Alternative Comics Research Articles

Materiality and metalepsis in handmade small press alternative comics

This article reconsiders the narratological theory of metalepsis in comics through a discussion of handmade small press publications. I will argue that material and formal elements can collapse categories through which metalepsis is theorized. I will give examples of cases in which traces of the author’s body coexist on the object of the comic through both mechanical reproduction and artisanal intervention and argue that this undermines binary metaphors such as ‘descending/ascending’ and ‘inside/outside’ through which metaleptic incursions from and into storyworld are understood. I will argue that material aspects, as well as production and distribution contexts, have been under-considered in formulations of metalepsis in comics, and that consideration of these aspects helps us rethink the role that the body of the author and reader play in metaleptic encounters.

Stylistic co-existence and the chronotope in Stone Fruit and onwards towards our noble deaths

ABSTRACT In this essay, I will examine the co-existence of different styles of drawing in Stone Fruit by Lee Lai (Lai, 2021). I will argue that this graphic novel uses two styles of drawing to produce different space times which can be better understood through a discussion of Bakhtin’s idea of the Chronotope. (Bakhtin 2011) I will compare this use of drawing to the drawing styles present in Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths by Shigeru Mizuki (Mizuki and Allen, 2011) and argue that these comics use style to activate different chronotopic space times in order to deepen the reader's understanding of the interpersonal relationships between characters. I will consider the implications for both the drawn and drawing body in these comics, in the context of the history of naturalistic forms of representational drawing in manga and the practice of genre-splicing and ‘swiping’ in alternative comics. I will examine ways in which the movement between two styles of drawing form a structuring element of these narratives and argue that this movement is essential to communicating the meaning of these comics.

Playing on the Expectations: Seth’s It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken (1993–1996) as Graphic Autofiction

Abstract The article revises the well-established reading of the Canadian author and artist Seth’s first graphic novel It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken (1993–1996) as autofiction, employing a more recent theorization on autofiction and the autofictional (that is, autofictional pact and strategies of counterfactuality). Seth consciously constructs his narrative identity, exploiting generic conventions and respective social expectations, which arise at the turn of the twenty-first century in light of the rising popularity of confessional writing in American alternative comics. Within the scope of this article, I touch upon the pragmatic of authorial self-articulation, that is, manipulation of architextual relations by means of his pseudonym, professional label, and genre elements, as well as the functional analysis of the binary system of characters. The study suggests the importance of differentiating between the fictional and referential in autofiction in order to preserve the autofictional equilibrium of establishment and subversion of authenticity.

대안 만화의 문화다양성 실천에 관한 연구

Today, hatred and discrimination against social minorities are emerging as serious social problems. When it is necessary to transition to a diversity society where differences are respected, this study attempted to examine the meaning of alternative comics’ practice of cultural diversity. The concept and characteristics, of alternative comics, which are distinguished from commercialized mainstream comics, were analyzed, and furthermore, Georg Simmel's Stranger Theory was used as a theoretical basis to view the meaning and value of cultural diversity pursued by alternative comics. In addition, through the case analysis of the Third Bookstore <Hometong>, the practical capabilities of alternative comics to overcome discrimination and hatred against social minorities were examined. Alternative comics are meaningful as a minority culture that pursues diversity by resisting commercialized mainstream culture and as a cultural expression of various minority groups. In addition, alternative comics play a vital role in revealing the contradictions and vulnerabilities of society's dominant value system and mainstream culture through the characteristics of strangers claimed by Simmel, objectivity and freedom, or checking the tendency of cultural uniformity. The case of <Hometong> shows a specific example of cultural diversity practice through alternative comics, and reveals the practical capabilities of alternative comics to overcome discrimination and hatred.

Spaces of Care and Graphic Medicine

While there are several studies that focus on care settings in relation to verbal narratives, only a few studies have paid attention to how comics in general, and graphic medicine in particular, engage critical care environments and settings. Drawing strengths from the underground and alternative comics and capitalizing on health humanities, graphic medicine, a recent development in the comics genre, concentrates on the issues related to health, illness, and care. Coined by Ian Williams in 2007, graphic medicine refers to the intersection of comics and concerns of healthcare. Graphic medicine has always engaged informal, formal, and biomedical caregiving settings. Against this backdrop, the present article, drawing on relevant theoretical debates on spatial studies and care, examines Stan Mack’s Janet& Me (2004), Joyce Farmer’s Special Exits (2014), and Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles (2012). In so doing, the article seeks to delineate care facilities (family, hospitals, among others) and their impact on patients.

