Bande dessinée, 1964–2024, exhibition at Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2024 Joann Sfar: La Vie dessinée, exhibition at the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme, Paris, 2024. Clémentine Deroudille, Thomas Ragon and Paul Salmona, eds, Joann Sfar: La Vie dessinée (Paris: MahJ/Dargaud, 2023). 224 pages. ISBN: 9782205211191 (€35).
This article uses the 2022 graphic novel Maroni: Les Gens du fleuve to explore the idea of ethnography as a collective endeavour which unsettles existing, traditional ideas of the anthropologist while also producing a deeper understanding of the Maroni region in the west of French Guiana. The space of the Maroni River offers an invitation to think further about the positionality of the ethnographer. The article focuses first on the challenges the collection presents to existing visual iconographies of French Guiana. It then examines how the positionalities of the artists turned ethnographers are explored within the space of the collection. Finally, it suggests that the future of comics ethnography lies in viewing it as a collective endeavour that aims to bring different artists together via initiatives such as the Mapa Buku Festi, an annual book festival in the commune of Maripasoula that inspired the resulting Maroni collection.
Whatever People Say I Am is series of digital comics challenging stereotypes. Each is informed by academic research with the objective of making research more accessible to the people it purports to represent. The process of gathering of data for each comic is deliberately slow to facilitate conversations and relationships with participants, who, as co-creators, are consulted at each stage of the creative process. Unique to digital comics, the series includes contextual articles – such as interviews with participants – that are linked to panels in the comic. This layering of meaning encourages the reader to evaluate the validity of the representations in the comic and consider if they might have done differently, or not, thereby encouraging deeper engagement with the theme.
This article explores perspectives on childhood through comics-making, inspired by the artist's own childhood war memories. Positioned at the intersection of comics theory, criticism, and artistic practice, it critiques prevailing views on childhood. Leveraging drawing to illuminate overlooked aspects of life, it examines visual storytelling's potential to reveal neglected fragments of childhood experienced during the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the subsequent Yugoslav wars, including the NATO air strike campaign against Serbia in 1999. The methodology diverges from conventional comics-making methods, adopting a visual dialogues approach in narrative construction. Transcending instrumental uses of comics, this research seeks to foster imaginative connections with the world.
In autumn 2022, we organised an online round table dedicated to the theme of ‘graphic narratives of social justice’ which was supported by a small British Academy grant and hosted by the Centre for the Study of Inequality, Culture and Difference at Nottingham Trent University. While we had both been working on and with comics and graphic novels in different capacities for a number of years, this was the start of an ongoing conversation of which this special issue comprises the next step. The articles presented here work together to set out a series of key themes, challenges, and to some extent, ethical imperatives around the rapidly growing use of comics and graphic novels by researchers, educators, and activists to increase wider understanding, engagement and empathy with marginalised groups and individuals as well as forgotten or overlooked events and histories. Not all the ‘ethnographies’ explored in this issue are produced by academics or with the intention of being read as ethnographies. As such, a further aim is to suggest how comics as research blur boundaries between traditional scholarly disciplines and the hierarchies of knowledge production and dissemination these continue to engender. To help situate the articles, our editorial introduction will consider the wider ‘graphic turn’ within ethnographic research over the past decade, emphasising the connections with other established graphic genres, including autobiographical and documentary comics, together with the important role played by comics within the growing fields of memory and trauma studies. We will then set out what we consider to be the common threads taken up by different authors across the issue – community building, author/artists positionality and reflexivity, translatability, and accessibility.
In L'Odyssée d'Hakim , Fabien Toulmé documents the perilous journey of the Syrian refugee Hakim from the suburbs of Damascus to Aix-en-Provence in France, and Hakim's reasons for undertaking this life-threatening endeavour. With his work, Toulmé attempts to intervene affectively in the Western apathy and indifference to the refugee crisis. However, Toulmé’s work is driven largely by a shameful realisation of his own initial lack of interest in the crisis, and not being able to escape his own dominating presence while supposedly giving voice to a refugee. In this article I highlight both the productive qualities of Toulmé’s work and the pitfalls of a staged representation of a perfect refugee, which collides dangerously with the meritocratic belief that one must be virtuous to enter France.
