Comics Forum

Graphic narrative suggests that historical accuracy is not the opposite of creative invention; the problematics of what we consider fact and fiction are made apparent by the role of drawing

(Chute 2008: 459).

In 2008-2010, cultural anthropologist Markéta Hajská, Romany linguist Máša Bořkovcová and scriptwriter/artist Vojtěch Mašek collaborated on “Negotiated Stories” (Vyjednávané příběhy), a project organized by the Czech civic organization Ašta šmé and supported by the European Cultural Foundation. The resultant trilogy of documentary comics, O Přibjehi (stories, 2010) [1], chronicled the lives and hardships of three Roma living in the Czech Republic through a combination of interviews, direct testimony, participant observation and graphic narrative.

From different life-stories – of Albina, a 45-year-old mother of seven in a Roma ghetto in Slovakia; Ferko, a 60-year-old disabled pensioner in northern Bohemia who fashions tall tales in a mixture of languages; and Keva, a 20-year-old entry-level worker in Prague’s industrial Smíchov district – there emerges a palpable sense of economic struggle, institutionalized prejudice and cultural alienation faced by a population still marginalized (if not vilified) by mainstream Czech society. But what also shines forth is the subjects’ canny instincts for survival, drive to make their narratives heard and determination to live on their own terms. Striking too is the trilogy’s self-conscious presentation: the “oral history” format reproduces individual language ticks and slang, partly through unconventional spelling,[2] while Mašek and his collaborators appear frequently along with their subjects, discussing the work the reader holds in her hands, in photos and drawings worked over on computer through a variety of graphic styles (with Ferko’s story told primarily in a yellow palette, Albina’s in red and Keva’s in blue).

Much of the reception for O Přibjehi, by a Czech readership that still sees “serious” comics as a novelty, emphasized its socially-conscious, even-handed and accessible qualities, its important “insight[s] into the life and mentality of the Roma in a documentary and at the same time readable form,” as Jiří G. Růžička noted in his review. He adds: “It exposes the reasons why most Roma in our society are not successful, while pointing out that this failure is not only in them. At the same time it’s not afraid to show the cause of some of the stereotypes through which the dominant society sees the Roma.”[3]

Michal Uhl, the rare Czech anthopologist who also has a deep knowledge of Czech comics,[4] praised the work even more effusively, maintaining that a visual/verbal medium could forge links between the academy and the lay public on important issues:

Social anthropology, which in the Czech case often explores the lives of the Roma culture and the lives of the Roma themselves, like most sociological work often has to deal with its own inability to reach mainstream society. Unfortunately, often the only readership that knows the conclusions of research reports are colleagues from the departments of anthropology, ethnology or Roma studies who can listen in at a professional conference, or read them in the proceedings of a professional journal. And that’s a shame, because the results of these final reports are usually the product not of tedious research, but very interesting experiences in the field. Many studies and ethnography researches deserve more than just an academic hearing. The role of anthropology as a bridge between cultures would finally begin to really realize itself. Comics as a genre seems ideal for this task.

Through an examination of Keva, this essay considers the stakes in the O Přibjehi trilogy for comics’ treatment of (personal) history, in ways that put to the test Uhl’s point about the medium’s serviceability (echoed by other proponents of “comics anthropology,” such as Hannah Wadle) for making complex issues and unfamiliar subjectivities “accessible.”[5] In particular, I want to explore how comics’ image/text framework invokes tensions which have beset visual anthropology since the 19th century; in my conclusion, I weigh what promise such an approach holds for the fledgling Czech comics industry itself.

Comics Anthropology and the ‘Threat of the Visual’

Although the visual, as noted by Chris Wright, has been “central to anthropology since its inception” (16), whether as 19th-century ethnographic photographs, the cinema of Jean Rouch, indeed in the explicit meaning of the term “observation” itself, the subfield of visual anthropology has had to contend with a long-held professional suspicion of the visible.[6] Its ambiguity, incapacity to capture ethnographic “intangibles” or “confirm” pre-established categories of race (visual evidence tended rather to contradict them),[7] along with intolerable levels of “excess,” among other sins, constituted a threat to the discipline’s cherished notions of scientific objectivity.[8] As argued by Deborah Poole:

[T]he mid-nineteenth century anthropological romance with photography was fueled in important ways by a desire for coherence, accuracy, and completion. It was also, however, plagued almost from the beginning by a certain nervousness about both the excessive detail and the temporal contingencies of the photographic prints that began to pile up around the anthropologist’s once comfortably distant armchair … By specifying uniform focal lengths, poses, and backdrops, anthropologists sought to edit out the distracting “noise” of context, culture, and the human countenance (163).[9]

The obsessive urge to police visual excess, particularly the photographer’s traces – in short anthropology’s “disenfranchisement of vision” – belies a certain “Cartesianism within anthropology” (Wright: 17), a refusal of the sensual, as well as an anxiety that “art” might overwhelm “data” in a discipline that traditionally privileged words over pictures:

It is possible to see the relation between words and images within visual anthropology in terms of the polarity between anthropological relevance and aesthetic composition … The tendency to adopt an oppositional model between anthropological relevance and aesthetic composition, between word and image, perhaps belies, or actually works to perpetuate, some perceived threat that the visual poses to anthropology (ibid: 20).

In turning to comics, a medium with a propensity to use sequentially-ordered cartoons for narrative purposes – coupled, it need be said, with its traditional dismissal by the mainstream public as a children’s diversion – the disciplinary anxieties cited by Wright and Poole come all the more insistently to the fore. Perhaps this helps explain why anthropologists have only recently incorporated comics into their work. As Hannah Wadle has written:

While film and photography have fallen on fertile ground from the early days of Anthropology and moulded the sub-discipline of Visual Anthropology, comics has not yet become an equally respected and applied ethnographic methodological tool and format of presenting anthropological knowledge.

Yet comics’ modus operandi bestows distinct advantages for just such a presentation; besides depicting qualities and events difficult to photograph, its amalgam of word, picture and sequence conveys the multiplicity of experience and presence in unique ways. As Wadle notes, through their textual/image strategies “comics ethnographies are freed from the restrictions of soloist scripts to represent orchestral pieces.” Furthermore, comics’ forthrightly constructed and interactive nature analogizes how subjectivity emerges out of social collaboration. As Joseph Witek has argued, the medium at every turn reminds us how identity is shaped by others (157); its visual/verbal tensions complicate any monolithic or totalizing version of reality, including social reality.[10] For such reasons, Wadle relates the “authenticity” of comics anthropology to that of the animated documentary (which also wears its artifice on its sleeve), a move I embrace and extend in my conclusion.

With the foregoing in mind – comics anthropology’s collaborative, verbal/visual poetics; its (for some) suspect status in light of “traditional” anthropology’s logocentric biases; “art” vs. “data” – let us turn to the ways Hajská, Bořkovcová and especially Mašek negotiate such fraught terrain in their landmark work.

Keva and the ‘Roma Problem’

As explained by James Goldston, “Lacking a territory or government of their own and numbering only eight million to ten million, the Roma today are in many ways Europe’s quintessential minority” (147). With most of the Roma living in Eastern Europe, the issue of how to integrate them into mainstream society while respecting their ethnic diversity has grown more acute as states of the former communist bloc angle for membership in the European Union, with its demands for enhanced human rights standards. Racism, segregation, violence, even ethnic cleansing have been directed at the region’s Roma population (which already under communism had suffered discrimination, attempts at cultural assimilation, accusations of “parasitism” and worse). As Rick Fawn writes, “If one group of people seems today to be consistently verbally derided, subjected to physical abuse, social marginalisation and even legal disenfranchisement in the post-communist space, it is them” (1193).

The Czech Republic, an ethnically homogenous society (Roma population: 2.4 percent), has proven no exception to these trends, and in some cases has been a leader. Indeed, outsiders have remarked how Czechs’ popular attitudes to the Roma strikingly deviate from their reputation as a free-thinking, liberal people. If, as former dissident and first post-communist president Václav Havel declared, the Roma question is a “litmus test of civil society” (ibid: 1195), the Czech Republic has largely, regrettably, failed it. In short, the country’s Roma up through the second decade of the 21st century remain second-class citizens – ghettoized, morally suspect, their children often sent to “special schools” for the mentally retarded, and subject to attack.[11]

Keva reflects all these realities – from the receiving end – through a 20-year-old heroine who embodies the hopes and despair of a post-communist Roma generation still kept at the periphery of society. Nonetheless, as the youngest, Keva is the most culturally assimilated of the O Přibjehi trilogy’s subject/witnesses: she speaks a slang-filled, working class Prague version of the Czech language; she is fully conversant in current Czech and American popular culture as well as social media; she despises her service-industry jobs; skips school and goes clubbing; and practices a self-absorption familiar to her Czech coevals (perhaps to young people everywhere).

