Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads 9781472544124, 9781441185754

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Notes on the Contributors Georgiana Banita is Assistant Professor of US Literature and Media Studies at the University of Bamberg, Germany, and Honorary Research Fellow at the United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney. She is the author of Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture after 9/11 (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) and “Chris Ware and the Pursuit of Slowness” (in The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking, University Press of Mississippi, 2010). Aryn Bartley is Assistant Professor of English at Radford University, USA. Her research explores depictions of human rights violations in twentieth-century fiction and literary journalism. She has published articles in Modern Fiction Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, and Literary Journalism Studies. Mark Berninger teaches English literature at the University of Bamberg, Germany. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Mainz, Germany, for a study on new forms of the history play in Great Britain and Ireland since 1970. He has published widely on contemporary drama and on comics, including the essay collection Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives (with Gideon Haberkorn and Jochen Ecke; McFarland, 2010), and is currently finishing a book on the impact of John Milton on later writers, with a special focus on present-day references to Paradise Lost. Katharina Bieloch majored in Slavic and English Studies at Carl-von-Ossietzky University, Oldenburg, Germany, where she received her B.A. degree for a thesis on contemporary Polish drama. She has worked for the Kestnergesellschaft in Hannover, where she was in charge of the press office and translated the exhibition catalog Eric Fischl: Ten Breaths (Kerber, 2007). She has been a research assistant in Oldenburg since 2010 and has worked on various projects, such as the anthology EthniCities: Metropolitan Cultures and Ethnic Identities in the Americas (WVT, 2011). Sharif Bitar is a graduate student in English and American Studies at Carl-von-Ossietzky University Oldenburg, Germany. His main research field is

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American popular culture, with a special interest in representations of the Batman character in and across diverse media. His first academic endeavors include a paper on Frank Miller’s Holy Terror presented at the Annual Conference of the German Association for American Studies (University of Mainz, Germany, June 2012) and his contribution to this collection, coauthored with Katharina Bieloch. Michael A. Chaney is Associate Professor of English at Dartmouth College, Hanover, USA. He received his Ph.D. from Indiana University. He is the author of Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative (Indiana University Press, 2009) and editor of Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011). His essays have appeared in African American Review, American Literature, College Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, MELUS, Modern Fiction Studies, and Journal of Narrative Theory. Shilpa Davé is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Brandeis University, USA. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She is the author of Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American TV and Film (University of Illinois Press, 2013.) and coeditor of East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture (New York University Press, 2005). Shane Denson is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Leibniz University Hannover, Germany, and a member of the Research Unit “Popular Seriality—Aesthetics and Practice” (funded by the German Research Foundation). His dissertation, completed in 2010, is titled Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface. Currently, he is writing a monograph, titled Figuring Serial Trajectories, on the roles and functions of popular serial characters at times of media change and transition. Topics of research, teaching, and past publications include media theory, seriality, film, comics, and philosophy of technology. Jochen Ecke teaches English literature at the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany. He has written his master’s thesis on concepts of time and space in Alan Moore’s later works and is currently preparing his doctoral thesis on the so-called British Invasion of American mainstream comics in the 1980s and 1990s. In addition to coediting Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives (with Mark Berninger and Gideon Haberkorn; McFarland, 2010), he has done extensive

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work in the German comics industry, serving as German editor and occasional translator of works by Ed Brubaker, Greg Rucka, and Alan Moore. He has also published a number of essays on topics closely connected to his thesis. Elisabeth El Refaie is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Language and Communication Research, Cardiff University, Wales. The focus of her research is on new literacies and visual/multimodal forms of metaphor, narrative, and humor. She is the author of Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures (University Press of Mississippi, 2012), and her articles have appeared in Visual Communication, Visual Studies, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Studies in Comics, and several other journals and edited volumes. Lukas Etter studied German and English and Comparative Literatures in Bern, Geneva, and Paris. He is currently writing his dissertation on aspects of serial storytelling in recent US-American alternative graphic narratives. He is a member of the University of Bern’s Institute of the Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (IASH), and his research interests include intermedial narration (specifically text-picture relations) and autobiographical graphic narratives. Jean-Paul Gabilliet is Professor of North American Studies at the University of Bordeaux, France. He specializes in the cultural history of comics in America and Europe. His latest publications include Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books (University Press of Mississippi, 2010; trans. B. Beaty and N. Nguyen), the chapter on comics in the Cambridge History of Canadian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and the biography R.  Crumb (Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2012). Florian Groß studied English, American Studies, and Political Science at Leibniz University Hannover, Germany, earning his master’s degree in 2006 with a thesis on the representation of television in the works of Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace. He is now working as a lecturer in Hannover’s American Studies division. His research interests include popular culture (especially television and comics) and recent American fiction. He is currently writing his Ph.D. thesis on contemporary American television series. Iris-Aya Laemmerhirt is a postdoctoral candidate and lecturer for American Studies and British Studies at the TU Dortmund, Germany. She is currently working on her postdoctoral project on American literature of the 1940s. Further research interests are Transnational and Transpacific Studies with a special focus on Hawaiian history, literature, and culture.

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John A. Lent, a pioneer in the study of international communications, Third World mass media, and comic art, has authored or edited 73 books and monographs and hundreds of articles. He was founding managing editor of WittyWorld and is founding chair of the Asian Popular Culture Group of the Popular Culture Association and the Comic Art Working Group of IAMCR. He is also the founder, publisher, and editor of the International Journal of Comic Art. He chaired the Asian Cinema Studies Society and published and edited the journal Asian Cinema for 17 years. He was a professor from 1960 to 2011, teaching in China, Malaysia, the Philippines, and the United States. In 2000, he was the first to hold the Rogers Chair at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. For two years, he was a member of the Pulitzer Prize selection board for editorial cartoons, and since 2008, has chaired the Asian Pacific Animation and Comics Association, which he founded. Frank Mehring, Professor at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands, teaches twentieth-century visual culture, theories of popular culture, ethnic modernism, and processes of cultural translation in transatlantic contexts. He recently received the biennial EAAS Rob Kroes Award for his monograph The Democratic Gap: Transcultural Confrontations of German Immigrants and the Promise of American Democracy (Universitätsverlag Winter, 2013) as the best book manuscript in Europe on American Studies. He is the author of Sphere Melodies (Metzler, 2003), which examines the intermediary work of the avantgarde artists Charles Ives and John Cage. In 2004, he published a biography of the German-American freedom fighter Charles Follen; he has also edited Follen’s writings (Between Natives and Foreigners, Lang, 2007). Stefan Meier is Assistant Professor in American Studies at Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany. He has published on a range of topics in literary and media studies. His Ph.D. project is titled “It’s a Bird . . . It’s a Plane . . . It’s Superman [Again]: Die Pop-Ikone als Wiedergänger transmedialer Serialität.” His research interests include popular culture, media history, and film studies. Christina Meyer is Assistant Professor and Research Associate in the English Department at Leibniz University Hannover, Germany. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies with a dissertation titled War & Trauma Images in Vietnam War Representations (Olms, 2008). She is an associate member of the Research Unit “Popular Seriality—Aesthetics and Practice” and is working on a DFG-funded book project on the Yellow Kid newspaper comics of the late nineteenth century.

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She has worked as peer reviewer for journals on comics art, has coedited American Comic Books and Graphic Novels (special issue of Amerikastudien/ American Studies 56.4: 2011), and has published essays on comics and other forms of graphic narratives. Daniel Stein holds a doctorate in American Studies from the University of Göttingen, Germany, where he is Assistant Professor and member of the Research Unit “Popular Seriality—Aesthetics and Practice” (funded by the German Research Foundation). Within the Research Unit, he is working on a monograph tentatively titled Authorizing Superhero Comics: On the Serial Evolution of an American Genre. He is the author of Music Is My Life: Louis Armstrong, Autobiography, and American Jazz (University of Michigan Press, 2012) and coeditor of Comics: Zur Geschichte und Theorie eines populärkulturellen Mediums (transcript, 2009), American Comic Books and Graphic Novels (special issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies 56.4: 2011), and From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative (de Gruyter, forthcoming 2013). Daniel Wüllner is a doctoral student in the American Literature Department at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany. His doctoral thesis addresses questions of seriality in the novels of William Gaddis. As a freelance author, he regularly writes reviews and articles on comics and has conducted interviews with comics artists for various German newspapers and magazines. His editorial and scholarly texts are collected on his homepage at .

Foreword John A. Lent

Lest we forget, comic books and graphic novels, as well as comic strips, editorial cartoons, and animation, are either mass media or appendages of mass media. As such, comics and related forms share with mass media a number of historical and theoretical traits relative to their study. Both communications and comic art borrowed their theory from the social sciences, and lesser so, from the humanities; both struggled to attain legitimacy in academia; both drew predominately from Western thought, and both treated similar concepts, issues, and problems over the years. Reading Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads was like reviewing the study of international communication, in which I became involved beginning in the 1960s. Many of the concepts studied here ranked high on the agenda of the Non-Aligned Countries Movement and UNESCO throughout the 1970s, in their deliberations to establish a New World Information and Communication Order. Transnationalism certainly figured in these agencies’ debates, usually in reference to the smothering impact of transnational media corporations, some of which have since garnered large chunks of the world’s comics/animation industries. Researchers then talked about the dwindling importance of nationness, the lingering impacts of colonialism, the all-encompassing cultural and media imperialism, commodification, unsuccessful cultural transfers, and culture homogenization. Somehow, these topics have failed to interest all but a few comics researchers; thus, the immense importance of this volume. From the beginning, the editors point out the dearth of transnational investigations of graphic narrative in comics studies and set it as their goal to rectify this shortcoming. They and their contributors succeed admirably, using multidisciplinary approaches, as they broaden literature searches beyond the United States and superheroes, draw upon Asian, European, Middle Eastern, and North American works for analysis,

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and scrutinize issues of transnationalism already cited, as well as others such as hybridity and globalization. What is especially interesting are the many turns transnationalism takes in this volume, a feature that makes categorization difficult. The present overarching pigeonholes in which the chapters are placed are: “Politics and Poetics,” “Transnational and Transcultural Superheroes,” and “Translations, Transformations, Migrations.” These categories might be rearranged thus: comics creators as transnational agents; depictions and representations of transnationalism in comics; and transnational comic book titles and characters. Comics creators as transnational agents: Symbolic of this category are creators who straddle different countries/cultures, either in their residence or their work. They include artists and writers who themselves or whose families are recent immigrants; many of the earliest American comic strips and comic books were linked to the immigrant experience of such artists. Individuals working for comics industries other than those of their home country fit here, exemplified by the so-called British invasion of American comics (discussed by Jochen Ecke in his interpretation of the work of Warren Ellis), and before it, the “Philippine invasion.” Florian Groß’s treatment of the wordless graphic novel features border-crossing artists, the main one being Frans Masereel, Belgian-born, who worked primarily in France. Other wordless graphic novelists may have stayed put physically, but their thoughts and sympathies were for transnational causes. With the widespread use of the internet, transnational comics creators have become plentiful. The same can be said of comics researchers, more of whom are studying topics besides US superheroes. Depictions and representations of transnationalism in comics: Papers with elements of this categorization bring in a variety of dimensions. Michael A. Chaney shows how transnationalism is expressed in two graphic novels dealing with black enslavement in the United States, pointing out that “[s]lavery is in itself an entry into transnationalism as both an object of history and an object of thought with historical resonances leading toward further enmeshment in the transnational.” Depictions of transnationalism in comics most often focus on a locale—on how it, and issues associated with it, are represented. For example, Lukas Etter, while studying Jason Lutes’s Berlin and its depiction of the Weimar Republic, illustrates how Lutes made allusions to other artists’ styles and other countries’ cultures, leading to what he terms a “complexity of transnational connectedness.”

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Two chapters on comics journalism by Georgiana Banita and Aryn Bartley, respectively, note how this genre itself is transnational, portraying, as it does, an outsider’s gaze at troubled places such as Gaza, Pyongyang, and Burma. Dehumanization by war and the “pace of the globalized media” and the “disappearance from history” of events and places (such as Palestine) are vital transnational issues discussed in these chapters on comics journalist Joe Sacco and others. Iris-Aya Laemmerhirt’s analysis of Night Fisher by R. Kikuo Johnson argues that this graphic novel refutes the transnational image of Hawaii as solely a tourist paradise, a portrayal that ignores the sad remnants of colonialism, imperialism, and commercialism left behind. Night Fisher puts Hawaii in a transnational context, according to Laemmerhirt, by depicting the flow of people and goods from mainland United States to the islands and vice versa. Transnational comic book titles and characters: In one of the chapters, an important distinction is made by Daniel Stein between international and transnational comics titles—the former is usually a US creation received by worldwide audiences; the latter, a character revised, reimagined in a specific national context and style. Bringing together two such comics properties is called hybridity; when little or no distinction can be made between the two, that is often labeled homogenization. Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel Scott Pilgrim, according to Mark Berninger’s analysis, is a hybrid of United States, Japanese, and Canadian comics, leading Berninger to conclude that it makes little sense to study comics purely from a national context. Spider-Man India and Spider-Man the Manga, both subjects of chapters, can be classified as transnational and hybridized titles because they transplant the popular American superhero into Indian and Japanese cultures and settings. A similar situation existed for decades with Japanese manga as their settings and characters were modified to meet the cultural and censorship standards of neighboring East Asian countries where they were sold. The Kuwaiti-based superhero comic, The 99, the subject of Stefan Meier’s chapter, is different in that the multitude of superheroes hail from different regions of the world, not the United States. However, The 99, rooted in Islamic mythology, is written by American authors and has a linkup with the Justice League of America comics series. In his chapter, Jean-Paul Gabilliet demonstrates that cultural transfer via comics is not always successful. He shows how European comics such as Tintin and Astérix, translated into 90 and 100 languages, respectively, could not catch on in the United States for a number of reasons, including their relative expensiveness and US parochialism.

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These and other topics that I have not broached make Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads an invaluable source for comics scholars as well as nonacademic readers. The book introduces us to realms of the art and industry of comics that need far more critical attention and interpretation. For example, the transnationalism of comics itself must be scrutinized in terms of who benefits and at what costs. The fast-paced globalization of cultural forms such as comics and their centralization into a few transnational corporations are justifiable concerns, as are the end results of big business comic art—among them, synergistic monopolization, content standardization, and the narrowing in number of those who set themselves up as arbiters of public taste. Transnational corporations’ natural penchant for high levels of commercialism has increasingly led to comic art being treated as merchandise that is more important than the comics’ content; the extent and implications of comics’ commercialization need to be addressed systematically. Denson, Meyer, and Stein present us a selection of excellent essays that touch on issues of transnationalism relative to comics. They and their contributors have spearheaded an agenda for further research. Let us hope that placed high on that list will be more political economy studies of the transnationalization of the comics industries.

Introducing Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads Shane Denson, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein

Intersections: Comics and transnationalism— transnationalism and comics This volume aims to chart the ways in which graphic narratives have been shaped by aesthetic, social, political, economic, and cultural interactions that reach across national boundaries in an interconnected and globalizing world. As such, it sets out to address two critical blind spots: the overall neglect of graphic narratives in the increasingly transnational field of American literary and cultural studies, on the one hand, and the relative dearth of transnational investigations of graphic narratives in the growing field of comics studies, on the other.1 While comics scholars have examined different national traditions of graphic narrative from Anglo-American comics and Franco-Belgian bande dessinée to Japanese manga, most critics still treat these forms of graphic narrative as relatively self-contained phenomena.2 Significantly, some of these examinations subscribe to the logic of national origins and influence, for instance, when they debate the origins of graphic narrative: whether the first comics artist was the Franco-Swiss Rodolphe Töpffer, or whether that honor goes to the British inventors of the Ally Sloper character, the American comic-strip creator Richard Felton Outcault, or even the German Wilhelm Busch as the master of the illustrated story. In other cases, the existence of nationally defined comics traditions and their potential intersections are largely sidestepped. Thus, to name just one example of a widespread tendency, Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith’s otherwise highly insightful study The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture issues a universal claim in its title but then focuses almost exclusively on American superhero comic books, telling the history of comics as a predominantly American story.

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Yet as Paul Williams and James Lyons write in their preface to The Rise of the American Comics Artist, “[t]here are good reasons to understand North American comics in a transnational context: the institutional transaction of texts, creators, and capital across national borders has contributed to observable productive tensions in the comic texts themselves.”3 This observation is crucial, and it resonates with a current paradigm shift in American studies and related disciplines. It points at a critical oversight among many comics scholars, who have offered relatively little analysis of what Shelley Fisher Fishkin terms “the broad array of cultural crossroads shaping the work of border-crossing authors, artists, and cultural forms that straddle multiple regional and national traditions.”4 Fishkin’s call to scholars of American studies to extend their critical interests beyond the boundaries of their discipline and the borders of the United States has been echoed by Günter Lenz, who argues that the shift in American studies toward the transnational and the transcultural “means [that] a ‘centrifugal’ dynamics has deconstructed its traditional [disciplinary] boundaries, objectives, and methodological procedures, and the sense of its traditional unity as an interdisciplinary field seems to be ever further dispersed.”5 Taking Fishkin’s and Lenz’s observations seriously, while also realizing Williams and Lyons’s suggestions for transnational comics analysis, we believe that the deconstruction of disciplinary boundaries and the centrifugal dispersal of research objectives and methodologies point toward the necessity of two complementary moves: Americanists should devote more attention to the wealth and diversity of graphic narratives, while comics scholars should study them in the light of a wide array of border-crossings. Together, these shifts of perspective not only call on us to (re)read comics and other forms of graphic narrative as transnational phenomena (reaching, or rather moving, across borders). But also, and more importantly so, they urge us to explore the transnational dynamics that have come to shape contemporary forms of graphic storytelling at the crossroads of cultures.

From an international to a transnational perspective New approaches to cultural phenomena have a tendency to proclaim their superiority over older approaches, to justify their novelty by way of contrast with modes of inquiry they characterize as outdated or out of step with our rapidly changing lifeworlds. The transnational perspective that guides the work we have collected in this volume, however, does not claim to supersede the related approaches from which it takes off. Specifically, a transnational approach does

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not aim to replace or render superfluous the study of comics in national and international frameworks. Rather, we see the present volume as complementing those studies that investigate graphic narratives according to their local variations, in relation to the nationally and regionally defined shapes and forms they assume around the world, and in terms of the particular cultural and political work they perform in specific national contexts. Taking aim at border-crossings, interstitial relations, and cultural and material exchanges between traditions, a transnational perspective remains indebted to such studies, which continue to serve as a basis for comparative work; hence, particularity is not effaced in this perspective by a generalized global culture. On the other hand, however, the multidirectional transactions uncovered by a transnational perspective problematize the foundational role of discrete national units; though not effaced, the particular is thus rendered internally multiple as the traces of exchange are discovered within, and not merely between, national cultures, traditions, and identities. Insistence on this last point distinguishes specifically transnational from more broadly international perspectives. Once again, though, it cannot be a question of the one replacing or supplanting the other. For just as the notion of the transnational threatens to dissolve into a nebulous field of indistinction without the counterpoint provided by national specificity and difference, so too are transnational exchanges inextricably rooted in—and, due to the presence of the transnational within the national, partially productive of—particular international exchanges. The international, we might say, marks at once the fount from whence the transnational flows and the delta where it issues back into the global. As such, any study of transnationally articulated phenomena, such as the present volume, will necessarily be concerned with moments and instances of international encounters. But a truly international view of graphic narratives—a comprehensive view of the medium in all its past, present, and future implications—would necessarily explode the limits and limitations of a single volume of essays. After all, as the prodigious scholarship published in John A. Lent’s invaluable International Journal of Comic Art (1999–) has taught us, the overwhelming diversity of different types of graphic storytelling around the globe demands the continued efforts of many scholars from many disciplinary and national backgrounds.6 That is why, in the present volume, we have focused more narrowly on the transnational reassessment of a more limited set of texts. Rather than offering an expansive perspective on the medium of graphic narrative in all of its national and international expressions, this volume concentrates on largely American genres and productions as an exemplary field of transnational exchange.

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Thus, the difference between a transnational and an international perspective is in part a question of scale. To realize an international perspective, the individual chapters of this book would have to cover a range of national comics styles and traditions so vast that it would be difficult to find a common thread among them. However, as we suggested above, there are also significant conceptual differences between an international and a transnational perspective. As Ulf Hannerz reminds us, the term “international” generally designates the interaction of nation-states (or national institutions) as corporate actors, whereas “transnational” relates to a diverse set of corporate and noncorporate actors whose interactions contribute to an “overall interconnectedness” of cultural activities around the world.7 This notion of transnationalism allows for the study of what Fishkin describes as “the transnational crossroads of cultures”: the “multidirectional flows of people, ideas, and goods and the social, political, linguistic, cultural, and economic crossroads generated in the process”; the “global flow of people, ideas, texts, and products” that urges us to “see the inside and outside, domestic and foreign, national and international, as interpenetrating.”8 Moreover, this volume’s movement from an international to a transnational perspective allows us to connect Fishkin’s disciplinary reorientation—the shift she urges from the study of American culture to an analysis of different crossroads of cultures beyond the borders of the nation— with the perspectival change in comics studies announced in Mark Berninger, Jochen Ecke, and Gideon Haberkorn’s recent Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives. Though the essay collection references “international perspectives” in its subtitle, its editors actually endorse a transnational view when they speak of “the transplantation of specific comics, as well as whole movements and national styles [.  .  .] from one country to another” and acknowledge the idiosyncrasies and interconnections that mark comics adaptations across cultures.9 The transnational perspective that we adopt here allows us, in other words, to consummate the mutual turns envisioned above: The decentered study of American culture outlined by Fishkin and Lenz turns toward comics studies, and vice versa; the two fields of study meet in the space of the transnational, which they together document as a terrain of robustly concrete intersections among the levels of the national, the international, and the global.

Premises, promises, pitfalls In the preface to Multicultural Comics, Derek Parker Royal makes the following claim: “[G]iven its reliance on symbols and iconography, comic art speaks

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in a language that is accessible to a wide audience, transcending many of the national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries imposed by other media and giving it a reach that is as democratic as it is immediate.”10 While certainly less sweeping than Japanese mangaka Osamu Tezuka’s statement that “comics are an international language that can cross boundaries and generations,” serving as “a bridge between all cultures,” Royal’s claim surely speaks to the transnational and transcultural (as well as multicultural) potential of graphic narrative as a medium that enables, facilitates, or perhaps even encourages, the transcendence of limitations imposed by the nation, by culture, and by language.11 But Royal also discerns specifically political powers of graphic narrative as an immediately accessible and thus inherently democratic form of storytelling. The chapters in the present book seek to engage both claims critically by investigating a broad range of graphic narratives by (mostly) American creators, as well as non-American artists working in traditionally American idioms and genres; these are examined in terms of their formal realization of (or failure to realize) transnational interconnections, along with the social, political, economic, and cultural work these texts perform in what Arjun Appadurai has labeled “imagined worlds”: “the multiple worlds which are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe” and “which are chimerical, aesthetic, even fantastic objects.”12 What kind of relations obtain between the “imagined worlds” of graphic narratives—encompassing not only their diegetic universes, but also the spaces of fan cultures as well as national and regional comics traditions— and the “imagined communities” that, in Benedict Anderson’s famous analysis, constitute the basis of nationhood as an iterable, and hence transnationally articulated, mode of being?13 The basic premise of this essay collection is that comics and other forms of graphic narrative are predisposed toward crossing national borders and cultural boundaries because their unique visual-verbal interface seems to translate more readily—though not without transformation and distortion—across cultures than do monomedial forms of literature, nonnarrative artworks, or even such visual narrative media as film. This premise—and the comparative argument it proposes—is certainly controversial, which is why the chapters in this collection delve into the media-specific means and parameters according to which comics communicate their ideas, produce and disseminate knowledge, and operate materially within a unique set of spatiotemporal relations. The political workings of graphic narratives, in other words, are not unrelated to their formal properties. The hybrid medium of graphic narrative challenges Lessing’s famous

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“rule,” namely, “that succession in time is the province of the poet, co-existence in space that of the [visual] artist.” As Lessing saw it: Painting and poetry should be like two just and friendly neighbors, neither of whom is allowed to take unseemly liberties in the heart of the other’s domain, but who exercise mutual forbearance on the borders, and effect a peaceful settlement for all the petty encroachments which circumstance may compel either to make in haste on the rights of the other.14

We believe that a transnational perspective on graphic narratives must take into account their medially constitutive infractions of such formal borders— the spatiotemporal hybridities that result from the intersection of visual and verbal forms and that define narration itself as a series of transgressions, moving from panel to panel, violating the borders of individual images, and crossing the expanse of the gutter. It is far from clear how this formal basis might guarantee the medium’s promotion of multicultural understanding or democracy, as envisioned by Parker. What it does suggest, however, is that the internal functioning of the medium is not so different, formally, from its external imbrications in transnational exchanges. In both cases, imagined geographies are constructed, challenged, and brought into contact with one another through dynamic processes that fail to respect the sanctity of “the other’s domain” and in which “mutual forbearance on the borders” is seldom exercised. Such a process unites the single reader, for whom a narratively coherent world emerges from juxtaposed images and words, with imagined communities of various sorts—the communities of fans, of local and spatially dispersed cultures, and of nations, among which graphic narratives circulate. Careful attention to graphic narratives’ formal and material properties will therefore add further insights into the ways in which meaning and values travel across borders and help explain how they are “entangled within both national and transnational formations.”15 To be sure, though, formal analysis is not sufficient for understanding the complex transactions involved in graphic narratives’ transnational proliferations. At stake in this volume is thus also a crucial cultural and political premise about the nature of the transnational. As scholars such as Winfried Fluck, Heinz Ickstadt, Frank Kelleter, and Günter Lenz have argued in different contexts, one of the problems that trouble many transnational analyses is the fallacious assumption that national borders can simply be transcended or rendered inconsequential and that the economic, political, and cultural might of the former superpowers has now given way to an equal playing field of global exchange and transnational flow. As Kelleter has noted, transnational approaches “should

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make us question some of our most routine ideological convictions, such as the widespread belief that to speak transnationally, or to evoke the transnational, automatically means to speak in a counter-hegemonic way,” or that to recognize the increasingly transnational interconnectedness of global cultural production inevitably spells the demise for the United States as an agenda-setting force.16 This is why we believe that it makes sense to train a transnational focus precisely on American productions and genres, so that the work collected in the present volume can be said to “do national American studies with a transnational consciousness.” Accordingly, this volume does not so much “expand the borders of [the] discipline but the horizon of our questioning.”17 Moreover, we believe that all of the contributions reflect Fluck’s reminder that “far from going outside the U.S., we have to go back inside”18 in (at least) three ways: in terms of the political implications and specifically transnational poetics of graphic narratives, in terms of various transnational adaptations of the culturally emblematic and nationally iconic American superhero, and in terms of the multifaceted flows of cultural materials in and out of the United States.19 These observations determine the tripartite structure of this book. “People live in local places,” writes Myria Georgiou, “but their everyday life is shaped in the context of discourses, cultures and relations that are formed in the dialogue between the local, the national and the transnational.”20 In this sense, some chapters in this volume examine what Fishkin calls “the diffusion of cultural forms and the spread of capital and commodities” as well as “the cultural work done by U.S. popular culture abroad,” while other chapters consider the cultural work performed by foreign graphic narratives and comics traditions (and creators) on American texts.21 The chapters in the first part, “Politics and Poetics,” largely follow Inderpal Grewal’s assumption that, “[i]n a transnational age, with millions of displaced and migrant subjects, questions of identity and citizenship became both crucial and vexed, since these subjects questioned the legitimacy of the nation-state while also reinforcing its ability to endow rights.”22 The chapters in the second part, “Transnational and Transcultural Superheroes,” focus on transnational adaptations of superhero characters that support neither simplistic notions of cultural imperialism nor romantic understandings of postcolonial subversion or counter-hegemonic cultural production. The chapters in the third part, “Translations, Transformations, Migrations,” map the transnationally inflected shifts and changes that have come to shape contemporary comics culture on a global scale. They attend to the “translocal conjunctures and intercultural circuits” that mark not only modern and contemporary poetry but graphic narratives as well.23 The volume

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concludes by performing a comics-specific operation on itself—the “retcon” (so called for its institution of retrospective continuity); the afterword reassesses the previous transnational analyses in order to highlight the continuity, across the range of case studies included in this volume, between the formal constitution of the graphic narrative medium and its social and political entanglements in the hybrid spaces of the transnational.24 As Priscilla Wald contends, “‘transnational’ analyses are raising questions more than providing answers or solutions, and they bring with them their own set of problems.”25 We hope that this book will answer some of these questions but that it will also serve as a discussion starter that raises many more pertinent questions and, as such, enables new transnational perspectives on graphic narratives. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, and we apologize in advance for any unintentional omission. We would be pleased to insert the appropriate acknowledgment in any subsequent edition.

Notes   1 The present volume grew out of a workshop on “The Transcultural Work of Comics and Graphic Narratives” held at the German Association for American Studies conference in Regensburg (June 18, 2011). Two papers presented at this workshop have appeared in the conference proceedings (see Denson, Starre); three papers are included in the present volume (Ecke, Etter, Laemmerhirt). For a recent survey of transnational American studies, see Hebel’s introduction to the proceedings. The editors wish to thank Paul Gravett, Roger Sabin, Henry Jenkins, and especially Eric Rabkin for their encouragement and support of this book project. We would also like to express our gratitude to John A. Lent for writing the foreword to the volume as well as David Avital and Laura Murray at Continuum/Bloomsbury for their precious help and assistance.   2 We use “graphic narrative” in the widest transnational sense as an umbrella term for various types and forms of graphic storytelling. As such, it includes more limited and culturally distinct terms such as the American “cartoons” and “comics,” the Franco-Belgian “bande dessinée,” the Japanese “manga,” or the Italian “fumetti.” Accordingly, we distinguish it from Chute and DeKoven’s definition as “a narrative work in the medium of comics” (767) and from Chute’s notion of “a book-length work in the medium of comics” (453). For a more elaborate terminological discussion, see Stein et al.   3 Williams and Lyons xiii.

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  4 Fishkin 32.   5 Lenz 4.   6 See also Lent’s essay collections on Asian cartooning and comics production, Illustrating Asia and Themes and Issues in Asian Cartooning, as well as the international perspective of comics censorship in Pulp Demons. For early international studies of comics, see Horn; Silbermann and Dyroff.   7 Hannerz 6. Hannerz further argues that “[t]he term ‘transnational’ is in a way more humble, and often a more adequate label [than the term ‘global’] for phenomena which can be of quite variable scale and distribution, even when they do share the characteristic of not being contained within a state” (6).   8 Fishkin 22, 24, 21, 41. Global and transnational/transcultural analyses of graphic narratives have largely emerged in the context of manga studies. See Berndt; Berndt and Richter; Johnson-Woods.   9 Berninger et al. 3. 10 Royal x. 11 Tezuka qtd in Gravett 30. 12 Appadurai 296–7, 299. 13 See Anderson. 14 Lessing 109–10. 15 Grewal 1. 16 Kelleter 30; see also Fluck. 17 Ickstadt 555–6, 556. 18 Fluck 82. 19 We realize that there are many other ways in which a book about transnational graphic narratives could be structured and that many other creators, texts, genres, and transcultural phenomena could have been selected for analysis. This is why we understand the present volume as an incitement for further research and critical engagement. 20 Georgiou 138. 21 Fishkin 24, 33. 22 Grewal 11. See also Royal et al. 23 Ramazani 336. 24 Readers may wonder why we did not include a chapter on Art Spiegelman’s seminal Maus (1986/1991). In fact, Maus has already been discussed in a transnational, or at least cross-cultural, context (see the chapters in the “The Holocaust across Borders” part in Baskind and Omer-Sherman). Moreover, Maus has been so excessively scrutinized since its publication that it makes sense to devote critical attention to less studied texts. Finally, MetaMaus had not yet appeared when we sent out the call for papers for this volume; Spiegelman’s self-identification as “a rootless cosmopolitan, alienated in most environments that I fall into” and his

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understanding of Maus as “a diasporist’s account of the Holocaust” in MetaMaus certainly merit future scholarly attention (133, 153). 25 Wald 216.

Works cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd edn. London: Verso, 1991. Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” In Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity. Ed. Mike Featherstone. London: Sage, 1990. 295–310. Baskind, Samantha, and Ranen Omer-Sherman, eds. The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Berndt, Jaqueline, ed. Intercultural Crossovers, Transcultural Flows: Manga/Comics. Global Manga Studies. Vol. 2. Kyoto: Seike University International Manga Research Center, 2011. Berndt, Jaqueline, and Steffi Richter, eds. Reading Manga: Local and Global Perceptions of Japanese Comics. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2006. Berninger, Mark, Jochen Ecke, and Gideon Haberkorn. “Introduction.” In Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010. 1–4. Chute, Hillary. “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.” PMLA 123.2 (2008): 452–65. Chute, Hillary, and Marianne DeKoven. “Introduction: Graphic Narrative.” In Graphic Narrative. Ed. Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven. Special issue of MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 767–82. Denson, Shane. “Frame, Sequence, Medium: Comics in Plurimedial and Transnational Perspective.” In Hebel, Transnational American Studies 561–80. Duncan, Randy, and Matthew J. Smith. The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture. London: Continuum, 2009. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies—Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004.” American Quarterly 57.1 (2005): 17–57. Fluck, Winfried. “Theories of American Culture (and the Transnational Turn in American Studies.” In Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Ed. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2009. 69–85. Georgiou, Myria. Diaspora, Identity and the Media: Diasporic Transnationalism and Mediated Spatialities. Cresskill: Hampton Press, 2006. Gravett, Paul. Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

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Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Hannerz, Ulf. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge, 1996. Hebel, Udo J., ed. Transnational American Studies. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012. Horn, Maurice, ed. The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons. 2nd rev. edn. New York: Chelsea House, 1999. Ickstadt, Heinz. “American Studies in the Age of Globalization.” American Quarterly 54.4 (2002): 543–62. Johnson-Woods, Toni, ed. Manga: An Anthology of Global and Cultural Perspectives. London: Continuum, 2009. Kelleter, Frank. “Transnationalism: The American Challenge.” RIAS: Review of International American Studies 2.3 (2007): 29–33. Lent, John A., ed. Illustrating Asia: Comics, Humor Magazines, and Picture Books. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001. —. Pulp Demons: International Dimensions of the Postwar Anti-Comics Campaign. Madison and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses, 1999. —. Themes and Issues in Asian Cartooning: Cute, Cheap, Mad, and Sexy. Bowling Green: Popular Press, 1999. Lenz, Günter H. “Redefinitions of Citizenship and Revisions of Cosmopolitanism Challenges of Transnational Perspectives.” Symposium: Redefinitions of Citizenship and Revisions of Cosmopolitanism—Transnational Perspectives. Journal of Transnational American Studies 3.1 (2011): 4–17. . Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoon. An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry: With Remarks Illustrative of Various Points in the History of Ancient Art. Trans. Edith Frothingham. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969. Ramazani, Jahan. “A Transnational Poetics.” American Literary History 18.2 (2006): 332–59. Royal, Derek Parker. “Foreword.” In Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle. Ed. Frederick Luis Aldama. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. ix–xi. Royal, Derek Parker, S. C. Gooch, and Juan Meneses, eds. Graphic Engagement: The Politics of Comics and Animation. Special issue of Forum for World Literature Studies 3.1 (2011). Silbermann, Alphons, and H.-D. Dyroff, eds. Comics and Visual Culture: Research Studies from Ten Countries. München: Saur, 1986. Spiegelman, Art. MetaMaus. New York: Pantheon, 2011. Starre, Alexander. “American Comics Anthologies: Mediality—Canonization— Transnationalism.” In Hebel, Transnational American Studies 541–60. Stein, Daniel, Christina Meyer, and Micha Edlich. “Introduction: American Comic Books and Graphic Novels.” In American Comics Books and Graphic Novels. Ed.

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Daniel Stein, Christina Meyer, and Micha Edlich. Special issue of Amerikastudien/ American Studies 56.4 (2011): 501–29. Wald, Priscilla. “Minefields and Meeting Grounds: Transnational Analyses and American Studies.” American Literary History 10.1 (1998): 199–218. Williams, Paul, and James Lyons, eds. The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.

1

Not Just a Theme: Transnationalism and Form in Visual Narratives of US Slavery Michael A. Chaney

As a biracial person of Afro-German and Anglo-American descent, growing up in 1980s America was ideologically reassuring. Television’s mixed-race families from Diff ’rent Strokes to Webster and the glut of commercial advertisements that showed white and black friends together blissfully united to sell an article of clothing or a bar of soap, all amounted to one glorious nod to me. Each member of my family looked to be of a different race, some looking ambiguous enough to belong to many different races at once, making me feel ludicrously at home while peering into Benetton ads. The most intense mythological focalization of this fantasy that the world had come round to our multiracial way of life, leaving monoracial and binaristic modes of thinking behind—to collect cultural dust alongside pet rocks, disco music, and fondue—crystallized for me in the pages of Chris Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men. Nowhere else did this cultural myth of multiracial, multinational collectivity ring truer nor gain as much theoretical clarity. Here was a group of mutant outcasts explicitly coded as racial outliers (given their species difference) and as transnational subjects, since each one hailed from a different corner of the globe. From images of the sentinels hunting mutants in grim echo of the racist iconography of Nazism to one particular punctum-laden scene from the first X-Men graphic novel, God Loves, Man Kills (1982), in which two African American children are exterminated on a swing set by sentinels who leave them hoisted (lynched) there in the playground at night with the viciously abbreviated sign “Mutie” attached to their chests, the X-Men founded a new kind of multiracial superhero collective. Their novel angst distinguished them from traditional superhero groups, while their historical and racial mythos was one step removed from recent sociohistorical upheavals plaguing American society—Jim Crow segregation, the struggle for civil rights, and even the Black Power movement

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in Magneto’s Malcolm X counter to Professor X’s MLK-inspired “can’t we all just get along?” philosophy. The reader will excuse traces of nostalgia in these musings, for if nostalgia is always in some sense a circular killing off of a past that must remain dead even while it is being recollected to be resurrected in the now, then my situation is no different. In hindsight, I see this vision of a multiracial 1980s American culture industry overtaken (murdered, as it were) by a philosophy of globalization and multi- and transnationalism, which made such orthodoxies of interracial friendship, as Benjamin DeMott would call them, obsolete.1 However artificial these images seemed to be, particularly in the face of actual American social spaces still reflecting racial difference rather than multiracial harmony, I found their absence troubling. And this was so not least because they seemed to be replaced by our current furor, driven by the internet and other telepresence technologies, to overliteralize W. E. B. Du Bois’s prediction that the internal American struggles of the color line were indeed to be limited to the twentieth century.2 Magically, the problem of race seems resolved, having been put in the critical “post” tense, as it were, by a culture industry designed to sell ever more products according to a concomitantly expanding set of myths proclaiming a new age of global intimacy. Multiracialism, in other words, is really yesterday’s news; transnationalism is the catchword of the day, and its circulation is not limited to big oil, cola hucksters, or Facebook: academia has followed suit, trailing critically, skeptically, and theoretically in its wake. Spurred on by the scholarship of Zygmunt Bauman and Benedict Anderson, the interest that theorists of transnationalism took in the culture and literature of the United States was not surprising, given the potent reach of American militarism half-veiled and thus half-exposed by the global dominance of US cinema, music, and fashion.3 But just as US interests inordinately fueled the ascendency of multinational corporations, supposedly no longer defined by traditional national borders or economies, so too was it the traditional, Western, and national literatures that energized the various critical enterprises identifying themselves under the aegis of transnationalism, rather than those non-Western and frequently minor literatures whose traditions assume the transnational impress of colonial influences. It is within just such a tautology that some of the most radical Americanist exhortations from Wai Chee Dimock or Don Pease, to name only two, are given a context, so that the tendency of a transnational American literary practice was not simply to widen the reception context of a novel like Moby Dick or The Scarlet Letter to a global scale, but to agitate for readings that explode the traditional borders of the United States.4 In line with

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a post-Althusserian approach to ideology and in the face of an increasingly muscular post–9/11 Bush administration, such interventions sought to demystify the bounded nation-state, exposing it as an obsolescence whose residual but largely spurious legitimacy helped to conceal the proliferation of asymmetrical arrangements of global power. If there is a cultural counterforce in the great books of American literature, some of the transnationalists suggested that it was no longer to be found in their mediation of ideologies central to US colonial projects (such as the myth of American exceptionalism or the infinitely exploitable frontier) but in the possibility that such mythologies may be made available as such to the very non-American constituencies threatened by them. While it is spurious to make generalizations about a critical orientation that assumes a diverse plurality, we might still note that for US-based American literature specialists with limited budgets for global travel and often little training in ethnographic research, a less complicated approach took hold, one that privileges discussing texts that explicitly thematize transnationalism. For scholars of comics and graphic novels, one can readily see the significance of works like Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986/1991) or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2000–3) in this regard. It is easy to infer from the pages of such texts concerns about the porous boundaries separating history from the present, old world from the new, or ancestral cultures from the flux of modernity. The average reader does not need a Ph.D. to see how these texts articulate their own theories of transnational identity and identity formation. Little wonder that many graphic novels have been read as illustrations of a range of theoretical concepts derived from transnational and globalization studies by those with Ph.D.s interested in applying such ideas. But what if we were to consider a different graphic novel blockbuster, say Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006)? How would a transnational reading of a work that does not explicitly treat themes of nationality come about? What, in other words, aside from content in a graphic novel, adduces to transnationalism? Naturally, I am drawn back to a sociological framework, involving ethnographic fieldwork, interviewing or survey methodologies, or work that centers on reception context. My own brief experiences at scholarly conferences on comics in Europe affirm the potential for a transnational analysis of Bechdel’s impact on making a particular form of lesbian identity legible. Indeed, I think of one Eastern European comics artist I met who was organizing a serial webcomics collaborative in the vein of Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For (1983–2008), which could easily become the basis for a transnational analysis of Fun Home. But this type of research still assumes little to nothing of transnational analytical

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value in the form of the text itself. To press the point of methodology further, we might note how some critics have pointed to gutters as spaces where Fun Home in particular negotiates and resists the claims of its ideological nemesis of heteronormativity. Perhaps, it is there that we might likewise look for evidence, if any, of its formal engagement with transnationalism? Before we go looking to find exactly what we are looking for in the convenient blanks of the gutters, we might more instructively notice that we can play a similar game with just about any graphic novel that has a salient ideological theme. We can reliably find the antagonist or opposing ideological position in the gutter. Is it not in the gutters of Palestine (1996) where Joe Sacco solicits and negotiates the anxieties of Western Zionism? Is it not in the gutters of Watchmen (1986–7) where Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons conjure the psychological simplicity and narrative linearity of conventional superhero comics? Is it not in the gutters of King (2005) where Ho Che Anderson creates a formal space for his historical icon to literally confront the post–Civil Rights subject of postracial affect? The answer is undoubtedly yes in all cases, but not because we learned anything in the gutters. We knew full well what we would find in them before the fact, having been driven by a vulgar form of deductivism to seek out the very thematic antagonist of each text that we set out to find in its formally constitutive nonspaces. The nonspaces of comics gutters have been too conveniently articulate for a wide array of scholars, and it is not my intention to replay such heresies of the gutter here.5 Rather, with these and other concerns for methodology in mind, I shall turn now to consider the thematic and formal value of transnationalism in graphic novels by African American artists and writers that contain representations of US slavery. These graphic depictions of historical slavery are perfect test cases for a comics approach committed to avoiding the pitfalls of vulgar deductivism. As narratives about the transatlantic trade (for many historians the origin of cultural amalgamation and political entanglement on a global scale), graphic novels like Tom Feelings’s The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo (1995) and Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner (2006) dramatize the concerns of transnational studies. Bearing out the claims of Paul Gilroy, these texts predicate the heterogeneous fluidities of the Atlantic as the conceptual template for psychic and cultural notions of origin or homeland, rather than anything so stable as this or that country, this or that continent, as in the more traditional psychological landscape. For Gilroy as well as for the Afrodiasporic subjects written of and drawn in these graphic novels, identity entails a syncretistic model of being, memory, and culture. But beyond these matters of content, where the text that contains black people is more liable

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to include themes of disidentifying with nations than registering the shock at their dissolution, these graphic novels are also primarily pictorial. As such, they seek to disidentify from even the most seemingly benign of national affiliations, that of language. Since Toni Morrison’s famous characterization of the slave past as a matter of unspeakability, the methods by which Afrodiasporic writers recount the horrors of the Middle Passage have been analyzed in terms of trauma, indirection, and double voicedness. The slave past, as the title of Morrison’s lectures indicates, is one of those “unspeakable things unspoken,” something that has inflicted wounds to both the individual and the collective consciousness that are so deep that to revisit them in representation is to court prohibitive gaps in language and understanding. What is interesting about the transnational problematic in graphic novels about slavery by Afrodiasporic author-illustrators is that it plays out directly as a crisis of epistemology—as the very anxiety of deductivism that we have been discussing. This anxiety is the starting point for their portrayals. Rather than merely being about the transnational or about slavery—the West’s sinister entry into the transnational—these texts foreground the problem of depiction itself and center on the uneasy tensions between the past and the present, the historical and the fictive, absence and presence, and a range of other antimonies essential to the production of meaning in a Western context. Still, at first glance, Tom Feelings’s The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo is an unlikely text to read as an ideal of graphic novel transnationalism. If we were to follow the packaging and genre labeling of bookstores, Feelings’s text is more children’s book than graphic novel. We won’t worry over such arbitrary distinctions here. Indeed, for in an African American context, there is hardly a better place to start a discussion about visual representations of the Middle Passage and their global implications than Feelings’s beautifully illustrated, wordless account. One reason is that Feelings’s text, unlike Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner, for example, which also envisions the Middle Passage, is entirely consumed by the depictive project. There is no other subtext or side-narrative but the Middle Passage. Although there are decipherable scenes, subjects are generalized into the ghostly figurativity of ships, waves, and bodies. As with Catholic iconography’s stations of the cross, the narrative units familiar to the Middle Passage crystallize as abstract fragments of the universal lightly touched with referential specificities or particularities. The other reason for beginning here returns us to the dilemma of a vulgar deductivism. Because the Middle Passage is a priori the vicious genesis of the African into the American, it is thus transnational avant la lettre. Premier in

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any discussion of the Middle Passage is the concomitant examination of what it means to be a citizen, a subject, or a human, in the first place. Paul Gilroy alludes to the metaphysical implications of examining the Middle Passage in his definition of the Black Atlantic as that which is “continually crisscrossed by the movement of black people—not only as commodities—but engaged in various struggles towards emancipation, autonomy, and citizenship.”6 In Gilroy’s definition, as in the work of Tom Feelings, the oceanic beginning of African America is figured less as a space of entry into national belonging than as the disruption of such myths of origin via continual practices and ongoing struggles. It is the middleness of the Middle Passage that most African American representational forays into the subject seem inclined to refute. The texts studied in this chapter will not prove exceptional in this regard. Thus, the transnationalism we read in any representation of the Middle Passage may be overdetermined. The matching game that ensues is somewhat predictable: An already transnational subject matter, the Middle Passage, is evoked in a text that takes up slavery or the consequences of the Passage as its principal theme. Nevertheless, that relation of theme and topic is anything but simple in Feelings’s visual narrative. Quite to the contrary, The Middle Passage revels in the complexity of the Middle Passage, representing it as a series of events taking place in theoretical nonspaces of racial and existential conflict, elevating the whole to a level of cosmic antagonism. To be sure, there are white and black charcoal renderings of Africans: each African body existing on the same linear plane as the next, each one with a white loin cloth, each one being taken hostage by what looks to be an Arab soldier toting a rifle and wearing a long white tunic. Beyond the superficial conflict discernible in any one image as cultural or racial, Feelings’s style across several panels elevates conflict, abstracting the pain his emblematic figures express to humanize the event, making it less about any particular historical moment and more about the thematic interplay of human experience and perception—of light and dark, substance and shadow, individuality and collectivity, agony and fear, silence and scene (seen/seeing). This is not to suggest that Feelings sentimentally sidesteps the atrocities that torment his subjects. Anyone who glances through the pages would readily note just how much visual emphasis is placed on scenes of howling pain and rage. At rhythmical intervals throughout the sequence, African faces and heads swell, taking up entire pages. The effect is to enlarge African embodiment to become the visual equivalent of planetary bodies, crying out in deific agony for the global traffic that has ravaged them. Although the book’s intended audience includes children, Feelings does not skirt the horror: His white figures are

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shown in tableaus variously caught in the act of torturing, branding, whipping, even raping black bodies, which are elsewhere shown to be praying, crying out, jumping overboard slave ships (momentarily, as if taking flight) and then, in adjoining panels, plunging beneath the waves toward sharks.7 But even though historical trauma is confronted as pain, it is never rendered as such merely. If the traumatic pain represented in this exclusively visual text is never merely visual—but musical as well—then one may associate the transmedial structure of Middle Passage with the transnational as well. To do so is to read the text with Gilroy’s thesis in mind, which claims that African bodies were never limited to European national or cultural limits and boundaries along the landmasses that edge the Atlantic and that their more fluid circulation through these spaces is best expressed through the drift and flow of black musical adoptions throughout Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas. Just because there is no overt music in these comics about slavery (another vulgar deductivism) does not mean that they contain no music nor fail to uphold Gilroy’s thesis. There is indeed a musicality in both Feelings’s Middle Passage and Baker’s Nat Turner. Both are suspicious of logos, speaking the unspeakable through pictures and expressing a staunch resistance toward words coded as European. There is a visual rhythm to the narrative choreography of that resistance in Feelings’s work as his characters are shown singing out their historical pain sotto voce in arias of dislocation and cosmic misery. Feelings himself refers to music when trying to explain his intention of pairing joy and sorrow in his illustrations: “It’s clearer in music—in the blues, the lyrics are painful but the rhythms are joyful—you almost want to dance. I had to listen to black music, the blues, jazz, spirituals, so that I could constantly be reminded that in our culture the pain is always tempered by the joy and the joy always tempered by the pain.”8 And why wouldn’t there be an obvious musicality to these visual stories? What they attest to, after all, is that representations of the collective black African body—after and because of slavery—add up to a kind of musical trope, a theatricality of embodiment that performs at every glance the Not-Me of Western Enlightenment. Feelings’s visual work, like Baker’s, unmasks that performance of the subjective excision of African identity from Western discourse. It does so by drawing the historical moment of that excision and by drawing attention to its own unsettled relationship to discourse in staged protests of verbal language. A transnational aesthetic informs the coded portrayal of certain white slavers. As mentioned, early captors are clearly Muslim Arabs based on details of dress and beard style. After a mass sale overseen by an African king, slaves are ferried

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out to a slave ship. We are then presented with a full page comprised of two images representing the slaves’ first encounter with whiteness incorporated—the vicious white crew of the slave ship. One rather long rectangular image panel shows us the slavers as if we were in the position of the boarding slaves. Although uniformly white and presented in a linear fashion, as if in a lineup, crew members seem to emerge on the page as though drawn as a positive effect of applying the dry media and then erased, coming through as an effect of a negation—wispy, blurred, ever fading from view. Conversely, African bodies appear throughout as a surplus of positive applications, as substantial markings of the dry media, standing out against contrasting white figures and lighter backgrounds. In the accompanying panel on this particular page where Africans encounter the crew is a full-blown image of one of the white slavers’ heads. This is in accordance with a typical strategy of the book, in which a depiction of bodies as collectivities, or else as serial iterations, finds contrast in images of individual heads abstracted and enlarged. Interestingly, in this panel, the serious-faced white slaver wears a floppy cap that recalls portraits of Columbus, particularly the 1520 painting by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio. Therefore, in contrast to images of slavers as Arabs, as generic serialized figures fading into whiteness, and here as ethnically recognizable and distinct from one another (the hat is notably Roman Catholic whether or not the image is meant to signify Columbus), African slaves are drawn according to a principle of interchangeability. Feelings’s translation of individuality into the terrible thingness of cargo is heightened in a series of images that render the tight-packing of the ship’s hold as a geometrical carving up of space—where stylized images of slaves as cargo echo the famous blueprint diagramming the slave body’s conversion into cargo. That image appears superimposed onto an enormous black body in the shape of a ship with massive chain links trailing decoratively in its wake (see Figure 1.1). But in spite of this tagging of ethnic specificity and transnationality as being on the side of the enslavers, there is nevertheless a sense of placelessness in these scenes, as if they were set in space along a geometrical grid, whose lines, whether swirling or straight, indicate abstraction, two-dimensionality, and metaphoricity rather than realism, dimensional depth, or any place in particular. It is the nonspecific quality of settings and backgrounds that lifts the archetypical images of the Middle Passage out of the context of mere history, where the dead would merely signal inoperable, irrecoverable losses. Feelings’s obvious play with form and style helps to replant, reroot, and reroute his subjects in new image contexts of surreality and dream, where the dead seem to function anew as a productive deathliness, in which the dead are dangerously (because overtly) aestheticized.

