THE INTERNATIONAL COMIC ARTS FORUM - ICAF 2020 Blog Posts

‘A Powerful Forum’: The National Social Welfare Assembly Comics Project

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 14:30:00 GMT

Evan Ash

Ph.D. student in history at the University of Maryland

What does the trajectory of comic books during midcentury America look like if we move away from the traditional, deterministic framing of Superman to Wertham to Comics Code? What do these tenuous years look like if we focus our attention instead on those that took a more dispassionate view of comics, promoting their use in education and the development of socially-constructive messages and endorsing what came to be known as multimodal literacy? (Tilley 2017, Jacobs 2013, 65-99)

This is but a brief survey of the National Social Welfare Assembly Comics Project, a twenty-year public relations project between the National Social Welfare Assembly (NSWA), an administrative confederation of organizations that promoted health, civic engagement, and youth development, and National Comics Publications (NCP), the immediate predecessor to DC Comics. involved the publication short one-page comic stories aimed primarily at youth. Topics tackled by the strips include racial discrimination, respect for elders, stay-in-school conversations, and many more. Over the course of the Comics Project’s near twenty-year run, they published over 170 public service announcement comics, and by the project’s cessation in 1967, they provided over a million reprints of these comic strips to public service organizations across the country.

The project got its start when Vernon Pope, head of public relations for NCP, wrote to John Moore, an assistant director at the NSWA, in January 1949. Pope wanted to show that NCP’s comics were a cut above the rest in light of renewed criticisms of comics, and wrote to Moore, offering space in NCP’s comics “exclusively as a means of communication between organizations and the youth of America.” The NSWA sent the idea to their Public Relations committee, who approved the project in a trial capacity. The committee overseeing the project, known as the National Advisory Committee for the Comics Project, acknowledged the still-present controversy over comics but came to a consensus that one could not wholly condemn nor embrace comics, dedicating themselves to improving the medium. That these professionals, who came from diverse areas like public relations, religious advocacy, scouting, and health advocacy, believed in the didactic power of comics was a serious testament to comics’ cultural palatability when the general mood seemed to view comics as low-class and crude.

A photostat of the most frequent characters in the Comics Project PSAs, including Superman, Batman and Robin, Buzzy, Peter Porkchops, Green Arrow, and others. Scanned from NCP Comics Project advertisement poster, n.d. late-1949 to early 1950.

The project’s first strip starred NCP’s Archie competitor, Buzzy, and extolled the virtue of staying in school for America’s youth, stressing that completing their education would be of more benefit than dropping out of high school to work. (Schiff et al., 1949) The strip received favorable mention from the New York Times and TIME for giving comics a socially constructive purpose. (TIME 1949, New York Times 1949) A 1951 readership study performed by NCP showed, as the committee hoped, a high degree of reader interaction. Studying reader responses to advertising, the report indicated that the selected PSA led next-highest ad for men and women by nine and fifteen percent respectively but dipped for children and was third out of seven ads for that demographic. A project the following year with the American Friends Service Committee that sought to collect shoelaces to be sent overseas netted 1,310 letters from all fifty states and five countries. After a number of successful years and reports, the chair and secretary of the advisory committee for the Comics Project sent a report to the NSWA’s executive committee, which recommended that the NSWA take the project out of its “experimental phase” and run it in an official capacity.

They would need that official support in the coming years, as Fredric Wertham, ever the enemy of comic books, attacked the Comics Project in late 1954, accusing the NSWA’s affiliate organizations of being a front for evil comics companies, calling them “the chorus helping to advertise the fascist Superman, lesbian Wonder Woman and the homosexual Bat Man!” (Wertham 1954, 404) The criticism, however, did not sway the Comics Project nor their subscribers, as they mailed 65,000 copies of their comics that year, and counted nearly 200 New York City schoolteachers on their mailing list. The committee began their most ambitious project in November 1956, sending strips to 31 Detroit-area schools, and tracking teacher and student engagement.

A promotional booklet of Comics Project PSAs distributed to NSWA-affiliated organizations, circa 1954.

By the 1960s, however, NCP was in turmoil due to the restrictions of the Comics Code, enacted in 1954, and increased sales pressure from Marvel Comics. These new realities, compounding an increasing turnover in advisory committee chair and general member positions, rang a death knell for the successful and well-received Comics Project. Despite their downturn, they published their most successful comic during this period. Titled “Smoking is for Squares!”, the strip debuted alongside the famed Surgeon General’s Report of 1964, which definitively linked cigarette smoking with cancer. (Schiff et al., 1964) The American Cancer Society, who had a staff member on the Comics Project advisory committee, ordered at least 700,000 reprints, claiming later they had ordered over one million.

NCP’s need to respond to the changing business climate of the 1960s ultimately spelled the end for the Comics Project, despite the wide success of “Smoking is for Squares”. Jack Schiff, an influential, long-tenured editor at NCP and the Comics Project’s main point of contact, retired after a company directive came down that forced writers out of editing positions, replacing them with artists. (Gabilliet 2010, 61) Jack Liebowicz, president of NCP, felt that was Schiff was irreplaceable, explaining to the NSWA that he could no longer justify the loss of advertising revenue in his comics. The Comics Project’s final meeting took place on May 10, 1967, though they would not disband officially until August 1968 after trying in vain to find a new sponsor for the project.

All told, the Comics Project, with its hundreds of socially-aware comics and diverse set of professional advisors came to be an unprecedented partnership between a comics company and social service organizations with a special eye toward the development of youth in America. Responses to the committee’s work showed that attitudes towards comics in the 1940s and 1950s were not as pessimistic as some may have us think, bore out professional divides with regard to youth, and spoke to the crisis of authority in the 1950s.

Works Cited
“Comics to Carry Messages to Children; August's to Tell 10,000,000 'Go to School'.” New York Times, 18 Aug. 1949.
Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen, University Press of Mississippi, 2013.
Jacobs, Dale. Graphic Encounters: Comics and the Sponsorship of Multimodal Literacy. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.
Schiff, Jack, writer. Art by Graham Place. Letters by Ira Schnapp, “Buzzy Says Stay In School – Give Yourself a Break!” Action Comics #137, August 10, 1949. Print.
Schiff, Jack, writer. Art by Sheldon Moldoff. Letters by Ira Schnapp. “Smoking is for Squares!” Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #80, August 27, 1964. Print.
“Take It from Buzzy.” TIME, 29 Aug. 1949, p. 46.
Tilley, Carol. “Educating With Comics.” The Secret Origins of Comics Studies, edited by Randy Duncan and Matthew Smith, Routledge, 2017.
Wertham, Fredric. “The Curse of the Comic Books.” Religious Education, vol. 49, no. 6, 1954, p. 404.

Evan R. Ash is a Ph.D. student in history at the University of Maryland studying the cultural history of the American 1950s, particularly anti-comics advocacy and childhood. He is preparing a dissertation proposal titled “The Strange and Baffling Eyes of Youth”: Comics, Children and the Moral Landscape of Twentieth Century America. He has presented his research at the conferences of the Comics Studies Society, Midwestern History Association, and recently the Flyover Comics Symposium. He is the current vice-president of the Comics Studies Society Graduate Student Caucus and can be reached on Twitter @evanthevoice.

Motoori Norinaga’s 'Mono no Aware' and Comics as Self-Cultivation

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 14:30:00 GMT

Johnathan Flowers

Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Worcester State University

Coined by the Japanese philologist Motoori Norinaga, “mono no aware” refers to the moving power of things as they are encountered in experience as well as the sensitivity to the moving power of things in experience. For Norinaga, mono no aware was crucial to the capacity for art, specifically poetry and literature, to move the human kokoro, or heart-mind, in its consumption. It is the embodiment of mono no aware in poetry through the skilled organization of words that enables art to connect the kokoro of individuals across time, distance, and social position (Marra, 189). For Norinaga, the cultivation of mono no aware through consuming works of art enables an individual to cultivate their capacity to sense mono no aware in other realms beyond the aesthetic, including in social relationships.

Kokoro in Norinaga’s mono no aware and Japanese philosophy broadly, refers to the combined rational and affective capacity of an organism. Translated as “heart/mind,” the kokoro “involves a propensity for engagement, a sensitivity expressed as either being in touch with something else or being touched by it” (Kasulis 7), and it thus enables a mode of intersubjective responsiveness between the individual and the world. For our purposes, the movement of the kokoro in response to the encounter with the world is what gives rise to poetry as the articulation of an unbearable “aware” for Norinaga. While such aware may be released through a cry or a shout, or other emotional outburst, it is through poetry and art that the pent up aware within the human kokoro is given an articulate form so that other individuals might be moved by it and respond appropriately to the aware that moved the artist (Marra, 189).

Aware is therefore the movement of the kokoro in response to the encounter with the world around us. As such, aware includes a wide range of affects including, joy, charm, sadness, delight, love, and the social position of individuals as we are moved by our encounter with them (Marra, 184). In his commentary on painting and aware, Norinaga makes clear that painters should strive to match the bearing and affect of the individual represented, fictional or otherwise, such that the kokoro is moved as if the perceiver stood in the presence of the individual depicted (Marra, 139). For Norinaga, accurate representation was less a matter of pictorial accuracy and more a matter of capturing the attitude or bearing of the individual depicted: we should be moved by our encounter with the work in the same way that we would be moved by the encounter with the individual.

There is one final element of Norinaga’s mono no aware that is relevant for comics and comic art before we can proceed: the capacity for art to embody the aware of an event. Like the individual described above, events also have their own aware and their own kokoro. Events, for Norinaga, are also things that the kokoro responds to through its movement, and thus possess their own aware (Wehmeyer, 22). In its embodiment of the aware of a person or event through the appropriate arrangement of words, literature makes present the kororo of an event as experienced such that the individual engaging with the work comes to recognize the aware of the event and learns to respond appropriately to it in their own lived experience (Harper and Shriane, 12317-20). It is in this way that literature and art engages in the cultivation of mono no aware through placing the kokoro of the perceiver in communication with the kokoro of the event or character such that they learn to respond appropriately to experiences distinct from their own (Marra 172-3).

Here, we can turn to comics. For Norinaga, the purpose of art in general, and literature in specific, was the accurate articulation of the mono no aware of an event or an individual such that those who engaged with it could come to recognize it in their own lives (Harper and Shriane, 12317-20). In Norinaga’s view, this is also the role that comics should play in their integration of images and text to articulate a narrative. That is, comics should strive for the representation of the mono no aware of diverse experiences such that comics readers and comics fans can come to recognize the aware of the situations experienced by others. Thus, for Norinaga, questions of representation in comics and the kinds of narratives comics articulate are questions of the ways that we want comics to engage with the cultivation of the self. To this end, the following from Eve Ewing, author of the 2019 run of Ironheart, is valuable:

I think that Riri’s very existence and the stories we can tell about her have the potential to be revolutionary. It’s important to me that Riri is not a superhero who happens to have melanin. She is a Black superhero. There are things about her worldview and her perspective that are shaped by her cultural identity and who she is. (Ewing, “interview”)

In the above, Ewing makes the distinction between a “superhero who happens to have melanin” and a “Black superhero,” a distinction that can be accounted for through Norinaga’s mono no aware. For Norinaga, a “superhero who happens to have melanin” is not informed by the experiential context of being black: their heroism, and the aware it articulates within the narrative, do not reflect the world inhabited by Black people. Insofar as the social worlds, like the social positions of individuals, have a unique aware that emerges through the ways people interact within them, the distinction Ewing is drawing is one of the ways that Black superheroes draw upon the experiences of the “Black world” to inform how they respond to the broader world through the movement of the kokoro.

In this vein, Ewing provides the example of Riri treating a young thief with compassion based on the compassion that she received in a similar situation. That is, Ewing depicts Riri’s kokoro as having been cultivated by the experience to recognize the similarity in aware in the situation of the thief and Riri’s own situation such that the response of her kokoro is one of compassion (Ewing, “interview”). In Norinaga’s view, the depiction of Riri’s compassionate actions in response to the aware of the situation, and the aware that emerges through Ewing’s depiction of Riri in that moment should serve to cultivate the reader’s kokoro such that they have an understanding of the aware of similar situations and, in keeping, how to respond to those situations. More specifically, Ewing’s articulation of Riri’s Black cultural identity serves to communicate the aware of that cultural identity, the way that it shapes how the kokoro interacts with the world, to readers who cannot have that experience.

