The Great War in Comics: Workings and Imagery

Abstract

Within Europe and beyond, the centenary of the Great War began to be commemorated in 2014. As with any act of retelling history and re-creating memories, the events orchestrated around this centenary involve a certain tailoring of narratives and a process of forgetting that refl ects more on the present milieu than the past. As noted by the sociologist and philosopher Elena Esposito, recent neurophysiological fi ndings posit memory ‘as a procedural capability realizing a constant recategorisation’. Especially relevant for this issue of European Comic Art is her claim that the memory of society as a whole ‘is constituted, fi rst of all, by the mass media and ruled by their always changing forms’. As emphasised by the articles in this issue, popular media during and after the First World War (music hall, illustrated magazines, comics, cartoons, pulps) were propagators of images that have persisted, often with altered signifi cance, into our times. Although veterans of the First World War are no longer alive, the memory of the war in the public sphere is mediated through what Pierre Nora has famously called lieux de memoire, ‘moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned; no longer quite life, not yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded’. These include, but are not limited to, places