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Figure 1.1  Tight-packing diagram as body of slave as ship from The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo by Tom Feelings, copyright 1995 by Tom Feelings. Used with permission of Dial Books for Young Readers, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

In the existential hiatus between figures coded as national or cultural, between, even, anything easily coded as a locational integrity—setting in The Middle Passage is accorded a narrative logic that is circumscribed by an ethics of sacred, communal unspeakability. Ever since Toni Morrison’s injunction that the enforced diaspora of African labor to the New World be respected as an unspeakable event, which animates the history as well as the unconscious of present-day African Americans, representations of slavery and the Middle Passage could be seen in conceptual dialogue with representations of the Holocaust—each having to negotiate a communally erected partition, a Bilderverbot that was itself a kind of monument to the anonymity and silence of the unrepresentable dead and the unrepresentable enormities they endured. Therefore, although we might begin with a position that seems on the surface quite simple—that slavery is a topic of transnationalism par excellence—we soon realize that the topic of slavery is in itself an entry into transnationalism as both an object of history and an object of thought with historical resonances leading toward further enmeshment in the transnational. In addition to seeing Morrison’s injunction on the unspeakability of the Middle Passage reflected in the wordless structure of Feelings’s text, we

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might productively find echoes in it of that which Andreas Huyssen finds in Spiegelman’s Maus—a negotiation with Adornian mimesis so as to circumvent even while reinstating the Bilderverbot of the Holocaust.9 To return to the anxiety of deductivism that provokes this chapter, we might further note how the comic form’s inevitable synthesizing of categorical oppositions works here as well, so that the transculturality, for example, that Rocío Davis sees in Satrapi’s Persepolis functions in Feelings’s text as a binaric tension between silence or unspeakability and the uninterrupted vocality of depiction.10 Part of this effect is achieved by an approach to the human figure that wavers between the naturalistic and the symbolic. As Sarah Wyman has shown, Feelings’s panel compositions tend to portray “subjects in single moments; individuals do not change or develop, but are caught in an instant of transformation from living in Africa, to enslavement abroad.”11 We might bicker with the implied state of certainty Wyman imputes to the destiny of Feelings’s subjects en route to an “enslavement abroad,” since so little designates the Western nodes of the Atlantic trade in his portrayals while so much in them stresses the disorientation of the Passage itself. Nevertheless, Wyman’s analysis of the maternal trope in Feelings’s work could not be more insightful: In a key image [.  .  .] Feelings depicts a mother holding her child, while simultaneously cradling the cross-cut hull of a slave ship, peopled by shackled Africans. The abstracted crouching and prone forms are easily identifiable, inscribed like lettered calligrams for bodies bent beyond their will. [.  .  .] The naturalistic depiction of the mother contrasts with the abstracted ship, signifying a merger of historical memory and the interpretive element necessitated by the great remove in time and space from actual events.12

With Morrison and Gilroy, Feelings clearly rejects in these slippages between specificity (mother and child) and symbolic expansiveness (mother as Africa, child as slave, as ship, and as the soon-to-be African American) any reductive or monolithic possibilities for interpretation. Amidst Feelings’s illustrated associations of subjects and bodies, historical territories and domains of identification, is an ever-pressing injunction that we as reader-viewers allow room for a hermeneutics of becoming, where the subjects we discern and the referents we might conjure for them remain in a state of oceanic limbo—as with the Passage—where processes of ontological and epistemological becoming take priority over the urgencies of bottom lines. The same is true of Kyle Baker’s graphic novel Nat Turner. There are two panels in this nearly wordless retelling of the infamous Virginian slave rebellion

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of 1831 that resonate strongly with Feelings’s collapse of mother-daughter and ship symbolism. Even as much of Baker’s text seeks to valorize the violence of Turner’s insurrection, it does so by devoting early sections to familiar scenes of infanticide aboard a slave ship, which seem intended to justify and anticipate Turner’s uprising.13 They appear as part of an episode recounting an African father who decides to surrender his baby to the sharks rather than give him over to the white slavers. A series of panels silently renders the action. First, a father clutches an infant, looking as though he has just conceived of the terrible plan. Then, the baby dangles overboard as a white shark snaps hungrily at it from the waters below. The father’s black hand then releases the crying infant, but a white slaver’s hand saves the child from certain death in the following panel. Thereafter, we get a close-up of the African father biting the white hand that holds the baby and then a panel showing the child drifting into the maw of the shark below. We do not see the shark bite, nor must we. The first bite of the father’s engulfs and renders ghostly the second one that goes unrepresented. The infant is never visualized as a corpse, but, as with the narrative present of fiction, forever falls toward its toothy disaster. Its persistent status as the grim raw material for hypostatizing Middle Passage atrocity culminates in its transfer from diegetic image (of action happening in the real-time narrative) to aural icon—a pictogrammic sign of speech content. That is to say, by the last page of this opening section of Nat Turner, the scene of the baby that drifts into the mouth of the shark reappears as a speech bubble spoken by the young Nat Turner (see Figure 1.2). Curiously, this panel also metaphorizes the reception context of both this graphic novel and Feelings’s illustrated narrative. As visual hearers of the story of the Middle Passage, we are like the stupefied listeners of Nat’s pictorial shark story, watching with mouths and hearts agape. Such visualizations of the Middle Passage are also interesting in the context of transnationalism for their negotiation of temporality. Transnationalism, globalization, the new world order, and all of their cognate terms nearly always nudge us toward the horizon of some unseen futurity, configured as a new spatial awareness. A scene like this one from Baker, or many others like it from Feelings, reminds us of the historical dimensions inherent to any redemptive imagining of new global arrangements of power, whether they be commercial, cultural, or merely theoretical. This scene, for instance, emphasizes the value of facial expressions in mediating an affective (and thereby redemptive) relationship to the present fiction as well as to the past. The distinction between these two temporalities, as well as between Turner and Baker, productively unravels in the slack of fiction’s permissive contract with readers. According to this scene

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Figure 1.2  Young Nat Turner narrating the Middle Passage shark scene from Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner, 57.

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of the young Nat narrating, everything we have seen in the graphic novel thus far becomes mystifyingly congruent with two other narratives—the visions that motivated the young Nat to undertake his rebellion and the instigating retelling of those visions to an audience of novitiate revolutionaries. Ultimately, Baker’s and Feelings’s choice of pictorially dominant media suggests that the Middle Passage is best experienced not in academic, lexical, or verbal terms but in soteriological terms of icons and idols: not as some past event reprised through narration, but as vision, immediate and materially present. This orientation to history as a kind of encounter recalls Walter Benjamin’s formulation: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”14 The danger is one of historical causation. Baker wants to propose a sequentiality, if not a logic, for the Turner uprising rooted in a notion of origin, and that myth of origin which Robert Reid-Pharr in another context refers to as “the Big Bang Theory of African American culture”15—locating the illogical, but inevitable Bang within a suddenly retrievable and suddenly manipulable Middle Passage. While we may be encouraged to read these scenes as a fictional retelling of Turner’s ancestry, underwritten by realism’s contract of verisimilitude, we soon realize that what we have been experiencing all along is really more of an oral tale, a prophecy of the type that invested Turner with authority among his fellow freedom seekers. Two closely related forms of dissidence intertwine here, relating this revelation of the tale as one told by the young Nat to Feelings’s general abstraction of style throughout Middle Passage. There is in both a formal infraction that confuses speech and image, voice and sight, in order to produce a catachresis emblematic of the ruptures of the Middle Passage. Although both trade on rebellion and subjection thematically, they continue to assume a fairly intact, positivist notion of a past, however traumatic, that can be transmitted to readers in the present. Perhaps more alarmingly in Baker but present in Feelings as well is the subtle gendering of the entirety of the Middle Passage as a feminine and therefore abject prehistory of some more masculine narrative of becoming, as expressed in the dependent sequential relationship that the scenes involving Turner’s African mother bear with respect to his rebellion. But while Baker goes to great lengths to recalibrate the anonymity of his enslaved figures, he does not entirely undo the anonymity of slavery’s historical corpses, thrown overboard during passage, for this figure is not named, per se; but a sort of naming in death, or being named according to a particular position as death, occurs nevertheless. This metaphorical naming ritual accords at least some tincture of presence to a

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figure that otherwise comes to embody slavery’s terrifying yet palpable absences, its negations and substitutions of names. Baker’s sacrificial child, for example, becomes a kind of African American casus belli and is thereby named in the process. Baker thus shows what is only implied in Feelings’s text: how the imagined community of Middle Passage remembrance, the audience that his comic models and constitutes, “thrives on anonymity in death,” as Sharon Holland says of Benedict Anderson’s theory of national emergence, in which the nation mythically conceives of its immortality “by transforming fatality into continuity.”16 If we were to expand the idea of a nation to include the black American community (a community within a community often figured as having close ties to the dead already, according to Holland) or, more specifically, to the ideal reading-viewing community constituted by either Feelings’s or Baker’s text, then we might observe how this community of Middle Passage remembrance is situated by the texts that call them into being. Both texts prompt this community to reconfigure the fatality of history into a self-evident fiction. History is translated into a series of events related by strict rules of narrative causation that turn out to be, much like Baker’s text in general, a story told by the historical figure whose story the present work purports to tell. Fatality, in other words, both real and imagined, becomes the raw material of being, drive, and memory—even with an ever expanded horizon of internet-activated, socially networked transnational belonging. Fatality sustains the continuity of a community still partly constituted by historical traumas that fly directly in the face of our most aggressive contemporary fantasies of global collectivity, and it is this fatality that is figured in both of these visual texts of Middle Passage as the apotheosis of storytelling itself. The result is the constitution of a readership of remembrance, which, like all aesthetic communities, “is a community structured by disconnection.”17 That is to say, these graphic novels convene their readers as actors who must engage in the very practices that imagine such a community, while simultaneously substituting for the impossibility or lack of such a community in actuality. These texts thus become moving and picturesque examples of the historical inversions inherent to Rancière’s aesthetic community. Rather than being simply “a monument that stands as a mediation or a substitute for a people to come,” Feelings’s and Baker’s reader-viewers must become the auditors of an absent community of the ancestral dead, whose pictorial monologues cry out for our affective responses in the present.18 Some will say that the historical orientation of these contemporary works gives them an unfair advantage in being considered transnational. They look

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back to slavery and the Middle Passage and thus achieve de facto credibility by virtue of the fact that these momentous events constitute the volatile incipience of globalization and transculturality. Such a conclusion, however, which once again stresses the tropological, overlooks the very different role that history plays as the problematic catalyst for a great deal of African American creative arts. In this context, history gives rise to new dialogues, subverting established narratives by putting formerly silenced voices at the center. Themes of slavery or Middle Passage are thus not simply aesthetic choices for artists working within an Afrodiasporic paradigm, nor are they automatic shortcuts to a transnational sensibility. Rather, they replay the very provocation to expressivity that organizes and fails to organize knowledge. In a diasporic context, the Middle Passage is never merely content, but the ontological structure for content to inhabit.

Notes   1 DeMott critiques multiculturalist ideologies for making the politics of affect seem more relevant than the realpolitik of inner-city economics: “Promoting the fantasy of painless answers, inspiring groundless self approval among whites, joining the Supreme Court in treating ‘cleansing’ as inevitable, the new orthodoxy of friendship incites culture-wide evasion, justifies one political step backward after another, and greases the skids along which, tomorrow, welfare block grants will slide into state highway-resurfacing budgets. Whites are part of the solution, says this orthodoxy, if we break out of the prison of our skin color, say hello, as equals, one-on-one, to a black stranger, and make a black friend” (34).   2 As from the opening paragraph of Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk.   3 See Bauman’s Globalization and Anderson’s Imagined Communities.   4 For further examples of the kinds of essays I am thinking of here, see Dimock’s “Literature for the Planet”; Pease’s “Re-thinking American Studies after US Exceptionalism”; or any of the fine contributions in Dimock and Buell’s edited collection Shades of the Planet.   5 In itemizing the conditions that make any graphic novel produced by Americans at the present time transnational, one could also refer to the powerfully global influence of Japanese manga and its facilitative impact on comics reception worldwide even for non-manga comics. Following this line of thought, one could argue that were it not for manga, the rise in popularity during the 1990s of US comics as a viable commercial medium of storytelling would not have taken place in the same way or at the same rate of success or (more forcefully) at all. A similar line of argument could seek to understand the popularity of US graphic novels on

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  8   9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives a transnational scale by leaving aside issues of medium, focusing less on the global viability of comics than on the English language as a newly global medium of commerce and culture. But these arguments are tangential to mine, never entirely out of view but backgrounded by the salience of my different subject matter. Gilroy 2. For more theoretical discussion of the Middle Passage as represented in African American art, see Brooks. Brooks might read such depictions of the Middle Passage as “encoded with the traumas of self-fragmentation resulting from centuries of captivity and subjugation,” so that performances of what Brooks calls Afro-alienation bear the capacity “to turn the horrific historical memory of moving through oceanic space while ‘suspended in time’ not only into a kind of ‘second sight,’ as Du Bois would have termed it, but also into a critical form of dissonantly enlightened performance” (5). Feelings, “Balancing” 62. See Huyssen. See Davis. Wyman 304. Wyman 307. For more scholarship on Baker’s entwining of race and history in his superhero comics, see Wanzo; for more on Baker’s Nat Turner, see Kunka. Benjamin 247. Reid-Pharr 144. Holland 22; Anderson 11. Rancière 59. Rancière 59.

Works cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1983. Baker, Kyle. Nat Turner. 2006. New York: Abrams, 2008. Bauman, Zygmunt. Globalization: The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. 253–64. Brooks, Daphne. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom 1850–1910. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Davis, Rocío G. “A Graphic Self: Comics as Autobiography in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 27.3 (2005): 264–79.

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DeMott, Benjamin. “Put On a Happy Face: Masking the Differences Between Blacks and Whites.” Harper’s Magazine (Sept. 1995): 31–8. Dimock, Wai Chee. “Literature for the Planet.” PMLA 116 (2001): 173–88. Dimock, Wai Chee, and Lawrence Buell, eds. Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Du Bois, W. E. B. Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: McClurg, 1903. Feelings, Tom. “Balancing Pain and Joy.” International Review of African American Art 19.2 (2003): 62. —. The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo. New York: Dial, 1995. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Holland, Sharon Patricia. Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Huyssen, Andreas. “Of Mice and Mimesis: Reading Spiegelman with Adorno.” New German Critique 81 (Fall 2000): 65–82. Kunka, Andrew J. “Intertextuality and the Historical Graphic Narrative: Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner and the Styron Controversy.” College Literature 38.3 (2011): 168–93. Morrison, Toni. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review 28.1 (1989): 1–34. Pease, Donald. “Re-thinking American Studies after US Exceptionalism.” American Literary History 21.1 (2009): 19–27. Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Gregory Elliott. New York: Verso, 2009. Reid-Pharr, Robert. “The Slave Narrative and Early Black American Literature.” In The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative. Ed. Audrey Fisch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 137–49. Wanzo, Rebecca. “Wearing Hero-Face: Black Citizens and Melancholic Patriotism in Truth: Red, White, and Black.” Journal of Popular Culture 42.2 (2009): 339–62. Wyman, Sarah. “Imagining Separation in Tom Feelings’ The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Comparative American Studies 7.4 (2009): 298–318.

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Transnational Identity as Shape-Shifting: Metaphor and Cultural Resonance in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese Elisabeth El Refaie

Introduction This chapter considers the use of shape-shifting as a metaphor for transnational identity in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006).1 The graphic narrative tells three seemingly unrelated episodic tales, which are finally woven together in a dramatic climax. All three story strands—featuring a Chinese American boy struggling to be accepted in his predominantly white suburban school; the legendary Chinese figure of the Monkey King; and the Caucasian-looking Danny, whose attempts at assimilation are thwarted by the annual visit of his stereotypical Asian cousin—involve physical transformations of some kind. I argue that shape-shifting is an apt metaphor for the unstable nature of all cultural identity, particularly in immigrant nations such as America, where culture is inevitably constituted both within and across categories of class, gender, race, ethnicity, politics, and religion. Moreover, the prior use of the theme of shape-shifting in Chinese folklore and American popular culture allows Yang to evoke a whole range of additional, and more specific, cultural connotations. As I contend in the first section of this chapter, cultural identity is a highly abstract notion that cannot be properly understood without recourse to some form of metaphor or allegory. In transnational approaches, culture is most often conceptualized through spatial or biological metaphors. Metaphors always highlight some aspects and hide others, as well as bringing with them specific meanings and resonances depending on their provenance and the way they have been used in the past by particular cultures and social groups. Spatial metaphors may implicitly reinforce the links between culture and geography,

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while the notion of hybridity, due to its provenance in biology/zoology and its uses in nineteenth-century scientific racism, is still haunted by the ideas of racial purity and pollution. Gene Luen Yang’s shape-shifting metaphor, by contrast, emphasizes the important role of the body in giving us a sense of cultural belonging or exclusion. This, I suggest, makes it a particularly apt and illuminating analogy to use not only in stories about cultural identity but also in scholarly discussions about transnationality. The second section of this chapter focuses on some of the historical and cultural resonances that the shape-shifting metaphor is able to evoke. Shape-shifting is a common theme in many mainstream American comic books, particularly in superhero comics such as Superman, Captain Marvel, Plastic Man, and Spider-Man. This tradition is referenced repeatedly in American Born Chinese in terms of content and stylistic features. The shape-shifting metaphor also enables Yang to set his tale firmly within the world of Chinese folklore by drawing on the famous legend of the half animal and half divine Monkey King, while also bringing in elements of the Judeo-Christian tradition. This chapter thus uses the example of American Born Chinese to illustrate the potential of graphic narratives to problematize the links between body image and cultural identity, and—particularly when they draw on several specific national myths and verbo-visual storytelling traditions—to offer a unique perspective on transnationality as something that is always more complex and unruly than just the sum of its constituent parts.

Cultural identity, metaphor, and embodiment As Günter Lenz points out, transnationality has become one of the key notions of current scholarship in American studies.2 According to this view, cultural identity is not bound to nationality or ethnicity; rather, it is seen as a process of constant change, “where identity is endlessly constructed, and deconstructed, across difference and against set inside/outside oppositions.”3 Consequently, it is perfectly normal for people to belong simultaneously to different cultures and for their allegiances to be shifting constantly. Globalization and the greatly increased opportunities for travel and migration have arguably made categories of belonging even more unstable. The most common metaphor used to express these ideas is one which compares identity to a spatial location and cultural change to physical movement from one place to another. A good example is Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of “contact

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zones,” “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination.”4 Homi Bhabha’s pivotal work, The Location of Culture, and his influential concept of “third space,” which describes the new cultural identities that often emerge in the border zones between incommensurably different cultures, are similarly based on a spatial analogy. Another metaphorical term that is frequently used by scholars to describe the diversity and dynamics of cultures is “hybridity.” Originating in biological science, where it referred to the outcome of crossing two different species, it now also describes a broad range of social and cultural phenomena of mixing.5 The prevalence of metaphor in discussions about cultural identity would not surprise conceptual metaphor theorists such as George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Zoltán Kövecses. They believe that metaphor is a fundamental property of human thought that allows us to understand areas of experience that go beyond our immediate, physical experience in terms of something more concrete and embodied. For example, we all experience a connection between our movement through space and the passing of time, which accounts for the many metaphorical expressions that compare life events to a journey. Many of these expressions are entirely unremarkable, and, consequently, they are typically produced and interpreted at the level of unconscious or barely conscious thought processes. This, however, does not prevent them from impacting upon our thinking and behavior. Indeed, it is precisely the unreflected, apparently commonsensical nature of conventional metaphors that gives them so much power over the way we understand and act toward particular areas of our lives. Metaphors are often able to reveal aspects of a phenomenon that may otherwise be overlooked, but they are also liable to overemphasize some features and obscure others completely. As Lola Young argues, we must therefore pay close attention to the metaphors we use in scientific inquiry and never “lose sight of the differences between the object under discussion and the object to which it is being compared.”6 When, for instance, spatial metaphors are used to describe transnational phenomena, they may inadvertently reinforce Romantic nationalist notions of cultural identity as intimately connected to a person’s place of birth or abode. A conflict or clash of cultures is then more likely to be regarded as a consequence of the movement of people across geographic boundaries through patterns of globalization and migration. Paradoxically, the regular use of such terms may thus reemphasize the very notion of culture as territory-based that scholars in this tradition are trying so hard to dismantle.7 The idea of a fusion of separate parts underlying the biological metaphor of hybridity is

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even more problematic, since it implicitly assumes the prior existence of “pure” antecedents. Moreover, it also carries echoes of its historical uses in (pseudo-) scientific discourses that focused on the prospects and dangers of fertility across different species or “races.”8 The metaphor of shape-shifting, which structures and gives meaning to all three story strands in American Born Chinese, avoids many of these problematic connotations. Instead, like many other contemporary graphic narratives, Yang’s work emphasizes the important role of the body in giving us a sense of our own identity.9 Over the past few decades, embodiment has become the central focus of a wealth of work by sociologists, cultural theorists, and art historians. Many of their writings focus on the sociocultural aspects of embodiment, conceiving it as an active process—performed both by the self and by others—through which the body is rendered meaningful: “To do, to dramatize, to reproduce, these seem to be some of the elementary structures of embodiment.”10 According to this view, our bodies are constructed on the basis of social and cultural assumptions about class, gender, sex, race, ethnicity, age, health, and beauty, and these, in turn, are reflected in, and influenced by, the actual bodies and body images we encounter in our everyday lives: “[W]henever we are referring to an individual’s body, that body is always responded to in a particularized fashion, that is, as a woman’s body, a Latina’s body, a mother’s body, a daughter’s body, a friend’s body, an attractive body, an aging body, a Jewish body.”11 The view of embodiment as operating across a limited set of socially constructed categories tends to overlook the possibility of real, qualitative transformation. An alternative line of thinking, which has become very influential in (new) media studies (e.g. Hayles; Shaviro), focuses on the body as a general condition of material existence and experience, emphasizing the “intrinsic connection between movement and sensation whereby each immediately summons the other.”12 According to this approach, embodied identity is not limited to the performance and reproduction of predetermined discursive bodies. Rather, since it depends on our sensual and affective experiences of the world as they unfold over time, it is necessarily multiple, contradictory, and constantly changing. In American Born Chinese, both socially constructed and experiential, transformative aspects of embodiment are addressed in all three of the story strands. When Jin Wang moves from San Francisco’s Chinatown to a new, suburban neighborhood, he finds himself mocked and ostracized by his almost exclusively white classmates. Eventually, he makes friends with Wei-Chen, who has recently arrived from Taiwan and who is even more obviously “other” than Jin himself. But when he falls in love with a blond, blue-eyed all-American girl,

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he becomes increasingly obsessed with the desire to blend in with the majority and ends up betraying Wei-Chen.13 The second story strand is based on the old Chinese fable of the Monkey King, master of kung-fu and adored ruler over his monkey subjects. When he is refused entry to a heavenly dinner party for the gods on the grounds of being merely a monkey, he uses the kung-fu discipline of shape-shifting to take on a more humanlike form and demands to be hailed as a god. After openly defying Tze-Yo-Tzuh, the creator of all of existence, he is buried under a mountain of rocks for 500 years, until, one day, he accepts the invitation by Tze-Yo-Tzuh’s emissary to accompany him on a journey to the West. In order to escape from under the pile of rocks, however, he must first revert to his true simian form. In the third story strand, Danny, a popular, Caucasian-looking teenager receives an annual visit from his hideous cousin Chin-Kee. Deeply humiliated by his cousin’s antics in front of his friends and schoolmates, Danny is forced to transfer to a different school every year. All three of these seemingly unrelated episodic tales are woven together in a dramatic climax toward the end of the book. After a fight between Danny and his cousin (see Figure 2.1), Danny is revealed to be a reincarnated version of the little Asian American boy Jin, who woke up one morning to find that his most intimate desire to look like everyone else had finally come true. Chin-Kee is actually the Monkey King, who took on the shape of Chin-Kee to remind Jin Wang of the importance of remaining true to his Chinese origins. Wei-Chen, finally, turns out to be the Monkey King’s son, charged by Tze-Yo-Tzuh to take on a human form and live in the mortal world for 40 years as a test of his virtue. The book ends with a scene in which Danny/ Jin Wang, having reverted to his Chinese American incarnation, is reconciled with his friend Wei-Chen and rediscovers the joys of his cultural ancestry. At first sight, the central idea running through American Born Chinese seems to be that we have only one “authentic” cultural identity, which is inextricably linked to the particular body we inhabit. Any attempt to adopt another body image will thus inevitably lead to the shattering of our “true” self. Such a limited and static view of embodied identity would run counter to a transnational conception of cultural identity, which, as mentioned above, takes the unstable, fluid nature of culture and of the bodily self for granted. In fact, though, physicality plays a much more complex role in American Born Chinese than such a superficial reading would suggest. One focus of Gene Luen Yang’s story is on the impact of unequal power relationships on people’s ability to determine how their bodies are perceived, both by themselves and by other people. It is obvious that some members of a society are always accorded more

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Figure 2.1  Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese, 208. Used with permission.

freedom than others to choose among a wide range of body images. As Michael Schwalbe argues, white, socially privileged men are generally much more able to define themselves as unencumbered by their physicality than those whose bodies are constructed by the powerful majority as culturally “other,” such as women, the disabled, and the socially or racially marginalized.14 In situations such as those described in all three story strands of American Born Chinese, where an individual’s internal visions of the self stand in stark contrast to the way he or she is seen by the more powerful majority, the result can be a fractured self-image and a profound sense of alienation. According to Drew Leder, it is precisely in such situations that individuals become painfully aware of their bodies. The relationship between the body and human consciousness is deeply paradoxical: “While in one sense the body is the most abiding and inescapable presence in our lives, it is also essentially

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characterized by absence. That is, one’s own body is rarely the thematic object of experience.”15 Leder suggests that it is only at times of dysfunction, when we are ill, in pain, or experiencing the physical changes associated with puberty or old age, that the body forces itself into our consciousness. The body is now perceived but is experienced as a “dys-appearance,” or, as Leder writes, “a sharp and searing presence threatening the self.”16 Dys-appearance can also be inaugurated by internalizing the attitudes of people who regard us not as autonomous subjects but as objectified “others,” for instance, on the basis of a disability, different skin color, or gender. Jin Wang’s fervent desire to blend in with his white classmates reaches its apex when he hits puberty and falls in love with Amelia, a strawberry-blond, blue-eyed all-American girl. His body, of which he was only periodically aware while growing up, suddenly seizes his attention and makes him experience his whole physical existence as “other.” In Leder’s terms, “the body appears as thematic focus, but precisely as in a dys state.”17 In a series of wordless panels, Jin Wang is shown walking home from school, his ruminations represented not verbally but visually through a series of pictures in thought balloons.18 In the first panel, he is deeply immersed in his happy contemplation of the beautiful Amelia, but in the second panel, she has been joined in his thoughts by his main competitor for the girl’s affections, a blond, blue-eyed, curly haired boy. The next panel shows Jin Wang focusing on this boy’s appearance, and in the final one, the blond, curly hair has become detached from its owner and forms the only object of Jin Wang’s thoughts. In the following scene, Jin Wang has acquired a perm, which makes him look utterly ridiculous to his Asian American friends but which he hopes will allow him to resemble his Caucasian classmates and endear him to Amelia.19 His wish seems to become reality when he takes on the bodily shape of Danny, but he continues to feel awkward and out of place, particularly when he is reminded by his cousin’s visits of his essential “otherness.” In American Born Chinese, the metaphor of shape-shifting is thus used to capture several of the central aspects of embodiment discussed above. For Yang, bodies are both political—because we are not all equally free to perform the physical identities we choose—and deeply personal—because we experience our own material existence as something that is constantly shifting and changing as we move through life and respond emotionally to the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Yang’s emphasis on embodied aspects of identity is hardly surprising given the primacy of visual images, more specifically of caricature, in the graphic narrative medium, which allows culturally meaningful physical features to be selected and foregrounded through exaggeration (see Figure 2.1).

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Moreover, the way this sequential medium encourages readers to trace subtle (or sometimes dramatic) changes in characters’ appearances across individual panels tends to draw attention to the ever-changing and transformative potential of the body. As I argue in the following section, Yang further emphasizes the fluid nature of human identity by fusing characters and story elements from Chinese mythology, Christian folklore, and American popular culture, many of which are closely associated with the theme of shape-shifting.

Cultural allusions and resonances The most obvious intertextual reference in American Born Chinese is that of the Monkey King, the legendary half animal and half divine trickster figure of the classical Chinese epic tale Journey to the West, who through Taoist practice acquires supernatural powers, including the ability to transform into various animals and objects. Originally a popular oral legend, the story was recorded in the late Ming Dynasty and then changed and adapted to include both foreign and indigenous secular and religious influences. In recent years, it has also been a popular element of Asian American writing, including Maxine Hong Kingston’s highly successful novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989).20 Changing the tale further, Gene Luen Yang takes up elements of Christian folklore and biblical references. Tze-Yo-Tzuh (the Buddha in the original story) is converted into a kindly old man in a red robe and with long, gray hair and beard, who carries a huge shepherd’s staff. Although his depiction also includes some stereotypical Asian features, such as high cheekbones and slanted eyes, it is strongly reminiscent of the way in which the Christian God is often imagined and represented. Many of Tze-Yo-Tzuh’s pronouncements are also thinly disguised quotes from the Bible. Thus, his words to the Monkey King—“I know your most hidden thoughts. I know when you sit and when you stand, when you journey and when you rest. Even before a word is upon your tongue, I have known it”21—echo the first four verses of Psalm 139 in the Old Testament: “Lord, you have probed me, you know me: you know when I sit and stand; you understand my thoughts from afar. You sift through my travels and my rest; with all my ways you are familiar. Even before a word is on my tongue, Lord, you know it all.”22 Similarly, the journey to the West, which in the original story involved retrieving Buddhist sutras from India, has been transformed by Yang into a form of pilgrimage to the birthplace of Christianity. In a panel that visually parodies

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many famous representations of the nativity scene, Tze-Yo-Tzuh’s emissaries take on the role of the three Magi, offering precious gifts to the infant Jesus.23 Yang also exploits many of the sociocultural connotations of American comics, which, as Marc Singer points out, have a “long history of excluding, trivializing, or ‘tokenizing’ minorities.”24 Yang’s figure of Chin-Kee, in particular, represents “a monstrously exaggerated concatenation of every popular cultural stereotype of Asians and Asian Americans over the last two centuries,” many of which are clearly taken directly from comic books.25 One of the earliest newspaper comic strips was Richard Felton Outcault’s Yellow Kid series, which ran from 1895 onwards in the New York World (then in the New York Journal) and which was used to boost the sales of newspapers especially to the city’s immigrant populations, many of whom struggled to read English. It centered on the antics of an obnoxious yet strangely endearing boy in a long, yellow nightshirt, who lived in a fictional urban slum tenement and spoke in a peculiar pidgin English. Some of the visual features of the Yellow Kid, including the round face, protruding ears, goofy grin, and buck teeth, are echoed in Chin-Kee, who also has a similar way of ludicrously mispronouncing the English language: “Dis day so fun, cousin Da-nee! Chin-Kee so ruv Amellican School!”26 Chin-Kee’s extraordinary ability to answer all the teachers’ questions when he visits Danny’s school picks up on another popular stereotype of Asian Americans as inhumanly studious, efficient, and single-minded in their pursuit of economic opportunity. This particular fantasy, which from the early 1960s onwards was often framed as a compliment, was prefigured in another popular comic of the late nineteenth century, The Rat, which regularly featured images of grotesque Chinese Americans overrunning San Francisco and destroying its institutions with their alien habits and supernatural efficiency.27 The American superhero genre provides Yang with a particularly rich source of narrative themes, stereotypes, and stylistic features. Superhero comics, which emerged in the 1930s and rapidly achieved huge popularity with the young soldiers fighting in World War II, typically center on a character who is both an ordinary American and a member of a superhuman race of alien beings and who is often shown to be trapped between these two mutually exclusive roles. Superhero comics can thus “literally personify the otherwise abstract ontological divides of minority identity, assigning each self its own visual identifier, its own body.”28 As was discussed above, the notion of shape-shifting and divided identities is taken to extremes in American Born Chinese, where all the central characters are revealed in the end to have at least one alter ego.

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The figure of Chin-Kee is also reminiscent of some of the stereotypical Asian villains and clumsy, foolish sidekicks of white heroes that feature in many of the early superhero comic books. One obvious influence is the character of the evil Chinese genius Dr Fu Manchu, who was introduced by British novelist Sax Rohmer in the early twentieth century and who has since featured extensively in American superhero comics, sometimes under the name of the Mandarin or Yellow Claw, for example. Phillip Cunningham describes this character as “the greatest archetype for the modern supervillain” and “the poster child of the dangerous Other and Yellow Peril.”29 A less threatening but, to many, equally offensive character is Chop Chop, who was invented by Will Eisner in the early 1940s as the youngest member of the team of fighter pilots of different nationalities in Blackhawk. Like Chin-Kee, Chop Chop was originally drawn with bright yellow skin, slit eyes, buck teeth, and a queue, although this stereotypical depiction was gradually toned down from the mid-1960s onwards.30 The superhero genre is also referenced by Yang in some of the fight scenes between the Monkey King and various gods and between Dany and Chin-Kee (see Figure 2.1), where the motion lines, the “soundtrack” provided by onomatopoetic words, exaggerated expressions of pain, diagonal panels, and rapid shifts in scale and perspective are strongly reminiscent of equivalent scenarios in superhero stories.31 Closely related to the superhero genre are those comics that were created from the 1960s onwards to encourage the sale of action figures, including G. I. Joe, Masters of the Universe, and Transformers, a line of toys in which all the parts can be shifted about to change them from a vehicle, animal, or other device, into a robot action figure and back again. In a key scene in American Born Chinese, Jin Wang is shown playing with transformers and declaring to the ancient wife of a traditional Chinese herbalist that this is what he himself would like to be when he grows up.32 The herbalist’s wife responds by assuring him that he can become anything he likes, “so long as you are willing to forfeit your soul.”33 Jin Wang’s desire to “be a transformer” can also be interpreted as a reference to the transformative power of storytelling. Jared Gardner believes that graphic narratives may be uniquely suited to the task of confronting racial stereotypes because the gaps between individual panels and between verbal and visual meaning require individual readers “to forge the connections and fill in the blanks.”34 This active process of meaning making, he suggests, inevitably destabilizes established patterns of thinking and opens up the possibility of multiple readings.35 As I have argued throughout this chapter, the metaphor

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of shape-shifting is used in American Born Chinese to further emphasize the fuzzy nature of all preestablished cultural categories. By choosing elements from different historical periods and cultural backgrounds, grossly exaggerating and mixing them together with other cultural themes, and then reinserting them into a new, contemporary narrative context, Yang challenges readers to reexamine their own assumptions and prejudices.

Conclusion The metaphors we use to make sense of complex areas of experience are never neutral and innocent because they selectively emphasize certain aspects of a phenomenon while simultaneously hiding others. In this chapter, I have argued that the two most common metaphors used by scholars to discuss the notion of transnational cultural identity are both problematic: Spatial metaphors may inadvertently reinforce the idea that a person’s culture is indelibly linked to his or her place of birth, while biological metaphors are liable to evoke the dangerous notion of racial purity. In contrast to this, the central metaphor of shape-shifting that underlies Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese emphasizes the importance of our bodies and body images in giving us a sense of who we are, while also enabling the author to draw on and allude to a broad range of texts of international provenance that have previously developed similar themes. Shape-shifting is thus a particularly apt metaphor to use in a story about cultural identity in contemporary America. It also has the potential to be developed as a central metaphor in scholarly debates about transnationality more generally. American Born Chinese would not have been nearly as effective if it had been created in any other medium. Because of the primarily visual nature of their stories, the creators of graphic narratives cannot avoid engaging with the sociocultural models that underpin body images, including categories of culture, race, and ethnicity, while the sequential nature of the medium encourages a focus on the fluid and contradictory ways in which we experience our bodies. Moreover, graphic narratives are often highly parasitic, drawing on a broad range of characters, themes, and visual styles from many different cultures and from both popular and more prestigious art forms, including early comic strips, films, popular myths, novels, and religious texts. For all these reasons, the medium offers exciting new ways for creative individuals to explore and develop the notion of transnationality as a form of identity made up of multiple elements

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that are constantly shifting, interlocking, and merging to create something entirely new and distinctive.

Notes   1 I would like to thank the editors of this volume for their thoughtful and perceptive comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The responsibility for any errors or misinterpretations is, of course, entirely my own.   2 Cf. Lenz 4.   3 Bromley 5.   4 Pratt 4.   5 See Brah and Coombes.   6 Young 157.   7 In this vein, it might be said that the terms “transnational” and “transcultural” themselves reinforce the spatial conceptions suggested by their etymology (the Latin trans- indicating movement “across,” “beyond,” or “through” spatial boundaries).   8 Kawash 5.   9 Physical identity plays a central role in the majority of contemporary graphic memoirs, for example (see El Refaie). 10 Butler 402; see also Waskul and Vannini. 11 Weiss 1. 12 Massumi 1. 13 The significance of the phenomenon of passing in American culture from the late nineteenth century onwards is considered in detail by Kawash (124–66). 14 See Schwalbe. 15 Leder 1. 16 Leder 91. 17 Leder 84. 18 Yang 97. 19 Yang 98. 20 For detailed discussions of Tripmaster Monkey and other contemporary Asian American works of fiction that feature the figure of the Monkey King, see Lowe; Maini; Pearson. 21 Yang 80. 22 New American Bible, Revised Edition. 23 Yang 215. 24 Singer 107. 25 Gardner 139.

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26 Yang 120. 27 Cf. Gardner 133–5. 28 Singer 116. Given this background, it is perhaps not surprising that Jews were predominantly responsible for inventing, writing, and drawing the vast majority of superhero comics. As Fingeroth notes perceptively: “The creation of a legion of special beings, self-appointed to protect the weak, innocent, and victimized at a time when fascism was dominating the European continent from which the creators of the heroes hailed, seems like a task that Jews were uniquely positioned to take on” (17). 29 Cunningham 58; see also Mayer. 30 Cf. Daniels 15. 31 See, for instance, Yang 16–19, 62–8, 205–12. 32 Yang 27–9. 33 Yang 29. 34 Gardner 146. 35 Whitlock similarly believes that it is precisely the effort involved on the part of the comics reader in looking for closure that encourages a sense of affective engagement with characters who are fundamentally “other,” even across deep social and cultural divides.

Works cited Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Brah, Avtar, and Annie E. Coombes, eds. Hybridity and Its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture. London: Routledge, 2000. Bromley, Roger. Narratives for a New Belonging: Diasporic Cultural Fictions. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” In Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 401–17. Cunningham, Phillip Lamarr. “The Absence of Black Supervillains in Mainstream Comics.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 1.1 (2010): 51–62. Daniels, Les. Comix: A History of Comic Books in America. New York: Bonanza, 1971. El Refaie, Elisabeth. Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2012. Fingeroth, Danny. Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero. New York: Continuum, 2007. Gardner, Jared. “Same Difference: Graphic Alterity in the Work of Gene Luen Yang, Adrian Tomine, and Derek Kirk Kim.” In Approaches to Multicultural Comics: From

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Zap to Blue Beetle. Ed. Frederick Luis Aldama. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. 132–48. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Kawash, Samira. Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Narrative. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Kingston, Maxine Hong. Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. 1989. New York: Vintage International, 1990. Kövecses, Zoltán. Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Leder, Drew. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1990. Lenz, Günter H. “Redefinitions of Citizenship and Revisions of Cosmopolitanism Challenges of Transnational Perspectives.” Symposium: Redefinitions of Citizenship and Revisions of Cosmopolitanism—Transnational Perspectives. Journal of Transnational American Studies 3.1 (2011): 4–17. . Lowe, John. “Monkey Kings and Mojo: Postmodern Ethnic Humor in Kingston, Reed, and Vizenor.” MELUS 21.4 (1996): 103–27. Maini, Irma. “Writing the Asian American Artist: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book.” MELUS 25.3–4 (2000): 243–66. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Mayer, Ruth. “Machinic Fu Manchu: Popular Seriality, and the Logic of Spread.” Journal of Narrative Theory 43.3 (forthcoming 2013). New American Bible: Revised Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pearson, J. Stephen. “The Monkey King in the American Canon: Patricia Chao and Gerald Vizenor’s Use of an Iconic Chinese Character.” Comparative Literature Studies 43.3 (2006): 355–74. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Schwalbe, Michael. “We Wear the Mask: Subordinated Masculinity and the Persona Trap.” In Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Society. Ed. Phillip Vannini and Patrick J. Williams. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. 139–52. Shaviro, Steven. Connected, or, What It Means to Live in the Network Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Singer, Marc. “‘Black Skins’ and White Masks: Comic Books and the Secret of Race.” African American Review 36.1 (2002): 107–19. Waskul, Dennis D., and Phillip Vannini, eds. Body/Embodiment: Symbolic Interaction and the Sociology of the Body. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Weiss, Gail. Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Transnational Identity as Shape-Shifting Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics.” In Graphic Narrative. Ed. Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven. Special issue of MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 965–79. Wu, Cheng’en. Journey to the West. Trans. W. J. F. Jenner. Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1993. Yang, Gene Luen. American Born Chinese. New York: First Second, 2006. Young, Lola. “Hybridity’s Discontents: Rereading Science and ‘Race.’” In Brah and Coombes, Hybridity and Its Discontents 154–70.

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3

Cosmopolitan Suspicion: Comics Journalism and Graphic Silence Georgiana Banita

Comics suggest motion, but they’re incapable of actually showing motion. They indicate sound, and even spell it out, but they’re silent. They convey continuous stories [. . .] but one of their most crucial components is blank space. Douglas Wolk And with every few steps one relentless Eurobeat drowns out another, but all the relentless Eurobeats cannot drown out the silence, which is the most relentless thing of all. Joe Sacco

Still life with children In Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), Alison Bechdel registers the suppressed tensions roiling underneath a contented—if listless—family life, encapsulating them in the image of small children as interior decoration, the living alibi to an inner death: “I think my father actually enjoyed [. . .] the air of authenticity we lent to his exhibit. A sort of still life with children.”1 The key image here is less the contrast between the fresh appearance of family contentment and its putrid core (the embalmment, as it were, of an inconsolable despair) than the contrived picture-book silence of the family scene, as if quiet pose and static self-sufficiency were the ultimate proof of domestic bliss. In a graphic novel that depends, like all works of its kind, on sequential movement, the still images raise aesthetic questions that testify to the narrative and visual sophistication of the medium. A similar effect is mobilized by the use of still panels or longer silent sequences in graphic narratives ranging from Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan (2000) to David Small’s Stitches

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(2009).2 While in both of these narratives the silent panels accurately encode the squirming humiliation or, in Stitches, the real voicelessness of disempowered young protagonists, in comics reportage the interruption occasioned by a quiet panel or page is even more arresting because it stops both the deafening roar of war zones and the psychic adrenaline we bring into the vicarious experience of violence. The children depicted on the cover of Jean-Philippe Stassen’s Les Enfants (2004) are a good example. Smoking, hardened thugs before their time, they would not even be recognizable as children if the book’s title did not refer to them as such. To stop and look at the victims of war in far-flung zones (here Rwanda, elsewhere Bosnia or Gaza) is to inhabit a compressed area of metaphorical land mines where the national boundaries redrawn by war, crisscrossed by the jet-setting war journalist, and gracefully written over by postnational theory become a visual stumbling block. This chapter will pause on the aesthetic features shared by such images in several works of comics journalism in order to tease out their significance for an ethics of the foreign gaze not merely in regarding the pain of others, but in doing so without words. The taxonomy I develop here builds on three types of still panels in comics journalism, classified according to what they lack (aside from the obvious absence of captions or speech balloons): namely, comment, dialogue, and narrativization. Examples of each of these can be found in Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea (2005), several of Joe Sacco’s journalistic war-zone reports, Jean-Philippe Stassen’s Deogratias (2006), and Ari Folman’s animation documentary Waltz with Bashir (2008). Taken together, these graphic narratives suggest through their deployment of silent panels that it is not the iconography of mobility that most provocatively distinguishes the challenges of the transnational, especially at its points of violent friction, but its inverse: It is silent images of paralysis, vacancy, and confinement that effectively dramatize the historical and political gridlock of ideological repression and war, creating a space that is separate from visual progression and seriality as much as it is divorced from the pieties of national and postnational geography. These panels choose to be silent on issues that the cacophony of transnational discourses cannot cease to speak about. They also have the power to prevent us from adopting the impatient tourist gaze prescribed by global travel and from too easily assimilating the relentless, event-driven plots breathlessly lining up torture, execution, and all-out war. Still images ultimately cede the position of firsthand witness to the reader—in ways that share more with war photography than literature3—while the protagonist or narrator often disappears, leaving us vulnerably and quietly alone in foreign lands, at the mercy of fixers, warlords, dictators, and angry lynch mobs. Beyond their role at the intersection of journalism, life writing,

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and graphic narrative, the silent panels employed by these texts are significant for their ability to vividly problematize the Western viewer’s desensitization, in a much-touted globalized world, to the virtues of localized, static, in-depth reflection—to the ethical vantage of the visual stopping-place. Comics journalism is per se a transnational genre and does not exist outside of a dichotomy that pits the “home” against “abroad,” the familiar against the uncanny.4 If we agree that one purpose of comics journalism is civic education through information, empathy, and mobilization, then the most apposite idiom in interrogating these narratives is the rhetoric of cosmopolitanism as conceived by a wide range of thinkers from Martha Nussbaum to Anthony Appiah.5 The texts I have selected reflect several gradations of the cosmopolitan paradigm, ranging from benign curiosity in Delisle (the least militant of these texts) and involved investigation in Sacco’s work to deeper epistemological questioning in Stassen and Folman, both of whom engage with memory and trauma within the story and in its layered narrative telling. To decipher these diverse narratives, I turn to the challenge formulated by German sociologist Ulrich Beck in his essay “War Is Peace: On Post-National War” as one in a series of calls for more critical discernment (and greater ambivalence) in weighing the demands and perils of normative globalizing agendas.6 An interesting feature of a silent aesthetics in comics journalism is its divergence from dialogic visions of cosmopolitanism, to the extent that such aesthetics expose the failure of cosmopolitanism’s convivial ethics. People are dead or about to die; there is little to discuss; memory fails, sinking somewhere outside the sphere of logos; the sheer congestion of heaving humanity trapped in camps or dodging sniper fire brooks no comment or deliberation. Beck comes closest to dramatizing this breakdown of language when he identifies George Orwell’s doublespeak as the method by which the discourse of cosmopolitanism cannibalizes itself in the process of its realization. He distinguishes between an “empirical-analytic cosmopolitanism” meant to facilitate discussion and clarify controversies, and the “normative-political cosmopolitanism” seen to trigger a “paradox”—namely, “that the successful institutionalization of the cosmopolitan regime that serves the objective of securing the world conjures up the contrary: the legitimization and the legalization of war.”7 Beck proposes a self-critical response to this normative force through the maintenance of a “perverse suspicion: the legal order that is supposed to lead to the recognition and protection of the rights of others contributes to war the blessing of law, rendering it ‘just’ and more plausible.”8 By standing outside the normative order of sequential narrative and, by extrapolation, outside the causal seriality of political iteration itself, the silent interpellations of comics journalism help articulate this “suspicion” in powerful and endlessly varied ways. Underscoring the validity of Beck’s reflexive

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cosmopolitanism and the collapse of communication that verifies it, Orwell’s election campaign mottos as they appear in 1984—“War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” “Ignorance is Strength”—provide natural categories for the graphic narratives discussed here and adumbrate their performative contradictions. The still images contained in these narratives disaggregate and diagnose not only ideas of cosmopolitanism but especially its material indexicality. They are the equivalent of spatial and temporal locality, or local specificity, whose power cosmopolitanism implicitly recognizes by explicitly flouting, just as comics journalism bows to local concerns while regarding them “through Western eyes.” The silent panels also defy what thinkers such as Nussbaum and Appiah identify as the bedrock of practical cosmopolitanism: its consistent and coherent rationalism, its doctrine of universal reasoning secured by the dialogue with others, or what Walter Mignolo terms “diversal rationalism,” namely, “the relentless practice of critical and dialogical cosmopolitanism.”9 Clearly, when the reporting voice is silenced, local tones may be heard, as well as their claim to take part in cosmopolitan universalism. The widows of Gaza and Goražde have been photographed, interviewed, and drawn before. Their wailing almost seems to occur in silence, as if conserving their effort for the benefit of the (silent) camera. What they want to know is how exactly Sacco’s portrayal will make a difference. The challenge of cosmopolitanism, as Judith Butler points out, should therefore emerge “from those who are not covered by it, who have no entitlement to occupy the space of the ‘who,’ but who nevertheless demand that the universal as such ought to be inclusive of them.”10 By the same token, the challenge of the wordless graphics emerges from images that lie outside the locus of action and reportage while nonetheless demanding narrativization: the silence of massacre, the speechless aftermath of death. While Beck proposes that we replace the vertical cosmopolitanism of war and empire with the horizontal cosmopolitanism of suspended universalism, the verbal restraint of these texts similarly supplants the layered signification of the graphic code with the level muteness of the depthless image, all the more vociferous for its unintelligibility. In lieu of cosmopolitanism’s dialogical imaginary we engage in a dialogue of a material, somatological kind—not captioned, but lived.

