Black Bleeds and the Sites of a Trauma in GB Tran’s Vietnamerica

Abstract

‘The gutter’ is the space between panels where panel transitions happen—readers fill in the blank space by connecting panels to make sense of the story. In GB Tran’s Vietnamerica (2010), however, black gutters become part of black ‘bleeds’ (pages congruent with single panels in them) to portray the sites of a trauma. This article argues that if bleeds, as Scott McCloud claims, can depict timeless space, they could also represent the sites of a trauma where the memory of the past is intervened by the future interpretation of the memory. In Vietnamerica, the panels in black in a waffle-iron grid are simultaneously black gutters and a black bleed, where reinterpretation of trauma takes place as speech balloons are later imposed on the same recurrent waffle-iron grid. While Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory helps read Tran’s black bleeds as the sites of a trauma, the latter also extends Caruth’s notion of ‘traumatic awakenings’ since the black bleeds as the sites of a trauma turn into the places of reconciliation and healing.