Comics Forum

‘“I really do believe

future generations can

live without the in-

tervals of anxious

fear we know between our

bouts and strolls of

ecstasy.”’

James Schuyler

(qtd. in José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia)

The first two books of comics published by Norwegian dancer, choreographer, and comic book artist Brynjar Åbel Bandlien are also the first two and only comics published in Romania that address queer topics.[1] The author embarked on the doubly daunting task of using a medium that was new for him (i.e. comics) and representing a way of living (that he calls strîmb)[2] whose visual presence in Romania is quite scarce. Bandlien’s two fictional autobiographies, Strîmb Life (2009) and Strîmb Living – 5 Years with Oskar (2011), are related attempts to provide a view of what it means to be living a strîmb life, although more often than not they are simply about living a happy life. These two books are welcome interventions in a space of almost complete silence and everyday invisibility, but they are (thankfully) neither didactic to-do lists meant to guide us through the hours and days of a queer life, nor are they exhaustive exercises in defining queerness.

Queering the Everyday in Bucharest and Elsewhere: Strîmb Life (2009)

Bandlien’s first comic book, Strîmb Life, works really well to convey a sense of the mundanely extraordinary that is his everyday life in Bucharest and elsewhere with his partner, Manuel Pelmuş. In Romanian, strîmb translates as ”bent,” but it is definitely not a familiar term for ”queer,” perhaps because there is no generally used familiar term for ”queer” in Romanian that is not offensive. The first queer (or strîmb) comic book published in Romania is thus square-ish, slim, black-and-white, and has a peephole carved in the front cover (Fig. 1). The book looks strangely unassuming for such an achievement.

Fig. 1. Two-part cover of Strîmb Life, showing Brynjar and Manuel through a peephole.

Through that important peephole in the cover of Strîmb Life, the reader is invited to become a voyeur in possession of a rare gift of visibility: the everyday life of a gay couple, a fairly absent image in contemporary Romania. Divided thematically into a few chapters, the book contains one-page stories with the same panel structure (8 panels plus a round one in the middle, reproducing the peephole on the cover). Two panels inevitably show the two male protagonists asleep, in the morning and at night, perhaps to indicate the same soothing routine in which this couple contentedly basks day after day.

The couple displays a quiet satisfaction with the little repetitions of life, also expressed by their unchanging body postures. Brynjar is always shown casually lying back, hands behind his head, and Manuel is always cross-legged, his Mac on his lap. Irrespective of the activity they are engaged in (Fig. 2)[3], their life is permanently tethered to the central panel, going round it at a steady pace, grounded by the harmony of the ‘home strîmb home’ that the two men have managed to build. In this way, it appears that the apparent “peephole” suggested by the book cover is slowly turning out to be less a gateway to the arcana of homosexuality and more a formal device meant to suggest the separation of the happy couple from the outside world, whose intrusions are not always welcome.

Fig. 2. The first page of Strîmb Life, introducing the two main characters, Brynjar and Manuel.

The “outside” of Bucharest is, however, for most of the time, an extension of the couple’s indoor life, especially when they go to places (such as the Contemporary National Dance Center, The French Institute, The Goethe Institute, underground club Ota, the Contemporary National Art Museum) populated by friends and likeminded people.

The everyday activities of this strîmb couple inside the home are those of any couple: chatting about the events of the day, looking out the window to observe the latest in Bucharest fashion, taking out the trash, having sex (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3. ‘Spoons,’ ‘missionary style,’ ‘doggy style,’ ’69,’ ‘ABBA (back to back),’ ‘hybernation.’

The peephole closes when it comes to their carefully listed sexual positions; darkness and a sheet cover the couple’s activities, the labels handwritten in the bookcase above the bed and the wavy line of the bedclothes the only clues for the reader’s imagination. There is even a footnote explaining the fifth position, boasting a private name, ABBA (‘back to back’), although the wavy line does not change significantly and the reader is left scratching her head and, much like in the famous drawing from Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, wondering whether that particular panel contains the drawing of a hat or an elephant inside a boa constrictor.

The narrative of this enviable cohabitation is rarely punctured by conflict, and whenever that happens, the source is never dissension within the couple’s ranks: it is the outside world, manifesting itself, say, as the stray dogs of Bucharest or the made-up drama of “GeorgeMichaelJackson,” a street kid the couple “adopts” after pregnancy predictably fails to follow sex. However, little shakes the harmony of this couple, whose routine is joyfully accepted and peacefully enacted irrespective of geographical location (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4. Snapshots of Brynjar and Manuel’s travels through Berlin, Lisbon, Istanbul, Tangier, New York, and Chişinău.

Strîmb Life is keen on showing that love is indeed the belief in repetition, the belief that the beloved will come again, as queer theorist Peggy Phelan was saying in Mourning Sex, where she also combined autobiography, biography, and fiction. It is a combination of genres that works well in Strîmb Life, in support of the concluding statement issued from the peephole/bubble the Brynjar character says to his partner on the last page, ‘I never get bored with you’ (Fig. 5).[4]

Fig. 5. The last page of Strîmb Life.

One Step Closer to Utopia: Strîmb Living: Five Years with Oskar (2011)

The contented routine of the two characters from Strîmb Life is seamlessly continued in Strîmb Living: Five Years with Oskar, even if the geography of the book has changed: the habitation of the strîmb couple, Brynjar and Manuel, is now thirty minutes from Oslo, in a snug house tucked away in a forest and circled by flying men that appear to have taken the place of the protective peephole from the first book (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6. The house where Oskar, Brynjar and Manuel live, circled by the flying men.