To the extent that Ewing, as a Black woman, drew upon her own experiences of being Black in society to give life to Riri’s kokoro and the kokoro of the events she experiences, Ewing creates a context wherein readers can engage with the aware of the Black cultural context such that they can come to recognize that aware in spaces beyond the pages of comics. Here, Ewing’s description of Riri as “revolutionary” (Ewing, “interview”) is telling: because comics, the narratives they tell, and the aware they articulate have predominantly emerged from the kokoro of white authors and creators, from the experiences of white authors and creators, the articulation of the aware of a non-white experience in a world organized around whiteness is a revolutionary act, one which is in keeping with Norinaga’s mono no aware.

Thus, If the role of mono no aware in art is to enable the cultivation of kokoro sensitive to the aware of a variety of experiences in the world, then, for Norinaga, the concern of comics and the representations therein, should be enabling the cultivation of the kokoro of its readers such that they respond to the aware they encounter in the world with compassion.

Works Cited

Sceritz, John Robinson IVAKA. “Interview: Eve L. Ewing.” Comics Horizon, 1 Feb. 2019, doyouevencomicbook.com/2019/02/interview-eve-l-ewing/.

Harper, Thomas and Shirane, Haruno. ed. Reading The Tale of Genji: Sources from the First Millennium, Columbia University Press. Kindle Edition.

Kasulis, Thomas P. “Cultivating the Mindful Heart: What We May Learn From the Japanese Philosophy of Kokoro.” The Ohio State University and Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture Roche Chair for Interreligious research, 2006

Marra, Michael F. The Poetics of Motoori Norinaga: A Hermeneutical Journey. University of Hawai’i Press, 2006.

Wehmeyer, Ann (trans). Kojiki-den: Book 1. Cornell University East Asian Program, 1997

Johnathan Flowers is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Worcester State University. His research focuses on the affective ground of experience and embodiment through American Pragmatism, Phenomenology and East-Asian Philosophy. In applying his research to comics studies, Flowers focuses comics as an affective experience through Japanese and Pragmatist aesthetics, as a mode of philosophical writing, and cross-cultural approaches to comics including affective experiences of marginalization and representation through comics and the comics community.

Flowers’ work on comics has appeared in With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Teaching Learning, and Comics, Immigrants and Comics: Graphic Spaces of Remembrance, Transaction, and Mimesis, and Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society.

Why Do We Need «Reading Patterns» When Reading Comic Books?

Thu, 11 Feb 2021 14:30:00 GMT

Jakub Jankowski

Institute of Iberian and Ibero-American Studies, University of Warsaw

Comic book studies have different ideas linked to reading patterns. For example, we have z-path pattern/closure (McCloud), art of tensions (Hatfield), the network (Groensteen), path (Gąsowski), graphical equivalence (Birek), ECS (External Compositional Structures; Cohn), unflattening (Sousanis) or openness (Ahmed). All these approaches listed above are not the only ones that are likely to be applied by the authors when breaking down sequences into panels (in a nearly 100% conscious way, but we should keep in mind that all the creative activities are bound to carry over something that can be realized only a posteriori) by the readers (rather in an unconscious way or automatically) and by the researchers when analyzing the dynamics of storytelling in comics books (in a thoroughly analytical), but they do show a rather vast array of how we can approach comic books. Should we decide to treat them as guidelines, it will surely help us to understand the story, but would it also make an escapist experience out of reading it?

The idea of an escapist pleasure in reading comic books is linked with one of the functions of our reading in general. As Rocco Versaci states, we read “to be informed, entertained, instructed, challenged, or transported (…)” (2). Being transported is commonly associated with escapism, which is seen as futile or as it could only belong to the entertainment designed for mass appeal and reduced thinking, but “the notion of escape lies at the heart of our engagement with all texts” (5) and “when we escape into […] comic book[s], we enter into an authored representation of the world. Every time” (5). For Versaci this means that what we are looking for in the imagined worlds, is something that may be lacking or lost in our actual lives (6). However, for Versaci the idea of a magical transportation through comic books would be reductive. He emphasizes that “one can never completely escape into a comic book because its form – impressionistic illustrations of people, places, and things – reminds us at every turn [or panel] that what we are experiencing is a representation” (Versaci 6). Page turning has to do with the materiality of comic books (Kashtan), and the materiality of a book format can be meaningfully used by the author to guide us through panels in a different way that we are used to. This may refer, for example, to splash pages and to using neighboring pages to spread the sequence and break the down-to-page meaningful units. As Hatfield describes, it is the art of tensions operating here, that produce meaning out of comic book materiality. It is about the way we read single image vs. image-in-series, how we perceive sequence vs. surface (the page layout corresponding to a frame both as a sequential and non-sequential unit), and how we experience text as experience vs. text as object (Hatfield 32-67). If we should limit ourselves to closure, understood as filling in the gutter space between neighboring frames (McCloud), in order to recreate the basic comics sequence, we can easily miss the overall picture. To avoid it, we can first try to unflatten the visuals in order to find all the possible meaningful elements of the comic book structure, just to see more than meets the eye (Sousanis). This should help us to literally open the book for interpretations, both the message and the structure (Ahmed). We do that by bringing all the cognitive input at our disposal to fill in McCloud’s gutters between frames. And being conscious about possible transversal links between units in comic books, we can work this network of frames out (Groensteen). Opening and unflattening means looking for meaningful tensions within the whole work we are experiencing, and by doing it we should avoid simple tracing z-path through the panels, or drawing one thin line through a page, the so-called path (a line that can be drawn to show how our eyes are likely to move within a comic book page; Gąsowski) or looking for instant graphical equivalence (echoing frames, sequences or elements of the drawing that are repeated for a narrative outcome; Birek) planned for us by the author. Comic books should stay open for our reading experience which will familiarize us with their inherent, visual suggestiveness and unconventionality (Ahmed 7). In order to achieve that, as crazy as it can sound, the first step is to stick to Groensteen’s idea: “[…] within the paged multiframe that constitutes a complete comic, every panel exists, potentially if not actually, in relation with each of the others. This totality […] responds to a model of organization that is not of a strip nor that of a chain, but that of the network” (Groensteen 146).

I would like to discuss further, at ICAF Virtual Panels, the practical application of the method described above in at least two ways: as a methodological tool in academic research used for analyzing the meaningful structure of comic books, and as a practice in reading comic books to create a particular reading experience. As examples of different reading patterns producing diversified reading experiences, I would like to draw on examples from Tungstênio by Brazilian Marcello Quintanilha, Zapętlenie by Polish Daniel Chmielewski, and Here by Richard McGuire (Polish edition). And my point and conclusion that I hope to reach is: we need reading patterns but only to think how to transgress them, and therefore look for a truly subjective reading experience, one of your own and measured for your means to reach the end you are looking for.

Works Cited

Comic Books
Chmielewski, Daniel. Zapętlenie. 1st edition, Timof Comics, 2014.

McGuire, Richard. Tutaj (Here). 1st edition, Wydawnictwo Komiksowe, 2016.

Quintanilha, Marcello. Wolfram (Tungstênio). Translated into Polish by J. Jankowski. 1st edition, Timof Comics, 2016.

Theory/Methodology:
Ahmed, Maaheen. Openness of Comics. Generating Meaning within Flexible Structures. 1st edition, University Press of Mississippi, 2016.

Birek, Wojciech. Z teorii i praktyki komiksu: Propozycje i obserwacje. 1st edition, Centrala, 2014.

Gąsowski, Paweł. Wprowadzenie do kognitywnej poetyki komiksu. 1st edition, Fundacja Instytut Kultury Popularnej, 2016.

Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Translated into English by B. Beaty and N. Nguyen. 1st edition, University Press of Mississippi, 1999.

Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. 1st edition, University Press of Mississippi, 2005.

Kashtan, Aaron. Between Pen and Pixel: Comics, Materiality, and the Book of the Future. 1st edition, Ohio State University Press, 2018.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. The Invisible Art. 2nd edition, HarperPerennial (1st edition), 1994.

Sousanis, Nick. Unflattening. 1st edition, Harvard University Press, 2015.

Versaci, Rocco. This book contains graphic language. Comics as literature. 1st edition, Continuum, 2008.

Jakub Jankowski is an assistant professor at the Institute of Iberian and Ibero-American Studies at the University of Warsaw, comic book translator (from Spanish, Portuguese, English), member of the Polish Comic Book Association, and winner of the first “Dr Tomasz Marciniak award” (for the scientific text on comics about Joe Sacco’s works). He is a member of the Polish Management Committee for the COST Action Investigation on comics and graphic novels in the Iberian cultural area (iCOn-MICS). Jakub is currently working in three major fields: 1) Theory and practice of translating comic books from Portuguese, Spanish and English, 2) Comic book as a didactic tool (from translation exercises to classroom use), and 3) Socio-political problems in the PALOP countries and their reflection in artistic production (comic books, satirical drawings, films). See more at the: ResearchGate.

Divining Epistemologies in Informe Tunguska (2009)

Thu, 04 Feb 2021 14:30:00 GMT

Irenae Aigbedion

PhD candidate, Department of Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University

With its opening conceit—an aerolite crashing into Earth and the establishment of an altering-reality-zone—Alexis Figueroa and Claudio Romo’s 2009 graphic novel Informe Tunguska immediately pulls readers towards two distinct frames of reference: history and science fiction. “Tunguska” points to the mysterious meteorite collision that occurred in 1908 near the Stony Tunguska River in Russia, while the reality bending area calls to mind “the Zone” from Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film, Stalker. Employing these referents, the text also turns us towards political history, linking the fictional crash and subsequent government investigations of the fallout to the 1973 coup d’état in Chile and the resultant Pinochet dictatorship which, like the mysterious zone, fundamentally altered the lives of the Chilean people. Although reading this text through the lens of political history is highly encouraged within the text itself and would lead to fruitful interpretations, the overabundance of references within the graphic novel resists a totalizing reading that would reduce the entire text to a historical interpretation.

Resisting closure, Informe Tunguska provides us with a branching network of references, which, if followed, congregate at the heart of the text, at the epicenter of the crash. Edward King and Joanna Page would argue that such an understanding of the text favors a semiotic reading of Informe Tunguska that discovers the “shared forms that transcend the boundary between humans and the non-human world” (174). One such thread is the presence of religion, my focus in this short piece. Not only does the Christian Church haunt the text as a suspicious institution capitalizing on the fallout from the crash, but focusing on Chapter 10, we note that the dialogue comes from a more recent edition of the Bible which purportedly draws on the original textual sources for its newer, more accessible translation. Borrowing from Darcy Orcutt’s theoretical connections between comics and religion and from Edward King and Joanna Page’s posthumanist, ecocritical reading of Informe Tunguska, I argue that the religious references—particularly to the Book of Job which structure Chapter 10—serve as a reminder of the as of yet unknowable nature of the posthuman and of the crippling limitation of human perception. Citing Christian scriptures, alongside literary, historical, and ecological references, this graphic novel seeks to fill an epistemological gap and to represent a human reaction to a confrontation with the very limits of humanity and human perception.

In Chapter 10, two researchers, Sebastián, Erica, and two guards come across a group of monsters, some humanoid, others massive airborne creatures. The humanoids kill Erica and the two guards but leave Sebastián alive. No character speaks or utters a sound in the chapter; the narration in the panels, quotations taken from various chapters in the Book of Job, corresponds to and complicates the action in the narrative. It seems that the main thrust here is God’s unfathomable, undecipherable wrath and power; what is chronicled in the series of images (and reinforced through the text) is an overwhelming, unintelligible, supernatural experience.

Despite the layer of unintelligibility, Sebastián notes, “...Entonces los vi con mis propios ojos; no fueron las sombras de mi imaginación.” (Figueroa and Romo) Hence, he simultaneously warns readers that what follows may seem untrue.

