Contemporary Graphic Novels Research Articles

Loud, Proud, and All Around Hilarious: Queer Humor in Contemporary Graphic Novels as a Method of Interpersonal Affirmation and Awareness

ABSTRACT Despite the prevalent humor in political, performative, and personal means of expression throughout American LGBTQ+ history, there is not yet an academic analysis on the overlap between queer theory and humor theory. In this article, I explore the ways in which LGBTQ+ writers use humorous techniques to highlight aspects of queerness to establish a theory of queer humor. I rely on three contemporary graphic narratives as a platform for humorous expression and for challenging social expectations, specifically in regards to LGBTQ+ identities and experiences. Through these close readings, I find queer humor exposes cultural policings of gender performativity by promoting queer experiences over normative assumptions and building solidarity with the reader regardless of their identity. These methods encourage acknowledgments and accommodations of queer existence within a heterosexist society.

Graphic Novels and Traditional Art Forms: The Indian Context

The visual language of graphic novels is increasingly becoming a powerful tool of expression. Originally known as the comic books, the contemporary graphic novels are being acknowledged as a potential medium for handling serious issues. Recently, a great changeover in the thematic concerns and the art style of Indian Graphic Novels has been witnessed. This hybrid medium of text and image is addressing to the sensitive issues and questions of the contemporary modern society and also establishing a cultural identity through its artistic (visual) expression. The conventional style of comic sketching and caricaturing on paper is being replaced by the traditional art forms from different cultures and regions of India. This shift has brought about a change in the perspectives or the ways of ‘seeing’ both the Indian Graphic Novels and the Indian visual art forms. The paper purports to establish a connection between these two with a proposition that the graphic novels are a potential mode of preserving the traditional art forms of India and helping them gain recognition globally so that the Indian Graphic Novel can also create a distinguished identity in verbal-visual literature like that of Japanese Manga. The paper is an endeavour to examine how the traditional art forms are being contextualized in the contemporary times and how they are effectively registering the resistance against the stereotype and the negligence especially of women and Dalits in the Indian society itself.

Emotional socialization and agency: Representations of coping with old age dementia and Alzheimer’s in graphic novels

This research investigates representations of emotion work and emotional labor in caregiving, in the medium of graphic novels. The study is based on a collection of six contemporary graphic novels that discuss the relationships between older adults who are suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s and their family caregivers and professional caretakers. Family caregivers are caught in a complicated web of family relationships and new, emerging caregiving roles. We rely on thematic content analysis to identify the main forms of emotional agency, structural constraints and trade-offs in family and professional situations. Emotional agency in caregiving is portrayed as situated, though emerging from divergent definitions of the situations for caretakers and patients; it is embedded in the family system, which is contrastively portrayed with the procedural, less empathic medical institution, and also with the general mass media portrayal of old age. Graphic novels contribute to the emotional socialization of people anticipating situations of suffering, or caring for mental disorders associated with old age.

Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations ed. by Marina Gerzić and Aidan Norrie