The benign Oskar, a pensioner in his seventies one guesses to be a relative of Brynjar’s, although the connection is not explained, is now added to the couple’s formula for happiness. Oskar is a mediating figure, represented as a kind chubby bespectacled man mostly seated between Brynjar and Manuel, whom he has welcomed to his home (Fig. 7). There, they each take turns buying groceries and performing various chores, but more often than not they are so static that they are even vacuumed by the cleaning lady. They rarely leave the house and prefer falling asleep in front of the TV, where they watch various shows as well as what they pronounce to be the same old news, over and over again.

Fig. 7. Oskar seated between Brynjar and Manuel, in a telling panel where Oskar cannot remember a word that the other two characters are already piecing together, in the same harmony as in the previous book.

Indeed, Strîmb Living is one step closer to utopia than Strîmb Life, perhaps because the intrusions of the everyday appear less here, and the harmonious and often dreamlike universe of love and leisure populated by our three main characters tends to contaminate the rest of the world rather than allowing the world to come in and spoil its bliss. These intrusions of dreams upon reality are accepted with calm by the characters, such as when Brynjar and Manuel hitch a ride on a moose’s back on one of the rare occasions when they have to leave the house to attend a party (Fig. 8), or the occasion when Oskar meets and helps the king of Norway whilst skiing in the forest. Even David Attenborough’s nature show features a moose coming out of the crack of a buttock-shaped mountain to possibly sexually assault him; thus, even the documentary TV show is infused with playful fiction.

Fig. 8. Brynjar and Manuel hitch a ride on a moose’s back on their way to a party.

Homophobia is rarely present either in Strîmb Life (where it does not make a full-fledged appearance) or in Strîmb Living, and when it does appear, it is regarded with stupefaction, as in the episode where some kids in an Oslo parade shout homophobic slurs, to Oskar’s dismay (Fig. 9). The latter is an upsetting moment Bandlien downplays by quickly using the opportunity of quoting, in Oskar’s screaming face, the figure of the artist most present in Oslo, Edvard Munch.

Fig. 9. Oskar’s reaction after they are insulted by kids shouting homophobic slurs at them during an Oslo parade.

There is also some related violence, but it is part of the fictional realm, and it appears in the form of a TV show – called Strîmb Kids – featuring two queer children, a male ballet dancer who looks strikingly like Brynjar and a female judo player;[5] they are the strîmb kids who team up to distribute deserved punishment upon homophobes.

The rather ‘extravagant’ lifestyle – as the Brynjar character puts it – of the three men in this second book is, however, periodically threatened by its inevitable end, signaled by Oskar’s increasingly frequent falls which indicate a failing health he is generously trying to keep from his two houseguests, so as not to alarm them. Although the outside world is kept at bay and the little forest utopia prospers undisturbed for a while, the levitating men become rather ominous, associated as they are with Oskar’s episodes, where he loses consciousness and presumably drifts into a dreamlike state. Drawn as they are on extensions to the book, fold-out pages that make it appear to have the ability of flying away at any given moment, the flying men are reality checks – signs of the temporary nature of achieved utopia – paradoxically relegated to the realm of dreams and hallucinations. Oskar is evasive whenever he is asked about his episodes, but their increased frequency indicates that he is slowly leaving the peaceful utopia he has created together with the other two young men. At the end of the book, he simply does not return after one of his episodes, and his half-sketched face signals his evanescence. This is an appropriate representational solution for the disappearance of a character whose connection to life seems fragile at all times, perhaps also because of his rare kindness and incredible benevolence.

Interrogating Queer Life/Living as Utopia

Strîmb Life and Strîmb Living may not be quite successful in establishing strîmb as a new term in the generally poor vocabulary Romanian has for queer things, but Brynjar and Manuel do on occasion attempt to create a vague definitional cluster around the term. For instance, in Strîmb Living the couple playfully solve a crossword puzzle and successfully guess words such as “bum,” “semen,” “butch,” “testicles,” “dildo,” and in the end they realize that the fact that they have a 100% score means that they must be strîmb. This is completed somewhat by the lines of the cheerful song they sing when a friend (in possession of “strîmb beauty,” we are told) gives them a sledge ride home (Fig. 10). The song suggests that the world has never been as straight as all that (“no line runs in one direction/nothing goes in one straight line”) and perhaps that “true love” is responsible for the partner we choose.

Fig. 10. The strîmb song, whose score is also given at the end of the book.

However, the song thankfully maintains a good distance from its own potential axiomatic heaviness, not only because, like most of the book, it whimsically moves from one topic to another, but also because the three goofy characters are all catapulted off the sledge, presumably because of an error committed by the little dog driver with a medical collar around its head.

Bandlien’s strîmb work thus confirms the notorious ‘resistance to definition’ (Jagose 1) of queerness, but also engages in deliberate but playful conversation with the methods of an important comics genre, that of “reality-based comics,” also known by many other names, such as “autobiographical comics,” “graphic memoir,” “autographics” (cf. Whitlock). In the end, Bandlien willingly situates his work on the side of “autobifictionalography” (cf. Barry), where he can productively use fantasy to flesh out the missing pieces of an extravagant world of love and happiness.

At the same time, Bandlien’s decision to place his characters outside of (hetero)normative time manages to draw the important outline of a utopian space where queer/strîmb is a temporarily achieved utopia but also a future hope (Fig. 11) through the joyful routine of a couple that escapes the demons of compulsory chronology,[6] ‘the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance’ (Halberstam 6).

Fig. 11. The promise of a queer utopia.