Born premature within weeks of the November, 1989 Velvet Revolution (her first ride home from the hospital is diverted by rallying crowds), Keva – boldly, as she is an outsider – figures the new nation itself; her life (touched by violence, poverty and dreams) reflects the euphoria and pitfalls of a dawning 21st century in which reaching out across cultural divides grows only more difficult – for Czechs and Roma both. In this brief examination, I wish to focus on three major aspects of Keva’s poetics for how they construct, affirm and negotiate an at times unstable alterity: its aforementioned disparate visual registers; its treatment of time; and, most critically, the subject’s self-representation in concert with the text’s anthropologist authors.

Though O Přibjehi represents his first foray into non-fiction, since 2004 Mašek (b. 1976) has earned accolades as one of the leading practitioners of comics in the Czech lands. His work with a frequent collaborator, the writer Džian Baban, shows a deep influence of the avant garde, in particular surrealism.[12] His artistic approach to Keva privileges variety and experiment, sometimes at the expense of coherence. The overall impression is one of a ceaseless, ever-shifting flow of experience, its fluctuations signaled through styles ranging from photorealism to collage to crude near-stick figures scrawled with markers. Some images take up one or two-page spreads, while other pages consist of dozens of tiny panels. (Mašek fashions the book so that such disparate designs often clash, confronting each other on facing pages, or even on the same page.)

Such aesthetic exuberance and polyphony couch what are often banal incidents of the everyday: a child’s impressions of chaotic family life; the dullness of work; bus stop chit-chat. But the harsh realities of being Roma – the reminder that one is first, foremost and always regarded an outsider – lends an ever-present racialist edge to the depiction of Keva’s routine.

Mašek switches styles almost with every turn of the page. For example, an altercation with skinheads on the street appears in four tiers separated by thick black borders, like film strips. A mishmash of hastily-drawn figures – swastika, skinhead, the adolescent Keva, her friend Kačena’s beaten visage, an infant witness – succeed each other in action-to-action and aspect-to-aspect sequences, conveying violence and confusion. The much younger Keva’s encounter with a sensitive bodybuilder (she drives him to tears with her impromptu critique of his exaggerated physique) seems even more minimalist: the man’s face is rendered as two smeared dots for eyes, quick lines for nose, mouth and lips, with a thin vertical line to represent shadow, while Keva’s narration (“I couldn’t stop laughing. Then I got frightened he would kill me” [n.p.]) seems scribbled with a felt-tip marker running out of ink. Lest the reader simplistically associate “minimalism” with an earlier period in the heroine’s development, however, later in the story Keva relates her first memory, of being led by the hand to a crib and staring out from behind its bars (signaling her social status): here the art is less baroque and more detailed, with three blue-white panels along the right hand side set off against a great deal of white space.

In contrast, Mašek renders a scene in which a social worker visits seven-year-old Keva at home (she’s skipping school, enjoying a cigarette) through an etching technique over photographs. When the woman marvels, “You smoke? How is that possible?” Mašek reproduces the same picture from a previous panel, redrawn. Such re-reworked photos (the same yet different) appear throughout the book, creating an eerie effect, as if touched-up puppets or collages were performing the actions. Whereas Keva’s unflattering portraits of her hated teachers (on the page facing the social worker scene) are drawn in an “ugly” caricaturistic style recalling Lynda Barry’s Ernie Pook’s Comeek.

A school ski trip scene displays yet another technique altogether. A married teacher’s affair and downfall into alcoholism unfolds on a single page, in 17 compact panels and a column of text offset by white space; here the story’s scope expands to the novelistic. While a later scene, in which Keva recalls a dream of shooting up with her friends in a tunnel, returns us to the “film strip” design: four tiers separated by broad black spaces. Only now the panels contain photorealistic portraits, including a graphic image of a needle penetrating skin – whose specificity seems to contradict Keva’s assertion that she only dreamed the episode. (By her own admission, drug use is rampant among her friends and young Roma in general.) Indeed, the blurring of reality, dream and fantasy plays a major role in the book. At her deli job, in a large walk-in freezer, the present-day Keva indulges a reverie of having an affair with the middle-aged movie star Jiři Langmajer (as her puffs of breath “transform” into a luxurious white fur coat). Her bemused reaction upon coming to: “I don’t know how an actor like that could come to my mind.”

The foregoing litany of scenes gives some impression, I hope, of how Keva’s inconstant patchwork of styles resonates with, complicates, contradicts and synthesizes its subject’s varied experiences – colorful, unpredictable, humdrum, unique as any life – while giving voice to the fundamental humanity of the subaltern.

Yet the O Přibjehi trilogy insistently grounds its subjects’ inner lives in their particular places and times, linking their experiences to the greater social realities around them. To that end, in Keva Mašek utilizes a clock motif to remind the reader of the ineluctable historical context in which its heroine is situated. The clock – “floating” in the corner of the frame like a TV news graphic – appears intermittently, at times serving a pedestrian purpose; in the “Langmajer daydream” just discussed, it informs us that Keva’s reverie consumed about seven minutes of her working day (she hardly seems to regret the shirking). At other times the clock tracks her rhythms and routines: at 10:25, she discusses a potential paramour’s Facebook profile with a friend, at 8:26 her neighbors invite her over for chocolate, at 9:26 she’s having another session with Mašek, Hajská and Bořkovcová, at 3:51 the workday crawls along.

But the clock motif also carries out a more unnerving, “memento mori” function: like the hourglass – age-old symbol of death – it marks the passage of Keva’s limited time on Earth. Is she making good use of it? As the hours and days lapse, is she “progressing” or spinning her wheels in place? The clock therefore seems to serve, perhaps inadvertently, as a sort of judgment on Keva’s activities (and that of all Roma?), as well as a marker of the cyclical, repetitive nature of time itself for the subject’s private/public personae. This would explain the recurring scene of the neonate Keva being brought home from the hospital on November 17, 1989: she is tied to the fate of the Czech nation, itself newly-born, through a moment in time obsessively rehearsed, reimagined, revisited.[13] In other words, like Mašek’s stylistic heterogeneity, like Keva’s myriad perceptions, the clock carries a polysemous charge.

The book’s aesthetic and temporal structuring of Keva’s life, in collaboration with the subject herself, returns us to the initial theme of this essay, the “negotiated story.” For, not unlike Art Spiegelman’s Maus (to take the most prominent non-fiction graphic narrative example), Keva devotes extended passages to its own self-construction. Several pages depict the authors around a table with Keva, mulling, shaping and reworking the text (which emerged from many hours of recorded conversations and scores of photographs). As Uhl notes, “A reader thus has the opportunity to trace how the story was collected, including the subject’s interactions with various characters. The authors deal with the problem of anthropological fieldwork quite elegantly, seeing as how they interpret their field data without denying that their presence affects the ground which they examine.”

The final point strikes me as critical: Mašek, Hajská and Bořkovcová set out to produce not a work of reportage, but witness – they do not seek objectivity or verifiability. Keva has the final word on her own presentation; many scenes show her personally assessing the book’s pages-in-progress splayed out before her, even crossing out parts she doesn’t like. In this regard, O Přibjehi follows recent interventionist moves in anthropology to collaboratively hand over the tools of discourse to the “native” speaking subject (Poole: 170).[14]

Keva begins precisely on such a note of postmodern literary collusion: over drinks the authors ask their young collaborator/muse how she wants to be drawn (as Mašek thinks to himself, with a self-satisfied grin, “This would make for a really nice opening …”). She replies with the body parts of celebrities: Jennifer López’s posterior, Mariah Carey’s legs, Angelina Jolie’s lips, “Or else the face of Salma Hayek, but with thicker hair! And thinner eyebrows than her, that’s what I’d like.” (The somewhat morbid “plastic surgery” on the actress’ face unfolds over three panels.) Upon turning the page, however, we see not an idealized, Frankensteinian portrait, but a photorealistic splash of Keva in the here and now.

The episode underscores an uncomfortable fact (aside from how readily Keva kowtows to Western corporate body image ideals for women): the text’s “collaborative” ethic is a bit of a chimera. Keva looks like herself in photographs, not like Salma Hayek. However “inclusive” their aims, the authors of course determine the ultimate cast, content and tempo of the book; even when Keva censors something, they show us what she’s censoring. Some critics deem such an admission a sign of the authors’ sincerity: “Their presence in the comics enhances the authenticity of the stories, demonstrates their personal involvement and relationships with actors; the questions they pose often guide the logic and direction of the story” (Macáková). But the line between “personal involvement” and coercion at times wears awkwardly thin. Bořkovcová’s request that Keva recount her skinhead story a second time sparks this exchange:

K: Again? I just told you!

B: But we didn’t record it.

K: That’s bad luck!

At other moments the authors coax their collaborant into telling them about things she doesn’t find interesting, while on the issue of style – as discussed, a critical feature of the work – Keva’s opinion is not solicited. However generously we frame the issue, it’s clear that the subject’s oral testimony is both driven and resculpted, at least in part, according to its authors’ well-meaning agenda and the drive towards “accessibility.”[15] This threatens to make Keva less Rigoberta Menchú than Eliza Doolittle. Whose story is this?