“Freedom is slavery”: Guy Delisle The Québécois animator and cartoonist Guy Delisle is known for his comic book travelogues from some of the world’s most secretive countries. Pyongyang: A

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Journey in North Korea (published in English in 2005) was followed by Burma Chronicles in 2008 and Chroniques de Jérusalem in 2011. The journalistic memoir Pyongyang documents his two-month sojourn in North Korea in 2001, when he was working on a French-produced cartoon series. The book mines the expatriate lifestyle by providing vignettes of Delisle’s everyday routines in gray-tones and sketchily delineated, abstract caricatures. Particularly in a capital like Pyongyang, a “phantom city in a hermit nation” entirely devoid of quotidian life, the everyday can only be captured through an aesthetic of the unexceptional. Not only is this the sluggish story of life in a morose, profoundly unamusing city, but it is the chronicle of a country in which absolutely nothing happens.11 For long stretches, the protagonist, Mister Guy, ambles about with no set plans, visiting restaurants, underground stations, and shops, as well as assorted monuments housed in nuclear bunkers and surpassed in absurdity only by the dictatorial regime itself. The mood of these adventures, which Guy can undertake only in the company of guides and translators, is invariably surreal and somnambulant. The reasons for this decelerated pace become clear as soon as a series of silent panels portray the country as a secretive, empty, socially fortified environment that shuns contact with the rest of the world and the unfortunate foreigners arriving here, of whom there are not many anyway. As Guy observes, “North Korea is the world’s most isolated country. Foreigners trickle in. There’s no Internet. There are no cafes. In fact, there’s no entertainment. It’s hard to even leave the hotel and meeting Koreans is next to impossible.”12 In the hotel restaurant, Guy is the only guest. Coming home in the evening, he is greeted by a dark, cool cavity whose terminal silence is disturbed only by the heavy paddle of a massive turtle swimming purposelessly in an aquarium. The sound of the turtle, more imagined than perceived, haunts Guy at night, as he lies in bed wondering whether or not he is only imagining “a turtle crawling over a drum . . . very slowly” in the room upstairs.13 The static image of the turtle bottled in its aquarium in the dark hotel lays bare the ponderous, time-repellent lifestyle of this little-understood people (see Figure 3.1). Guy has no choice but to conform to their standard speed, as he spends his workdays pondering the facial expressions and body language of animated bears and his nights trying to escape the hotel and his guide, only to find himself walking down empty roads in complete darkness, unable to call a taxi, his path illuminated only by islands of neon framing the features of “eternal president” Kim Il-Sung, who is still in power despite having died in 1994. In global terms, Delisle’s North Korea is a dead link—connected to nothing, invalid, obsolete, untouched by the transnational and its convivial loquaciousness.

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Figure 3.1  Guy Delisle, Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, 96. Copyright 2012 Guy Delisle. Used with permission.

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Hardly anyone speaks, let alone engages in rational cosmopolitan deliberation. The narrative adapts to the empty temporality of the local enabled by countless silent panels in which the narrator sheds all pretence of universalist authority. Significantly, he travels with Orwell’s 1984 and liberally lends it to his translator. In this country, however, the freedom of reading and rationalism can make nothing happen. Guy remains incarcerated in his hotel room, immobile in the dead silence pressing down from high ceilings and emanating from royally laid dinner tables. It is in his hotel room (otherwise a symbol of cosmopolitan mobility and travel) that he feels most alienated from the world and most desirous to bridge the gap between himself and his mysterious environment. He does this by tossing paper airplanes from his window on the fifteenth floor, hoping they will make it to the river. This gesture is one of the book’s most deliciously subversive. No doubt, Guy attempts other forbidden things as well, such as tracking banned radio stations with his personal radio, or explaining foreign policy to his seemingly brainwashed North Korean acquaintances. Yet the technologically primitive, symbolic paper airplane furnishes the most effective prism for understanding Delisle’s critical cosmopolitanism. The jet-set mobility of globalization shrinks here (and in Folman, as we shall see) to the breadth of a shore. The global steps of mankind are here a man’s small steps taken in isolation and prudent silence. Mirroring the Warholian atmosphere of a local supermarket, in which everything is a single color, shape, and size, individuals are made to resemble each other in ways that further flatten the human geography of the nation and its temporal void. Even further, the narrative’s still panels evocatively question the objectification of this nation into a wordless image (a rogue state and part of the Axis of Evil, according to George W. Bush), impervious to global interpellation and indifferent to universalist claims beyond its own self-justifying narrative. Sidonie Smith’s assessment of contemporary graphic memoirs thus applies in equal measure to Delisle, who “take[s] on the sometimes hidden, sometimes hypervisible bodies and histories of those referenced in and through stereotypes” by using silent panels as a form of noncommunication to place “the question of difference in stylized frames and unsettle the commonplaces of cultural framing.”14

“War is peace”: Joe Sacco With Joe Sacco, the pace of the narrative quickens. In Palestine (2001), Footnotes in Gaza (2009), Safe Area Goražde (2000), and The Fixer (2009), silent panels

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appear less frequently and seem all the more iconic for their scarcity. The desire to uncover the hidden atrocities behind newspaper headlines, coupled with his shame at being a mere spectator in the first Gulf War (as described in his 1991 book War Junkie), has led Joe Sacco—a journalism graduate of the University of Oregon—to investigate combat zones through personal journeys and encounters of a more convivial type than Delisle’s deadpan face-offs with his North Korean subjects. Sacco’s Palestinian and Bosnian hosts are always hospitable, despite their precarious circumstances, and we are treated to countless anecdotes of oversweetened Palestinian tea and Bosnian home-made pizza. The anecdotal conviviality is, however, not always effective. “One loose anecdote doesn’t bridge any gulfs. Anyway, it’s not like I’m here to mediate,” Sacco remarks after one such communicational malfunction.15 This casual observation suggests that the journalist favors impartial reporting over personal involvement, yet it also underlines the uselessness of verbal intercession or at least of the soundbite methods normally used by the media and political advocates in representing this war. In Edward Said’s words, Sacco’s subjects are “forgotten places and people of the world, those who don’t make it on to our television screens, or if they do, who are regularly portrayed as marginal, unimportant, perhaps even negligible were it not for their nuisance value which [. . .] seems impossible to get rid of.”16 They are similar in that way to Delisle’s North Koreans, yet they are described in much greater detail that oscillates from the painstakingly historical to the visually histrionic. The ethical impulse of Sacco’s work resides in a sense of responsibility toward the historical record, which Sacco aims to uncover partly by moving beyond authentic representation into hyperbole and fantasy.17 And while Delisle’s North Korean portraits remain one-dimensional and bland, Sacco shocks with gruesome imagery meant to “restore a sense of humanity to those dehumanized by the pace of the globalized media.”18 The stillness of some of Sacco’s most iconic panels thus rebels simultaneously against the misleading rhetoric of anti-Palestinian discourse (by forcing a “long look” at realities on the ground), against the precipitated speed of news reporting from war zones, and ultimately against the narrative drive of the graphic genre and its Manichaean ethics. But as the equally disabused Christopher Hitchens (whose views on the Bosnian war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resonate with Sacco’s) points out in his preface to Safe Area, “Joe Sacco was evidently no blessed-out internationalist.”19 To the banal moralism of conversational reporting Sacco opposes his own brand of what Beck refers to as cosmopolitan “suspicion”: reveling in friendly chatter with his local friends in both Bosnia and Palestine, yet capturing the war’s undercurrent of ambivalence and absurdity best crystallized

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in large-scale silent panels foregrounding the sheer scale of disaster and deprivation with the zooming gaze of a Hieronymus Bosch, capturing individual faces and seemingly insignificant events that might occur (to borrow a phrase from Michael Ondaatje) “within just a square inch or two of a Brueghel.”20 As Sacco himself explains, “this is not a mass of humanity. These are individuals.”21 The very gesture of subjecting history’s consecrated panels to renewed scrutiny echoes what Scott McCloud describes as “closure”—as the reader fills in the gaps created by limited or unreliable information, thus becoming complicit in the constitution of historical narrative. If, as McCloud states, “panels fracture both time and space, offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments,”22 I am interested in wordless panels that reinstate the continuity of the narrative through their sheer sprawl, as well as in panels left without comment in which the gorily depicted wounds act as a voice “used to foment a sense of belonging and national pride, especially among a people who have lost so much”23—above all, their ability for self-expression. Rather than “tak[ing] our eyes across the page, pulling us deeper into the text and the conflict,” captions would merely detract from the ability of comics to “detain” us.24 Critics have argued that Sacco’s attempts to redeem suppressed local history and reinstate the humanity of war victims depend on his efforts to fittingly contextualize the horrors discursively. Yet a few silent panels resemble the mute atrocity footage circulating widely among UN safe areas at the time of the Bosnian war, as well as the indecent muteness of the pornographic films discussed by exasperated Bosnian men, one of whom aspires to dramatize his war experience in a “porno tragedy.”25 Despite lacking rational and analytical context and commentary, these images have a lot more to say about the international dithering and disconnect preventing military intervention than what we glimpse from Sacco’s otherwise hectic verbalization of fragmented wartime lives, constantly destabilized and interrupted by a barrage of captions and sound bites. Because “[a]n important aspect of his work is [. . .] the rejection of the detached and seemingly unbiased journalistic voice and photographic view,” Sacco is at his best when he steps back from the verbose historicism of his comics to reveal the “view” itself in its enormous potential for silent interpellation.26 Much of the silence has to do with the numbing routines of Palestinian lives under occupation—“a life of aimless wandering within the place’s inhospitable confines, wandering and mostly waiting, waiting, waiting.” What Said calls “the rootless spaces of Palestinian dispossession” can only lie outside of time and the structuring forces of verbalization.27

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Where Delisle’s political comments were overt and self-deprecating, Sacco’s are subliminal, as in the image of two Sarajevo tower blocks (right next to the Holiday Inn) battered and scarred by the assault on the city.28 The Twin Towers come immediately to mind. “The imagery of a globalized American corporation standing near two buildings echoing New York’s late landmark disturbs the reader with their familiarity. These could be our streets. These could be our neighbors. It could even be ourselves pictured here,” Walker remarks.29 Because they are fundamentally placeless and human, the cosmopolitan Esperanto of these pages must remain silent. And if Rocco Versaci is right to argue that the comic journalist “uses the overall structure of his work to remind readers of his shaping hand,” then by silencing some panels Sacco’s style becomes uncharacteristic in ways that efface his own perspective and implicitly the Western (US and UN driven) glossary of criminal responsibilities through which the events in Bosnia and the Gaza strip are publicly emplotted.30 With meticulous attention to minutiae, Sacco creates in The Fixer a visually black and white, though morally ambiguous, picture of Sarajevo at various stages of the Bosnian conflict, combining finely detailed, textured images with laconic, carefully scripted text. The protagonist, a hard-drinking army veteran called Neven, is an antihero, a maverick nicknamed “the fixer” for his ability to arrange anything, especially access to restricted areas, for the right price. He is one of “history’s losers,” to speak with Said, “banished to the fringes where they seem so despondently to loiter, without much hope or organization, except for their sheer indomitability.”31 Sacco isolates Neven from the elaborate, ultrarealistic urban landscapes of the book by placing him in a monastically furnished hotel lobby whose unrelieved grimness has much in common with Mister Guy’s North Korean hotel room. As in Delisle, the silent hotel panels mark a boundary between the visitor and the locals, at once hosts and hostages.32 Even as Guy and Sacco are allowed freedom of mobility and expression, they are always at a remove from their subjects. And because the locals lack sovereignty over their own home, their hospitality is meaningless. The impassable trench between the observing consciousness (seeking empathetic dialogue) and the taciturn locals (seeking original jeans and other Western trifles) is aptly encapsulated by the grove-like hotel in which the voice and pace of the story ultimately flounder. The same tropes of the disaster cosmopolitanism channeled by hotel imagery are used in both Pyongyang and The Fixer: dark, smoky interiors, eerily self-effacing personnel, windows over landscapes in ruin—debris-cluttered streets in Sarajevo, a massive, unfinished opera house in Pyongyang. Yet despite these barriers to cosmopolitan conviviality, Sacco’s purpose here is to engage intimately with one

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character and his unique (if sleazy) story, in contrast to his factually overloaded and overpopulated works on Palestine and Goražde. The encounter between the two men in this desolate space dramatizes the tacit complicity between international media and the protagonists in the war, while exploring the tension between the visualization of war and the muted spaces to which the voices of this war have been relegated, with Neven, the shady local who silently greases the wheels, acting as a noir-like sleuth and international go-between. In the “Footnotes” section of Footnotes in Gaza, Sacco writes: “History can do without its footnotes. Footnotes are inessential at best; at worst they trip up the greater narrative.”33 Many silent panels are inserted to fulfill a very similar purpose, namely, to make historical narrative choke. The two pages depicting Palestinian camps in the Gaza Strip, imagined as “Disneyland[s] of refuse and squalor,” are made up of individual segments, each of which tells a story in itself sufficient to spawn an entire sequence.34 The angle of the image is partly level with the taller buildings in the area, partly at a higher, panoptic remove, too distanced from the human figures to regard them with anything other than curiosity or suspicion, and importantly, too distanced to begin a conversation. At this range, the precarious balance of ethics and politics, a balance that the witnessing journalist might otherwise help stabilize, begins to falter.35 One in a series of smaller silent panels in Safe Area is drawn from a point just behind a Serbian tank rolling toward a Bosnian village, thus framing the victims through the black caterpillar tracks and pushing them beyond the immediate, accessible field of vision.36 The aftermath of a massacre in Rafah back in 1956, as families carry away the bodies wrapped in blankets, occupies only the lower half of the page, the upper half being completely obscured by the night sky. “There was no shouting there. No screaming. It was slightly like thieving,” Sacco writes, alerting us to the surreptitious nature of silence in these lugubrious panels that embody the calm before the storm.37 The moment after a massacre is already the prelude to the next.

“Ignorance is strength”: Jean-Philippe Stassen and Ari Folman In the final pages of Footnotes in Gaza, a total of 22 silent panels retell the story of the 1956 massacre that Sacco had set out to investigate. After the violent cacophony of the previous sections, this subdued summary has an almost hallucinatory effect, as if the text had suddenly switched to a different register or medium. The claim these panels formulate, however, has less to do with fantasy

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than with an investment in historical authenticity. The same device is used by Ari Folman in the final moment of his celebrated film Waltz with Bashir, as the narrative abruptly switches from animation to documentary footage. As in Footnotes, Folman’s closing shots are silent, as are all Palestinians featured in this film, the focus of which is the involvement of Israeli soldiers in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the killings of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila. Silence carries here a more ominous connotation, already adumbrated in the film’s (and the book’s) central moment: Ari’s questionable memory or vision of himself and two friends as they emerge naked from the Beirut sea, their thin bodies bathed in the glow of night flares.38 This finale ties in with the powerful opening images of the dogs haunting Ari, dogs he had killed during the war and that now seek payment in blood. Folman’s story shares this interest in animal imagery with Stassen’s poetic graphic novel Deogratias, whose young, drug-addled Hutu protagonist is driven to insanity by the memory of a pack of dogs devouring the bodies of raped and murdered Tutsi women during the Rwandan genocide of 1994.39 The animal metaphor is far from unique: “What better icon than the animal and its ‘abyssal gaze’ to figure a killing so vicious that it strains human comprehension and the vicissitudes of narrating or indeed receiving the story of that killing?,” Michael A. Chaney writes in his analysis of Rupert Bazambanza’s graphic memoir of the Rwandan genocide, Smile through the Tears.40 Nor is it surprising that the dog imagery goes hand in hand with an obsession with the night sky as a symbol of omniscient knowledge and elusiveness, obliquely pointing to the issues of witnessing, involvement, and responsibility against the background of a country often treated, like North Korea, with ignorance or indifference by the international community. In Deogratias, the images of the sky are mostly nocturnal, punctuating the boy’s loneliness in static purples and blacks that bespeak his atrophied memory and painfully tormented conscience. Like Folman’s beachside tableau, the images straddle the boundary between memory and hallucination, and they are just as repetitive and opaque. The saturated colors appear to recreate the carnage in the manner of ancient woodcuts, as if the killings had entered the realm of sacred myth and community ritual. And much like Folman’s demystifying representation of war (with hapless Israeli soldiers fantasizing about naked women against a 1980s rock soundtrack), Stassen’s stills focus on the daily aches of trauma: Deogratias wanders aimlessly through the village, waiting for the anxiety to relent, hoping to find someone who can sell him some banana beer, his favorite beverage at such times. The most frequently recurring image depicts the star-studded Rwandan sky, not a romantic picture of peacefulness

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but a pressing reminder of the deaths he has witnessed. His own body carries the phantom pain of the victims like so many stigmata: “It’s at night that I’m scared. . . . The sun isn’t watching over me anymore . . . the stars are melting. .  .  . Like nails on the skulls. .  .  . No bellies to open, to eat .  .  . the insides of bellies are blending into the inside of my head.”41 Such pronouncements have reached the limit of communicable thought and emotion. Beyond this, only the simple (though extravagantly colored) representation of the night sky can offer guidance and solace to Deogratias and the reader alike. In the emptiness of the images, he finds an emotional burial ground, learning from the barbaric placidity of the sky how to work through his trauma and regain his faith. The freezing effect of the stills locks the reader into the shocking frame of murder, thus enforcing a brief commemorative moment of silence. While Dirk Vanderbeke may be right to observe that comics journalism “is less capable of complex argument [. . .] and ultimately cannot replace the written word,” we should not overlook the deeply rationalist, dialogical premise of this claim.42 Delisle, Sacco, Stassen, and Folman aspire to a form of communication predicated on the collapse of meaning, of dialogue, of rational exchange and compromise. Through their very lack of articulation, their uncompromising forays into silent cartooning open up to a cosmopolitan vision constantly suspicious of its own benign, partly delusional faith in the postnational validity of exchange. In lacking voice and motion, the still images register the passivity of a site that endured violence without respite, holding up a mirror to Western passivity in addressing the problem of Bosnia, Gaza, or Rwanda while suggesting the enabling role of graphic silence in representing the processes of ethical address and traumatic memory. The aesthetic of these images is one of capture, not caption; detainment, not infotainment. For all the clamorous belief of comics journalism in the dynamic ethic of witnessing, investigation, and political action, the ultimate achievement of these panels emerges from their unflinching ability to maintain a painfully protracted, inert focus on the still and stillborn lives of war’s most ravaged children.

Notes   1 Bechdel 13.   2 For an interpretation of silent panels in the work of Chris Ware as symptomatic of how narrative deceleration manifests itself in the comics genre, see Banita. Wolk

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  5   6   7   8   9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

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Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives also offers a concise explanation of how silent panels affect the process of reading graphic narrative: “[R]eaders tend to hit the brakes when they encounter wordless sequences; a single image without text is read as a pause, and a longer sequence without text demands some scrutiny. Without language acting as a ‘timer’ or contextual cue for understanding the image, every visual change causes the reader to stop and assess what exactly is happening, and how long it’s supposed to take” (129). In discussing what Wolk refers to as “wordless sequences,” I use the terms “still panel” and “silent panel” mostly interchangeably, although I do perceive a distinction between stillness as a more encompassing quality of the image (implying the lack of words but also of movement, a kind of photographic fixity) and silence as merely the absence of dialogue and narration. Recent graphic narratives in fact assimilate the photographic image quite seamlessly, blurring the boundaries between traditional drawing and photojournalism. See, for instance, the documentary graphic novel The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors without Borders (2009), narrated and drawn by Emmanuel Guibert and including photographs by the late Didier Lefèvre. Comics in general have their roots in mobility and travel, intended as they were for cheerful working-class entertainment in the 1880s, when they served as travel companions for commuters and became known as “railway literature” (Sabin 18). Alternative models are globalization and multiculturalism. For key discussions of cosmopolitanism, see Appiah; Nussbaum. For a comprehensive elaboration of this theory, see Beck’s Cosmopolitan Vision. Beck, “War Is Peace” 6–7. Beck, “War Is Peace” 7. Mignolo 744. Butler 49. Delisle, Pyongyang 25. Delisle, Pyongyang 10. Delisle, Pyongyang 86. Smith 68. Sacco, Palestine 76. Said iv. For a similar approach to the Bosnian war in graphic narrative, see Gipi’s Notes for a War Story (2004), a narrative set in an unnamed Balkan country that seeks to capture not a researched historical truth but its allegorical image. Here, the narrative decelerates through other means (although the text is also interspersed with silent, painting-like panels): Since Gipi worked in oil without preliminary sketches, work on the book “involved ‘intolerable’ drying times” (Siegel 115–16). Walker 69, emphasis added. Hitchens, “Introduction” n.p. See also Hitchens, “Why Bosnia Matters.”

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20 Ondaatje 140. On the influence of Brueghel’s The Triumph of Death on Sacco’s work, see Vanderbeke 70. 21 Groth 60. 22 McCloud 67. 23 Walker 79. 24 Walker 84; Said v. Chute argues that comics release the reader “from the strictures of experiencing a work in a controlled time frame,” thus allowing her to decide “when she looks at what and how long she spends on each frame” (9). The use of silent panels effectively undermines this argument, as it imposes an unhurried pace, especially through longer series of silent panels. 25 Sacco, The Fixer 120. 26 Vanderbeke 76. 27 Said iii, v. 28 Sacco, The Fixer 12–13, 35. 29 Walker 86. 30 Versaci 120. See also Wolk: “[H]is drawing relies on careful observation, but his style indicates that his stories are subjective interpretations of those observations. [. . .] The same goes for memoiristic comics by Guy Delisle” (121). 31 Said v. 32 Sacco, The Fixer 14–16. 33 Sacco, Footnotes 9. 34 Sacco, Footnotes 28–9; Palestine 146–7, 208. 35 For an ethical reading of Sacco’s comics journalism as testimony, especially through the prism of Levinas, see Bartley. 36 Sacco, Safe Area 174. See also the series of three silent panels in Palestine (148) that includes the shaded image of Sacco as he peers through the windows of a vehicle at Palestinians loitering and Israeli soldiers marching by, as helpless to react or intervene as if he were watching television. 37 Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza 348–9, 347. 38 Folman and Polonsky 26–7. 39 Stassen, Deogratias 74–5. 40 Chaney, “The Animal Witness” 95. 41 Stassen, Deogratias 52–3. 42 Vanderbeke 80.

Works cited Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton, 2006.

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Banita, Georgiana. “Chris Ware and the Pursuit of Slowness.” In The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking. Ed. Dave Ball and Martha Kuhlman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. 177–90. Bartley, Aryn. “The Hateful Self: Substitution and the Ethics of Representing War.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 54.1 (2008): 50–71. Bazambanza, Rupert. Smile through the Tears. Trans. Leslie McCubbin. Montreal: Les Editions Images, 2005. Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Beck, Ulrich. Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006. —. “War Is Peace: On Post-National War.” Security Dialogue 36.1 (2005): 5–26. Butler, Judith. “Universality in Culture.” In Nussbaum and Respondents, For Love of Country 45–52. Chaney, Michael A. “The Animal Witness of the Rwandan Genocide.” In Chaney, Graphic Subjects 93–100. —, ed. Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. Chute, Hillary. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Delisle, Guy. Burma Chronicles. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2008. —. Chroniques de Jérusalem. Paris: Editions Delcourt, 2011. —. Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2005. Folman, Ari, and David Polonsky. Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon War Story. New York: Metropolitan, 2009. Gipi [Gianni Pacinotti]. Notes for a War Story. New York: First Second, 2004. Groth, Gary. The Comics Journal Special Edition: Volume 1: Cartoonists on Cartooning. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2001. Guibert, Emmanuel, Didier Lefèvre, and Frédéric Lemercier. The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors without Borders. New York: First Second, 2009. Hitchens, Christopher. “Introduction.” In Sacco, Safe Area Goražde n.p. —. “Why Bosnia Matters.” London Review of Books 14.17, Sept. 10, 1992: 6–7. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993. Mignolo, Walter. “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism.” Public Culture 12.3 (2000): 721–48. Nussbaum, Martha. “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism.” In Nussbaum and Respondents, For Love of Country 2–17. Nussbaum, Martha, and Respondents. For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism. Ed. Joshua Cohen. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. Ondaatje, Michael. Divisadero. New York: Knopf, 2007. Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels: A History of Graphic Novels. 2nd edn. London: Phaidon, 2001. Sacco, Joe. The Fixer and Other Stories. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2009. —. Footnotes in Gaza. New York: Metropolitan, 2009.

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—. Palestine. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2001. —. Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–1995. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2000. Said, Edward. “Homage to Joe Sacco.” In Sacco, Palestine i–v. Siegel, Alexis. “Of Boys and Guns: Reflections on Gipi’s Notes on a War Story.” In Gipi 115–23. Small, David. Stitches: A Memoir. New York: Norton, 2009. Smith, Sidonie. “Human Rights and Comics: Autobiographical Avatars, Crisis Witnessing, and Transnational Rescue Networks.” In Chaney, Graphic Subjects 61–72. Stassen, Jean-Philippe. Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda. New York: First Second, 2006. —. Les Enfants. Marcinelle: Dupuis, 2004. Vanderbeke, Dirk. “In the Art of the Beholder: Comics as Political Journalism.” In Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives. Ed. Mark Berninger, Jochen Ecke, and Gideon Haberkorn. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010. 70–81. Versaci, Rocco. This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature. New York: Continuum, 2007. Walker, Tristram. “Graphic Wounds: The Comics Journalism of Joe Sacco.” Journeys 11.1 (2010): 69–88. Ware, Chris. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. New York: Pantheon, 2000. Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Cambridge: Da Capo, 2007.

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Staging Cosmopolitanism: The Transnational Encounter in Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza Aryn Bartley

In late 2008 and early 2009, the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine escalated as Israeli forces carried out an intensive assault on towns in Gaza. This war, in addition to Israel’s ongoing blockade of services and goods to civilians in Gaza, became a linchpin within the United States for public debate about the role and responsibility of the international community in relation to the conflict. Just months later, Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, a graphic narrative chronicling the writer’s efforts to uncover a hidden history of violence in the region, was published to critical acclaim.1 In the book, Sacco researches the events of November 1956, when Israeli soldiers massacred groups of Palestinians living in the Gazan towns of Khan Younis and Rafah. The massacres, Sacco argues, were erased “like innumerable historical tragedies over the ages that barely rate footnote status in the broad sweep of history.”2 The narrative mobilizes the potential of graphic nonfiction to envision—quite literally—historical and present-day suffering, taking seriously events otherwise considered secondary “footnotes” to official histories. In their introduction to a Modern Fiction Studies special issue on graphic narratives, Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven proclaim that “[g]raphic narratives, on the whole, have the potential to be powerful precisely because they intervene against a culture of invisibility by taking the risk of representation.”3 Sacco’s book takes such a risk by making visible both an erased history and everyday living conditions in Gaza. The text is both historiographical and metahistoriographical; Sacco documents the oral histories of Palestinian survivors as well as the process of tracking down and documenting these testimonies within Gaza. The book utilizes the imaginative possibilities of visual representation to concretize the firsthand testimonials it recounts by

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emphasizing both the stories told and the process of telling. In doing so, it makes immediate for distant readers tales of suffering that often become subsumed into more general and abstract national histories. Sacco’s historical project participates in and internationalizes the broader political goals of oral historiography and other modes of memorialization within the region. Nur Masalha describes the practice of oral history in post-1948 Palestine as “a key genre of Palestinian historiography—a genre guarding against the ‘disappearance from history’ of the Palestinian people.” Masalha argues that the voices of Palestinian refugees in particular challenge, supplement, or replace official histories that have erased various aspects of the experiences of Palestinians since 1948: “[T]he vitality and significance of Palestinian oral testimony in the reconstruction of the past is central to understanding the Nakba.” Yet such testimonies, Masalha notes, serve not only to commemorate the past; they simultaneously denote “ongoing dispossession and dislocation.”4 Palestinian theater artists similarly use oral testimony to “deal with daily Palestinian suffering by documenting collective experience and memory.”5 Finally, historical monuments outside of Palestine buttress present-day attempts by Palestinian refugees to “[legitimate] their claim to membership in the Palestinian national polity and, on the other hand, [appeal] to the international community for recognition and justice.”6 Sacco’s work builds upon such practices, but from the self-conscious perspective of a political outsider. Footnotes in Gaza contributes explicitly to the American version of the transnational debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Sacco describes his work as a response to biased representations of Palestinians within the United States: “[W]hen I was a kid in high school the only time I ever heard ‘Palestinian’ was ‘hijacking’ or ‘terrorist act,’ and to me, they all seemed crazy and they were all terrorists. I mean, that’s the only time you ever hear their name brought up.”7 Whereas the mainstream news media has offered politically liberal citizens in the United States little opportunity to demonstrate solidarity with the Palestinian cause, Sacco’s narrative contributes to the popularization of alternative viewpoints of the conflict.8 Even more importantly, the text rethinks and critiques cosmopolitan ideals of citizenship (both United States and global) by imagining citizenship not as an abstract concept but rather as a series of interactions performed within specific political and interpersonal contexts. In its attention to moments of listening and narration, Footnotes in Gaza becomes a kind of case study that stages the complexities of encounter across political and personal borders.

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The question of transnational or cosmopolitan citizenship has become especially pressing for scholars in American studies. A recent symposium in the Journal of Transnational American Studies (2011), for example, charts the debate about the possibilities and limitations of cosmopolitan citizenship. We might read this conversation in light of the general move to view US history, literature, and politics within a context of colonialism and imperialism, a critical perspective popularized by Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease’s 1993 collection Cultures of United States Imperialism. More recently, the Iraq War and the ongoing “War on Terror” forced intellectuals to confront US imperialist actions around the world and the political positions available to citizens in response to such actions. Scholars have increasingly considered questions such as: What are the possibilities for and limitations of citizenship across borders? How can cosmopolitanism reinforce and/or challenge imperialist projects? Footnotes in Gaza implicitly participates in such a debate by staging the transnational encounter between the American and the Palestinian within Gaza. In so doing, the text replaces empathy-based visions of transnational identification with an encounter aligned more closely with Walter Mignolo’s “critical cosmopolitanism” and Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic global politic.9

Joe Sacco as a civic model In their representations of “reality,” international reportage and travel narratives in particular ask readers to cross over geographic, political, and ideological lines to imagine other places, peoples, and events. Nonfiction graphic narratives can intervene in political debates by transforming theory into practice; they stage for the reader concrete embodiments of otherwise abstract political scenarios. In Residues of Justice, Wai Chee Dimock argues that literature “textualizes” and “historicizes” justice: We might think of literature, then, as the textualization of justice, the transposition of its clean abstractions into the messiness of representation. We might think of it, as well, as the historicization of justice, the transposition of a universal language into a historical semantics: a language given meaning by many particular contexts, saturated with the nuances and inflections of its many usages.10

My use of the word “staging” is aligned with Dimock’s concepts of “textualization” and “historicization,” but it emphasizes more explicitly the visual quality of

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representation. I would argue, further, that political nonfiction—by imaginatively representing what is considered “the real”—encapsulates the possibilities of staging. Nonfiction graphic narratives, which “envision” quite literally the scenarios they represent, do so even more explicitly. As a graphic journalist, Sacco pursues a distinctive approach to visual representation that has ontological, historiographical, and civic implications. He recreates physical settings by drawing not just from memory, but also by using photographs as visual aids.11 In his representation of Gaza, Sacco emphasizes small details of place. On pages 28–9, for example, he tells us that “now [the camps] look like this.” The two-page spread presents a painstaking representation of the cityscape, reproducing in detail not only children playing ball in the street in the lower right corner and clothes hanging on a line in the left, but also each brick holding up dozens of buildings, hundreds of concrete blocks holding down corrugated metal roofs, and delicate power lines threading the buildings together. The reader is given a bird’s eye view of the landscape and can follow these same details into the minutiae of the background. If photographs have historically been, as Nancy Pedri points out, “closely associated with the real through the referent,” in Sacco’s settings the photographic and the drawn, the “real” and the imagined, are aligned.12 By recreating his journey to Gaza in careful detail, Sacco concretizes a political situation often coded in the abstract. As opposed to the sole use of photographs, however, the imaginative aspects of drawing allow Sacco to recreate and “account for” otherwise erased details of everyday life.13 While his physical settings appear “realistic,” Sacco is free to elaborate on what he has seen, to create the children’s game in the forefront, for example, as a means of bringing the scene to life. He engages intimately with the space he represents, creating along with observing. Sacco’s style of illustration has historiographical implications as well. “Realness” filters down into the visual depiction of historical events. Unlike his representations of the present day, Sacco recreates images of the past from others’ stories. Because his drawings of the present have been associated with the details of the photograph, those of the past also take on the immediacy of a truth claim. Two matching drawings on pages 98 and 99 demonstrate the alliance created between the past and the present. The left-hand image depicts a plain brick wall lined with bodies. Text boxes describe, in the words of the eyewitness Faris: “More than 100 bodies . . . close to the wall, from the beginning of the wall to the end . . . I put down the jug.” Sacco depicts (and thus the reader envisions) a specific historical moment. The incorporation of tiny details—palm trees in the distance, a boy walking, a small jug on the ground—“accounts for” the specificity of the moment.

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The next page displays the same wall with a text box reading: “Almost 50 years later Faris retraces his footsteps to the ruins of the 14th century castle, which now forms one side of the town square.”14 The wall retains its original shape, but now it is decorated with pictures and Arabic script. Instead of being lined with bodies, it is lined with cars, and the streets are busy with people. Rather than palm trees, buildings fill in the space behind the wall. In an article examining Footnotes in Gaza, Hillary Chute describes how, formally speaking, comics “[make] literal the presence of the past by disrupting spatial and temporal conventions to overlay or palimpsest past and present.”15 She argues that comics as a medium are therefore uniquely capable of representing traumatic life narratives. The direct comparison between the imagined past and the photographic present here concretizes (and makes visible) the traumatic history of the Palestinian people. Finally, Sacco’s mode of illustration emphasizes his interpretive role within the text. As Ann Czetkovich writes, “graphic narrative’s hand-crafted drawing distinguishes it from contemporary realist forms such as photography and film and reminds us that we are not gaining access to an unmediated form of vision.”16 It is Sacco’s mediating role—and especially the resonance of this role for the reader—in which I am most interested. He is, after all, very much present in his own narrative. He meanders through the text, serving as both guide and model for the reader. On the one hand, I would argue that Sacco implicitly directs his narrative toward outsiders to the situation who—like him—have worked to educate themselves about Israeli-Palestinian relations. On the flip side, Footnotes in Gaza urges all of its readers to trust and identify with its narrator. The reader is invited to accompany Sacco as he locates interviewees. When, at the beginning of many of the chapters recounting the interviews, we encounter “head shots” of those being interviewed staring out of the pages into our eyes, we might consider this strategy as aligning us with Sacco, who ostensibly has gazed full in the face of those he interviews. As I have suggested in another context, Sacco’s generic, cartoonish representation further encourages readerly identification.17 Sacco’s unique status within the text grants him both the sympathy of readers and narrative authority. He is both expert and layperson; as Rachel Cooke has put it, “both reporter and innocent abroad.”18 Sacco notes early on that “the guy at the Foreign Press Office tells me my application for press credentials has been turned down. [. . .] Still, he said I might be able to get into Gaza without a press pass, that it’d be up to the soldiers at the Erez crossing point.”19 The authority granted Sacco by his status as journalist combined with his unwilling transformation into civilian historian emphasizes his newly acquired role as concerned citizen at the mercy of the state. The combination of his status as expert and his relative

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powerlessness allows him to speak with authority at the same time that he serves as a role model for the politically engaged reader.

The encounter (I): Universal empathy Footnotes in Gaza regards the encounter with the Palestinian survivor of violence as fundamental to the story. The importance of such an interaction is underscored by the head shots earlier described, in which readers are encouraged to imagine themselves in Sacco’s position in an act of narrative empathy.20 The reader gazes at the speaker in a seemingly unmediated face-to-face encounter. We are provided access to the conditions of the interviews, listening to first-person stories that are given to us in the exact words of each speaker. Readers are asked to consider also how receiving stories about suffering encourages an empathetic response. If, during the “present-tense” moments of the narrative, we identify with Sacco-as-listener, in the past-tense moments, we are invited to imagine ourselves at the moment of historical violence. In a passage in which Sacco describes the massacre at Khan Younis, for example, the reader is led to envision the scene from various perspectives (see Figure 4.1). In one panel, we see a line of Palestinian civilians, staring directly out from the page. This strategy invokes the head shots as introductions to the chapters; we encounter these civilians face-to-face. While perspective here may at first seem to be neutral, the next panel politicizes that perspective. Here, we are positioned slightly behind the Palestinian men, looking at four Israeli soldiers who aim machine guns in our direction. This shift asks us to review our identification in the first panel as aligned with the soldiers. Perspective alternates back and forth as the soldiers fire and the men crumple to the ground. Later in the story, we are flung up in the air to witness the scene from a bird’s eye view. This quickly shifting mode of perspective initially seems to evoke a kind of universal empathy resonating with other left-wing representations of the conflict. A brief diversion into one such narrative, however, will show the differences between this passage and more conventional representations of empathy. Like Footnotes in Gaza, Ari Folman’s film-turned-graphic-novel Waltz with Bashir recounts the process of uncovering a historical massacre of Palestinians.21 Folman, a former Israeli soldier, structures his narrative as an attempt to gather information about Christian Phalangists’ 1982 assault on Palestinian refugees at Lebanon’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Unable to remember witnessing the massacre, Folman interviews friends and former colleagues to fill in the blank

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Figure 4.1  Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza, 88.

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spaces in his memory and piece together the past. David Polonsky, the artist who illustrated both the film and the graphic novel, claims in an interview with Liel Leibovitz that in both texts his goals were “to create a feeling of authenticity” and to draw with “compassion.” He states, “I wanted to draw people, not caricatures. I wanted to try and load up everything—the cars, the people, the animals—with a real sense of existence.”22 Such a perspective on the ethics of representation might be aligned with Sacco’s realistic depiction of Gaza and its inhabitants. Yet, the particular way in which compassion and empathy operates in Waltz with Bashir indicates subtle but significant differences between the underlying assumptions of the two texts. An interview with Folman’s friend Ron Ben Yishai late in the book models a universal empathetic response. In his story about encountering the aftermath of the massacre, Yishai describes seeing the body of a young Palestinian girl: “I looked again and saw curls, a curly head, covered with dust. A hand and a head. My daughter was about the same age as that girl. She had curly hair too.”23 At the very same moment that Yishai aligns himself with the parents of the girl, the reader sees the image of the dead child. This passage allows for an examination of what it means to encounter the other across national lines—as a witness and as a reader. In the act of near-universal empathetic identification, Israeli soldiers, Palestinian refugees, and transnational readers are depicted as fundamentally similar. Empathetic identification leads directly to recognition and knowledge. Two pages later, Yishai proclaims: “And then it came over me: What I was looking at was a massacre.”24 In its last few pages, the narrative solidifies the alliance between recognition, knowledge, and universal empathy. The reader moves from Yishai’s perspective to that of Palestinian women moving through an alleyway. We approach Folman, who is standing at the end of the alley with his weapon. Then, perspective changes and we see, through his eyes, a wailing woman. He “sees” the effects of the massacre that he earlier forgot. Perspective moves back and forth; we end with journalistic photographs of suffering Palestinian women. The appeal of Waltz with Bashir’s ending to politically liberal US readers is clear. After all, it offers an alternative to the militaristic “us-them” discourse popular in the United States, providing instead a vision of the world in which Israeli soldier, Palestinian refugee, and American reader are aligned. Such a vision of the world resonates with a strain of cosmopolitanist discourse that, as Chantal Mouffe argues, erases antagonism in favor of “an idealized view of human sociability, as being essentially moved by empathy and reciprocity.” Such a viewpoint, she notes, is at the core of modern democratic theory. In a post-Hobbesian world, “[v]iolence and hostility are seen as an archaic phenomenon, to be eliminated

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thanks to the progress of exchange and the establishment, through a social contract, of a transparent communication among rational participants.”25 Waltz with Bashir embraces empathy and reciprocity as the core of a global democratic relation. Mouffe, however, critiques such a vision, arguing that “instead of creating the conditions for a reconciled society, [it] leads to the emergence of antagonisms.” In fact, “[t]here is much talk today of ‘dialogue’ and ‘deliberation,’” she writes, “but what is the meaning of such words in the political field if no real choice is at hand and if the participants in the discussion are not able to decide between clearly differentiated alternatives?”26 What she suggests is that to erase difference in favor of “idealized” responses like empathy ultimately undermines political decision-making. Indeed, this scene—which features an emotive but mute gaze—erases political positionality and speech. Sacco’s narrative resonates with Mouffe’s critique as it explores the ethical and political problems posed by imagining transnational citizenship as empathy (universal or otherwise).

The encounter (II): The violence of empathy Folman has argued that he and Sacco share a common political platform.27 Yet, a substantial difference in the way the writers envision transnational response separates the two. The passage from Footnotes in Gaza in which readers see from the perspective of Israeli soldier, Palestinian civilians, and a bird’s eye view may at first seem to forward the interchangeability of subject positions in relation to a violent event. Sacco, however, does not allow the reader to forget the importance of positionality. As José Alaniz argues, “[v]ery often he will pick angles in his artwork that favor the perspective of the victim: He’ll draw Israeli soldiers or settlers from a low perspective to make them more menacing and towering.”28 Indeed, in this scene, our identification with the Israeli perspective asks us to imagine ourselves shooting unarmed men. When we look from the Palestinian perspective at the soldiers, we rarely see facial expressions. When we do see an expression, such as on the top of page 89, the man’s face is impassive. Here, there is an explicit disjunction between different positionalities; if we are asked to identify with the aggressor, such an act is positioned as both unpleasant and problematic. This strategy can be read as a manifestation of Sacco’s project to represent a Palestinian perspective and as a critique of universal empathy. He forces readers to see themselves as both aggressor and victim, and to recognize the difference between the two positions. He discards universal empathy but reinforces the importance of empathizing with the

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Palestinian perspective. Empathy increases readers’ political engagement with the Palestinian perspective, countering representations of Palestinians-as-terrorists. Sacco seems unwilling to embrace fully even this mode of empathetic response. In the book’s final passage, he highlights the difference between outsider (researcher/listener/reader) and insider (survivor). Here, he recounts a last interview with Abu Juhish, an old man who survived the Rafah massacre. He displays an image of himself and the man facing each other, silhouetted against a black space. If this image would seem to represent visually an interchangeability of roles, the words that accompany, precede, and follow it expose such seeming equivalence as an illusion. Abu Juhish is asked by his grandson, “[w]hat is the worst thing you remember from that day?” He replies: “Fear. Fear.” “Suddenly,” Sacco writes, “I felt ashamed of myself for losing something along the way as I collected my evidence, disentangled it, dissected it, indexed it, and logged it onto my chart.” These words accompany the bifurcated image of Sacco and Abu Juhish, literally separating them from each other. Sacco continues, “[a]nd I remembered how often I sat with old men who tried my patience, who rambled on, who got things mixed up, who skipped ahead[,] who didn’t remember the barbed wire at the gate or when the mukhtars stood up or where the jeeps were parked, how often I sighed and mentally rolled my eyes because I knew more about that day than they did.”29 If the image of Sacco and Abu Juhish at first suggests equivalence, we are asked, suddenly, to see the two men as opposed. Indeed, Sacco aligns his historiographical practice with the act of violence he seeks to expose: Abed and I came here to find out what happened on November 12, 1956, and now, arguably, we are the world’s foremost experts. How often we forced the old men of Rafah back down this road lined with soldiers and strewn with shoes. How often we shoved the old men between the soldiers with sticks and through that gate. How often we made them sit with their hands down and piss on themselves. In the end, when we’d finished with them, we let them break down the wall and run home.30

In this passage, Sacco critiques empathetic identification as a mode of violence, powerfully reaffirming this critique in the book’s ending. The book’s final sequence features three pages of six, six, and five panels (for a total of seventeen) and one page filled with black ink. In this sequence, the reader is placed in the position of a victim of the massacre in Rafah, moving in a crowd of people toward a schoolyard. The first panel features the friendly but worried faces of two Palestinian women and one man making eye contact with us. In the next three panels, we see the side and back of the man’s head as we are asked to imagine

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ourselves walking toward the schoolyard. In the fourth panel, we see—partially blocked by the man’s head—two men walking at gunpoint, their hands up. The next four panels feature increasing violence as soldiers’ angry faces emerge, again partially blocked by more hands going up (including hands that appear to be our own). In the next panel, we look down at a foot (ours?) narrowly avoiding the legs of a fallen man. In the next six panels, we see soldiers raising clubs in the air as we are brought closer to the hands, backs, and feet of cowering and fallen men. In the second to last panel, we see, past backs and hands, a soldier making eye contact with us, raising a plank of wood in the air as if to strike. The fifth and last drawn panel on the page features a club coming down in our direction. In the space of a final panel, we are given only the black of the frame. The next page is completely black. While we might read this passage as a straightforward expression of imaginative empathy, in which Sacco (like Folman) places the reader in the silent shoes of the victim, I would suggest that this passage ultimately critiques empathy. The space of the final (absent) panel and the last page, both filled with black ink, can be read most immediately as demarcating the immediate effect of violence for the victim—the unconsciousness that comes after a blow. Yet the image (or lack thereof) questions the limits of empathetic identification. What does it mean to identify with oblivion? Unconsciousness can be read as a moment of rest, but it is temporary. The implicit aftermath of such a moment emphasizes the disjunction between the sufferer, who will endure the resonating physical and emotional effects of violence, and the reader, who will not. We might also read in the black page a commentary on the limitations of historiography. While in his earlier works, such as Safe Area Goražde (2000), Sacco utilizes black borders to set off the past from the present, in Footnotes in Gaza the passages set in the past are not usually visually distinguishable from those set in the present. Rather, Sacco guides us seamlessly between the past and the present. The text further emphasizes the continuity between the past and present by the use of graphic matching (earlier discussed regarding pages 98–9). The last sequence of the book, however, is the only instance in which a past moment is set off by a black border. We might consider this choice as cementing the ultimate inaccessibility of past suffering.