In this sense, it is important that so little emphasis is placed on the work of the two main characters, who are well-known and very active artists, because in this manner Bandlien manages to lift his narrative even further out of “grown-up” temporality, responsibility, and fear. There is—importantly—no fear in Bandlien’s work, and it is in this fearless place where repetition is embraced as a confirmation of the beloved’s presence that we can find the blueprints for the Not-Yet-Here [7] of strîmbness.

Author’s Note

I would like to thank Brynjar Åbel Bandlien for allowing me to use images from his books in this paper, and also for his promptness and kindness during the writing process. A few paragraphs from my comments on Strîmb Life, as well as the interview with Brynjar Åbel Bandlien were initially done for a comics app (COMICS RO), financed by an AFCN grant and commissioned by Asociaţia Jumătatea Plină. The writing of this paper was also made possible by UEFISCDI grant PN-II-RU-TE-2011-3-0149, Cross-Cultural Encounters in American Trauma Narratives: A Comparative Approach to Personal and Collective Memories; project coordinator: Assoc. Prof. Roxana Elena Oltean.

Works Cited

Bandlien, Brynjar Åbel. Strîmb Life. Bucharest: Hardcomics Publishers, 2009. Print.

—. Strîmb Living: Five Years with Oskar. Bucharest: Hardcomics Publishers, 2011. Print.

Barry, Lynda. One! Hundred! Demons! Seattle: Sasquatch, 2002. Print.

Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York UP, 2005. Print.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York UP, 2009. Print.

Phelan, Peggy. Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. London: Routledge, 1997. Print.

Whitlock, Gillian. ‘Autographics: the Seeing “I” of the Comics.’ Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (Winter 2006): 965-79. Print.

Mihaela Precup is an Assistant Professor in the American Studies Program at the University of Bucharest, Romania, where she teaches American visual culture, popular culture, film studies, as well as American literature. Her main research interests include autobiographical comics, trauma studies, and family photography. She is the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship with the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Yale University (2006-2007). She edited a volume of essays entitled American Visual Memoirs after the 1970s. Studies on Gender, Sexuality, and Visibility in the Post-Civil Rights Age (Bucharest: Bucharest University Press, 2010). She is currently involved in two research projects funded by the National University Research Council of Romania (NURC), Cross-Cultural Encounters in American Trauma Narratives: A Comparative Approach to Personal and Collective Memories and Women’s Narratives of Transnational Relocation.

[1] – This paper is informed by José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, where he identifies the queer aesthetic as the place that ‘frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity’ (1).

[2] – In Romanian, strîmb translates as bent/not straight. I shall come back to this term later in my paper.

[3] – In an interview, I asked Bandlien what his motivation was for portraying himself here as a loafer, blissfully smiling, hands behind his head, and, I thought, never working. However, Bandlien drew my attention to the fact that, despite appearances, he does portray himself and Manuel working in this part of the book: ‘I do portray myself and Manuel at work on the first page in the second panel/fourth and sixth frame of Strîmb Life [Fig. 2]; Manuel playing music from a gettoblaster and me dancing naked at Centrul National al Dansului-Bucuresti. But its true that my dancing career isn’t very present in Strîmb Life. The fixed positions in which Manuel and myself are posing throughout the book, which by the way are the same as in Strîmb Living, have to be seen in relation with the structure of the panels. At the center of each page is a circular frame of Manuel and me sitting in our living-room. The cover shows even more clearly how we in fact are sitting inside a bubble hovering above Bucharest. I guess that is how I saw us at the time… living from day to day, dancing at parties and hanging around Bucharest with our friends in a more or less decadent lifestyle. I wished for us to remain unchanged by all the situations and events that were taking place around us (…).’

[4] – However, there is definitely a disconnectedness in Strîmb Life from the everyday realities of Romania outside the standard issues of aggressive stray dogs and orphans. Nowhere else is that more visible than in the ”adoption” episode that reads as unnecessarily flimsy and seems to avoid the real social issue behind the caricature (although the couple does do social work in an underprivileged community, which makes that part of the book even foggier ideologically). Perhaps this indicates a certain difficulty of separating the life of a couple so completely from the life of the city, and this hesitation speaks quite aptly about the negotiation with the outside world many couples must perform.

[5] – In my interview with Bandlien, he did say that his next comic book will be entitled Strîmb Kids, and that it is a project developed together with his friend, Stine Lastein, and related to ‘Strîmb Kids, that somewhat violent two episode TV-show in Strîmb Living.’

[6] – It is true, Oskar does die, but it is perhaps more accurate to say that he vanishes. Also, throughout the book, the Oskar character is also portrayed as an individual who lives outside of time.

[7] – I am here referencing José Esteban Muňoz’s Cruising Utopia, where he relies on Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope to suggest that ‘queerness in its utopian connotations promises a human that is not yet here, thus disrupting any ossified understanding of the human’ (25-6).

Jason Lutes’ stunning graphic novel, Berlin: City of Stones, captures a response to the woodcut novel that represents a common reaction by many readers who first open one of these books. In this case, the book Mein Stundenbuch (Passionate Journey) by Frans Masereel is targeted by the character Erich, who is having a heated discussion about objectivity and emotion with his friends. The panels display Erich as he pulls the book from his friend’s coat pocket. In a manner of disgust, Erich presents the book as an example of emotionalism. His attitude changes when he opens the pages and becomes engrossed in the pictures.

Fig. 1. Berlin: City of Stones. Book One. © Jason Lutes. Used by permission.