Reviewed by: Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations ed. by Marina Gerzić and Aidan Norrie Jennifer E. Nicholson Gerzić, Marina, and Aidan Norrie, eds, Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations, New York, Routledge, 2020 hardback; pp. 279; 15 illustrations; R.R.P. US $252.00; ISBN 9780367256463. 'Play' is the thing in Marina Gerzić and Aidan Norrie's Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations. The purpose of the collection is to highlight the importance of irreverence and play in the creation of 'new "Shakespeares"', as described in the book's abstract. From Victorian burlesque to contemporary graphic novels, this collection provides a range of material for the reader interested in Shakespearean adaptation of drama (his poems are not extensively addressed). The collection seems best suited to students or scholars new to examples of adaptation or those wanting to expand their knowledge of it. The first section is entitled 'Page to Stage/Stage to Page'. Roberta Grandi opens with emphasizing the long history of playfully mocking Shakespearean genre and text through her exploration of three burlesques that adapt King Lear. Grandi's is unfortunately the only chapter that addresses historical representations as its main subject, although Gerzić's excellent chapter on children's editions of Richard III identifies the importance of early Shakespeare for children from Charles and Mary Lamb, Harrison S. Morris, Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch, and Henrietta Maria Bowdler. Gerzić argues that these and more contemporary editions demonstrate the flexible and complex ways of adapting even a violent Shakespearean play for young audiences and makes particular note of the effects of illustration in each edition. Chelsea L. Horne tackles Neil Gaiman's The Sandman comics that directly adapt Shakespeare as their subject. She deftly addresses the metatextual complexities of the adaptation process of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the value of such an exercise. Between Grandi and Gerzić's chapters lies Miranda Fay Thomas's critique of Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed. Thomas identifies how Atwood's novel 'advocates for accessible Shakespeare' (p. 48), even though the nature of her approach perhaps alienates those readers. Thomas also rightly questions the motivations of Hogarth Press for commissioning even a 'ludic' collection of Shakespearean adaptations (p. 51). This section closes with Sophie Shorland's romp through Terry Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters and its debts to Shakespeare. I must admit this chapter was a personal favourite, as Shorland provides an inspired and rich discussion of the implications of fantasy genres and audience in Pratchett's adaptation. The next section provides invaluable information about two recent adaptation projects. The creation and success of the Shakespeare Republic web series is outlined by Sally McLean in the first chapter. As she heads up the project, McLean offers both a potted history of its genesis and a reflection on how her team's playfulness towards Shakespeare has created their best work. The second chapter discusses richard III redux, a faintly damning reimagining of questions concerning disability and representation in Richard III by playwrights Kaite O'Reilly and Phillip Zarrilli and actress Sara Beer. Their critique of previous stagings of Richard's disability extends to reflecting on the relationships between [End Page 216] the historical and Shakespearean Richards. They offer a sensitive and insightful discussion of how this can play out very negatively in casting and costuming practices. These chapters' different authorship, emphases, and insights are an excellent counterpoint to the remainder of the collection. Sections III and IV consider televisual adaptations of Shakespeare and his context, with historical and neoliberal points of focus. For Ronan Hatfull, the Shakespearean origin stories of the film Bill (2015, made by the team at Horrible Histories), and to a lesser extent the television series Will (2017), demonstrate our cultural interests in playfully enforcing and undermining stereotypes of genius when imagining the past of an iconic figure like Shakespeare. Norrie's chapter works in a similar vein, but with relation to representing Elizabeth I. He notes that a range of films and television programmes frequently depict her fictional relationship with Shakespeare to enforce and undermine our cultural memory of her. In Section IV, Jennifer Clement discusses the cringe comedy Hamlet 2 and the cruel irony of its irrational plot of eventual success despite the odds...

Teaching Jihad: Developing Religious Literacy through Graphic Novels

This study examined the representations of jihad in graphic novels to ascertain how its depictions may inform the development of religious literacy in secondary classrooms. Hegemonic constructions of jihad in the West are commonly reduced to false binaries that shape non-Muslims’ extant beliefs and perceptions of Islam and Muslims. This raises concerns about the ways in which societal expectations shape knowledge formation in schools. Accordingly, this critical content analysis explored the depiction of jihad in three graphic novel memoirs, an increasingly popular medium of instruction in secondary classrooms. Our analysis identified three forms of jihad conveyed through the graphic novels, specifically: jihad for education, jihad for gender justice, and jihad for identity. These representations provide robust counternarratives and suggest the value of teaching religious concepts through graphic novels as a way to develop deeper understandings and counter misinformation. The article concludes with six recommendations for educators to consider when teaching religious content through contemporary graphic novels.

Floods in contemporary biocentric graphic novels

ABSTRACT This essay examines representations of floods in contemporary graphic novels that follow 1960s and 1970s’ popular stories’ fascination with the end of days, when climate change awareness was starting to hit the popular consciousness. I demonstrate that Robert Hunter’s Map of Days (2013) and Richard McGuire’s Here (2014) are paradigmatic updates of climate disaster narratives by introducing ‘biocentric’ choruses of voices that survive floods, as well emphasising Gaia. Catastrophes are caused by non-anthropocentric agents and the narrative form is radically changed. In reflecting on contemporary graphic novels’ responses to floods, my chosen texts point not only towards new biocentric responses to climate change but also raise awareness of the unimportance of human life within this vast cosmic scale.

Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory by Victoria Aarons

Reviewed by: Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory by Victoria Aarons Alan L. Berger (bio) Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory By Victoria Aarons. Rutgers University Press, 2020. 241 pp. Prophesizing in the wake of a devastating locust plague, the prophet Joel admonishes his listeners, a group of aged men: "Has such a thing happened in your days, or in the days of your fathers? Tell your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation" (Joel 2:3). A locust plague then, the Shoah now. What does the biblical injunction have to do with the twentieth-century catastrophe? And what is its message for second- and third-generation descendants of Holocaust survivors? Several crucial links emerge: Each trauma is hideous. What is the nature of Jewish life after a physical and psychic devastation? Both the locust plague and the Shoah become part of the fabric of Jewish existence, prompting self-reflection on crucial psychological and theological issues concerned with Jewish identity. The imperative to bear witness to the intergenerational transmission of trauma engendered by these disasters is of utmost importance. The transmission of trauma endures, but its artistic manifestation will inevitably assume new forms depending on shifting cultural norms. Victoria Aarons's breathtaking study, Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory, is a masterpiece of interpretation that calls to mind Joel's prophecy. Casting her keen interpretive net widely, she focuses primarily on the second and third generations, the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. The trope of memory looms large in her intelligent and insightful study. But this in turn begs the central question, what does memory mean in the context of those who are generationally and experientially removed from the Holocaust? Further, how do the images help reveal the central points made in graphic novels? Aarons, a gifted literary critic, responds to these questions in her engaging and lucid discussion of the hybrid nature of contemporary graphic novels. [End Page 336] At the outset it is important to recognize that Aarons has chosen graphic narratives as her subject and not comic books. In the author's words, graphic novels perform a variety of tasks: "They evoke the passage of time and memories both personal and collective and thus produce a material extension of trauma" (15). Moreover, "As the stories open up to history and to generations, we find a widening of the lens of perspective, a multidirectional, polyphonic chorus of voice and position from which the past is unfastened, retrieved, and negotiated" (15). Aarons analyzes five graphic novels, which illuminate her main thesis concerning the retrieval and negotiation of the past. Her book includes two second-generation works, Martin Lemelman's Mendel's Daughter (2006) and Bernice Eisenstein's I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2006); a child survivor's (auto)biographical memoir, Miriam Katin's We Are on Our Own; and two graphic novels by the third generation, Amy Kurzweil's Flying Couch (2016) and the late Joe Kubert's Yossel: April 19, 1943 (2003)—a counternarrative imagining the fate of a Jewish youth fighting in the Warsaw ghetto. Aarons ends her discussion with Al Feldstein and Bernie Krigstein's Master Race (1955), an eight-page short story that is "in many ways a precursor to the genre of Holocaust graphic narratives" (178). Since Art Spiegelman's breakthrough Maus volumes over three decades ago, the concept of comics as a representational genre for the Holocaust has been widely discussed. But what does Spiegelman mean by using comics? For him, the word comics should be read as co-mix, that is, text and image together telling a story that is—in his case, but not always—both biographical and autobiographical. Graphic narratives employ facial expression, perspective, and shadows to help convey feelings, moods, and engagement with, or withdrawal from, the obligation to remember. Moreover, co-mix has significant genre implications, as Aarons's crisp discussions reveal. She notes correctly that over the past two decades the genre of the graphic narrative "has moved from underground to mainstream," and that the graphic novel typically combines the "authentically personal and the complexly political" (2). Consequently, graphic novels have emerged as...

Readers of Comics and the Recursive Nature of Adolescent Emotion: Exploring the Productive Relation of Visual Response and Memory in Teacher Education

ABSTRACT This paper details the visual responses created by a group of preservice teachers reading a series of contemporary graphic novels about adolescence. Visual response is here understood as an interpretive methodology of transmediation, informed by theorists of multimodal literacies as well as particular forms of psychoanalytic inquiry related to creative symbolization. Over the course of 5 months, six readers collaboratively interpreted four novels, each of which took a unique glance at the emotional and developmental challenges of adolescence: Tamaki and Tamaki’s “This One Summer,” Barry’s “My Perfect Life,” DeForge’s “Big Kids,” and Yang’s “American Born Chinese.” Responding in visual form, readers were able to reacquaint themselves with the emotional value of adolescence, a value that is often unavailable to strictly linguistic modes of expression.