The encounter (III): Cosmopolitan documentation Walter Mignolo argues that certain modes of cosmopolitanism reinforce colonial and imperialist projects. Mignolo distinguishes between “cosmopolitanism

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from global designs” (which “are driven by the will to control and homogenize”), “emancipatory cosmopolitanism” (which can yet be “oblivious to the saying of the people that are supposed to be emancipated”), and “critical cosmopolitanism.” He argues that because the first two approaches to the political are shaped by their location “inside modernity,” they “have failed to escape the ideological frame imposed by global designs themselves.” Critical cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, “provide[s] a critical perspective on global designs”; such an approach is, therefore, “the necessary project of an increasingly transnational (and postnational) world.” Mignolo describes his critical cosmopolitanism as “located in the exteriority and issuing forth from the colonial difference.” He argues that critical cosmopolitanist projects “must negotiate both human rights and global citizenship without losing the historical dimension in which each is reconceived today in the colonial horizon of modernity.” Critical cosmopolitanism would “reconceive cosmopolitanism from the perspective of coloniality” and would “[demand] yielding generously [.  .  .] toward diversity as a universal and cosmopolitan project in which everyone participates instead of ‘being participated’ [.  .  .]. [C]osmopolitanism today has to become border thinking, critical and dialogic, from the perspective of those local histories that had to deal all along with global designs.”31 Earlier, I described Chantal Mouffe’s critique of empathetic visions of democracy. If Mignolo’s conception emphasizes a cosmopolitanism manifested in “planetary conviviality,” Mouffe, conversely, envisions one more grounded in contestation, asking political theorists to conceptualize “a vibrant ‘agonistic’ public sphere of contestation where different hegemonic political projects can be confronted.”32 Footnotes in Gaza imagines a cosmopolitan encounter—both physical and imaginative—that mirrors aspects of both theories. Sacco’s work encourages empathetic response rather than political erasure; the appeal of such an approach, therefore, should not be underestimated. But nor should it be idealized. In Footnotes in Gaza, global citizenship becomes more than an empathetic response to violent narratives. Documentation itself becomes a cosmopolitan act. To use Mignolo’s terms, the book approaches the Israeli-Palestinian conflict neither from the perspective of “global designs” nor as an “emancipatory project” that elides the Palestinian perspective, but rather “from the perspective of coloniality.” Sacco’s practice of extended direct transcription emphasizes this approach. Sacco has elsewhere noted that his representations of interviews are directly transcribed from tapes: “[T]he organizing itself can take weeks because I’m going through all my interview notes, I’m actually transcribing all the tapes myself.” He emphasizes the extent of the practice: “[T]here were many hours of

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tapes; probably 70 taped interviews.”33 Documenting, transcribing, translating, and publishing become cosmopolitan acts, facilitating with care the circulation of narratives, images, and ideas across borders. Such a practice helps to create something akin to Mouffe’s “vibrant ‘agonistic’ public sphere of contestation where different hegemonic political projects can be confronted.” Sacco does not elide difference but includes in his narrative information that might be uncomfortable for politically liberal American readers. As he put it in his interview with Gary Groth, “[w]hat I would point out is that I don’t sugarcoat the Palestinians. I don’t sugarcoat their anger, their vitriol. I don’t sugarcoat acts they commit that as far as I’m concerned don’t help their cause. I lay it out.” In one passage, for example, a Palestinian interviewee (“the Fedayeen”) aligns himself with the Nazi architect Adolf Eichmann: “I feel they might read your book and do to me what they did to that German one—I still remember his name—who they brought from Argentina. . . . To face the fate of Eichmann! Take care! The Jews miss nothing!”34 The deliberate inclusion of this outburst addresses the challenges to cosmopolitan identification, highlighting the rhetorical limitations of aligning oneself with a Nazi who was responsible for brutal human rights violations. This passage also forces the reader to grapple with the politics of narration, emphasizing one of Sacco’s most important points: that in Gaza, the threat of state violence pervades both the historical and the storytelling moment. The “risk of representation” here is imagined to be quite literal. Physical violence emerges as the underside of historical erasure. Footnotes in Gaza, therefore, stages a vision of cosmopolitanism in practice that does not abandon empathy and identification but rather pushes beyond those modes of relation to contribute to a transnational conversation about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in ways that are historical, critical, and agonistic. To counter the worry that Sacco replaces one cosmopolitanist ideal with another, I would like to return to the black page that ends the book. Having staged the transnational encounter, Sacco presents this page as his ending image. We receive a page oppressed with ink (with history?). It is overmarked and overdetermined. Yet, if this page suggests that the time for a blank slate has been irretrievably lost (if it ever existed), it implies as well that its very darkness can serve as the backdrop for new words and new images—an important reminder in light of the story it follows.

Notes   1 Cockburn’s review of Sacco’s book in the New York Times claimed that it was “gripping,” “important,” and “stands out as one of the few contemporary works

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Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives on the Israeli-Palestinian struggle likely to outlive the era in which they were written” (BR13). Sacco, Footnotes ix. Chute and DeKoven 772. Masalha 136, 137, 149. Nassar 24. Khalili 32. Sacco, interview with Gary Groth. As Slater argues about news coverage of Israeli-Palestinian relations, the “largely uninformed and uncritical mainstream and even elite media coverage in the United States of Israeli policies” contrasts directly to coverage by Israel’s newspapers and magazines, which provide multiple and nuanced viewpoints about the conflict (85). The past ten years, however, have seen the increasing accessibility of left-wing media outlets on the internet in what have been called “little media” sites. Aufderheide notes that during the Iraq War such sites “testif[ied] to a reality that they found obscured in mainstream media, [. . . and] challenged received wisdom or mainstream reporting” (333, 338). Nonfiction graphic narratives like Sacco’s might be read as forwarding similar cultural projects. Indeed, the historically subcultural status of comics/comix has made the genre an ideal location in which to present radical and/or nonmainstream viewpoints. See Mignolo’s “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis” and Mouffe’s On the Political. Dimock 10. His representations of characters, on the other hand, vary between realistic and cartoonish (the latter is most noticeable in his self-representations). Pedri 13. Pedri uses the language of accountability to describe the similar effects of Emanuel Guibert’s illustration of Didier Lefèvre’s Le Photographe: “[Guibert] actually offers readers a glimpse of, and thus accounts for, what Lefèvre was unable to capture photographically, such as the activities he engages in on a day-to-day basis: photographing, bathing, reading, conversing with group members, running for shelter, walking in the dark and so forth” (19). Sacco, Footnotes 98, 99. Chute 109. Qtd in Pedri 15. Sacco, Footnotes 208; see Bartley. Cooke n.p. Sacco, Footnotes 7. Narrative empathy has been defined by Keen as “a vicarious, spontaneous sharing of affect, [which] can be provoked by witnessing another’s emotional state, by hearing about another’s condition, or even by reading” (208). As Keen

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22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34

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points out, “[i]n fact there is no guarantee that an individual reader will respond empathetically to a particular representation” (222). In this reading, I am interested in looking at how texts invite empathetic response, and not in whether or not readers actually respond empathetically. Waltz with Bashir was originally produced as a film in 2008. Following glowing reviews and a series of international awards and nominations, the film was transformed into a graphic novel in 2009. While the novel restructures the narrative somewhat, it follows the same basic plot progression and incorporates the film’s most well-known images. Polonsky n.p. Folman and Polonsky 111. Folman and Polonsky 113. Mouffe 2–3, 3. Mouffe 4, 3. See Brogdan’s article, in which Folman states: “I really admire the guy. . . . And I feel from his work that we share exactly the same opinions about what’s happening in the Middle East” (n.p.). Qtd in Brogdan n.p. Sacco, Footnotes 384, 385. Sacco, Footnotes 383. Mignolo 722–3, 724, 723, 725, 723, 744. Mouffe 3. Sacco, interview with Gary Groth. Sacco, Footnotes 64.

Works cited Aufderheide, Patricia. “Big Media and Little Media: The Journalistic Informal Sector During the Invasion of Iraq.” In Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime. Ed. Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan. London: Routledge, 2004. 333–46. Bartley, Aryn. “The Hateful Self: Substitution and the Ethics of Representing War.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 54.1 (2008): 50–71. Brogdan, Marcus. “Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza is a Bookshelf Lightning Rod.” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 27, 2009. . Accessed Aug. 15, 2012. Chute, Hillary. “Comics Form and Narrating Lives.” Profession (2011): 107–17. Chute, Hillary, and Marianne DeKoven. “Introduction: Graphic Narrative.” In Graphic Narrative. Ed. Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven. Special issue of MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 767–82.

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Cockburn, Patrick. “They Planted Hatred in Our Hearts.” New York Times, Dec. 27, 2009: BR13. . Accessed Aug. 15, 2012. Cooke, Rachel. “Eyeless in Gaza.” Guardian, Nov. 22, 2009. . Accessed Aug. 15, 2012. Dimock, Wai-Chee. Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Folman, Ari, and David Polonsky. Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon War Story. New York: Metropolitan, 2009. Kaplan, Amy, and Donald E. Pease, eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Keen, Suzanne. “A Theory of Narrative Empathy.” Narrative 14.3 (2006): 207–36. Khalili, Laleh. “Places of Memory and Mourning: Palestinian Commemoration in the Refugee Camps of Lebanon.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25.1 (2005): 30–45. Masalha, Nur. “Remembering the Palestinian Nakba: Commemoration, Oral History and Narratives of Memory.” Holy Land Studies: A Multidisciplinary Journal 7.2 (2008): 123–56. Mignolo, Walter. “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism.” Public Culture 12.3 (2000): 721–48. Mouffe, Chantal. On the Political. London: Routledge, 2005. Nassar, Hala Khamis. “Stories from Under Occupation: Performing the Palestinian Experience.” Theatre Journal 58.1 (2006): 15–37. Pedri, Nancy. “When Photographs Aren’t Quite Enough: Reflections on Photography and Cartooning in Le Photographe.” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 6.1 (2011). . Polonsky, David. “This Animated Life: An Interview with David Polonsky.” By Liel Leibovitz. Words without Borders: The Online Magazine for International Literature (Feb. 2009). . Sacco, Joe. Footnotes in Gaza. New York: Metropolitan, 2009. —. Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–1995. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2000. —. “TCJ #301: Joe Sacco on Footnotes in Gaza.” By Gary Groth. The Comics Journal 301 (June 6, 2011). . Slater, Jerome. “Muting the Alarm over the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The New York Times versus Haaretz, 2000–06.” International Security 32.2 (2007): 84–120.

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“Trying to Recapture the Front”: A Transnational Perspective on Hawaii in R. Kikuo Johnson’s Night Fisher Iris-Aya Laemmerhirt

In our globally connected world, where we are surrounded by images, the role of the visual can hardly be exaggerated. It is thus increasingly important to develop media literacies that will help us understand how meaning is constructed and transmitted via images. Indeed, the proliferation of images has far-reaching consequences, including a reconfiguration of such basic faculties as the imagination. In Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai has outlined the central position of the imagination in a globalized world dominated by visual materials. He argues, “the imagination is now central to all forms of agencies, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order.”1 Transnational theory embraces Appadurai’s observation that communication, mass migration, and new media are sites of interactions and permanent tensions between the local and the global as different perceptions of the world collide.2 Shifting away from an exclusively Eurocentric point of view, theories of the transnational strive to include disparate perspectives, thus broadening our perception of the world. The connection between images and imaginations offers an important starting point for reflection on what this might mean and for tracing the concrete pathways along which transnational processes transpire. If we understand transnationalism as a new way of thinking and imagining cultural relationships, this approach is particularly pertinent with respect to graphic narratives, for comics and graphic novels rely heavily both on images and the imaginations of their readers. In his introduction to the MELUS journal issue Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Narrative, Derek Parker Royal suggests along these lines a connection between basic properties of the medium and significant consequences for the representation of ethnic and

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cultural difference. Comics and other forms of graphic narrative, reasons Royal, have a significantly different impact on readers than more traditional modes of narration because of their medially hybrid incorporation of written texts and images.3 Graphic narratives provide global audiences with preencoded visual images, and these are particularly interesting in a transnational context. As Royal points out, authors of graphic narratives do not have the space to develop their characters to the extent possible in film or literature. Accordingly, graphic narratives “must condense identities along commonly accepted paradigms,” which can lead to stereotyping practices, to the enforcement of existing prejudices, and to the reductive generalization of characters according to their ethnic or cultural backgrounds.4 It is in this context of the cross-cultural and transnational linkage between images and imaginations that the graphic novella Night Fisher, published in 2005 by the Hawaiian author R. Kikuo Johnson, is of particular interest. Here, the author achieves a transnational perspective by means of his rather unusual visual and narrative depiction of Hawaii. Instead of repeating familiar images of Waikiki Beach, or painting the spectacular sunsets and the clear blue water of an imagined paradise, the images of the graphic novella are rendered without exception in black and white, creating an almost gothic atmosphere. In addition, by advocating a diverse, multicultural perspective, Johnson subverts colonial and neocolonial (entertainment- and tourism-oriented) images of Hawaii and emphasizes the fact that the island state is still very much a contested space. The once independent kingdom of Hawaii was overthrown by Americans, who nearly extinguished the Hawaiian language and culture before confiscating the native population’s land, but this history is systematically neglected in the tourism industry and in popular culture at large. Johnson, however, openly criticizes these blind spots and illustrates—renders graphically visible—these dark sides of American history. Moreover, Johnson puts Hawaii in a transnational context through his depictions of a flow of people, plants, and images from the mainland to the island state and vice versa, thereby broaching issues of place, belonging, and the environmental problems that arise from such flows. Finally, the graphic novella is concerned with poverty, crime, and racial discrimination, which are conceived as side effects of the islands’ colonial history, and which, for that reason, are actively written out of idealized representations of Hawaii.5 Instead of creating another alluring, colorful representation, Johnson’s monochrome depiction paints a rather dark and haunting image of the islands, one which utilizes the nexus of image and imagination and foregrounds it as a site of complex and multidirectional transnational negotiations.

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Image and imagination in the construction of the exotic Set on the island of Maui, Night Fisher mounts its challenge to the dominant Western image of Hawaii as a paradise on earth by way of its character constellation: a group of troubled Hawaiian teenagers whose lives revolve around drugs, crime, and identity crises. Loren Foster, the protagonist of the story, is a high school senior who had moved with his father from Boston to Maui six years prior. Unlike stories that portray Americans vacationing in Hawaii, Night Fisher depicts a protagonist who learns that growing up in Hawaii is far from easy. Instead of enjoying a carefree life of surfing and beach parties, Loren has a problematic relationship with his single father, who struggles to pay for their house and to keep it in shape. In Loren’s words: “It was my dad’s dream house. The yard, however, proved a bigger liability than either of us foresaw, and within a year, it was the blight of Makamaka Heights. We couldn’t get a yardman— The house was already extravagant by our standards.”6 Rather than helping his father, however, Loren prefers to stay out all night fishing, and he later starts taking crystal meth with his best friend Shane. The friendship between the two teenagers, which is the main focus of the narrative, is troubled, though, as Loren feels increasingly estranged from Shane. In order to reconnect with him, Loren even goes so far as to commit burglary to finance Shane’s drugs. Visually, the shadow-laden pages of Night Fisher convey a sense of darkness, occasionally even threat, and stand in stark contrast to the more conventional, highly colorful and often exoticizing depictions of Hawaii that populate tourist industry brochures. Such advertisements often display hula girls in front of swaying palm trees, and they thereby feminize Hawaii by equating the state with a submissive young woman, exposed to a white (male) gaze, thus reciting an essentially colonial narrative.7 Yet, the visual effects of the black-and-white pages, as well as the problems that the young male protagonists face in the graphic novella, deconstruct the idea of Hawaii as a perfect, intrinsically happy place. Instead, Johnson’s Hawaii is a place where people suffer from personal and economic crises; apart from Loren’s home, the novella’s main settings are low-income neighborhoods and industrial areas. And the fact that bored teenagers make wrong choices and get into trouble, almost ruining their lives in a place that virtually epitomizes paradise and happiness, makes their personal tragedy all the more intense. The reader follows the protagonist and often experiences Hawaii from Loren’s perspective; and because he is a resident and not a tourist in Maui, the island is drained of its exoticism. Concomitantly, the image of the alluring Hawaiian woman, so central to the commercialized image

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of Hawaii itself, is appropriated by Johnson to expose the commodification of Hawaii for (international) tourists. When Loren and Shane sneak into a hotel at night to go swimming in the hotel pool, they meet a young Caucasian girl at the front desk, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and with flowers in her hair. Unquestionably, she is supposed to convey an “authentic” Hawaiian feel to tourists, as is the huge wall painting of two half-naked and supposedly indigenous Hawaiian women behind her. Upon closer scrutiny, the painting turns out to be Paul Gauguin’s “Two Tahitian Women” (1899). This significant intertextual—and in this context “transinsular”—reference depicts Tahiti as a beautiful and innocent paradise, literally embodied by two attractive women. In Noa Noa, a book about his experiences in Tahiti, Gauguin associates the island itself with a native woman: “Tahitian paradise, navé navé fénua,—land of delights! And the Eve of this paradise became more and more docile, more loving.”8 In both painting and writing—that is, in the visual and verbal media that, on a different island, will later come together in the graphic narrative— Gauguin links the beauty of the Polynesian island with images of alluring native bodies. Celebrating the innocent primitivism of the native inhabitants, especially the women of the island, Gauguin projects attributes onto the island that he missed in the urban, especially European society.9 By turning to the supposedly primitive native, Gauguin—like many other Western artists and authors, including Herman Melville and Jack London—celebrates the South Sea Islands and their noble native inhabitants, who live in harmony with nature, uncorrupted by Western civilization. In Jane Desmond’s words, such celebrations amount to “an aestheticization of imperialist expansion,” an enactment of the “ethnographic gaze” that “constructed ‘modernity’ by picturing the ‘primitive’ as its defining other.”10 And it is precisely in the framework of this ethnographic gaze that the stereotypical Hawaiian native has more often than not been depicted. In the past, such a dichotomy between the “modern” West and “primitive” Hawaii has found expression in two basic attitudes toward the islands. As the exotic, bare-breasted Hawaiian woman was constituted as primitive in her difference from the representational canons of a Western normative framework, new colonial enterprises to “civilize” these apparently uncivilized people found their justifications in this nexus of image and imagination. On the other hand, such primitivist images and narratives constituted Hawaiians, and thus Hawaii itself, as a “pre-urban, pre-industrial, pastoral vision in harmony with nature,” thus catering to the image of Hawaii as an Edenic paradise.11 In Night Fisher, however, Gauguin’s painting no longer refers only to such ideas of uncivilized heathens or noble savages. Instead, it shows how hotel

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owners, who decorate their front desks with paintings of Tahitian and not Hawaiian women—thus rendering them more or less interchangeable— reimagine Hawaii for their visitors by mixing different Western imaginings of the South Sea. Yet, as the girl at the front desk is depicted yawning in front of the image of the stereotypical Polynesian beauties, the panel further suggests that she may be yawning at this stereotypical sort of depiction itself. Here, in this panel, the reader emphatically fails to find that “Aloha spirit” which greets tourists in Hawaii; instead, we are confronted with a young woman working the night shift in a hotel, where trespassing teenagers hang out, stealing shots and bathrobes from hotel trolleys. The yawning girl plays with the Euro-American fascination with the exotic Hawaiian, while the painting on the wall is exposed as a kitschy ornament in a hotel catering to touristic ideas of Hawaii. Overall, the panel shows how Hawaii is visually constructed as a mythical space that does not necessarily correspond with reality.

Society, ecology, and the search for roots Rather than focusing on such Western ideas of the island state, Johnson concentrates on his protagonist’s development and problems. Like many teenagers, Loren feels out of place in his surroundings. He constantly struggles to decide whether he should go to college in Hawaii or return to the mainland. As he phrases it, “I’ve been here six years and I still feel like a sore thumb at the mall.”12 Significantly, the story casts this question of social adjustment and belonging as a question of ecological balance and quasi-biological “rootedness.” Loren, who has not yet adjusted to his surroundings, is unable to establish new roots; however, returning to the mainland, from where he has similarly been uprooted for the past six years, does not seem to be an alternative. What is more, as a white teenager from the mainland, he is not only an outsider; he is, moreover, figured as an invader, recalling the historical US land grab and annexation of Hawaii. Johnson repeatedly uses visual images of nature and plants to underline this point. The tensions between the “native” and “invader” are established at the very beginning of the narrative, when Loren’s father is introduced to the reader. Working in the garden, Loren’s father constantly fights the plants that threaten to overtake their yard and explains to his son that he is “just trying to recapture the front.”13 The use of the terms “recapture” and “front” already indicates an aggressive action, as it evokes images of war and of reclaiming property. Indeed, Loren’s father literally combats the local fauna, which he sees as invading his

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front yard. When Loren approaches his father, Mr Foster warns his son: “Watch it—I haven’t weeded there yet.”14 In the following two panels, the reader sees that Loren has already stepped into a tiny thistle, which is shown in a close-up with its prickly thorns. The image of the tiny plant that manages to keep Loren, at least temporarily, from moving further into the yard, which itself must be “recaptured,” establishes the property, and by extension Hawaii, as a contested space with an agency of its own. Obviously, the fact that the local flora seeks to overwhelm the garden can be read as an allegory, suggesting that native wildlife, and thus Hawaii, is unwilling to yield to its invaders; but the thistle, which immobilizes Loren for a moment, also suggests the possibility of taking root in this environment. Such environmental tensions must be seen, of course, in light of the continued, if subtle, political resistance to Hawaii’s “Americanization.” To this day, native Hawaiians fight for the sovereignty of the island state, insisting that the land was taken from them wrongfully and demanding that a measure of self-government be restored. The so-called Hawaiian Cultural Renaissance, which emerged in the 1970s and remains active today, not only protests against the commodification of Hawaiian culture for the tourist industry, but has also helped to revive traditional native Hawaiian culture.15 Many native Hawaiians are worried by the sheer number of tourists visiting the islands; it is estimated that “tourists outnumber local residents by six to one and Native Hawaiians by 30 to 1.”16 The political history of the islands thus precipitates social and cultural problems today that can properly be seen as ecological, creating an environment of rapid transnational flux in which native Hawaiians have little space left for themselves. It is this intersection of social and ecological forces that explains why many natives refuse to accept the status quo of the islands as part of the United States. It is in this light that we can understand the depiction of nature in Johnson’s graphic novella. Nature refuses to give in and continues to fight against the invaders. Loren’s father classifies the local flora in his garden as “weeds” and considers the native plants a mere nuisance. This parallels the attitudes of the early white businessmen in Hawaii, who invaded the islands and decided that they needed to either eliminate or change the local population according to their ideals, oftentimes judging native Hawaiians as second-rate human beings.17 The idea that Hawaii is in need of reshaping is further visualized in a scene in which Loren’s father, a dentist, tries to straighten out a tree in his garden. Resigning himself, after some effort, to the fact that the tree cannot be bent into shape, he remarks that the attempt is “a bit like putting braces on a smile full of

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cavities”18—that corrective measures do not make sense as the tree is intrinsically deficient and will never meet American standards (of beauty) anyway. Once more, a parallel is drawn to colonial practices that reshaped the environment in accordance with normative Western standards and dismissed native populations and agencies (whether trees or human subjects) once it became clear they could not be adapted to Western ideals. Yet, Johnson’s narrative indicates that not only Americans have been active in shaping the environment, but that the environment itself has retained an agency of its own, which is active in transforming the story’s protagonist. By employing visual metaphors of the islands and their flora, Night Fisher probes what it means to be “native” in the first place. The book opens with drawings from a geology book showing how the island of Maui was formed over millions of years. At first, it seems as if the illustrations were included merely to underscore the book’s setting, or to “locate” the narrative visually. On closer scrutiny, however, it becomes clear that the changing geography of Maui, detailed over the course of four pages, foreshadows and symbolizes the changes that will take place in the life of the protagonist as well. Just as the islands were formed by geological influences, Loren is shaped by his surroundings and develops throughout the story. Thus, from the opening pages, Loren and Maui are visually interconnected, and the last map of Maui morphs into a page from Loren’s geography book before the images visually zoom in to reveal Loren holding the book in his hands, reading while fishing at the beach. These images convey and connect the conflicting notions that, on the one hand, Loren gazes at the islands as an outsider, while, on the other hand, he is already an integral part of the island on which he lives. The idea that a former “outsider” can indeed become part of the Hawaiian Islands is captured by the voice of one of Loren’s teachers, who explains that “about one half [of all plants on the islands] were transported in bird droppings, a quarter washed ashore, and two percent rode air currents from Asia,” thus revealing that many of the plants now considered “native” to Hawaii were in fact imported centuries ago.19 The same is true of the Hawaiian population, consisting of people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, all of whom immigrated to the islands at one point or another—thus constituting a history that spans from an originary “multiculturalism” to the transnational society of modern-day Hawaii. Illustrating an evolutionary collusion of human and nonhuman populations, twelve panels, spread out across two facing pages, visualize Loren’s visit to a market, where he observes people from different ethnic backgrounds shopping for fruits and vegetables. Here, we see six close-up images of different plants, some native, some brought to the islands centuries ago, juxtaposed with six images of

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market visitors from different ethnic backgrounds, including a Japanese couple, Caucasian tourists, and local Hawaiians. Loren observes the scene and, in the next panel, stops to touch and smell a piece of fruit. It seems for the first time as if Loren is coming to terms with his life by recognizing his place in this society. He understands that it is less important where one originally came from than how one adapts and relates to one’s surroundings. By showing native plants next to imported ones that are now considered to be part of Hawaii, Johnson deconstructs the myth that Hawaii was totally isolated from the rest of the world prior to the arrival of Westerners and thus questions whether there is such a thing as a “true” or “authentic” Hawaiian or American identity. Indeed, those plants, animals, and people that are today most firmly rooted in the island and considered most centrally “Hawaiian” previously travelled thousands of miles to their present home. And just as it is nearly impossible to visually distinguish the native from the nonnative plants in these panels, it is also difficult to tell where the market-goers come from. One can assume their ethnic backgrounds in some cases; yet, Johnson focuses more on their institution of a transcultural and transnational community in Hawaii. Indeed, in the graphic novella as a whole, it is generally difficult to identify characters’ ethnicities on the basis of their visual representation alone; often, their heritage is indicated only by their name or a remark. Thus, on a visual level, Johnson stresses a transnational blending of people and influences in the larger Hawaiian ecology. Loren’s friend Shane foregrounds the mixed nature of the Hawaiian population and its political implications. Throughout the graphic novella, his ethnic heritage would seem to be of little importance, as it is never discussed; his identity, that is, is “unmarked,” on a par with the implicitly normative status of the white male in general, which serves as the background against which differences of race, gender, and ethnicity can be made to stand out. Yet, at the end of the novella, it is revealed that his last name is Hokama, suggesting a Japanese ancestry. The reader further learns that Shane has also indicated Hawaiian roots on his college application. When Loren looks at his school’s announcement board, where the news that Shane was accepted at MIT is displayed, he sees a picture of his friend, who now looks significantly more Asian American than before but who visually expresses his Hawaiian descent by displaying the shaka sign—a hand gesture frequently used on the Hawaiian Islands to greet one another.20 Several students object, however, that Shane is only one-sixteenth part Hawaiian, thereby referencing the so-called blood quantum logic, which presumes that “one’s ‘blood amount’ correlates to one’s cultural orientation and identity.”21 As J. Kēhaulani Kauanui explains in her book Hawaiian Blood, the “contemporary

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legal definition of ‘native Hawaiian’ [is] a ‘descendant with at least one-half blood quantum of individuals inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands prior to 1778.’”22 This definition was invented in the 1920s when the US Congress assigned land to be leased for eligible native Hawaiians.23 In Night Fisher, Shane uses his ethnic heritage in order to profit from affirmative action when applying for colleges on the mainland, but the fluid transformation of cultural imaginations and of visual images of racial or ethnic difference, as exemplified in the Gestalt-shift pertaining to Shane’s identity and appearance, problematizes the essentialist bias of such politics and exposes its supposedly objective standards to contextual redefinition. Questions of race and heritage are, of course, closely connected to the colonial history of Hawaii. At one point in the narrative, Johnson includes a legal document that the protagonist finds hidden away between a drug dealer’s pornographic magazines. The document turns out to be an ancient deed to a piece of land that was taken away from its Hawaiian owner by white pineapple planters in 1853. One of Loren’s native Hawaiian friends states that the deed is worthless as it is “not American,” thus illustrating the prevailing power inequalities between native Hawaiians and (mainland) Americans.24 The fact that the teenagers find the legal document in a drug dealer’s house, hidden between pornographic magazines, underscores the idea that the deed is not only worthless but also needs to be hidden, pointing to the shameful treatment of Hawaiians by Caucasian landowners. Moreover, this episode alludes to the high rate of drug addiction among native Hawaiians today and the lack of opportunities to make a living on the islands. In many cases, the only work Hawaiians can find is in the tourist industry, where they perform low-wage jobs. In Night Fisher, this is foregrounded when Shane explains to Loren that 60,000 native Hawaiians have left their home in order to relocate to Las Vegas, “the ninth Hawaiian Island,” because “families that struggle to make it on hotel and restaurant wages in Hawaii find the same jobs in Vegas and can buy homes.”25 This reverse flow further indicates that even today, many native Hawaiians are forced to leave their homeland because of economic pressures, thus constituting an extension of the transnational flow of people in the history of Hawaii. This flow is made concrete in the story’s resolution: Shane, with his Hawaiian background, decides to leave Hawaii, while Loren, a former outsider, finally adapts to and “takes root” in the islands. Yet, this transnational flow is not only viewed positively, as Johnson makes clear that Hawaii and the Hawaiian landscape are altered, that nature is exploited and destroyed by people coming to Hawaii. Loren, for example, is shocked when he recognizes how a former beach

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is being turned into an apartment complex. For the first time, Loren shifts from the perspective of an outsider to a more transnational perspective, criticizing the commodification of the islands and demonstrating that he is not indifferent about the future of Hawaii. Indeed, he seems to be worried about the exploitation of the islands as he feels that Hawaii has become his home. Literally illustrating the teenager’s newfound belonging in the environment, the last panels of Night Fisher show Loren lying down in the grass. The grass grows tall around him, and he becomes almost invisible as part of the Hawaiian landscape. This image, which brings the narrative to a close, visualizes the idea of Hawaii as a heterogeneous, transnational space: Loren, with his American background, does not fuse with the landscape to the point of indeterminate “oneness,” yet he becomes an integral part of it and is therefore neither simply “American” nor completely “Hawaiian.” The two pages following the story contain an afterword by the author, but they also display images of grass and dandelions. As the plants are drawn across the pages, they convey the feeling that the reader is lying in the grassy land as well, thus drawing the reader into the story, offering him or her the opportunity to become part of Hawaii—part of an emphatically transnational ecosphere—as well. We are invited, that is, to follow Loren’s example, who finally gives up the battle to “recapture the front,” surrenders to the gentle and invisible force of that tiny thistle that held him momentarily, and allows himself to be reshaped by the environmental flux of transnational exchange. Materially instantiating the conflux of image and imagination that also serves as the subject of the book, the graphic narrative consummates, finally, its ecological vision of transnationalism by transforming itself into an imaginative environment for the reader’s own exploration of rootedness, belonging, and change.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Appadurai 3. Cf. Appadurai 32. Cf. Royal 7. Royal 8. Cf. Desmond xxii. Johnson 17. Pan American Airlines, for example, used images of beautiful, sometimes scantily dressed Hawaiian women to advertise flights to Hawaii from the 1940s to the 1960s. 8 Gauguin 32. 9 Cf. Barash 265.

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Desmond 37. Desmond 40. Johnson 75. Johnson 13. Johnson 13. Cf. McGregor 48. Trask 138. Cf. Kauanui 67. Johnson 15. Johnson 82. Johnson 133. Kauanui 2. Kauanui 2. Cf. Kauanui 2. Johnson 52.

25 Johnson 79.

Works cited Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1996. Barash, Moshe. Theories of Art: 3. From Impressionism to Kandinsky. New York: Routledge, 1998. Desmond, Jane. Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Gauguin, Paul. Noa Noa: The Tahitian Journal. Mineola: Dover, 1985. Johnson, R. Kikuo. Night Fisher. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2005. Kauanui, Kēhaulani J. Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indignity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. McGregor, Davianna. Nā Kua’ā: Living Hawaiian Culture. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. Royal, Derek Parker. “Introduction: Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Narrative.” Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Narrative. Ed. Derek Parker Royal. Special issue of MELUS 32.3 (2007): 7–22. Trask, Haunani-Kay. From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai’i. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999.

6

Folding Nations, Cutting Borders: Transnationalism in the Comics of Warren Craghead III Daniel Wüllner

In his comic book How to Be Everywhere (2010), American-born comics artist Warren Craghead III states that he “likes to make pictures.”1 Craghead’s humble self-description bears ironic traces, considering that he won a Xeric Grant for Speedy (a comic book published in 1996) and that he was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2006. But Craghead’s statement can also be read, I would suggest, as a critique of the American comic book market, which publishes mostly mainstream comics and is hesitant to acknowledge more experimental modes of graphic expression.2 Most of Craghead’s comics are thus self-published and can be purchased online via his website; some of his pieces have appeared in Abstract Comics, a collection of nonnarrative comics, and in art exhibitions.3 Craghead’s artistic style is rather unusual—his small (pencil) drawings of ordinary things, such as lampposts in the streets or images seen on television, are not preliminary sketches to be continued and completed at a later moment in time. Rather, they are finished pieces of artwork, showing “fleeting” beautiful impressions of everyday life. Seeking to express the beauty of everyday life, Craghead often collaborates with poets, for example, with Roger Noyes in other people’s schemes in 2003, thus combining (and playing off against each other) the rhythm, sound, and rhetorics of poetic writing with visual modes and means of representation. Craghead’s “pictures” are interesting not only because of their stylistic specificities; significantly, they also neglect conventional forms of narration. While comics usually work with a sequential line of panels and progress according to clearly defined principles of cause and effect, the formal principle of Craghead’s sequences is that of the non sequitur. His break with conventions

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offers a new sensibility for the borders between single pictures. But Craghead does not stop at the level of form; panel frames and the spaces between single pictures also play an important role in creating the content of his comics. As I argue in this chapter, Craghead’s comics functionalize borders to do more than formally set apart—while simultaneously connecting—pictures: Craghead uses the concept of borders (meaning, the containing, the putting something into clearly defined demarcation lines) to activate discussions about the politics of nation-states and the constitution of citizenship. As I will be suggesting, this is what makes Craghead’s work particularly suited for transnational analysis. Indeed, Craghead’s artwork actively engages in transnational exchanges. In order to substantiate this claim, I will analyze two of Craghead’s recent comics, How to Be Everywhere and seed toss, kick it over (2011) and will show how the artist presents two possible ways of “performing” transnationalism. To explore Craghead’s comics against the backdrop of transnational theory not only allows for a new close reading of his texts; it also introduces the medium of comics as an important “arena of activity” in transnational exchanges.4 My reading of Craghead’s works as transnational texts begins with an assessment of How to Be Everywhere, in which the artist transfers the (visual) form and content of the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s work in order to transgress or destabilize the idea of the fixity of national borders, historical periods, and (expressive) media. I maintain that it is particularly the formal composition of How to Be Everywhere that invites readers to reconsider the value of national borders as defining “signifiers” of comic book production.5 In the second part of my chapter, I focus on Craghead’s minicomic about the Arab Spring, seed toss, kick it over. By including his readers in the process of producing the minicomic, Craghead subverts the notion that community and belonging are solely defined by national boundaries. In other words, seed toss, kick it over opens up spaces to create transnational connections between people of different cultures. Such an investigation of Craghead’s comics shows the potential of comic books as popular media to undermine “literal, epistemological, and metaphorical” boundaries “in an increasingly transnational world.”6

Going transnational Emerging in the wake of postcolonialism, theories of global connectedness evolved during the mid-1990s. The first analyses of “transnational connections” followed, and scholars soon announced the arrival of a “transnational turn.”7

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Rather than stressing the international connections between nations, “nationness” itself became a questionable term. Arjun Appadurai, for instance, argues that the concept of the nation, “as a complex modern political form, is on its last legs.”8 The alleged disappearance of this concept poses a problem because it tends to threaten the legitimacy of national discourses. How should one conceive of the field of American studies, for example, when nationness itself is no longer regarded as an important factor? Paul Giles reassures us that “[t]o reconsider American literature and culture in a transnational context [. . .] is not to abandon the idea of nationalism, but to reimagine it as a virtual construction, a residual narrative rather than a unifying social power.”9 In other words, by displaying transnational connections, we critically address “nation-ness” in a dialectical fashion. In a world in which the importance of nation-states dwindles, we must not mistake the term “transnationalism” for the omnipresent “globalization.” Instead of the overarching idea of “globalization,” transnationalism focuses on individual forms of exchange. For this reason, the social anthropologist Ulf Hannerz highlights active collectives, the “global ecumene,” instead of an amorphous entity lurking behind processes of “globalization.”10 Hannerz agrees with anthropologist Steven Vertovec that transnational ties are neither controlled by a state or a nation nor aim specifically at the interconnections between states. Hannerz places the emphasis on the actual transactions, “the interconnectedness of the world, by way of interactions, exchanges and related developments, affecting not least the organization of culture.”11 What has led to this idea of the interconnectedness of the world that Hannerz discusses? Vertovec addresses several reasons for the rise of transnationalism. Enhanced methods of transportation have increased the exchange of goods between nations, and new technologies have accelerated the means of communication. People travel faster between nations, physically and virtually, often even ignoring borders and cultural differences separating states: Transnationalism describes a condition in which, despite great distances and notwithstanding the presence of international borders (and all the laws, regulations and national narratives they represent), certain kinds of relationships have been globally intensified and now take place paradoxically in a planet-spanning yet common—however virtual—arena of activity.12

This acceleration of transportation and information calls for a new understanding of how relations and connections among nations, communities, and individuals have changed. Apart from the quickened and broadened exchange of information, it is the production of new cultural goods that has led to what Hannerz describes

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as a “transnational imaginary,” a kind of cultural production that undoes national identities and reshapes everyday existence on global and local levels.13 In their introduction to Global/Local, Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake reflect on the “new world-space of cultural production and national representation” and argue that cultural production at the end of the twentieth century “is simultaneously becoming more globalized (unified around dynamics of capitalogic moving across borders) and more localized (fragmented into contestatory enclaves of difference, coalition, and resistance) in everyday texture and composition.”14 The authors consider this new space of cultural production as a (new) way to “refigure one-way models of domination” and “activate multiple lines of social invention, contestation, mobility, reimagining, coalition, and flight.”15 Accordingly, this “transnational imaginary enlivens and molests the textures of everyday life and spaces of subjectivity and reshapes [. . .] contemporary structures of feeling.”16 I will take Hannerz’s as well as Wilson and Dissanayake’s thoughts about the transnational imaginary as a starting point for my discussion of How to Be Everywhere and seed toss, kick it over.

Crossing the Atlantic In 2010, Craghead conceded that “[t]ranslating another artist’s work is never simple, and transforming work from words to pictures has its own pitfalls.”17 He wrote these lines in the introduction to his comic book How to Be Everywhere— an artistic attempt to translate and transfer Guillaume Apollinaire’s collection of visual poetry, Calligrammes (1918), into a (new) graphic form. In an email conversation in 2011, Craghead explained to me his interest in the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire. He describes how he stumbled upon the work of Apollinaire during his research on cubism. Fascinated, Craghead tried to learn more about the poet/critic of Polish descent. Born on August 26, 1880, as Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki in Rome and raised in Monte Carlo, Apollinaire became one of the leading figures in twentieth-century poetry. He was part of the modernist movement in Paris during the turn of the century. Influenced by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Robert Delaunay, and Edward Satie, he questioned dominant aesthetic concepts and, at the same time, sought to refine his own poetic style.18 Recognizing a kindred spirit, Craghead tried to capture the essence of Apollinaire’s poetry. It was not Craghead’s foremost interest to review Apollinaire’s oeuvre. Rather, the American comic book artist selected the one thing that most

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interested him in the other artist’s work: the visual quality of his poetry. Influenced by his peers, Apollinaire had created idéogrammes lyriques, his own visual poetry, which accentuated the visual design of the poems: “Every visual image has a verbal counterpart that it serves to delimit. On the basis of the visual design the viewer can easily differentiate between Apollinaire’s calligrammatic palm tree and his fruit tree. [. . .] He does not need to consult the verbal text.”19 Apollinaire thus blurred the clear-cut border between visual design and verbal expression. In his last collection of poems, Calligrammes, he introduced a collage style of composition. According to S. I. Lockerbie, “the discontinuities [in Calligrammes] are much more radical” than in Alcools.20 Apollinaire’s first collection of poetry was strongly influenced by modernism, especially by the French symbolists (such as Charles Baudelaire and his Fleurs du mal or Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés), who reflected back upon their own psyche. Lockerbie notes: “The shadowy and obsessive nature of the poet’s state of mind is reflected in elliptical, elusive, and sometimes hermetic expressions.”21 But during the years 1913–16—when the poems in Calligrammes were written—Apollinaire’s view of the world and the poet’s place in it changed. During World War I, which he experienced as a rupture, Apollinaire acquired a more optimistic view toward life. Similar to the futurists, he enjoyed the new opportunities that technological revolutions had to offer—even though these opportunities included the cruel realities of the war.22 In his poems, Apollinaire attempted to capture the moment and express the “color of the times”: These poems are circumstantial in the sense that their point of departure is a factual event or a concrete detail of color of the times. The planes fighting overhead, the bombs, the flares, the telephone, or the phonograph serve as an impetus to new imagery surpassing its circumstantial nature.23

Apollinaire’s poems offer a brief glimpse into a future inspired by modern transportation and communications, by airplanes, cars, and telephone cables, but also by contemporary warfare. Following the modernist credo, Apollinaire also adjusted the form of his poems according to their topics. The reader should not only take in the theme, but also its artistic presentation: “Central among [Apollinaire’s] aesthetic ideas was the notion that the modern work of art must adequately reflect the global nature of contemporary consciousness.”24 Scott Bates further describes Apollinaire’s technique as a blend of various techniques of European art and poetry around him: futurism’s telegraphic leaps and shocks, its concrete structures [.  .  .] dramatism’s antidescriptive, simultaneous choral poetry; cubism’s collages and its

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reconstruction of shattered reality. [. . .] Mallarmé’s experiments with visual mimesis in Un coup de dés [. . .] and of course is own stream-of-consciousness techniques.25

Fascinated by the possibilities that new modes of communication had to offer, Apollinaire tried to capture their immediateness and to stress the “importance of simultaneity.”26 He did not use classical meter or rhyme scheme but deleted punctuation and opened up new connections between the single elements of his poems. A century later and thousands of kilometers away, Craghead was fascinated by “work that does not just represent the world but competes with it.”27 As the fragmented vision of everyday life celebrated its renaissance at the turn of the new millennium, Craghead recognized the importance of Apollinaire’s work and attempted to transfer and thus remediate it into the comic book form. Talking to me about the production of How to Be Everywhere, Craghead admitted that he had read some biographical works on Apollinaire but focused mostly on an English translation of Calligrammes, on Apollinaire’s theoretical approaches, and on Scott Bates’s book Guillaume Apollinaire. How to Be Everywhere addresses all aspects of Apollinaire’s work—from thematic inspirations to formal innovations—and recreates them in the comics medium. Instead of using traditional elements of composition, such as panels, captions, and speech balloons, Craghead appropriates, or rather transposes, Apollinaire’s concrete poetry by deconstructing the images and by highlighting the borders between panels. He disassembles faces, bodies, and machines only to recombine the juxtaposed fragments afterwards. The image of a hand is connected to a chest of drawers; a series of legs is displayed; lightbulbs are removed from lampposts and are reconnected with them via telephone lines. Instead of using the traditional syntax of a mainstream comic book to create a successive line of events, Craghead searches for alternative visual solutions. By stripping away the panel borders as a means of orientation, Craghead invites the reader to think about the make-up of the comic itself. Like Apollinaire, who ignored the structure, rhyme, and meter of classical poetry (especially the sonnet), Craghead appropriates an alternative visual solution inside the pages of his comic. In order to reconnect the single elements of Apollinaire’s poems with each other, Craghead uses straight horizontal and vertical lines instead of panel borders. He literally draws the single fragments back together. Such a deand reconstruction of objects questions their original construction. Instead of recognizing a street as a whole, Craghead disassembles its component

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parts: A lightbulb belongs to a lamppost; a lamppost belongs to a street, and so on. By placing the signs of Apollinaire’s poems onto the telegraphic lines between the objects, Craghead oversaturates these connections with meaning. In other incidents, the verses of the poems themselves are the connecting lines. In the end, the single letters of a poem populate trenches of World War I. Craghead draws a setting with trees and craters and positions each character on a different branch, on a hilltop, and on the edge of the trench. From left to right, the letters form the verse: “How to be everywhere” (see Figure 6.1). This idea of ignoring or, rather, transgressing, boundaries took shape when Craghead was introduced to Apollinaire’s transatlantic modernism and his “vision [which] radiates across frontiers and continents and unites the modern world in a network of concordances.”28 Cross-cultural connections between France and the United States and transnational reverberations are not a new research field. As Giles points out, “the interaction of American writers with Europe is an old and extensive topic.”29 This form of exchange had already been discussed during the times of Henry James, when it was called the “international theme.”30 Craghead’s How to Be Everywhere certainly transfers themes such as the fascinating metropolis and the rise of technology across the Atlantic. But the new, and indeed more interesting, aspect of How to Be Everywhere is the way in which Craghead’s text transgresses formal and generic boundaries, thereby performing what we might call a transformal and transgeneric exchange, and the way in which it challenges the notion of borders along national lines.

Figure 6.1  Warren Craghead III, How to Be Everywhere, n.p. Used with permission of the artist.

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Craghead’s translation and transferal of European poetry does not, however, possess the subversive power to question the hierarchy of either nation. This is different in Craghead’s latest comic, seed toss, kick it over, which enacts the immediate exchange mentioned above. How to Be Everywhere, then, can be considered a foundation for the immediate exchange in seed toss, kick it over. Whereas Craghead’s adaption of Apollinaire’s poetry is restricted to the transformation from one form and genre to another, Craghead’s “sense of communion with the world, even in its far flung reaches,” to speak with Lockerbie, takes shape in his minicomic seed toss, kick it over.31

Folding the Arab Spring On May 4, 2011, Craghead published seed toss, kick it over as an open-access, free comic on his blog.32 Because of its size and length (it measures 6 × 5 cm and counts only 12 pages) the comic resembles a very traditional form: the so-called minicomic.33 He had started seed toss, kick it over in January 2011, when the revolution, today known as Arab Spring, began in Egypt. The young and unemployed people of Egypt assembled on Tahrir Square, voiced their resentments, and effectively toppled their president, Muhammad Hosni Mubarak. Sitting in front of his television set, Craghead felt shocked as he saw the violence, but he was also fascinated by the idea of a revolution for the people’s rights. Witnessing the televised events, he wanted to participate in one way or another. Craghead started immediately; he explained his modus operandi on his blog later. The first thing he did was to take pictures of the television screen with his smartphone. Afterwards, he edited them via image-processing apps. As he writes on his blog: I drew in pencil but processed them through apps on my iPhone (fitting since these revolutions were partly driven by cell phones and digital social media). I especially used PictureShow and Instagram to give the drawings more texture and color. Instagram publishes images to their online social site where people can follow and comment on images and I sent them to Twitter and Facebook as well.34

After altering the photos, he rearranged them to form a sequence, a narrative, a comic book. The pages offer a brief history of the events in Egypt. Every page of seed toss, kick it over is filled with a single image that displays only a small fragment of the events Craghead witnessed on television. The

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images display a general fuzziness that simulates the photographed television screen. Each page is underwritten by a verse.35 The first five brown-and-green pages show raised fists holding flags and clubs, throwing stones; the text below these pages reads: “I WILL NOT PRETEND / TO KNOW (from here / seen heroes) / WE HOPE / YOUR JANUARY.”36 These first pages show the uprising, while the narrator denies that he understands the situation. Although Craghead constantly uses adverbs that create binary oppositions and employs a deictics of place (“here” and “there”), he also evokes the idea of compassion and togetherness by turning the singular “I” into a “WE.” Craghead as author and narrator of seed toss, kick it over thus tries to express his compassion and hope for the people and their undertaking: “YOUR JANUARY” (see Figure 6.2). This initial spark of hope shining through these first pages is followed by two red images in the middle of the comic, encompassing the confusion on Tahrir Square during January 2011. There are fires burning, smoke is rising from an unknown source, and indistinct human figures are running around in confusion. The two dramatic images are completed by the words “YOUR WINTER / IS OVER.” The revolution has suddenly turned into a warlike situation. The parallels to Apollinaire’s Calligrammes become visible. Both texts describe the feeling of a caesura; they portray the moment of rupture, but also the beginning of something new.37 The raised fists in seed toss, kick it over depict the same “fierce celebration of passion”—to use Lockerbie’s wording here—as Apollinaire’s images of World War I.38 But Craghead departs from the path of fascination on which Apollinaire and the futurists tread. He recognizes the Arab revolution as a sign of hope and literally frames the middle pages on both sides with the promising line: “WE HOPE.” Instead of separating people from each other by borders, Craghead introduces the “WE” again and creates a new understanding of belonging together. The minicomic ends on a hopeful and promising note, visualized by the use of color and brightness. The red turns to brown and the images get brighter, actually fading into a light green again. We see Tahrir Square, where people are being dragged around. In this single image, Craghead questions the reliability of the news media. The viewer is not able to figure out whether the blurred photo taken by a smartphone shows a wounded person being carried off to a medic or whether two policemen are dragging away a protester. The last two images show the fists again, this time holding up cell phones, cameras, and flags. The emblematic text underneath reads: “(from here/there/seems spring).” The concluding proposition recalls a quote by diaspora scholar James Clifford: “[I]t is the connection (elsewhere) that makes a difference (here).”39 Clifford

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Figure 6.2  Warren Craghead III, seed toss, kick it over, n.p. Used with permission of the artist.

blurs the clear distinction by placing contradicting adverbs of place next to each other, and this idea can be applied to Craghead’s seed toss, kick it over. Distances do not seem to matter. Instead of a border that separates, Craghead creates a bond between his audience and the people of Egypt. “[H]ere” and “there” become exchangeable parameters that are no longer defined along national lines. Rather, they signify two or more groups that belong to the same “global ecumene.” Craghead is aware of the distance and his own inability to alter the outcome of the revolution, yet his verses show compassion with the revolution: “from here/there/seems spring.” Here, the adverbs of place are right next to each other. While his minicomic offers a visual-verbal reflection on the Arab Spring,

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Figure 6.2  Continued

Craghead invites his readership, via the production of the minicomic, to take part in the events and thereby ignore the borders between nations. As Craghead notes in the passage quoted above, he also redistributed his images on the web. Instead of offering a virtual commodity, he turned seed toss, kick it over into a processable—malleable—piece of cultural production. Craghead reintroduced the altered images into the virtual world via the Creative Commons license. He formatted his comic for a 8.5 × 11 inch (21.5 × 28 cm) sheet of paper and included an instruction manual, explaining how to print it on both sides and how to fold, staple, and cut it: “I put the images into a small

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DIY downloadable book so they can be shared all over. Please print, download, send, whatever. SCATTER!”40 With seed toss, kick it over, Craghead thus not only reflects on the subject of the Arab Spring but actually transforms the production of the minicomic into an act of participation. Readers become part of the project as they put the pieces of information back together, transforming them into a coherent message. The “arena of activity” no longer includes just one author but invites a multitude of readers to become authors, too. The finished product of these acts of writing/drawing and “stitching” together are 12 colored pages, each of which adorns a single image. The minicomic includes a front and back cover, an editorial, creative rights statements, and dedications: “TO THE HEROES OF TAHRIR. Thanks to Internet (esp. In Focus, The Big Picture & Al Jazeera English). Also to iPhone and apps. Also to A. W. & V. C.-W. & G C.-W.” The list of dedications combines unknown protesters from Egypt with Craghead’s own family, turning them into Hannerz’s “global ecumene.” Even popular culture—digital and otherwise—is presented in this tour de force of dedications. The phrases “kick it over” (on the front cover) and “no one will guide you” (on the back cover) are taken from the song “Armagideon Time” by the British punk band the Clash. On the back cover, which displays a victory sign and the national flag of Egypt, Craghead opens up a kind of dialogue through the utterance “no one will guide you.” This last line embodies the sampled lyrics from “Armagideon Time” and transforms the revolutionary stance of the Clash into a transnational rallying cry.