The next caption, “13:1 Si, todo esto lo vi con mis propios ojos, lo escuché con mis oídos y lo entendí” appears as a continuation of Sebastián’s reflections, noted with minute markers; his eyes bring him information (via binoculars), as well as his ears). His knowledge emerges through sensory perception. These words, however, belong to Job in the Old Testament. As the intertext of the chapter, the Book of Job highlights an encounter with the unintelligible and the limitations of human perception. The narrative voice in “Leviatán” does not only come from Job, but also draws quotes from God and Eliphaz the Temanite (who himself is citing a voice in a dream). This borrowing creates a seemingly unified voice from a plurality of speakers, yet, once we distinguish the multiple voices behind the narration, it becomes a chaotic network of positions clashing with each other even within the source text. Such chaos challenges the identification of each speaker in this chapter (or in the whole comic) and, even finding the voice’s source, the connection among speakers could be irretrievable.

Finally, the Bible’s translation quoted within the text is worth mentioning here. The verses here come directly from El Libro del Pueblo de Dios, the 1980 Spanish language translation of the Bible compiled by Presbyterians Armando J. Levoratti y Alfredo B. Trusso. Released in Argentina and adopted later in Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, this version of the Bible is marketed as the approved translation for liturgical use in the Conferencias Episcopales del Cono Sur encompassing the four countries. It is also the version of the Bible currently hosted by the Vatican’s official website. What is fascinating about El Libro del Pueblo de Dios (ELPD) are the stark differences not only between it and the widely used King James Version (KJV) or the New International Version (NIV), favored by English speaking Catholics and Protestants, but also between it and other Spanish translations of the text. Most notably, in this version, there are extended chapters, verses that appear to be out of order in comparison to the KJV or the NIV (and potentially the NVI, the Nueva Versión Internacional). We should note that ELPD can be understood as a firmly Latin American edition of the Bible, using Latin American, not Peninsular/Castilian forms of Spanish. Adopting this version of the text (published in the middle of the Argentine military dictatorship) is another way of connecting the distinct yet parallel histories of Chile and Argentina and making room for another possible reading of the inclusion of religion in Informe Tunguska: a move to carve out a distinctly Latin American history decoupled partially from the Spanish conquest. Analyzing religion as one interpretive tool offered in Informe Tunguska facilitates a deep engagement with the text that exponentially expands the dense network of references.

Works Cited

Figueroa Aracena, Alexis, and Claudio Romo. Informe Tunguska. LOM Ediciones, 2009.

Orcutt, Darby. “Comics and Religion: Theoretical Connections.” Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels, edited by A. David Lewis and Christine Hoff Kraemer, Continuum, 2010, pp. 93–106.

Page, Joanna and Edward King. “Post-Anthropocentric Ecologies and Embodied Cognition.” Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America. UCL Press, 2017, pp. 163–180.

Irenae Aigbedion is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on representations of blackness and racial identity in contemporary literature and visual culture from the Americas. Focusing on a corpus of comics and films from the United States, Mexico, and Brazil, her dissertation examines the ways in which images of blackness create and sustain a cultural imaginary of black identity/identities throughout the Western Hemisphere. Her work has been published in the International Journal of the Classical Tradition and in ImageText.

The Role of Communal Studios in Combating Precarious Labor

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 14:30:00 GMT

Keith Friedlander

Write something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview.

When I lived in Toronto, I would often hear it described as a hub of comics culture. I understood why. The city hosts an abundance of comic shops, including landmark locations for both alternative comics (The Beguiling) and nerd culture (The Silver Snail). There are also numerous expos and conventions to attend: Fan Expo, Anime North, and the Toronto Comics Arts Festival (TCAF), which has grown into one of the most diverse, well-reputed North American festivals.

However, a lot of what makes Toronto an important city for comics folks is less obvious to your average isolated comics fan. It is exciting to know that the city is home to a large community of writers and artists, that there is a long history of that community, built up and supported by figures like Darwyn Cooke and Ty Templeton. But, other than occasionally spotting Chip Zdarsky in the park, that aspect of the city remained largely invisible to me during my years there. My curiosity was provoked by the prospect of a city of artists hiding in plain sight: sharing apartments, working in studios, hanging out, supporting one another.

That curiosity is what initially led me to research communal studios. Artist-run studio spaces have a long history in the comics industry as a method for creators to share resources, mitigate costs, and learn from one another. In the 1970s and 80s, some of the most critically-acclaimed superhero comics were produced out of Upstart Associates in Manhattan, a space shared by Howard Chaykin, Walt Simonson, Jim Starlin, and Frank Miller. Not all studios have catchy names and famous members. Rather, they vary widely in terms of size and formality, and in their simplest form can simply consist of artists splitting rent on a work space. It is only recently that some of them have become public facing organizations, offering formal mentorship programs and community engagement.

I began the project with a simple goal of learning more about how communal studios functioned and why some artists joined them. In 2019, as part of my research, I conducted interviews with members of three studios: Helioscope in Portland, World Monster HQ in Minneapolis, and RAID in Toronto. Numerous themes emerged across the different interviews, but the one I would like to focus on in this blog post is the role studios can play in offsetting the precarious work conditions of the comics industry.

One way that communal studios combat precarity is by acting as a source of collective knowledge and experience for its members. This is especially useful for younger members at the outset of their career. Lucy Bellwood from Helioscope describes this as a kind of switchboard:

The diversity of perspective in a single place and having the studio act as a sort of switchboard for resources and discussion. That can range from anything from getting offered a freelance contract and polling the room saying, ‘Hey, this guy wants to pay me $70 an hour. Is that reasonable?’ (Bellwood)

[click to enlarge]

Access to this knowledge can protect inexperienced artists from entering into exploitive contacts with publishers. Over the past decades, the comics industry has increasingly transitioned to a decentralized model of labour, with production spread out over a network of subcontractors (Norcliffe and Rendace 252). A survey of comic creators conducted in 2019 found that 82.9% of respondents work from home (Bassett). This isolation prevents workers from taking part in collective organization, which in turn leaves them vulnerable to wage suppression. The potential for “self-exploitation” is especially true for young, passionate artists eager to break into the industry (Woo 62). Communal studios serve as both a support network and a pool of industry experience, providing new artists with the knowledge and confidence to negotiate equitable wages.

Another way the communal studios combat precarity is by facilitating access and mobility within the industry. This can take a number of forms, perhaps most importantly making it easier to table at conventions. Applying to conventions as a group not only increases the odds of securing a table at a discounted rate, it also increases the artists’ visibility on the floor (Bellwood). Studio members may also split the cost of travel and accommodations, allowing them to attend more conferences (Wartman). The networking opportunities that come from these conventions can be essential in creating a toehold in the industry (Norcliffe and Rendace 260). Other forms of access can include receiving job opportunities passed down from veteran studio members, gaining credibility with publishers through one’s studio affiliation, and making connections in entirely new fields, such as illustration or animation (Perez). In this way, the studio can mitigate prohibitive expenses and remove barriers to entry for upcoming artists.

While communal studios offer many potential benefits to empower creators, their long-term sustainability and impact may be limited. As the cost of rent continues to rise in urban centres, studios come under increasing financial pressure. Multiple interview subjects predict that young artists will increasingly choose to live in more affordable, remote locations and operate online (Lieber; Perez). Initial investigations into providing members with job benefits through the studios themselves have proven unproductive (Bellwood; Perez). Finally, the long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on these studios is not yet known. Nonetheless, as calls for labour organization in the comics industry continue, I believe that studios could play a critical role as sites for consolidation.

Works Cited

Bassett, Sasha. Comics Workforce Study 2019. Portland State University, 2019, https://sites.google.com/view/cws2019. Accessed 20 Aug. 2020.

Bellwood, Lucy. Personal interview. 21 May 2019.

Lieber, Steve. Personal interview. 12 May 2019.

Norcliffe, Glen and Olivero Rendace. “New Geographies of Comic Book Production in North America: The New Artisan, Distancing, and the Periodic Social Economy.” Economic Geography, vol. 79, no. 3, 2003, pp. 241-263

Perez, Ramon. Personal Interview. 15 May 2019.

Wartman, Peter. Personal interview. 23 May 2019.

Woo, Benjamin. “Erasing the Lines between Leisure and Labor: Creative Work in the Comics World.” Spectator, vol.35 , no. 3, 2015, pp. 57-64.

Dr. Keith Friedlander is a communications instructor at Olds College in Alberta, Canada. He is currently the president of the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics. His research focuses on production cultures in the modern comic book industry, as well as representations of sexuality and gender in superhero comics. His work has appeared in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and The Middle Spaces, as well as the recently released anthology Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero.

Ruptured Graphic Narrative as a Tool for Intersectional Knowledge: Chicana and Japanese Iconographies in “Flies on the Ceiling” and Skim.

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 14:30:00 GMT

Camila Gutierrez

Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature and Visual Studies at Penn State

This paper was meant to be a longer study regarding moments of rupture in graphic narrative, and how those moments open a space for intersectional aspects of the narrative to surface. By rupture, I mean moments in which the conventional linearity and sequentiality of comics is momentarily abandoned, or moments in which seemingly decorative but actually meaningful elements disrupt the page. If conventional comics are a woven pattern of panels and gutters, these moments are ruptures through which the spun fibers are visible for a moment. The knit fabric of the page reveals the twists of a gendered life, of an ethnic lineage, or a distant culture. By reading the graphic novel Skim by Canadian Japanese authors Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki, and the comic “Flies on the Ceiling,” by Chicano author Jaime Hernández this paper discusses how the language of comics may illustrate alternative epistemologies or women’s epistemologies as coded in non-linear languages. Scott McCloud has named some of the techniques featured in these comics as “aspect to aspect” transitions, or “non sequitur.” Thierry Groensteen in turn has referred to how arthrosis may replace sequentiality in narrative moments of this kind. In line with McCloud’s and Groensteen’s formal language, I start from the premise that these works are conveying alternative ways of knowing that may seem unstructured from the point of view of logic and sequentiality. The comics illustrate a kind of alterity that concentrates on moments of intersectional tension in the lives of their women protagonists. In these moments, the artists introduce iconographic references that stress the close connection between these women’s gender/sexuality and their ethnic backgrounds.

From Skim my Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki.

Skim, by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, has several references that intermittently focalize the story through premodern and modern Japanese culture and literature. Contextualizing these tropes in Japanese women’s culture, one may read Skim as a story about complex forms of female homosociality rather than lesbianism as understood in the West. There is, for example, the drawing of Kim, the protagonist, as a premodern Japanese beauty –her face framed by straight black hair, her eyebrows small, her cheeks full and her mouth tiny and delicate. At multiple times, her face evokes an otafuku mask (a theatre prop that in turn relates to an 8th-century female deity who lures goddess Amaterasu to come out of a cave –as per Nara period mythology). Pages 48 and 73 show Kim as a floating otafuku against a black background. Her location obeys no paneling and no divisions. Her face floats like a Japanese mask through the page as she works through unpleasant emotions. The sequence is ruptured, the page becomes fluid, and so readers access the protagonist’s inner realm. In these and other floaty moments where sequentiality seems suspended, Kim is shown struggling to find comfort or happiness in her relationships; her social world affected by a pained interiority. Kim may not be the charming dancer capable of captivating a goddess. But she is empathetic to other women’s complex emotions –to their grief, their disappointment, their growth. The melodramatic tone of Skim’s girl-girl connections resonates with S-kankei literature from the early twentieth century, which thematizes intense relationships between—rarely sexual, albeit zealous and passionate. Understanding this and other examples of rupture and culturally specific nuances of Skim’s imagery may interiorize readers into the realm of Japanese girls’ love and intimacy beyond the limited scope of Western homosexuality.

"Flies on the Ceiling" by Jaime Hernandez

In “Flies on the Ceiling,” the narrative is likewise ruptured and in this case, charged with Mexican-Catholic visuals. Jaime Hernández uses the aesthetic resources of comics to foreground Isabel’s Chicanidad at a point where her wound is intrinsically embodied–during an abortion.¹ The precarious conditions of her abortion are shown in the images of dehumanized bodies and animalistic portrayals of her emotional/mental illness. These evoke Chicana imagery where Judeo-Christian and pre-Columbian myth conflate. In stark contrast with this scene is the opening page of the story, where the middle panel shows an American Planned Parenthood office surrounded by white and/or male protesters. This early panel suggests that Isabel’s abortion actually took place in the pulchritude of an American clinic, where her decision is questioned in ethnically-distant, mostly political terms (note the “Reagan–‘80” sign). However, it is only on pages 10-12 where we see the abortion through her lens. Even though she has had an abortion in a first world clinic, her embodied and heartfelt experience of the abortion is encoded in the rupture. The rupture, connecting the beginning of the story and the chaotic fever dream in a relationship of arthrosis, shows the protagonist’s traumatizing experience through a third world lens.