Twilight zones of history: Aleksandar Zograf’s Regards from Serbia and the Serbian alternative comics of the 1990s

ABSTRACT This article analyzes Regards from Serbia (2007), a comic strip diary by Aleksandar Zograf, a Serbian underground cartoonist, as an instance of the alternative, anti-nationalist oppositional media space during the Yugoslav War. Drawing on comics scholarship and Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history, the article explores Zograf’s use of the fantastic and surreal aesthetics to depict the political spectacle of Serbian nationalism during the 1990s, a historical time which Zograf imagines as a collective dream or, alternatively, a nightmarish mass hallucination. The visual diary spans the entire decade of the 1990s, a period of war, privation and authoritarian rule in Serbia: from the internationally imposed sanctions in the early 1990s to the overthrow of the Serbian strongman, Slobodan Milošević, following the U.S led NATO-bombing campaign. By examining the overall narrative progression of the comics diary and the use of surrealist themes, I view Zograf comics as site of dialectical images that critically reframe both the political rhetoric of Milošević’s nationalist regime as well as international mass media representations of the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.

Breakup of Yugoslavia Portrayed by Serbian Alternative Comics Scene - The Case of Aleksandar Zograf

The article presents phenomenon of emergence of Serbian alternative comics scene during the period of breakup of Yugoslavia. The analysis is focused on anthology of works “Regards from Serbia” by Aleksandar Zograf who is considered the founder of the new direction in comic art. The works drawn over the nineties were portraying everyday life in Yugoslavia during its breakup. This period has been considered a strong taboo since and is not being willingly taken up by scientist from former-Yugoslavia what makes it difficult to gain knowledge that would meet scientific standards. Zograf’s comics were being published both in his country and abroad, what made them source of knowledge on situation in the Balkans of the world. In the article comic art is also being treated as anthropological evidence that enables understanding of foreign culture and processes related to attempts of rejection of the old ideological, moral, and axiological order.

