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Inequality and Adversity, in Content and Form: The Indian Graphic Novel Bhimayana by E. Dawson Varughese

15 Jun

The Indian graphic novel Bhimayana: experiences of untouchability was published in 2012 by a New Delhi-based company called Navayana. The book charts the life of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891 – 1956) who campaigned for equal rights and an end to social discrimination in particular towards ‘untouchables’ or ‘casteless people’ in India. He was the principal architect of the Indian Constitution. The graphic novel blends biography, Indian legislation, letters penned by Gandhi and primary source material in the form of newspaper clippings of the post-millennial period; the clippings sadly underscoring how important issues of untouchabilty remain in today’s India. Untouchability in contemporary India, like earlier eras, ostracises groups of people by depriving them of their legal mandate and excluding them from social customs and cultures. Ambedkar, one of India’s ‘foremost revolutionaries’ (Bhimayana 2012 – back cover) grew up as an untouchable and faced discrimination throughout his life; this graphic novel explores such instances as he is refused water, accommodation and his right to education.

My most recent work [1] is interested in visuality and ‘new ways of seeing’ in post-millennial India and for me Bhimayana (2012) is part of a larger body of work which invokes new ways of seeing in New India. These new ways of seeing correspond to post-millennial trends in visual cultures and creativity which in turn, often depict India in challenging and inauspicious ways. Much of life in New India today involves new forms of cultural consumption and much of that cultural consumption has to do with ‘seeing’. Lutgendorf (2006) tells us that ‘…‘‘seeing’’ was (and continues to be) understood as a tangible encounter in which sight reaches out to ‘‘touch’’ objects and ‘‘take’’ them back into the seer’ (2006: 231). It has been argued that the role of visuality in Indian culture is defining, given the concepts of darshan and drishti which are usually translated as ideas of ‘seeing’ or ‘gazing’ and are at the heart of Hindu modes of visuality (see Ramaswamy, 2003: xxv). Freitag (2003) argues that the visual realm is a critical component in South Asian modernity because: ‘[A]cts of seeing become acts of knowing as viewers/consumers impute new meanings to familiar images. Such agency enables a civil society to grapple with change through indigenous sociologies of knowledge so that it can be naturalised and accommodated.’ (2003: 366) Lutgendorf (2006) reminds us of the power of darshan/darśan when he writes that ‘darśan is a ‘‘gaze’’ that is returned’ (2006: 233, original emphasis) and in his work, he has translated darśan as both ‘visual dialog’ and ‘visual intercourse’ (2006: 233) in order to emphasise the idea of communication between the gazer and the gazed upon.

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Posted by on 2015/06/15 in Guest Writers

 

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Manga Studies #8: Shōjo Manga History: The Obscured Decades by Dalma Kálovics

11 Jun

Previously on Comics Forum, Monden Masafumi shed light on the fact that Japanese shōjo manga discourse tends to prioritize a gender-related perspective, disregarding the majority of graphic narratives which do not fit a subversive reading of the genre, or even dismissing them for their allegedly conservative representation of femininity. But this is not the only one-sided approach to shōjo manga, there is also a historical bias at play. Shōjo manga of the 1970s, notably works by the so-called Magnificent 49ers (see below), have been the main focus of discussion, overshadowing other eras, both before and after. In the following overview, I will outline how the 70s and especially the 49ers ended up as the center of attention, how this favoritism has obscured other periods, and finally how views on shōjo manga history are beginning to change.

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Posted by on 2015/06/11 in Gender, Guest Writers, Manga Studies, Women

 

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News Review: May 2015

04 Jun

Africa

South Africa

Culture

The current exhibition at Erdmann Contemporary is Speechless, a comic art exhibition. Link (English, WG)

Americas

United States

Education

The University of Massachusetts Boston has recently acquired a collection of comic books, called the Allan D. MacDougall Popular Culture Archive. A list of comics can be found via the link, and is grouped by publisher. Link (English, WG)

Obituary

David Beronä, a comics scholar and librarian, has recently passed away. He authored Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels (2008). Link (English, WG)

Research

A special issue of the journal, Composition Studies, on Comics, Multimodality, and Composition has been published. Link (English, WG)

There is an extended deadline of 30th June for submissions to the edited collection, The Canadian Alternative, which focuses on  Canadian graphic novelists and cartoonists. Link (02/05/2015, English, WG)

The Northeast Popular/American Culture Association (NEPCA) is seeking paper proposals on comics and graphic novels for its fall conference to be held at Colby-Sawyer College in New London, New Hampshire on the 30th and 31st October.The deadline to submit proposals is the 15th June. Link (12/04/2015, English, WG)