Erich’s interest reflects a natural desire for storytelling and in this example the power of woodcut novels, which are wordless imaginative and realistic stories by Masereel, Otto Nückel, Lynd Ward and others. They are told in black and white pictures that focus on humanistic ideas. The woodcut novel refers not only to woodcuts but also to wood engravings, linocuts, leadcuts, and solid plastic. A woodcut uses the plank cut with the grain, while a wood engraving uses hardwood cut across the grain that allows a finer line. Despite their short-lived popularity, the woodcut novel had an important impact on the development of the contemporary graphic novel.

The popularity of Masereel’s woodcut novel in this scene by Lutes, set in Germany during the 1920s, is due to the commitment of the publisher Kurt Wolff, who was introduced to Masereel’s woodcut novels by Hans (Giovanni) Mardersteig, Wolff’s book designer. Wolff noted his association with Masereel later in an essay:

It was Mardersteig who established the connection with Frans Masereel. When we first published his Stundenbuch (Book of Hours) in 167 woodcuts, the Belgian’s name was completely unknown in Germany. Within a few years Masereel’s series of woodcuts—Stundenbuch, Sonne (Sun), Passion eines Menschen (A Human Passion), Die Idee (The Idea), Geschichte ohne Worte (Story without Words)—produced in inexpensive editions with introductions by Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and others, won a surprisingly large circle of admirers and attained a number of printings we had never expected, given the uncompromising quality and character of these books. (15) [1]

What made these books so popular? At the core of the woodcut novel and the wordless novel is the use of pictures to tell a story. In his critical book Words About Pictures, Perry Nodelman captures the essential ingredients of wordless novels.[2]

Because these books have no words to focus our attention on their meaningful or important narrative details, they require from us both close attention and a wide knowledge of the visual conventions that must be attended to before visual images can imply stories….finding a story in a sequence of pictures with no help but our eyes is something like doing a puzzle. It cannot be done if we do not know that it is meant to be done, so we must first understand that there is indeed a problem to be solved. (186-187)

In addition, a score of artists have found the woodcut novel a perfect medium to express their ideas from a personal, imaginative, and social standpoint. The process of carving a block is a ponderous activity with few practitioners today. Creators of the woodcut novels include George Walker and various artists who teeter between the graphic novel and artists’ books.[3]

Today, readers of comics approach the woodcut novel, and the wordless graphic novel in general, with a sophisticated graphic vocabulary, enhanced over the past two decades by the advances in technology and the greater use of an iconic language in various functions including smartphones, gaming, and, of course, the internet. Immediate access to information also provided answers to inquiries about the development of the graphic novel and artists of historical importance. The recognition of the woodcut novel as part of the medium of comics and its place in the history of comics was confirmed with the selection of Lynd Ward as the Judges’ Choice in the 2011 Will Eisner Hall of Fame.

This was not always the case. With little understanding or scholarly interest in this genre of storytelling these works remained in libraries, private collections, and used bookstores and were largely discovered serendipitously, as in my case. There were single editions of Masereel’s most important woodcut novel, Passionate Journey that Dover Publications (1971), Penguin (1988), and City Lights (1988) kept in print. Ward’s Gods’ Man was reprinted by World Publishing (1966), St. Martin’s Press (1978), and Abrams who collected all six woodcut novels, selected books illustrations and prints in Storyteller Without Words: The Wood Engravings of Lynd Ward (1974). The woodcut novels of Masereel and Ward were mentioned in books on illustration and printmaking but rarely from a narrative perspective. One scholarly article ‘The Novel in Woodcuts: A Handbook,’ published in 1977 by Martin Cohen drew little attention at the time but is now an essential work in the understanding of the woodcut novel.[4] When the comic book expanded from a serial to include a book length format referred to as a graphic novel, a term attributed to Will Eisner [5], the perception of the comic began to change.

It has been my advantage to witness the evolution of the comic that has also increased the awareness of wordless novels, my lifetime undertaking. The additional branding of the graphic novel and the sophisticated level of storytelling changed the public’s idea of comics, which created browsing areas in bookstores, and slowly opened the impenetrable golden gates of the Modern Language Association, so that graphic novels are now discussed at numerous conferences beyond the Comics Arts Conference, established in 1992, and the Popular Culture Association, which was the first national academic conference with a separate division devoted to comics scholarship.[6] Critical journals like INKS: Cartoon and Comic Art Studies (1994-1997) and International Journal of Comic Art (1999-) were established for a growing group of comic scholars and publishers like University Press of Mississippi—an early publisher of scholarly books on comics—are now among many journals and publishers devoted to comic studies. In addition, graphic novels are now taught at colleges and universities and are the subject of a growing number of dissertations.

Rosemary Ross Johnston joins others and me in recognizing the graphic novel as literature: ‘This reflects a significant and deeper shift in ideas about language in general, and about “reading” in particular. Images in narrative are no longer “viewed”; they are “read,” with all the implications that that term carries in the meaning-making process (422).’

Despite being considered oddities, woodcut novels were also being rediscovered and reported as a major influence in the lives of noted comic artists like Peter Kuper, wordless picture book artists like David Wisner,[7] and creators of artists’ books including Jules Remedios Faye. In addition, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and Will Eisner’s Graphic Storytelling were key reference books that identified the woodcut novel’s contribution in the development of comics.[8]

In conjunction with this growing public interest, Dover Publications came out with new editions of woodcut novels: five works by Masereel; Nückel’s masterpiece Destiny, which had not been republished since 1930; all six of Ward’s woodcut novels; and James Reid’s Life of Christ in Woodcuts. The Library of America chose Lynd Ward’s six woodcut novels as their first publication with illustrations in 2012, and an outstanding documentary film O Brother Man: The Art and Life of Lynd Ward by Michael Maglaras and Terri Templeton produced in 2012, that further affirmed public acknowledgment of the woodcut novel.

