Women’s Cartoons and Comics in the Twenty-First Century

Streeten draws on Simone Lia’s graphic novel Fluffy (2005, Jonathan Cape) to demonstrate how humor combines with the comics form to address and quietly challenge assumptions around childcare, parenting, and masculinity. Streeten’s consideration is part of her wider thesis that the humorous cartoon and comic has been an essential element of feminist activism in the UK, supporting serious political messages. Her claim is that the structures built by feminist activity have made the buoyant position and visibility of women cartoonists in the UK today possible. The role of humor in this history, has been an essential, yet little recognized aspect.

“So You Still Believe in the Future?”

The third in a trilogy of graphic novels by Mary and Bryan Talbot, The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia both explores the intersection of violence, law, and gender, and allows an unprecedented opportunity to explore what can be called the expository function of graphic narrative. This chapter provides the first ever exploration of the continuity between Mary Talbot’s writing for comics and her academic work, whilst also addressing the surprising gap in scholarly work on Bryan Talbot whose international reputation and pioneering work in the medium merit further enquiry. Drawing on a Marxist tradition of critique embodied by Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, the chapter explores the political commitments of this graphic novel, enriching our understanding of the way Red Virgin combines fiction and non-fiction, as well as text and image, to provide a nuanced contribution to debates concerning utopianism and revolutionary politics within critical comics studies.

On Violation

This chapter discusses the relationship between the marginalized cultural status of comics and the phenomenology of comics reading. When anti-comics discourse was most influential in the middle of the twentieth century, it targeted aspects of the comics reading experience—particularly comic books’ complex relationship to the reader’s body—that strongly distinguished this experience from that of reading conventional print literature. Such differences remain resonant today, and help to explain how and why comics, as a medium that is especially phenomenologically reactive, do not generally evince the same relationship between form and legitimacy that has typified the novel as a genre.

The Freedom of the Press

This chapter engages with important strands of scholarship on comics work, arguing for a critical comics studies that attends to the political economy, social relations, and material processes of production. It examines the relationship between struggles over the organization of cultural labor and the forms of value inscribed in comics, via the case study of a specific site of British comics production that reimagined how comics work could be organized and the artistic value comics could have– the cooperative Birmingham Arts Lab Press (1969-1982) and its Ar:Zak imprint. Bringing together archival inquiry and participant interviews, wider historical research into the arts lab, alternative press, community arts and underground/alternative comics movements, and Marxist political and aesthetic theory, this chapter analyzes how struggles for an autonomous, democratized, participatory creative practice that took place within this context of comics production were embodied in the material and visual form of the comics made.