There is a call for papers for an edited collection entitled The Comics of Art Spiegelman. Abstracts are due by the 15th June. Link (04/05/2015, English, WG)

Penn State University Press has published the Graphic Medicine Manifesto, co authored by MK Czerwiec, Ian Williams, Susan Squier, Michael Green, Kimberley Myers, and Scott Smith. Link (English, WG)

The Comics Journal has a report on Queers & Comics: The LGBTQ Cartoonists and Comics Conference. Link (18/05/2015, English, WG)

Drawn from the Classics: Essays on Graphic Adaptations of Literary Works, edited by Stephen E. Tabachnick and Esther Bendit Saltzman has been published through McFarland. Link (English, WG)

Europe

Austria

Culture

The 1st Vienna Comic Con is going to take place on the 21st and 22nd November. Link (14/05/2015, German, MdlI)

Ben Katchor is going to teach a course on ‘Comics and Performance’ in Salzburg from the 20th-25th July. Link (28/05/2015, German, MdlI)

France

Research

The programme, and other details for the Sixth International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference / Ninth International Bande Dessinée Society Conference, which takes place in Paris between the 22nd and 27th June, can be found via the link. Link (English, WG)

Germany

Culture

The exhibition on Western comics, Going West!, is now shown in Dortmund. Link (04/05/2015, German, MdlI)

An exhibition of recent German comics was shown in Asperg until the 29th May. Link (04/05/2015, German, MdlI)

Munich Comic Festival is going to take place from the 4th until the 7th June this year; guests include Dave McKean, Mike Perkins, and Jock. Link (13/05/2015, German, MdlI)

A roundtable on reading of webcomics took place at the re:publica web 2.0 conference in Berlin on the 5th May; a video recording is available. Link (German, MdlI)

Publisher Tokyopop and website Animando have founded a new award for dōjinshi. Link (13/05/2015, German, MdlI)

Several comic authors are going to participate in Comic Symposium in Saarbrücken on the 9th June, including Barbara Yelin and Marijpol. Link (21/05/2015, MdlI)

A series of exhibitions of abstract comics is going to be shown in Bremen from the 13th June until the 8th November. Link (25/05/2015, German, MdlI)

Research

Stephan Packard has been awarded one of this year’s Heinz Maier Leibnitz awards of the German Research Foundation (DFG). Link (07/05/2015, German, MdlI)

A roundtable organised by the German Society for Comics Studies (ComFor) is going to take place on the 7th June as part of Munich Comic Festival. Link (14/05/2015, German, MdlI)

Two talks on autobiographical comics were given in Bonn on the 20th May. Link (18/05/2015, German, MdlI)

Portugal

Culture

From the 29th May until the 14th June, the Casa da Cultura of Beja will host the annual International Festival of Comics (XI Festival Internacional de Banda Desenhada de Beja). This festival is usually composed by some exhibitions, book/magazine launches, author events, workshops, concerts, and much more. Link (Portuguese, English and French, RR)

Spain

Culture

An exhibition about the work of Japanese author Yuichi Yokohama can be seen at Centro Centro, Madrid, from the 27th May to the 6th September. Link (25/05/2015, Spanish, EdRC)

An exhibition about the creation of Las Meninas, best Spanish work at the Barcelona International Comic Fair, can be seen at Libreria Gil, Santander, from the 6th May to the 4th June. Link (06/05/2015, Spanish, EdRC)

Research

The international conference, Comics y Compromiso social (Comics and social commitment), will be celebrated at Valencia from the 18th to the 20th November. Abstracts are due by the 15th July. Link (16/02/2015, Spanish, EdRC)

The summer course, Imágenes y migraciones del cómic y la novela gráfica (Images and migrations from comics and graphic novels), will be celebrated at the University of Alcalá from the 23rd to the 26th June. Link (16/05/2015, Spanish, EdRC)

Switzerland

Culture

The exhibition, La Magie du Western dans la Bande Dessinée Franco-Belge, which focuses upon Franco-Belgian Western comics will be at the château de St-Maurice from the 22nd May until the 15th November. Link (French, WG)

UK

Research

The Comic Electric: A Digital Comics Symposium will be held at The University of Hertfordshire on the 14th October. Abstracts are due by the 27th July. Link (29/05/2015, English, WG)

Reports on the Applied Comics Network meetup which took place on the 9th May can be found via the link (scroll down). Link (English, WG)

There is a call for papers for, TRANSITIONS 6 – New Directions in Comics Studies 2015 Symposium, which will take place on 31st October at Birkbeck, University of London. Link (01/06/2015, English, WG)

*                    *                    *

 News Editor: Will Grady (comicsforumnews@hotmail.co.uk)

Correspondents: Enrique del Rey Cabero (EdRC, Spain), William Grady (WG, UK), Martin de la Iglesia (MdlI, Austria & Germany), Renatta Rafaella (RR, Portugal).