Earlier, when I was writing introductions to new editions of these forgotten woodcut novels for Dover Publications, I slowly discovered a rising fountain of wordless novels that surged with freshness and showered me with entirely new and exciting work across the continents. What was an anomaly like Pilipino Food (1972) by Ed Badajos or Squeak the Mouse (1984) by Mattioli lead to a series of works like Gon by Masashi Tanaka and the Frank series by Jim Woodring in the 1990s, in addition to single works by a variety of artists like Mea Culpa by Peter Kalberkamp and The Silent City by Erez Yakin.[9]

Forecasting this rise in wordless novels was L’Association, a noted French publisher of bande dessinée, when it published Comix 2000 in celebration of the millennium. This was a mammoth book of 2000 pages of wordless comics by 324 artists from 29 different countries and it became a reference to many artists who would go on to create wordless novels.

What was once only practiced by a few artists slowly began attracting others like Eric Drooker, Thomas Ott, and Chris Lanier, whose scratchboard drawings imitate the appearance of a woodcut. These and other artists committed to the wordless novel have strengthened the foundation for a growing assortment that extends today in the work of Andrzej Klimowski, Vincent Fortemps, Michael Matthys, Winshluss, Marc-Antoine Mathieu, Danijel Žeželj and numerous others.

Not only are many of these wordless novels incredibly rich in narrative scope but the media varies as much as the themes. These novels fall within the scope of comics, but there are also choice children’s picture books that have the same sense of excitement and urgency associated with graphic novels that cross back and forth between the two audiences. A good example of this crossover is Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, which won many awards including both the Angouleme International Comics Festival Prize for Best Album and the New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books award.

Marshall Gregory in his recent book, Shaped by Stories: The Ethical Power of Narratives, writes: ‘We find stories useful because they swallow the whole world, and in fact the domain of stories may be the only form of human learning other than religion that makes the attempt to encompass the entirety of human life and experience.’ (31) This was true with the woodcut novel and continues today with the wordless graphic novel; they attest to the power of stories to display the mystery of our lives.

Works Cited

Gregory, Marshall W. Shaped by Stories: The Ethical Power of Narratives. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2009.

Johnston, Rosemary R. ‘Graphic Trinities: Languages, Literature, and Words-in-Pictures in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival.’ Visual Communication 11.4 (2012): 421-41.

Lutes, Jason. Berlin: City of Stones. Book One. Montreal, Quebec: Drawn & Quarterly, 2001.

Nodelman, Perry. Words about Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books. Athens: University of Georgia, 1988.

Wolff, Kurt, and Michael Ermarth (ed). Kurt Wolff: A Portrait in Essays & Letters. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991.

David A. Beronä is a historian of the woodcut novel and wordless comics. He is the author of Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels (2008)—with editions in French and Korean, a winner at the New York Book Show, and a Harvey Awards nominee. He has published and presented papers widely on these topics with essays in Critical Approaches to Comics: Theory and Methods (Routledge, 2011) and The Language of Comics: Word and Image (University Press of Mississippi, 2001). He recently selected and edited Alastair Drawings and Illustrations (Dover Publications, 2011) and Eric Gill’s Masterpieces of Wood Engraving (Dover Publications, 2013). He is a member of the visiting faculty at the Center for Cartoon Studies and the Dean of the Library and Academic Support Services at Plymouth State University, New Hampshire.

[1] – It is important to note in the history of publishing that Wolff left Germany in 1930 and immigrated to New York. In 1942 he founded Pantheon Books and published the wordless novel Danse Macabre by Masereel in the same year. Pantheon Books has continued this commitment to graphic artists and championed graphic novels by Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, and others in recent years.

[2] – Although Nodelman’s focus is on children’s picture books, I have found that his evaluation of reading a wordless book also aptly applies to wordless comics.

[3] – There is a growing list of contemporary artists who have published a woodcut novel including Marta Chudolinska, Stefan Berg, Megan Speer, and Neil Bousfield. Chudolinska’s woodcut novel Back + Forth was a finalist in the Best Book category of the 2010 Doug Wright Awards.

[4] – Cohen makes a close association between the woodcut novel and comics when he acknowledges in reference to Passionate Journey that the “cartoonlike flavor of the ending is a characteristic Masereel would repeat again and again in his woodcut novels.”

[5] – There is disagreement when the term “graphic novel,” first originated. Kyle and Wheary published a book length comic Beyond Time and Again: a graphic novel by George Metzger in 1976, which was two years prior to Eisner’s publication of A Contract With God. For further discussion, see:
http://www.oocities.org/rucervine/002261.html

[6] – Tom Inge was instrumental in comic scholarship as he indicates in this email:

“I set up the first panel on comics held at the third meeting of the new Popular Culture Association in Indianapolis, Indiana, in April 1973. I brought together a group of friends to talk about comics as literature, art, and drama (Maurice Duke, Morris Yarowsky, and John Lyle), and somewhere in the files of the association at Bowling Green is a set of their papers. In the first few years of the association conferences, we distributed copies of the papers rather than read them.

