Abstract Founded in 1979, World War 3 Illustrated has played a central role in radical comic art with its annual, artist-driven productions.
Abstract This article aims to analyze the exhaustion experienced by Black women in Brazil, a segment of the population that continues to occupy the base of the country’s social pyramid, facing the worst social and economic indicators. Although the topic is vast and deserves extensive research, this article seeks to start from a common point shared by Brazilian Black women—fatigue—in order to more systematically reflect on the experience of exhaustion among Black women who have made significant contributions to Brazilian literature. To this end, the works of Carolina Maria de Jesus and Conceição Evaristo will be examined through an analytical approach that seeks to explore how the act of writing can serve both as a source of fatigue and as a potential means of coping with the shared exhaustion experienced by Black Brazilian women.
Abstract Nested in the theoretical framework of Alice Walker’s 1974 essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” this research analyzes the life and work of North Carolina artist Minnie Evans (1892–1987) to contemplate causations for the lost potential of female African American artists. Evans’s exposure to white violence as a survivor of the 1898 Wilmington massacre and coup d’état is considered, as are the deleterious effects of white supremacy and the ways it intertwined with capitalism to exhaust Black women. Evans toiled as a domestic laborer for decades in the depths of the Jim Crow South. Eventually, she secured employment as the gatekeeper of Wilmington’s Airlie Gardens, one of the South’s most magnificent green spaces. Evans utilized this inspirational setting and more restful role to unlock her artistic talent. As her rest increased, so did the production of her art. This study of Evans sheds light on obstacles that African American women faced in exploring their creativity and realizing their artistic dreams in twentieth-century America.
Abstract This essay discusses Rebecca Hall’s Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts (2021), a genre-bending graphic novel-history-memoir, reflecting on its strengths as a teaching resource. It grapples with the exceptional qualities of the text, while also situating the work within a relatively recent tradition of classroom-friendly graphic novels that get at “difficult” history through a potent blend of historical research, personal narrative, and critical reflection on power and the production of history. The author parallels the ways Wake might be considered “subversive” with the ways recent grassroots movements to topple monuments to white supremacy and foreground African American history in public education have also been maligned and dismissed in mainstream discourse in the United States.
Abstract China’s lying-flat (tangping) movement, which first emerged in 2021, is as much a critical rejection of the historical ideology of diligence and the contemporary regime of hard work as it is a creative reimagination of work and rest. This article examines both the sociopolitical and artistic aspects of the lying-flat movement. First, it analyzes the use of body images by the movement to criticize toxic work cultures and vindicate workers’ right to rest. Then, it traces the ideological construction of diligence in China’s prolonged intellectual history to illuminate the obstacles facing the lying-flat generation in their attempt to change hustle culture. The demystification of diligence underlies the movement, as overworked youths refuse to keep making personal sacrifices for postponed rewards to benefit “the greater good.” The conclusion investigates three popular media representations of farming to demonstrate how labor is reimagined by the lying-flat generation. The fantasy of farming in rural lifestyle vlogs, farming fiction, and farming reality shows centers on immediate gratification and playfulness to constitute a creative space for China’s burned-out youths to escape and recover from hard work. The body at rest is thus conceptualized as a critical and creative force of life.
Abstract The main objective of this research is to analyze the narrative mechanisms used in superhero comics to incorporate the demands raised by the social movements in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. The protests emanating from the militancy of the second half of the twentieth century focused on the disidentification problem and the need to return to a process of identity resignification, which had been incomplete during the First Reconstruction. Social movements sought to generate new, inclusive discourses not only in the political and social spheres but also in the cultural one. The mass-culture industry embraced these claims by reconstructing the narrative it had sustained up to that point. The article focuses on this discursive reconfiguration in the comic book sector, more specifically the superhero comic, which applied different mechanisms to incorporate into its plots those subjectivities that had remained on the margins. To better understand the discursive forms of the superhero genre, the author focuses on the character of Wonder Woman and her participation in the feminist fight.
Abstract This essay reflects on the creation of an archive of war-related ego-documents gathered in Ukraine during the first months of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Centered on the collaborative project Two Months of War, it documents how diaries, dreams, visual art, and testimonies served as both a psychosocial coping mechanism and a means of recording cultural trauma. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, trauma studies, and visual culture analysis, the essay explores how experiences of disrupted sleep, mediated violence, and “quiet trauma” became manifest in wartime expressions, particularly through dreams and images shared on social media. It positions ego-documents as historically valuable artifacts that bridge personal memory and collective experience, and proposes that the dreamscape offers a unique entry point into the affective and symbolic dimensions of war. Ultimately, the essay argues for the importance of alternative, embodied forms of witnessing, particularly visual and dream-based records, as a mode of resistance and cultural memory in the context of mass violence and displacement.