In my analysis, Juan Mah y Bush’s use of “heartfelt awareness” serves as a mode of perception: one that arranges and rearranges our hierarchy of values, our seriality, sequencing, when we engage in an aesthetic struggle. I argue that this comprehensive understanding of “the conceptual alliance among aesthetics, struggle, and heartfelt awareness” is necessary because having remedied the disarticulation of this triad, there is a better chance to comprehend sensibilities of struggle in both the Chicana and her peripheries (101). In these and other ways, both graphic narratives use visual elements to thematize intersections of gender/sex and ethnicity, and to show said intersection as a generative site for alternative forms of relational knowledge for women.

Notes:

1. In this context “wound” has an open meaning that encompasses the physical, the psychological, and the spiritual among other elements of Chicana intersectionality. By using “wound”, I am preliminarily evoking Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorizing of the wound as the emotional residue of the borderland; "la herida abierta" which splits and stakes the Chicana in multiple ways (24-25). However, I plan on expanding this reading in my dissertation by including the voices of other Chicana and Latina feminists, and therefore, this section is still a work in progress and well beyond the scope of this blog-length essay.

Works Cited

Ellwood, Robert S. “Shinto and the Discovery of History of Japan.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 41, no. 4, 1973, pp. 493–505.

Groensteen, Thierry, Nick Nguyen, and Bart Beaty. The System of Comics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018. Print.

Hernández, Jaime. “Flies on the Ceiling”. Love and Rockets. 29. (1988): 17-31. Web archive.

Mah y Busch, Juan D. “The Importance of the Heart in Chicana Artistry: Aesthetic Struggle, Aisthesis, “Freedom””. The Un/making of Latina/o Citizenship: Culture, Politics, and Aesthetics, 2014. Print.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993. Print.

Tamaki, Mariko and Jillian Tamaki. (2008). Skim. Toronto: Groundwood Books. Print.

Camila P. Gutiérrez-Fuentes is working towards a dual-title Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Visual Studies at Penn State. Her research examines aesthetic lineages and migrations across women’s comics cultures from Japan, The United States, and Latin America (mainly Chile and Mexico.) She has taught undergraduate courses in World Literature, Video Game Culture, Graphic Novels, and Virtual Worlds. In her extracurricular work, she serves as president of the Liberal Arts Collective at Penn State, and is a producer of their podcast Unraveling the Anthropocene: Race, Environment, and Pandemic.

4DTime.Space

Thu, 07 Jan 2021 14:30:00 GMT

Elk Paauw

Masters Student in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For my Master’s thesis research in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I created an interactive webcomic on the philosophy of time (specifically Block Universe Theory, also known as four-dimensionalism or “worm theory”) through the lens of comics formalism. Through 4dtime.space, I explore various issues within four-dimensionalism, and expand upon them by creating new concepts such as the "spacetime sausage" and "corkscrew block universe.” I also connect the comics medium to string theory and multiple universe theory, as well as explore the ramifications of the comics medium as a "multiples medium" on issues of personal identity through time. The form of the website is in itself a block universe, where each section exists simultaneously and can be read in any order, and is currently live online. In the next section, I’ll walk you through the website with some excerpts for your reading pleasure...

Walkthrough
The form of the website is meant to re-create a 4D hyperobject in the form of a webcomic, where you can click on each section (like diving into a wormhole) where its long-scroll format mimics a world line that traces across the Block Universe of the site as a whole. You can read the sections in any order, because time is relative, and all occur simultaneously just as in real life.

Fig 1. Homepage Chapter Selection Screen

In the section in the upper right, entitled “The Fourth Dimension,” I discuss the history of four-dimensionalism, going back to antiquity, with a special focus on four-dimensionalism in surrealism, cubism, and abstract expressionism in the 1900s

Fig 2. “Corpus Hypercubus”

I create new concepts within four-dimensionalism, including the idea of a "spacetime sausage,” which better illustrates how time can be sliced into arbitrary chunks (like salami slices), but are still part of a single whole (the sausage itself) and relate it to the shape of our universe. I look at four-dimensionalism in geometry (especially the works of Hermann Minkowski and Rudy Rucker) and connect it to film theory, arguing that a reel of film can be seen as a block of 4D spacetime, where individual frames are slices of the greater whole.

Fig 3. from “Book As Block Universe”

4dtime.space culminates with my argument that comics as a medium express four-dimensionalist thought, in that panels can be considered slices of space-time that when stacked together in the form of a book of multiple pages create a four-dimensional block of spacetime (see fig. 4 & 5).

Fig. 4 and 5. from “Book as Block Universe” [click to enlarge]

When we apply this to a genre such as autobiographical comics, we can see the artist creating their own 4D block universe of the Self. I continue this line of thought to discuss multiple universe theory, applying it further to the Marvel/DC comics universes as well as comics in general as being innately a “multiples medium”, and connect my spacetime sausage theory to contemporary string theory (see fig. 6).

Fig. 6, from “Book As Brane”

The work concludes by taking a look at ancient agrarian notions of cycles of time, where I define a new understanding of Block Universe Theory by delineating a "corkscrew block universe" where time flows forwards in a corkscrew motion, so as to bring together Block Universe Theory and the more classical Cyclic view of time. I also address fears of fatalism in Block Universe Theory by calling upon Friedrich Nietzsche's Eternal Return (fig. 7), and the notion of Amor Fati, or love of fate, which I explore through a reading of The Death of Superman (1992, fig. 8).

Fig 7. from “Corkscrew Block Universe”

Fig 8. from “Corkscrew Block Universe”

Greater Implications
In this work, I wanted to expand upon Scott McCloud’s chapter on time in Understanding Comics and Thierry Groensteen’s notion of the hyperframe from The System of Comics, as well as provide a more academically rigorous and less mystical response to Nick Sousanis’ Unflattening. Tying in my personal interest in existentialism, geometry, and my research in the Philosophy of Time, I have created new and unique solutions to traditional problems within Block Universe Theory (such as the feeling of time passing, grappling hard determinism/fatalism, as well as the conflict between subjective versus objective views of time) using comics formalism. While I could add infinite content to 4dtime.space, particularly in exploring examples of how comics use of panel and page layout can (and do) subvert standard conceptions of time (which I touch on briefly in the section “Book As Block Universe” where I discuss braiding in Watchmen as well as the vast, infinite time found in single-panel comics such as Family Circus), in the future I aim to further my study of what I call a “Trans Metaphysics”, of which 4dtime.space is a first installment.

Works Cited

Aristotle. Physics. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/physics.6.vi.html. Classic Department, MIT. Accessed 16 Apr. 2020.

Dali, Salvador. Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus). 1954, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/488880. The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 913.

Galison, Peter Louis. “Minkowski’s Space-Time: From Visual Thinking to the Absolute World.” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, vol. 10, Jan. 1979, pp. 85–121. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.2307/27757388.

Groensteen, Thierry, et al. System of Comics, The. English. 1st edition, Univ Pr Of Mississippi, 2009.

Gubser, Steven S. The Little Book of String Theory. 2011. Open WorldCat, http://www.vlebooks.com/vleweb/product/openreader?id=none&isbn=9781400834433.

Jurgens, Dan. The Death of Superman. New York, NY: DC Comics, 1993.

Keane, Bil. Family Circus. King Features, 1960-ongoing.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. Reprint, William Morrow, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 2017.

Moore, Alan, and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen. New York: Warner Books, 1987.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Viking, 1954.

Paauw, Elk. “4dtime.Space.” 4dtime.Space: Comics in the Fourth Dimension, May 2020, https://4dtime.space.

Rucker, Rudy. The Fourth Dimension: A Guided Tour of the Higher Universe. Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

Sousanis, Nick. Unflattening. Harvard University Press, 2015.

Elk Paauw is a self-published Seattle comics artist and queer transdude (he/him/his pronouns), currently working on a sailing travelogue called Foss Follies set in the South Sound. He performs regularly as half of the cartoon band Spooky Action, and hosts a monthly international animated children's film series called Saturday Morning Cartoons at SIFF Cinema Uptown. Originally from Seattle, Paauw is currently in Chicago getting a master's in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Genocide, Armenian Comics and Mangasaryan’s Prior to the Auction of Souls

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 14:30:00 GMT

José Alaniz

Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures - University of Washington, Seattle

Widely regarded as the “father” of Armenian comics, Yerevan-based Tigran Mangasaryan has been producing graphic narrative works since the late 1980s. Since 2005 he has devoted several graphic novels to the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1917, one of the 20th-century’s greatest tragedies, in which over one million Armenians died at the hands of the Ottoman Turks (many modern-day Turks either dispute these figures or point to similar atrocities committed against their own people at the time, or both). Public remembrance of those events more than a century ago remains a pillar of Armenian identity formation, in support of which it mobilizes numerous types of media, both within and without the country’s borders. As described by Roxanna Ferllini:

Diasporic communities have been able to develop and maintain cultural and national identity via a series of mnemonic devices, such as historical studies, publications in books, magazines, and newspapers, collections of photographs, memorials, oral histories, and the staging of commemorative events. This kind of “memory work” has served to keep intact Armenian heritage, language, belief systems, sociocultural practices, and maintained an active remembrance of the genocide (“Armenian”: 357-358).

Cover to Tigran Mangasaryan’s Prior to the Auction of Souls (2014).

Mangasaryan’s Prior to the Auction of Souls (2014) adapts one of the best-known instances of such “memory work”: Aurora Mardiganyan’s testimonial Ravished Armenia (1918), which depicts in harrowing detail the loss of the young Aurora/Arshalouis’ Armenian family during the genocide and her escape to the USA. The 17-year-old Mardiganyan’s account became the basis for the film Ravished Armenia (aka The Auction of Souls), produced in 1918 to raise funds for victims. The film starred Mardiganyan herself, re-enacting her own traumatic experiences before the camera (see Demoyan/Abrahamyan).

Comparable in some respects to Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986-1991), both in its unflinching representation of historical atrocity as well as its exploration of memory production/ narrativization and its effect on others, Tigran Mangasaryan’s work lends itself well to a reading framed by Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory.” In particular I want to highlight the generative impetus of postmemory for those traumatized by experiences which they themselves did not live through:

Postmemory’s connection to the past is […] not actually mediated by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation. To grow up with such overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one’s birth or one’s consciousness, is to risk having one’s own stories and experiences displaced, even evacuated, by those of a previous generation. It is to be shaped, however indirectly, by traumatic events that still defy narrative reconstruction and exceed comprehension. These events happened in the past, but their effects continue into the present (Hirsch, “Generation”: 107).

The collaborative, communal, constructed nature of history plays a central role in Mangasaryan’s Prior to the Auction of Souls, complicating the notion that traumatic events “defy narrative reconstruction.” Aurora, as if in front of an audience, tells her story in a large hall to a small group of people that includes a film director. Mangasaryan depicts these present-day framing scenes in the USA in a black and white wash technique, while Aurora’s narrated memories appear in vivid color – making them more “lifelike.” Furthermore, the “audience” constantly interrupts, peppering her with questions, prompts, commentary and off-the-hip story editing (see Fig. 3). For example, the director demands: "No! No! Start from the beginning! We are not that smart to reconstruct the bits and pieces of your story […]Sweetheart, we are not interested in the objects of your house! Tell us about your family. How many were you? How were you living?" (3).

Advertisement for Auction of the Souls (1918).

Later, after the girl recounts a particularly gruesome atrocity, a staff member says, “Calm down, Aurora. Let’s give her a break” (47). The filmmakers, taken aback by the unending parade of murder and violation (see Figs. 6&7), themselves need respite. At one point the director says, “That’s enough! I will not put this scene in the movie.” But a burly man with a cigar (later revealed as the producer) thinks to himself, “You will. This will be the most interesting scene[,] where God has gone mad” (31). In such episodes, Prior to the Auction of Souls conveys both the potential trauma of an engagement with history, as well as the intensely social nature of historiography, how the narrative comes about through a process of negotiation – and sometimes, brute imposition.

