by Andrea De Falco
‘Fluid Images – Fluid Text’ was the title of an interdisciplinary conference that took place at Cardiff University (Wales) on 23-24 January 2020. The conference, organised by Dr Tilmann Altenberg (School of Modern Languages) and Dr Lisa El Refaie (School of English, Communication and Philosophy), hosted eighteen speakers from twelve institutions spread across seven different countries, featuring a wide range of backgrounds and approaches. The conference received financial support from Institute of Modern Languages Research (London), University Council of Modern Languages, Cardiff Comics Storytelling Network, Cardiff School of Modern Languages and Cardiff School of English, Communication and Philosophy.
The aim was to investigate from a transdisciplinary perspective three different and interlinked dimensions underpinning comics’ mobility: time, space and artistic media. The chronological dimension covers a broad field including the relationships between comics and history and the transformations investing their editorial and reading practices. Translation is the key word to understand how comics have been able to transcend national borders, by means of transmission in different languages and cultures. The last dimension leads us to comics’ adaptation in other media, investigating their relationships with different forms of artistic expression.
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Tags: A Borrowed Life, A Distant Soil, adaptation, Aka B, Alessandro Tota, Alison Bechdel, Ana Penyas, art, Asterix, autobiography, Ángel de la Calle, Bea Enriquez, biography, Caterina Sansone, classroom, Colleen Doran, dictatorship, digital comics, Disney, Edgar Clement, family, film, Fumettibrutti, Fun Home, Gender, Graphic Novels, Greece, heritage, History, humour, identity, Il tempo materiale, intermediality, intertextuality, Italy, Je est un autre, Kobane Calling, Luigi Ricca, Martin Lemelman, memory, Mendel’s Daughter, Mexico, nationalism, Núria Tamarit, Non-fiction Comics, Operación Bolívar, P. La mia adolescenza trans, Palacinche, Paperinik, Phoebe Gloeckner, Photography, Pinturas de guerra, place, Politics, Race/ethnicity, social conflict, Spain, Storia di una madre, Taiwan, The Adventures of Tintin, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, The Story of a Mother, theatre, time, Tintin, Translations, transmediality, Transphobia, transsexual abuse, UK, Wales, Women, Zerocalcare
By Antarleena Basu
In 2015, while Paul Gravett was affirming that “the Indian graphic novel is here to stay” (Gravett), a 162-page comic/graphic novel that raised many an eyebrow for its dauntless representation of the Naxalite movement and the rise of the communist ideology across India was published in book form somewhere in Bhilai, a bustling industrial city in the state of Chattisgarh in India. The Naxalite movement, also known as the “peasant uprising”, refers to the armed struggle of the peasants against wealthy and exploitative land-owners and it was initiated by a small fraction of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) led by Charu Mazumdar in a small village of West Bengal in India called “Naxalbari”; hence the name “Naxal uprising”. Titled Amar Bari Tomar Bari Naxalbari (which roughly translates from Bengali as “my house and your house is Naxalbari” and echo the popular Bengali slogan of the Naxals), Sumit Kumar’s comic was the first of its kind—it not only dares to portray the serious topic of the Naxal and communist uprising through the verbal and visual interaction of the comic mode but also experiments with a wide array of styles and techniques in the text, thereby injecting the necessary dosage of plurality that could go into the making of an Indian comic. By amalgamating the present political events with those of the past, by invoking classics as well as pop-culture and its icons, by mixing colourful pages with stark blacks and whites, among his many binaries, Kumar creates a scathing, tragic-comic narrative that almost borders on the absurd.
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Tags: History, India, Indian Comics, Indian graphic novel, Politics, South Asia, violence
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