Abstract Dolores Huerta and the Plight of Farm Workers and Union Organizers (by Henry Barajas, illustrated by Louie Chin, Gab Contreras, and J. Gonzo, 2023) and In the Shadow of Giants (by Matthew Fisher and illustrated by Aria Villafrance, 2023) place reaching younger audiences with stories of unknown heroes at the center of their mission by making the comics available for free download.
Abstract This article examines how Japanese American cartoonists have historically been at the vanguard of comic art, creating arguably some of the earliest American long-form graphic narratives to critique dominant ways of seeing citizenship. The author begins by briefly tracing the emergence of American comics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries alongside the legal histories that have shaped American citizenship, in particular laws restricting Asian immigration and barring naturalization. The author then looks at two brief examples of how Japanese American comic artists represent and respond to this national exclusion: Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama’s The Four Immigrants Manga (1931) and Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660 (1946). Both texts work across various comic art traditions—Japanese manga, American newspaper comic strips, graphic memoir, documentary comics, and comics journalism—to expand comics’ potential “as a form of bearing witness to war and historical devastation,” as Hillary Chute theorizes. Through their comics’ witnessing, both texts illustrate that citizenship is not a fixed status but is, in fact, weaponized and suspended in response to national anxieties and crises. Beyond simply representing these realities, these comics also document what the Asian American studies scholar Lisa Lowe calls “immigrant acts” of refusal, creative acts that push against and work in excess of the exclusionary boundaries of citizenship.
Abstract This article consists of a transcribed conversation between two colleagues and close friends, neuroscientist and expert on Black peoples’ sleep, Lauren Whitehurst (Yale University) and Black feminist scholar Mali Collins (American University), to flesh out the nuances between sleep and rest, what it does to Black bodies, and what it means for our reproductive futures. This conversation (recorded, transcribed, and edited) will also consider the intersections between Black feminist adages that mandate rest and self-care as a political act, and the shift and caregiving work that both affords and prohibits these expressions of feminism. Taking into account Collins’s active doula practice of seven years and Whitehurst’s lived activism as a Black farmer, this conversation engages Black feminist theories of science, psychology, innovation, and medical humanities to return the emphasis of rest on our ability to live fully, and how the quality of Black rest is neglected from infancy to mature age.
Abstract This essay discusses the historic problems of comic artists and creators, the drastic changes in audience and artists during the “Underground” phase of the 1970s, the impact of British underground comics in the US field, and the rise of digital comics and the creative solution through “direct marketing.”
Abstract These research notes explore dreams as historical and cultural artifacts within the context of an ethnographic study conducted in 1990s and 2000s of unhoused populations in New York City. The individuals the author met offered a cross-section of life underground in terms of age, gender, and ethnicity. After, by chance, hearing people speak of the “big dreams” they had while living in the tunnel, the author asked several underground residents to record their dreams using tape recorders he provided and to write their stories and dreams in journals. These journals became instrumental in understanding how environmental and spatial factors and surrounding darkness affected their imagination and experience. The dreams of this unhoused population, who found shelter in bunker-like spaces with no windows and no separation barriers along the two-and-a-half-mile underground expanse, combined sensory input of the sounds, sights, and smells of the tunnel with memories and fears, even as rest and sleep provided solitude, tranquility, and a kind of freedom.
Abstract Is it possible to dream together? This essay assembles an archive of collective dreaming that includes the art installation Black Power Naps (2015); Harriet Tubman’s neuroatypical visions of freedom that took hold during involuntary bouts of sleep; the dictionary of dream symbols that the ethnologist Charles Seligman extracted from colonial India; and Mohammad Malas’s film The Dream (1987), which documents the dreams of Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon. Against a Jungian conception of the collective unconscious that roots itself in a racist vision of prehistory, these reflections look toward dreams as they are interwoven with shared endeavors to disrupt the inevitability of white supremacy. While colonial historiography tendentiously minimizes the significance of sleep and dreaming, evicting them from the sphere of political rationality into the fringes of the private individual, this inquiry considers how these oblique frequencies of experience help to metabolize common struggles and disarticulate linear conceptions of time that conventionally orient History and the metaphysics of race.
Abstract Gay Comix (1980–98) is well known as an important comics series that brought together just over one hundred LGBTQ+ creators over the course of its twenty-six issues and nearly two decades. Despite its renown, there exists no comprehensive overview of the series and the impact it had in building the LGBTQ+ comics community. This article reviews how Gay Comix innovated queer comics storytelling by assessing how gender, sexuality, and race were depicted across the whole series, examining in particular how nonwhite artists—Jennifer Camper, Burton Clarke, Roberta Gregory, and Ivan Velez Jr.—represented racially diverse characters. In its varied approaches to portraying LGBTQ+ lives, Gay Comix set the stage for the explosion of queer comics in the twenty-first century that now portray an even broader LGBTQ+ spectrum.