Conclusion With How to Be Everywhere and seed toss, kick it over, Craghead created two types of comics that each engages in transnational exchange yet does so in different ways. Each creates links between communities that are not defined by affiliation to any specific nation, but they also present two sides of the same coin. How to Be Everywhere transfers and thus remediates Apollinaire’s visual poetry into a different art form—a comic book—and thereby introduces his readers to the ideas of a French poet. Craghead opens up new possibilities of expression in the medium of comics. Avoiding the conventional syntax of a comic book, he chooses a visual form that highlights connections between objects in order to question their nature and construction. Particularly interesting is Craghead’s recognition of Apollinaire’s desire for mass communication: “[T]hrough worldwide communications he is aware of what is happening in the world,” as

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Lockerbie puts it.41 Apollinaire’s longing for a global awareness, which Craghead inscribes in his How to Be Everywhere, can—and should—be read as a necessary foundation for seed toss, kick it over. Although Craghead allowed several months to pass before he created it, there is a palpable impression of “simultaneity” and immediacy in the minicomic. To borrow Lockerbie’s words on Apollinaire once more, Craghead engages in the “process of reordering the world according to the artist’s own vision.”42 Yet, it is not simply the artist rearranging the world that makes seed toss, kick it over so valuable for a discussion in the frame of transnational theory. Rather, it is the creative and transgressive nature of the text: seed toss, kick it over invites the reader-viewer to participate in its production and thus opens up virtual, digital, formal, and generic borders. Artist, here, means everybody who becomes engaged in the process of assembling the minicomic. Furthermore, by placing the adverbs and deictics of place—here and there— right next to each other, Craghead challenges the concept of nationness and instead offers a view of a “global ecumene.” The comic—whether it is digitally or physically distributed—makes use of the space in-between borders, a space that is not already dominated by nations and conglomerates. My close reading has shown how Craghead uses the space in-between-borders to “draw” people of different cultures together in this “global ecumene.” By way of conclusion, I would argue that seed toss, kick it over might not be able to actually change the outcome of the revolutions in North Africa but that it nonetheless champions new forms of transnational exchange via the active participation of readers, an immediate and reciprocal form of communication, and a new understanding of borders. According to Berndt Ostendorf, “[t]ransnationalism presupposes anti-essentialism, favors plurality, mobility, hybridity and favors margins or spaces in-between.”43 As I have suggested, comics and other forms of graphic narrative—texts, ironically, that are made up of lines, margins, and spaces-in-between—are quite germane to discussions about transnationalism. It will thus be interesting to see what kinds of new formats will emerge in the comics medium and how they will continue to mediate transnational exchange.

Notes   1 Craghead, How to Be Everywhere 105.   2 Gabilliet offers valuable insights into the American comics publishing market in Of Comics and Men.

108   3   4   5   6   7   8   9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives Parts of How to Be Everywhere were originally displayed in art exhibitions. Vertovec 3. On these matters, see Ostendorf 2. Ostendorf 1–2. Vertovec 13. Appadurai 19. Giles 20. Cf. Hannerz 3–7. Hannerz 7. Vertovec 3. Hannerz 7. Wilson and Dissanayake 1. Wilson and Dissanayake 2. Wilson and Dissanayake 2. Craghead, How to Be Everywhere 7. Apollinaire’s interest in criticism and theoretical approaches to aesthetics led him to publish his first collection of concrete poetry, Alcools (1913), and his own artistic manifesto, L’Esprit nouveau et les poètes (1917). Intrigued by contemporary art styles, Apollinaire shifted between symbolism and surrealism. In fact, it was Apollinaire himself who coined the latter term. In the preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1917), he included the word surréalisme to describe the new style of his drama. Bohn 19. Lockerbie 3. Lockerbie 2. In his “Futurist Manifesto,” Marinetti declared: “We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.” Lockerbie 3. Lockerbie 3. Bates 106. Bates 106. Bates 106. Lockerbie 4. Giles 2. Zapf 180–1. Lockerbie 2. See . It is not a webcomic, nor an eBook, although seed toss, kick it over is downloadable from the internet. Rather, as the instructions read, it is a downloadable “d.i.y. PDF.” Readers can also scroll up and down to take a first look at seed toss, kick it over.

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33 Minicomics are usually drawn, xeroxed, cut out, and stapled by the artist him- or herself. Such do-it-yourself types of comics are usually given away for free at comic conventions and in comic book stores. 34 Craghead, “New Book: seed toss, kick it over.” 35 I use slashes to indicate page breaks. 36 Craghead, seed toss n.p. 37 Lockerbie describes Apollinaire’s view of World War I in quite similar terms: “The general social climate at the outbreak of the hostilities—which was, curiously, one of eager anticipation—together with the more specific optimism and energy of his own modernist outlook led him to welcome the coming conflict as the opening of a new era of infinite promise” (14). 38 Lockerbie 17. 39 Clifford 332. 40 Craghead, seed toss n.p. 41 Lockerbie 3. 42 Lockerbie 4. 43 Ostendorf 19.

Works cited Apollinaire, Guillaume. Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913–1916). Trans. Anne Hyde Greet. Introduction by S. I. Lockerbie. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. 4th edn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Bates, Scott. Guillaume Apollinaire. Rev. edn. New York: Twayne, 1989. Bohn, Williard. Apollinaire, Visual Poetry, and Art Criticism. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1993. Clifford, James. “Diasporas.” Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (Aug. 1994): 302–38. Craghead III, Warren. seed toss, kick it over. Mar. 4, 2011. . Accessed Dec. 28, 2011. —. How to Be Everywhere. 2nd edn. Self-published, 2010. —. “New Book: seed toss, kick it over.” Weblog Drawerdrawer. May 4, 2011. . Accessed Dec. 27, 2011. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. Giles, Paul. Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

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Hannerz, Ulf. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge, 1996. Lockerbie, S. I. “Introduction.” In Apollinaire, Calligrammes 1–20. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. “The Futurist Manifesto.” Le Figaro, Feb. 20, 1909. Ostendorf, Berndt. “Transnationalism or the Fading of Borders?” In Transnational America: The Fading of Borders in the Western Hemisphere. Ed. Berndt Ostendorf. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2002. 1–22. Vertovec, Stephen. Transnationalism. London: Routledge, 2009. Wilson, Rob, and Wimal Dissanayake, eds. Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Zapf, Hubert. Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1996.

7

Batman Goes Transnational: The Global Appropriation and Distribution of an American Hero Katharina Bieloch and Sharif Bitar

Introduction: On the scope of Batman as a transnational icon It has become somewhat of a platitude to refer to Batman, and superheroes at large, as “American icons.”1 While, in recent years, scholars in American studies have devoted much work to the project of “deconstruct[ing] and transcending the myth of exceptionalism,” the notion that superheroes are genuinely American products of popular culture has somehow persisted.2 This may very well be due to the domination of the market by DC Comics and Marvel, as both of these companies are, after all, subsidiaries of transnational media conglomerates that target an international audience. In addition, and especially since the so-called British invasion, superhero comics are not written and drawn exclusively by Americans, but by authors and artists from all over the world.3 Undoubtedly, superheroes were functionalized to defend America’s alleged basic values, that is, “freedom and egalitarianism,” against the rising threat of fascism in Europe, and they were later marshaled to propagate an anticommunist policy.4 If wartime and Cold War–era international politics required superheroes to be as “American” as possible (even if that meant estranging them from the conceptions of their creators, often the children of immigrants), then today’s realities of globalization, migration, and diaspora certainly call for a superhero who is not so much an American icon, but rather a transcultural and transnational one. What do we mean by “transcultural” and “transnational”? The notion of transcultural work addresses both the inevitable hybridity of culture and its constant flux in a globalizing world. It thus refers to cultural diversity in any given space and, by extension, to globalization itself. Cultural practices, in

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transcultural work, are not defined and contained by geographic or national borders—at least not necessarily.5 This means that a transcultural perspective acknowledges the inherent permeability of borders to cultural and social practices. In a traditionally geography- and nation-based discipline such as American studies, we wind up with a transnational perspective that takes into account an “America” outside of the United States and the “non-American” inside of it. Our understanding of transnationalism, then, is based on the assumption that it is a process that “involves the flow of human [. . .] capital, commodities and ideas, with transformative effects on both source and destination regions.”6 Accordingly, this chapter explores recent graphic narratives in regards to their representation, appropriation, and distribution of Batman as a transnational figure. It is our contention that especially in the Scotsman Grant Morrison’s Batman: Incorporated series (2011), traditional notions of the “Americanness” of superheroes are reevaluated.7 In fact, these comics work to open up to popular discussion transcultural and transnational figurations of the superhero, and they offer the prerequisites to challenge this perhaps most prevalent popular remnant of the exceptionalism myth: the superhero as “American icon.” According to Donald Pease, American exceptionalism was once a “representation of U.S. global dominance upon representations of a destabilized world order in need of U.S. power to maintain order,” and this is certainly also true for the Batman character. Yet, the recent narratives we discuss display and promote “the U.S.’s embeddedness within transnational and transcultural forces rather than reaffirm its unique isolation from them.”8 After all, graphic narratives in general are exceptionally potent in the realm of transcultural work as their form, a “hybrid of images and text,” is in itself representative of the very idea of variance and hybridity.9 This chapter discusses Morrison’s Batman: Incorporated and the related introduction of the new character Nightrunner as he appeared in Detective Comics Annual #12 (2011) and Batman Annual #28 (2011). These stories build up, we contend, to a comprehensive reevaluation of the Americanness of the superhero. The Nightrunner story arc serves to lay the groundwork for the concept of Batman Incorporated—a global network of Batman-styled superheroes working for Bruce Wayne—and preemptively defuses the potential of this very idea to be read as an assertion of American cultural superiority. Incorporated itself, then, begins to elaborate on transcultural workings, as opposed to blatant cultural imperialism, in a two-issue story arc that reveals how cultural practices cross nation-borders, beginning with the example of the cultural influence exerted reciprocally between Japan and America. This example is not merely a depiction

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of such transcultural workings, though; we read it also as a call for the conscious application of these principles to other cultural products. Once this is established, we will move on to discuss how the relations between states and nations are depicted in Incorporated so as to avoid conferring any particularly elevated role to America; how, in fact, Morrison makes the realities of a globalizing world impact his stories in a way that hardly allows for a special role of the American Batman among the international team of superheroes. Lastly, it remains to be seen how, precisely, these stories work to question the alleged exceptionalism of America in the popular cultural phenomenon that is the superhero.

The Nightrunner primer Englishman David Hine’s inaugural Batman Incorporated story arc begins with Bruce Wayne’s proposal to establish a branch of Batman Incorporated in France. “Do you know the French for ‘Batman,’ Mr. Wayne?” Henri Lafayette, head of the Police Nationale, asks. “L’Homme Chauve-Souris?” Wayne replies, and Lafayette corrects him, “[n]o, it is ‘Le Batman.’”10 Pointing directly to one of the major themes that pervade Batman: Incorporated and its spin-offs, the cultural and political role of America in a globalizing world, Lafayette goes on to explain: You have to understand the resistance of the French people to what we perceive as cultural imperialism. We are swamped with your movies, your TV shows, your popular music, your media technology and your fast food. Now you want us to adopt your .  .  . pardon me, but .  .  . your frankly adolescent concept of costumed crime fighters.11

The police chief identifies not only Batman but the very concept of the superhero as genuinely American. Furthermore, he articulates a common concern: that alliances formed under the aegis of a multinational corporation, in this case Batman Incorporated, are initiated by the American side and thus seem to bear much more transformative potential on the “destination regions” than vice versa. Lafayette’s views constitute a “projection of [. . .] superiority as inherent to the American system and way of life.”12 His dismissal of Batman Incorporated should not misguide the reader into taking the same stance toward Incorporated, however; for rather than underwriting cultural imperialism, the ensuing narratives depict the openness of other cultural spaces to the idea of a Batman-style crime fighter, effectively showing how nonuniquely American this figure really is. Crucially, in this respect, the Batman of France had taken up

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costumed crime fighting before his recruitment by Batman Incorporated, as had virtually all the following recruits. Eventually Lafayette, by presidential decree, has to give in and allow Wayne to pick his French counterpart, who is “strictly regulated by [Batman Incorporated’s] central office, but also answerable to [Lafayette] as head of the French police force.”13 An American company recruits a French superhero to aid the French police force’s fight against crime, and the recruit’s training is financed by America in the guise of Batman Incorporated. The statement here is that finance and experience from America—where it is apparently more readily available— can and should support, if so desired, solutions to problems in sovereign states outside of American jurisdiction. In this light, David Hine’s Nightrunner origin story functions as a primer to attenuate potential criticism of Incorporated as inherently supportive of an America overstepping its jurisdiction. This story further functions as a primer for Incorporated in the transcultural sense. Nightrunner’s civilian identity is Bilal Asselah, son of Sunni Muslim Algerian immigrants,14 who lives in Clichy-sous-Bois, the scene of the 2005 riots.15 The choice of a Muslim for Batman of France has been decried by several right-wing commentators who mourn that he is not French by heritage.16 This criticism points toward a perceived discrepancy between cultural heritage and nationality, while legally, of course, there is no discrepancy. Asselah was born and raised in France, and he is thus—despite and irrespective of his religion or his parents’ country of birth—French, not Algerian. By making Nightrunner a Muslim, Hine highlights the fact that culture in a globalizing world inevitably crosses national borders, that culture is hybrid, and that this transculturality is to be viewed in a positive light. It is, after all, precisely because of Asselah’s understanding of France’s clashing social levels—and they do largely coincide with differing cultural backgrounds—that he is able to move freely between them as an unbiased mediator. What Lafayette calls “cultural imperialism” is the aggressive, undesired invasion of one culture by another with the ultimate, if possibly unconscious, goal of superseding the original culture. Asselah, however, is not depicted as an objectionable invader. He seeks not to replace “French” culture with his own; rather, he merges the two. The Nightrunner story arc thus displays what Günter Lenz has described as an “understanding of ‘culture’ as always hybrid and transgressive [and] not territory-based in the traditional sense,” and it “addresses the inter- and cross-cultural dynamics of culture.”17 It is this display of the transnational practice of transcultural proliferation that the reader will find exercised throughout Incorporated, which is concerned equally with real-world and fictional

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incidents and conditions. In keeping with Morrison’s general style, however, the implementation of this display is more subtle than in the Nightrunner story arc. What, then, can be said about what Peter Jackson, Philip Crang, and Claire Dwyer refer to as “transformative effects on both source and destination regions”? Diegetically, French-Algerian realities play a part in the formation of the superhero Nightrunner. Similarly, but outside the diegesis, non-American writers and artists inform “American” superhero comics. Thus, the permeability of national borders to cultural processes, the mutual influence across different nations as depicted in the case of Bilal Asselah, has its real-life counterpart in Asselah’s inventor—and not only in him, but in the multitude of non-American writers and artists who have taken to infusing Batman with their own cultural predispositions and thus to remodeling this character from an “American” icon into a decidedly transcultural and transnational one.

Transcultural influence In Incorporated #1 and #2, Batman recruits Jiro Osamu as the Batman of Japan. The character’s name combines those of Jiro Kuwata, creator of a 1960s Japanese Batman adaptation known today as Bat-Manga, and Osamu Tezuka, who is referred to (and not only on the Incorporated letter page) as the “Father of Manga” (#7). By dubbing his character Jiro Osamu, Morrison reveals and acknowledges the influence of non-American comics authors on American superhero comics. Apart from this moment of transcultural intertextuality, the story arc is replete with nods to cliché representations of Japanese culture. When Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle alias Catwoman arrive in Tokyo, a newscaster announces the latest activities of “Shiny Happy Aquazon of Super Young Team” (#1). This team was introduced in Morrison’s Final Crisis run as a group of superheroes whose main goal seems to be not so much actual crime fighting but rather fame. The names of both the heroes and the team are obvious takes on what has in recent years become increasingly popular satire of the purported Japanese mode of combining many positively connoted English adjectives into curious compound words. Shiny Happy Aquazon, then, represents at once the American in Japanese culture—pop star superheroes—and the Japanese in American culture—the stereotypical compound words. It is crucial to acknowledge, however, that none of the characters can be viewed as genuinely Japanese. The team leader Most Excellent Super Bat, for instance, bases his superhero identity on both Superman and Batman. Thus, what is perceived and presented as allegedly Japanese is

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really founded in American culture, but ultimately created by a Scot. In this sense, Super Young Team is a truly transcultural product, as any sense of cultural authenticity becomes increasingly blurred, and any attempt to backtrack the cultural interconnections is nearly impossible. Calling into question the value and significance of authenticity, heritage, and originality is, of course, basic to transcultural processes themselves. Morrison’s transcultural perspective is also displayed when he depicts Catwoman looking at what appears to be a hentai comic book that presents the cliché of tentacled creatures sexually violating girls; she remarks, “What’s the appeal, I ask myself ” (#1).18 Later, in order to save the Japanese Batman-tobe’s girlfriend, she jumps through a trapdoor from one story of a building into another, which is flooded with water. Here, she must fight an octopus. Again, the reader faces a multitude of transcultural layers; American Catwoman literally has to confront a representational fragment of Japanese culture. She has to engage directly with something she failed to comprehend earlier. The situation is compellingly represented in the bottom three panels of issue #2’s opening page. In each panel, we see through two windows into the building: Through the top window, we watch Batman and Osamu battle a group of villainous henchmen; through the bottom window, we see the flooded story in which Catwoman takes on the octopus. The composition is evocative of Ludger Pries’s understanding that “different social spaces with no previous geographic overlap or relationship to one another can become ‘stacked’ within one and the same geographic space.”19 Apparently, it is through actual physical contact that Catwoman is able to overcome her lack of understanding of a Japanese cultural representation. She grapples with this piece of Japanese culture in a very physical sense, which is only possible by entering this particular geographic space. Through this contact, different “social spaces” not only converge or coexist but interact and impact one another. In other words, her crossing of nation-borders actually produces her understanding of a distinct cultural space, providing her with a necessary disposition to partake in a globalizing world. The same willingness to engage with cultural difference is expected of the reader. To understand the irony of the situation, the reader has to be able not only to identify a specimen of Japanese culture, but also its transnational (“inauthentic”) version—in this case, the transnational proliferation of a cultural product, hentai, that happens to refer us directly back to graphic narrative culture.20 Jiro Osamu, protégé of Japanese superhero Mr Unknown, takes up cowl and cape after his mentor’s death and becomes the Batman of Japan. As opposed to Nightrunner, who wears a loosely Batman-themed costume, Osamu dons a

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costume identical to that of the original Batman. But if this suggests an act of unilateral Americanization, Batman Incorporated’s next would-be recruit, the Argentinian El Gaucho, declines the costume altogether, proclaiming: “El Gaucho is his own Man” (#7). With Osamu, Nightrunner, and El Gaucho, then, the series displays a spectrum of varying degrees of submission to Batman Incorporated— and thus to America.

Transnational relations The covers of Incorporated #3 through #5, like all issues up to that point, have the flags of nations displayed in their artwork. On the cover of #3, a skull replaces the face inside the sun on the Argentinian flag, while the Falklands coat of arms and the Union Jack appear on the cover of #5. Issue #5’s storyline, then, is set on the Falkland Islands and is loosely embedded in the Falklands War. While the political tensions surrounding that crisis become tangible, the crisis itself remains shrouded by the vagueness of its introduction. The second panel in Incorporated #3 is a map of the Falklands, and the caption reads, “51.9823 S. 58.6062 W. In time of war.” Other than that, there is no designation of either the islands or the Falklands War as such. The responsibility to identify this specific historical event, which serves as a background for Morrison’s story, lies with the reader. What could Morrison’s intention or motivation be for placing the story arc among past events that are not even clearly named? In his memoir/superhero-history Supergods (2011), Morrison tells us how in his childhood in Scotland superhero comics, and Superman in particular, helped him overcome his fear of nuclear war: “It’s not that I needed Superman to be ‘real,’ I just needed him to be more real than the Idea of the Bomb that ravaged my dreams.” Later, speaking of the impact of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on superhero comics, he writes: “What was real had slipped and become uncertain, fantastic.”21 Morrison is not the first to formulate the idea that 9/11 was the moment in which reality caught up with the endless fictional repetitions of complete destruction in popular culture or, conversely, that grim fictional fantasies of devastation and apocalyptic scenarios were no longer dissimilar to reality. According to the logic of Morrison’s childhood fantasies, superhero comics serve as coping mechanisms because the universal threats to humanity that regularly motivate their stories are eventually obliterated by superheroes. As these stories—apparently, at least—often have a basis in extratextual contexts, events like the Falklands War in Incorporated unsurprisingly find translation

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into comic storylines. In issue #5, it becomes clear that Morrison deliberately depicts the conflict with a lack of specificity and accuracy, while leaving the extratextual historical event recognizable enough. Morrison provides the reader with an instance of fiction that is evidently influenced by actual events, thus indicating that other comics might be equally influenced by events in the outside world, though perhaps less palpably. He effectively underscores the connection between the real and the fictional, even though it may be shrouded. Furthermore, the conflict referred to here is itself of a transnational nature, much like Morrison’s “Idea of the Bomb” and, of course, 9/11. Thus, Morrison’s treatment of the Falklands War needs to be seen in connection with his more explicit acknowledgments that the ever-present threats of transnational proportions in the age of globalization have, quite necessarily, seeped through into superhero comics. Incorporated accordingly exemplifies Lenz’s idea of “transnational interactions and negotiations in a time of globalization and relocalizations.”22 These relocalizations are represented, among other things, by the character Dr Dedalus. In issue #5, we find out that Dr Dedalus, or Otto Netz, as he is referred to here, had worked for the Nazi regime at one point and was awarded for his efforts by Adolf Hitler personally. Later on, he is captured by the British, betrays his former cause, and becomes head of the fictional UN organization Spyral. Dedalus stands, then, for the transnational political entanglement that is characteristic of an increasingly globalizing world. The opacity of his transnationally informed biography continues throughout much of Incorporated, as most of the international power relations remain unclear. The sheer number of secret organizations at play is overwhelming. Furthermore, Morrison brings together different historical episodes in a single story arc, thus creating a perplexing connection between the Falklands War and World War II and its repercussions as personified by Dedalus. Initiating world organizations such as the UN and NATO, the reverberations of these conflicts are decidedly transnational in nature. In the end, multiple layers of transnational processes are revealed in this story arc, not all of which add up. However, this should not be considered negligent writing but rather read as representative of the sometimes incomprehensible, complex effects of globalization which are mirrored in the story. Because the power relations remain opaque and nations are always represented as primarily partaking in transnational processes, no nation stands out as dominant. America, in particular, as represented by Batman and Batwoman seems somewhat out of place in the global conflict(s) that Morrison depicts. Consequently, the perspective shifts decidedly away from an America-centered viewpoint toward one that acknowledges the importance of transnational processes.

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This very decentering of the American viewpoint is emphasized in issue #4, which is largely a flashback that explicates some of the story arc from issues #3 to #5. Here, we find a new origin story of Kathy Kane alias Batwoman. Like the story itself, the grainy, vintage-looking quality of the coloring by Canadian Nathan Fairbairn is suggestive of comics of the 1950s and 1960s. Thus, issue #4 is an accumulation of references that clearly points toward times when superhero comics could more appropriately be regarded as “genuinely American,” to times when America, as represented by Batman, could possibly even be seen as a superior nation, equipped with more money and more power than any foreign state. But Morrison destabilizes this notion immediately: Batman says to the new superhero Batwoman, “[w]hat I do isn’t for amateurs.” She replies, “I have almost a decade of life experience on you. I’m richer than you, I’m smarter than you, and there are no rules to this” (#4). According to Batwoman, anyone, given the means and expertise, can be a superhero; implicitly, then, nothing guarantees that the concept should be exclusive to America. This is amplified by the fact that Morrison, in the new Batwoman origin story, adds a transnational twist to things: Kathy Kane was recruited by Spyral, which is headed by Dedalus, a German. Consequently, in Incorporated #4, the transcultural and transnational mode supplants the traditional conception of superheroism as inevitably American. This point is later emphasized in issue #7, where Morrison zooms in on America and clears away potential vestiges of American exceptionalism by depicting social problems within US national borders. Consequently, the story is somewhat evocative of the Nightrunner story and, despite its narrow focus on America, offers transcultural and transnational deliberations on the state of the nation. The narrative “addresses intracultural and multicultural diversity and hybridity of US culture(s)” in depicting the Native American crime fighters Manof-Bats and Raven as integral parts of Batman Incorporated.23 When Batman offers his support, Raven says, “[w]e have 80% unemployment. Teenage suicide is four times the national average, and life expectancy here is the lowest in the country. We have no train, no bus, no theater. No clothing stores, no barbers, restaurants, garages, or even a mailman ’round here.” He sums up the massive social discrepancies in America that manifest themselves, as they did in the Nightrunner story, against a backdrop of cultural diversity. Batman then informs Raven that Leviathan, Dedalus’s network, has infiltrated the reservation, to which Raven responds, “So America’s been invaded? You need any advice on how to live through that, you came to the right place.”24 By equating the reservation with America as a whole, Raven signals that the idea that Batman alone could represent America cannot hold true against the realities of the nation.

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Conclusion: The not-so-American icons How, then, does the Batman: Incorporated series decenter the US perspective on superheroes? The series problematizes the increasingly antiquated idea that Batman is an American icon. The Nightrunner primer states in the very beginning that Incorporated should not be read as a celebration of either American cultural superiority or cultural imperialism. This is followed by the Japanese story arc that reveals and acknowledges transcultural influence across national borders in general and in comics in particular. Morrison makes clear that as much as the American superhero has influenced non-American cultural spaces, the latter are equally capable of exerting an influence on the former. Because this transcultural conditioning necessarily continues to take place, the story calls for a willingness to engage with transcultural practices more deliberately—and, thus, to actively question the idea that Batman is uniquely American. Taking this as groundwork, Incorporated takes a step back and offers a view of transnational relations as they play out in superhero comics. We see that because these comics negotiate and deal with extratextual conflicts, and because the outside world today is an emphatically transnational space, superhero comics are themselves transnational products. Because America’s role in the world is not one of straightforward leadership—either politically or culturally—neither is the superhero’s. Morrison writes that “[w]hen American comics became more inclusive and began to introduce their own versions of foreign characters [in the 1950s, they] were the figures of national stereotype.”25 As we have seen, the comics discussed in this chapter work against these trends and go beyond such clichés. They open up what used to be the limited cultural frame of the superhero to the possibility of broader readings—readings that take into account transcultural influence and transnational realities. This reevaluation of the superhero as personified by Batman is effectively the inevitable appropriation of something “American” in a globalizing world—a world in which “American” in the cultural sense has repeatedly been shown to be virtually undefinable and impossible to demarcate completely from the “non-American.” Many of the panels in the narratives discussed here lack an outer border; the panels’ edges are simultaneously the pages’ edges. The effect is twofold: A proximity is established between the world of the plot and the geographic and cultural space where the comic is read, and the borderlessness of the panels is suggestive of the cultural borderlessness of nations. This must be seen as symptomatic of the overall understanding of the Batman character in these stories: Batman cannot remain the solitary crime fighter he used to be; instead he, his writers, and his readers alike need to acknowledge their

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own indebtedness to, and mutual dependency on, transnational conditions. This destabilization of the increasingly unwarranted perception of the cultural product superhero as uniquely American entails the effect that makes these comics the valuable cultural products they are for transnational American studies—namely, the realization that, if even this perhaps “most American” popular cultural product is really not so exceptionally “American,” then what is? The reevaluation of the superhero, the appropriation and subsequent distribution of Batman and other not-so-American icons, in the end, is how these recent graphic narratives facilitate a more critical popular discussion of the myth of American exceptionalism.

Notes 1 For more on Batman’s status as a cultural icon, see Brooker, who argued in 2001, “that with 60 years behind him Batman has now reached the point where he could live on in the cultural imagination, as myth, if that institution [DC Comics] decided to cut him free” (11). 2 Lenz 4. 3 The term “British invasion” designates efforts of American comic book companies to recruit British comic authors during the 1980s. DC Comics was the first to introduce a British crew of comic writers like Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and Grant Morrison, each of whom had a different and distinctive style. This recruitment of non-American authors should, however, be viewed more as talent scouting than as an effort to make superhero comics more artistically and culturally diverse. In fact, the sleeve of the collected hardcover edition of Neil Gaiman’s Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? (2009) promotes this superhero as an “American icon.” On the British invasion, see also Jochen Ecke’s contribution (Chapter 10) to this volume. 4 Switzer 6. 5 Cf. Lenz 4. 6 Jackson et al. n.p. 7 Among (re)emerging characters such as Superman, the Fantastic Four, or the Incredible Hulk, Batman is one of the most prominent figures, his story being immensely popularized of late, especially by the highly successful movie series by Christopher Nolan. Although we focus on Batman, Mark Millar’s Superman: Red Son (2004) provides a case study of equal relevance. 8 Pease 20. 9 Tyree 28. On the question of form rather than content as the bearer or site of transnational exchange, see the chapters by Michael A. Chaney (Chapter 1) and Shane Denson (Afterword) in this volume.

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10 Detective Comics Annual #12. Throughout this chapter, all emphases in quotes from comics are in the originals; none of the comic books have pagination. 11 Detective Comics Annual #12. 12 Kennedy 313. 13 Detective Comics Annual #12. 14 With respect to France’s imperial past in Algeria, the story of Bilal Asselah offers an interesting connection to the extratextual realm. 15 Cf. Detective Comics Annual #12. The French civil unrest began after two Muslim boys died in an attempt to avoid questioning by the police. The violent protests that ensued were directed against poverty and the lack of education and employment opportunities, and they spread from suburban areas in Paris to several French cities, including Marseille, Toulouse, and Lyon. 16 See, for instance, Green; Huston. 17 Lenz 4. 18 We use the westernized meaning of the word “hentai” as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary. 19 Pries n.p. Pries distinguishes between “geographic space (the state)” and “social space (the nation)” (4). 20 On the reception of Japanese manga and other cultural artifacts in the United States, see Jenkins’s chapter on “Pop Cosmopolitanism” in Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers. 21 Morrison, Supergods xv, 347. 22 Lenz 4. 23 Lenz 4. 24 Batman: Incorporated #7. 25 Morrison, Supergods 51.

Works cited Brooker, Will. Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon. New York: Continuum, 2001. Green, Avi. “Detective Comics Annual 12: Batman Hires an Islamist.” astuteblogger. blogspot.de. Dec. 15, 2010. The Astute Bloggers. . Accessed Nov. 17, 2011. Higgins, Kyle, writer. “The Night Runner.” Detective Comics Annual #12 (Feb. 2011). Art by Trevor McCarthy, color by Andre Szymnowicz, lettering by Travis Lanham. New York: DC Comics. —, writer. “Nightrunner.” Batman Annual #28 (Feb. 2011). Art by Trevor McCarthy, color by Andre Szymnowicz, lettering by Travis Lanham. New York: DC Comics.

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Hine, David, writer. “All the Rage: Part One of Two.” Detective Comics Annual #12 (Feb. 2011). Art by Agustin Padilla, color by Tony Aviña, lettering by Sal Cipriano, cover by Stanley “Artgerm” Lau. New York: DC Comics. —, writer. “All the Rage: Part Two of Two.” Batman Annual #28 (Feb. 2011). Art by Agustin Padilla, Andres Guinaldo, et al., color by Tony Aviña, lettering by Ken Lopez, cover by Stanley “Artgerm” Lau. New York: DC Comics. Huston, Warner Todd. “Batman’s Politically Correct European Vacation.” Publiusforum. com. Dec. 23, 2010. Publius’ Forum. . Accessed Nov. 17, 2011. Jackson, Peter, Philip Crang, and Claire Dwyer, eds. Transnational Spaces. New York: Routledge, 2004. Jenkins, Henry. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Kennedy, Liam. “Enduring Freedom: Public Diplomacy and U.S. Foreign Policy.” American Quarterly 57.2 (2005): 309–33. Lenz, Günter H. “Redefinitions of Citizenship and Revisions of Cosmopolitanism Challenges of Transnational Perspectives.” Symposium: Redefinitions of Citizenship and Revisions of Cosmopolitanism—Transnational Perspectives. Journal of Transnational American Studies 3.1 (2011): 4–17. . Morrison, Grant, writer. Final Crisis. Art by J. G. Jones, Doug Mahnke, et al., color by Alex Sinclair, et al., lettering by Rob Leigh, Travis Lanham, et al. New York: DC Comics, 2009. —, writer. “Mr Unkown Is Dead.” Batman: Incorporated #1 (Jan. 2011). Pencils by Yanick Paquette, inks by Michel Lacombe, color by Nathan Fairbairn, lettering by John J. Hill. New York: DC Comics. —, writer. “Resurrector!” Batman: Incorporated #2 (Feb. 2011). Pencils by Yanick Paquette, inks by Michel Lacombe, color by Nathan Fairbairn, lettering by John J. Hill. New York: DC Comics. —, writer. “Scorpion Tango.” Batman: Incorporated #3 (Mar. 2011). Pencils by Yanick Paquette, inks by Michel Lacombe, color by Nathan Fairbairn, lettering by Patrick Brosseau, additional art by Pere Perez. New York: DC Comics. —, writer. “The Kane Affair.” Batman: Incorporated #4 (Apr. 2011). Art by Chris Burnham, color by Nathan Fairbairn, lettering by Patrick Brosseau. New York: DC Comics. —, writer. “Masterspy.” Batman: Incorporated #5 (May 2011). Pencils by Yanick Paquette, inks by Michel Lacombe, color by Nathan Fairbairn, lettering by Patrick Brosseau. New York: DC Comics. —, writer. “Medicine Soldiers.” Batman: Incorporated #7 (July 2011). Art by Chris Burnham, color by Nathan Fairbairn, lettering by Patrick Brosseau. New York: DC Comics. Morrison, Grant. Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2011.

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Pease, Donald. “Re-thinking ‘American Studies after US Exceptionalism.’” American Literary History 21.1 (2009): 19–27. Pries, Ludger. New Transnational Social Spaces: International Migration and Transcultural Companies in the Early 21st Century. New York: Routledge, 2001. Switzer, Tom. “In Defense of ‘Leading from Behind.’” International Herald Tribune, Oct. 22–3, 2011: 6. Tyree, J. M. “American Heroes: On Frivolity and Horror in 2008’s Summer Superhero Movies: The Dark Knight, The Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man.” Film Quarterly 62.3 (2009): 28–34.

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Spider-Man India: Comic Books and the Translating/Transcreating of American Cultural Narratives Shilpa Davé

In 2004, Gotham Entertainment Group (with offices in Bangalore, India) joined with Marvel Entertainment to publish a revisionist origin story of Spider-Man that asked what would happen if Spider-Man was an Indian teenager and grew up in India? The four-issue miniseries that explored this scenario was released simultaneously in both India and the United States with a 5  million print run.1 While Spider-Man India was more an experiment than a commercial success, the idea of rewriting an American comic book from an Indian cultural perspective caught on, and it continues to have a modest impact on the development and dissemination of Indian images in an international superhero market. Spider-Man India was one of the first attempts to culturally translate and transform a quintessentially American superhero into a hero with an Indian cultural background, but it was not without a diverse set of cultural and conceptual forerunners that prepared the way. Reinventing and revisioning superhero origin tales has long been a popular practice in the American comics industry, where superheroes are frequently placed in alternative universes and different historical eras. Spider-Man India follows the logic of the Marvel Comics “What if .  .  .?” (1977–) series, which explores divergent narrative possibilities and story settings for their heroes. DC created a similar format, the Elseworlds series (1989–), to feature their popular superheroes in diverse time periods and environments that stand outside of their mainline continuity. For example, creator Mark Millar developed the miniseries Red Son (DC Comics, 2003) to explore an alternative history where Superman landed in Russia rather than in the United States during the Cold War era. Like Spider-Man India, this series featured a retelling of an American

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superhero from a foreign perspective. Moreover, exchanges between Asian countries and the United States have been featured in the Marvel Mangaverse series (2000–3, 2005–6), where core characters are reenvisioned in the style of Japanese manga and given Asian social and cultural characteristics. Peter Parker, for instance, has the skills of a ninja. More recently, DC has introduced Batman Incorporated (2010–), a series in which Bruce Wayne utilizes his corporate empire Wayne Enterprises to establish a racially and culturally diverse international watchdog group of heroes stationed all over the world.2 While these crossover narratives may appeal particularly to those niche fans Henry Jenkins calls “pop cosmopolitans”—consumers with eclectic tastes for a range of foreign popular culture beyond the pale of the domestic mainstream—the stories also represent a growing awareness of, and engagement with, transnational and transcultural flows in the context of American popular culture (and its icons) at large.3 Moreover, the production of such cross-cultural narratives speaks to larger issues of cultural translation and raises questions about the ways in which difference (national, linguistic, racial, economic, gender, social) is presented and relayed between groups in popular culture. In the era of globalization, the narratives of American superheroes travel rapidly through mass media across national borders. They are often utilized to promote a nationalistic discourse of America that influences multiple subjects and diverse social and political movements around the world. For example, Jenkins points out that a series such as DC: The New Frontier (2003–4) links “the formation of the Justice League with the first stirrings of the New Frontier” in the 1950s and “uses Superman and Wonder Woman to debate America’s involvement in Indochina.”4 In the American neoliberal discourse of the 1990s, according to Lisa Duggan, consumption and capitalism became the driving forces of national identity, and global culture became a marketplace to buy and sell trade goods and popular narratives.5 Inderpal Grewal further argues that the narratives of American national identity cross territorial boundaries to great effect: “America was important to so many across the world because its power enabled the American nation-state to disseminate the promise of democratic citizenship and belonging through consumer practices as well as disciplinary technologies.”6 Thus, even the purchase, possession, and utilization of American consumer goods outside of the United States offered potential association with American power and prestige. Yet, these global dynamics were not just a one-way interaction. Media corporations such as Sony, Fox, and Disney were involved in developing local programming in a variety of countries for export to the United States as well as in bringing US

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programming and films into Asian markets. The Spider-Man India series is a result of global corporate marketing strategies engaged in transnational trade and a global comics fan base. This chapter suggests that the Spider-Man India series questions the practice and definitions of cultural translations and the functions of national superheroes in a neoliberal world dependent on cultural trade and popular cosmopolitanism. The series draws on comics’ potential as a visual and textual form to create multiple storylines, to cross multiple genres, and to go beyond the conventional superhero narrative of “men in tights.” Situating Spider-Man India in a transnational context, both as a product venture and as a narrative revision of the iconic American superhero, illuminates the ways in which transnational consumer exchanges of culture and capital can translate, transform, and create new versions of national, racial, religious, and class narratives.

The narratives of transnational and transcultural exchange The terms “transnational” and “transcultural” can be used in many different ways, and it is inevitable that there is some overlap between them. But as Günter Lenz argues in an Americans studies context, there is good reason to make a conceptual distinction.7 A transnational focus destabilizes definitions of monolithic national identity and takes into account issues of empire, of multiculturalism, and of ethnic, racial, and class diversity. The narrative presented in Spider-Man India invites a transnational interpretation because the character and his actions expose how familiar American tropes of economic, national, and social hierarchies are reenvisioned in India. In contrast to the transnational, as Lenz maintains, the transcultural is less concerned with national identity but instead emphasizes a “performative understanding of ‘culture’ as always hybrid and transgressive that is not territory-based in the traditional sense.”8 Lenz adds that a transcultural approach emphasizes the dynamic and fluctuating nature of border-crossings and that this approach challenges the nature and definition of culture and the ways we express and translate cultural meaning.9 So while the surface elements of the plot such as the costume and characters of Spider-Man India lend themselves to a more transnational interpretation, the conception and production of the series is essentially transcultural because it creates something new, something that crosses business/marketing strategies with comic book genre boundaries as well as fosters culturally hybrid visions (rather than solely nationalistic) definitions of heroism and justice.

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In Spider-Man India, Indian culture seemingly exerts a great influence on the development of the character Pavitr Prabhakar (the Indian version of Peter Parker), so much so that even the emblematic Spider-Man costume is revised to include an Indian dhoti in addition to the red and blue form-fitting body suit. But beyond the visual costume modification, I am interested in the manner in which the translation of an iconic American superhero integrates and creates alternative narratives for cultural exchange. To begin with, the American story and character of Spider-Man translates well into an Indian cultural landscape because it is a narrative of class and cultural difference that obscures national identities and speaks to everyday concerns in a global world. However, the Indian Spider-Man’s racial difference with respect to his American counterpart is minimized to the extent that his values are represented as cultural differences with alternative cultural referents. How does Spider-Man show that he is Indian when his racialized body is covered by a costume? It is through his written dialogue, his social interactions, and his fight scenes. As a result, the idea of racial difference and its effects on notions of popular heroism are subsumed under an Indian class narrative related to education and access to Western culture. To those familiar with the American story, the comic presents a different world with exotic landscapes and unfamiliar cultural referents, reminiscent in some ways of stories from the What If and Elseworlds series. India, as the real-life world in which the fictional universe is rooted, is strangely familiar yet also exotic. One of the legacies of British colonialism in India is that English is one of the two official languages (the other is Hindi). Thus, English is widely spoken and written, and it constitutes one of the primary languages of communication in government, mass media, and top-tier educational institutions. For readers of Spider-Man India, cultural expressions may therefore require translation, but the language does not. To help these readers cope with the unfamiliar cultural idioms, the Indian and Indian American creators provide a glossary that translates the unknown terms at the back of the comic. In that sense, the task of making Spider-Man Indian involves negotiating both the familiarity of Western influences such as language (English terms and phrases) and the differences in cultural referents and social history. Spider-Man India not only translates an American story into an Indian one, but it attempts to redefine the very processes of global interaction and narrative revision through the amalgamation of these two culturally specific storylines. CEO of Gotham Entertainment and cocreator of Spider-Man India Sharad Devarajan explains that his intent was to create a new way to express American and Indian cross-cultural influence: “Unlike traditional translations of American

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comics, Spider-Man India will become the first ever ‘transcreation’ where we [Indians and Indian Americans] reinvent the origin of a Western property like Spider-Man.”10 While Devarajan’s new phrase evokes the corporate language of bringing two different “properties” together, I believe that the concept of transcreation points beyond mere business strategies and toward important questions of narrative genre crossing. This essay examines transcreation as a transcultural process by discussing how Indian writers and artists translate an iconic American hero to an Indian cultural and geographic landscape. The process of cultural transcreation is different from cultural translation because it evokes the emergence of a new aesthetic, one that is not bound by national and cultural misinterpretations embedded in the act of translation. Transcreation is ambitious because it tries to dispose of hierarchies and, at the very least, avoid the exotic consumption of India and Indian products by putting the project in the hands of South Asians who are themselves cross-cultural products of global migrations. In essence, transcreation attempts to redefine the American nature of a product and infuse it with the local environment. This is the deeper significance of Spider-Man India’s visual difference, a difference that fuses iconic American superhero mythology with Indian spiritual mythology to create a secular hybrid hero. As I will argue, the transcreation of Spider-Man India is problematic because the new aesthetic is limited by the corporate goal to open new consumer markets while pleasing the existing fan base and keeping to the American national narrative associated with the character. The navigation between the limitations of the original story (and adherence to corporate goals) and the attempt to create a new hybrid narrative offers an opportunity to examine different genealogies of national mythology, cultural identity, and global flows.

Spider-Man and American/global identity Among the most recognizable American comic book superheroes are Superman, Batman, Captain America, Wonder Woman, and Spider-Man. The first four were created in the era of the Great Depression and World War II. Spider-Man, however, did not make his debut until 1962 and, according to creator Stan Lee, was designed to appeal to teenagers in the 1960s.11 Unlike earlier heroes, who were adults with teen sidekicks, Spider-Man was featured as a solo hero when he got his own title and appeared in issue #1 of the Amazing Spider-Man in March 1963. Lee wanted to introduce a different kind of hero: “a teenage everyman. [. . . W]hen he spoke to those who were discouraged and felt disenfranchised, his

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words rang true.”12 Not only an “everyman,” Spider-Man was also an underdog who did not bask in the glow of admiration from the law or the media.13 The distancing of his character from American institutions associated with the accouterments of corporate imperialism not only makes him an “everyman” but a global man of the masses who has an easily translatable story and character. Compared to heroes with extreme wealth such as Batman or an alien with superpowers such as Superman, Spider-Man is paradoxically a common man and a hero with wide audience appeal. After the death of his uncle, Peter Parker has to shoulder the responsibility of taking care of his elderly Aunt May and paying the household bills. A thief murders Peter’s Uncle Ben, and Peter soon realizes that the murderer is the man he had witnessed committing a crime and had earlier let go. This tragic series of events shapes his understanding of his role in the world. His creed, “with great power there must also come—great responsibility,” suggests that his newfound powers eclipse his personal desires for a normal life or for fame and fortune and should be used to help those in need. However, unlike Superman, who is often associated with American politics, Spider-Man functions as a maverick figure that is not tied to national political interests. Spider-Man’s creed espouses the idea that sacrifice must be made for the greater good, which is a message that transcends national ideologies and can translate to a global audience and in particular an Indian audience without changing the core nature of his character. Part of Marvel Comics’ popularity in the 1960s was the introduction of superheroes who had to face the practical problems that came with their roles as public heroes. They dealt with questions such as whether they should reveal their identities and what personal sacrifices it might mean to wear a mask. In Comic Book Nation, Bradford Wright notes that Spider-Man is one of the first heroes to be conflicted about his powers and that out of his character emerge the beginnings of the antihero, a character who is introspective, flawed, and overly examines his motives.14 Although he often challenges authority, Spider-Man generally does the right thing; ultimately, he does not upset the system. Instead, he has to defend his role as a hero and is often isolated from others (including other superheroes). Spider-Man is connected to an American narrative of generational and class politics, but his background as a working-class teenager with adolescent anxieties and later as a young adult worried about college and jobs transcends the context of the 1960s and resonates with a contemporary American and global audience. He not only shares the American Dream for success (and the drive to get it) but also experiences “real” tragedies (death, heartbreak) and hardships (losing a job) that we rarely see with other mainstream comics heroes.

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Since the 1960s, Spider-Man has gone through a vast variety of storylines, and in 2001, his character achieved more popularity than ever. Part of the reason for this popularity was the buzz around the feature film Spider-Man, which was directed by Sam Raimi and scheduled for release in 2002. Being so intimately linked with New York City, the perseverance of the eternal underdog Spider-Man resonated with the spirit of New York City after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001.15 Marvel heroes, unlike DC heroes, live in the fictionalized “real” world and thus are associated with contemporary issues and specific landscapes. The film made Spider-Man an emblematic symbol of New York City and an all-American hero in contrast to the dark figure of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005) or the teen heartthrob of Clark Kent in the television series Smallville (2000–10).16 The first Spider-Man movie (2002) was a blockbuster both in the United States and internationally, grossing 403 million dollars domestically and 413 million overseas, including 56 million in Japan and 5 million in India (the top grossing foreign film in India; by comparison, the top grossing Hindi film of 2002, Devdas, made 25 million).17 Spider-Man had already been a well-known commercial product in India as a comic book character and television cartoon figure before the blockbuster film.18 But creating an Indian storyline for SpiderMan was a novel idea. Spider-Man India was published just prior to the release of Spider-Man 2 (2004).19 The film opened up a new possibility of global commerce and marketing—a comic book miniseries that could appeal to the Indian diaspora and a general American readership as well as promote the sequel to the first film.