The reader sees how said trauma manifests as postmemory when the disturbed director rushes home to gaze at his sleeping young son (see Fig. 8). He thinks, “Thank God we’re living in America!” That “present-day” panel, as noted, appears in black and white. The color panel adjacent to it duplicates the composition, only now showing Aurora/Arshalouis’ father looking at his own son, whom he will soon kill in an act of defiance against the Turks (19). “I simply [can’t] stop thinking about that production,” the director later tells his wife. “I don’t know how to start and how to end. I am being terrified about you and little Mickey” (37).

Figure 3. Aurora interrupted during her account.

Prior to the Auction of Souls exemplifies the strategies pioneered by Mangasaryan to conceive, produce and market adult-oriented graphic narrative in Armenia, at a moment when this small former Soviet Republic’s comics industry is in its earliest stages of becoming. More than that, Mangasaryan’s graphic biography explicitly participates in the advancement and global dissemination of the important “memory work” pertaining to the genocide, i.e., to particular versions of national historical trauma which as Ferllini argues play a crucial role in modern Armenian identity.

As Mangasaryan told an interviewer: “[T]he most important thing is the preservation of one’s language and culture. […] And for the preservation of your culture, your history, you need to use all means available. Drawn stories are now very relevant to this mission” (Kunin, “Tigran”).

Works Cited

Demoyan, Hayk and Lousine Abrahamyan. Aurora’s Road: Odyssey of an Armenian Genocide Survivor. The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, 2015.

Ferllini, Roxana. “The Armenian Genocide: Forensic Intervention, Narrative, and the Historical Record.” Excavating Memory. Ed. Maria Theresia Starzmann and John R. Roby. University Press of Florida, 2016: 357-375.

Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today. Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring, 2008): 103-12.

Kunin, Aleksandr. “Tigran Mangasaryan: obraz novogo romana.” Territoriia L (May 17, 2017). http://gazetargub.ru/?p=5905.

Mangasaryan, Tigran. Prior to the Auction of Souls. Self-published, 2008.

José Alaniz, professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Comparative Literature (adjunct) at the University of Washington, Seattle, has published two books, Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (University Press of Mississippi, 2010) and Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (UPM, 2014). His research interests include Death and Dying, Disability Studies, Eco-criticism and Comics Studies. Current book projects include Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia. His comics have appeared in The Stranger, the Seattle anthology Dune and Tales From La Vida: A Latinx Comics Anthology.

Walking-With Un Día: Ana Paula Machuca’s Love Letter to Trujillo, Peru.

Thu, 10 Dec 2020 14:30:00 GMT

Andrea Aramburú Villavisencio

PhD Student at the Centre of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge

In 2017, Giancarlo Roman, editor of the independent comics publisher Pictorama, in Lima, Peru, asked me if I wanted to collaborate on a publishing project, a small series of zines by Peruvian women comics artists: Ana Paula Machuca (Piura), Ale Torres (La Libertad) and Leila Arenas (Arequipa). I readily accepted. The project was a valuable initiative in a still very masculine comics scene, that is often limited to the capital.

It was Ana Paula’s work that drew me in the most. Un día (2018) is an autobiographical foregrounding of urban ordinariness. It is composed in a 10x14 cm lined vintage notebook, drawn and handwritten in coloured pencils and liquid pen. Although it sketches a series of scenes that she would encounter routinely on her way to the state sports complex in the city of Trujillo. Her amble does not follow a fixed path; she walks, along 24 pages, “sin destino alguno” (Machuca 5).

As the comic opens she writes, “En cada paso que doy veo como la ciudad cobra vida.” This essay will briefly outline how Ana Paula consciously engages with the space she inhabits, making herself “accountable in the presence of others” (Springgay and Truman 12). I am eager to walk-with her, where walking-with, following Juanita Sundberg, underscores how walking, even when done by oneself, can “move collectively” (Springgay and Truman 12).

The conceptual affair between the autobiographical and walking goes way back. “Perhaps it is because walking is itself a way of grounding one’s thoughts in a personal and embodied experience of the world that it lends itself to this kind of writing” (Solnit 58). Un día performs an embodied poetics of walking. In doing so, Ana Paula makes us consider what the city of Trujillo means to her, but she also enables us to ask key questions regarding who has or has not the right to the city, and how within the urban many forms of the material and the immaterial coalesce.

As Cheng Yi’Eng puts it, the walking body is constantly attuned, through the senses, “to a host of affects and mundane vignettes of the city” (Cheng 211). I read “affect” not necessarily as emotion, but rather as intensity, as that which emerges within the ordinary and the relational. Un día’s compositions bring into play both the visual and the written to turn towards other non-visual, more affective elements of the walk. It is in this juxtaposition, and the contrasts of their rhythms, where she paints these scenes’ atmospheres, therefore making the reader attune into the autobiographical I’s “senses of hearing, touch, and smell” (Hague 3). The way she composes the combi’s immersive atmosphere, for instance, merits attention. Combis are small, cramped buses that serve as one of the most common modes of transportation in Peru. The “cobrador” is the one who charges the fare. Ana Paula dwells along the combi’s illustration by writing how “el cobrador grita a todo pulmón su ruta” (Machuca 4). Her metaphor takes on this character’s articulation of breath as they announce the combi’s route, making their body expand into the sounds of the city.

At once intense and fleeting, she brilliantly signals the trajectory of a sense--the visual--emphasising the sounds and movements that it picks up along the way. As we attune to el cobrador’s shout dissolving into the city’s atmosphere, we also trace the passengers’ falling posture in the window, to the tune of a “cumbia psicodélica” by the Peruvian chicha band Los Shapis. In this journey between sights, positions and sounds, Ana Paula draws an affective continuum between herself, the city, and its human and non-human actors. The senses’ permeable boundaries are revisited later on: as the illustrations depict running bodies, the caption adds how her “ritmo cardiaco empieza a desacelerar.” Even if she is not the one running, her cardiac rhythm still seems to be affected by the space and those she’s sharing it with, merging her affective body with theirs.

Figure 1: A combi’s sliding door, a motorbike and a waving scarf to the tune of Los Shapis (from Un Día, page 4)

And yet, despite portraying Trujillo as a shared space, Un día also shows being cognizant that everyday life, even if affectively entwined with a community, is not the same for everyone. Even if “most walking is mundane and habitual” (Edensor 70), walking is “not experienced universally, or evenly” (Lorimer 22). Thus, it not only has different meanings for different cultural groups, but also the dimensions it takes and the affects it is associated with depend on privilege, race and class.

Ana Paula’s account is significant because it turns its gaze to the informal structures and agents of Trujillo, foregrounding their crucial role in the commons. She is prone to portray the city’s hard workers, especially women “ambulantes”--workers in Peru who do not abide by legal regulations, and thus are exempt from job benefits--often left behind and underestimated, despite making up around two-thirds of the informal sector (Machuca, Personal interview).

In this context, her drawings account for and make visible the strong women workers she routinely encounters: “ella, con su mazamorrera y arroz con leche” or “una mujer mayor llenando baldes de flores silvestres” who, she adds, no one or nothing can move, neither the police nor a nasal congestion (Machuca 6, 8). As she says, it is unbelievable that nowadays women are often still characterised as weak, when the streets reveal exactly the opposite: it is these women who make the mesh of the commons (Machuca, Personal interview). Gesturing towards Miranda Joseph’s Against the Romance of Community (2002), I want to emphasise that Un día’s version of community is not romanticised neither does it respond to “organic, natural, spontaneous occurrences” (ix); it does not happen on the margins of economic processes but is instead enabled by them.

Ana Paula’s love letter to Trujillo is a comic dedicated to its weather, its corners, and its graffiti walls. It is an affective meditation on herself and her memories. But it is most notably a complex embodied and critical account of the collective bodies that make up the fabric of the city.

Figure 2: A strong woman, selling mazamorra and arroz con leche (from Un Día, page 6)

Works cited

Yi’En, Cheng, “Telling Stories of the City: Walking Ethnography, Affective Materialities, and Mobile Encounters.” Space and Culture, Vol. 17, no. 3, 2014, pp. 211–223.

Edensor, Tim. “Walking in rhythms: place, regulation, style and the flow of Experience.” Visual Studies, vol. 25, no.1, 2010, pp.69-79.

Hague, Ian. “Comics and the Senses: A Multisensory Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels." Routledge, 2014.

Joseph, Miranda. Against the Romance of Community. University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Lorimer, Hayden. “New forms and spaces for studies of walking” in Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects.” Edited by Tim Cresswell. Ashgate, 2010, pp.19-34.

Machuca, Ana Paula. Un día. Pictorama, 2018.

Machuca, Ana Paula. Personal interview. 24 July 2020.

Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Viking, 2000.

Springgay, Stephanie and Sarah E. Truman. Walking Methodologies in a More-Than-Human World: Walking lab. Routledge, 2019.

Wunderlich, Filipa Matos. “Walking and Rhythmicity: Sensing Urban Space.” Journal of Urban Design, vol. 13, no. 1, 2008, pp.41-50.

Andrea Aramburú Villavisencio (she/her) holds a Master of Arts in Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory from King’s College London, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Hispanic Literature from PUCP, in Lima, Peru. She is currently doing her PhD at the Centre of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Scholar. Her research looks at the interactions between relationality, affect and aesthetics in contemporary Latin American women’s and queer comics. She is currently writing a chapter on memoir and diary comics, and the works of Powerpaola (Ecuador/Colombia), Ana Paula Machuca (Perú), Constanza Salazar (Chile) and Sofía La Watson (Colombia). She took up longboarding during lockdown and now she enjoys her free time riding around Cambridge.

A “Gentle Fantasy” of Ocean Conservation: Environmental Justice in Aquicorn Cove

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 14:30:00 GMT

Brianna Anderson

PhD student, English Department at the University of Florida

The widespread devastation of ocean ecosystems due to marine pollution, overfishing, and rising temperatures caused by climate change has emerged as one of the greatest man-made environmental issues of the twenty-first century. This crisis will undoubtedly have devastating, far-reaching consequences, particularly for today’s youth, who will need to adapt to an increasingly inhospitable world ravaged by environmental disaster. Given this unsettling reality, Carlie Trott contends that “empowering today’s children to understand and take action on climate change should be an important goal, both to support children’s agency and to promote present and future community resilience in the face of climate change impacts” (43). Katie O’Neill’s middle-grade comic Aquicorn Cove (2018) takes up this challenge by using a “gentle fantasy” narrative to educate children about ocean conservation. The comic centers on young protagonist Lana as she returns home to her storm-ravaged, nameless village and rescues an injured baby “Aquicorn,” an adorable seahorse-unicorn hybrid. Soon, Lana discovers that the village’s unsustainable fishing practices have contributed to coral bleaching and endangered the Aquicorn population. Beyond merely using the colorful, Disneyfied Aquicorns to evoke sympathy in the reader, I argue that O’Neill’s comic models “global feminist environment justice,” which Noel Sturgeon defines as “using an intersectional approach… and revealing the connections between social inequalities and environmental problems to uncover the systems of power that continue to generate the complex problems we face” (6). By drawing attention to the larger systemic issues threatening the oceans, Aquicorn Cove empowers children to engage in justice-oriented environmental activism.