The climactic denouement of Keva – immediately before the last two pages, which show the heroine retiring, then sleeping in her bed – emblematizes the quandary of author/subject power relations which I’m describing. Speaking in her bathroom with Bořkovcová (by telephone), Keva stands before the sink in a photorealistic splash. The older woman is asking for her impressions of the book so far. She answers, with a thoughtful look:

To me it’s like a kind of biography. Even though I can see that I’m young. That actually it’s just a small part of my life. That it’s just the past and the future. No, not the future. There’s nothing there about how things are going to be later on.

The youth continues her monologue over the next two pages, whose style sharply deviates from the splash: against a black background bleed, the panels progressively shrink and proliferate, eventually numbering in the dozens as they illustrate Keva’s catalog of experiences and her flirtation with religion:

I was thinking, that if I’m going to take up those books, if I’ll have to change after a while. I’d like to change …

I was thinking, actually, that I need to change. Not like for the better, but just like everything is going to change on me. Like I’m going to be doing something different.

I’m not worried or anything, it’s just that sometimes you go through times when the same things keep coming your way, over and over.

Like I get up in the morning.

I go to work.

I come home. Go to sleep.

Or I have time off. And I wake up early anyway.

I call my girlfriend. I go have coffee or go out.

Then we go out together for a while.

I come home. I clean house.

I watch a movie that I’ve already seen a thousand times.

Friday comes. I go to the discotheque.

Saturday and Sunday I doze all day long.

On Monday I go to work.

And it just feels like the same thing, over and over.

It’s just like, those Jehovah’s people, they have nice ways of doing things, or ways that make your life feel like it’s on an even path or just ways that make you learn to think about one thing all the time.

But then, as soon as you get past all that, as soon as you get to know everything, then it seems to me like it’s all for shit. Like they already have everything behind them, they’ve got harmony with the world. That’s what it feels like to me when they’re worshiping. Like they haven’t needed to learn anything new since they were baptized.

The words are Keva’s, but the entire structure of their presentation – the illustrations’ multi-stylistic registers, the visual dialectic between her full-page splash and the more fragmented, cartoony moments of her life depicted on the subsequent pages along with her narration – creates contrasts, continuities and complexities not present or implied in the oral testimony itself. This episode of summation (of her book/life-in-progress) – fittingly Lacanian, as the subject stands before a mirror – resists any simple reading due to what Chute calls comics’ “expansive visual-verbal grammar” which “can offer a space for ethical representation without problematic closure” (214).

Keva seeks a sort of mastery over the material facts of her life; she asserts the right to interpret their meaning, to privilege the unified image of herself before the mirror as the “true” self, its beset essence transcendent over an ordinary, stultifying, routine, “particulate” daily existence. But Mašek’s art and design point to a more Heideggerian reading: we are all constituted and determined by being-in-the-world; the tiny “particulate” slivers of experience, to say nothing of the socioeconomic forces that drive them, make up who we are. By the end of the sequence Keva herself has “vanished” – the scene closes with a caesura: two silent panels of the empty bathroom, Keva gone. Silent, but not unspeaking.

Conclusion

No matter how we might conceive the actual relationship between a representation and “reality,” an epistemological wager is part of the code that governs the reception of non-fiction genres: the viewer or reader expects that a work purporting to be non-fiction will be true. The challenge for the author of such a work is to encode it with recognizable signifiers of truthfulness in order that the audience might believe in it. To put it another way, non-fiction genres rely on regimes of authenticity rather than verisimilitude

(Woo: 169).

O Přibjehi, along with the “Negotiated Stories” project, joins a number of recent Czech cultural productions which either address the Roma issue itself or attack the country’s rising incidences of xenophobia and racism more generally.[16] The trilogy’s producers and sponsors confront a society in which, “[a]t a minimum, the common Czech view is that the Roma opt for a lifestyle of indolence, theft and unsanitary living conditions” (Fawn: 1196).

Comics anthropology in its Czech iteration both complicates and facilitates that task in exciting ways. A visual medium embracing what previous generations of anthropologists spurned as “excess,” it compels a reconsideration of subjectivity, authenticity, ontology itself along a complex text/image axis. As Benjamin Woo has written, “nonfiction comics are inescapably hyperreal, for, although they maintain a truth claim, they do not provide any access to the referent outside of the system of simulacra contained on the page” (175). Or, as Hillary Chute puts it, comics’ “manifest handling of its own artifice, its attention to its seams. … [i]ts formal grammar rejects transparency and renders textualization conspicuous, inscribing the context in its graphic presentation” (2008: 457). Works such as Keva thus pull off a neat trick: their realness about their fakeness, so to speak, lends them an aura of greater reliability for the trained reader. (Not bad for a medium which most Czechs still associate with the long-running children’s series Four-Leaf Clover [Čtyřlístek]).[17]

Comics anthropology thus exploits the readerly assumption of the form’s “inescapable hyperreality” in ways readily comparable to the approach of such animated documentaries as The Sinking of the Lusitania (d. Winsor McCay, 1918) or Waltz with Bashir (d. Ari Folman, 2008), made all the more potent by their blatant artifice. Sybil DelGaudio, writing on such films, notes:

If we agree that “representing reality” … is of critical importance to the projects of certain animated films, I will argue that the reflexive mode seems a particularly appropriate mode in which to situate certain animated films, since animation itself acts as a form of “metacommentary” within a documentary …         [A]nimation prompts the viewer to a “heightened consciousness of his or her relation to the text and of the text’s problematic relation to that which it represents” (192).[18]

In his own work on the comics memoir, Rocco Versaci comes to a like conclusion: readers “already view comic books as ‘unreal,’ so any further distortion of reality becomes a mere extension of the form” (76) under whose auspices one can smuggle (always contestable) truths.

Ah, yes – that “contestable” part. Oral testimonies, especially those of subaltern groups, have weathered criticism for how they strain at the bounds of verifiable “fact” – with the case of the Guatemalan activist Rigoberta Menchú among the most notorious examples.[19] A visual analogue of such “misconduct,” the staged scenes in the early film ethnography Nanook of the North (d. Robert J. Flaherty, 1922), recall us both to “traditional” anthropology’s distrust of the optical as well as to its problematic prescriptive “solutions.”

Should it bother the reader, then, that, as the Ašta šmé website puts it, the authors of O Přibjehi “didn’t aspire for an objective and impersonal record, they were influenced by their relations with the heroes”? Given my discussion of Keva’s (I argue) vexed production process, such questions may seem for the most part secondary. We can at the least say they fall along a spectrum. Does it really matter whether Keva daydreamed of Langmajer or another well-known older star, Zdeněk Svěrák? More concerning perhaps: whether Keva lies about the “shooting up” dream sequence, as the answer to that question (is she a habitual drug user or not?) influences the reader’s opinion of her, however subtly. Finally, if Keva were to accuse someone of rape or murder, then the accuracy of her “truth claim” would indeed become critically relevant; recall the “repressed memory” controversies over parental abuse of the 1980s/90s, which pivoted precisely on questions of verifiability and establishment of guilt.[20]

Old-fashioned as it may seem, the issue of whether Keva tells the truth, how one might tell the difference and whether her interlocutors care should concern us because of non-fiction comics’ power to, as Woo notes of Joe Sacco’s work, give “solidity” to a respondent’s story [21]; we are after all dealing with a medium which, in the words of Marianne Hirsch, “definitively eradicate[s] any clear-cut distinction between the documentary and the aesthetic” (quoted in Chute 2008: 457).

Those caveats in place, such complexity – even a controversy or two – bodes well for a burgeoning national industry in a market predisposed to keep its products at arm’s length. At a moment when, according to the journalist Radim Kopáč, “[o]riginal Czech comics for an adult reader are finally standing on their own two feet,” socially-engaged works such as Keva figure as significant milestones which adopt “reproducibility and mass circulation … as a mode of political intervention” (Chute 2008: 462) – doing good as they do well for the medium. Such sophisticated works don’t merely teach a skeptical Czech readership about comics’ potential, welcome a development as that is. More importantly, like some of the best art, they press a complacent Czech citizenry to confront troubling aspects of their culture they too often would rather avoid.

Works Cited and Consulted

Afonso, Ana Isabel. “New Graphics for Old Stories: Representation of Local Memories Through Drawings.” Working Images: Visual Research and Representation in Ethnography. Pink, Sarah, László Kürti, and Ana I. Afonso, eds. London: Routledge, 2004: 77-89.

Bořkovcová, Máša, Markéta Hajská and Vojtěch Mašek. O Přibjehi: Keva. Prague: Lipnik, 2010.

Chute, Hillary. “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. Vol. 123, No. 2 (2008): 452-465.

____________. “‘The Shadow of a Past Time’: History and Graphic Representation in Maus.” Twentieth-Century Literature, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Summer, 2006): 199-230.

DelGaudio, Sybil. “If Truth Be Told, Can ‘Toons Tell It? Documentary and Animation.” Film History. Vol. 9, No. 2 (1997): 189-199.

Fawn, Rick. “Czech Attitudes Towards the Roma: ‘Expecting More of Havel’s Country?’”. Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 53, No. 8 (Dec., 2001): 1193-1219.