Coordinated by the ARF! Comic Book Festival as fundraising for the Lazzaro Spallanzani National Institute for Infectious Diseases, COme VIte Distanti [Like Distant Lives] is a collaborative Italian comic created by around eighty artists that published daily on social media during the first COVID-19 lockdown (March–May 2020). This article analyses the comic as visual ethnography, by examining: (i) its narrative choices in representing diverse pandemic experiences; (ii) the organisational efforts of ARF! , informed by interviews with director Stefano Piccoli and artist-activist Anna Cercignano; and (iii) the role of audience engagement through social media. We discuss how comics can act as reflexive ethnographic tools and vehicles for activism: witnessing the pandemic's impact on intimate spaces and vulnerable communities, amplifying marginalised voices, and generating tangible support through creative fundraising.
In L'Odyss & eacute;e d'Hakim, Fabien Toulm & eacute; documents the perilous journey of the Syrian refugee Hakim from the suburbs of Damascus to Aix-en-Provence in France, and Hakim's reasons for undertaking this life-threatening endeavour. With his work, Toulm & eacute; attempts to intervene affectively in the Western apathy and indifference to the refugee crisis. However, Toulm & eacute;'s work is driven largely by a shameful realisation of his own initial lack of interest in the crisis, and not being able to escape his own dominating presence while supposedly giving voice to a refugee. In this article I highlight both the productive qualities of Toulm & eacute;'s work and the pitfalls of a staged representation of a perfect refugee, which collides dangerously with the meritocratic belief that one must be virtuous to enter France.
Whatever People Say I Am is series of digital comics challenging stereotypes. Each is informed by academic research with the objective of making research more accessible to the people it purports to represent. The process of gathering of data for each comic is deliberately slow to facilitate conversations and relationships with participants, who, as co-creators, are consulted at each stage of the creative process. Unique to digital comics, the series includes contextual articles-such as interviews with participants-that are linked to panels in the comic. This layering of meaning encourages the reader to evaluate the validity of the representations in the comic and consider if they might have done differently, or not, thereby encouraging deeper engagement with the theme.
This article explores perspectives on childhood through comics-making, inspired by the artist's own childhood war memories. Positioned at the intersection of comics theory, criticism, and artistic practice, it critiques prevailing views on childhood. Leveraging drawing to illuminate overlooked aspects of life, it examines visual storytelling's potential to reveal neglected fragments of childhood experienced during the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the subsequent Yugoslav wars, including the NATO air strike campaign against Serbia in 1999. The methodology diverges from conventional comics-making methods, adopting a visual dialogues approach in narrative construction. Transcending instrumental uses of comics, this research seeks to foster imaginative connections with the world.
This article uses the 2022 graphic novel Maroni: Les Gens du fleuve to explore the idea of ethnography as a collective endeavour which unsettles existing, traditional ideas of the anthropologist while also producing a deeper understanding of the Maroni region in the west of French Guiana. The space of the Maroni River offers an invitation to think further about the positionality of the ethnographer. The article focuses first on the challenges the collection presents to existing visual iconographies of French Guiana. It then examines how the positionalities of the artists turned ethnographers are explored within the space of the collection. Finally, it suggests that the future of comics ethnography lies in viewing it as a collective endeavour that aims to bring different artists together via initiatives such as the Mapa Buku Festi, an annual book festival in the commune of Maripasoula that inspired the resulting Maroni collection.
This article looks at the first three stories of Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude M & eacute;zi & egrave;res Val & eacute;rian and focuses on the ways in which the series, from its inception, both used and subverted contemporary speculative, graphic and generic tropes. The character of Xombul, a James Bondesque villain, is used as a case study to demonstrate the playful ways in which the creators were employing recognisable types only to confound readers' expectations. This camp character, bent on cosmic domination and destruction, is abruptly killed off and the series never again features a recurring antagonist. At the same time, Xombul stands to critique certain facets of the reach of the futuristic apparent utopia of Galaxity and consequently prepares the reader to treat the Empire's 'civilising mission' with a degree of suspicion.