The comic’s exploration of the link between social issues and environmental destruction manifests most obviously through a series of disagreements between Lana’s aunt Mae and Mae’s former lover, Aure. A blue, humanoid sea-creature, Aure resides in the coral reef off the coast of the village and protects the Aquicorns. While Aure and Mae initially strike up an unlikely interspecies romance, the ex-couple clash over the village’s harmful fishing practices. In a series of darkly colored panels that stand out starkly from the rest of the comic’s vibrant frames, Aure shows Mae the sparsely populated, dying coral reef (Figure 1). The grim tour concludes with an image of sea creatures encased within a net as Aure direly warns Mae, “Plastic nets have no feelings, they take everything and they never break. You have lost your connection to the sea. You say you only take what you need, but you seem to need more now” (60). Functioning as a less-shrill, sexier version of Dr. Seuss’s Lorax, Aure explicitly links the reef’s plight to human actions, denouncing the village’s greed and disconnection from the natural world. However, Mae justifies the village’s exploitation of the ocean by highlighting the economic necessities motivating their overfishing, insisting, “We have to bring money to the village, or it won’t survive” (ibid). Moreover, she underscores the apparent powerlessness of small groups of people to enact meaningful environmental change, stating, “My village is a speck in the ocean! You’re asking us to sacrifice our livelihood for what? Barely making a difference” (61). Rather than simply vilifying the humans, the comic emphasizes the tension between economic survival and environmental stewardship. In this way, O’Neill invites young readers to consider how the unequal distribution of wealth in capitalist societies contributes to the destruction of the oceans and the environment at large.

Figure 1: A bleak image of the dying reef in Katie O'Neill's Aquicorn Cove (2018: 59).

Though Mae initially resists Aure’s message, Lana later realizes that the dying reef no longer effectively shields the village from powerful storms. She convinces Mae that the survival of the reef and the humans are inextricably linked, saying, “[I]f the reef dies, I think our village will die too” (75). The comic concludes with the villagers vowing to destroy their plastic nets and return to the traditional, small-scale fishing practices used by their great-grandmothers--not their male ancestors, significantly. Additionally, Mae resolves to find alternative, more sustainable ways to generate income, stating, “It’s time to see what our village can grow and provide for itself. And Aure said they would help us find other things to sell, things the Aquicorns make” ( 85). Of course, Mae’s suggestion that friendly marine creatures will help to financially support the humans by producing goods is clearly a utopian fantasy that still operates within capitalist logics, rather than envisioning less destructive economic systems. However, the comic’s conclusion does effectively model what Kamala Platt terms “environmental justice poetics” by “promot[ing] both environmental well-being and social justice” (184). In other words, by portraying the villagers compassionately working with nature to develop mutually beneficial solutions, O’Neill encourages children to imagine more environmentally friendly, harmonious futures.

Finally, O’Neill includes nonfictional paratext that extends the comic’s environmental justice message by encouraging children to participate in real-world activism. A section titled “How Can We Stop This Damage?” suggests ways that readers can help to confront the global, systemic issues endangering the oceans, such as building coalitions, contacting local politicians, and boycotting corporations. However, in the back matter O’Neill cautions, “It’s also important to make sure that local communities are still able to make a living with these changes.” By facilitating children’s involvement in environmental conservation, while also reminding readers of the pressing need for more equitable and sustainable ways to generate income, Aquicorn Cove demonstrates how transformative environmental comics can bring structural problems to the forefront in order to empower children to challenge the status quo and participate in environmentally justice-oriented activism.

Works Cited

O’Neill, Katie. Aquicorn Cove, Oni Press, 2018.

Platt, Kamala. “Environmental Justice Children’s Literature: Depicting, Defending, and Celebrating Trees and Birds, Colors and People.” Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism, edited by Sidney Dobrin and Kenneth Kidd, Wayne State University Press, 2004, pp. 183-197.

Sturgeon, Noel. Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Natural. University of Arizona Press, 2009.

Trott, Carlie. “Reshaping our World: Collaborating with Children for Community-Based Climate Change Action.” Action Research, vol. 17, no. 1, 2019, pp. 42-62.

Brianna Anderson is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of Florida. Her research interests include children’s and young adult comics, picture books, ecocriticism, digital humanities, and visual rhetoric. She is currently working on a dissertation examining representations of climate crisis and environmental disaster in children’s comics. Her work is forthcoming in Studies in Comics.

Reading Trans Autobiographical Comics through Trans Phenomenology

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 14:30:00 GMT

remus jackson & F. Stewart-Taylor

Graduate students at the University of Florida

Despite raising pressing questions about representation and embodiment, trans autobiographical comics are understudied in both comics and trans studies. As comics theorists Elizabeth El Refaie and Hillary Chute have noted, the formal strategies for rendering the self inform the kind of “self” expressed on the page. Trans artists' presentation of self on the page can both describe the creator's phenomenological experience as subjects of coercive gender systems and the practices of resistance and hope that exceed these systems. Following José Esteban Muñoz, moments in these texts are utopian, proposing a future already germinating in the present where possibilities for gendered subjectivity exceed coercive systems. After a methodological overview, we’ll use a trans phenomenological framework to read two comics by Carta Monir. We gesture to possible uses for other texts, including the network of small press comics around Monir’s publishing company, Diskette Press.

A trans comics creator’s self-depiction allows them to describe how they experience embodiment through the orientation of the body on the page. As in queer and trans phenomenology, the self in trans autobiographical comics is oriented toward and away from others. Theorist Sara Ahmed proposes queer phenomenology as a turn away from traditional objects of desire and towards different ones, aligning with others who do the same (21). Queer phenomenology sees the world “at a slant,” offering a way of describing the world not constrained by straightness (67). Gayle Salamon develops a trans-specific phenomenology of the body, writing that “insistence that the body is crucial for understanding subjectivity” and in turn the body’s “manifestation and apprehension of sexuality” is vital for trans phenomenology (44). Salamon maps how the felt sense of the body is shaped by its orientations to our own perceptions and external objects, institutions, and other bodies. The cis and white gaze can be resisted through means of visualizing the self, informed by the artists’ phenomenological experience of transness.

Carta Monir work is fundamentally about how Monir navigates and strategically depicts her life as a trans woman of color making it ideal to discuss these issues. The two comics we discuss use radically different means to present the self. Laura Croft Was My Family (2017) includes sections stylized to resemble the video game Tomb Raider, while Napkin (2019) is created from Monir’s self-portraiture and notes Monir solicited from her sexual partners. Lara Croft uses video games as a metaphor to explore embodiment and control, and Napkin uses the control Monir has over her own image in photographs and risography to exult in the affordances of gender technologies including hormones to experience gender euphoria--the sensation of affirmation and wellbeing as a woman in the world. Napkin also challenges desire and gender as individual experiences, locating Monir in an embodied community of trans and queer lovers. Ultimately, the risograph printer becomes a gender technology, as Monir uses it to describe as well as create her own subjectivity.

Fig. 1. Spread from Lara Croft was My Family.

Both the real world and video game sections of Lara Croft feature spot color which resembles the ‘spray can’ feature from Microsoft paint, color which adheres to Lara Croft and to the other women Monir’s father attempts to control. This allows Monir to comment on these experiences by creating a digital ‘trace’ of real world trauma. She reasserts her control over narrativizing these experiences, since it is Monir who adds the color to the page. Like Muñoz’s “disidentification,” or the reclamation and transformation of harmful media through it’s reorientation to queerness, Monir is reclaiming and transforming Lara Croft and her childhood through her comics. Her identification with Croft and with her mother mediates her own experiences of womanhood in this text.

Napkin opens with a direct address to the reader:

when you open this book,
you’re opening my legs.

I trust you.

The reader is invited to share Monir’s orientation towards the world, which includes utopian community formation, and is reminded of the ethical obligations of doing so. Napkin alternates between Monir’s written descriptions of sex, self-portraits, and “comment cards” from Monir’s sexual partners, which place their experiences of sex on the same plane as Monir’s, rather than privileging Monir’s own experience. Following Ahmed, this is an orientation towards queerness, shared with others and defined relationally. Monir interweaves her own experience of her body as desired and desirable—to inhabit as well as have sex with—with the experiences of those she trusts as partners in describing and experiencing her body. Monir's strategy of orienting her body and herself underscores Salamon’s phenomenological description of trans desire. These utopian moments, where two or more people are able to describe together the experience of mutual recognition, through sex or comics reading, germinate a future of generous mutual constitution which exceeds current schemas of sex and gender but is possible, through the patchwork phenomenological framework of Napkin, within the present moment.

As Ahmed and Salamon signal, a queer or trans phenomenology is not a private language, but an experience of aligning with others. Diskette's risograph, a gender technology for Monir which she shares with Diskette's other authors, materializes trans solidarity, while the authors in the Diskette roster offer a kaleidoscope of trans worlding, each presenting a trans phenomenology rooted in their approach to visualizing transness. For example, Victor Martin’s You Don’t Have to Be Afraid of Me reorients Martin's experience of men as a threat to the hopeful possibility of identifying with a nonthreatening trans masculinity. By reading further into the network of trans artists printed and distributed by Diskette, the complexity of different intersectional trans experiences, and the essential solidarity work of a trans publisher, comes into focus.

Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology. Duke UP, 2006.

Chute, Hillary L. Graphic Women. Columbia UP, 2010.

El Refaie, Elisabeth. Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures. UP Mississippi, 2012.

Monir, Carta. Lara Croft Was My Family. 2017. Diskette Press, 2019.

--. Napkin. Diskette Press, 2019.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYU Press, 2009.

Salamon, Gayle. Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality. Columbia UP, 2010.

remus jackson is a trans comic artist and graduate student at the University of Florida whose work focuses on queer/trans worldmaking and museum studies.

F. Stewart-Taylor is a graduate student at the University of Florida whose work focuses on community formation.

Thoth, Justice, and the American Way: Egyptian Myth, Modern Egypt, and Superhero Comics

Thu, 19 Nov 2020 14:30:00 GMT

Adrienne Resha

Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the College of William & Mary.

Since the 1940s, American comic book creators working in the superhero genre have demonstrated a fascination with an ambiguous and amorphous East, including the Arab majority nations of the Middle East and North Africa. While that early fascination resulted in a number of superheroes whose power sets and personas were derived (however loosely) from Egyptian mythology, it did not produce Arab superheroes. Instead, Golden Age characters like Hawkman, Doctor Fate, and Ibis the Invincible were ancient Egyptians, wielders of ancient Egyptian (magical) artifacts, or both. Over eighty years, the origins of Hawkman have alternated between ancient Egypt and the planet of Thanagar, but the character has never been made Arab American. After 9/11, the Egyptian American Danny Khalifa inherited the Ibistick and became Ibis the Invincible. After the Arab Spring protests began in late 2010/early 2011 (beginning in Egypt on January 25th, 2011), the Egyptian Khalid Ben-Hassin and the Egyptian American Khalid Nassour were made to wear Helmets of Fate, the former outside of DC Comics’s primary continuity and the latter within it. The origin stories of Egyptian American legacy heroes, Khalifa and Nassour are examples of repatriation: in them, fictional Egyptian artifacts from the Golden Age are given to newly created Modern and Blue Age Arab American characters.

Figure 1: Danny Khalifa as Ibis the Invincible in writer Tad Williams and artist Phil Winslade’s The Helmet of Fate: Ibis the Invincible #1.

Repatriation may also be understood as a combination of Egyptianization and Americanization. In Arab Comic Strips: Politics of an Emerging Mass Culture, Allen Douglas and Fedwa Malti-Douglas use the term Egyptianization to refer to the application of pharaonic imagery to supplementary material in comics that were translated into Arabic in the 1970s (10). I use Egyptianization to refer to the application of the pharaonic aesthetic to American superheroes in the 20th and 21st centuries. I use Americanization to refer to the ways in which the American superhero aesthetic has been applied to Arab characters after 9/11 and the Arab Spring. I argue that repatriation alienates and assimilates the Egyptian American superheroes it affects. It alienates them by conflating ancient Egyptians and modern Arabs, both in the use of the pharaonic aesthetic in the artwork of their comics and in making these characters descendants of ancient Egyptian royalty, and it assimilates them by making them into comic book superheroes.

In 2007, Daniel “Danny” Kasim Khalifa was introduced in the event one-shot The Helmet of Fate: Ibis the Invincible #1. Set sometime after 9/11, the comic opens on Khalifa being assaulted by white teenagers. One of them says, “We ought to send all you camel-jockeys back to Iraq to get blown up.” Captions clarify that Khalifa is not from Iraq, but his parents are from Egypt, where his paternal family belonged to “an old, noble line.” In having the Khalifas be descended from royalty, the comic combines ancient and Arab Egyptian identities into one identity that is distant in space and time. After the bullies leave, Khalifa is magically summoned to an Egyptian temple, in which he finds the first Ibis the Invincible, Prince Amentep. Rather than bequeath the Ibistick to an Arab Egyptian, Amentep gives it and his blessing to Khalifa, an Arab American, and tells him to find Thoth, the Egyptian god of magic, writing, and judgment of the dead. Thoth inscribes Khalifa’s name as the new master of the Ibistick, allowing Khalifa to transform into Ibis the Invincible, a superhero whose blue and gold costume is, if not period accurate, then at least evocative of ancient Egyptian clothing. Khalifa is both Arab and American, simultaneously alienated and assimilated.