Goldston, James A. “Roma Rights, Roma Wrongs.” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 81, No. 2 (Mar. – Apr., 2002): 146-162.

Kopáč, Radim. “Monstrkabaret vystupuje z mlhy: V českém komiksu se něco děje.” Uni, Vol. 8 (2007). http://magazinuni.cz/literatura/monstrkabaret-vystupuje-z-mlhy-%E2%80%93-v-ceskem-komiksu-se-neco-deje/

Mačaková, Martin. “Barevné příběhy života.” Konstruktor (November 8, 2010). http://www.konstruktmag.cz/barevne-pribehy-zivota/

Marečková, Tereza. “Keva, Albína a Ferko.” Novy Prostor, No. 362 (Oct. 19, 2010): 24. http://www.novyprostor.cz/clanky/362/keva-albina-a-ferko.html

Michelson, Annette. “The Kinetic Icon in the Work of Mourning: Prolegomena to the Analysis of a Textual System.” October, Vol. 52 (Spring, 1990): 16-39.

Poole, Deborah. “An Excess of Description: Ethnography, Race, and Visual Technologies.” Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 34 (2005): 159-179.

Ruby, Jay. “Visual Anthropology.” Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology (Vol. 4). Eds. David Levinson and Melvin Embers. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1996: 1345-1351.

Růžička, Jiří G. “Trilogie O přibjehi nabízí vhled do romské mentality čtivou formou.” Ihned.cz (Sept. 24, 2010). http://life.ihned.cz/c1-46543490-trilogie-o-pribjehi-nabizi-vhled-do-romske-mentality-ctivou-formou

Růžička, Lukáš. “Pozvánka na křest: Mašek vypráví romské přibjehi.” Komiksarium (June 22, 2010). http://www.komiksarium.cz/?s=keva

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. “Ishi’s Brain, Ishi’s Ashes.” Anthropology Today, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Feb., 2001): 12-18.

Stoll, David. Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, 1999.

Uhl, Michal. “Nad třemi romskými příběhy: Komiks jako výzkumná zpráva.” Novinky. cz (Sept. 17, 2010). http://www.novinky.cz/kultura/salon/211608-nad-tremi-romskymi-pribehy-komiks-jako-vyzkumna-zprava.html

Verdery, Katherine. What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Versaci, Rocco. This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics As Literature. New York: Continuum, 2007.

Wadle, Hannah. “Anthropology Goes Comics.” Comics Forum, February 3, 2012. http://comicsforum.org/2012/02/03/anthropology-goes-comics-by-hannah-wadle/

Williams, Kristian. “The Case for Comics Journalism.” Columbia Journalism Review. Vol. 43, No. 6 (2005): 51-55.

Woo, Benjamin. “Reconsidering Comics Journalism: Information and Experience in Joe Sacco’s Palestine.” Goggin, Joyce, and Dan Hassler-Forest, eds. The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature: Critical Essays on the Form. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co, 2010: 166-177.

Wright, Chris. “The Third Subject: Perspectives on Visual Anthropology.” Anthropology Today, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Aug., 1998): 16-22.

http://www.astasme.cz/en.html

José Alaniz, associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Comparative Literature (adjunct) at the University of Washington – Seattle, published his first book, Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (University Press of Mississippi), in 2010. He currently chairs the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF), the leading comics studies conference in the US. His current projects include Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond and a history of Czech comics.

[1] – The trilogy’s glowing reception includes a Muriel, the industry prize, for Best Original Script (for Albina), awarded at the 2010 Komiksfest in Prague. A French translation, from Éditions çà et là, appeared in 2011.

[2] – The trilogy’s title, for example, is an egregious corruption of the word “příběhy” (stories). Most literate Czechs respond to “O Přibjehi” the way many English-speaking readers would wince at “storys” or similar non-standard spelling.

[3] – Unless otherwise stated, translations from the Czech are my own.

[4] – Uhl, a graduate of both the sociology and anthropology programs at Charles University, has taught courses on comics.

[5] – Note the similarity of Wadle’s language to Uhl’s:

Ideas and consideration, encoded in long prose texts, are often only perceived in academic circles, far away from the place where the research project had been conducted and written in a language inaccessible for informants. In the format of comics ethnographies could reach these groups of informants. Instead of excluding informants from academic discourses about their own culture and way of living, anthropology could benefit from their critical readership.

[6] – As recently as 1996, Jay Ruby could write, “Visual anthropology has never been completely incorporated into the mainstream of anthropology. It is trivialized by some anthropologists as being mainly concerned with audiovisual aids for teaching” (1345).

[7] – Poole’s article in particular deals with anthropology’s troubling imbrication with the history of Euro-American imperialism, Orientalism and racist thought. See also Scheper-Hughes.

[8] – Although such anxieties seem much less pronounced for film critics. For example, Annette Michelson could declare Mikhail Kalatozov’s documentary Salt for Svanetia (1930) an “ethnographic masterwork” (33-34) despite its “intrusive” early Soviet experimental editing, slow motion sequences and consciously rousing tempo.

[9] – Compare, for example, Lt. Henry Boyle Somerville’s “Portrait of Roviana teenagers, Western Solomon Islands, 1893” (Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Northern Ireland), with its many markers of “excess” and “visual noise” (including a man in the background who stares into the camera) to G. Roche’s Sami woman (Inga Eriksdatter), Norway, 1884. (Norsk Folkemuseum), with its rigidly posed subject in profile against a featureless backdrop.

[10] – In her writings on history in comics, Hillary Chute emphasizes a similar complexity: “In the graphic narrative … the non-transparency of drawing – the presence of the body, through the hand, as a mark in the text – lends a subjective register to the narrative surfaces of comics pages that further enables comics works to be productively self-aware in how they ‘materialize’ history” (2006: 457).

[11] – Fawn’s article documents many of the sad facts of life for the Roma in the contemporary Czech Republic. Most disconcerting, perhaps: the casual “it’s their own fault” bigotry with which many Czechs express themselves on the Roma question – something I myself have witnessed. As Fawn writes: “Many Czechs, including those holding university degrees and in professional capacities, are frank in asserting that any social inequality Roma may claim is of their own making, as if it is also preordained, ethnically-based or even biological” (1196). The reprehensibility of such beliefs, of course, is that they lend legitimacy to mistreatment of this population; between 1990 and 1998, at least 30 Czech Roma were killed by skinheads (ibid: 1198).

[12] – In 2004, Mašek and Baban (both graduates of the screenwriting and dramaturgy program at FAMU, the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague) co-founded the multimedia arts group Fred Brunold’s Monster Cabaret (Monstrkabaret Freda Brunolda), under whose auspices they released such Kafkaesque works as the Damien Chobot trilogy, about an anti-hero with an elephant’s trunk.

[13] – The subject’s perception of time has long preoccupied anthropologists. For an anthropological examination of time in the late communist era of Eastern Europe, see Verdery, chapter 2.

[14] – Wadle describes a similar technique practiced by the Portuguese artist/anthropologist Manuel João Ramos:

These graphic notes, which visualised the stories of the people were then discussed with the participants and refined, extended and redrawn by Ramos on the basis of the given feedback. The first step of narrating and note-taking thereby developed into a mutual collaboration, in which the informants were closely involved in controlling the recorded narrative and a representation of their stories, which were visually accessible for them.

Afonso too highlights the visual’s “potential as a collaboration device” in anthropology (75). See also Ramos’ own essay in the same volume as Afonso.

[15] – According to the Ašta šmé website, “[W]ere it not for the authors asking, Keva probably wouldn’t share the grimmer details with them.”

[16] – A handful of films such as El Paso (d. Zdeněk Tyc, 2009) have tackled the Roma question; graphic narrative treatments include “Czech Made? An Exhibit of Comics on Working Foreigners” (Prague, Brno, Ostrava, 2009) and Lucie Lomová’s important novel Anna Wants to Jump (Anna Chce Skočit, 2006), in which it forms a sub-theme. For a reading of Lomová’s “post-colonial” historical novel The Savages (Divoši, 2011), see my “History in Czech Comics: Lucie Lomová’s Divoši” in Ulbandus No. 15, forthcoming.

[17] – Launched in 1969, and in constant publication since, Four-Leaf Clover was the only communist-approved children’s comics after 1968’s rollback of liberal reforms.

[18] – DelGaudio here quotes Bill Nichols.

[19] – On the Menchú scandal, see Stoll, Chapter 13.

[20] – Such disputations have haunted psychoanalysis since Sigmund Freud’s “seduction fantasy” theory launched a thousand discontents – the subject of Janet Malcolm’s The Purloined Clinic.

[21] – In his discussion of Sacco’s Palestine, Woo points out how the author “matter-of-factly” inserts into the diegesis his interviewees’ “authentic but unrepresentable experiences” through “formal tricks”: “Sacco does not attempt to corroborate Ghassan’s case; he simply shows what he has been told, and, in doing so, gives a solidity to his respondent’s story” (Woo: 174).

