Lost Precursor to Autobiographical Comics, Kangarooland (ca. 1918–1919), Illuminates Transnational Creativity in Australia’s WWI Internment Camps

Abstract

ABSTRACT Autobiographical graphic novels have become crucial texts for understanding displacement and transnational identities. This article discusses a long-lost early example of the genre, The Voyage and Adventures of a Well-Behaved German in Kangarooland (Reise-Abenteuer eines Braven Deutschen im Lande der Kangaroo), a series of proto-comic books created circa 1918–1919 by the cartoonist C. Friedrich. A German immigrant to Australia imprisoned in an Australian internment camp during World War I, Friedrich used his self-published comics to document the routines, passions and frustrations of camp life. Drawing on recent scholarship on “POW creativity” as a conceptual lens, we argue that the transnational displacement at the heart of Friedrich’s work affirms Kangarooland as a pioneering work that provides a conceptual link with later autobiographical graphic novels and which should lead scholars to question claims that autobiographical comics are an American-born genre. Its origins in displacement and transnationalism, themes that animate so many of the most renowned graphic novels of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, suggest the genre instead developed out of the ability of comics to depict transnationalism and the precarity of displacement.