Figure 2: Khalid Nassour as Fate in writer Paul Levitz and artists Sonny Liew and Lee Loughridge’s Doctor Fate (2015-2016) Vol. 1: The Blood Price.

In 2015, Khalid Nassour was introduced in Doctor Fate (2015-2016). Set sometime after the Arab Spring, the comic opens on the Egyptian American Nassour preparing to begin medical school in the midst of catastrophic flooding caused by Anubis, the god of death and the afterlife. Nassour’s mother is an American citizen, but his father is an immigrant from Egypt. Nassour is identified throughout the series as being, through his father, “the blood of the pharaohs.” Again, ancient and Arab Egyptian identities are conflated. Taking refuge from the ongoing storm in the Brooklyn Museum, Nassour is in the Egyptian exhibit when a statue of Bastet, the goddess of protection and cats, presents him with the Helmet of Fate, a magical Egyptian artifact possessed by Nabu, a priest of Thoth. In order to become Fate in Doctor Fate, Nassour must not only put on the helmet but privilege his Egyptian ethnic identity over his American national identity. These identities, as represented in his costume, are discrete: the gold Helmet of Fate and an amulet appear over a blue hoodie and jeans. Later, in Justice League Dark (2018-), when Nassour voluntarily dons the Helmet of Fate, his costume better blends his ethnic and national identities: combining an ancient Egyptian aesthetic with modern American streetwear. Nassour is alienated, then assimilated, and these versions of him, the products of different creative teams at different times, coexist.

For most of the more than eighty years during which superhero comics have been made, Arabs have been depicted as villains if they have been depicted at all. That changed in the last twenty years, once after 9/11 and again after the Arab Spring. The repatriation of the Ibistick and the Helmet of Fate to Egyptian Americans Danny Khalifa and Khalid Nassour both alienates and assimilates those characters. As legacy heroes Ibis the Invincible and Doctor Fate, these Arab American superheroes are Egyptianized and Americanized. They are made foreign and familiar as they fight for Thoth, justice, and the American way.

Figure 3: Khalid Nassour as Doctor Fate in writer James Tynion IV and artists Alvaro Martínez Bueno and Raul Fernandez’s Justice League Dark (2018-) Vol. 3: The Witching War

Works Cited
Douglas, Allen and Fedwa Malti-Douglas. Arab Comic Strips: Politics of an Emerging Mass Culture. Indiana University Press, 1994.

Levitz, Paul, writer, Sonny Liew, artist, and Lee Loughridge, colorist. Doctor Fate (2015-2016) Vol. 1: The Blood Price. DC Comics, 2016.

Tynion IV, James, writer, Alvaro Martínez Bueno and Raul Fernandez, artists. Justice League Dark (2018-) Vol. 3: The Witching War. DC Comics, 2020.

Williams, Tad, writer, and Phil Winslade, artist. The Helmet of Fate: Ibis the Invincible #1. DC Comics, 2007.

Adrienne Resha is a Ph.D. candidate in the American Studies program at the College of William & Mary. She is the author of “The Blue Age of Comic Books,” Assistant Editor of Comics Academe at the Eisner Award winning WWAC, and President of the Graduate Student Caucus of the Comics Studies Society. She can be found online at adrienneresha.com or on Twitter @AdrienneResha.

Political Geographies of Race in James Baldwin and Yoran Cazac’s Little Man, Little Man

Thu, 12 Nov 2020 14:00:00 GMT

Maite Urcaregui

Doctoral candidate of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

James Baldwin and Yoran Cazac’s Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood is Baldwin’s love letter to Harlem and to his nephew, Tejan, for whom the story was written. The illustrated children’s book, which was marketed as “a child’s story for adults” on its original jacket cover (1976), follows a day in the life of four-year-old TJ as he moves throughout his Harlem neighborhood with his friends WT and Blinky. While the story could be categorized as an illustrated book, I purposefully place it within a capacious definition of graphic narrative and, thus, in the purview of comics studies. The story places images in intricate spatial relationships, at times creating panel-like structures, that exceed the illustrative and become integral to how the text creates meaning. Through its visual form, Baldwin and Cazac’s graphic narrative make visible how political geographies of race, particularly architectures of surveillance and policing, contour TJ’s experience with space.

Power relations shape how space is allocated, the work it does, for whom, and to what end. At the same time, the way individuals navigate space and its limitations—from the intensely intimate and embodied to acts of political gathering and protest—make meaning and create place. Ruth Wilson Gilmore urges that “the territoriality of power is a key to understanding racism” (22). Gilmore’s “political geographies of race” theorizes space outside of narrow geographic or political boundaries by attending to the power dynamics and relations—both local and global, personal and political—that make meaning through, out of, and in response to space. For Gilmore, within this dynamic fluidity exists possibilities for “a radical activism” that “productively exploit[s] crisis for liberatory ends” (22). Benjamin Fraser argues that comics—in their subject matter, artistic form, and method of production—are a uniquely urban form that can bring into view how structural inequalities shape spatial relations, positing that “in the right hands, the visual structures of the comics page. . . becom[e] a way of exposing, questioning, critiquing, and perhaps even correcting this systematic urban imbalance” (6-7). Fraser examines how the visual strategies of comics invite new ways of seeing and inhabiting city spaces. Within the limited space of this blog post, I analyze a moment of police violence, not to elide the text’s engagement with radical, joyful practices of place making, but to highlight how its visual form critiques the way race and racism are written onto the city’s material structures, impacting how TJ comes to understand and encounter the neighborhood he calls home. This six-page spread is the longest moment of sustained-visual narration and one that relies significantly on iconic solidarity between panels. In The System of Comics, Thierry Groensteen theorizes “iconic solidarity” as the double characteristic of images that are simultaneously separate and interdependent (18).

Fig 1. Part of the 6-page spread that depicts a police chase on TJ’s Harlem street.

In an intertextual description of TJ’s street through a hypothetical police chase, Baldwin and Cazac note how Harlem’s city space becomes a playground for racist police violence. TJ’s description of his street through the simile of the police chase suggests that this sort of police violence is not only commonplace but is also facilitated through the cityscape. TJ remarks, “This street long. It real long. It a little like the street in the movies or the TV when the cop cars come from that end of the street and they come from the other end of the street and the man they come to get he in one of the houses or he on the fire-escape. . .” (Baldwin & Cazac 12). While the police manipulate the space to enact their terror, the man they pursue sees that they are coming from atop the roof of a building, utilizing his own knowledge of the neighborhood to circumvent their efforts. As TJ recounts the places where the individual might run or hide as the police pursue him—“He might be on one of the fire-escapes, or he might be on the roof”—the visual narrative links individual panels showcasing separate locations that are connected through the stairs of a fire-escape (Baldwin & Cazac 14; see Fig. 1). These interdependent panels reveal how the police use the material form of city space—its streets and buildings—to enclose, contain, and ultimately enact violence, as the man falls from the roof to his “END,” portrayed as the final frame of a tragic film (17; see Fig. 2). Even in this children’s story, policing in Black communities ends in premature death.

As TJ is describing the street, the metaphor he reaches for is one that reveals a familiarity with spectacular images of policing in film and television and an embodied awareness of how police move throughout, surveil, and enact violence within Black communities. TJ describes the street chase as one out of “the movies or TV” and this likeness is emphasized in the visual narration as it frames separate but interconnected scenes first through the panels of a television screen and then through the squares of a film strip (14-17; see Fig. 3). TJ’s perspective as child narrator astutely comments on how popular media, such as television and film, help to shape harmful stereotypes that link Blackness to criminality. His perspective also reveals how this interaction reverberates throughout the community, as he describes it in relation to himself and his friends, saying, “The cops coming from the other end of this long street got to watch out for their man from the playground on TJ’s side of the street. . . He might be in the ice-cream parlor. . . He might be in Blinky’s house. . .He might be in WT’s house [. . .]” (16). TJ describes the police’s search in relation to the landmarks that he and his friends frequent, the playground, the ice cream shop, their houses. The chase seeps into the children’s intimate spaces, their homes, showing how the police might go anywhere in search or anyone or no one. While the detail and matter-of-fact tone suggests it might be a recollection of an experience TJ has witnessed, the hypothetical nature of the narration locates it in space but not necessarily in time. The conditional listing of the places the man “might be” comments on how police infiltrate all aspects of the neighborhood in search for a man that does not exist—in search of their own celluloid images of who a criminal is and what they look like.

The visual narration uses the spatial relations of the page—creating panel-like structures that are linked through the architecture of the neighborhood—to critique how police manipulate the material structure of the neighborhood to enact surveillance and violence. Little Man, Little Man not only visualizes how structural inequalities contour spatial relations but also, as Nicholas Boggs and Jennifer DeVere Brody argue, creates a counternarrative to the notion that Black urban areas are spaces of only social death (xvi). Little Man, Little Man highlights the survival, community, joy, and multi-sensory pleasures within TJ’s Harlem community. As Baldwin described it, his children’s story for adults “dances along with the child’s rhythm and resilience, making it an unforgettable picture as it looks to those who are black, poor, and less than four feet high” (jacket description). The graphic narrative asks readers to picture not only the way that political geographies of race contour TJ’s experience but also the way that he is situated within a family and a community that is also a locus of joyful struggle for liberation.

Fig 2. Part of the 6-page spread that depicts a police chase on TJ’s Harlem street.

Works Cited

Baldwin, James & Yoran Cazac. Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood. Duke University Press, 2018.

--. Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood. Michael Joseph, Ltd., 1976.
Boggs, Nicholas & Jennifer DeVere Brody. “Introduction.” Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood. Michael Joseph, Ltd., 1976, pp. xv-xxii.

Fraser, Benjamin. Visible Cities, Global Comics: Urban Images & Spatial From. University Press of Mississippi, 2019.

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography.” The Professional Geographer, vol. 54, no. 1, 2002, pp. 15-2.

Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Translated by Bart Beaty & Nick Nguyen, The University Press of Mississippi, 2007.

Maite Urcaregui is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her current research investigates how multiethnic American authors strategically employ visual elements in their literature to navigate and critique the visual politics of race, gender, and sexuality, particularly as they demarcate national belonging and who is seen as “citizen.” Her publications include “(Un)Documenting Single-Panel Methodologies and Epistemologies in the Non-Fictional Cartoons of Eric J. García and Alberto Ledesma” forthcoming in a special issue of Prose Studies, “‘A Revelation Not of the Flesh, but of the Mind’: Performing Queer Textuality in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home” in The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies edited by Frederick Luis Aldama (Routledge, 2021), and “Intersectional Feminism in Bitch Planet: Moving Comics, Fandom, and Activism Beyond the Page” in Gender and the Superhero Narrative (University Press of Mississippi, 2018).

“The Peace We Find in Battle”: Gender and Violence in Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel Comics

Thu, 05 Nov 2020 14:00:00 GMT

Carolyn Cocca

Professor of Politics, Economics, and Law at the SUNY, College at Old Westbury

The use of violence by female superheroes has been written about mostly in terms of its subversion of dominant cultural narratives of gender, as well as in terms of readers/viewers’ pleasure and feelings of empowerment. I would argue, further, that for those who find the subversion of gendered norms discomfiting, the palatability or popularity of female superheroes’ violence also lies in stories that: 1) conform them to raced and classed notions of gender performance, 2) present them as seemingly naturalized to such behavior because they were born to it via an alien and/or exoticized monoculture, 3) accentuate their similarities to popular male superheroes, and 4) surround them with familiar military tropes and trappings. The subversion of gender norms attracts a more progressive audience; the containment of that subversion through these techniques attracts a more conservative audience, thus ensuring marketability across the political spectrum.

