Comics Studies as Practitioner-Scholar

While comics studies as a delineated field of academic discourse is relatively new, comics studies as a practice has existed since the earliest days of modern Western notions of the form. This chapter, composed in comics form, explores the author’s own history as a practitioner-scholar, creating both academic metacomics and nonacademic graphic novels. The auto(bio)graphic(al) essay—comics as scholarship—serves as a framing device for explicating the various and evolving roles for comics creation in academia: as a subject of study, as a form of critical making, and as a means of information dissemination. The chapter also employs the conspicuously juxtapositional, multimodal representational affordances of comics-as-design to highlight tensions between the institutional contexts of academia and creative professional practice.

The Diversionary Art of Zeina Abirached in Le Piano Oriental

Zeina Abirached, a Lebanese and French cartoonist, has published several graphic novels exploring possibilities for creative self-expression amid and against violence. Four conceptual metaphors are used to analyze Abirached’s diversionary art in her graphic novel Le piano oriental (The Oriental Piano, 2015), which offers a model for evading monocultural constraints and (post) colonial exclusion. One is from the author of this chapter (affrontier), one is from literary history (clinamen), and two are from Abirached (déhanchement and tricotage). It is argued here that déhanchement (hip swaying) is an apt metaphor for transcultural alternation between the Eastern and Western cultural poles in her book. Tricotage (knitting) offers a powerful variation on, or substitute for, tressage (braiding), a metaphor through which Thierry Groensteen theorized exceptional repetition of images in comics. The chapter also shows how Abirached deftly combines fiction with auto-/biography to escape constraints of the latter on her artistic creativity.

When Feminism Went to Market

The comics anthology has long served as a productive format by which creators with a feminist consciousness have made their individual efforts visible and elaborated their networks of other like-minded creators. The material conditions under which comics anthologies with a feminist consciousness are made and received reveal how comics are a unique medium whose reach extends beyond the spaces where we expect to find feminist discourse, such as the feminist bookstore, rally, or consciousness-raising meeting. Looking at how feminist comics anthologies address these material conditions, this chapter considers how Sarah Dyer’s Action Girl Comics anthology in the early 1990s is inflected by Dyer’s history as a grass-roots zine maker and situates itself within the larger comics industry. The chapter then turns to Dyer’s archive at the Sallie Bingham Center to elaborate how her all-girl comics anthology’s mission to saturate the comics marketplace with women’s work actually played out.

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

This chapter traces the queer politics of Marvel Comics’ Dazzler (aka Alison Blaire) from her comics debut (1980), to her solo series and other appearances over the following decade, and up through her recent one-shot appearance in Dazzler: X-Song #1 (2018). Drawing on scholarship by queer theorists Sara Ahmed, Jack Halberstam, and Nishant Shahani, the chapter examines how queer reading practices expand on what Ramzi Fawaz refers to as an “affective orientation toward otherness and difference” in superhero comics by reading Dazzler alongside other concepts in queer studies—particularly those tied to disco, derby, and drag. By highlighting how Alison Blaire’s relationship to these concepts destabilizes normative gender categories, the chapter demonstrates how Dazzler’s status as both a mutant and a performer allows her to embody queerness even in periods devoid of explicitly LGBTQ+ content in Marvel Comics.

All By Myself

This chapter challenges the long-standing exclusion of single-panel comics from being seen as comics because they do not contain what is commonly regarded as a core feature of the genre: images arranged in a sequence. Accordingly, it offers not merely a defense of but what might even be called a manifesto for single-panel comics as comics. Titles belonging to this category have played an important role in the origins, evolution, and popularization of the genre in the United States. They have embodied some of the most successful and acclaimed works in the history of the medium. In many respects, sequential art as we know it would not be the same without comics that consist of only one panel. Accordingly, this chapter moves single-panel comics back into the genre where they belong. Single-panel comics are not simply comics; they are often examples of the medium at its most concentrated, controlled, and efficient.