Interrogating the transcreation of Spider-Man India By describing Spider-Man India as a transcreation rather than a translation, cocreator Sharad Devarajan indicated that he wanted to write an origin story that stayed true to the ideals of Spider-Man as a common man but that he also wanted to infuse him with Indian cultural markers in order to turn him into an Indian figure rather than merely translate an American to an Indian environment. The essence of his character is rooted in qualities that are not tied to a specific American political agenda and thus can be translated into a global urban narrative. While globalization breaks down national boundaries and identities, the attempt to write local “Indian” identity might instead promote the exotic and highly marketable Orientalized product of the East. Suchitra

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Mathur suggests that, in the 1980s, Indian comic book creator Sanjay Gupta created his Hindi comic book series and title character Nagraj (“Snake King” in English) by combining elements of the Spider-Man mythology with local Indian mythology.20 Nagraj shares similar powers with Spider-Man, such as a “sixth sense” and exploding snakes from his arms (instead of webbing), but his character is derived from snake lore and Indian mythology. However, despite the similarities, Mathur believes that the Nagraj comics represent “a negotiation between containment and resistance in an India where growing U.S. influence through a ‘liberalized’ consumerist economy co-exists with a resurgent militant nationalism allied to Hindu fundamentalism.”21 She concludes that Nagraj represents the emergence of a local Indian superhero aesthetic that counters other Indian narratives that only seem to copy American templates. I would argue that Spider-Man India also attempts to incorporate the local element by refashioning the American story for an English-speaking audience and further represents a venture that includes Indians and Indian Americans as creators as well as consumers of global products. While we cannot ignore that the narrative represents global hierarchies of power such as the privileged depiction of the wealthy Westernized Indian students compared to the poor country boy Pavitr Prabhakar, Spider-Man India utilizes an alternative strategy to bring together global interests and local markets. In her study of the marketing of Indian Barbie, Inderpal Grewal points out that corporate surveys of the consumer market in the 1990s suggested marketing strategies based on the recognition of global and national brands rather than class or caste, family status, or employment.22 More significantly, products were valued if they were identified with America, so in the process of translating and adapting an item for the Indian market, it still had to keep some of the elements that made it “American.”23 Grewal further notes that Indian Barbie was manufactured as a fair-skinned American Barbie with Indian clothes rather than a dark-skinned doll and thus reinforced Western standards of beauty and fashion. In the case of Spider-Man India, it is the familiar costumed hero who is an American product rather than the individual underneath the mask. To make the hero Indian is not necessarily to make the man underneath racially Indian but instead to change the costume so that it represents India. The visual image of Spider-Man India walks the fine line between a straight translation of an American product and the transcreation of a story that reflects a more complex cultural exchange. On the surface, it might seem that Spider-Man India, not unlike Indian Barbie, is just the fair-skinned American version with Indian accents.24 The series begins

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with Spider-Man India’s origin story, which is more or less similar to the original Spider-Man narrative. In the Indian version, the teenager Pavitr Prabhakar lives with his uncle Bhim and his Aunt Maya. The names are phonetically similar but culturally distinct from those of Peter Parker, Uncle Ben, and Aunt May. Other textual differences designed to specifically reference Indian life and culture include Hindi slang and euphemisms in the dialogue (e.g. bhaijan or naming popular Indian Bollywood film stars like Shahrukh Khan) as well as stories featuring cricket rather than football as the exclusive high school team sport. Thus, even though the names are Indian, the story at first glance appears to be a literal translation of the American story rather than the transcreative product promised by Devarajan. However, the series revisions the working-class American backstory of Peter Parker and replaces it with an Indian story of class differences that foregrounds the unequal power relations between the rural and small towns of India and the cosmopolitan city environment. The local narrative in this series emerges as a class conflict where rural traditional India is contrasted with the urban center of capitalism. The family has moved from their village to Mumbai (the financial and film industry capital of India) so that Pavitr can attend an exclusive private school on a scholarship. Their move is motivated by the desire to give Pavitr a better education, including learning English and being exposed to Western culture. His classmates are wealthy Indians who wear designer clothes and are conversant in American culture. Ironically, they are the target Indian consumer audience for the SpiderMan films and the comic book Spider-Man India. They make fun of Pavitr’s provincial garb, calling him “dhoti-boy” and “village idiot.” US-influenced culture is not contrasted with a militant nationalism but with a rural village community, which is visually absent from the book and instead embodied by Pavitr. The only sympathetic student is Meera Jain (his future love interest), who discloses to Pavitr that she also was once teased because of her nonWestern clothing. By representing how the characters deal with the pressures of conflicting cultural and global influences, the series rewrites the Spider-Man story and upsets its power dynamics because the Westernized characters are not necessarily the positive ones. Pavitr’s challenge (before he becomes Spider-Man India) is to navigate the real world of inequality where the only means of success is to accept the established hierarchies, which, in this case, means becoming part of the Westernized crowd or being an outsider. The initial drawings and appearance of Spider-Man India also appear to establish the character as Indian by rendering him in juxtaposition to Indian images. While the American Spider-Man is associated with the architecture of

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Figure 8.1  Cover image from the second issue of Spider-Man India by Jeevan J. Kang, Suresh Seetharaman, and Sharad Devarajan (Gotham Entertainment Group/Marvel Entertainment). Used with permission.

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New York City and national landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State building, Ellis Island, and the Brooklyn Bridge, the city of Mumbai (in American culture) does not necessarily teem with recognizable landmarks. For Indians and members of the South Asian diaspora, the artists include some familiar sites such as the Queen’s Necklace (ocean skyline view of the city from downtown) and the Gateway of India. Although the four installments do feature some local sites, the series tends to illustrate internationally recognized images of India. The cover of the second issue features Spider-Man in front of the Taj Mahal even though he is in the western coastal city of Mumbai and not in the northern city of Agra (see Figure 8.1). Placing Spider-Man at the Taj Mahal is indicative of the difficulties of presenting visual signifiers that would mark Spider-Man as Indian. It also highlights the imbalance between the powers of American iconography and Indian iconography in this transcultural product as well as the limits of transcreation to promote a more hybrid vision. In order to market Spider-Man India as Indian, the art needs to reflect what a mass global population consumes as Indian (the Taj Mahal, for instance), and the result is that images tend toward Western stereotypes of Indians. The artwork is evocative, but it tends to be dark and favors murky cityscapes. We do not see any rural landscapes, urban slums, or typical Indian markets. Spider-Man India, even as a newcomer to the city, would be more familiar with these areas than the Gateway of India. The city of Mumbai is portrayed as one of the centers of a Westernized consumer culture that fosters the development of global industrial and manufacturing corporations such as the powerful Oberoi Group. However, despite these shortcomings, Spider-Man India goes farther than merely marketing an American Spider-Man in India. The process of transcreation does not require dismissing American influences but instead calls for a retailoring of the narrative to engage with issues in the local environment. One of the ways this is achieved beyond the surface illustrations is through reimagining the origins of Spider-Man India’s powers and through linking these origins to Indian epic mythology rather than American science and technology.

The problematic transcreation of heroic origins While fleeing from a group of high school bullies, Pavitr is suddenly chosen by a mystical yogi to be the force of good in the battle between gods and demons. He is proclaimed a replacement for the “avatar of the gods” and given the power of a spider that “weaves the intangible web of life.” The yogi tells Pavitr: “The universe

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grants you this power and the necessary knowledge to use it. This is your destiny Pavitr . . . rise to the challenge and fulfill your karma.”25 Instead of a random bite from a radioactive spider, Pavitr’s powers are bestowed much more deliberately: It is his karmic destiny to be linked to a larger cosmic history. He undergoes a physical transformation that includes being given a masked costume. As someone who is chosen by the gods, his destiny taps into a larger narrative of superhero mythology. Richard Reynolds has argued that American comics often legitimize superheroes by borrowing liberally from mythic gods and legendary heroes. He has pointed out, for instance, that Marvel’s character Thor “is not an especially familiar character in contemporary Western culture. (Marvel Comics have made him and the whole Norse pantheon, intelligible to a whole new audience.)”26 The success of Thor hinged on linking Norse mythology to some of the core features of the superhero story that not only include character histories such as the lost or absent parents but, most importantly, the idea that science is magic. Reynolds asserts that this aspect is “fundamental to the nature of the universe which the superhero comic portrays. Science is treated as a special form of magic, capable of good and evil.”27 Spider-Man India opens up an alternative mythological narrative to Greek, Roman, and Norse traditions. In the process, it develops new character arcs and battles that revise key characteristics of the superhero genre. By changing the origins of the powers, rather than their nature, the series reframes the character and makes him Indian. For Spider-Man India, the drive to be heroic is linked to being part of a long and ancient history that eclipses the obsession with money and materialism in the present. The transcreative process fosters a connection that looms larger than the individual, speaks to a globalized way of thinking, and yet remains relevant to Indian culture in particular. A hero who is part of a karmic destiny and has a connection to a mythic history that transcends geographic and temporal boundaries replaces the antiauthoritarian attitude and independent nature that characterizes the American Spider-Man. The series incorporates elements of Indian mythology, including villains who are reincarnated demons and mystical yogis or wise men who find local heroes in the modern world to take on the challenge of an epic battle against “despots of malevolence.”28 Pavitr has become part of a larger cycle, and he is the latest avatar though not necessarily the last in this battle. The villains in the story are associated with corporate industrialization; like the original Spider-Man, Pavitr fights for the underprivileged and rural people who do not have the money or strength to speak to power. The villains are scientists and entrepreneurs in both versions of the story (the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus), but in the

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Indian version, they are artistically rendered as demons (rakshasas) trying to release evil into the world. It is not necessarily their exposure to Western culture that makes them evil, even though economic greed does influence them. Nalin Oberoi (Norman Osbourne) is overcome by evil through a magic amulet, and he transforms a doctor into Doctor Octopus. A favorable reading of Spider-Man India’s transcreative efforts might argue that the comic book presents a new hero who draws its roots from Indian mythology. In an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air in 2005, Devarajan said that he deviated from the 1960s origin story because he felt the original story focused on the interaction of men with science, technology, and atomic power. For the Indian version, he wanted the debate to be about how modern men relate to Indian spirituality and Indian mythology.29 In that sense, the series’ artwork does bring to life the hybrid vision of a transcreative process in the depiction of the ordinary and extraordinary characters, such as the careworn face of Uncle Bhim and the demonic transformation of Nalin Oberoi. The illustrations of demons are colorful, detailed, and steeped in Indian mythological representations. They create an alternative aesthetic vision of the supervillain. Spider-Man India, however, is not related to any wider narrative of Indian deities, and therein lie the limitations of using this series as an example of comic book transcreation. Although there are many gods with animal avatars and powers to choose from in the Indian pantheon, the spider figure does not have a historical connection to Indian stories. Devarajan, in his attempt to revise the story, was, in fact, subscribing (perhaps unknowingly) to a larger narrative in the comic book superhero genre that had been mapped out about the relationship between magic and science. Spider-Man India does succeed in introducing a mythic Indian narrative to new audiences, but unlike the Thor series or the Indian Nagraj series and instead of using local or Indian gods, the story is bound by the script of the original Spider-Man narrative. The powers or lore of the spider do not evoke Indian culture in either India or the United States. It is a cultural myth that translates as American and is difficult to transform into a transcultural comic. In addition, by relying on the mythic and magical elements of the story to emphasize the big change and local contribution to the story, the comic neglects the cultural norms of everyday life that make Spider-Man such a transcendent character. The setting of Mumbai presents ample opportunities to discuss local issues such as how the desire to obtain a good education is complicated in an Indian system that has caste quotas and intense admissions competitions or how living in an environment with diverse languages and religions might influence a superhero. While the beginning of the story tries to tackle some of these issues, it

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quickly becomes a rather simple narrative about class and rural-urban conflicts. And yet despite the inability of the transcreative process to transcend the original story of Spider-Man and create a new hybrid character, the idea of transcreation as a business strategy to develop and create new markets continues to thrive in the comics industry. Spider-Man India emerged out of a specific global media event and was one of the most widely recognized transnational ventures in the industry, and it will surely not be the last one.

Conclusion Gotham Entertainment Group coined the term “transcreation” as an explanation for how they envisioned submitting an internationally marketed American superhero such as Spider-Man to a “reverse type of globalization” that emphasizes the Asian local in the American-dominated global world in the comics industry.30 Any such cultural translation is subject to cultural imperialism and power differentials creating hierarchies of influence that privilege Western culture as the desired norm and Eastern culture as exotic and in opposition to the West. The act of transcreation attempts to change the power differentials of cultural exchange by deliberately reframing American national icons and images as Indian ones and introducing new heroes into the Indian and American lexicon. Spider-Man India is an example of a transnational product that examines global exchanges through the idea of cultural performance. The development of the Spider-Man India series as a transcreative product shows the limitations of working with an established icon because the creators were bound by the dictates of American narratives and conventions of storytelling in the development of the language and the plot. However, the series also opened up the possibility of creating new venues in the form of graphic narratives that pave the way for creative hybrid projects that challenge visual and narrative studies and translations of culture. Although Spider-Man India appeared in only four issues, Sharad Devarajan and his cocreators decided that developing and marketing comics rooted in Indian culture and mythology was an important venture. Instead of trying to translate or transcreate other American heroes, they decided to reenvision Indian heroes for a contemporary audience and advertise them to consumers of Indian and multicultural goods. In 2006, Devarajan teamed with British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson and Virgin with backing from Deepak Chopra and others to form Virgin Comics, which became Liquid Comics in 2008, a company devoted to stories derived from India but marketed to a global audience. The

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company created new series with transnational writers from India, Japan, and other Asian countries that feature mythological characters, spiritual tales, and original stories drawn from Indian mythology. Liquid Comics collaborates with film directors in the hopes of launching visual media productions in television that continue to reconfigure the image of India and further disseminate Indian stories. Many of the most successful books emphasize a religious mythology, but as we have seen in the comics industry, perhaps some interesting crossovers will occur.31

Notes   1 The miniseries was released first; in 2005, it appeared in graphic novel format as a trade paperback. An earlier version of this chapter, “Spider-Man India: Comic Books and Changing American Mythologies of Heroism,” was presented at the American Studies Association Meeting in San Antonio, Texas, on November 20, 2010. I want to thank the audience members for their comments and the editors, Shane Denson, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein, for their engagement with my ideas and their insightful suggestions.   2 For analysis of Batman Incorporated, see the chapter by Katharina Bieloch and Sharif Bitar (Chapter 7) in this volume.   3 Jenkins 24.   4 Jenkins 35.   5 Cf. Duggan xii–xvii. Social and political movements in the 1960s (Civil Rights, Gay Rights, Third World movements, and Women’s Rights) recognized the connections and relations between economic flows and cultural moments. Duggan identifies the 1980s as the moment when the discourse of culture was divided from economics.   6 Grewal 2.   7 Cf. Lenz 4.   8 Lenz 4.   9 Cf. Lenz 4. 10 Qtd in Saffell 265. On Japanese transcreations of Spider-Man, see Daniel Stein’s chapter (Chapter 9) in this volume. 11 Cf. Simon and Simon 184. Spider-Man first appeared in Amazing Fantasy #15 in 1962. This was the last issue of the Amazing Fantasy series. 12 Lee 6. 13 Newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson of the Daily Bugle constantly creates sensationalist headlines that depict the wall crawler as a public menace. Even Peter Parker’s own aunt, Aunt May, is not a big fan of Spider-Man. 14 Cf. Wright 212.

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15 One of the previews of the film featured Spider-Man swinging past the World Trade Towers and trapping a helicopter between the towers. After the 9/11 attacks, the studio pulled the preview and edited the scene in the film. 16 The trials and tribulations of Spider-Man the Musical could not prevent the popularity of the show. Despite going over budget, bad reviews, and losing creative director Julie Taymor, the musical opened on Broadway in the spring of 2011. 17 For Spider-Man figures, see BoxOfficeMojo.com; for Hindi films, see BoxOfficeIndia.com. The Indian figures for Hindi films are in Rupees and were calculated with Rs45 to $1 ratio. 18 Indian comic book houses Diamond Comics and Indrajal Comics were publishing American comics featuring Superman and Spider-Man from the 1960s in English and sometimes translated into Hindi (cf. Mathur 170). 19 The film grossed 373 million dollars domestically and 410 million internationally (60 million in Japan and 7 million in India). The blockbuster Hindi film that year was Veer Zaara (22 million). 20 Nagraj first ran from 1986–95 and was published by Raj Comics. Currently, Raj Comics is one of the largest publishers of Hindi comics. For more on Indian comics, see McLain; Rao; Sreenivas; on Spider-Man India, see O’Rourke and Rodrigues. 21 Mathur 173. 22 Cf. Grewal 96 23 Cf. Grewal 97. 24 In “Apu’s Brown Voice,” I discuss how Indian accents are physical and vocal characteristics that can be consumed or adopted and that evoke racial and cultural difference while not threatening core American values. 25 Kang et al., Spider-Man India 8. 26 Reynolds 57. 27 Reynolds 16. 28 Kang et al., Spider-Man India 10. 29 Cf. Devarajan, radio interview. 30 Devarajan, radio interview. 31 See, for instance, the work of Indian groups such as PAO, a Delhi-based independent group, and ACK, the online division of Amar Chitra Katha. See also publications such as Sarnath Banerjee’s graphic novel Corridor (2005).

Works cited Davé, Shilpa. “Apu’s Brown Voice: Cultural Inflection and South Asian Accents.” In East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture. Ed. Shilpa Davé, LeiLani Nishime, and Tasha Oren. New York: New York University Press, 2005. 313–36. Devarajan, Sharad. “Men in Tights.” Radio interview. NPR Fresh Air WHYY. Jan. 6, 2005.

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Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004. Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Jenkins, Henry. “‘Just Men in Tights’: Rewriting Silver Age Comics in an Era of Multiplicity.” In The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero. Ed. Angela Ndalianis. New York: Routledge, 2009. 16–43. Kang Jeevan J., Suresh Seetharaman, and Sharad Devarajan. Spider-Man India. Bangalore/New York: Gotham Entertainment Group/Marvel Entertainment, 2004. Lee, Stan. “Introduction.” Spider-Man the Icon: The Life and Times of Pop Culture Phenomena. By Steve Saffell. London: Titan, 2007. 1–8. Lenz, Günter H. “Redefinitions of Citizenship and Revisions of Cosmopolitanism Challenges of Transnational Perspectives.” Symposium: Redefinitions of Citizenship and Revisions of Cosmopolitanism—Transnational Perspectives. Journal of Transnational American Studies 3.1 (2011): 4–17. . Mathur, Suchitra. “From Capes to Snakes: The Indianization of the American Superhero.” In Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives. Ed. Mark Berninger, Jochen Ecke, and Gideon Haberkorn. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010. 169–80. McLain, Karline. India’s Immortal Comic Books: Gods, Kings, and Other Heroes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. O’Rourke, Dan, and Pravin A. Rodrigues. “The ‘Transcreation’ of a Mediated Myth: Spider-Man in India.” In The Amazing Transforming Superhero! Essays on the Revision of Characters in Comic Books, Film and Television. Ed. Terence R. Wandtke. Jefferson: McFarland, 2007. 112–28. Rao, Aruna. “From Self-Knowledge to Super Heroes: The Story of Indian Comics.” In Illustrating Asia: Comics, Humor Magazines, and Picture Books. Ed. John A. Lent. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001. 37–63. Reynolds, Richard. Superheroes: A Modern Mythology. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. Saffell, Steve. Spider-Man the Icon: The Life and Times of a Pop Culture Phenomenon. London: Titan, 2007. Simon, Joe, and Jim Simon. The Comic Book Makers. 1990. Lebanon: Vanguard, 2003. Sreenivas, Deepa. Sculpting a Middle Class: History, Masculinity and the Amar Chitra Katha in India. New York: Routledge, 2010. Wright, Bradford. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

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Of Transcreations and Transpacific Adaptations: Investigating Manga Versions of Spider-Man Daniel Stein

Assessing the global spread of Japanese popular culture, Koichi Iwabuchi distinguishes between “culturally odorless” products that carry only little “cultural imprint of the producing country” and products with a “cultural odor” that retain “cultural features of a country of origin and images or ideas of its national, in most cases stereotyped, way of life.” Once the cultural associations of a specific product are valued for their distinctiveness, he suggests, “the cultural odor [. . .] becomes a ‘fragrance’—a socially and culturally accepted smell.”1 These observations provide the conceptual framework for my investigation of transnational adaptations and transpacific transcreations of American Spider-Man comics into Japanese manga and their subsequent readaptation into American formats. The term “transcreation” was introduced by the creators of the four-issue miniseries Spider-Man India, published simultaneously in India and the United States in 2004, who described their retelling of the American Spider-Man tale as follows: “It is one thing to translate existing American comics into local languages, but this project is truly what we call a transcreation—where we actually reinvent the origin of a character like Spider-Man so that he is an Indian boy growing up in Mumbai and dealing with local problems and challenges.” The idea was “to make an international hero also become a local hero.”2 Focusing on Ryoichi Ikegami’s Spider-Man the Manga (1970–1/1997–9), Yamanaka Akira’s Spider-Man J (2004–5/2008–9), and Marvel’s Mangaverse version of Spider-Man (Kaare Andrews, 2002–3), this chapter traces the multidirectional cultural flow between American superhero comics and various Japanese manga transcreations. The first two of these Spider-Man manga

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(Ikegami and Akira) were created and first published in Japan before they were translated, reworked, and then published in the United States, while Spider-Man Mangaverse was designed to capitalize on the manga boom of the early 2000s by implementing American(ized) manga superheroes. As I will argue in the following, the story of Spider-Man transcreations and transpacific adaptations represents neither a teleological movement from locally resistant adaptations to a globally marketable and transnational hybrid style nor an extended moment of cultural imperialism during which American superhero comics would take over the Japanese market or Japanese superhero manga would come to dominate the production of superhero comics in the United States. Rather, the story illustrates the prevalence of transnational negotiations and transformations that subject popular serial narratives to endless circulation and cause them to bounce continually across national comics styles and storytelling traditions.3

Ryoichi Ikegami: Spider-Man the Manga The history of Marvel’s “basic commitment to put Marvel Comics in the Orient” is a complicated one, and it was addressed at length in issue #22 of the company’s pro-zine FOOM (Friends of Ol’ Marvel), published in the fall of 1978.4 The issue features an interview with Gene Pelc, who was working in the licensing department of Cadence Publishing, Marvel’s parent company at the time. Inspired by the popularity of American cultural products in Japan, Pelc set out to convince Japanese publishers to translate and sell Marvel comics. Yet, translations of Spider-Man, even when adapted to the manga reading order (back to front, right to left), failed to secure a broad readership: “We prepared all the work here and we flopped it. [. . .] So, a Japanese person could read it—with some difficulty, because the styles are different.” But “something was wrong. Something was not translating or coming across.” Assuming that he was dealing with a “cultural gap” that was difficult to bridge, Pelc suggested indigenously produced transnational adaptations that would “expand on the character from a Japanese viewpoint” as a viable solution.5 Ryoichi Ikegami’s Spider-Man the Manga is such a transnational adaptation. As such, it exemplifies a process through which an international superhero is transformed into a transnational character: not simply an American creation received by audiences around the world, but a character revised and reimagined in a specific national context, narrative tradition, and graphic style. The series appeared in the wake of an earlier, largely unsuccessful, attempt to establish

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American superhero comics in the Japanese market: Jiro Kuwata’s Bat-Manga, which had appeared in Shonen King and Shonen Gako between April 1966 and May 1967.6 Ikegami’s Spider-Man the Manga ran from January 1970 to September 1971 in monthly installments in Shonen magazine, and it can be read as a transpacific transcreation avant la lettre. Ikegami took basic elements of Spider-Man’s origin story and Peter Parker’s social life and placed them into a largely Japanese world. His transcreative revisions begin with the protagonist, who is named Yu Komori, and not Peter Parker, and whose facial features are rendered in the conventional manga style (and are thus at least superficially connoted as ethnically Japanese). Like his American counterpart, Yu attains his superpowers through the bite of a radioactive spider, yet this accident does not take place during a school trip to a science exhibit, but in his school laboratory, where he is experimenting with radioactive power in preparation for an upcoming exam. In that sense, it is not the clumsiness of a geek but the ambition of a master student that causes his transformation into a superhero—a difference that signals diverging attitudes toward public education in the United States and Japan in the early 1970s. The cast of characters surrounding Yu partially recreates Peter Parker’s social world: Aunt May is Aunt Mei, the notorious newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson edits a Japanese newspaper, and the hero’s girlfriend Mary Jane Watson is supplanted with the pen pal Rumiko Shiraishi. Only his Uncle Ben is absent. Moreover, Peter Parker’s adolescent hubris is replaced by Yu’s profound fear of his own superpowers. After a horrific dream about wreaking havoc and killing people in traffic-congested Tokyo, Yu realizes: “In this world, we have to learn to control our anger and lust. .  .  . There are some things you just can’t do.”7 This realization is generally in keeping with Peter’s understanding that “with great power there must also come—great responsibility,” but it refocuses this understanding from a republican discourse of personal sacrifice for the good of the community to a discourse of (super)humans as inherently monstrous and fearful figures whose violent urges threaten the destruction of society.8 Ikegami made efforts to construct a transcultural bridge between American comic book storytelling and the Japanese manga tradition.9 Spider-Man the Manga progressed at a slower narrative pace than most action-packed American superhero comics; it adhered to the cartoonish depiction of faces and the disproportionate body sizes typical of contemporary manga, employed silent panels with greater frequency, repeatedly used slapstick scenes, relied on a greater variety of unusual panel shapes and sizes as well as many establishing shots (splash panels) that depict the setting as distinctly Japanese (mainly Tokyo). Despite the new setting, the transnational nature of this manga adaptation frequently

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becomes explicit, such as when Yu remarks about his costume in the first issue: “I’m not Super Man. . . . But I made myself a costume.” This costume is not a perfect fit, and assembling it was a tough task: “I didn’t know how difficult . . . sewing was until . . . I made this costume! I could have had my aunt make me a better costume . . . but I don’t want anybody to know about this. [. . .] Anyway . . . when I put this costume on, I feel like I become a different person.”10 These reflections are integral to the intradiegetic story; they characterize Yu as a teenager not unlike Peter Parker, whose clandestine assemblage of costume and webshooters reveal him as a new type of superhero: a superhero much more closely aligned with the everyday lives and problems of his audience than Superman or Batman. But we also witness the adaptation of existing superhero material that is twice removed from the first appearance of American superheroes in the late 1930s. If Marvel had reenergized the superhero genre with its introduction of flawed heroes with mundane problems in the early 1960s, then Ikegami’s Spider-Man may be said to adapt the formula to a new cultural context. This double remove is suggested in the recap segment in issue #2, which recalls that Yu had “adopted the guise of the amazing Spider-Man” in the previous issue, indicating that Yu became Spider-Man by attaining superpowers and putting on his costume but also insinuating that the Japanese protagonist takes on—and takes over—the identity of his American model.11 Significantly, such takeovers are not just typical of the superhero genre in general; they are also frequently thematized on the story level. Indeed, superhero imposters appear regularly in American comic books and, as such, acknowledge the superhero figure’s tendency to proliferate across stories, series, genres, and media. These imposters therefore represent an intradiegetic way of accounting for—and also potentially defusing—such competing proliferations. Spider-Man the Manga also follows this logic; in issue #30, for instance, Yu is faced with a fake Spider-Man who uses his superpowers for a personal vendetta rather than the common good.12 While differences between the American Spider-Man and his transcreated manga version are frequently a matter of degree rather than principle—such as when Ikegami abandons the superhero plot for several issues to focus on Yu’s social life in school (issues #16–#17) or when he invents mythical figures whose backstories cater to specifically Japanese contexts (issue #24)—other stories are particularly pertinent in the context of transpacific relations. One such story features the American George Midoro (issues #19–#21). Midoro rides his Harley around the streets of Tokyo and eventually goes on a rampage during which he shoots a policeman before taking Yu and his friends hostage. He then hijacks an airplane, shoots several more people, and finally threatens to crash the plane.

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Thanks to Spider-Man, Midoro is stopped, and the plane can land safely. As such, the story does not diverge too much from American comic book stories, perhaps with the exception of its graphic depiction of violence and bloodshed. The significant difference appears on the final four pages, where the readers learn what had driven Midoro to his rampage: The Vietnam War. . . . A battlefield of death and destruction. George Midoro, American. Private first class. He spent four long years in that living hell, and when it ended, he was reassigned to the Iwakuni base here in Japan. He was one of the many U.S. soldiers stationed here. Today, the war returned to Private Midoro. He started reliving it in his mind [. . .]. He didn’t want to go back to the uncertainty, not knowing if he was going to kill or be killed in the war. So . . . he looked at us and. . . .

This both personal and national history contextualizes a plea voiced earlier in the story by a doctor, who had asked: “What have we ever done to you? We’re simple Japanese people who just want to lead normal, happy lives!”13 Passages such as these offer a complex transnational subtext to the American superhero narrative, a subtext that includes the graphic depiction of US fighter planes over Vietnam and a large group of Vietnamese inspecting a long line of dead bodies. Years before Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986/1991) introduced similar images of Holocaust victims into the field of Western comic books and before Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen (1973–85) depicted the devastation of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Ikegami visualizes the horrors of war. And he does so in an expressly transnational vein: America’s bombing of the Vietnamese evokes a significant connection among Asian countries—here Vietnam and Japan— whose people look back on a shared experience of American aerial warfare. Yu’s thoughts emphasize this connection when he identifies the Asianness of the Japanese as the impulse that had triggered Midori’s rampage (“he looked at us”). Thus, the manga suggests an uneasy alliance between the continued presence of American soldiers in Japan (at the actual airbase Iwakuni) and the aggressive attempts of American comics publishers to establish a commercial presence on the Japanese comics market. Interpreting this alliance of military and cultural forms as examples of US imperialism would probably go too far, but the ambivalence toward the arrival of American superhero comics expressed in this storyline of Spider-Man the Manga should not be underestimated. Spider-Man the Manga had its original reception in Japan, followed by a secondary reception when it was republished in adapted form in the United States (1997–9). Its Japanese reception was less than stellar, and it seems that the

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reasons were not just cultural, but also political, as its ambivalence concerning the American (military) presence in Japan suggests. The series did not create any lasting interest in American superhero comics. Ikegami recalls: I created an original main character named “Yu Komori” and tried to integrate him into the American story, but that didn’t go over too well with the Japanese readers. The editors finally decided to ask the Japanese science fiction writer Kazumasa Hirai to write scripts for us, creating a story more tailored to a Japanese audience. The popularity picked up a little after that, but as a series, it never really became a big success.14

In the mid-1990s, however, Spider-Man the Manga was republished with new covers in Japan and shortly afterwards in the United States, where its appearance came in the wake of the first wave of manga publications and anime films such as Osomo Katsuhiro’s cyberpunk Akira (1988).15 What is more, two of Ikegami’s later works, Mai the Psychic Girl (Eclipse/Viz Communications, 1987) and Crying Freeman (Viz Communications, 1989–94), appeared around the same time as Spider-Man the Manga. As series that moved away from the superhero genre and possessed a visual style that the editor of Eclipse Comics, Letitia Glozer, described as “[not] too Japanese or too American,” they found an American readership interested in this still largely unknown style of comics storytelling.16 Spider-Man the Manga was sufficiently different from its American sources that the editor of the translated and flopped American version, Tom Brevoort, raised questions of transcultural transformation in an afterword to the first American issue. Brevoort begins by anticipating reader feedback and then addresses the tension between original creation and the process of transcultural cloning: So what’s all this about Spider-Man Manga? Where’d this strange thing come from, and why’s it so different from the Spidey we know and love? Why didn’t Marvel Comics just translate the American Spidey comics into Japanese, rather than creating a whole new strip? And why, why, why isn’t this Spider-Man Peter Parker—who’s this Yu Komori, another clone?

Writing in 1997, Brevoort further proclaims the global appeal of Marvel comics and notes that their worldwide translation and circulation was now a firmly established business practice. Yet, as he also acknowledged, “when we attempted to expand into the lucrative Japanese comics market in the mid 1970s, we met with difficulty.” Brevoort then suggests that what had failed in the 1970s could now work as part of the increasing transcultural flow of comics styles and

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stories: “Today [.  .  .] there are a number of American Marvel comics which are routinely translated into Japanese for that audience—the cultural barriers between storytelling techniques gradually eroding away—just as today there are dozens of Japanese manga imported to America.”17 Published in the United States before manga became the mainstream phenomenon it is today, the Americanized version of Spider-Man the Manga used various indigenization strategies. One such strategy was keeping the Japanese covers while announcing the series’ transpacific origins prominently. These covers both exoticize and familiarize the manga for an American readership acquainted but in many cases not yet intimately familiar with manga storytelling. They acknowledge the comic’s status as a transnational hybrid by printing Ikegami’s name both in kanji and in Roman letters and also casting the iconic Spider-Man logo in kanji-looking Roman font. They further carry a “Marvel Imports” label and present the series as “the daringly different origin of the Japanese wall-crawler” and as “[t]ranslated from the Manga series by the internationally acclaimed artist Ryoichi Ikegami.”18 Within the manga, signs and sayings are occasionally left in the original kanji and are translated in footnotes. Most obviously, however, the reading order of these stories is reversed (all pages are flopped) so as to comply with Western reading habits. Spider-Man the Manga was not too successful in the United States. After 31 issues, publication was suspended in mid-series (issue #31 ends with “to be continued”), and the run was never completed. As I have suggested, its belated translation and American reception followed the popularity of a small number of anime productions and manga series that preceded the mainstream reception of manga in the United States. Its failure to see complete publication despite its various indigenization strategies should, however, not distract us from an increasing interest in manga versions of Spider-Man and other superheroes that manifested itself, within a little over a decade, in a number of manga adaptations of American superheroes. These adaptations included both Japanese productions translated and readapted for the American market, such as Kia Asamiya’s Batman: Child of Dreams (2000–1/2003) and Yamanaka Akira’s Spider-Man J (2004–5/2008–9), as well as comic books that were produced in the United States but made use of the manga style, such as Marvel’s Mangaverse line (2000–3). Furthermore, they included transnational cooperations like Yoshinori Nastume’s graphic novel Batman: Death Mask (2008), which was written and drawn by a Japanese mangaka but was commissioned for a Western audience and overseen by American editors.19

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Yamanaka Akira: Spider-Man J Yamanaka Akira’s Spider-Man J ran from November 2004 to May 2005 in the Japanese Comic Bom Bom magazine and was issued as an American adaptation first as part of Marvel’s Spider-Man Family series (#1–12, 2008–9) and then in two anthologies, Japanese Knights (2008) and Japanese Daze (2009).20 Both anthologies carry credit information that acknowledges the adaptation process (named are the original writer and artist, the translator, and the English adaptor, among others), and they are introduced by a brief announcement that foregrounds their global appeal: “Each corner of the globe has its own unique take on the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN! Direct from Japan, Marvel is proud to present. . . .” In fact, the titles of the anthologies, Japanese Knights and Japanese Daze, as well as the rebranding of Spider-Man into Spider-Man J already announce the texts’ status as a cultural import. The covers depict manga-style scenes from the stories (black-and-white drawings, massive motion lines, snippets of kanji) and feature Spider-Man J and his close friend Detective Flynn (a character original to this series) as quintessential manga figures with smallish physical frames, youthful facial features, and the typical oversized eyes. What is more, the back covers pitch these products as trendy imports (“Fresh from Japan”) that were “[o]riginally only published in Japan” but are now “collected for the first time in America and translated for your reading pleasure.” Apart from this suggestion of exclusivity, which clearly seeks to appeal to those appreciative of the manga aesthetic and repeats Marvel’s tried-and-true rhetoric of selflessly serving the desires of its readers, the back cover blurb gestures toward the existence of a potentially transnational fandom: “overseas, Spider-Man J enjoyed a large following of loyal readers. Now, fans here can enjoy Spidey’s manga-styled adventures, as well.” If editor Brevoort had still acknowledged the cultural barriers between American comic book storytelling and Ikegami’s Spider-Man the Manga adaptation in the 1990s and had pitched its US publication as the retroactive documentation of an ongoing process toward the popularity of Marvel superheroes in Japan, Spider-Man J openly promotes a global agenda of comic book production and consumption. This global agenda warrants a closer look at Spider-Man J’s visual aesthetics and storytelling techniques. In terms of its visual aesthetics, we find the manga-typical black-and-white line drawings and gray shading techniques; we also find the equally typical flexible use of panel shapes and page layouts as well as a characteristic mixture of different degrees of abstraction and caricature in single panels, where focal characters may be drawn in the already reduced manga

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style that concentrates on a small selection of specific facial features, whereas side characters and bystanders are rendered with an even greater degree of cartoonish abstraction, often consisting of only a few lines. Moreover, extended fight scenes (complete with excessive motion lines and stylized sound words) intersect with occasional goofy slapstick comedy, such as when Spider-Man J explains the law of inertia to Flynn and his explanation is accompanied by a hypercartoony instructional diagram of him falling off a skateboard and bumping his head against a wall. Finally, Akira uses a whole range of emotional icons familiar to readers of manga, such as huge sweat drops to indicate either fear or exertion, gaping mouths to express shock or surprise, and faces that morph into monsters to illustrate a character’s emotional state. In terms of storytelling techniques, Spider-Man J follows the common trajec­ tory of serial narration with individual story arcs extending over several episodes. Notably, the series largely aligns with the American Spider-Man’s backstory and characterization—without, however, inserting itself into the established Marvel continuity. The roster of villains includes versions of classic supercriminals like Dr Doom as well as science-fiction-inspired new creatures such as Lord Beastius, B-Warrior Tough Goraias, and Dragonfly. Among these new villains, it is especially the towering B-Warrior Tough Goraias who seems geared toward a Japanese audience. He looks like a manga version of the popular Transformer toys, and his Noh mask places him within the tradition of Japanese popular theater. Apart from science-fiction scenarios and references to popular theater, Spider-Man J employs themes that may be directed at a Japanese readership but would just as well have appealed to American audiences familiar with movie, television, and comic book representations of Japanese fighter figures. The Ninja theme of the “Enter .  .  . Elektra” episode, for instance, in which the mythical ninja hero Ka Mai U Soku Sai has left a scroll that is supposed to afford those who read it with the power to destroy all their enemies, would have resonated with popular culture-savvy American readers, some of whom might also have been familiar with the transnational backstory of Marvel’s Elektra (who is of Greek origin and acquired her Asian martial arts skills from a Japanese sensei). On the side of the superheroes, Spider-Man J is supported by the new sidekick Detective Flynn (a paternal figure less given to emotional outbursts and childish fantasies than Peter) and sometimes assisted by characters from the Marvel universe, Elektra and the Fantastic Four among them. Such team-up adventures have historically functioned as a means of uniting different series and their characters and storylines within an overarching fictional universe. They continue to serve as a means of inducing readers to purchase comic books they might not

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normally buy (i.e. when a favorite superhero migrates to another series for a team-up), and their narrative exploration of plotlines that may remain outside a character’s official serial continuity illustrates the transformative potential of the superhero figure across comic book series as well as comics traditions. In the case of Spider-Man J, team-ups foreground the transnational status of this manga adaptation and allow for a comparative reading that builds on the intertextual pleasures of seeing established American characters transported into a Japanese diegesis and storytelling mode. As the roster of villains and supporting superheroes illustrates, the character constellation of Spider-Man J neither simply reproduces the American cast nor completely reimagines it. We are dealing with an adaptation that only partially transcreates its source texts. To boot, at this point in the history of the superhero reception in Japan, no reintroduction of Spider-Man through a recap or revision of his origin story was necessary—at least, Spider-Man J does without one. While Uncle Ben, the moral center of Peter’s origin story, is never even mentioned, Spider-Man J has internalized the superhero’s eternal creed: “When you have powers like ours,” he reprimands Dragonfly, “you need to use them responsibly.”21 Other characters, above all Aunt May and Mary-Jane (here: Jane-Marie), also make appearances. Aunt May is a somewhat overbearing mother figure who frequently cuddles little Peter, while Jane-Marie is a friend but not yet a potential love interest. In fact, Peter is a small, preadolescent kid who still sleeps with stuffed animals and does not want to team up with the older and substantially more mature Elektra.22 He also misses his parents, who are alive (in contrast to the American continuity) and are doing research in America on a science project (the setting of Spider-Man J is present-day Japan, mostly Tokyo). It may not be too far-fetched to interpret Spider-Man J’s American parents as a diegetic acknowledgment of an American ancestry that also characterizes the manga’s intertextual and transnational indebtedness to the American Spider-Man comics. This is further underscored in a scene in which the Japanese Peter receives a present from his parents: an extremely tacky “I ♡ New York” jacket, which may be read as a self-reflexive joke about the Japanese fascination with American pop culture, a fascination on which Spider-Man J builds and which it simultaneously questions by endorsing a visual aesthetic that differs substantially from the American comics. The readaptation of Spider-Man J for the American market further illustrates its status as a transnational product. The pages are flipped so as to ensure the standard Western reading order (in some panels, this is still visible, for instance, when Roman letters are backwards). Yet, almost all of the signs in the diegetic

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world are kept in kanji lettering, as are all of the sound words. This is highly important because it renders the diegetic world a Japanese space that remains partially impenetrable for American readers. Especially the sound words tend to be all over the place; they play an integral part in specific panels and thus have verbal as well as visual functions. The same applies to the speech balloons, which were kept in their original shape (probably because reworking them would have entailed redrawing almost all panels) and thus are regularly too tall to accommodate Western left-to-right writing (as opposed to the Japanese top-to-bottom writing; the result is large patches of white space in these balloons). The American version of Spider-Man J thus retains much of its mangaspecific “odor,” appeals to readers interested in the culture-specific fragrances that Koichi Iwabuchi associates with products that have distinct cultural origins, and does not fully succumb to the “deodorization process” that Henry Jenkins finds at work in the mainstream promotion and marketing of globally palatable products of popular culture.23

Kaare Andrews: Spider-Man Mangaverse The Spider-Man Mangaverse five-volume miniseries, which appeared a few years before Spider-Man J (Mar. 2002–Apr. 2003), differs substantially from Akira’s manga. The miniseries was written by Kaare Andrews and was part of Marvel’s much publicized but short-lived Mangaverse line, which ran from 2000 to 2003 and was revived as the New Mangaverse between 2005 and 2006.24 In keeping with Marvel’s policy of incorporating the storyworlds of all of their superhero comics within an interconnected fictional multiverse (a policy from which transcreations such as Spider-Man the Manga and Spider-Man J were exempt), the Mangaverse stories take place in an alternate universe called Earth-2301. On the story level, Spider-Man Mangaverse offers little serious engagement with transnational and transcultural themes and, as such, does not do much in the way of transcreation. In fact, it largely recycles bits and pieces that readers would have known from some of the most popular Hollywood film franchises: Peter’s Uncle Ben is also his sensei and comes across as a curious mixture of Daniel LaRusso’s karate master Mr Miyagi in Karate Kid and Luke Skywalker’s Jedi teacher Yoda in the Star Wars movies. The final splash page in issue #5 depicts young Peter in Daniel’s iconographic karate kid pose; in addition, one of Spider-Man main opponents, the evil Venom, is actually Ben’s son; he was drawn to the dark side and thus “gave up the right to call him father,” as Peter insists

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in the first issue of the miniseries (the parallels to Darth Vader’s sinister career are obvious). Combined with the pseudo-hip high school setting and an overall anime look, these familiar pop culture references imply a preteen and teenage readership that is supposedly more open to this kind of superhero-manga mix than readers knowledgeable of the transnational history of American superhero comics and their Japanese adaptations into transcreated manga. Moreover, the story shows only superficial interest in Japanese culture. The plot pits good ninjas (the Spider-Clan) against bad ninjas (Baal’s Shadow of the Clan), but by the time Spider-Man Mangaverse appeared, ninjas in superhero comics had long ceased to be innovative—Frank Miller had already transplanted ninja figures into the superhero canon in Ronin (1983–4) and his work on Daredevil in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had been a mainstream phenomenon in the 1990s.25 Furthermore, the ninja presence is not made in any way plausible; readers are offered an adjusted origin story in which Peter attains his special powers from years of martial arts training, but his ninja heritage is never traced back to any transnational context. This origin story lacks any real justification for Ben’s obligatory final words, “remember . . . with that great power must come great responsibility.”26 Certainly, the preteenage Peter was a few minutes late to practice and was thus unable to prevent his sensei’s murder by Venom, but this comes across as a substantially weaker retelling of the initial origin story and does not reveal any deep character flaw that would render Peter a convincingly tragic—and convincingly transnational—character. Apart from a few general plot points, the majority of references to Japanese culture are visual, ranging from the manga influence on the iconography of the characters and the graphic design of individual panels to more or less superficial signifiers of a vaguely Japanese setting. These signifiers include the dojo in which Ben is murdered (it is also displayed prominently on the cover of the first issue, next to a group of skyscrapers), female servants to the sumo-wrestler look-alike Kingpin clad in kimonos and geta, Spider-Man’s weapons, a samurai sword in Peter’s home, as well as the ethnic Japanese facial features of Ben and Aunt May.27 The Spider-Man of this manga version is a much punier version than the Spider-Man of most ongoing regular series, and his visual rendition complies with many central elements of the manga style. This Spider-Man has a disproportionate physique, with a tiny body but oversized head, hands, and feet; his eyes, already prominent parts of the established mask, are oversized, as well; and his movements, especially during fight scenes, are highly stylized in a cartoonish manner that emphasizes the discrepancy between the size of his body, his strength of will and training, and the massive size of his opponents.

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Spider-Man Mangaverse employs additional features commonly associated with the manga style, for instance, frequent splash panels, extended fight scenes, and massive sounds words. However, a compelling case could be made that these features had already been absorbed into the visual arsenal of American comics creators at least since Jack Kirby and Frank Miller and then Todd McFarlane’s Spawn (since 1992) and that they might not necessarily have to be associated with manga specifically. In other words, the comic draws on various manga elements but subsumes them into an overall style that is frequently called “Amerimanga” and that uses manga simply as one more option on the palette of visual choices.28 Obviously, nothing had to be flopped in this American-produced comic book because it was written in the Western reading order from the outset. The conventional black-and-white reduction of Japanese manga is notably absent, as well, as the story is told in full color. Therefore, I would argue that Spider-Man Mangaverse exemplifies the absorption of selected stylistic elements from Japanese manga into the American comics mainstream, an absorption, however, that signifies a repatriation of cultural difference and allows American comics publishers to draw freely on comics styles from foreign national traditions in order to produce a popular product that actually transports very little distinct cultural flavor into this still largely American genre—and that deodorizes Japanese cultural odors to an extent that they remain traceable but faint.29 A single panel in the final issue of Spider-Man Mangaverse reinforces this point. It shows an exhausted Peter Parker wrapped in a Hello Kitty blanket. This image may be interpreted variously as a self-conscious reference to the comic’s indebtedness to Japanese visual culture— the trademarked Hello Kitty character is one of Japan’s most successful cultural exports and shares manga’s reduced cartoonish style—or as an allusion to the global marketability and spreadability of cultural artifacts that carry only the faintest traces of their countries of origin and are essentially received as global products.30

Conclusion The historical trajectory of the Spider-Man transcreations and transpacific adaptations I have sketched in this chapter is, of course, only a small segment of a much larger story about the globalization of popular culture. In fact, as many critics and commentators have pointed out, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between “American comics” and “Japanese manga”—so much so that

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Paul Gravett even endorses a particular notion of “world comics” when he writes: “As artists combine the genres from manga, Euro-comics, American comics and other sources, rather than forging a ‘universal’ style, they seem to be ushering in a post-imperialist, transnational culture of ‘World Comics.’”31 In fact, most major publishers of graphic narratives now operate as transnational corporations whose business practices are no longer defined by any close allegiance with their national origins or the country in which their headquarters is located. Indeed, manga are no longer just a Japanese export but are increasingly produced around the world by non-Japanese writers and artists, and their impact on the increasingly transnational fragrances of comic book superheroes is hard to deny.32 That this impact is substantial rather than marginal is nicely captured by the existence of drawing manuals such as Andy Smith’s Drawing American Manga Superheroes (2007), which teaches comics artists and those who want to break into the industry how to create transnationally hybrid manga superheroes.

Notes 1 Iwabuchi 27. 2 Devarajan, n.p. On Spider-Man India, see Shilpa Davé’s contribution (Chapter 8) to this volume. 3 This chapter is part of a book project that deals with the genre evolution of American superhero comics on a national and transnational scale. It is related to a joint research project (with Frank Kelleter) in the Research Unit “Popular Seriality—Aesthetics and Practice” (University of Göttingen; funded by the German Research Foundation). The aims and purposes of this project are outlined in Kelleter and Stein, “Autorisierungspraktiken.” For a companion piece to this chapter that examines Bat-manga adaptations, see Stein, “Popular Seriality.” 4 “Marvel’s Man in Japan” 13. 5 “Marvel’s Man in Japan” 14, 17. 6 For reprints of the strips, see Kidd et al. 7 Spider-Man the Manga #19, n.p. I cite from the American version of the series. 8 Lee and Ditko 19. 9 Any clear distinction between American comics and Japanese manga is bound to ignore the historical complexities that mark graphic narrative traditions as always already transnational. Manga were influenced by European and American sources from the late nineteenth century onwards. Bainbridge and Norris argue they “are already somewhat hybridized and therefore familiar to a globally dispersed audience” (241). Johnson-Woods speaks of a transnational flow that “goes both ways—in and out of Japan” (10).

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10 Spider-Man the Manga #1, n.p. 11 Spider-Man the Manga #2, n.p. 12 On the proliferation of serial figures across media, see Denson; Denson and Mayer. Spider-Man the Manga features culturally adapted supervillains whose American sources are more or less obvious. Examples are Electro in Spider-Man the Manga #2, whom readers may have known from his first appearance in Amazing Spider-Man #9 (Feb. 1964); the Lizard in Spider-Man the Manga #5–6, who had originated in Amazing Spider-Man #6 (Nov. 1963); and Mysterio in Spider-Man the Manga #13–15, who made his debut in Amazing Spider-Man #13 (June 1964). 13 Spider-Man the Manga #21, n.p. 14 Qtd in Fujii 48. 15 The film was based on Katsuhiro’s manga version, which had run from 1982 to 1990 in the Japanese Young Magazine and was presented to American audiences in 1988, when Epic Comics published it in six volumes. 16 Qtd in Gravett 155. Frank Miller’s promotion of Koike and Goseki Kojima’s samurai epic Lone Wolfe and Cub (1970–6/1987–91) further popularized manga in the United States. 17 Brevoort n.p. 18 Ikegami’s name is misspelled as “Ikegamil.” 19 On Batman: Child of Dreams and Batman: Death Mask, see Stein, “Popular Seriality.” 20 Other superhero transcreations include Shadow of the Spawn, a licensed manga adaptation of Todd McFarlane’s Spawn series, which was written and illustrated by Juzu Tokoro, originally ran in the Dengeki Comic Gao! magazine between 1998 and 1999, and was republished in the United States in 2006; and X-Men the Manga, which was created by Hiroshi Higuchi, Miyako Kojima, Koji Yasue, and others and ran in 12 volumes from 1998–9 (it was also republished in the United States). 21 Japanese Knights, n.p. 22 In one scene, Dragonfly mocks Spider-Man and Elektra as a laughable team-up, to which Spider-Man responds: “Elektra and I are not a team!” In response, Elektra cups his face in her hands and coos lasciviously, “Thank you. You truly are a hero,” which leaves Spider-Man visibly embarrassed (Japanese Knights, n.p.). 23 Jenkins 159. 24 In 2003, Marvel launched the imprint Tsunami, which published a variety of manga-styled comic books but was discontinued by the end of the year. 25 Spider-Man Mangaverse draws on Daredevil’s backstory. Like Spider-Man Mangaverse, Miller’s Daredevil run (issues #168–91) had depicted the rivalry between two ninja clans; like Peter, Matt Murdock is trained by a sensei and, like the Daredevil of Spider-Man Mangaverse, loses his girlfriend Elektra to the rival clan, where she becomes an assassin. 26 Spider-Man Mangaverse #1, n.p.