The relationship between comics and Greece is a rather interesting one. Having a tradition in political cartooning and with influences from Europe and the US, during the 80s we observe the first steps of the creation of a small local scene that seems to be growing each year. Nevertheless, the road to this growth wasn’t easy at all

Comics reached the Greek audience pretty late and that’s one reason why many Greeks have a specific, and often incomplete, understanding of them. In fact, the first comic series that reached the Greek market were mostly superheroes and Disney stories and that led to the perception that comics are just for kids, naive and funny stories. The frequent publication by religious and educational groups of critical reviews and statements about the bad influences comics presented also contributed to this idea.

Apart from the fact that in Greece we never had a tradition in comics, like in other countries such as Belgium, France or Italy, here graphic storytelling had another stereotype to confront. Carrying a heavy cultural heritage from our ancient ancestors, as a country we faced a difficulty not so much to develop but more to accept more modern artistic forms. What tend to characterize Greece in terms of culture are direct references to our classical past. That’s also a reason why Greek cultural institutions are more reluctant to adopt artistic forms that seem to move away from those stereotypes.

So it becomes clear that the development of a creative and academic comic scene was a challenge for our country. The beginning of that development can be located with the publication of Babel Magazine during the late 80s and early 90s. This magazine was the first attempt to show that comics aren’t only superheroes, or Disney stories or Asterix and Tintin, but that they are a unique storytelling medium that could tell any story. The impact of Babel Magazine was huge as it also became the first magazine to publish new Greek comic creators and some years later they organized the first international comic festival in our country (for almost 13 years, until 2009).

Since then we have experienced the growth of the comics scene in Greece. More comic shops, more publications and publishing houses, more events about comics, more Greek creators heading towards international collaborations. If we wanted to highlight the landmarks of this development we could say that Babel Magazine was the introduction of a wider range of comics to the Greek audience, the publication of 9 Magazine (a comics magazine inside a popular newspaper) was the first attempt to massively put comics in every Greek house, and the activities of Comicdom Press are the future of comics in Greece.

In that context and having that specific background, comics studies are still very young here. There are only few academic institutions, apart from Fine Arts schools, that allowed comics into their curricula as an independent module. The Department of Cultural Technology and Communication of the Aegean University has a very active involvement with comics studies, not only offering some modules but also organizing academic conferences about the medium. The Iconotopia research group is based there and they form the only official Greek research team dedicated to comics.  On the other hand the Department of Communication, Media and Culture of Panteion University was one of the first Departments to import comics as an academic topic, as part of the visual communication courses and then as a special course linked to communication (comics and communication) in the Advertising and Public Relations Lab. Also, more and more University Departments working on education, storytelling and visual communication include comics in their curricula.

In terms of conferences the Department of Cultural Technology and Communication of the Aegean University organized, in 2003, 2005 and 2009  three international conferences dedicated to comics. In 2006 in the context of Comicdom Con Athens 2006 there was a day conference organized by the Media Lab of the Department of Communication, Media and Culture of Panteion University, Comicdom Press and Hellenic American Union discussing responsibility issues through comics.  Apart from them there were a few other more random panel discussions in the context of Comicdom Con Athens festival (Comics and Literature in 2007, Comics and Education in 2010 and 2011), or the most recent entitled panel discussion “Comics and Modernism: the case of George Herriman and Lyonel Feininger”.

In addition, during the past four years Comicdom Press has been organizing educational workshops with the use of comics language for children and educators. The program addresses the issues of creativity and synthetic storytelling and it has been running to schools, museums and other cultural institutions. The aim is to introduce the comics medium to new readers and to help educators to use a more creative way of teaching. Within this remit, Comicdom Press published an activity book based on the workshops and also launched a website in order to create a database and an open forum for children, teachers and librarians to exchange opinions and collect useful material.

Let us now observe the situation in the field of research/academic publications. In recent years  there have been some PhDs on comic studies, mostly connected with social, historical, educational and psychological issues. Furthermore, there are some academic books dedicated to comics discussing several issues such as the interrelation of comics with other art forms or the role of women in comic stories, the educational aspect of comic books, the history of Greek fantasy comics and the historical memory through comic books. One of the most important Greek publications is the collective volume regarding comics narrative (View from above: Fantasy and Storytelling in Comics), including academic pieces from almost all the major Greek comic scholars.

Although there is a progress not only in the production but also in the perception of comics, we cannot talk about a fully formed academic field. There are some scholars and some university departments working towards that goal but we surely need more time and work in order to be able to discuss about a Greek comic academia. My hope is that thanks to those active scholars and to events like Comicdom Con Athens where people from around the world are able to meet and talk about comics, and also thanks to the fact that Greek people are every day discovering the power of the medium, we will be able to network, formally or informally, and continue to study them and produce a creative dialogue.

Lida Tsene holds a PhD in social media and social responsibility. Apart from academic books on corporate and media responsibility, social media and cultural management, she reads loads of comics. She tries to share everything she learns, and that’s the reason why she participates in many conferences about CSR, journalism,social media, storytelling and comics and also organizes educational workshops. She likes to talk a lot about the things she is passionate about, so she is collaborating as teaching associate with several academic institutions and she is also Public Relations Director of Comicdom Press.

Comics have long played a role in my life. My first memories of comics include Tales of Suspense 39 and Silver Surfer 1. The image of the grey Iron Man is one that I remember seeing as a kid, and I still have an affinity for that old costume. The Silver Surfer, too, remains one of my favorite characters. I also remember reading an old Legion of Superheroes story in which one of the characters, Chemical King, dies. I remember re-reading that issue several times just to make sure he did indeed die. It really affected me (I must have been about 10 or so). Other comics I read include Black Panther, Human Fly, Moon Knight, the Kirby and Simon Sandman reboot. I loved them (and still do). I remember going to 7-11 every week to see what new comics the store might have.

When I became a librarian nearly 20 years ago, I was always looking for ways to collect new and interesting materials. While I was working at the Mahon Public Library in Lubbock, it occurred to me that perhaps books on Spider-Man and Batman would circulate and be popular with patrons. I helped put together one of the most extensive collections of graphic novels in the country. At one time, Lubbock Public Library system had one of the biggest collections of over 4,000 unique titles. Graphic novels circulated like crazy, and we invested a lot into building a quality collection. I also designed a unique shelving/cataloging system for the books. I know that since I left the public library, they are still collecting graphic novels.

At Texas Tech University, we have a modest collection. Students often come to me to ask for help on projects ranging from studying Watchmen to Thor as a mythological character. I love lists, and one of my goals was to get Eric Werthmann’s suggested list for the Association of Research Libraries. He put together a standard core collection that I think all academic libraries should have. I feel lucky that at Texas Tech we can at least have the suggested ARL list. More and more classes are being taught using sequential art in universities across the country, so academic libraries cannot ignore making graphic novels a part of their collections. As a librarian, I am still always searching for unique materials to collect whether digital or physical.

This spring, I’ve been teaching a class for Texas Tech’s Honors College on the superhero in film and popular culture. We look at the history of the superhero and the various ways in which superheroes have been portrayed in film and popular culture. We examine the feature films, serials, television shows, animations, and fan films. I have a set of academic readings for students, and I use Peter Coogan’s superhero definitions — mission, powers, and identity, from his groundbreaking book Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre — as a theoretical basis. I even had one student in their paper argue for the concept of the “Coogian Superhero,” which I thought was nice. I also ask students to read two graphic novels: X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga and Marvels. So many classes use the Watchmen or The Dark Knight Returns that I wanted to try something a little different. Students have to write several papers based upon their viewings of a superhero-related movie, television program, and animated feature, plus a final project. In addition, I have students read Grant Morrison’s Supergods.

It is an exciting time to be an academic studying comics. There is so much good work from scholars in the form of articles, books, documentaries, etc. that it is impossible to keep up with it all. We have excellent journals like the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Sane Journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education, The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, Studies in Comics, ImageText, and the International Journal of Comic Art. I know theses and dissertations are being written about everything from Watchmen and The Sandman to the X-Men and the study of manga, etc. My fear, however, is that comics will be reduced to “just another text” and that all the life will be squeezed out of it. Academics sometimes have a tendency to analyze things to death. Even as academics, we should never lose sight of the “fun-lover” within, something the 1966 Batman movie reminds us of). I am trained as a historian, so for me comics are a form of social history in the same way that novels, film, fashion, and video games are. Popular culture tells us a lot about who we are and were. The comic format is a universal form, and I think it is thrilling that comics from around the world are getting noticed. I also think it’s great that so many movies are being made using superheroes or based on other graphic narratives. I know not all of them are good, but they do seem to be getting better.

As scholars we should be grateful that the stigma against studying comics is slowly disappearing and that as a legitimate field of academic study comics scholarship is finally gaining some respect. It is hard to believe that it hasn’t always been this way, but at one time scholars like Thomas Inge and John Lent (and librarians like Randy Scott) had to fight the good fight to get sequential art scholarship any respect. One text that looks at historical evolution of comics is Paul Lopes’ book Demanding Respect.