Comics as Art

This chapter argues that the history of physical, juxtaposed displays of comics and art in museum and gallery settings embodies curatorial containment strategies that perpetually fail. To pursue this claim is at the same time to assert that comics’ entrance into the art world, rather than a function of a postmodern turn and its contemporary reckoning, has been ongoing since the 1890s. To sketch this 130-year history, the chapter analyzes three key exhibitions in which museums and galleries have been unable to either fully disavow or fully integrate the connections between comics and art, comics as art, in the past century: the 1913 Armory Show, 1990’s “High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture” at MoMA, and the 2013 exhibition of Ad Reinhardt’s comics alongside his black cruciform paintings at the David Zwirner Gallery.

Ambiguity in Parallel

This chapter provides an analysis of Gene Luen Yang’s two-volume set Boxers and Saints, which offers historical fiction about the Boxer Uprising in the visual medium of comics. Embedded with numerous historical references, these graphic narratives unfold around two fictional characters who represent the complexity of a particularly contested period in Chinese history. Little Bao (a Boxer who is inspired by nationalism) and Four-Girl (a Christian convert who seeks belonging through faith) are on opposite sides of the conflict at the time, thus presenting parallel stories that prompt the reader to contemplate the nuances in the historical past. Both characters come to terms with who they are and what they believe in while being spiritually guided by the first Chinese emperor Ch’in Shih-huang and Joan of Arc, respectively. This chapter discusses how Yang’s work visualizes the intersectional images of the “thousand palms with eyes” of Guan Yin (the Buddhist goddess of compassion) and of Jesus Christ and how they present what Paul A. Cohen has called a “historically reconstructed past” in which the Boxers and the Chinese Christians’ encounters are visualized as “event, experience and myth” at the end of the nineteenth century.

This is Who I Am

As the body of comics increases, so, too, does the variety of subject matter. Comics now address profound aspects of the human condition, especially through the genre of memoir. However, it is not enough to note the breadth of memoir topically; it is critical to explore how these stories are told. Memoir in comics creates a space for experiencing the past in a visually dynamic way that both reflects and rejects literal or factual reality, supplanting it with a kind of subjectivity that embodies personal truths. This chapter explores how the medium of comics, through its hybridity and materiality, reveals the fictionality of autobiography in a stylized manner that still connects to personal experience in a way that manages to supersede realism. In addition, through their transgressive nature, comics synergize with voices and identities that move counter to mainstream culture, giving voice to the voiceless.

In Box

This chapter explores the critical value of learning to read the graphic narrative through the device of the speech bubble, the comics convention borrowed in the visual system of the text message. Active reading of text-image hybrids, always a part of our lives, is now especially crucial in a society saturated with word-text communication systems that frequently substitute for face-to-face encounters. Focusing on the comics of Emile Holmewood, or BloodBros, this chapter analyzes his short comic, “Speech Bubble,” which situates the text-messaging speech bubble against the comics-language speech bubble. The interplay of these bubbles and the way they expose our assumptions about reading and making meaning emphasize how the act of reading is an ethical process.

Animals in Graphic Narrative

Animal representation in graphic narrative has figured in many of the medium’s important developments and anchored one of its most popular genres, funny-animal comics. Since the modern emergence of the form sometime around the end of the nineteenth century, major figures such a Richard Outcault, Winsor McCay, George Herriman, Edwina Dumm, Carl Barks, Robert Crumb, and Jim Woodring have made extensive use of the animal figure, in both highly and minimally anthropomorphized forms. As argued by John Berger, David Herman, and other scholars, the animal’s lack of human speech renders it vulnerable to a brand of representational colonialism whereby its in-itself existence is emptied in favor of other symbolic, metaphorical, or ideological functions. Many works since the 1980s by Grant Morrison, Steven Murphy and Michael Zulli, and Nicole Georges have striven for less anthropomorphized depictions, in a bid to address the ethics involved in representing the animal subject.