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27 Like the covers of the American readaptation of Spider-Man the Manga, the covers of Spider-Man Mangaverse use kanji lettering to announce their transnationality (Andrews’s name is printed in Roman and kanji letters) and use a font for the Spider-Man logo that, by simulating brush strokes, suggests Japanese calligraphy. The insignia on Spider-Man’s chest is slightly altered so as to further indicate to readers that they are dealing with an alternative version of this superhero character. 28 On “Amerimanga,” see also Petersen 184–5. 29 I take the notion of a “repatriation of difference” from Appadurai (307). 30 Hello Kitty was designed by Yuko Shimizu for the Japanese Sanrio company in 1974; it made its first appearance in the United States in 1976. 31 Gravett 157. 32 On the manga-inflected work of the Canadian Bryan Lee O’Malley, see Chapter 15 (Mark Berninger) in this volume. On manga as a global phenomenon, see the essays in Johnson-Woods. As Katharina Bieloch and Sharif Bitar (Chapter 7), Shilpa Davé (Chapter 8), and Stefan Meier (Chapter 11) argue in their respective contributions to this volume, it makes little sense to think of comic book superheroes in an exclusively American context.

Works cited Akira, Yamanaka. Spider-Man J: Japanese Daze. New York: Marvel Comics, 2009. —. Spider-Man J: Japanese Knights. New York: Marvel Comics, 2008. Andrews, Kaare. Spider-Man Mangaverse. 5 issues. New York: Marvel Comics, Mar. 2002–Apr. 2003. Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” In Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity. Ed. Mike Featherstone. London: Sage, 1990. 295–310. Bainbridge, Jason, and Craig Norris. “Hybrid Manga: Implications for the Global Knowledge Economy.” In Manga: An Anthology of Global and Cultural Perspectives. Ed. Toni Johnson-Woods. London: Continuum, 2009. 235–52. Brevoort, Tom. “On the Origins of Spider-Man the Manga.” In Spider-Man the Manga #1. By Ryoichi Ikegami. New York: Marvel Comics, Dec. 1997. N.p. Denson, Shane. “Frame, Sequence, Medium: Comics in Plurimedial and Transnational Perspective.” In Transnational American Studies. Ed. Udo J. Hebel. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012. 561–80. Denson, Shane, and Ruth Mayer. “Grenzgänger: Serielle Figuren im Medienwechsel.” In Kelleter, Populäre Serialität 185–203. Devarajan, Sharad. “What an Amazing Journey.” Spider-Man India #1. Bangalore/ New York: Gotham Entertainment Group/Marvel Entertainment, Jan. 2005. N.p.

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Fujii, Satoru. Interview with Ryoichi Igekami. 1993. In Anime Interviews: The First Five Years of Animerica Anime & Manga Monthly (1992–97). Ed. Trish Ledoux. San Francisco: Cadence, 1997. 46–53. Gravett, Paul. Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics. New York: Collins Design, 2004. Ikegami, Ryoichi. Spider-Man the Manga. 31 issues. New York: Marvel Comics, Dec. 1997–June 1999. Iwabuchi, Koichi. Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Jenkins, Henry. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Johnson-Woods, Toni. “Introduction.” In Manga: An Anthology of Global and Cultural Perspectives. Ed. Toni Johnson-Woods. London: Continuum, 2009. 1–14. Kelleter, Frank, ed. Populäre Serialität: Narration—Evolution—Distinktion. Zum seriellen Erzählen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert. Bielefeld: transcript, 2012. Kelleter, Frank, and Daniel Stein. “Autorisierungspraktiken seriellen Erzählens: Zur Gattungsentwicklung von Superheldencomics.” In Kelleter, Populäre Serialität 259–90. Kidd, Chip, Geoff Spear, and Saul Ferris, eds. Bat-Manga! The Secret History of Batman in Japan. Trans. Anne Ishii and Chip Kidd. New York: Pantheon, 2008. Lee, Stan, and Steve Ditko. “Spider-Man!” Amazing Fantasy #15. Aug. 1962. 9–19. “Marvel’s Man in Japan: Gene Pelc.” Foom #22 (1979): 12–20. Petersen, Robert S. Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels: A History of Graphic Narratives. Santa Barbara: Praeger-ABC-CLIO, 2011. Smith, Andy. Drawing American Manga Superheroes. New York: Watson-Guptill, 2007. Stein, Daniel. “Popular Seriality, Authorship, Superhero Comics: On the Evolution of a Transnational Genre Economy.” In Media Economies. Ed. Marcel Hartwig and Gunter Süß. Forthcoming.

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Warren Ellis: Performing the Transnational Author in the American Comics Mainstream Jochen Ecke

Questions of authorship are at the very center of interest for the emerging field of comics studies. Open any of the many essay collections and monographs published on graphic narratives in the past few years, and you will likely find long chapters and whole sections devoted to what are by now such household names as Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, or Lynda Barry. In fact, probably because the genre was the most immediately recognizable for literary scholars, the academic community quickly caught on to the comics medium as a rich source of new, innovative life writing. A whole slew of recent publications such as Hillary Chute’s Graphic Women, the second issue of Studies in Comics (2010) devoted entirely to comics autobiography, or Graphic Subjects, edited by Michael A. Chaney, attests to this development. We might say, then, that what Andrew Bennett writes about traditional literary scholarship’s relationship to questions of authorship doubtless applies to comics studies as well: [T]he institution of literary criticism [. . .] is inextricably engaged in studying questions of authorship. It is perhaps not too much to say that what we might call the recurring, seemingly interminable crisis of criticism (including “crisis” in its etymological sense of crucial or deciding moment) itself turns on the question of authorship.1

Strangely, though, such a crisis of authorship has yet to produce itself for comics studies. This is likely due to the fact that the authorial models of literary autobiography could—with some minor modifications—be applied also to comics autobiography, especially in the form of the graphic novel. However, if we instead focus our attention on artists closer to the American comics mainstream, the result is much more problematic: Here, artists are notorious collaborators.2 They produce work employing characters, stories, and iconographies that they

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did not devise and do not own—as has long been common in the ubiquitous superhero books—and they have to face economic, artistic, and moral consequences: namely, that they sign over their work to corporations, thereby relinquishing intellectual ownership.3 And since they have chosen to work in popular vernaculars, they have no direct access to the discourses of authenticity into which their highbrow colleagues can so easily tap.4 In short, to speak in Michel Foucault’s terms, the author function in the majority of the American comics industry differs considerably from that of the literary field and therefore requires much closer scrutiny. When I speak of the author, or rather of the author function, I mean the term to refer not to the actual writer, but to a “discursive set,” as Foucault argues in “What Is an Author?” With regard to Foucault’s definition of the term, the following points are relevant to this discussion: First of all, he writes that “the author function is linked to the juridical and institutional system that encompasses, determines, and articulates the universe of discourses.” In other words, it is not predicated on a simple relationship of cause and effect between a single individual and a cultural artifact; rather, it is produced by a discursive system, thus actually “depriving the subject (or its substitute) of its role as originator.” The author as discursive construct thus can and will “give rise simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects.”5 The purpose of this chapter is to make a first step toward answering the following questions: How has the author function in the American comics mainstream changed over time, and how do these ideological and historical changes impact the actual comic books themselves? And in how far can we conceive of these changes as transnational processes? In particular, I argue that the last major rupture in conceptions of the author function occurred with, and partly because of, the so-called British invasion— namely, the influx of British talent into the American marketplace at the beginning of the 1980s.6 These writers and artists “appropriated [and] then revolutionized genres that seemed typically American, challenging audience expectations and creating waves of media interest.”7 The repercussions could be felt well into the Noughties. The considerable impact of the British invasion is one of the major reasons why a transnational approach to authorship in American mainstream comics is desirable. Arguably, authorship in American comics has always been a site of transnational negotiations predicated on the “multidirectional flows of people, ideas, and goods and the social, linguistic, cultural, and economic crossroads generated in the process.”8 And this especially rings true considering that the origins of serialized comic books are profoundly linked to the immigrant

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experience in the United States.9 Transnational theory also alerts us to the fact that, in the most general terms, literary forms always take shape not strictly within a single national or religious political world but rather within a horizon of historical events experienced in common and yet differentially, amid fluctuating, triangular strategic alliances. [.  .  .] These forms arise together dialectically, tilted toward each other like the nations and communities that spawned them. And so we best read them dialectically, as entities created by their agonistic entanglements with each other.10

The British invasion offers a particularly rich site of such complex transnational dialectics. As Ben Little puts it, speaking of the “emergence of the field of Anglo-American comics” in this context, the “influx of British talent to U.S. comics publishers paved the way for a fertile exchange of ideas, techniques and approaches that went beyond a simple notion of national influences.”11 The latter statement echoes Laura Doyle’s more general theorizing on transnational processes in the arts, according to which “literary texts and traditions are engaged not only dyadically toward and against each other in pairs, or as black texts and white, but also multiply and shiftingly.”12 The new models of authorship emerging in the course of the British invasion can be considered the outcome of such a complex series of multiple and shifting transnational engagements. The most important change in the author function that British writers and artists brought about was a new awareness of the discursivity of authorship. They adopted an attitude toward authorship that was in radical opposition to the one habitually held in the American mainstream at the time. For most American authors prior to the 1980s, this attitude can best be defined as a quiet, craftsmanlike self-effacement. Instead of adopting this historically entrenched model, many of the writers of the British invasion embraced the very fact that the author function produces “several selves” and “several subjects.” In fact, they began to openly participate in this dissemination of the author. For writers like Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and Warren Ellis, authorship thus became a question of mise-en-scène and performance.13 When I speak of performance, I mean to suggest the notion of “performativity” introduced by John Austin and John Searle.14 In Austin’s terms, a performative sentence is characterized by the fact that “the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action—it is not normally thought of as just saying something.”15 Uwe Wirth elaborates: “[T]he fact that the verb was uttered initializes a process which the announcement of the action already partially performed.” Performance theory has since been expanded to cover much more than verbal utterances; the

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performative turn was thus characterized by the discovery that “all utterances can always be regarded as performances, too.” Most importantly for the present chapter, the view is now widely accepted that performances change “the social world through the act of uttering them, i.e. they do not describe facts, but create social facts.”16 Further guiding questions for inquiries into the author function in comics might therefore be: Which discourses have these new authorial performances brought about? In what sense do they position themselves within and against the transnational framework of previous performances? Warren Ellis, born in 1968 and part of the second wave of the British invasion, offers an excellent example with which to embark on a discussion of this transnational, performative model of authorship.17 The following lines spoken by Ellis in a documentary film (Captured Ghosts) about his work may provide a first impression of what I mean: Today, I stopped being real. No-one is going to listen to a boy genius; no-one is going to listen to a philosopher or a traveler. All the things I’ve been—who really ever gave a shit? People like listening to characters. Characters are safe because they’re not real. So today, I become a character.

Ellis’s performance in this clip may be interpreted in the following way: The discourse of authenticity that is so prevalent in autobiographical comics is rejected or at the very least complicated. Despite appearances to the contrary, the distinction between an “objective reality” and a “make-believe performance” is equally relinquished. In fact, Ellis’s line, “Today, I stopped being real,” is decidedly ironic, in that it does not imply leaving reality behind but rather points to the decision to embrace the discursivity and performativity of human existence: authorship as role play. Finally, Ellis intimates that his performances always serve an aim when he points out that “characters are safe.” He endorses the exact opposite, of course; his performance is meant to be dangerous, subversive. As a matter of fact, the last point can be extended to formulate the main thesis of this chapter: By interrogating the ideologies of what may be termed the classical author function in the American comics mainstream, Ellis engages with the medium’s past history of authorial performances. Throughout his career, Ellis has thus consistently renegotiated what it means to be an author in the American comics mainstream by questioning the classical American authorial model(s), on the one hand, but also by pragmatically assimilating some of the artistic and economic strategies that characterize the American comics industry, on the other. In doing so, he has served as a role model for a considerable number of other mainstream writers and artists who have since adopted his authorial model.

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The dynamics initiated by Ellis’s performance within the American mainstream can be characterized as a transnational process for two important reasons. First of all, the very idea of comic books as the medium for the expression of individual genius firmly places the British writer in the Romantic tradition, itself a fundamentally transnational phenomenon. But Ellis’s penchant for role play also has somewhat more contemporary roots. Like many of the writers of the British invasion, he has cited chameleonic, explicitly performative rock artists such as David Bowie or Brian Eno as influences, both of whom were important architects of what is and was—especially after the original British invasion of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—the equally transnational phenomenon of rock music.18 Intuitively, we might say that authorial performance takes place on two levels: performance within and without the actual comic books. With Ellis, these two levels tend to bleed into each other, to the point where it becomes impossible to tell where the authorial persona ends and the work begins. Portraits of Ellis display a remarkable iconographic similarity to the protagonist of Ellis’s serial Transmetropolitan (1997–2002), journalist Spider Jerusalem. Most of the time, both the author and his protagonist are shown reveling in noir shadiness; they tend to sport the existentialist’s favorite pastime—smoking; and both usually exude a certain air of melancholia.19 This blurring of the edges between author function and diegetic fiction begins very early on in Ellis’s career. Figure 10.1 shows a series of photographs from an interview published in the now defunct comics magazine Wizard, dating from 1999, which rather faithfully reproduces a series of panels from Transmetropolitan, also seen in the figure, only substituting Ellis for Spider Jerusalem. Since Transmetropolitan, Ellis has done his best to further the permeability between the author function and his protagonists. Authorial doppelgängers can be found throughout his oeuvre. In Planetary (1999–2009), protagonist Elijah Snow acts as psychogeographer of twentieth-century popular culture. He investigates and interrogates the global popular imagination and, in a series of diaries, effectively rewrites it. The series is also about authorial complicity: Elijah Snow has lost most of his memories and discovers over the course of the 25 chapters that he himself had an important hand in “writing” the secret history of the twentieth century. Similar rewritings can be found in Ellis’s other works. In Frankenstein’s Womb (2009), the famous monster gives Mary Shelley a magical mystery tour of the future. In Crécy (2007), an English soldier tells the story of the Battle of Crécy in 1346. And in Doktor Sleepless (2008), the eponymous protagonist attempts to bring about what he calls an “eschatological

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Figure 10.1  Panels from Transmetropolitan © Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson. Used with permission of DC Comics. Photographs of Warren Ellis from Wizard, 1999.

event”—future shock, a quasi-Romantic revolution of consciousness. A number of conclusions can be drawn from these brief synopses. For one, Ellis favors outsider figures for his authorial substitutes: Frankenstein’s monster, mad/ visionary scientists, gonzo journalists, English foot soldiers. He is thus doubly positioning his persona as emphatically other, with respect both to mainstream American society and to American mainstream comics, on the pages of which we habitually find protagonists both less ambivalent and less clearly rooted in European aesthetic and literary traditions. In keeping with the outsider status of his protagonists, monologues are much more common in Ellis than elsewhere in the American comics mainstream—in fact, some books, such as Frankenstein’s Womb, consist of nothing but monologues. They often bring any sort of plot development to a halt. The focus of the action is thus no longer placed on the external or physical, both staples of American mainstream comics, but on the internal and intellectual. The conflicts of Ellis’s books are writerly conflicts and mostly of an epistemological and/or ethical nature.

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Finally, as can be gleaned from the titles of such works as Planetary or Global Frequency, Ellis has a cosmopolitan agenda that extends beyond questions of authorship. The British writer’s project from roughly 1998 until the present can be characterized as a thorough study of global popular culture and the terms on which it can be seen to exemplify what Rob Kroes has termed “the enduring power of [. . .] conventional forms of affiliation and self-identification” with the nation and the nation-state.20 Exemplifying what Ulrich Beck has called a “methodological cosmopolitanism,” Planetary attempts to overcome methodological nationalism by “becoming sensitive and open to the many universalisms, the conflicting contextual universalisms” found throughout global popular culture and correctly understood by Ellis as part of the discourses that encode national ethics.21 In Planetary, then, Ellis redefines the superhero as a cosmopolitan archaeologist of knowledge who observes and analyzes his or her own genre in a metafictional operation and who—only after a period of observation and deliberation—comes to act (if at all) in the interest of a planetary commonwealth. Outside the actual comic books, Ellis’s authorial performance is largely predicated on a massive internet presence. He was one of the first comics writers to maintain an email list, a website, a number of blogs, and—most importantly around the turn of the millennium—an internet forum. At the height of his performative zeal, Ellis wrote several monthly comics serials, a weekly essay series, and moderated a forum that, despite having been closed in 2002, can still be found online. The defunct forum’s “epitaph,” which rather impressively demonstrates the global impact of Ellis’s performance, reads: “At its height, there were 2500 people in here every day, writing 10000 messages a week, with twenty people in the chat room at any one time; open 24 hours a day worldwide. Couples met and even got married here, people found homes and aid here, companies were started and saved here. It was good.”22 Although Ellis’s enthusiasm for his internet persona waned around the middle of the past decade, the author’s presence is still considerable. At the last count, he had 417,055 followers on Twitter, for example. In fact, Ellis’s authorial persona has become so popular and recognizable that it really was only a matter of time until sites such as www. talklikewarrenellis.com began to appear. If you visit the website page and keep refreshing it, the algorithm will put together ever new combinations of Ellis’s typically vulgar witticisms.23 Phenomena such as www.talklikewarrenellis.com demonstrate which parts of Ellis’s performance actually stick with the audience: on the one hand, an ironically exaggerated image of Englishness predicated largely on colorful,

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linguistically inventive swearing; on the other hand, an equally wry display of dissension and combativeness. All of this constitutes a major change from the classical American author function in mainstream comics. Importantly, Ellis chooses to address his readership on his own terms, independently from publishing houses and editors, as was mostly the case in the past—if comic book writers and artists chose to communicate with their audiences at all. The concepts of individuality and artistic independence first formulated in Romanticism thus take center stage. Actually, we might say that Ellis is reenacting the change in the author function brought about by Romanticism, which, as Andrew Bennett puts it, “marks a turn in poetics and literary theory away from a focus on the literary work towards the subject who makes or creates the work, towards the poet or author as a site of analysis and exploration.”24 Just as the Romantics were in revolt against the impersonality and sterility of classical poetry, we might say that Ellis’s performance aims centrally to formulate a new author function in opposition to the classical author function in the American comics mainstream. Ellis’s performance, incorporating concepts as various as Europeanness, Britishness, individuality, intellectualism, and Romanticism, effectively aims to make his authorial persona other to those hitherto found in the American mainstream. A few brief words are required to sketch out what Ellis is actually appropriating as well as opposing in his performance—a performance which, it should be clear by now, very much stages the kind of dyadic, agonistic conflict of two national traditions that Doyle describes in her first sketch of a transnational philosophy.25 The past definition of the author function in the American comics mainstream was largely dictated by economic and ethical factors. If we follow Jean-Paul Gabilliet’s model, there were three, perhaps even four generations of artists producing comics in the American mainstream before Ellis started out in the field around the mid-1990s.26 Only the fourth generation actually began to seriously question the author function established in the 1940s. The writers and artists of the first three generations are ascribed the following characteristics by Gabilliet: The taste for a job well done, a temperate anti-intellectualism, the importance of “realism” in representation, the consideration given to a reader perceived as similar to himself, a John Doe, are values that were characteristic of a creator who grew up in the context of the Depression and who internalized the ideology of the New Deal. [. . .] Draftsmanship as craft and the cartoonist as a worker for hire: this was the self-image of [these] artists.27

Gabilliet’s contention that the first three generations of American comics writers and artists were defined by a tendency toward self-effacement can indeed be

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corroborated by interview material. The predisposition is perhaps epitomized by Superman artist Curt Swan, who presents his views on comics authorship in the following terms: There was a period when some of the artists and writers were trying to organize a Guild of some kind because they had grievances and so forth. They weren’t terribly happy with their income and residuals, what have you. I never got into that because I felt content. I felt I was being reimbursed fairly and I felt happy about doing what I’m doing simply because I was my own person, my own boss. I had control of my own destiny, so to speak, and my time, etc.28

It is important to note the extent of the freedom Swan talks about here. He enjoyed a certain amount of economic autonomy, but not artistic independence by far. For this child of the Depression, being able to arrange one’s working schedule at will was luxury enough. Ownership of the intellectual property he was generating was simply out of the question. The slightly younger Frank Thorne puts matters a little differently, and a lot more bitterly: “I know you can’t have the farmhands thinking they own the cow every time they pull a teat.”29 Tellingly, in the case of this metaphorical cow, the preexistence of the teat before the artist pulls it is never questioned—even for Thorne, there is never any doubt that the act of creation is performed by a corporation, not by an artist. None of this is to say that there were no notable authorial performances during those first three generations. However, most of them ultimately served corporate ends. EC Comics, for example, were among the first to feature portraits of their artists and writers on the pages of their horror, war, and crime serials.30 EC’s exploitation of a more individualized author function to create a sophisticated corporate image, though, can be considered largely benign compared to the practices of other publishing houses. Charles Biro, for example, originator of the infamous Crime Does Not Pay serial (1942–55), is today mostly remembered for his false claims to authorship of all the stories in his serials.31 In the same sense, it is possible to think of the—on the surface—self-effacingly hip authorial performances by Stan Lee in the 1960s and 1970s Marvel letters pages as a somewhat more charming way of enforcing corporate politics. Lee certainly wrote about his fellow writers and artists in his Bullpen Bulletin and Stan’s Soapbox columns, but he made sure that the right to perform in public lay solely with him, thus effectively depriving the Marvel artists of the right to stage their own authorial personas.32 We might say, then, that the central aim of Ellis’s act is threefold. First of all, it aspires to break the silence brought about by the previous generations’ attitudes toward authorship. Furthermore, it aspires to participate in the discursive

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formation of the author so as to establish Ellis’s name as a bankable commodity. And finally, it means to advance the author function in the comics mainstream from a definition as mere working-class craftsmanship to the middle-class notion of individual(istic) expression and ownership. Nowhere is this tendency more apparent than in the series of 52 weekly essays titled Come in Alone (written in 1999/2000 and published as a collection in 2001); in hindsight, these can be called some of the most important documents for the development of the American comics mainstream in that decade. Ellis assumes any number of roles in these essays, but one theme is common to most of them: righteous anger at the a-historicity of the American mainstream, which was much more pronounced in 1999 than it is today. Ellis rightly saw the comics industry’s anachronistic business practices as a weakness, pronouncing a time of upheaval: This is the time. The Western comics industry is scattered, unfocussed, badly confused. Such periods are optimum for violent revolution. The Old Bastard says sharpen your axes, make your peace and pack your Rohypnol; we’re going on a road trip to reclaim the comics industry and remake it in another image. Specifically, mine.33

Ellis was aiming to restore the comics industry’s cultural memory as well as its ethical sensibilities. Note how the rhetoric here, however drastic it may be, can be read as a satirical appropriation of the silencing strategies of, for example, Stan Lee. When Ellis assumes the role of the “Old Bastard” and says that he intends to remake the comics industry in his own image, he does so in order to emancipate four generations of artists, not suppress their voices.34 The grand project, then, just like Elijah Snow’s in Planetary, is to unearth, interrogate, and give voice to the cultural archive of mainstream comics. In 1999, this was almost impossible, since most of the archive was out of print. If many of the most important books in the history of American comics are widely available today, alongside many other reprints and new volumes sporting the names of their creators on the cover, often in large letters, this is at least in part due to the impact of Ellis’s essays.35 There are other reasons for this change in the author function, of course. Not least of all, the past decade has seen massive interest from the film industry in the mainstream’s vast archives of intellectual properties. The comics industry, in this sense, has also become historically aware because it has finally found a way to exploit its archives. There is an ambivalence in rereading these essays ten years later. In hindsight, we can see that Ellis’s performance was quickly appropriated by the companies to serve economic rather than artistic and ethical ends. The dominant American

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model of the comics author as, at best, a competent craftsman was not entirely supplanted by the European concepts of the artist as individualistic genius and middle-class property owner. Nowhere are the limits of the performance’s effectiveness more evident than in Ellis’s greatest complaint: the oversaturation of the market with superhero titles. Here is what is arguably the most famous passage from Come in Alone: Fuck superheroes, frankly. The notion that these things dominate an entire genre is absurd. It’s like every bookstore on the planet having ninety percent of its shelves filled by nurse novels. Imagine that. You want a new novel, but you have to wade through three hundred new books about romances in the wards before you can get at any other genre. [. . .] Superhero comics are like bloody creeping fungus, and they smother everything else.36

Elsewhere in the essay, Ellis makes no secret that he is complicit in this particularly American monoculture, acknowledging that this transnational dialectic is never one-sided in its assimilatory processes: “I am part of the problem. Fuck you.”37 Ellis’s interrogation of the mainstream author function remained the central paradigm for mainstream comics culture during the Noughties. American writers such as Matt Fraction, Jason Aaron, and Brian K. Vaughan adopted the model to create their own authorial brands; for a few years, every major writer in the mainstream had a message board, a blog, and wrote a series of essays for a comics-centered website.38 Ellis’s model afforded these writers some freedom in the mainstream: the freedom, for example, to experiment with narratives while not having to continually service corporate copyrights like previous generations. In the end, the Old Bastard’s Revolution never arrived, though—most likely because the success of the cinematic adaptations of their characters ensured that the Western comics industry would not be “scattered, unfocussed, badly confused” for very long after 1999. In retrospect, then, the second half of the Noughties can be considered a period of regression for the performative author function in American mainstream comics. In light of their growing ineffectiveness, authorial performances consolidated or waned. Of the more radical demands of the authors of the British invasion and their disciples, only those still have any currency which do not fundamentally question the orientation of the mainstream industry toward superheroes and regard intellectual ownership as a premium option in the later part of a successful comics career, not a prerequisite. Still, enough traces of the British invasion remain to indelibly mark many of the author functions that the

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marketplace currently accepts as a field of complex transnational negotiations. There is no doubt, then, that in analyzing the American comics mainstream, it is productive to adopt a transnational perspective in order to research the changes in the author function without the work in order to understand and even discover authorial performances within the actual comic books. Future research projects would have to focus on a detailed study of authorial performances within Ellis’s comics themselves and on the ways Ellis’s authorial model was adopted by other comics writers. Hopefully, though, it has become clear that the questions of authorial performance so familiar from studies of independent and autobiographical comics are of equal importance to an engagement with the mainstream, and that in order to understand the American mainstream in all its complexity, a transnational perspective is indispensable.

Notes 1 Bennett 112. 2 Duncan and Smith state what is currently the most widely spread definition of the American comics mainstream. In “the American comics scene, production is characterized as an oligopoly, a climate in which a few competitors control the field. In comics the few is actually a two, with the majority of sales concentrated in a pair of publishers, Marvel Comics and DC Comics. [. . .] Because the Big Two command so much of the comics readers’ attentions, they are often referred to as forming the mainstream, which is both a concession to their preeminence in the field and a critique of their conservative publishing practices. [. . .] For example, the majority of comic books made by the Big Two are from one genre, superheroes, and the two compete head-to-head using the conventions of that genre” (90, 91). Often, “mainstream” is used as a counter-term to alternative comics, which Hatfield defines as follows: “Alternative comics trace their origins to the underground ‘comix’ movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which, jolted to life by the larger social upheavals of the era, departed from the familiar, anodyne conventions of the commercial comics mainstream. [. . .] The countercultural comix movement [. . .] gave rise to the idea of comics as an acutely personal means of artistic exploration and self-expression” (ix). While this is an accurate summary of the attitude toward the mainstream often exhibited both by practitioners and enthusiasts of alternative comics, the general thrust of this chapter goes against the idea that the commercial comics mainstream is, or has ever been, merely characterized by “familiar, anodyne conventions” that do not afford any opportunity for self-expression or innovation.

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  3 For further information on the dominant model of intellectual ownership in the American comics mainstream, see Duncan and Smith 91. It should be noted, though, that since the 1980s, the mainstream publishers have reacted to the various movements for creators’ rights. For certain star writers and artists, it is now possible to do creator-owned work for both Marvel and DC Comics. Ellis owns Planetary jointly with DC Comics, for example, and Marvel allows their most popular writers and artists such as Ed Brubaker and Brian Michael Bendis to publish creator-owned series via their Icon imprint. DC’s Vertigo imprint has also championed creators’ rights and has proven to be much more open to give center stage to new talents than Icon. But the fact remains that the vast majority of comics being published in the American mainstream today are owned by corporations.   4 By “discourse of authenticity,” I mean the many forms of autobiography and life writing that have developed since the invention of the former term in the late eighteenth century—from a mode of writing that “privileges the autonomous individual and the universalizing life story as the definitive achievement of life writing” to postmodern/poststructural criticism of “this master narrative of ‘the sovereign self ’” (Smith and Watson 2, 3).   5 Foucault 107, 113, 117–18, 113.   6 For a detailed historical overview, see Murray 32–6.   7 Murray 31.   8 Fishkin 22.   9 A number of studies have detailed the importance of the immigrant experience for the explosion of serialized comic books in the 1930s. See Buhle; Fingeroth; Jones. 10 Doyle 5. 11 Little 141. 12 Doyle 5. 13 It should be noted that the American comics mainstream at the time was not without its own indigenous authorial performances. The most notable public persona was doubtless Frank Miller’s, who to this day continues to stir controversy, most recently with Holy Terror (2011). Other writers and artists such as Will Eisner or Jack Kirby were equally vocal about their desires to enact a change in the mainstream author function (see Eisner and Miller for the respective artists’ positions). Quite a few lesser-known comics creative types followed suit; Mike Grell, for example, was among the first mainstream artists to seek creator-ownership (see Ecke). 14 See Austin 1–11. 15 Austin 6–7. 16 My translations; Wirth 11, 39, 11. 17 The first wave of the British invasion arguably began with Alan Moore scripting Saga of the Swamp Thing in 1983 (cf. Murray 37); among quite a few others, writers and artists such as Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Jamie Delano, and Alan Davis

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18 19

20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34

35

36 37 38

followed his lead throughout the decade. A second wave arrived in the United States in the early 1990s with such writers as Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis, and Mark Millar (cf. Murray 42). For a recent example, see Ellis, “14.” For an example of a typical author’s photograph, see Ellis, “Pre-Flight.” The cover to the first volume of Transmetropolitan, titled Back on the Street, is a good example of how protagonist Spider Jerusalem is usually presented. Kroes 19. Beck 17. Ellis, “Forum” n.p. A random check brought up “Good afternoon, my sexy bonobos of the twitternet. You may tell me that you love me now”; “Good night, oiled buzzards of the apocalypse. I’m off to the pub”; and “ATTENTION SINNERS: Sit in my lap and tell me you’re sorry.” Bennett 3. Cf. Doyle 5. Cf. Gabilliet 160–8. Gabilliet 165. Swan 80. Thorne n.p. These artists’ biographies can be found throughout all of the copious EC Comics reprint material available at this point. For a pertinent example, see “The EC Artist of the Issue.” Cf. Hajdu 67. For examples, see the recent collection of Lee’s columns, Stan’s Soapbox (2009). Ellis, “Eighteen” 77. Ellis’s attempt to give a voice to the exploited previous generations of comics artists becomes even more apparent in the more recent essay collection Do Anything (2010), in which he purports to be conversing with the robot head of Jack Kirby, the comics artist responsible for much of the visual language of superhero comics who has somewhat infamously always played second fiddle to his most important cocreator, Stan Lee (Ellis, “001” 4). It should be noted that a creators’ rights movement had been active in American comics since the late 1970s, culminating in a “Bill of Rights for Comics Creators” drafted in 1988 (cf. McCloud et al., “Bill of Rights”). Ellis, “Eighteen” 78. Ellis, “Eighteen” 80. To give but two examples, Fraction’s essay series was titled “Poplife” and can still be found online at comicbookresources.com, as can Jason Aaron’s “Where the Hell Am I.”

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Works cited Aaron, Jason. “Where the Hell Am I.” comicbookresources.com. Dec. 13, 2011. . Accessed Aug. 15, 2012. Austin, John Langshaw. How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975. Beck, Ulrich. “Rooted Cosmopolitanism: Emerging from a Rivalry of Distinctions.” In Global America? The Cultural Consequences of Globalization. Ed. Ulrich Beck, Natan Sznaider, and Rainer Winter. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003. 15–29. Bennett, Andrew. The Author. London: Routledge, 2005. Buhle, Paul, ed. Jews and American Comics: An Illustrated History of an American Art Form. New York: New Press, 2008. Captured Ghosts. Dir. Patrick Meaney. Sequart, 2011. Chaney, Michael A., ed. Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. Chute, Hillary. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Doyle, Laura. “Toward a Philosophy of Transnationalism.” The Journal of Transnational American Studies 1.1 (2009): 1–29. . Duncan, Randy, and Matthew J. Smith. The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture. London: Continuum, 2009. “The EC Artist of the Issue: Jack Davis.” Tales from the Crypt. Vol. 2. 1952. York and West Plains: Gemstone, 2008. 10. Ecke, Jochen. “Auf der Jagd. Die Comic-Karriere des Mike Grell.” In Warlord: Skartaris. Ludwigsburg: Crosscult, 2010. 215–20. Eisner, Will, and Frank Miller. Eisner/Miller: A One-on-One Interview Conducted by Charles Brownstein. Milwaukie: Dark Horse, 2005. Ellis, Warren. “001.” Do Anything: Thoughts on Comics and Things. Volume One: Jack Kirby Ripped My Flesh. Rantoul: Avatar, 2010. 4–5. —. “14.” Do Anything: Thoughts on Comics and Things. Volume One: Jack Kirby Ripped My Flesh. Rantoul: Avatar, 2010. 42–7. Ellis, Warren, and John Cassaday. Absolute Planetary. 2 vols. New York: DC Comics/ Wildstorm, 2009/2011. —. “Eighteen. March 31, 2000.” Come in Alone. San Francisco: Ait/PlanetLar, 2001. 76–80. —. “Pre-Flight.” Warrenellis.posterous.com. Feb. 24, 2011. . Accessed Dec. 12, 2011. —. “Ten. February 4, 2000.” Come in Alone. San Francisco: Ait/PlanetLar, 2001. 43–5. —. “You Have Been Watching the Warren Ellis Forum.” May 1998–Oct. 2002. . Accessed Jan. 5, 2011.

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Ellis, Warren, and Darick Robertson. Transmetropolitan: Back on the Street. New York: DC Comics/Vertigo, 2000. Ellis, Warren, and Ivan Rodriguez. Doktor Sleepless: Engines of Desire. Rantoul: Avatar, 2008. Ellis, Warren, and Marek Oleksicki. Frankenstein’s Womb. Rantoul: Avatar, 2009. Ellis, Warren, and Raulo Caceres. Crécy. Rantoul: Avatar, 2007. Fingeroth, Danny. Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero. London: Continuum, 2007. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies—Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004.” American Quarterly 57.1 (2005): 17–57. Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” In The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984. 101–20. Fraction, Matt. “Poplife.” Comicbookresources.com. Dec. 13, 2011. . Accessed Aug. 15, 2012. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. Hajdu, David. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. New York: Picador, 2008. Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Jones, Gerard. Men of Tomorrow: The True Story of the Birth of the Superheroes. London: Arrow, 2006. Kroes, Rob. “Citizenship in a Trans-Atlantic Perspective.” Symposium: Redefinitions of Citizenship and Revisions of Cosmopolitanism—Transnational Perspectives. Journal of Transnational American Studies 3.1 (2011): 18–25. . Lee, Stan. Stan’s Soapbox: Over 14 Years and Over 46,000 Words of the Wit and Wisdom of Marvel Comics’ Stan Lee. New York: Marvel, 2009. Little, Ben. “2000 AD : Understanding the ‘British Invasion’ of American Comics.” In Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives. Ed. Mark Berninger, Jochen Ecke, and Gideon Haberkorn. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010. 140–52. McCloud, Scott, Ken Mitchroney, Mark Martin, Michael Dooney, Steve Lavigne, Peter Laird, Kevin Eastman, et al. “A Bill of Rights for Comics Creators.” Scottmccloud.com. 1990. . Accessed Dec. 14, 2011. Murray, Chris. “Signals from Airstrip One: The British Invasion of Mainstream American Comics.” In The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts. Ed. Paul Williams and James Lyons. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. 31–45.

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Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd edn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Swan, Curt. “An Interview with Superman’s Main Artist.” The Comics Journal 73 (1982): 64–90. Thorne, Frank. “10 Best Comics’ Creators’ Quips and Quotes.” www.jimshooter.com. June 6, 2011. . Accessed Aug. 25, 2012. Vandehey, Scott, and Miles Johnson. “Talk Like Warren Ellis.” Dec. 6, 2011. . Accessed Dec. 6, 2011. Wirth, Uwe. “Der Performanzbegriff im Spannungsfeld von Illokution, Iteration und Indexikalität.” In Performanz: Zwischen Sprachphilosophie und Kulturwissenschaften. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2002. 9–60.

11

“Truth, Justice, and the Islamic Way”:1 Conceiving the Cosmopolitan Muslim Superhero in The 99 Stefan Meier

In April 2010, Barack Obama hosted a Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship in Washington, D.C., the declared objective of which was to “deepen ties between business leaders, foundations, and entrepreneurs in the United States and Muslim communities around the world.”2 One of the participants was Naif Al-Mutawa, a Kuwaiti psychologist, founder of the Teshkeel Media Group, and creator of a Muslim superhero comic series titled The 99 (2006–). Praising Al-Mutawa’s efforts, the president stated that “[h]is comic books have captured the imagination of so many young people with superheroes who embody the teachings and tolerance of Islam.”3 Certainly, the attempt to create a Muslim superhero narrative represents a particularly challenging endeavor, not least since, as Susanne Enderwitz puts it, “[a]n Islamic comic strip seems at first sight to be an outright contradiction in itself, given the dominating features of comics on the one hand and Islam on the other, i.e., the ostentatious presentation of muscle-bound heroes in comic strips and the Islamic iconoclasm which tends to disapprove of physical representation altogether.”4 In publishing The 99, the Teshkeel Media Group and their founder Al-Mutawa, whose declared goal was to “offer new role models of superheroes born of Middle Eastern history and Islamic archetypes that possess values shared by the entire world,” have undoubtedly broken new ground on which a genre firmly attached to the values and norms of a Western cultural realm had never before gained a foothold. This chapter traces the evolution of a new cosmopolitan type of superhero, rooted in Islamic mythology, as it is conceived in The 99. Originating in the United States on the eve of World War II, superhero comics have frequently been taken to epitomize the dominant ideological

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discourses of their respective eras.5 Since the 1950s, the heroic characters that populate this genre have increased dramatically in number and type, and the narrative environments they inhabit have become tremendously diversified and complex.6 Yet, in spite of these developments, some of the most basic constitutive conventions of the genre have, in fact, changed rather little over time. Thus, what Peter Coogan identifies as the “definitional characteristics of mission, powers, and identity” certainly remain prevalent as the threefold core of generic conventions to the present day. Most superheroes’ general mission may still be defined as “prosocial and selfless,” and for many of these predominantly male characters, the “fight against evil must fit with the existing, professed mores of society.”7 At first sight, The 99 therefore almost perfectly exemplifies the superhero genre. A group of (teenage) heroes—provided with abilities that distinguish them from the rest of humanity—fights in a collective effort against evil of various kinds.8 What is remarkable about this new breed of superheroes, though, is the simple but crucial fact that the source of their extraordinary powers is rooted in Islamic mythology and—as the title of the series suggests—each of the team members is identified with one of the 99 names attributed to Allah in the Koran. Although their nationalities, their social and ethnic backgrounds, and their personal motivations are conceived as being as diverse as possible, they are joined together by the salutary powers of a moderate and cosmopolitan Islam, symbolized by the source of their power: the mysterious Noor Stones. The adolescent heroes’ primary figure of attachment is Dr Ramzi Razem, a psychologist who occasionally works for UNESCO and who bears a striking resemblance to Naif Al-Mutawa, the creator of the series. Razem serves as teacher, confidant, and father figure for The 99 and represents the proverbial mastermind behind all of their efforts. Against the backdrop of these reflections, this chapter examines The 99 as an evolving media franchise that exemplifies the embeddedness of a genre originating in American popular culture in “a world system [. . .] in which the exchange of commodities, the flow of capital, and the iterations of cultures know no borders.”9 I will argue that by promoting the idea of a postnational society rather than openly propagating a battle for “the Islamic way,” the series emblematizes an essentially humanist and universalistic Islam, emphasizing ethnic and gender diversity in view of a globalized world of shifting boundaries and identities.10 Drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s framework of five global cultural flows—“(a) ethnoscapes, (b) mediascapes, (c) technoscapes, (d) financescapes, and (e) ideoscapes”—as a central point of reference, this chapter interprets The 99 series as an attempt to create a new breed of superheroes in the face of an

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emerging postnational society. Focusing in particular on the transnational “woof of human motion” as conceptualized in the notion of the ethnoscape and the “large and complex repertoires of images, narratives, and ethnoscapes [available] to viewers around the world” as in that of the mediascape, I will take a closer look at the Muslim superheroes’ representation within the ongoing series, the conditions of their production, circulation, and reception, as well as at the various reactions toward their publication.11 Moreover, I will concentrate on the miniseries Justice League of America/The 99, which brings together The 99 and DC’s Justice League of America and envisions them fighting in a combined effort against an evil extraterrestrial force. Comparing the members of The 99 with those of the JLA, the latter of which represent the American model of a superhero narrative, will help to unravel the distinctively transnational implications of The 99 series.

The making of a Muslim media franchise The task of creating a superhero comic that successfully targets not only readers within the Western hemisphere but may also appeal to an even greater audience, including Middle Eastern readers, clearly represents a challenge for a number of reasons. As indicated above, the mere attempt to integrate Islamic elements of any kind into a genre rooted in American popular culture is prone to hostile reactions from conservative circles within the United States as well as from the guardians of religious morality in Muslim countries. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, the comics were banned for not being in accordance with the Koran, whereas in 2010, when an animated series based on The 99 series was scheduled for television broadcast, New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser gave her readers the following advice: “Hide your face and grab the kids. Coming soon to a TV in your child’s bedroom is a posse of righteous, Sharia-compliant Muslim superheroes.”12 Naif Al-Mutawa may have anticipated this kind of reception, but it did not dissuade him from founding the Teshkeel Media Group in 2005. He managed to raise enough money in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States to create, and eventually publish, the first issue of The 99 in May 2006.13 In spite of the conciliatory implications that Al-Mutawa’s endeavor obviously holds, the prohibition against figural images in Islam, which leaves very little room for interpretation, served as an impediment to the series’ extended circulation in many Middle Eastern countries right from the start. Nevertheless, their creator’s

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attempt to adapt a genre commonly associated with American popular culture to the needs of a predominantly Muslim audience was not a complete failure. In fact, an increasing number of readers in the series’ primary target group, adolescents in Muslim countries, are generally well accustomed to Western popular culture. Likewise, the economic prospects for a Muslim superhero narrative in the United States must not be underestimated, not least because members of Muslim communities represent a steadily growing segment within American society. In light of these considerations, it certainly appeared prudent to publish the series in both English and Arabic in order to make the text available to a globally dispersed audience. The well-chosen title added to its appeal because “[e]very Muslim child identifies ‘The 99’ with the ‘99 most beautiful names of God.’ In the Quran, the Sunna and in other places, God is described by his ‘most beautiful names’ [. . .] to which is added as the highest name [. . .,] the supreme name of God, Allāh.”14 A look at the creative minds behind the series, its sites of production, and the channels through which it is distributed immediately makes the global scale of contemporary comics production apparent. What appears most striking in terms of production is that the creators of The 99 share at least one significant attribute with the characters that inhabit their stories as well as with the audiences these stories address: They work and live in environments that are equally dispersed around the globe.15 In order to realize his project, Al-Mutawa enlisted a number of renowned comics artists and writers who had already worked in the superhero genre, for example, John McCrea and Fabian Nicieza. These artists and writers contributed a great deal of skill and experience to the production of The 99. As a result, the series also unmistakably bears these artists’ professional signatures. Having been cleverly marketed right from the beginning, The 99 swiftly evolved into a proper media franchise, following the lead of such prominent American series as Marvel’s X-Men and DC’s Justice League of America.16 Both an animated television series, produced by Endemol UK, and a Hollywood-produced animated feature film, The 99: Unbound, which premiered at the 2011 New York Film Festival, have launched The 99 into the expanding realm of transmedia storytelling.17 As these productions indicate, Al-Mutawa makes extensive use of new technologies and promotes his product in and through many different media.18 Further efforts to make the narrative accessible to extended audiences in the Middle East have resulted in the opening of a theme park in Kuwait.19 As a comic-based media franchise, The 99 therefore appears to be part of what Appadurai perceives as mediascapes, which include “the distribution of electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information” and “which are

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now available to a growing number of private and public interests throughout the world, and the images of the world created by these media.”20 Not only in terms of production and circulation but also in the practices of its reception—all issues of the comic book series are additionally published in electronic form and, therefore, become easily accessible all over the world—The 99 markedly epitomizes the transnational flow of images and information.

