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Genocide in Comics by Laurike in ‘t Veld

17 Feb

The first time I encountered Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986 & 1992) was, as for many, a revelatory experience. During my studies I had mainly focused on the representation of genocide in moving images; films, documentaries, television programs. I prided myself of having gained something of a distance to my studied objects. I could look at a film about the genocide in Rwanda or Bosnia and maintain my academic analytical composure, not letting the images get to me too much. But then I opened Maus, which broke right through my academic filters, as did Jean-Philippe Stassen’s Deogratias, Jeroen Janssen’s Muzungu, Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde, Paolo Cossi’s Medz Yeghern and many other comics.

The impact of the medium made me exchange the realm of moving images for that of the static image, which is moving nonetheless. It is my firm belief that the medium of comics employs unique strategies in representing something as sensitive as a genocide and in trying to establish a connection with the reader. Every comic book that deals with genocide reinforces the idea that these strategies need to be analyzed systematically. My research project, titled Genocide in Comics, analyzes how genocides are imagined and represented in comics and connects theories from genocide studies and comics/media theory in a critical analysis.

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Posted by on 2012/02/17 in Guest Writers

 

Comics Forum 2011 by John G. Swogger

13 Feb

Surely writing a review of a comics conference is on par with dancing about architecture? Text seems such an impoverished medium now – unequipped to condense three days into anything like a reasonable representation of the event. As unaccompanied text, “diverse”, “exciting” and “passionate” sound somewhat fatuous – the reviewer’s equivalent of multiple exclamation marks or a string of emoticons. A series of comic-panel vignettes really would be so much better.

If I did this review as a comic, “diverse” would be replaced with pages showing the work of artists like Karrie Fransman, Elodie Durand and Ian Kirkpatrick. In a comic, “exciting” would be replaced by quick-cut series of panels of Daniel Merlin Goodbrey flicking through a stream of digital-format comics, each one more inventive than the last. In a comic, “passionate” would be replaced with speech-bubbles from the intense, disquieting, sometimes overwhelmingly honest talks by Andrew Godfrey, Paula Knight and Katie Green.

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Posted by on 2012/02/13 in Comics Forum 2011, Conference reports, Graphic Medicine, Materiality and Virtuality: A Conference on Comics, Sculpture and Comic Art, Thought Bubble

 

The visualization of anger in comics by Charles Forceville

10 Feb

Ensuring readers’/viewers’ continued interest in a story requires that they are aware of the goals of one or more protagonists, and make an emotional investment in their success or failure; we hope that the hero or heroine will succeed, and fear that the villain will. We thus empathize with the story’s good guy(s)/girl(s) and antipathize with its bad ones. Of course goodness and badness can be complicated affairs, and we may end up having mixed feelings about characters.

Empathizing and antipathizing inevitably involve our awareness of the emotions felt by the characters themselves. We co-suffer in the sense of the luxurious substitute emotion evoked by fiction that Noel Carroll calls “art-emotion” (1991: 143 et passim) when the hero is wounded or loses his best friend; we rejoice if the heroine is proud to have saved the prince or the planet.

Comics have means for conveying characters’ emotions that partly overlap with those of other media and that are partly unique to the medium. In this short paper I will review some studies I have done on the representation of anger in comics (see also my students’ work as summarized in Forceville 2011a). My original framework was conceptual metaphor theory/CMT (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; for the current state of affairs, see Gibbs 2008, Kövecses 2010). Within this framework Zoltán Kövecses (1986, 2000, 2005) has systematically discussed the way emotions are metaphorically conveyed in language. Since anger is the emotion he has written about most extensively, this has become the paradigm emotion that others in CMT have decided to focus on. That is what I did when I tried to apply Kövecses’ theories to the visual realm, more specifically to comics (Forceville 2005). But this practical reason for privileging anger should ideally serve as a launching pad for broadening the discussion to the representation of emotion in comics in general.

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Posted by on 2012/02/10 in Guest Writers

 

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Anthropology goes Comics by Hannah Wadle

03 Feb

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. There are a few individual artists-anthropologists, who contribute to a discussion on comics and anthropology, but thousands of anthropologists returning from fieldwork, with their numerous little diaries, filled not only with written notes, but also with sketches and drawings, leave their graphic work behind and begin with their “real work”, the writing, as soon as they are back in their home universities.

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Posted by on 2012/02/03 in Comics Forum 2011, educators, Guest Writers, Materiality and Virtuality: A Conference on Comics

 

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Where did the ‘Stan Lee Excelsior Award’ come from? And where is it going? by Paul Register

27 Jan

Left to Right – Bryan Talbot (writer/artist of Grandville, Alice in Sunderland, The Tale of One Bad Rat, etc.), Theodore Adams III (Chairman of the Stan Lee Foundation) and Paul Register (award founder and organiser)

In presenting a study of the background of the award, it is probably worthwhile having a very brief look at the background of its organiser too. My name is Paul Register. I’m 41, have a degree in English Studies and a long-standing love of comics, in all their myriad forms. As a young child, my mother fed me a steady diet of classic humour comics like Whizzer & Chips and Plug and British reprints of American superhero comics like Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Hulk, X-Men, etc. I have been the Learning Resource Centre Manager (I prefer good, old-fashioned ‘Librarian’ as a professional label personally) at Ecclesfield School for the last three years and did a similar job at a school in Rotherham for eight years before that. That was preceded by a couple of years working for the bookstore chain Ottakar’s (before it was gobbled up by the retail giant that is Waterstone’s and slowly assimilated). That’s enough about the award’s organiser and founder though. This project has never been about self-promotion and never will be. The focus always has to be on the reading. The overall success of the award has to be gauged by the amount of reading it facilitates. That is its raison d’etre.

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Posted by on 2012/01/27 in Guest Writers

 

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