The first panel on comics to be held at a meeting of the Modern Language Association was in New York in December of 1978. Under the auspices of the American Humor Studies Association, which I had just helped start, I held a panel on the topic ‘What’s So Funny About the Comics?’ My speakers were Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman. Will had just published A CONTRACT WITH GOD (he had allowed me to read the pencil rough the year before while I was visiting with him in White Plains) and Art was drawing the early chapters of MAUS for RAW magazine. Francoise Mouly came along for the discussion. Unfortunately I did not tape record what they said or keep notes. It has taken the MLA over thirty some years to establish a permanent discussion group devoted to the graphic novel.

(Inge, M. Thomas. “PCA Question.” Email to Nicole Freim and Amy K. Nyberg. 28 June, 2011.)

[7] – David Wiesner Caldecott Medal Acceptance Speech 1991 for Tuesday,”Why Frogs? Why Tuesday?” pays tribute to his discovery of Lynd Ward’s woodcut novel, Madman’s Drum that “became a catalyst for many of my own visual ideas.”

[8] – I sent a copy of one of my earlier articles on woodcut novels to Will Eisner and asked if he was familiar with the work of these earlier pioneers. He replied in a letter dated August 7, 1995, “Thank you for the article from Bookman’s Weekly. I found it so pertinent that I am referring to it in Graphic Storytelling. I share with you your admiration for Lynd Ward and the breed of wood engraving artists who cut the path to the modern graphic novel.”

[9] – For an extended list of wordless comics compiled by Mike Rhode, Tom Furtwangler, and David Wybenga see: “Stories Without Words: A Bibliography with Annotations.”

In his essay on the Chinese Writer and academic Lu Xun (1881-1936), Luo Xuanmin discusses the concept of ying yi (硬译) and yi jie (易解). Lu Xun argued that translation should retain the flavour of the language used in the source text (ying yi), preserving the turns of phrase and poetry of the original.[1] He also argued that Chinese literature needed to adopt foreign linguistic forms which offer syntactical precision (yi jie). He considered classical Chinese, the main literary form in China at his time of writing, to be too dependent on inferred meaning on the part of the reader to serve as an entirely adequate literary form. He wished to import the precise grammatical and semantic forms of European languages into a new Chinese literary language. His ideas were viewed by many of his contemporaries as unpatriotic. Luo Xuanmin encourages an understanding of the work of Asian-American writers through the concept of ying yi and yi jie. He contends that a literature which contains an awareness of both Western and Asian literary and linguistic forms might provide a bridge between the Asian-American experience and that of other American cultures. For such literature to be effective, he argues, it should offer a precision of meaning, and a sensitivity to potential syntactic confusion, negotiating a form which ‘draw[s] nourishment’ (Luo; 2007, 48) from Asian literature and culture. He argues that it is the duty of Asian American writers to work as translators, bringing Asian literature to other languages and cultures.

It is in light of this concept that I wish to explore Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006). I will argue that the text employs a hybrid literary form and language in its exploration of Asian-American identities. The following analysis will separate the two, first examining the literary form, and then the use of language in the text.

American Born Chinese tells three stories which ultimately resolve as one: that of the story of the Monkey King, a reinvention of the first seven chapters from the 16th Century Chinese text Journey to the West; the story of Jin, a young American born Chinese student in love with a Caucasian schoolmate; and Danny, a Caucasian high-schooler whose life is ruined by visits from his Chinese cousin Chin-Kee, a synthesis of racist stereotypes in the style of, amongst other sources (see Chaney; 2011), Jack Cole’s Wun Cloo (reprinted in Spiegelman and Kidd, 2001). After his romance fails, Jin has a fight with his best friend, Wei-Chen and transforms, overnight, into Danny. By becoming Danny he amputates his Chinese self but, like a phantom limb, he continues to feel the presence of his racial background in the form of Chin-Kee. Eventually Danny loses his temper and hits Chin-Kee, who reveals himself to be the Monkey King. Danny becomes Jin again and resolves to mend his relationship with Wei-Chen. Each story revolves around the themes of exclusion due to minority status, transformation through violence, and eventual empowerment through self-acceptance.

Form

Gene Yang employs a distinctly American form in American Born Chinese. Graphic narratives have existed in various cultures for centuries, but the comic book form adopted by Yang is one described by Gopnik as ‘an American invention of the same vintage as contract bridge or the NFL’ (Gopnik; 1987, 30).[2] It uses thought balloons, broken lines around speech bubbles to indicate whispering, and a high instance of type 2 (action to action) panel transitions (see McCloud; 1994, 60-93), all of which are conventions of American comics. Yang follows in the footsteps of, to cite the most obvious example, Art Spiegelman in using the comic book as a means to explicitly ask what it means to be a racial minority in America, and how one should respond to family and cultural history. Further to this, Yang has rewritten the story of the Monkey King as a Christian story, complete with a creator being and a wise men journeying toward a star (see Dong; 2011, 235 and Vizzini; 2007, online).

China does have its own tradition of comic books called man hua shu (漫画书).[3] The conventions of comic books were imported by English colonisers in the late 19th Century, but Chinese comics have since developed their own conventions distinct from their European, Japanese and American equivalents. Man hua shu have been used to tell a variety of stories, including pictorial versions of Chinese classic literature. The Journey to the West and the Monkey King is a specific sub-genre of man hua shu (see Yang in Morton; 2010, online). By choosing to tell a story from classical Chinese mythology (perhaps the best known classical Chinese story in America) in a comic book format Yang has used an American form in a manner not dissimilar from the Chinese tradition.

