Movement and Mobility: Representing Trauma Through Graphic Narratives

The formal and stylistic movements found within the comic architecture of From Busan to San Francisco and Mail Order Bride interrogate the ways in which the visual and textual narrative can represent the emotional landscape of trauma and displacement through comics language. Engaging in a visual and textual critique of the global economy that trades in feminine identities, these graphic narratives interrogate the mobility and visibility of those who are trafficked. In these works, transnationalism is artistically embedded in consumptive practices of reading and seeing that reinforce or challenge Orientalist cultural assumptions about the Asian female body. Geographical movements of protagonists from South Korea to US and Canada as well as graphical movements of panel arrangements provide a form of ethical optics that allow us to reconsider narratives of trauma and commodification

Comics for Children?

Graphic narratives around the world have found lhemselves today beirlg read by certain types of readers. Literature scholars focus on elements such as character and plot structure, occupying their minds with what makes literature great and what some graphic nurratives share with that great literature. With a similar attitude, art historians focus on style, composition, and other artistic elements in graphic narratives that connect them to the art history timeline that goes back to cave paintings. Another type of audience exists, one that does not consider what graphic narratives are and whether they belong to an existing formal area of study. This type of audience is the reader who naturally reads any graphic narrative like a child. Appropriately, graphic narratives have been intentionally designed for the child-like reader. It makes sense then that this sort of audience can accurately extract the essence of this form of expression. Both comics readers and comics artists understand that graphic narratives do nol exclusively belong to either art or literature and that they are meant to be focused on the child and all the forms in which the child appears

Graphic narratives as trauma fiction

Graphic narratives of trauma often freeze moments that exercise a hold on the protagonist, sometimes through repetition, sometimes through the difficulty of recollection. Trauma narratives often include the inverse or negative of such a persistent traumatic image as well: persistent images that fail to show the traumatic events revealed or implied through words are central to several narratives about atrocity, genocide and ecological disaster. The self vacated in response to the overwhelming power of psychic trauma and the uncontrolled re-living of trauma have inspired fantastic and mythic visions of possession and metamorphosis from the earliest era of shell shock. The use of animals and monsters, particularly the visualized human–animal transformation, in a genocidal or military context visually connects genocidal cause and traumatic impact. Monstrosity as a traumatic transformation can be a revision of the “full-bodied, kinetic performance” enacted by superheroes, except as a reverse superpower which absorbs the transformative impact of shock

Comics, graphic narratives, and lesbian lives

Lesbian comics and graphic narratives have gained unprecedented cultural presence in the twenty-first century. Yet despite the surge in interest in the work of artists such as Alison Bechdel, and despite the existence of a substantial online archive about lesbian comics created by artists, readers, and collectors, relatively little critical attention has been directed to this work. The chapter begins to fill this gap. Taking the Bechdel’s work as its start-and-end point, it provides an overview of major developments in lesbian comics and contextualises them including in relation to the gendered conditions of possibility that define comics culture

Drawing (on) Disability

This is a book review of Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives which was edited by Chris Foss, Jonathan W. Gray, and Zach Whalen and published in 2016

Drawing (on) Disability

This is a book review of Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives which was edited by Chris Foss, Jonathan W. Gray, and Zach Whalen and published in 2016

Graphic Narratives of Women in War: Identity Construction in the Works of Zeina Abirached, Miriam Katin, and Marjane Satrapi

By applying terminology from trauma theory and a methodological approach from comics scholarship, this essay discusses three graphic autobiographies of women. These are A Game for Swallows by Zeina Abirached (trans. Edward Gauvin, 2012), We are on our Own by Miriam Katin (2006), and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (trans. Anjali Singh, 2004). Two issues are at the centre of the investigation: the strategies by which these works engage in the much-debated issues of representing gendered violence, and the representation of the ways traumatized daughters and their mothers deal with the identity crises caused by war