Click here for News Review correspondent biographies.

Click here to see the News Review archive.

Suggestions for articles to be included in the News Review can be sent to Will Grady at the email address above.

 
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Posted by on 2015/06/04 in News Review

 

Funny? Animals? The Problem of We3 by Alex Link

30 May

There can be no doubt as to the importance of the representation of the animal body in comics history. This, of course, is not to say that comics, with talking dogs that walk on two legs and the like, have traditionally aspired to realism. Rather, the anthropomorphized animal pervades comics, and typically, in the history of “funny animal” comics, “the ‘animalness’ of the characters becomes vestigial or drops away entirely.” [1] Even so, “comics and graphic novels are a virtually untapped source of insight into cultural paradigms about animals” [2] when the comics animal is considered qua animal. Recent comics such as Pride of Baghdad (2006), Duncan the Wonder Dog (2010), and others have returned to this legacy of the funny animal with a critical gaze, doing so at a time that coincides with the development of critical animal studies.

Critical animal studies takes as one of its aims the exploration of the manner in which “ ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’ . . . must be continuously reimagined and reconstituted” [3] and We3 (2004-5), by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, seems to do precisely that. Wanting “‘to do to funny animal comics what Alan Moore did to superhero comics,’” Morrison—who ended his time writing Animal Man (1990) with an explicit call for animal rights—and Quitely invite a reappraisal of the comics animal. [4] While it is true that Art Spiegelman’s Maus famously takes caricatural anthropomorphism beyond humour, it leaves intact the role of comics animals as proxy humans, and/or as metaphors for qualities based on “understandings of animal behavior that circulate . . . in . . . culture” [5]. These practices have always ultimately “celebrate[d] and naturalize[d] the superiority of the human,” [6] and elided animal alterity. Rosi Braidotti calls for the direct examination of animal alterity in narrative, by asking that we approach the animal as animal, or “neoliterally.” [7] Perhaps surprisingly, when one approaches We3 with this “neoliteral” recognition of the animal in mind, one quickly encounters the difficulty with which the animal might clearly be separated from additional cultural categories that serve as others to the always-contested definition of the “human.”

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Posted by on 2015/05/30 in Guest Writers

 

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The Whites of their Eyes: Implied Violence and Double Frames in Blazing Combat and The ‘Nam by Harriet Earle

13 May

It will come as no surprise to anyone reading this that comics has a massive arsenal of techniques for the representation of violence, of trauma, of horror, of life. Indeed, the array is so vast that this paper can only concentrate on a single technique – one that is both subtle and incredibly effective. This is a technique that allows violence to be implicit. It is sneakiness and cleverness combined. It is, to my mind, one of the best examples of the utter magic of the comics form. I am talking about the representation of the human eye. It may not seem at first that the drawing of an eye is anything more than just that – an eye. But I propose that the way an eye is drawn and its relationship to the rest of the image is in fact an acutely important representational tool and one that allows violence to be implicit, dependent on the reader’s imagination.

In this paper, I consider examples from two American war comics. The first is Doug Murray and Mike Golden’s The ‘Nam, a Marvel publication that ran from 1986 to 1993 that mimicked the typical tour of duty so the characters were rotated in and out of story arcs as they would have been in combat. The series followed the Comics Code Authority guidelines and as such does not depict certain aspects of the Vietnam War – no drug use, no swearing. That said, it does have a fairly level approach to combat and is rightly praised for not subscribing to the ‘men’s adventure’ derring-do style storytelling that is has been employed by other publications. The second example is Blazing Combat, written by Archie Goodwin, which ran from 1965 to 66 before being rather abruptly cancelled. The second issue ran a story set in Vietnam and this was something of a death knell. American PX shops (shops set up on American military bases internationally) refused to stock it because, while the comic is not necessarily anti-war, it steadfastly refuses to subscribe to any glorification of war and instead concentrates on individuals and the trauma of their experience. These are not typical war comics – neither are as brash as Commando or Battle. As Kurt Vonnegut would suggest there is no role for John Wayne here (see Slaughterhouse-Five, p.11).

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Posted by on 2015/05/13 in Guest Writers

 

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