Further to the use of English, American Born Chinese uses the visual language of comic books. American comics have their own language and require a specific visual literacy to decode, but the form can be used to offer an accessibility and directness unavailable to other literary forms. In comics which are written, like American Born Chinese, to be accessible to younger audiences, simple images are used in such a manner as to concretise the meaning of the words.[4] Crawford and Weiner contend:

Graphic novels can dramatically help improve reading development for students struggling with language acquisition, including special-needs students, as the illustrations provide contextual clues to the meaning of the written narrative. They can provide autistic students with clues to emotional context that they might miss when reading traditional text.[5]

(Crawford and Weiner; 2013, online).

It is no coincidence that the initials of Yang’s book spell ABC: the English-speaking child’s first introduction to written language. As a multi-lingual text which may be read by children, the visual elements of American Born Chinese can serve to counter any potential semantic misunderstandings. The comic book language used, because it employs a visual language which compliments meaning, is yi jie.[6]

Language

Mirroring the comic book form used to tell a classical Chinese story, the language of American Born Chinese is American English with occasional inflections of Chinese. By using English primarily, Yang deploys a language which, Lu Xun argued, holds greater syntactical precision relative to the language of Chinese literature. He supplements this with traditional Chinese script and an awareness of Chinese grammar, creating a hybrid language befitting of the book’s title.

The characters in the Monkey King’s narrative speak English for conversation, and Chinese to create magical effects (specifically the characters雲， 大， 小， 多, and 變). The use of written Chinese is mirrored by Jin’s level of Chinese literacy. He speaks Chinese well but struggles to read it (when a waitress asks Jin what he would like to order he points to something on the menu. She replies ‘That says “Cash only” (Yang; 2006, 226). Chinese is thus presented as Jin, the second-generation immigrant, sees it; an impenetrable, mystical, historical, and fundamentally Othered, language. It is the language of ancient wisdom and culture rather than the modern world. This is reinforced by the choice of traditional characters (the written language of Chinese poetry) rather than simplified Chinese used in mainland China today. Jin has no means to represent modern China or the postmemory of the Cultural Revolution, just a myriad of imagined Chinas drawn primarily from the American cultural imagination.[7] Jin is only Chinese in relation to the non-Chinese characters; the Other who his classmates imagine him to be is equally alien to him.

The intrusion of Chinese characters also serves to inform the reader that the story of the Monkey King has been translated from Chinese. Rather than translating the words from Chinese into English, the Otherworldly characters have been retained. This use of Chinese corresponds with Lu Xun’s concept of ying yi in that it retains the flavour of the original text through the process of translation, rather than rendering it entirely in the systems of the target language.

Ying yi is further explored in the use of English by Wei-Chen. Wei-Chen speaks in a Chinese-cadenced English, and, in moments of tension, Mandarin (indicated by ‘less than’ and ‘more than’ parentheses). His first question to Jin in English is ‘you– you- Chinese person?’ (Yang; 2006, 37). Later, as his English fluency improves, Wei-Chen confuses verb tenses and omits articles. He tells Jin ‘I find out in a sneaky way. Like ninja’ (Yang; 2007, 174). Unlike Jin, Wei-Chen is more comfortable speaking Mandarin than English, representing a partial assimilation into English-speaking American culture. He is also comfortable with the stereotyped associations of his Asian identity such as subterfuge and ninjas. His Chinese-inflected English is never a barrier to his being understood, however, nor is it used explicitly as a means to exclude him. His English is an alternative, equally valid, means of communication.

Wei-Chen’s language, it transpires, is part of his cover. When he returns to speak with his father the Monkey King, he uses technically ‘correct’ English. At the end of the text, when he meets with Jin once more, Wei-Chen only speaks in Mandarin. He appears dressed in a manner more typical of Taiwanese taike (台客), and drives a car decorated with Chinese characters. He is no longer interested, if he ever was interested, in performing a non-Asian identity. His presence, like the Chinese characters spoken by the Monkey King, is ying yi; he transplants fragments of unassimilated and authenticated Asian language and identity into an English language text.

Chin-Kee’s English, rather than adding syntactic clarity to the English language, serves to call attention to the damage that racist cartoons can do. His language is more inflected with Chinese grammar than Wei-Chen’s, in addition to which he speaks with a heavy accent and refers to himself in the third person. At one point he announces, for example, ‘Now Chin-Kee go to riblaly [library] to find Amellican girl to bind feet and bear Chin-Kee’s children’ (Yang; 2007, 120). Despite his technically incorrect grammar, Chin-Kee knows specialised English words such as humerus (Yang; 2007, 112). His speech is written with the /r/ /l/ pronunciation error is more typical of Japanese-speakers who are learning English as a second language (see Aoyama et al. 2004), a linguistic feature which has been ascribed to many Asian groups in racist caricatures.

A parallel might be drawn between Chin-Kee’s speech and the play The Corrected Poems of Minah Jambu (2001) by Singaporean playwright Alfian Bin Sa’at. Alfian experimented with deliberately bad translation as a means to create a conflicted reaction in an audience. The oulipeme in the play’s title (‘corrected’ instead of ‘collected’) refers both to the stereotyped /r/ /l/ confusion of Asian English speakers, as spoken by Chin-Kee, and the ironic ‘improvement’ which supposedly comes from translation into English. In the play a Malaysian poet reads her works in poorly-translated English, eliciting first laughter, and then sympathy and guilt from the audience. Alfian contends that ‘[b]ad and ineffective translation is a strategy with the potential to empower the audience member into examining cultural incompatibilities and political incongruities’ (Alfian; 2006, 283). Bad translation makes a reader or audience member aware of the gaps in equivalence between languages and the ways in which those gaps can be used to humiliate the non-native speaker. Like Minah Jambu, Chin-Kee is designed make the reader uncomfortable, and to invite them to examine the humiliation which non-fluent English speakers are subject to.