Anthroposcenes: Towards an Environmental Graphic Novel

In this article, I consider how two contemporary graphic novels, Richard McGuire’s Here (2015) and Lauren Redniss’s Radioactive (2010), take up the challenge posed by the Anthropocene to represent both geologic and human scales. I argue that graphic novels prove a fruitful site for investigating the capacities of both visual art and literature to respond to such a refiguring of the boundaries of the human subject and narrative. While the most commercially popular and frequently studied texts in climate fiction tend to be novels or films, I turn from considering the patterns of genre fiction to the affordances of form. I explore how the conceptual and aesthetic frameworks of the graphic novel form encompass environmental phenomena that are often difficult to visualize elsewhere, stretching beyond human perspectives. In particular, I show how the aesthetics of temporality, or visual time, in graphic novels encourages readings that take notice of the nonhuman presence in plots and narrative events. In arguing for the environmental, more-than-human implications of visual time in the graphic novel form, I focus on how representations of domestic habits and daily routines in Here and Radioactive are articulated within and implicated by unruly scales of time and space (too small and too large to contain). I argue that the aesthetics of time in the form of the graphic novel address representational challenges central to the Anthropocene, environmental justice, and slow violence, in particular, the mediation between the planetary and the domestic.

Visualizing Black Leadership: The African-American Civil Rights Struggle in Two Contemporary Graphic Novels

Over the last few decades, the genre of the graphic novel has known an unprecedented diffusion as a viable aesthetic form through which its creators can vehicle cultural and political discourses. Especially in the hands of artists belonging to social and racial minorities, the medium has displayed a crucial potential for undermining the master narratives of the dominant (i.e. white) culture, whose traditions of textual and visual representation contributed to the normalization of oppression and exclusion. As they did for other genres of the white American tradition, black artists have recently started to employ graphic narratives so as to question biased views on the African American past, along with the legacy of racialized images through which blacks have been portrayed. Strictly connected to such concern with history and its re-formulation in a predominantly visual medium, there is also an involvement in personal or (auto-)biographical narratives where the self becomes the prism through which one approaches the events and collective experiences defining a particular historical moment. In the case of African-American representations, this biographical element takes up a special resonance for its recalling the tradition of the slave narratives—a genre which was in an already problematic relationship with the ideological uses of white American life-writing. What I am going to explore here is the declination of African-American historical biography within the form of the graphic novel; I will do so by considering two works that thematize black experience during the Civil Rights Movement in different ways and with different purposes—the graphic memoir March, by African American Congressman John Lewis, and the graphic biography King by Afro-Canadian artist Ho Che Anderson.

Introduction

Survey of the directions taken by the papers of the forum “Comics and the Canon”: a reading of modern prints as an overlooked part of comics genealogy, followed by intertextual and intermedial readings of contemporary graphic novels in relation to canonical art and literature.

‘Nice cape, super faggot!’ Male adolescent identity crises in young adult graphic novels

In recent years, a focus has arisen on the difficulty young men experience during adolescence and the pressures they encounter from both institutional and cultural sources. Authors of graphic novels for young adults have engaged the topic with works that detail the experiences of adolescent males struggling with the demands of what Connell has identified as hegemonic masculinity practices. The novels we examine each feature an adolescent male protagonist who occupies a marginalized position within larger hegemonic masculine frameworks and over the course of the novel gains a more acute awareness of this marginalization. This awareness instigates a move by the character towards a more developed gender identity position. In this article, we will examine these notable contemporary graphic novels in relation to broader cultural and gendered forces, which provide a fascinating lens into current gender discourses as well as insight into the difficult choices many adolescent males face.