In this interview, television producer and polymath Peter Kessler reflects on the origins of his love of comics and his developing critical awareness of the artistic dimensions of the medium, which led to one of the first studies of a comics series to be published in the UK, his guide to Astérix . He recounts his association with the Lakes Comics Festival, where, in a productive collaboration, he brought an innovative approach to events, and lifts the veil on the process that enabled comics to breach the walls of the University of Oxford. He shares his views on the role of comics in secondary education, and on transmedial adaptation, and offers an analytical take on the creative resources that are peculiar to comics.
Bande dessinée, 1964–2024 , exhibition at Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2024 Joann Sfar: La Vie dessinée , exhibition at the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme, Paris, 2024. Clémentine Deroudille, Thomas Ragon and Paul Salmona, eds, Joann Sfar: La Vie dessinée (Paris: MahJ/Dargaud, 2023). 224 pages. ISBN: 9782205211191 (€35).
This article looks at the first three stories of Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières Valérian and focuses on the ways in which the series, from its inception, both used and subverted contemporary speculative, graphic and generic tropes. The character of Xombul, a James Bondesque villain, is used as a case study to demonstrate the playful ways in which the creators were employing recognisable types only to confound readers’ expectations. This camp character, bent on cosmic domination and destruction, is abruptly killed off and the series never again features a recurring antagonist. At the same time, Xombul stands to critique certain facets of the reach of the futuristic apparent utopia of Galaxity and consequently prepares the reader to treat the Empire's ‘civilising mission’ with a degree of suspicion.
This article studies how the main protagonists of the French comic book series Valérian et Laureline by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières have been developed over the forty years of the series, as characters but also as the foundation of a complex science fiction universe. It offers a striking example of a kind of co-evolution between the innovative drive of science fictional narratives, both on an ontological – Darko Suvin's novum – and on a narratological level, and the constant reinvention of the main characters, whose traits and relationship are at once echoed and remodelled with each new album.
Published amid post-war shifts in the science fiction (SF) genre, bande dessinée and French society, the French comics Valérian et Laureline emerge as a pivotal work. Written by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières after their time in the American West, the first album (1967–1971) blends nostalgic, American-style space operas with progressive sociopolitical themes of 1960s counterculture. Tracing the changing definitions and public perceptions of both SF and comics, this article suggests that the series opens up new possibilities for visual SF storytelling – especially, but not exclusively, in France. Highlighting speculations surrounding Valérian et Laureline 's visual influence on George Lucas's Star Wars (1977), the article concludes that the series’ inception and publication foster a transhistorical and transnational reflection on SF.
This article argues that numerous characteristics of Valérian et Laureline derive from its original context of publication in Pilote and the ways in which Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézière negotiated the norms and constraints of the magazine. By examining the other recurring comics published at the same time as Valérian in Pilote , it seeks to show that the series was conceived as an original way to fill an identified gap in the magazine's generic system, yet opted for stylistic and narrative choices fully compatible with the tacit assumptions regarding Pilote content. The article further highlights the magazine's fascination with technology, and the space race in particular. It argues that Valérian benefited from this enthusiasm, but was also one of the first sites in the magazine to articulate a critical discourse about it.
Photography and comics were both media born with modernity in the nineteenth century, with an important role in the configuration of mass society. Photography has been related to comics in many ways, but it is in nonfiction comics where authors have exploited its potential as an index of reality and as evidence for testimonies. Works such as Art Spiegelman's Maus or Emmanuel Guibert's Le Photographe [The photographer] contributed to open a field of experimentation that some Spanish cartoonists have also explored. A comparative analysis of graphic novels such as Paco Roca's Regreso al Ed & eacute;n [Return to Eden] or Carlos Spottorno and Guillermo Abril's La Grieta [The crack] and La Falla [The fault] enables an assessment of the multiple values of photographs when they are included in a graphic narrative.
German comics have in recent decades become an important art form in terms of their engagement with popular memory culture. The four works selected for discussion in this study explore the formation of identities through documentary and literary memory work: Kinderland [Land of children] by Mawil, Da war mal was [There once was something] by Flix, Madgermanes by Birgit Weyhe and Heimat [Belonging] by Nora Krug. While the comics give form to lived experience, passed-on or intergenerational memories, everyday objects and material culture play a particular key role in these four works. Objects become a vehicle for the artists to use as memorable signifiers in their storytelling and to work around ambiguities or difficulties of communicating distinct relationships to the past.