Conclusion

In American Born Chinese Yang has created a multi-lingual text which draws upon the distinctly American format and visual language of the comic book, and elements of Chinese written language and grammar. The combination of these elements can be understood through Lu Xun’s concept of ying yi and yi jie as creating a form which offers both the visual beauty of the traditional Chinese written form, an awareness of multiple Englishes, and an accessible gateway into Chinese literature.

The Chinese-cadenced English in American Born Chinese is not only ying yi. It serves to distinguish degrees of integration. Jin speaks English and struggles with written Chinese, Wei-Chen’s English authenticates his Asian identity, but serves as a barrier to complete integration, Chin-Kee’s pronunciation challenges, reductio ad absurdum, the Chinese male as imagined by racist American cartoons, and the Monkey King’s magical Chinese words invoke a mystical China which is perhaps no more authentic than the racist imagining of China which Chin-Kee comes from. By presenting a range of Asian-American languages and identities, Yang presents not one, but a multitude of Asian-American experiences.

Bibliography

Alfian Sa’at and Lindsay, J ‘Out of Synch: On Bad Translation as Performance’ Lindsay, J ed. Between Tongues: Translation And/Of/In Performance in Asia (NUS Press 2007) pp.272-283

Aoyama, Katsura; Flege, James Emil; Guion, Susan; Akahane-Yamada, Reiko; Yamada, Tsuneo, ‘Perceived phonetic dissimilarity and L2 speech learning: the case of Japanese /r/ and English /l/ and /r/’ Journal of Phonetics 32 (2004) pp.233–250

Boatright, Michael D. ‘Graphic journeys: graphic novels’ representations of immigrant experiences’ Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 53:6. 2010. pp.468-76

Canadian Council on Learning ‘More than just funny books: Comics and prose literacy for boys’ (2013) Lessons in Learning. online
http://www.ccl-cca.ca/CCL/Reports/LessonsinLearning/LinL20100721Comics.html

Crawford, Philip and Weiner, Stephen ‘Using Graphic Novels with Children and Teens: A Guide for Teachers and Librarians’ (2013) Scholastic.com. online
http://www.scholastic.com/graphix/Scholastic_BoneDiscussion.pdf

Dong, Lan: ‘Reimagining the Monkey King in Comics: Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese’ in Mickenberg, Julia L.and Vallone, Lynne ed., The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2011) pp.231-251

Gopnik, Adam ‘Comics and Catastrophe’ New Republic (1987) pp. 29-34

Hammond, Heidi. ‘Graphic Novels and Multi-modal Literature: A High School Study with American Born Chinese’ Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature. 50:4 2012. pp.22-32

Hirsch, Marianne Family Frames: photography, narrative and, postmemory (Harvard University Press; 1997)

Libowitz, Richard ‘Holocaust Studies’ in Modern Judaism 10.3 (1990) pp.271-281

Luo, Xuanmin ‘Translation as Violence: On Lu Xun’s Idea of Yi Jie’ Amerascia, Volume 33.3 (2007) pp.41- 54 (USA)

McCloud, Scott Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (HarperCollins 1994)

Morton, Paul ‘The Millions Interview: Gene Luen’ The Millions Yang (2010)
http://www.themillions.com/2010/07/the-millions-interview-gene-luen-yang.html

Spiegelman, Art The Complete Maus (Penguin Books 2003)

- Breakdowns (Pantheon 2008)

Spiegelman, Art and Kidd, Chip Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to their Limits (DC Comics 2001)

Venuti, Lawrence The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (Routledge 1995)

Vizzini, Ned ‘High Anxiety’ in New York Times (2007)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/books/review/Vizzini-t.html?_r=2

Wong, Wendy Siuyi Hong Kong Comics: A History of Manhua (Princeton Architectural Press 2001)

Yang, Gene Luen American Born Chinese (First Second 2006)

Philip Smith is currently in the final stages of completing his PhD thesis with Loughborough University. He is the author of several academic and non-academic publications.

The author offers his sincere thanks Professor Luo Xuanmin for providing some of the material which this essay was based on. He also wishes to thank his brother Zhe Zhang for providing the term taike.

[1] – The concept of ying yi closely mirrors Venuti’s concept of foreignization.

[2] – The American comic book medium has its own codes and visual language (which are distinct from the codes and visual language used in comic books from other cultures), but the form itself has origins which predate America.

[3] – For a history of man hua shu, see Wong (2001).

[4] – For a discussion of the use of American Born Chinese in the classroom, see Boatright (2010), and Hammond (2012).

[5] – The Canadian Council on Learning’s website summarises the results of many studies which examine the positive role comic books can play in developing literacy (CCL; 2013, online).

[6] – This argument does not necessarily hold true for other genres of comic books or, indeed, for all children’s comics. In many comic books, words and images are used in combinations which create, to name just two examples, dramatic irony or jarring juxtapositions. For an example of the latter, consider Spiegelman’s ‘Little Signs of Passon’ in the volume Breakdowns (2008). Spiegelman combines images of a man leaving a pornographic theatre and tripping over a tin of paint with a quote from Jack Woodford on sexual tension in romance fiction.

[7] – Hirsh defines postmemory as follows: ‘[p]ostmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood not recreated’ (Hirsch; 1997, 22). Hirsh coined the term to describe the relationship between the second-generation Holocaust survivor and their parent’s experiences, but it might usefully be mobilised to describe other forms of cultural trauma such as the Great Chinese Famine during 1958-1961.