionalsozialistische-Dokumentations-Zentrum, a research centre on Nazism, there were several higlights connected with this dramatic period of 20th-Century history: the conversation on But I Live , a collection of graphic intervies of survivors of the Shoah, featuring one of the artists involeved in the project, Barbara yelin, and the mastermind of the project, Charlotte Schallié; a panel specifically devoted to graphic memoirs of the Shoah; a panel on comics dealing with Latin American Dictatorship (a topic with strong connections with the tragic history of Nazism).

But there were also panels on graphic depictions of colonialism, pre-modern warfare (and their ideological implications), Chinese history, Indigenous histories in North-America, race issues in the United States. The only regret we have is that—as it is usual in such conferences—one could not attend two simultaneous panels. However, we could listen to the stimulating plenary lecture by Hillary L. Chute, one of the top experts on Art Spiegelman's Maus , which delivered a rich overview of recent comics on current affairs (from Ukraine to Lebanon) and historical issues (from racial revolts to the history of the American empire), dealing with works from a variety of countries.

Given the focus on a specific territory of the comics continent, one may well consider this conference as a milestone in comics studies; and hope that the organizers will manage to hold another in the next future, something that has been tentatively proposed during the final remarks and enthusiastically welcomed by the audience.

Introducing The C-S Post. A new space for Comics Studies scholars

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 18:07:47 GMT

Yes, we finally decided to have a blog!

Indeed. When we decided it was time for the ICLA Research Committee on Comics Studies and Graphic Narrative to have a website, we thought it would be appropriate to also include a blog. It was, in fact, an almost obligatory choice. For years, the organisation of panels and other initiatives by members of our group has aimed not only at the legitimate satisfaction of our geeky egos(!) as scholars of comics and graphic narratives of all kinds, but also at encouraging dialogue about a discipline that has taken a long time to make its way into the broad ranks of academic disciplines considered worthy of being called such. Our intention to give Comics Studies a new status, deepen its contents and increase its reach can certainly benefit from such an established digital communication tool as a blog.

This space is not only open to members of our Research Committee, but to all scholars of Comics Studies (and of the disciplines with which it is in dialogue) who wish to have their say on the more or less established topics of our field of research, propose new topics for discussion, present publications and events, and more.

That said, welcome to this new Comics Studies Agora. We look forward to hearing from you!