New Indians and Indigenous Archives

Native americans have long been the missing subjects of american literature, either excised from narratives of nation through colonial erasure or limited to the discourse of the “vanishing Indian.” Such marginalization is no longer the case, or at least not to the same extent, particularly for literary studies of national, transnational, and hemispheric constructions of race and citizenship. As critics from Vine Deloria to Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Craig Womack have demonstrated, a wide range of indigenous practices and forms of knowledge must be reclaimed within academic forms of inquiry, representation, and circulation. One strategy for Native American literary studies has been to expand notions of text to include winter counts, wampum, and other forms of material culture. Even with a narrower definition of text, however, the current archive of American Indian literature encompasses such diverse works as early songs and oratory, nineteenth-century poems in Ojibwe and English by Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, a range of boarding school narratives, contemporary graphic novels, and the amplified (digital) poetry of Brandy Nalani McDougall and Craig Santos Perez.

Teaching the Graphic Novel (review)

Tabachnick, Stephen E., ed. 2009. Teaching Graphic Novel. New York: Modern Language Association. $40.00 he. $25.00 sc. viii + 353 pp.Stephen E. Tabachnick's edited collection Teaching Graphic Novel makes a significant contribution pedagogy and comes at an important moment of need for teachers and scholars who want study such texts and incorporate them into their classes. Though graphic novels such as Art Spiegelman's Maus, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen have achieved both popular and critical acclaim recent years, their customary positioning outside traditional literary canon - form if not necessarily function or genre - can render them suspect as legitimate content literature (or other) courses.It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Tabachnick begins this collection with a carefully argued rationale for using graphic novels classroom, recounting their origins as a literary form and comparing them best examples of contemporary literature and high art. In good sequential art, he asserts, the lyricism of poetic word choice is combined with lyricism of striking visual images create a stunning, hypnotic form of poetry (4). For those readers who have, perhaps, a more prosaic view of world, Tabachnick quotes N. Katherine Hayles, claiming that we are also now in midst of a cognitive shift [brought on by new technologies] and . . . reading today has become a hybrid textual-visual experience (4). Graphic novels, he suggests, are well-suited this new paradigm for reading and uniquely poised take advantage of it.Teaching Graphic Novel is a collection of thirty-four essays arranged five sections that discuss and reflect upon multiple aspects of graphic novel form. The essays Part I, Thematic and Aesthetic Issues, focus on structural components of visual narrative, drawing heavily on Scott McCloud's formalist schema Understanding Comics (1993) and Will Eisner's dissection of medium Comics & Sequential Art (1985). Contributors this section provide readers with a helpful vocabulary for analyzing and critiquing graphic novels - layout, pacing, closure, paneling, transitions, etc - but they also (as chapters by Tucker and Rabkin) reflect upon analytical approaches and methodological tools that are best suited exploring hybrid visual and textual space occupied by graphic narratives. However, despite focus on tools, definitions, and structure this section, none of the. contributors are seduced by appealing simpHcity of a reductive formalism. Charles Hatfield's Defining Comics Classroom, for instance, takes pains critique McCloud's analytical framework, identifying several points of tension and fracture that become apparent when applying it authentic texts.The Social Issues addressed Part II, though few number, are common topoi for many graphic novels and equaUy common topics of discussion classrooms: race (Chaney), gender (ThaUieimer), culture (Horn), Holocaust (Barr), and 9/11 (Carter). A strong cultural studies approach infuses each of these essays, though authors aU engage their topics from a diverse set of critical perspectives. These readings offer smart, deft analyses of contemporary graphic novels, interrogating them not just as reflections of cultures which they are embedded but, as Horn asserts, as powerful weapons of change that can often enable students to revise their racial or cultural assumptions simultaneously and also sequentially (97).The longest section book is Part III, with twelve chapters devoted Individual Creators and pedagogical questions that arise when using their works as primary texts. There is a Httle something for everyone here, ranging from mainstream and alternative commix creators such as Frank MiUer, Alan Moore, Robert Crumb, Chris Ware, and Lynda Barry, more obscure graphic novefists like Ben Katchor and Marissa Marchetto. …

Tragik, Schock, Ratlosigkeit

Abstract This essay examines the representation of emotions in comics fromthe early history of modern comics around 1900 until the present day. It begins by examining the representation of emotions in comic strips from the turn-of-the-century to the 1950s, then presents a close reading of exemplary comic books and graphic novels of the postwar era which depict historical events. Finally, it compares contemporary graphic novels with historico-political subjects, arguing that comics are not limited to comedy and comical subjects. For when dealing with historical items, comics convey emotions connected with impotence, perplexity and grief.