Primary source publications like Alter Ego, Back Issue, Comics Journal, and all those old fanzines like Rocket Blast Special that have articles and interviews (with writers and artists) are a goldmine for scholars to study and use for their work. I am so glad that these “fan” publications are finally used more and more as scholars begin to realize their value. There are so many perspectives from which one can study comics (sociological, historical, philosophical, psychological, medical, media influence, theological, etc.). The sky is the limit! It truly is a wonderful time for someone to be studying comics.

Some of my most recent and forthcoming projects include the December 2011 issue of Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, which I co-edited with Dr Mel Gibson, on audiences and readership. Other projects include a volume on Spider-Man co-edited with Dr Robert Moses Peaslee from Texas Tech’s Department of Electronic Media and Communications. (He is one of the most brilliant and articulate scholars I know.) The book is called Web Spinning Heroics and is coming out soon. Dr Peaslee and I are also working on an edited scholarly book on the Joker (the academic literature on supervillains is sparse at best).

I am also in the process of co-editing a book on comics, graphic novels, and education with my excellent library colleague, associate social sciences librarian Carrye Syma, also from Texas Tech. And I have several articles coming out in Matthew Smith and Randy Duncan’s Icons of the American Comic Book.

My advice to scholars studying comics is to keep doing it. Comics scholarship is really in its infancy, and we have a chance to be creative, thoughtful, and make a difference in the way the rest of the world understands sequential art.

References

Eric Werthmann. “Graphic Novel Holdings in Academic Libraries.” In Graphic Novels in Libraries and Archives. Edited by Robert G. Weiner. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co: 242-259.

Semple, Lorenzo (dir), Adam West, Burt Ward et al., Batman: The Movie. Beverly Hills, CA : 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2008. (DVD) originally released in 1966.

Robert G. Weiner is an associate humanities librarian at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. He is the author of Marvel Graphic Novels: An Annotated Guide, editor of Captain America and the Struggle of the Superhero and Graphic Novels and Comics in Libraries and Archives, as well as the author of a number of comics-related articles in books like the Routledge History of the Holocaust, Gotham City 14 Miles, and The Gospel According to Superheroes. He is the co-editor of In the Peanut Gallery with Mystery Science Theater (with librarian Shelley Barba). He has also published on film- and music-related topics.

There were a number of paths that lead me away from the law and toward a study of comics, not least of which was that comic books are far more interesting to read than judgements and legislation. However, somewhere along the path I came to see exciting possibilities for comics studies under the umbrella of transmedial storytelling. Where transmedial studies generally focus on cinematic and televisual storyworlds (with some gaming and books thrown in for good measure), I focussed on those storyworlds crafted across music and comic books. Identifying this affinity is hardly ground-breaking; storytelling and music are intimately linked, and comic book bands such as The Archies and Josie and the Pussycats ‘performed’ in the 1960s, while other live-action bands, such as The Monkeys, The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch were also successful musical and narrative performers. Meanwhile, pop-bands such as The Beatles and The Jackson 5ive performed through animations. However, these earlier instances of transmediality are predominantly more reminiscent of transmedial franchising rather than transmedial storytelling. The transmedial elements were marketing strategies, not storyworld telling. Therefore, while music might be an element of these storyworlds, it is as an event that occurs within the story. The music is made accessible to readers as an experience within that world; such music does not contribute the process of telling or expanding the storyworld. More recently, the animated band The Gorillaz also achieved popular acclaim as a band at the centre of a deftly constructed transmedial storyworld and Neil Young also developed the less commercially successful, but equally elegant Greendale narrative.

My particular focus is on transmedial storyworlds where:

1) music and comics are part of the discursive form; and

2) there is an element of autobiographical “frottage”.

As such, I have not looked closely at either The Gorillaz or Greendale in this project, rather I have looked to the storyworlds performed by Coheed and Cambria (a progressive rock band from New York) and Amanda Palmer (a punk-cabaret performer from Boston). These artists have developed storyworlds where music works with comics and graphic novels or a photo-book (that discursively functions in a similar way to a graphic novel) to expand the storyworlds, and have used this storyworld to explore/reveal elements of their own lived experiences. This discursive choice conflates the authors/performers with the readers/audience. This conflation is not merely a theoretical supposition, but is a process of corporealisation that occurs within the narratives’ “gutters” (McCloud, 66). In these spaces the storyworlds’ emotional “truths” (as understood by readers) are manifested within the readers’ body when they hear (or sing along with) the musical text. This corporeality has repercussions both within the storyworld and in the legal and economic narratives that frame the discourses of “property” in creative works, I expand on this destabilisation within my thesis however that issue is outside the remit of this blog post.

Both The Amory Wars (TAW) and Who Killed Amanda Palmer (WKAP) are transmedial narratives; storyworlds constructed across multiple media. They are not adaptations; they do not retell the one story through a number of media. Rather, TAW and WKAP engage in the process Henry Jenkins calls “the art of world making” (21): each media develops a different part of the storyworld and it is up to the readers to search out the coherence between the different medial explorations. As such, it feels artificial to approach transmedial narratives like TAW and WKAP as story fragments; to look at a singular medium and experience rather than to recognise the organic confluence of the whole work. It is for this reason that it is essential to determine how the books and music work together.

TAW’s ur-text is musical and told across five albums: it is a work of poetry, loaded with repetition and metaphor and is, more often than not, dense to the point of incoherence. In contrast the WKAP ur-text is only the one album, and although the lyrics are more cogent, they are richly intertextual incorporating layer upon layer of narrative into the seams of Palmer’s story. The comics and photobooks orbit the musical texts that preceded them, clarifying the lyrical poetry with direct prose’ comforting beam. TAW and WKAP assume that the reader/audience is familiar with the music before they engage with other texts that create the storyworld. Therefore music frames the ideal readers’/audience’s encounter with the remainder of the storyworld. This is a reasonable expectation given that the authors’/performers’ music has been released prior to the books and that the music is generally more readily available for readers to purchase and engage with. TAW’s graphic and codex novels are often hard to track down outside of specialist and online stores, and the WKAP photobook was limited to an initial print run of 10,000 books. Further, the storyworld itself is often sourced and pieced together by and fans who have performed close readings of the lyrics and matched them with information provided by the authors/performers these epitexts. This has the effect of bringing together the music and the book within the reader/audience, of rubbing them against each other so that the music is painted into the words and images. In turn this decentres the storyworld ensuring that author/performer, the music and the books are not at the heart of the transmedial labyrinth – the reader is.

In TAW Claudio Sanchez has crafted a science fiction epic that invokes the traditional Hero with a Thousand Faces trope, with regular references to John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. This intertextuality encourages readers to search for references to both other storyworlds and to Sanchez’s own lived experiences. This means that when the reader/audience is engaging with the storyworld they utilise the gutters between comic frames and the spaces between paragraphs for three purposes:

1) To determine the temporal passage between frames,

2) To recall the layers of narrative invoked by intertextual references within the frames; and

3) To recall and embody the storyworld as it is extrapolated through other media, specifically, through music.

The gutter is therefore no longer a space that is the exclusive domain of the reader (McCloud, 66), rather it is a space that is partially guided by the author/performer and that is manifested (in a corporeal sense) within the reader. Transmediality (as a practise) inscribes the storyworld into the memory and imagination of the reader/audience. When music is thrown into the mix, this effect is heightened. This performance is also performative in the reiterative (Butlerian) sense; it is played over and over to shape the story, unlike a book that might be read once (more often if it is beloved), music bears repeated listening, it becomes familiar and intimate. Music resonates within our bodies and soundwaves manifest the story beneath our skin.

In TAW this manifests as concepts repeated within the books and the music, ideas that press against each other for a moment, before breaking apart again to explore the story from different perspectives. TAW’s flittering storyworld is demonstrated in Coheed’s second album, In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth 3 (IKSSE3). The album opens with ‘The Ring in Return’. We hear a ringing telephone and a woman in heels walking across to answer it before the recording swings into the IKSSE3 theme and an electronic segue. The track ends when a man’s voice (impliedly the protagonist, Claudio Kilgannon) says “Hello, Apollo. Where should I begin?” The title of the song indicates the purpose of the opening track and this is expanded upon in the graphic novel. The protagonist, Claudio Kilgannon returns to his high school sweetheart’s house and tries to call her to explain his prolonged absence. When she answers the phone, he is unable to speak and eventually hangs up on her. He then sits in her garden and narrates his adventures to her dog, Apollo. This establishes a narratological framework for the remainder of the story, bringing together the music and the text in a press of synchronicity (the ringing telephone) before musically exploring Kilgannon’s experience of linguistic rupture and differending; his inability to articulate the hurts he has experienced during his exile. This exile included time spent in a concentration camp on the planet Shylos XII, where Kilgannon’s nemesis, Whilhelm Ryan, was exterminating a non-sapian race called The Stars. Genocide narratives are often articulated in non-linguistic or grammatically unstable semiotic forms as a way of expressing experiences that are outside the order of language, being entirely abjected and otherwise “unspeakable” (Maher). While music does not directly relate the experiences of trauma, it allows the emotive imputation of anguish to beat against the illustrated panels. Minor keys crest in the comics gutters to remind the audience/reader of the experiences Kilgannon had in Second Stage Turbine Blade (SSTB) and between SSTB and IKSSE3 that are not written into the canonical text. This allows the reader/audience to both recall Kilgannon’s explicit narrative and to incorporate their understandings of such horrors as they have and do occur in our own world, thereby temporally dislocating the reader/audience. They simultaneously experience the character’s previous, existing and potential temporalities as well as the narratives and histories from their own lived experiences, all within the space between and around the panels in a graphic novel.