The Hernandez Brothers: Love, Rockets, and Alternative Comics by Enrique García

Reviewed by: The Hernandez Brothers: Love, Rockets, and Alternative Comics by Enrique García Alicia Muñoz KEYWORDS Hernandez Brothers, Comics, Intertextuality, Latino, Parody enrique garcía. The Hernandez Brothers: Love, Rockets, and Alternative Comics. U of Pittsburgh P, 2017, 192 pp. The publication of Enrique García’s The Hernandez Brothers: Love, Rockets, and Alternative Comics provides a much-needed introductory book to the work of these established Latino comic writers. Inspired by the late 1970s/early 1980s California punk scene, Mario, Gilbert, and Jaime Hernandez introduced new aesthetic and narrative styles into the alternative comics scene. The controversial nature of their content, specifically in terms of sex and violence, and complex narrative world can make the comics difficult to digest. Through a personal anecdote about his graduate classmates’ antagonistic reactions to one of the Hernandez Brothers’ comics, Love and Rockets, García communicates the pedagogical intention behind his own book: to address the exploitative and sexualized storytelling for which the Hernandez brothers have been critiqued while recognizing their artistic narrative style and nuanced ethnic and gender representations. Focusing on Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, García explains the value of these comic artists: “I personally believe that Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez are two of the greatest Latino creators in the US because, as ethnic auteurs, they have been able to create narratives that subvert hegemony without falling into the didactic tendencies of many writers. More importantly, they have been able to avoid the ‘ghettofication’ of their subjects and to create a complex intertextuality that could only be completely understood by a reader that can decode both Latino references and the visual narratives of the Anglophone American industry” (3). García divides his study into an introduction and three chapters, the third of which is actually a transcription of an interview with the two brothers that García conducted in 2013. The interview is a valuable addition and is organized by the central topics of the book. Following the introduction and chapters 1 and 2, García includes short “Spotlight” sections that each detail and analyze a different story by the Hernandez brothers that complements previous themes. The unique format provides readers with a brief respite while expanding their familiarity with the brothers’ artistic production. Moreover, it fits with the overlapping, interwoven style of the book. The chapters are not siloed, but build on one another in such way that the reader gains confidence in their familiarity and ability to interpret the many layers of the Hernandez brothers’ works. García repeats the themes and arguments of the book with persistent signposting throughout the chapters, to the point of being at times excessive. Yet such explicit repetition is quite helpful for undergraduate readers and allows for excerpting for pedagogical purposes. Beyond providing a synopsis of the book, the introduction eloquently situates the work of Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez within the context of US comic books as it highlights how the industry was shaped by the control and manipulation of the identity and physical organization of distribution spaces. Furthermore, García explains the impacts of the Comics Code Authority of the 1950s, which imposed restrictions on any content that defied national morality, such as crude violence, sex, and horror subject matter. Stunted by this code, mainstream comics largely consisted of superhero storylines set in utopian versions of the nation. In the [End Page 246] 1960s and 70s, an underground comix movement resisted through the parody and deconstruction of these conventional narratives, further infusing their work with content deemed inappropriate by the code. It is against this backdrop and influence that the Hernandez brothers’ Love and Rockets anthology emerges. García uses the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Frank D’Angelo, and Linda Hutch-eon as a theoretical framework to explain the intertextuality of the Hernandez brothers’ comics. Indebted to other American comic artists, such as Harvey Kurtzman and Robert Crumb, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez’s narratives function as complex postmodern pastiches that subvert and manipulate genre conventions through parody. To demonstrate this point, the first chapter provides an in-depth analysis of Gilbert’s “BEM” and Jaime’s “Penny Century, You’re Fired” and “Mechan-X.” García does not miss an...

Kashtan, Aaron. Between Pen and Pixel : Comics, Materiality and the Book of the Future

Aaron Kashtan’s latest book, Between Pen and Pixel: Comics, Materiality and the Book of the Future, is the 14th in the series “Studies in Comics and Cartoons”, edited by renowned comics scholars Jared Gardner (Projections, 2015) and Charles Hatfield (Alternative Comics, 2008). Other prestigious contributors to this series include the likes of Frederick Luis Aldama (2018), Marc McKinney (Redrawing French Empires, 2013), and Robert Harvey (A Gallery of Rogues: Cartoonists’ Self-Caricatures, 19...

Enrique García. The Hernandez Brothers. Love, Rockets, and Alternative Comics .

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Identity and Representation in US Comics

Identity and Representation in US Comics

The Imaginary and the Dead Media in the Works of the Kosmoplovci Collective

Drawing from a movement which aimed to re-activate the practices of the emancipation of cultural production established in Yugoslav cine-amateurism: Low-Fi Video (1997–2003), the Kosmoplovci Collective, established in 2001, developed various interdisciplinary experiments, contesting the elements of the media framework of production. In a specific osmosis of practices stemming from the computer demo scene, video, alternative comics, electronic music and design, Kosmoplovci contributed to the contemporary explorations of the media-archaeological art, which uses archival work and historical materials related to the shifts of media paradigms. The videos, computer demos and online interactive projects of Kosmoplovci produced in the beginning of the 2000s can be seen as the projections, emulations or anticipations of the imaginary or dead media, or even a future excavation and re-invention of media (Void, Selfaware, X21, Artificial Detection). The treatment of media machines in the tension of their imagined untimely existence, as in the description of imaginary media by Siegfried Zielinsky, and the imagined future recovery from their deep death which is another form of their dislocation, destabilizes the fixed positions of the elements of contemporary media art production: the camera, the internet, but also the parallel relation of the image and the sound. The practice of this overall destabilization of fixed elements of the media system puts the Kosmoplovci Collective in the line of continuity of the experiments of radical amateurism.
 
