Feeling your pain: empathy in comics

Abstract

ABSTRACT Comics are frequently lauded for their affective capabilities, owing in no small part to both their dynamism and their affordances for depicting both experience and emotion. The potential to graphically represent feeling and sensation through abstraction is a powerful tool for the medium, but how deeply can readers feel into comics beyond documentary testimony? This paper takes up the question of pain language and empathy in fiction comics. Beginning with 19th Century cartoonist Rodolphe Töpffer and critic Friedrich Vischer, and proceeding through commentary on aesthetics, comics, and feeling, we outline a framework for applying considerations of empathy and affect to contemporary comics. Our particular focus is on empathy solicited through depictions of both physical pain and affective trauma, and we argue that empathy in comics is frequently bound up in translating these experiences through the medium. In closely reading the empathic techniques in two fiction comics – Eleanor Davis’s surrealist How to be Happy and Nick Drnaso’s grounded Sabrina – we problematise the empathic potential of comics, suggesting that emotional identification and in-feeling is as much projection as recognition.