Transmedial storyworlds invoke a revolving rather than a lineal understanding of time, and I note that the returning musical motif, or even the repetition of chorus and verse within an individual song, allows the storytellers to reference a number of elements in a few short notes, including the character’s identity, their emotional state and their temporality both within and without the storyworld. These positions in time and of character within the storyworld are corporealised by the reader/audience, through their bodies, as musical sound-waves, and within their minds as memory and imagination. Anthony Storr writes that music “brings about similar physical responses in different people at the same time… Music has the effect of intensifying or underlining the emotion which a particular event calls forth, by simultaneously co-ordinating the emotions of a group of people” (24). The soaring theme that is associated with Kilgannon intimates his position as both sublime godhead and abjected tragic. This instrumental passage is played on synthesiser along with stringed instruments. This instrumentation echoes the character’s hybridity as part angelic Prise, part IRO-bot, and part human. This simple passage constructed between books and music explodes the audience/readers’ control over the text, it re-directs readers/audience toward certain readings and encouraging them to search out the author/performers’ commentary on the story.

I contrast this frottage of music and comic with Amanda Palmer’s WKAP. Palmer’s WKAP is more akin to a braid, a collection of stories and parallel universes wrapped around each other to create a cohesive whole. Structurally, the WKAP photobook is akin to a comic book. Photographs of Palmer’s “corpse” are juxtaposed with her own song lyrics and stories by Neil Gaiman. The images and text are framed, allowing for open space between the words and the images, like McCloud’s gutter. The WKAP album is also conscious of the gutters between musical tracks, and fills them with a recording of Palmer’s own lived-experience, her feigned death and a former partner’s discovery of her “corpse”. This establishes an autobiographical framework for Palmer’s music that the reader/audience may subsequently impute to the photobook. Throughout both texts Palmer’s corporeality/corpseoreality is present, waiting for the reader to press their own subjectivity against it.

Within the photobook, the juxtaposition of text and image aligns Palmer’s music, as referenced by the lyrics presented as poetry, and Gaiman’s stories with a collection of photographs taken by Palmer and her friends from the mid-1990s to 2007. Each image and story (and obviously the lyrics themselves) brings the reader/audience back to the album, both the music and the spoken word recording that is interspersed between the songs. The images’, lyrics’ and stories’ initial moment of frottage is with Palmer: her body is representative, reiterative and ludic. Palmer herself stated in an interview on February 8, 2010 that storyworld creation is “never just about music, ever… because behind the music is the people and the emotion and the intention… It’s impossible to separate the art and the artists who are making it and the story behind both” (youtube). Subsequently, upon recognising this press of the symbolic, emphatic and playful, the audience/reader experiences their moment of frisson.

This press is elegantly demonstrated in ‘Oasis’, a story that fictionalises traumatic events that Palmer experienced. She terminated a pregnancy at the age of 17 and three years later she was date-raped. In the song, an unidentified man (“the Barbarian”, who is a character, rather than a named individual) rapes Palmer’s character at a friend’s party. Palmer’s character subsequently tests positive for a pregnancy and decides to terminate it. The song relates the unstable back and forth of teenage girl friendships, exploring the notion of the “frenemy”, as well as the social taboos associated with women exercising autonomy over their bodies.

Palmer is explicit about her experiences but her lyrics are playful. She employs a 1960s surf aesthetic (specifically, Palmer was mimicking the Beach Boys), framing Palmer as a narrator who is innocent and naïve, an aesthetic associated with that musical genre. Palmer’s recollection of trauma is at odds with the playful music. This uncomfortable juxtaposition is made more explicit in the film clip where her high-camp aesthetic and the large smiles on both her face and her rapists face testify to the social acceptability and normalisation of rape culture in society. This aspect is also addressed in the photobook, where (next to the lyrics for ‘Oasis’) Palmer’s “corpse” is slumped across a bed. She is wearing a child-like, pink party dress and her normally short, dark hair is covered with a long, blonde wig. She is wearing a tiara that slides off her head and her make-up can be seen as smudged around her eyes. There is a bruise on her hand that is in shot and her legs are spread, with the pink, frilly skirts bunched around her knees. Her mouth is open. The costume and pose place Palmer’s body somewhere between a Beauty Queen and an inflatable doll, signifying her position as object of gaze that is celebrated for its aesthetic appeal and her position as a tool for the gratification of heteronormative, masculine sexual desire. In her blog Palmer writes “the song isn’t even so much ABOUT [rape and abortion], it’s about denial, it’s about a girl who can’t find it in herself to take her situation seriously. That girl exists, everywhere”.

In both TAW and WKAP the storyworlds are felt and lived experiences for the reader/audience. The body, my body, your body, becomes the gutter for the storyworld, and there is immediacy to our bodily and musical experiences that cannot be abscinded.

References

Articles and Chapters

Maher, L.J., “A Little Glass Booth: Auschwitz, Snow White and the Performance of Fear”, antiTHESIS, Vol. 10 (2010), 55-71.

Music

Coheed and Cambria, Second Stage Turbine Blade (Equal Vision Records: New York, 2002)

― In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth 3 (Equal Vision Records: New York, 2003)

― Good Apollo I’m burning star IV : Volume one, From fear through the eyes of madness (Columbia: New York, 2005)

― Good Apollo I’m Burning Star IV: Part 2 No world for tomorrow (Columbia: New York, 2007)

― The Year of the Black Rainbow (Columbia: New York, 2010)

Palmer, A., Who Killed Amanda Palmer? (Roadrunner Records: New York, 2008)

Video

Coheed and Cambria, Live at La Zona Rosa (Sony BMG Music Entertainment: Hudson, 2004).

― Live at the Starland Ballroom (Sony BMG Music Entertainment: Hudson, 2005).

― Live at the Hammerstein Ballroom (Sony BMG Music Entertainment: Hudson, 2006).

Palmer, A., M. Pope et al., Who Killed Amanda Palmer: A collection of music videos (Roadrunner Records: New York, 2008)

Books

Barthes, R. Image Music Text (Fontana Press: London, 1977).

― S/Z, (Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1990).

Butler, J. Bodies That Matter (Routledge: New York, 1993).

Campbell, J., Hero with a Thousand Faces (Fontana Press: London, 1993).

Grosz, E. Volatile Bodies (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1994).

Jenkins, H., Convergence Culture: Where old and new media collide (New York University Press: New York, 2008).

Kriwaczek, R., On the Many Deaths of Amanda Palmer (and the many crimes of Tobias James) (The Overlook Press: New York, 2008).

McCloud, S. Understanding Comics (HarperPerrenial: New York, 1994).

Milton, J., Paradise Lost (Penguin Classics: London, 2003).

Palmer, A., N. Gaiman et al, Who Killed Amanda Palmer: A collection of photographic evidence (Eight Foot Books: New York, 2009).

Sanchez C. and C. Shy, Good Apollo I’m Burning Star IV: From fear through the eyes of madness (Evil Ink Comics: Los Angeles, 2005)

Sanchez C. and P. David, In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth 3 (Evil Ink Comics: Los Angeles, 2010-2011)

― Year of the Black Rainbow (Evil Ink Books: Nashville, 2010).

Sanchez C. and G. Vasquez, The Amory Wars: The Second Stage Turbine Blade (Image Comics: Berkley, Calif., 2008)

Snyder, I., Hypertext: The electronic labyrinth (Melbourne University Press: Melbourne, 1996).

― The Literacy Wars (Allen & Unwin: Crows Nest, 2008).

Storr, A. Music and the Mind, (Harper Collins: London, 1992).

After completing a combined Law and Performing Arts degree in 2006 LJ Maher returned to study (much to the disappointment of her parents who thought she might actually grow up and get a job) and began her studies in English literature. She is now midway through a PhD with the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies at Monash University. Her thesis interrogates autobiographical representation and corporeality through trans-media literature (or, as she prefers explaining it, comic books and rock ‘n’ roll FTW). Her previous research addressed queering in Young Adult literature, women’s access to human rights discourse and prostitution, and the role of the abject and the sublime in vergangenheitsbewältigung literature.

Last semester, I taught an advanced course on children’s comics and picture books, one of those courses we find ourselves teaching because we have more questions than we do answers. From years of studying critical commentaries on the form of comics and the form of picture books, I had arrived at a very respectable, highly informed position from which I could no longer say anything coherent on the subject. Naturally, that meant I was ready to teach it.

Our readings that semester were far-ranging, and I will maintain to my dying gasp that our great breadth of inquiry was the result of our eclectic thirst for knowledge, not because the captain had been clinging to a broken rudder since the moment his ship set sail. As a result, we covered territory I found familiar as well as territory I was still trying to map. And not surprisingly to anyone else who has ever tried this “strategy” of teaching, it was while we were crisscrossing what was, to me, the familiar and the unfamiliar that one of my many excellent and engaged students, a young man named Tyler Brown, pointed out that there were hidden depths in one of the most well-charted areas.