 Article received: December 28, 2017; Article accepted: January 10, 2018; Published online: April 15, 2018; Original scholarly paper
 
 How to cite this article: Sekulić, Aleksandra. "The Imaginary and the Dead Media in the Works of the Kosmoplovci Collective." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 15 (2018): 93–102. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i15.233

Discordant discourses: history and journalism in the graphic novels of Joe Sacco

ABSTRACTJoe Sacco’s graphic novels are often described as comics journalism, even though many of them evidence a distinctly historical method. This essay discusses the development of an engagement with the past in Sacco’s oeuvre and asserts that Safe Area Gorazde is the first long-form work where he fully deploys journalism and history together. A close reading of that work demonstrates that these two approaches are not combined into a synthesis as many scholars often assume. Instead, journalism and history largely unfold as separate modes of discourse alongside one another and as such are doubly performative: they transform our awareness of the present as well as our understanding of the past. Sacco was born on Malta but his family soon moved to Australia and then to the United States, where he studied journalism in college. He became involved with alternative comics in the 1980s. While travelling during the early 1990s, he visited the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and his experience there led to the work Palestine, which gained him critical attention. That work and the others that followed established him as a "comics journalist."

Alternative and Underground Comics: Interview with Caitlin McGurk

ABSTRACTIn this installment of “Conversations,” Caitlin McGurk, associate curator for outreach at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, discusses alternative and underground comics along with different aspects of her professional career in cartoon and comics librarianship.

Enrique García. The Hernandez Brothers: Love, Rockets, and Alternative Comics. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2017.

Enrique García. The Hernandez Brothers: Love, Rockets, and Alternative Comics. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2017.

Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives ed. by Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley

Reviewed by: Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives ed. by Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley Olga Michael Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley, eds. Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives. Wilfrid Laurier up, 2016. 305 pp. $29.99. Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives is a collection of ten essays edited by Candida Rifkind and Laura Warley. Together with Rifkind and Warley's introduction, these essays shed light on the alternative comics scene in Canada, focusing on print book-length graphic life narratives produced from 1980 to 2011, created by five white men, three white women, one Indigenous man, and one Black Canadian man (Rifkind and Warley 4). Because of its inclusivity in terms of creators' backgrounds and subject matters, the collection provides access to a diverse body of Canadian [End Page 199] graphic life narratives, offering nuanced readings that foreground the richness and complexities of the comics representation of issues both specific to the Canadian culture and extending beyond it. The collection is a much-needed tool for students and scholars interested in life writing and comics studies because it successfully demonstrates how and why comics is a fertile medium for verbalizing and visualizing unspeakable stories. These concern relationality and the deconstruction of identity through Alzheimer's, trauma and loss, failed white masculinity, masculinity and military culture, abject female sexuality, the suffering of Indigenous populations, and the role of gender in colonial Canada. In addition, we come across an analysis of an alternative re-presentation of (Martin Luther King as) a political figure, the image of the child in relation to the Canadian nation, and the educational potential of graphic biographies for young people. Canadian Graphic is groundbreaking not only in its variety of analyses that successfully blend various theoretical backgrounds and examination of the verbal and visual components of these texts but also in how it opens the door into controversial issues as those are depicted via the language of comics. Rifkind and Warley's introduction situates Canadian Graphic in life writing studies and sets the comics scene in Canada in a very detailed and insightful way, starting by naming Sylvie Rancourt's Mélodie, her semi-fictionalized comics about her life "as a nude dancer in [Montreal's] infamous strip clubs," as "a first, if not the first, Canadian comics autobiography" (1–2). While acknowledging female contribution in the field and foregrounding Rancourt's controversial subject matter, the introduction never feels like it focuses on a specific aspect of the Canadian graphic life narrative. Contrarily, it provides information about the development of comics both in Francophone and Anglophone Canada, its web and print outputs. Additionally, it refers to the history of the Canadian comics publishing industry as well as to the reception of comics within and outside academia, mentioning university courses devoted to the medium, gallery exhibitions, the establishment of the bilingual Canadian Society for the Study of Comics, and the annual international conference attached to the Toronto Comics Art Fair (6–7). After providing an overview of the development of Canadian comics, Rifkind and Warley proceed to aptly state what the following essays illustrate: that "remembering in comics can extend beyond the personal and can be a pedagogical project connected to constructions of nation, gender, and race" (11). The collection is composed by three sections, each starting with a cover page including its title and a comics illustration—an excerpt from [End Page 200] one of the primary texts analyzed in the following chapters. This, together with its cover, makes the book as attractive in terms of presentation as it is thought-provoking in terms of contents. The first part, "Confession and the Relational Self," starts with an essay by Kevin Ziegler that introduces "a category of formal composition [called] comics confession," a genre that renders the reader an intimate listener of shameful stories (23). Closely reading excerpts from Chester Brown's Yummy Fur (1983–94), Julie Doucet's My New York Diary (2013), and Sarah Leavitt's Tangles (2010), Ziegler foregrounds "comics confession" as "a distinct model of personal address" that "engages readers and asks them to participate in a dialogue through a strategy of formal intimacy" expressed via the visuality of comics, which evokes affect in the relationship...