Abstract When the comics World War 3 (WW3) Illustrated appeared in 1979, Lucy Lippard was already deeply experienced in New York City’s political art movements. Subsequently she became increasingly active as a critic, curator, organizer, and a devoted promoter of women and their art. Originally, she was oriented toward minimalist and conceptual art, but under conditions of increasing war, strife, poverty, pending doom—and expansive resistance—she reoriented toward social justice art. And especially toward WW3 and radical comics. Over these years, she contributed to and reinforced the direction of WW3, and her own development (including her writings of some two dozen books) was shaped by WW3.
Abstract Egyptian subversive comics emerge as effective instruments of political resistance within authoritarian contexts, employing satirical mechanisms to critique state ideologies reproduced by the built environment while circumventing heavy media censorship. Drawing on Louis Althusser’s conceptualization of ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) alongside theoretical stances from Umberto Eco, Vladimir Propp, and Dustin Griffin on satire and humor, this article explores how Egyptian comic artists strategically deploy satire mechanisms and comics language as indirect political dissent. By examining diverse Egyptian comic formats and sources, the article reveals how these works construct layered critique that exposes state ideological manifestations within the built environment while adapting to censorship tactics. While these comics function as effective resistance tools by appearing non-threatening to censorship regimes, the satire they operate with simultaneously reinforces and normalizes the very ideologies they seek to critique. The authors’ analysis highlights the potential of this seemingly unserious tool in critiquing serious political issues in ways other tools are unable to do well.
Abstract Through the historical archives of the anti-Filipino white supremacist movements of the 1920s and 1930s, this article examines how activities (or nonactivities)—such as sleeping, lingering, cruising, or idling—unsettled structures of racial capitalist, heteropatriarchal, and colonial power. The time of rest, for Filipino diasporic transients, caused panic, not necessarily because it was a reparative means for reproducing labor power and increasing profits. Instead, Filipino rest—and perhaps all forms of diasporic transient rest under rapidly industrializing capitalism—was deemed dangerous because it could engender wayward relations that flourished during the time of rest.
Abstract This essay interprets the economic and political strategies of the Pomo-speaking people in late nineteenth-century Northern California through a lens of moral economy. The Pomo moral economy developed out of ancient cultural practices, but it took shape in a specific moment of crisis following their dispossession of land, and it developed in the succeeding decades as Pomo people entered the local agricultural economy as wage laborers. An early 1870s religious revival known as the Bole Maru, or “dreamer,” instructed participants to forsake personal wealth and to direct their productive energy back to the well-being of a larger community while enjoying one another’s company. Thereafter, although they were required to work for pay, Pomos’ non-waged activities, such as feasting, gambling, and dancing—which employers and state officials interpreted as leisure time activities or evasions of labor—distributed resources, cemented valuable social bonds, and sustained Pomo communities.
Abstract This essay explores a genre of propaganda posters that appeared in the Soviet Union in the 1970s that were designed to combat what they depicted as an epidemic of workplace lassitude and absenteeism. Workers in the posters appear to be engaging in different forms of rest, repose, and recreation on the job, from sleeping to chatting on the phone or with fellow workers, to reclining restfully on factory equipment. On the clock but not working, they appear to undertake all sorts of personal pursuits in the middle of the workday: shopping for clothes, fishing, playing the accordion, and drinking alcohol. Whereas the posters (and the propaganda arms of the Soviet government that commissioned them) may have interpreted this phenomenon of worker inefficiency and apathy as a national malady, this essay reads it as evidence of vitality, of a late Soviet citizenry seeking ways to benefit from the Soviet Union’s original promise, that of liberating workers from the drudgery, coercion, and inhumane pace of the modern industrial economy.
Abstract This essay follows an arc of feminist consciousness-raising, beginning with a newsletter put out by the “wives and girlfriends” of the underground comix artists of the early 1970s. Next it examines the feminist newspaper It Ain’t Me Babe (1970–71), especially a comic strip about consciousness-raising by Trina Robbins, Belinda Berkeley. That strip follows the life of a woman who earns a BA but works as a secretary to support her deadbeat boyfriend, and who over the course of the year that the comic ran has her consciousness raised via meetings with feminists. Robbins repurposed the title It Ain’t Me Babe for a comic book by and for women (1970), the subtitle of which was “Women’s Liberation.” Both the newspaper and comic book paralleled events in Trina Robbins’s life, and together they underline the importance of alternative newspapers and comics in creating a graphic version of an ongoing struggle for liberation. The essay ends with the anthology Wimmen’s Comix, which is well known in the history of alternative comics, and emphasizes the importance of these antecedents, the first tentative gestures of resistance and liberation, which are largely missing from that history and should be included.