Brown wrote his final paper on a book that frequently falls in and out of favor in comics circles: Mark Waid and Alex Ross’s Kingdom Come. His topic was decidedly old fashioned: what allusions does the book make? It’s the kind of question that a comics scholar would never ask, nervous of echoes of The Anxiety of Influence or otherwise unfashionable scholarship. But as Brown and I worked on where he might go with this topic, an interesting pattern came to light, one that I had noticed but never thought much about before my student populated it with his examples. Kingdom Come’s most obvious allusions are biblical: it quotes Revelation, names a villain Magog, puts a funny hat with ram’s horns on said villain’s head, titles itself after a phrase from the Lord’s Prayer, and so on. But the book’s most common allusions are to low-brow culture: Fat Albert, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, 1960s pop music, and, of course, comics. Indeed, Brown came to the conclusion that the biblical allusions did little more than emphasize the book’s apocalyptic tone, but the allusions to low-brow culture, he began to sense, meant something more significant. With the end of the semester looming, he had to wrap up his inquiry, ending with the theory that perhaps these low-brow allusions say something about how comics readers are eager to read backward through allusions to inform themselves about the history of popular culture.

I like that idea very much—after all, it’s flattering to think of me and mine as people who are looking for excuses to learn—but it’s probably an untestable theory. Nonetheless, the more I allowed myself to think about the decidedly unfashionable question that drove it—namely, what allusions do comics make?—the more I was convinced that there is a pattern here that says something about comics and how they’re read. The examples of comics making allusions to low-brow culture are too many mention here—I’ve just finished work on an essay about how Urasawa invokes and revises Tezuka in Pluto, to pull one suggestive example out of my hat—so what I’d like to do for the rest of this brief post is to start with this tentative given (that comics often allude to low-brow culture and rarely allude to high-brow), sketch out some of the ways we might think about the allusions popular comics tend to make, and then suggest some ways of explaining what the patterns of those allusions mean.

It might do, considering that this question arose from a course on comics and picture books, to begin thinking about allusions in comics by contrasting them with allusions in picture books. Both are media that rely on word-image combinations, and both rely on sequential readings to make meaning. But one of the few important differences between comics and picture books is that the latter make allusions to high art with some frequency, while comics do so only rarely. There are many examples of picture books pointing off-screen to famous paintings, but in the interest of space, I’ll cite only one study exploring such high-brow allusions in picture books. In an essay published in 2000, John Stephens highlights allusions to van Gogh’s Vincent’s Bedroom at Arles, The Chair and the Pipe, and Starry Night as well as Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window and Gentleman and Girl with Music in addition to Bosch’s The Crowning with Thorns and perhaps even Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère…and that’s just in one picture book, Allen Say’s Emma’s Rug! If one picture book (indeed, a picture book created by someone who began his career in comics) can happily include so many high-brow allusions, why don’t comics?

It’s possible that the difference between the allusions made in comics and picture books is traceable to a widely noted difference in the role the two forms are perceived to play in literacy. It is generally taken for granted (see for example a recent essay by Mel Gibson) that picture books are understood by the wider populace to be a noble step on the road to literacy, whereas comics are either a threat or a short-term distraction on the way to real books. But the abundance of low-brow and scarcity of high-brow references in comics would connect to that observation from an odd angle. The perception of comics’ relationship with literacy seems to be one imposed from without, by people invested in the teaching of literacy looking at the popularity of comics from the outside. But if the surplus of low-brow allusions in comics is connected to comics’ supposed opposition to literacy, then the allusions are in comics because the comics creators themselves feel that comics are opposed to literacy; that is to say, the perception of comics as anti-literacy comes from without, but the choice to privilege low-brow allusions has to come from within. From the picture books angle, this makes a certain amount of sense: picture book creators profit from contributing to the perception that their wares are essential to literacy, and including high-brow allusions would make sense for creators making money by selling children’s books to parents who want to recognize picture books as imbued with the aura of the educative, as Good For Children. It’s not unlikely that comics creators know they are perceived by a larger public as contributing to an art form that hinders literacy, but I balk at the notion that, aware of that perception, comics creators embrace it.

But then again, there is something…delinquent about the kinds of allusions comics prefer. By preferring low-brow allusions, comics seem to be inviting readers to thumb their noses at high-brow culture. Think back to Kingdom Come as an obvious example. Whereas its multiple biblical allusions feel respectful toward the source text, borrowing its authority almost gratefully in order to mirror the apocalyptic tone of late scripture, the more common low-brow allusions have the air of metafiction, of a technique that doesn’t add to the unity of the book’s tone, but that makes a joke of unity and artistic integrity. When the neo-fascist Bat-bots of Waid and Ross’s dystopia chase after the characters of Fat Albert, the text must be seen as inviting readers to pop out of the awe-struck narrative tone of the rest of the book in order to smirk at the odd allusion. The metafictionality of the allusions, then, especially as compared with the biblical allusions, feels downright disrespectful to Literature-with-a-capital-L: the unity of the story is interrupted to give the audience the old wink-wink, nudge-nudge, a giggling allusion that is more self-indulgent than it is an addition to the crafting of the story. The biblical allusions bear fruit for the story’s apocalyptic tone, but the other allusions pointedly threaten it. This does seem to be evidence of comics creators going out of their way to make their tales anti-literary, to locate some of the pleasure for knowing readers in the fracturing of good, respectful storytelling.

So one angle of this realization about allusions in comics is that comics still cherish low-brow allusions above high-brow; but the fact that we can find some prominent high-brow allusions in a book like Kingdom Come is also a sign that the habits of comics may change. One reason that we can expect more high-brow allusions from comics in the future is that the format of comics is changing. Because of the booming popular of the trade format comic (sigh… “graphic novel”) at the expense of magazine-style floppies, readers have and are encouraged to develop a different relationship with the story between the suddenly sturdy covers. Some very provocative scholarship on picture books has pointed out the relevance of the fact that from the beginning of the twentieth century, picture books were designed to endure and reward repeated re-readings (Nathalie op de Beeck’s Suspended Animation is the best recent treatment of this topic). As a result, picture books have for nearly a century featured detailed drawings with hidden delights, a red balloon in the background of a story about a gorilla going to sleep, a hidden deer in the background of a picture book about Anansi the spider, and so on. But comics, which were originally designed to be ephemeral objects, were magazines, to be read through a limited number of times before they simply fell apart. But with the widespread popularity of the trade format, narratives could be written for a comic book that would tolerate multiple re-readings. And if it was going to tolerate those re-readings, a comic really ought to reward re-readers for returning to the story again and again. Therefore, Kingdom Come—I bought my own copy, in fact, as a hardback issued by the Science Fiction Book Club—is emblematic of a new kind of comic, one written with an eye to the kind of shelf life that had previously been more common for picture books than comics. That kind of book needs to have something in it to reward readers for re-reading, and allusions to high-brow culture are more likely to make sense on later readings than are allusions to popular culture, which is by definition more temporal. Therefore, there’s a good reason to expect comics to behave more like picture books in the future.

I’ll close by fending off the inevitable argument that there are many comics of the past, even before the blossoming of the trade format, that make allusions to classic rather than pop culture. Of course there are comics that have high-brow allusions. In fact, a great deal of the work of Gilbert Hernandez makes a point of alluding to high-brow literature and visual art, and comics have a long tradition of adapting classic literature…which isn’t really the same thing as making an allusion, but it’s close. Still, even in the work of, say, Hernandez, the high-brow allusions appear alongside—indeed, to my mind, they’re dwarfed by—allusions to punk music, popular wrestling, and (surprise surprise) comics. And that seems to be the pattern through comics, to maintain the right to make high-brow allusions but revel in the nerdy glee of low-brow allusions. It’s an unfashionable question to ask, this question of what allusions a book makes, but in the case of comics, it’s a provocative question with surprising answers. And those answers may well change dramatically in the coming decades.

Works Cited:

Gibson, Mel. “Picturebooks, Comics and Graphic Novels.” The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature. Ed. David Rudd. London: Routledge, 2010. 100-11.

Op de Beeck, Nathalie. Suspended Animation: Children’s Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.

Stephens, John. “Modality and Space in Picture Book Art: Allen Say’s Emma’s Rug.” CREArTA 1.1 (June 2000): 44-59.

Joe Sutliff Sanders is a professor of children’s literature in the English Department at Kansas State University. He is the author of Disciplining Girls: Understanding the Origins of the Classic Orphan Girl Story (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011). He wrote recently on theorizing sexuality in comics in The Rise of the American Comics Artist (UP of Mississippi, 2010), and he has pieces forthcoming on Urasawa’s adaptation of Tezuka and comics for mobile devices. He is the graphic novels columnist for Teacher Librarian, an international journal for school librarians. He has just been awarded a Fulbright to research Occupation-era Tintin.