Figure 1. Captain Marvel with one of her teams, the Banshees, in fatigues and wielding various military weapons (art by Dexter Soy 2012, Captain Marvel #3)

This presentation is part of a larger project that analyzes these female characters’ use of violence, their service in military organizations, and their protection of vulnerable “others” in their comics and films. The book explores to what extent such stories can embody the more collective feminist politics from which the characters originated and for which they are touted by some fans, while also being enmeshed in postfeminist, postrace, neoliberal, and neoconservative rationalities that emphasize individualized empowerment for some and reinscribe inequalities for most.

Wonder Woman and Captain Marvels’ 2010s comics employ all of the practices noted above. First, most female action heroes and female superheroes, like Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, are white and conventionally attractive and almost always portrayed as heterosexual—not women of color, not working-class, not impoverished, not disabled, not queer, not transgender. They may be subverting norms of gender with their superheroism, but do not provoke further anxieties about race, class, and sexuality.

Second, these two characters are presented as naturalized to their behavior through their biology. That is, since their revised 2010s origin stories, both characters are now descendants of warlike, othered, exoticized monocultures: Captain Marvel is now part Kree because her mother is Kree; Wonder Woman is now part Greek god because her father is Zeus. No longer are their powers chosen or earned, but inherited from a non-human parent in a way that explains and softens their exceptionality—their subversion of gender norms via their physical strength and use of violence—in the male-dominated superhero universe.

Third, recent changes to their power sets, personalities, and dress frame them as more akin to popular male superheroes. Wonder Woman has become much more like both Superman and Thor. Like Superman, she now flies and is so strong as to seem undefeatable except by aliens or gods. Like Thor, she can call lightning to her and redirect it at others, and just as he carries two weapons (a hammer and axe), the 2010s Wonder Woman does as well with her sword and magical bracers. Her revised parentage as a daughter of Zeus rationalizes these new powers in a way that her gender and Amazon training apparently could not. Similarly, Captain Marvel has become more akin to Captain America through their military “dress blues” uniforms with red accents and a mid-chest star, and that military connection is reinforced in their calling each other “Army” and “Air Force” and in their allies calling both of them “Cap.” Neither will stay down in a fight. She is also increasingly similar to Iron Man Tony Stark: both are hotheads who live with alcoholism, defuse tension with humor, shoot beams of light/energy out of their hands, fly, love Lt. Col. James “Rhodey” Rhodes, and are affiliated with the U.S. government and military.

Fourth, while each of the above techniques frames these heroes in ways that increase their militarism, none does so more than surrounding them with military aesthetics. They are repeatedly shown surrounded by uniformed people, institutional weaponry, and military hierarchy such that their transgressive female strength is contained. At the same time, they are presented as heroes with diverse allies who protect the vulnerable against injustice. Rarely are the costs for their faceless or othered enemies shown. As such, their use of deadly force to engage in conflicts is normalized and can more easily be celebrated by a variety of audiences (see Figures 1 and 2).

Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel’s whiteness and non-queerness, ancestry, similarities to male characters, and military attachments as contextualizing their use of violence can ease anxieties among more conservative audiences about their being feminist superwomen. Their being feminist superwomen who work with allies from marginalized groups and who seek justice for the vulnerable can ease anxieties among more progressive audiences about their military violence. Their militarism works both with and against their feminist origins and story histories in ways distinct from their male counterparts and contributes to their global and politically polysemic popularity.

More broadly, these types of portrayals render the feminism performed by these characters highly contestable and illuminate debates about the diversification of both the military and the superhero genre. Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel embody the success of liberal feminist advocacy for inclusion in the armed forces and in media representations as a mark of equality. But they also embody other feminists’ critiques that women’s participation in such institutions as they currently operate is tokenistic and conservatizing, serves an unjust and imperialist nation and a capitalist system that discriminate against and physically harms multiple vulnerable groups in the U.S. and abroad, and undermines the potential for more liberatory actions done collectively and/or in solidarity.

Figure 2. Wonder Woman with her boyfriend Steve Trevor, in fatigues and wielding a military machine gun (art by Liam Sharp 2017, Wonder Woman #21)

Author

Carolyn Cocca is Professor of Politics, Economics, and Law at the State University of New York, College at Old Westbury. She is the author of Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel: Militarism and Feminism in Comics and Film (2020) and the Eisner-Award-winning Superwomen: Gender, Power, and Representation (2016). She has written numerous articles and book chapters about gender and popular culture as well as about gender and law. She is also the author of Jailbait: The Politics of Statutory Rape Laws in the United States and the editor of Adolescent Sexuality. She teaches US politics, constitutional law, and gender studies.

“Look Out World – We’re Comin’!”: Queer Utopia in Mildred Louis’ Agents of the Realm

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 13:00:00 GMT

Ayanni C. H. Cooper

English PhD Candidate at the University of Florida

The webcomic Agents of the Realm (AotR) by Mildred Louis is a “college years coming of age story that takes influence from a number of timeless Magical Girl classics,” like Sailor Moon (“About”). The narrative follows Norah, Adele, Kendall, Paige, and Jordan—five young women at the imaginary Silvermount University who, after the discovery of magical amulets, transform into “fetching super-warrior[s] … [who] courageously fight the forces of evil” (Sugawa). Louis relies on some of the greatest, tried-and-true magical girl tropes in her story: the team of five become “a specialised task force” of “chosen” ones who must “protect our world,” plus they “are endowed with heightened strength, stamina, [and] magical powers” (Liu 5). That said, Louis also adds her own spin to the genre by making the main cast college freshman and by having “the majority of the cast [identify] within the LGBTQ community” (“About”). Louis uses the university environment in AotR to create a utopic space for her queer magical girls. While this is a story-wide project that unfolds over the course of many chapter, I’ll examine a brief sequence towards the end of volume one that demonstrates how this utopic space explores queer identities.¹

To begin, I should explain what I mean by queer space and queer utopia. Queer spaces are, in what may be an oversimplification, “spaces which are not heterosexual spaces … these are the foundations where queerness is played out” (Prado-Castro and Graham 98). In addition, Sara Ahmed describes queer space as areas where “queers … have spaces to breathe…with breath come imagination. With breath comes possibility” (Ahmed 210). While queer space can be theoretical, I am also thinking of actual, physical spaces that can be sites of welcoming, sites of comfort, and sites of safety.

Through the use of her fantasy narrative, Louis is engaging in what José Esteban Muñoz called “queer-world-making:” “a utopia that understands its time as reaching beyond some nostalgic past that perhaps never was or some future whose arrival is continuously belated—a utopia in the present” (75). Using her comic to envision “the ways we might construct possible futures and more clearly understand how our present worlds inform these futurities,” Louis creates a present utopia in Silvermount University (Matsuuchi 275). Yes, Norah and her friends do have to fight monsters, face villainous antagonists, and “navigate the complexities of college” (“About”), but any violence they face is not a result of their queerness. Even more so, their social experiences speak to “the possibility of happiness in the here and now” (Matsuuchi 271).²

Figure 1: “Woooooow” Panel Spread; Agents of the Realm Vol 1, pp 229 (Printed)

We can see this queer utopian space in action during chapter five’s party sequence, in which the protagonists attend the 10th Annual Halloween Pub party. Louis depicts four of the five girls excitedly sharing their expectations for the evening, illustrating their fantasies for the readers. Jordan imagines herself dancing with the girl she likes, while Adele comments that “there are so many cute boys! I need to talk to every single one here,” picturing herself being waited on hand and foot (Louis 1-229). Playing off Adele, and physically juxtaposed to her on the page, Paige says, “Mmm, yeah. There’s definitely some cuties with my name on ‘em” (Louis 1-229). The characters with her are neither overly masculine nor feminine, playing on gender-neutral use of “cuties” as opposed to “cute boys”.

Of all the cast, Norah is the least excited. However, leaning into the idea that the university is a queer utopian space, even hesitant Norah is given the chance to explore her sexuality safely. Taking a seat at the bar, she is smitten by a (perhaps genderqueer) party-goer dressed as Snow White, turns away in panic, and resolves to say “H-hey” (Louis 1-235). But Norah trips over her words, the conversation falters, and Snow White leaves. Sharing a glance with the bartender Leela, Norah mutters, “Okay. That was bad” (Louis 1-236). In this moment, Leela becomes an integral part of this queer, utopic space by helping Norah recover from her failure

Figure 2: “Safe, care free fun” Panel Spread; Agents of the Realm Vol 1, pp 238 (Printed)

Leela attempts to balance the ‘bad’ of the college dating scene with the positives: “It can be a chance to get to know someone. Finding out more about them. And sometimes even finding out more about yourself in the process. And if it’s something you’re looking for – a chance for safe, care free fun…Just try and enjoy yourself in the moment, even if it’s fleeting” (Louis 1-238, emphasis mine). Through Leela’s dialogue, paired with four images of Norah’s friends enjoying themselves with potential amorous interests, Louis is connecting learning about oneself—i.e. sexual identity and exploration—with the safety of this college environment.

Though this was just a quick glimpse at the text, AotR is deserving of a deeper, more thorough study. For example, I’d love to analyze how relationships and mystical connections to older, queer women also contribute to the university becomes a queer, utopic community space or to expand on how this space functions for queer people of color. As the narrative continues—and the girls move outside of the university—it will be interesting to see if and how Louis contrasts the rest of the world to her magical queer utopia.

Notes:

1. As a note, Louis does not ascribe specific sexual identities to her characters, leaving it relatively open to interpretation. While this could potentially be viewed as problematic or wishy-washy, I posit that she is leaning into possibilities of exploration, perhaps hinting that her characters are in the process of defining their identities within the narrative.

2. In the original version of this paper, I spoke some on how Louis’ creation of a utopic collegiate space in AotR recalls actual, lived experiences of queer young adults attending university. For more information, please see articles like “Constructing Our Identities: Identity Expression Amongst Lesbian Women Attending University” by D. M. Prado-Castro and T. M. Graham and “Bisexual Politics and Spaces: An On-Campus Discussion” by Kathleen O’Reilly and Erin Sidonia Mitchell.

Work Cited

Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Duke University Press, 2010.

Jones, Angela. “Introduction: Queer Utopias, Queer Futurity, and Potentiality in Quotidian Practice.” A Critical Inquiry into Queer Utopia. Edited by Angela Jones. Palgrave Macmillan US, 2013.

Liu, Yungi. “Superpower Empowerment: Portrayal of the Female in Japanese Girls' Comics.” (Unpublished MA thesis), Long Island University, Brooklyn. 2010.

Louis, Mildred. Agents of the Realm: Volume 1 Semester 1. 2016.

--- “About.” Agents of the Realm. Accessed 20 September 2020. https://agentsoftherealm.com/about/

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York University Press, 2019.

Matsuuchi, Ann. “Happily Ever After”: The Tragic Queer and Delany’s Comic Book Fairy Tale”. African American Review, vol. 48, no. 3, 2015, pp. 271-287.

Prado-Castro, D. M. and T. M. Graham. “Constructing Our Identities: Identity Expression Amongst Lesbian Women Attending University.” South African Journal of Higher Education, vol. 31, no. 4, 2017, pp. 94-111. doi: 10.20853/31-4-914

Sugawa, Akiko. “Children of Sailor Moon: The Evolution of Magical Girls in Japanese Anime.” Nippon.com, Nippon Communications Foundation, 26 Feb. 2015, www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/a03904/#auth_profile_0.

Ayanni C. H. Cooper is an English PhD Candidate at the University of Florida, specializing in comic and animation studies. Her research interests include monster theory; feminist critique; gender & sexuality; science fiction & fantasy; representations of Blackness in speculative fiction; and anime & manga studies. Her dissertation project is tentatively titled “‘We Live in a Time of [Sexy] Monsters: Desire and the Monstrous in Contemporary Visual Media.” (To put it simply, she’s curious why so many folks are attracted to monsters.)

Ayanni also co-hosts the podcast Sex. Love. Literature, which takes a semi-scholarly look at why the “sex-stuff” in media matters. When not dissertating, she enjoys playing Destiny with her family, finding new cartoons to watch/comics to read, and making friends with the neighborhood cats. You can find Ayanni on twitter (@AyanniDoesStuff), Instagram (@AyanniDoesThings), and on her website, Ayanni.com.