Critical perspectives on mainstream, groundlevel, and alternative comics in The Comics Journal, 1977 to 1996

The Comics Journal, the premiere venue for comics criticism in the United States since its inception in 1977, built its reputation on its harsh criticism of mainstream comics and its championing of alternative comics, but the Journal did not arrive fully at this position for two decades. During this time its critical perspective was complex and contradictory, with the Journal continuing to hold out hope for the eventual improvement of superhero comics. However, the Journal focused most of its critical energies on what were known at the time as groundlevel comics, small, independently published comics that utilised the genres of science fiction, fantasy, horror and superheroes. The Journal largely ignored alternative comics until the late 1980s, and it wasn’t until the 1990s that the Journal fully embraced them as the driving force for the evolution and improvement of American comics.

A Mouse in the Bookstore: Maus and the Publishing Industry

This paper uses a materialist framework to analyze the impact of Art Spiegelman's Maus . The emergence of Maus into the mainstream bookstore was a careful negotiation between many actors, among them the publishing industry and Spiegelman himself. Maus created a commercial market for artistic comics by adopting many of the values and commercial strategies of the mainstream literary sphere. The emergence of the graphic novel as a major form reflects these negotiations. Far from being incidental to the autonomous process of artistic creation, factors of publishing and distribution had an immense effect on the evolution of alternative comics.

Wiz Kids, nuclear bombs, and Marvel’s Hazmat

In my paper ‘Postmodern Chinoiserie in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese’ (2014, Literature Compass 11 (1): 1–14), I propose that existing scholarship on the portrayal of Asians and Asian Americans in American comics has largely focused upon racist newspaper cartoons from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and modern Asian-American alternative comics. There exists a small but growing body of academic literature on the depiction of Asian Americans in modern mainstream comics. In this essay I seek to develop the scholarship by analysing Marvel’’s character Hazmat (Jennifer Takeda) in the context of modern depictions of Asians and Asian Americans in American comic books and the postmemory of Nagasaki Hiroshima, and the Japanese internment camps. This paper is organised in two parts. The first focuses upon the ways in which Asians and Asian Americans have historically been depicted (or, in many cases, not depicted) in American comics. The argument includes an examination of the ways in which the Marvel character Hazmat has been written in relation to those stereotypes. The second half of the essay considers the ways in which Hazmat embodies (quite literally) the violence towards Japanese civilians during World War II, and the ethics of exploring the history of genocide through the superhero genre.

An alternative by any other name: genre-splicing and mainstream genres in alternative comics

Alternative comics are typically defined by the supposed absence of superheroes and other mainstream genres, yet these genres have appeared repeatedly in key examples of alternative comics, including works by Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, Art Spiegelman, and Jaime Hernandez. These cartoonists’ use of mainstream genres takes the form of what I call ‘genre-splicing,’ the combination of two or more genres in a way that fragments the fictional reality of the work or violates the norms of the genres employed. Genre-splicing provides a vehicle for many effects and aims, including thematic development, narrative pleasure, self-reflexivity, and disjunctive disruption. Alternative cartoonists’ use of genre-splicing not only punctures the myth that alternative comics are defined by mainstream genres’ absence, it also challenges the description of alternative comics as adult, literary, and artistic, in contrast to the juvenile and commercial nature of most mainstream comics. Despite their contradictions, however, alternative and mainstream are nevertheless useful terms whose ambiguities and contradictions mirror those of the cultural practices they describe.