Fighting for truth, justice, international harmony, and cooperation Fourteen regular issues have been published in the ongoing series as of this writing, and they have successively introduced the members of The 99. The motto which Dr Ramzi never tires of repeating serves as a common motivation for his adolescent gemstone-bearing followers; what he declares with great persistence as one core objective of The 99, namely, “to foster international harmony and cooperation,” can be regarded as emblematic for the internationalist aspirations of the text.21 In fact, the apparently schematic commitment to internationalism implicit in this motto is accompanied by a noticeable tendency toward the creation of a cosmopolitan type of superhero as someone who “embrace[s] cultural difference, seeking to escape the gravitational pull of their local communities in order to enter a broader sphere of cultural experience.”22 This is evident in the series’ settings and in the characters’ visual appearances. On the narrative level, the protagonists’ national and ethnic backgrounds are accentuated while their working and living environments are denoted as transnational. In the special issue titled The 99: Origins, for example, we are introduced to a character named Nawaf Al-Bilali, who miraculously manages to survive the detonation of a landmine. As the result of this incident, he becomes Jabbar the Powerful, bearer of a gemstone that has bored itself into his body in the form of innumerable small splinters, transforming this average teenager into a giant, almost invincible superhero who is barely able to control his enormous powers. As the story progresses, he becomes the first member of The 99. While his birth name Nawaf signifies a specific ethnic background, suggesting a Middle Eastern descent, his codename Jabbar is related directly to Al-Jabbār—one of the “99 beautiful names of God.”23 Later in the issue, we learn that Nawaf is Saudi Arabian. Whereas, in his case, the relation between place of birth and the Islamic denomination soon becomes readily apparent on the visual level—one panel depicts his mother

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wearing a burqa—other members of the team display hardly any markers of their affiliation with Islam. Some of them were born and raised in countries with only small or marginal Muslim populations, such as Hungary, South Africa, or Portugal. Consequently, as Enderwitz notes, “[a]lthough [. . .] there are no blonde beauties among the female heroes, ‘The 99’ are as multi-coloured, -cultured and -religious as their creators and audiences are.”24 What holds true for all of them, additionally, is that their ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds, if apparent at times, are never thematized or negotiated beyond the visual level of their outward appearance. Skin color and clothing are therefore the only (and rather unreliable) indicators of ethnic or cultural identity. By contrast, the narrative uses a variety of means to ensure that the reader is perfectly aware of a character’s ethnic and/or national descent. In some instances, the birth name signals a character’s background. This applies, for example, to Jami the Assembler, a 13-year-old Hungarian kid of superior intelligence, whose birth name is Miklos Szekelyhidi. Alternatively, captions supply such information when characters make their first appearance in the course of a particular adventure. What is indeed striking in the context of the series’ depiction of ethnic and national heterogeneity is that the conflicts that might emerge from the interactions of such a diverse cast of characters are generally not articulated. This does not mean that the young superheroes’ relationship to each other would generally be carefree. Yet, actual conflicts are commonly ascribed to their homogeneous social backgrounds, youth, or lack of experience. Cultural and ethnic difference is, therefore, presented as an asset rather than a potential problem or obstacle to understanding and cooperation. Living and working together in a global setting with hardly any perceivable, clear-cut boundaries, this group of young superheroes exemplifies what Appadurai envisions as an ethnoscape, signifying the “shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guestworkers, and other moving groups and persons [who] constitute an essential feature of the world, and appear to affect the politics of and between nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree.”25 Even though the personal ties with the superheroes’ homelands are not overly emphasized within the series, nationality fulfills at least two important functions. First, The 99 originate from different countries and regions all over the world instead of being rooted exclusively in the Middle East. Nonetheless, they fight together to “make the world a better place,” which serves to validate the unifying powers of an “extremely discreet Islam.”26 This mythological Islam, shaped in its moral implications by explicitly humanist and universalistic values, eventually represents the subliminal but single common point of identification for all

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members of The 99. It is, after all, intended to do so as well for the adolescent readers who are primarily addressed by the text. Secondly, to populate a narrative with diverse characters, none of whom are compatriots, may certainly serve an economic function in that it makes the text more easily accessible for heterogeneous audiences and thus increases its potential readership. Apart from The 99 Steps Foundation’s headquarters, which is located in Paris and represents the institutional body that serves as a retreat as well as a training ground for the young superheroes, there are hardly any recurring places of action in the series. Be it Dubai or Paris, St. Louis or Hong Kong, the Philippines or Zimbabwe—the places to which the story takes the reader are as numerous and diverse as their protagonists’ ethnic and national backgrounds. Their spheres of activity are depicted as constantly in flux. Indeed, these spheres become interchangeable over time since the members of The 99 are apparently always on the move in search of new adventures.27 The new breed of cosmopolitan superheroes that works and travels across the globe is conceived as a diasporic community permanently in motion rather than as one firmly attached to one particular region or nation. Their “local roots [are . . .] only one of the many signifiers of [their] sense of self.”28 In that sense, The 99 operate in, and are representatives of, what Appadurai describes as “the post-national world we are seeing emerge [in which] diaspora runs with, and not against the grain of identity, movement and reproduction.”29 Hence, the series at least implicitly pushes for a transnational understanding of the superhero figure, simultaneously emphasizing its specific cultural roots. In doing so, it promotes a cosmopolitanism that “accepts difference but does not make it absolute[,] rather [seeking] out ways for making it universally agreeable.”30 Yet, what is true for the heroes in terms of location also applies to the major evil force within the series, Dr Ramzi’s arch enemy Rughal and his allies, who are naturally operating on a global scale as well. The character of Rughal, being conceived in accordance with the conventions of the genre as the ruthless villain par excellence whose powers and virtual immortality also derive from the mysterious Noor Stones, unquestionably represents the central antagonist of The 99. Moreover, he is the sinister mastermind behind an extremely powerful and well-networked business conglomerate called Mamluk International, a multinational company which Raqib, the Watcher, another gem bearer and occasional member of The 99, considers to be a serious enemy because it “reaches into the global flow of money, energy, commerce, influence on governments.”31 While it is a rather inconspicuous old mansion that houses the headquarters of The 99 Steps Foundation in Paris, the various buildings harboring Mamluk

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International and its subsidiary Nahomtech, as the dubious conglomerates symbolizing the worst outgrowths of contemporary global capitalism, are of a completely different character. In the context of a Muslim superhero narrative, we would certainly expect to come across distinctive signs of religious practice to be displayed at least occasionally. But as if in order to acknowledge Appadurai’s observation that “the disposition of global capital is now a more mysterious, rapid, and difficult landscape to follow than ever before,” these emblems of global finance and economy seem to have replaced them here in their colossal presence.32

The team-up as a transnational experience The greatest achievement in acquainting a Western audience with The 99 has been the creation of a team-up story with the Justice League of America, which ran from December 2010 until May 2011 in a six-part miniseries at DC. Teaming up the JLA, currently one of the most prominent superhero teams in the superhero genre, with The 99, this miniseries employs a motif frequently used in superhero comics: that of Earth facing apocalypse. The first issue opens with a title page of The Daily Planet and the headline “‘City of the Future’ to Open Today: Bold Experiment in International Harmony.”33 Two images are displayed underneath this headline. The upper image shows the silhouette of a modern metropolis filled with countless skyscrapers, embedded in a desert landscape and canopied by a giant “semi-permeable domed roof.”34 As we learn from the captions, the city is located somewhere on the Arabian Peninsula within “the heart of the ‘Empty Quarter’—one of the largest desert areas of the world.”35 In the second image, we see a public open space surrounded by a green area, in the center of which children of undefined ethnic descent are playing below a number of fountains. Additional captions provide further details about the location of this idyllic place, informing readers of “a showpiece of international peace and cooperation” and telling of “[f]amilies from virtually every country [who] have volunteered to live here, as an example to the nations and peoples of the world.”36 Furthermore, two corporations are said to have “donated high-tech equipment to this effort”—Mamluk International and WayneTech. Ostensibly built on neutral ground—there is no mention of national boundaries here— and inhabited by a global community, this location emerges as an ideal space for which The 99 are willing to fight on a global scale. This ideal space is the perfect city in a postnational sense because it is able to accommodate a peaceful multiethnic community.37

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In the following panels, the reader witnesses The 99’s first encounter with Superman and Wonder Woman, who represent the Justice League of America, in the “City of the Future.” On this occasion, Superman holds a speech in which he declares that “the Justice League . . . stands for the same ideals of peace and harmony he [Dr Ramzi] so eloquently described.” Moreover, he refers to the fact that the team-up of which he is a member “include[s] representatives from Africa, Russia—even Mars and the Kingdom of Atlantis.”38 Drawing another parallel between the two teams by highlighting the national diversity among the members of the Justice League, this statement is remarkable as it directs the reader’s attention to something that is seldom acknowledged within narratives about superhero team-ups: their protagonists’ ethnic diversity. Nevertheless, it cannot hide the fact that the JLA is operating in a different mode than The 99. What Superman and the members of his team ultimately stand for is a traditional type of internationalism. The JLA strive for international harmony and cooperation, but they are, in fact, unable to reach beyond this conception, which is so closely connected to the idea of the nation-state. Superman’s monologue, therefore, appears like a concession to a new breed of superheroes firmly embedded in a globalized world of transnational flows. Even if they are depicted as apprentice-like at times and full of respect for their established role models, whose representations have shaped the genre virtually ever since it emerged in the 1930s and 1940s and who look back on a long history of epitomizing the values of the nation-state, this bunch of extraordinary teenagers seem instead to embody the zeitgeist of a postnational era to come. Whereas the members of the JLA are bound to the logic of the classical heroic narrative that, “[by] rendering the ideals of a nation in stark, Manichean terms [.  .  .] offers an avenue through which one can access the core values of a society,” those of The 99, even though eventually fighting for the same goal, have no plausible reason to subscribe to these ideals.39 Naturally, the actualization of this postnational fantasy—the dream of a harmonious, multiethnic utopia becoming reality—is soon disturbed by evil forces that call for the first instance of cooperation between the two superhero teams. For those familiar with The 99 series, the mention of Mamluk International on the initial page of the first issue would have been an early indicator of the challenges the “City of the Future” will have to face. As the superheroes soon realize, the inhabitants of the city have come under the control of an extraterrestrial being that, in collaboration with the arch villain Rughal, is striving for world domination and ultimately destruction. In the following issues, the JLA and

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The 99 join forces and battle relentlessly against the extraterrestrial intruders. This battle will last until “[t]he two groups [have] successfully crossed a divide of age, experience and culture to work together in a common goal.”40 As the Justice League of America/The 99 miniseries and The 99 series illustrate, this new species of Muslim superheroes works perfectly well within the established conventions of the superhero genre. But while The 99 are depicted as being deeply embedded in the transnational flows of a globalized world, their exploits take place in a rather naive vision of a postnational utopia as symbolized in the “City of the Future.” While adopting the basic conventions of the superhero genre, The 99 unfolds its particularly innovative power predominantly on a narrative level. On this level, there is indeed evidence of the creation of a new breed of superheroes that embraces the transnational flows in an emerging postnational society, representing young Muslim cosmopolitans whose story and visual depiction reach beyond their creator’s internationalist aspirations. So even if this narrative is still operating within the clear-cut boundaries of the hero/villain-dichotomy, obviously lacking a critical examination of the ongoing processes of globalization, and, eventually, confronting readers with a somewhat utopian outlook toward a postnational society, the mere fact that it attempts to supplant the American model of the superhero figure by introducing a set of fresh characters, inspired by the values of medieval Islamic cosmopolitanism, is certainly to be considered an achievement in itself.

Notes 1 2 3 4

Fattah n.p. US Department of State n.p. The White House n.p. Enderwitz 83. The usage of the term “Islamic iconoclasm” is rather problematic in this context. Not only does it misrepresent the actual diversity of the comics medium, but the “conception of a monolithic [. . .] Muslim response to the image [as implied here . . .] elides the distinction between different cultural practices [and, therefore,] obscures any variation, complexity, or sophistication in Muslim responses to the image” (Flood 641). 5 Often cited in this context is Superman’s motto of “fighting a battle for truth, justice, and the American way,” which implies a patriotic message to be identified in a significant number of superhero comics during the war and postwar periods. 6 Cf. Ndalianis 10.

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  7 Coogan 30, 31.   8 In the logic of the genre, The 99 therefore represent a superteam “that bring[s] together the greatest heroes of a culture or a company to form a team to accomplish a task or a mission” (Coogan 121).   9 Paul Lauter qtd in Fishkin 21. When speaking about superhero comics as being rooted in American popular culture, it must be stated that it was first and foremost Jewish artists and writers with an immigrant background, such as Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, or Bob Kane, who were significantly involved in the initial creation of the superhero figure and who consequently must be regarded as mainly responsible for the foundation of the genre. For valuable accounts of the genre’s origins and its creators, see Fingeroth; Jones. 10 Cf. Fattah n.p.; cf. also Enderwitz 94. 11 Appadurai, Modernity at Large 33, 33–4, 35; emphasis in the original. 12 Peyser n.p. In spite of a number of negative reactions toward the series, it was, in fact, quite well received by a majority of the international media. Nevertheless, according to Al-Mutawa, even these few openly negative reactions have played their part in preventing the series from becoming a major success in the United States. See also Merica. 13 See The 99, “About Us” n.p. 14 Enderwitz 84–5. 15 Cf. Enderwitz 87. 16 The character of Dr Ramzi displays striking similarities to Prof. Xavier of the X-Men. 17 For a detailed account on the notion of transmedia storytelling, see Jenkins, “Transmedia 202” n.p. 18 Al-Mutawa not only runs a webpage that provides a great deal of additional information about the series, including an extensive archive of press clips, but he also uses various social media, hosting Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter channels. Moreover, a documentary about his achievements titled Wham! Bam! Islam! was broadcast on PBS in 2011. 19 See Arabnews.com n.p. 20 Appadurai, Modernity at Large 35. 21 Moore et al., Justice League #1, 2. 22 Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers 155. 23 Enderwitz 85. 24 Enderwitz 87. 25 Appadurai, Modernity at Large 33. 26 Enderwitz 90. 27 What is presented here on a narrative level as the regular business of a modern superhero can certainly be regarded a response to what Aihwa Ong identifies as an emerging “flexible citizenship” that describes “maneuvers of mobile subjects who respond fluidly and opportunistically to dynamic borderless market conditions” (501).

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28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Kroes 20. Appadurai, “Heart of Whiteness” 803. Beck and Grande 14. Naif Al-Mutawa et al., The 99 #6, 14. Appadurai, Modernity at Large 34. Moore et al., Justice League #1, 1. Moore et al., Justice League #1, 1. Moore et al., Justice League #1, 1. Moore et al., Justice League #1, 1. In fact, this image by no means corresponds to the realities of today’s “transnational civic life [that still] remains embryonic, even in its most developed formations, as in the European Community, the European Court of Justice, or the United Nations” (Kerber 853). 38 Moore et al., Justice League #1, 3. 39 Costello 15. 40 Moore et al., Justice League #6, 21.

Works cited Al-Mutawa, Naif. The 99: Origins. Ed. Marie Javins. Writers Fabian Nicieza and Stuart Moore. Art by June Brigman, Roy Richardson, Dan Panosian, and John McCrea, inks by Sean Parsons, color by Monica Kubina. Safat: Teshkeel, 2008. —. The 99 #6. Safat: Teshkeel, 2011. —. The 99 #8. Safat: Teshkeel, 2011. Appadurai, Arjun. “The Heart of Whiteness.” Callaloo 16.4 (Fall 1993): 796–807. —. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. 6th edn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Arabnews.com. “Enjoy a Thrilling Experience in Middle East’s First Theme Park.” Arabnews.com. Aug. 11, 2010. . Accessed Jan. 31, 2012. Beck, Ulrich, and Edgar Grande. Cosmopolitan Europe. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Coogan, Peter. Superhero: The Secret Origins of a Genre. Austin: MonkeyBrain, 2006. Costello, Matthew J. Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America. New York: Continuum, 2009. Enderwitz, Susanne. “‘The 99’: Islamic Superheroes—A New Species.” In Transcultural Turbulences: Towards A Multi-Sided Reading of Image Flows. Ed. Christiane Brosius and Roland Wenzlhuemer. Berlin: Springer, 2011. 83–95. Fattah, Hassan M. “Comics to Battle for Truth, Justice, and the Islamic Way.” New York Times, Jan. 22, 2006. . Accessed Jan. 31, 2012.

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Fingeroth, Danny. Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero. New York: Continuum, 2007. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies—Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004.” American Quarterly 57.1 (2005): 17–57. Flood, Finbarr Barry. “Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm, and the Museum.” Art Bulletin 84.4 (Dec. 2002): 641–59. Jenkins, Henry. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2006. —. “Transmedia 202: Further Reflections.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. Aug. 1, 2011. . Accessed Jan. 31, 2012. Jones, Gerard. Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book. New York: Basic Books, 2004. Kerber, Linda K. “The Meanings of Citizenship.” The Journal of American History 84.3 (1997): 830–54. Kroes, Rob. “Citizenship in a Trans-Atlantic Perspective.” Symposium: Redefinitions of Citizenship and Revisions of Cosmopolitanism—Transnational Perspectives. Journal of Transnational American Studies 3.1 (2011): 18–25. . Merica, Dan. “Muslim Superheroes Series Meets Resistance in the U.S.” CNN. Oct. 5, 2011. . Accessed Feb. 13, 2012. Moore, Stuart, and Fabian Nicieza, writers. Justice League of America/The 99 #1. Art by Tom Derenick and Drew Geraci, color by Allen Passalaqua, letters by Robert Leigh. New York: DC Comics, 2010. —. Justice League of America/The 99 #6. New York: DC Comics, 2011. Ndalianis, Angela. “Comic Book Superheroes: An Introduction.” In The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero. Ed. Angela Ndalianis. New York: Routledge, 2009. 3–15. The 99. “About Us.” The99.org. . Accessed Jan. 31, 2012. The 99—Unbound. Directed by David Osborne. Kuwait, 2011. Ong, Aihwa. “Mutations in Citizenship.” Theory, Culture & Society 23.2/3 (2006): 499–505. Peyser, Andrea. “Trading Cape for Burqa.” New York Post. Oct. 11, 2010, . Accessed Feb. 13, 2012. US Department of State. “Promoting Entrepreneurship: Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship.” Apr. 26–27, 2010. . Accessed Jan. 31, 2012. Wham! Bam! Islam! Directed by Isaac Solotaroff. USA: ITVS, 2011. The White House. “Remarks by the President at the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship.” Apr. 26, 2010. . Accessed Jan. 31, 2012.

12

Lost in Translation: Narratives of Transcultural Displacement in the Wordless Graphic Novel Florian Groß

He remembered the immigrant’s fear of going unrecognized in a land of strangers, of being lost in the translation from there to here. Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay 381 Wordless graphic novels are a strange kind of comics. If they are comics at all. Often cited as precursors to the contemporary graphic novel, visual narratives without words epitomize the medium’s fundamental emphasis on visual forms of narration and yet flout comics’ central element of word-image relation.1 The wordless graphic novel’s aesthetic states of in-betweenness and precarious belonging, coupled with its reliance on visual rather than linguistic means of narration, make it a compelling case study for the transnational potential of comics. For the question arises: With their complete reliance on the language of pictures, are these wordless narratives not ideally suited for transnational communication and impact? The following statement from George Walker’s recent anthology of wordless graphic novels seems to assume as much: Imagine the advantage of writing a book that can be read anywhere in the world without translation. Free of the confines of words, books written in the universal language of pictures are understandable anywhere in the global village. A drawing of a stick figure needs no translation. Pictorial narratives are not new; the earliest known cave paintings told tales of hunting, the Egyptians used sequential images and all written languages evolved from pictures, our universal system of expression and communication.2

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But is the matter really that simple? To whom does Walker’s first-person plural possessive adjective “our” refer? Are pictures really a “universal system” and pictorial books “understandable anywhere”? In fact, Walker’s reference to Egyptian sequential imagery provides an interesting case in point. Hieroglyphs are one of the most famous instances of the very necessity of translation; without the Rosetta Stone, modern readers would still wonder what these particular types of Egyptian pictures meant. Given this fact, it comes as no surprise that Scott McCloud sees them as precursors to writing rather than to comics. Even with Egyptian paintings, any attempt to read them from a modern point of view is already a process of translation, as McCloud’s Understanding Comics illustrates. In his analysis of a scene painted for the Tomb of Menna, his captions are a veritable translation of the scene depicted in the individual panels.3 On the surface, it is, of course, an indicator of the universal quality of the pictures that a twentieth-century American can decipher Egyptian symbols from 1500 BC. Yet, the amount of knowledge needed to make sense of the pictures and the relation between the Egyptian paintings and McCloud’s words in these panels is a translation in the original sense of the word (lat. transferre meaning “to bring over, carry over”). For his translation, McCloud has to do more than simply determine what the pictures mean from a universal point of view; he has to decipher what the pictures meant to those who used them when and where they used them. He then has to bring the depicted information and the pictorial means over from one cultural context to another, thereby inevitably changing both the paintings’ “original” meaning(s) and his understanding of sequential art. This hybrid transcultural exchange elucidates the fact that no matter how easily we recognize the denotative meaning of images, their connotative meaning is far from fixed. Or, in the terms of structural linguistics: An image’s signifier may be universally recognizable, but the signified is not and always changes if we move from one semiotic context to another. Turning to the medium of comics, manga offers a prominent example of the issues that arise from a reductionist, ethnocentric take on pictorial translation. As Jens R. Nielsen has shown with special reference to the large eyes typical of manga, images and symbols in comics are no less culturally dependent than any other pictorial material, and the translation of the “cultural conventions” and “semiotic agreements” embodied in comics is highly problematic.4 In the Japanese context, the huge eyes do not so much signify cuteness, but are rather conventionalized signs representing mutual openness between character and reader.5 It follows that the pictorial meaning of comics, including the wordless graphic novels that are the subject of this chapter, can never be universal, and that pictures require translation

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just as much as conventionalized images such as letters and words. This may complicate a supposedly seamless transnational movement, but it also provides a powerful image of the dynamics of transnational contact and exchange. Translation in the sense of movement from one semiotic context to another is also a central thematic aspect of several of the best-known wordless graphic novels. Although their strictly pictorial aesthetics clearly evokes ideas of universal access, these books problematize matters of transcultural and transnational communication in ways that ultimately reflect on their own medial self-awareness as liminal texts between visual art and comics. Frans Masereel’s The City (1925), Lynd Ward’s Gods’ Man (1929), and Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006) depict cultural exchange as a highly problematic process fraught with misunderstandings while simultaneously highlighting the transnational basis for their aesthetics. This duality is also emphasized by Michael Chabon’s representation of The Golem, a fictional wordless graphic novel in his comics-themed novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000). These narratives reflect their own precarious aesthetics through narratives of misunderstanding, isolation, and displacement, and they defy an overly simple reading of their culturally contingent pictorial aesthetics. Rather than treating images as a transparent form of communication, they use their supposedly greatest transcultural asset as a self-conscious means of negotiating aspects of transcultural (mis)understanding.

Comics and the wordless graphic novel There is broad agreement that the relation of words and images is crucial for any definition of comics. Most prominently, Robert C. Harvey claims that “when words and pictures blend in mutual dependence to tell a story and thereby convey a meaning that neither the verbal nor the visual can achieve alone without the other, then the storyteller is using to the fullest the resources the medium offers him.”6 This plea for the essential bimediality of comics and the central aspect of medial hybridization is, in fact, central to many definitions of comics. In Comics and Sequential Art, Will Eisner describes sequential art as “an art and literary form that deals with the arrangement of pictures or images and words to narrate a story or dramatize an idea.” This “image-word mix [. . .] presents a montage of both word and image, and the reader is thus required to exercise both visual and verbal interpretive skills.” Like Harvey, Eisner claims that “in the skillful employment of words and images lies the expressive potential of

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the medium.” Once “coupled with words,” images “form a precise message to be understood by the reader.” Despite this emphasis, however, Eisner concludes his heavily illustrated chapter on “Imagery” with the acknowledgment that “[i]t is possible to tell a story through imagery alone without the help of words,” and he illustrates this with a largely pantomimic Spirit story.7 His stance on pure pictorial storytelling remains ambiguous, though. On the one hand, he praises the silent comics drawn by Norwegian artist Jason: “Readers of any language can reflect on [their] universal themes.” On the other hand, he concludes on a more tentative note: “Images without words, while they seem to represent a more primitive form of graphic narrative, really require some sophistication on the part of the reader (or viewer). Common experience and a history of observation are necessary to interpret the inner feelings of the actor.”8 Through Eisner’s cautionary remark, universal reflection and specific interpretation are cast as two very different processes, such that the superficial accessibility of wordless pictures inevitably leads to much more complex, and ultimately more precarious, processes of translation. In his meta-comic Understanding Comics, McCloud defines comics as “[j]uxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.” This definition suggests that words are not a necessary condition for comics while simultaneously drawing attention to the very centrality of the verbal. His stand-in character may claim that “it doesn’t have to contain words to be comics,” but the inclusion of “pictorial and other images” is significant here and points to a certain hierarchy of the worded over the wordless.9 Still, by putting sequence at the center of his definition, McCloud includes wordless graphic novels in his definition of comics—but makes it clear that we are dealing with a special case. For McCloud, wordless picture sequences are not so much comics as a hybrid between visual art and comics. In a panel that shows an excerpt from Gods’ Man, he says: “Woodcut artist Lynd Ward is such a missing link. Ward’s silent ‘woodcut novels’ are powerful modern fables, now praised by comics artists, but seldom recognized as comics.”10 For these theoreticians of comics, word/image relation emerges as the core of the dominant definition, leaving open only a marginal space for the rarer special cases—like the wordless graphic novel, which is indeed a much less common instance of sequential art. Ironically, in the context of bimedial comics, it is this “purer” form of pictorial storytelling that emerges as the strange or hybrid kind, as a mongrel between visual art and comics. Hovering between inclusion in the medium of comics and the demand to be taken on

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their own separate terms, wordless graphic novels defy discrete classification and construct a medial space of in-betweenness.

Transnational silence In-betweenness is the watchword here, as wordless graphic novels also provide us with a rich history of texts that highlight transnational exchange, an aspect that often goes unnoticed in general accounts of comics. The transnational element in wordless graphic novels has also been alluded to by Walker, who stresses the relation between the early wordless graphic novel and the class struggles and protest movements of the 1920s and 1930s.11 Beyond this, I want to claim that we can also find a recurring sense of displacement, alienation, and the perpetual need to translate unknown cultural codes and disjunct experiences in the wordless narratives analyzed in this chapter. The transnational dimension of wordless graphic novels is already apparent if we look at the creative minds behind the books, for all of them are subject to—and agents of—“the broad array of cultural crossroads shaping the work of border-crossing authors, artists, and cultural forms that straddle multiple regional and national traditions.”12 Frans Masereel was a Belgian-born artist working primarily in France, and his work The City was first published in Germany. Shaun Tan is an Australian artist of part-Malaysian descent, while Lynd Ward was a US-American heavily influenced by European artists like Masereel. With Chabon, we have a Jewish American author who writes about the displaced European Jew Josef “Joe” Kavalier in mid-century America. The fact that all of these illustrators and authors are published by mainstream publishers in the United States makes it deceptively obvious that we are dealing with a quintessentially transnational phenomenon. Yet, when Shelley Fisher Fishkin claims that “places hard to categorize” and “figures who have been marginalized precisely because they crossed so many borders that they are hard to categorize” will be more central to a transnational American studies, she speaks in terms that connect the aesthetic position of the wordless graphic novel with its tendency to focus on exactly these transnational actors and locales.13 The transnational is a double-edged sword; just as much as it facilitates exchange and global understanding, it also leaves in its wake those subjects stuck in a transnational limbo between spaces. And the same holds true for the wordless graphic novels in the focus of this chapter: While their visual aesthetics are deceptively simple and transparent, they speak of the perils

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of not-belonging. Their narratives are thus ironic testaments to the difficulties of understanding one another across cultural and national borders.

Alienated and anonymous: The City Often cited as the fount of twentieth-century wordless graphic novels, Masereel’s woodcut narratives also set the scene for the transnational lineage of this wordless comics genre. Masereel’s sympathy with the international labor movement can already be seen in his first book, The Passion of Man (25 Images de la Passion d’un Homme, 1918). This short sequence depicts a worker’s life literally from the cradle to the grave. Born to a single woman and reared in poor circumstances, he becomes a worker and later a leader of the labor movement. After the protagonist is arrested and convicted by the capitalist authorities, the short narrative ends with him awaiting execution. Less overt in its political message, but equally sociological in focus, The City (Die Stadt, 1925) is the depiction of life in a(ny) modern metropolis.14 For David Beronä, Masereel’s choice of a line from Walt Whitman for the epigraph of his book—“This is the city and I am one of the citizens, Whatever interests the rest interests me”—indicates that Masereel “captures the pedestrian activity seen in any large city at the turn of the century.”15 The first three panels seem to depict a movement to the city, beginning with a man sitting in nature outside an industrial city before showing trains and commuters in a train station; the rest of the book deals with a lateral movement within the nameless city in associative sequence.16 The 100 disjointed woodcuts depict juxtaposed, alienated, and anonymous subjects in urban life. Blue-collar and white-collar work, consumption, leisure, and entertainment go hand in hand with military parades, sexual orgies, and murders and deaths. There is no sequence in a straightforwardly narrative sense of connecting one scene logically with the next; rather, the narrative isolation of the individual panels stresses the isolation of the individuals and the respective social groups. But without knowledge of European culture between the wars, these individual panels would hardly be understandable. More basically still, it is not even clear whether we are dealing here with succession or simultaneity, whether the different scenes take place at the same time, within an hour, a day, a month, or a year.17 This almost imagist aesthetics, together with Masereel’s expressionistic visual style, connects the book to the essentially transnational phenomenon of modernism. The setting is equally ambiguous. Given that Masereel was Francophone, it comes as no surprise that in the few instances when actual words are depicted, they

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are in French; but apart from that, his evocative woodcuts of inner-city scenes, department stores, military parades, and political speeches could portray Paris just as well as interbellum London, Berlin, or Moscow.18 The city of the book’s title emerges as the anonymous city of modernity, where various transnational and transcultural movements and phenomena converge and diverge and where the differences between concrete instances of urban modernity become blurred. This space, however, is no place of transnational utopia; it is rather a chaotic geography of anonymity and alienation.

Stranger in a strange land: Gods’ Man In 1929, the wordless graphic novel “immigrated” to the United States when, after a visit to Germany, Lynd Ward began to work in this idiom. Just like Masereel, Ward used woodcutting, and just like Masereel’s, Ward’s style is heavily influenced by modernist expressionism. However, compared to Masereel’s stark black-and-white compositions that rely heavily on black spaces and sharp contrasts, Ward’s frequent use of white lines in his black spaces creates a much more nuanced, less drastic visual effect—and he tells an actual story. With Gods’ Man, we have both the first modern American wordless graphic novel and yet another depiction of modern urban life. After a perilous journey, a quintessential Romantic artist arrives at an unknown city with an unknown semiotic code—capitalism.19 At an inn, the artist must learn that he has to pay for everything, food included, and that his art is not a valid currency unless transferred into money. Everything is owned by somebody, and everything has a price in this system of monetary exchange value and the trading of proprietary goods. A Mephistopheles figure comes to the rescue, buys a painting, and thus enables the artist to pay for his meal. The masked figure seems to recognize the artist’s talent and offers him a brush that promises to make him a better painter. In the next six panels, we see the historical trajectory of this brush in a markedly transnational sequence that encapsulates the history of Western art. The first panel depicts an ancient Egyptian holding the brush while painting, and the next panel shows a Greek artist using the brush to paint a vase. While a medieval monk is at the center of the next panel, the fourth panel clearly depicts Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), one of the most famous precursors of woodcut art. The sequence ends with a Renaissance artist and a modern painter with an easel and the brush. After hearing this story (which we only see in its pictorial translation), the painter in Gods’ Man (literally) signs the pact with this story’s devil and,

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in best Faustian fashion, is soon rewarded with commercial success. Later on, however, he has to leave the city and start a new life in nature, where he lives with his wife and child. This Romantic idyll is terminated, finally, when the devil cashes in on his outstanding debt; he claims the artist’s life. With its story of an artist failing in a strange and corrupting city, Gods’ Man highlights the problems inherent in transcultural contact, emphasized through its metaphorical narrative and its emphasis on the incongruity of semiotic systems. Even a transnational tool such as the brush, imbued with the aesthetic history of Western civilization, cannot prevent the artist from failing to find a place in the transnational realms he discovers.

Explicitly transnational: The Arrival Shaun Tan’s recent The Arrival depicts cultural exchange as a no less complex endeavor, but it represents it in more hopeful terms than did Masereel or Ward. In many respects, this contemporary wordless graphic novel is much more similar to “comics,” as the term is commonly understood, than its historical precursors: It consists of drawings rather than woodcuts, and even though there are numerous full-page images, it frequently features sequences of multiple panels on a single page. The story itself (naturally) does not feature any word balloons, but its panels feature many letters from a clearly foreign language unintelligible for both the reader and the protagonist.20 As such, The Arrival reduces words and letters to their pictorial basis, for the protagonist and for us, and highlights the semiotic problems that arise when entering alien spaces. At its core, The Arrival is a classic, straightforward story of migration. A father has to leave his family to make a living in a foreign city across the ocean. After he has become accustomed to this strange place, his family follows him, and the book ends with a panel in which the protagonist’s daughter helps a new immigrant. This hopeful conclusion and the family’s translation of their past into their new life is especially stressed on two structurally similar pages. On the very first page, we see nine panels that depict some of the family’s belongings: a paper-bird, a clock, a hat, a bowl, a child’s drawing, a kettle, a cup, a suitcase, and a picture of the family that the father will put in this suitcase. The last part of The Arrival starts with a strikingly similar succession of panels, but in the first seven panels, the old items are replaced by the retro-futuristic appliances of the nameless city, and the new paper-animal and drawing are also reminiscent of the visual code of the family’s new home. These sequences show a successful

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transnational exchange by indicating how the family has adopted the new codes without entirely losing its old ones. The circularity of The Arrival is also a vivid illustration of what Fishkin describes as the typically transnational, the “endless process of comings and goings that create familial, cultural, linguistic, and economic ties across national borders.”21 What distinguishes The Arrival from classic nineteenth- and twentiethcentury immigration narratives is twofold. First, its narrative and particularly its visual style are decidedly antinaturalistic. Mixing surrealism with classic imagery and historical accuracy with an idiosyncratic retro-futurism, the book visually represents both an objective reality as well as a subjective experience of migration. Second, it uses its reliance on elastic visual codes to freely mix various narratives of migration and set its transnational narrative in an unspecified locale. Just as “the” city of Masereel’s book is an amalgam of different (European) cities between the wars, so too is “the” arrival an assemblage of several arrival experiences of the turn of the century.22 Next to allusions to Australian immigration history, several panels evoke the heavily mediated immigration experience of the turn-of-the-century United States, in particular Ellis Island—thus invoking the context in which the very term “transnationalism” was coined, in 1916, by Randolph Bourne under the impression of immigration to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.23 The Arrival’s blending of several iconic migration movements speaks to a wide range of transnational audiences, something that may also be read as a shrewd move to appeal to as many consumers as possible. Nonetheless, while clearly drawing on the US perspective, Tan’s blending of this perspective with the globally lesser-known Australian experience also decenters the hegemonic understanding of “America” as the quintessential space of modern immigration.

A monstrous comic book: The Golem Joe Kavalier’s The Golem is a very different kind of wordless graphic novel. Neither its author nor the book itself actually exists, as they are both part of Michael Chabon’s historical novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. This wordless narrative resides within a comics narrative consisting of nothing but words. Chabon’s novel about the creation of comics in the Golden Age of Comic Books is a narrative of cultural displacement that also highlights the transnational element in comics culture. The art school–trained Joe escapes the Prague Ghetto and arrives in New York in 1938, where he begins a comic

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book franchise with his cousin, the “enterprising thief ” Sam Klayman “Clay.”24 After a short period of success reminiscent of the classic Golden Age creative duos, Joe vanishes from the face of the earth for 13 years. During this time, he creates a 2,256-page long wordless graphic novel about the mythical creature that facilitated his original escape from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia: There were no balloons in any of the panels, no words at all except for those that appeared as part of the artwork itself—signs on buildings and roads, labels on bottles, addresses on love letters that formed part of the plot—and the two words THE GOLEM! which reappeared on the splash page at the start of each chapter, each time in a different guise, the eight letters and exclamation point transformed now into a row of houses, now into a stairway, into nine marionettes, nine spidery bloodstains, the long shadows of nine haunted and devastating women. Joe had intended eventually to paste in balloons and fill them with text, but he had never been able to bring himself to mar the panels in this way.25

This passage characterizes The Golem as a hybrid, or a transitional form, between the comic books and woodcut novels of its day. Its treatment of the splash page and the inclusion of letters in its artwork are highly reminiscent of a popular comic book series of the 1940s, Will Eisner’s The Spirit. But everything we learn about its style transcends the visual style of its day and rather evokes artists like Ward and Masereel: “the queasy angles and stark compositions, the cross-hatchings and vast swaths of shadow, the distended and fractured and finely minced panels of his monstrous comic book.”26 Moreover, its book-length format also connects it to Ward’s woodcut novels, an influence Will Eisner acknowledged when he coined the term “graphic novel”: “In 1978, encouraged by the work of the experimental graphic artists Otto Nückel, Franz [sic] Masereel and Lynd Ward, who in the 1930s published serious novels told in art without text, I attempted a major work in a similar form. In a futile effort to entice the patronage of a mainstream publisher, I called it a ‘graphic novel.’”27 The Golem’s transitionality is not restricted to questions of style and format, though. The fact that the narrative was conceived with speech bubbles and now hovers between the “original” comics idiom and a strange wordless variant connects Joe’s narrative with the transnational experience it “translates.” Moreover, The Golem, this “monstrous comic book,” remains unpublished, and therefore in a perennially transitional state. It remains open what exactly makes the book “monstrous,” but there is good reason to believe that it might refer to more than a diegetic creature or the sheer size of the book. Mirroring the number of US states in 1954, The Golem is told in 48 chapters, and it blends this “American”

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structure with a narrative that relates specifically Euro-Judaic traditions. The book at once translates a foreign culture’s experience and emerges as an utterly idiosyncratic text that defies comprehension. When he sees the book for the first time, Sam has problems “deciphering the action from the flow of wordless images across the page” and has to ask Joe about the content. Without words, the “precise” meaning (Eisner) of the pictures is hard to grasp for Sam, who lacks both the cultural background knowledge of this “awful lot of Jewish stuff ” as well as a medial literacy in this kind of visual narrative.28 The definite article of the book’s title once more refers to something more ambiguous than it may seem, but this time the ambiguity is even more a part of the very subject to which it refers: the mythical Golem, this transnational Jewish figure. Shortly after his arrival in the United States, Joe draws a Golem for his pitch meeting with a publisher, and the novel emphasizes the relation between the Golem and the American superhero.29 Chabon not only imagines a strikingly Jewish backdrop to the Golden Age of Comic Books: He emphasizes its transnational background. As indicated by the novel’s narrator, the Golem— “from Rabbi Loew’s to Victor von Frankenstein’s”—is a serial figure that is transhistorical, transgeneric, and transnational.30 From myth to fiction, from comics to art, and from Europe to America, it is a wayfarer between disparate places. Furthermore, its being made of clay, its silence, and its reliance on words that vanish in its body all emerge as powerful metaphors for its inclusion in Joe Kavalier’s wordless graphic novel. In Kavalier & Clay, the golem lays the basis for a narrative that “escapes” from the confines of nationalized languages, but the fact that it is never published marks it as little more than a utopia— or, more positively, as an irreducibly transitional space, much like that of the transnational itself.

Conclusion All of the narratives considered here revolve around cities, these transnational hubs of modernity, and all of them locate their narratives in spaces marked by transnational and transcultural phenomena of migration, exchange, and transition. They blend cities (The City), highlight the very absence of national markers (Gods’ Man), freely mix various (trans)national narratives of migration (The Arrival), or represent the concrete transnational experience of European migration to the United States (The Golem). They do so, however, from a decidedly Western perspective, and their visual aesthetics are only universal

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insofar as they are relatively accessible to Western audiences. But wordless graphic novels should not be seen as pretending to transcend these limitations. It is less the genre’s emphasis on a universal visuality than its medial state of inbetweenness that makes the wordless graphic novel a fitting locus for transnational narratives—for narratives that appropriately stress states of hybridity, liminality, and transitionality. Wordless graphic novels highlight narratives of transnational contact and integrate them with visual aesthetics that emphasize the fits and breaks in transnational translation; they construct a transnational potential while always stressing its limits. In the end, even though the wordlessness of wordless graphic novels also facilitates transnational access, it demands a form of transnational reception that pays close attention to the complex process of pictorial translation and does not take the smooth translatability of visual narratives for granted.

Notes   1 See Walker; Beronä. I would like to thank the editors for their immensely helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.   2 Walker 9.   3 Cf. McCloud 13–15.   4 My translation; Nielsen 339. See Mark Berninger’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 15) for an exploration of one sort of translation of manga’s “cultural conventions.”   5 Cf. Nielsen 356. This is important insofar as the predominantly Western association of large eyes with cuteness often leads to a disturbing connection between childish connotations and the sexualized content of many manga.   6 Harvey 4.   7 Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art xi, 1–2, 7, 9, 10.   8 Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art 18, 20.   9 McCloud 9, 8. In his historical overview of comics, McCloud refers to William Hogarth’s silent picture sequence A Harlot’s Progress (1731) but, significantly enough, follows up on this with a reference to Rodolphe Töpffer’s picture series and their employment of word-image relation, calling Töpffer “the father of the modern comic in many ways” (17). 10 McCloud 18. 11 Cf. Walker 10. 12 Fishkin 32. 13 Fishkin 31, 30.

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14 While The Passion of Man was first published in Masereel’s home country Belgium, The City was first published in Germany by Kurt Wolff after he had published German editions of Masereel’s earlier works. It was also Wolff who convinced Thomas Mann to write an introduction for Passionate Journey (Mon Livre d’Heures, 1919) and Hermann Hesse to write one for The Idea (Idée, 1920) (cf. Walker 20–1; Walker reprints all of these works). 15 Beronä 36. 16 Masereel panels 1, 2–3. 17 In fact, the rising/setting sun in panel 40 opposed to the moon in panels 85 and 100 seems to indicate that we are dealing with different times, but the relation between them remains indeterminate. 18 Masereel panels 4–5, 11, 23, 53. 19 Here, Ward might have been influenced by the narrative structure of Masereel’s Passionate Journey, which also opens with a young man entering an unknown city. 20 Cf. Bradford 29. 21 Fishkin 24. 22 Like Ward, Tan also draws explicit attention to his influences—but this time not as part of the diegesis, but in the form of a (written) “Artist’s Note” at the end of the book, where he cites scholarly, historical, and artistic sources that he used for The Arrival. 23 Cf. Mayer 17–18. 24 Chabon 7. 25 Chabon 578. 26 Chabon 578. 27 Eisner, A Contract with God ix–x. 28 Chabon 579, 583. 29 For a fuller account of the relation between Judaism and the creation of American superheroes, see Fingeroth. 30 Chabon 582. On the concept of the serial figure, see Denson and Mayer. On the relation between Frankenstein, comics, and serial figures, see Denson.

Works cited Beronä, David A. Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels. New York: Abrams, 2008. Bradford, Clare. “Children’s Literature in a Global Age: Transnational and Local Identities.” Nordic Journal of ChildLit Aesthetics 2 (2011): 20–34. Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. 2000. New York: Picador, 2001. Denson, Shane. “Marvel Comics’ Frankenstein: A Case Study in the Media of Serial Figures.” In American Comic Books and Graphic Novels. Ed. Daniel Stein, Christina

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Meyer, and Micha Edlich. Special issue of American Studies/Amerikastudien 56.4 (2011): 531–53. Denson, Shane, and Ruth Mayer. “Grenzgänger: Serielle Figuren im Medienwechsel.” In Populäre Serialität: Narration—Evolution—Distinktion. Zum seriellen Erzählen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert. Ed. Frank Kelleter. Bielefeld: transcript, 2012. 185–203. Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. 1985. New York: Norton, 2008. —. A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories. 1978. New York: Norton, 2006. Fingeroth, Danny. Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero. New York: Continuum, 2007. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies—Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004.” American Quarterly 57.1 (2005): 17–57. Harvey, Robert C. The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Masereel, Frans. The City: A Vision in Woodcuts. 1925. Mineola: Dover, 2006. Mayer, Ruth. Diaspora: Eine kritische Begriffsbestimmung. Bielefeld: transcript, 2005. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. 1993. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. Nielsen, Jens R. “Manga—Comics aus einer anderen Welt?” In Comics: Zur Geschichte und Theorie eines populärkulturellen Mediums. Ed. Stephan Ditschke, Katerina Kroucheva, and Daniel Stein. Bielefeld: transcript, 2009. 335–57. Tan, Shaun. The Arrival. 2006. New York: Scholastic, 2007. Walker, George Alexander, ed. Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels. Buffalo: Firefly, 2007. Ward, Lynd. Gods’ Man. 1929. Mineola: Dover, 2004.

13

Hard-Boiled Silhouettes: Transnational Remediation and the Art of Omission in Frank Miller’s Sin City Frank Mehring

Frank Miller began to make his mark on superhero comics with his visual approach to Daredevil, written by Roger McKenzie in 1979. In Ronin, the six-issue miniseries he did for DC in 1983–4, he started to shift his attention to creative visual storytelling in order to foster a new narrative tone and level of drama. Here, Miller successfully blended Japanese manga techniques (particularly Katsuhiro Otomo’s work on Akira) with Franco-Belgian comic traditions (borrowing from Alain Saint-Organ, Hergé, and others) to evoke a dark, dystopic New York of the future. A few years later, in his epochal Dark Knight miniseries for DC Comics (1986), he found in Batman a superhero whose persona could be translated into an expressionist aesthetics of a shadowy doppelgänger. The figure of the caped crusader lent itself to an exploration of the narrative potential of silhouette figures in dark urban environments. Emphasizing the criminal underworld, corrupt cops, bad guys, femme fatales, and heroes of the urban jungle in Sin City, his highly lauded crime series that ran between June 1991 and April 2000, Miller quickly emerged as an iconic artist who excelled in the use of silhouette aesthetics.1 Sin City explores the narrative potentials of silhouette aesthetics, featuring a highly evocative textual and visual style that activates memories, fantasies, dreams, and nightmares associated with global cities.2 Yet, how do such mental images come into play and with which effects? And how does Miller’s crime series functionalize the visual representations of mental images? In this chapter, I argue that the effectiveness of Miller’s images is built on the idea of images being an integral part of the content of memory.3 The reader retrieves mental images from his or her memory by referring to his or her mind as a form of an apparatus

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comparable to the cinema, computer, or a camera. Instead of only looking at images in media, in our case the silhouettes in Sin City, Miller plays with and activates images of media that have taken shape in our minds.4 Miller’s images of cityscapes, housing structures, alleys, crossroads, bridges, cars, and so on have by now acquired what Erwin Panofsky has called “pre-iconographic qualities”:5 We recognize things before we concern ourselves with their potential meaning. Friedrich Kittler has gone so far as to define the city itself as a medium.6 By reducing the visual complexity of the urban experience of the different characters in the Sin City stories to brush strokes of stark black-and-white panels, Miller builds on qualities of “firstness” (C. S. Peirce) such as texture and shape. The important category of color is for the most part eliminated;7 Miller thereby sets in motion powerful processes regarding storage and retrieval of mental urban images.8 Fredric Jameson has argued that new media become systemically dependent on each other and on prior media to gain cultural significance. In Sin City, we can identify a kind of genealogy of remediation that has become a staple in postmodern societies (and, one might argue, in the history of Western representation in general). The “pictorial turn” of the late twentieth century has contributed to processes of remediation that challenge the dominance of literary theory based on texts.9 Jameson emphasizes the role of the visual, musical, bodily, and spatial in media analysis, arguing: It is because we have had to learn that culture today is a matter of media that we have finally begun to get it through our heads that culture was always that, and that the older forms or genres, or indeed the older spiritual exercises and mediations, thoughts and expressions, were also in their very different ways media products.10

The appeal of Miller’s Sin City and the use of what I describe as “hard-boiled silhouettes” become apparent if one explores the genealogy of remediation at work in the graphic novel series. My understanding of remediation indicates a process that David Bolter and Richard Grusin describe as media “continually commenting upon, reproducing and replacing each other.”11 Turning to Jacques Derrida’s argument that there is nothing prior to writing, they claim correspondingly that for visual culture “there is nothing prior to mediation. Any act of mediation is dependent upon another, indeed many other, acts of mediation and is therefore remediation.”12 If we agree with Marshall McLuhan that new media often make us more self-conscious of their predecessors, we should ask in which ways Miller draws on residual media (Charles R. Acland) by reconfiguring, renewing, and

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recycling visual styles that have been neglected, abandoned, or thrashed over the course of time. In the following sections, I analyze the historical background and media contexts that will help us understand Miller’s use of silhouettes and his art of omission. Elements of his visual style can be traced to other media such as Chinese shadow plays and silhouette drawings in Europe preceding film noir aesthetics. I will show that the rich history of genres, styles, and visual tropes remediated in Sin City is largely of European origin and thus contributes to render Sin City a transnational text. As Günter Lenz has pointed out, the term “transnational” must be understood in a double sense: first, as a way of questioning “the meaning of ‘America’ (qua USA)” through “decentering the US perspective.”13 Here, outside perspectives are as crucial as the emphasis on intercultural dialogue. Second, a transnational perspective “reflects on and deconstructs the focus on the nation-state without simply dismissing its boundaries in its political analyses, and it addresses intracultural and multicultural diversity and hybridity of US culture(s) and transnational interactions and negotiations in a time of globalization and relocalizations.”14 My investigation regarding processes of remediation and Miller’s art of omission in Sin City further follows Donald Pease’s differentiation between the international and the transnational. Pease argues that the “transnational differs from the international in that it forecloses the possibility that either nation in the transaction will remain self-enclosed and unitary.”15 From these perspectives, it will be possible to understand the transnational appeal of the aestheticized urban environment of Sin City.

Remediating film noir In Sin City, Miller remediates filmic as well as literary genres. He explicitly frames the aesthetics of his graphic novel series via his interest in hard-boiled detective novels of the 1930s and the film versions of the following decades. “I grew up reading comic books,” Miller explains, “and eventually graduated from superhero comics to Mickey Spillane novels, and Raymond Chandler and all that, and fell in love with film noir and the whole crime scene.”16 The figures which populate Sin City are a good deal tougher than anything American film noir had seen until then. In fact, Miller does more than mimic the peculiar stylistic genre elements of hard-boiled detective stories and film noir. He creatively plays with them and renders them strange.

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The term “film noir” is a French invention to describe American films with a common style and theme. Often, the focus is on a crime committed by an average citizen who is drawn into a criminal act by an unusual intervention of chance. The inaugural story of Sin City, titled The Hard Goodbye (June 1991– June 1992), follows this pattern of the falsely accused citizen who must reassert his innocence by solving an enigmatic riddle of murder. In most classical noir films, the hero never loses control despite the drastic situation in which he finds himself. Ultimately, however, many of these films follow a specific pattern that Paul Schrader has described as follows: “There is nothing the protagonists can do; the city will outlast and negate even their best efforts.”17 According to Schrader, the reference to noir suggests a certain mood and atmosphere, rather than delineating a clearly defined genre. Aesthetically, Sin City builds on many parameters that define film noir: The criminal underworld of cities, shady characters, and plot developments in the darkness are effectively used as a backdrop for crime and detective stories, melodramas, or female gothic thrillers. The association between nighttime mysteries and cityscapes is already invoked in film titles such as Fear in the Night, The Long Night, Dark City, and Night and the City.18 Miller’s Sin City explicitly brings a moral category to film noirish representations of the city and foregrounds its effects on the lives of its denizens. At the center of Miller’s first story, The Hard Goodbye, is Marv, an addict and a brutal killer on parole. After an intense night of sex and booze, he wakes up beside his object of desire, the beautiful Goldie. She was killed while he was intoxicated and lying unconscious beside her. From then on, the story sets in motion a series of encounters with bizarre characters, fights, escapes, and scenes of torture in which Marv tries to solve the mystery of Goldie’s murder. The hard-boiled cynical language of the graphic novel insinuates that it will end in tragedy rather than redemption. After his parole officer Lucille tells him to settle down and take another pill, Marv explodes in a fit of rage: “There’s no settling down. It’s going to be blood for blood and by the gallons. It’s the old days. The bad days. The all-or-nothing days. They’re back. There’s no choices left and I’m ready for war.”19 The search for Goldie’s killer leads Marv on a downward spiral of sadist fantasies and extreme brutality. In the course of solving the mystery of his guilt and false accusation, Marv’s body undergoes a terrible transformation. In particular, his face becomes more and more deformed. It is beaten, kicked, scratched, sliced, and patched up again with band-aids. In an antithetical development, the protagonist’s personality achieves complexity while his face is more and more reduced to pulp. The story gains momentum through Marv’s

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unusual conduct as he becomes a relentless fighter for justice on a dead-end street to self-destruction.20 Another technique that Miller appropriates from film noir is the subjective point of view that manifests itself most vividly in the hard-boiled voiceovers in the tradition of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, and John O’Hara. Miller activates the cultural memory of film noir such as Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), the iconic appearance of Harry Lime’s white face out of the darkness of a doorway in the British film noir titled The Third Man (1949), and even neo noir films such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) to establish the aesthetic parameters under which the story will unfold. The textual voiceovers of the graphic novel fulfill the same purpose they fulfill in the medium of film. They emphasize a subjective point of view through which the reader will understand the character’s perspective on his guilt and false accusation. The reductionist techniques that turn Sin City into such an intense experience of urban fantasies rely on different modes of intertextuality and the reader’s ability to fill the empty spaces with texture in the process of a creative transfer. Miller explains the function of the reader in the following way: I learned how much was involved in making the images themselves tell the story, and to let the lines fall away so that the reader creates the lines for me. The mind gets very excited by an unfinished image, the same way when you move from one of the panels of the comic book to the next, there’s a white gutter between the two where your brain makes up a hundred images. That’s my job—not to be there when it counts.21

It is this dance of the mind between the seen and the unseen, the visible and the invisible, that represents one of the “unique” techniques of visual storytelling in the medium of comics and other forms of graphic narrative.22 Miller activates all of our senses by expanding and blurring the use of empty spaces between the panels. For example, in “Sex and Violence” (March 1997), he creates full-page images of a hooker-like figure that are visually connected by a black background interspersed with white lines representing rain.23 Other pages explore metaphors of love-making as representations of wild raptors fighting with each other. Miller omits the outlines of panels in favor of showing three scenes on white background, shifting between realistic foreground and metaphorical background.24 In addition to the creative work with gaps between the panels, the so-called gutter, Miller reintroduces silhouette aesthetics as a visual leitmotif to his Sin City saga.

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Remediating sound effects and wordless woodcuts Sin City is clearly defined by a cinematic approach. However, this approach is not limited to film noir. Miller’s specific art of omission in the process of remediating images of the city is effective in triggering synaesthetic responses. Since all media are mixed media combining visual and acoustic images, sights, sounds, smells, pictures, and text, the reader’s imagination builds its own powerful urban scapes with shadowy denizens based on the black-and-white images and silhouette bodies.25 For Miller, sound effects are particularly important. In blockbuster action films of recent decades, the sounds of gunfire have become an important means to create shock, tension, and excitement. He responds to these developments by combining silhouette techniques with onomatopoetic words, pushing visual storytelling by merging letters and images in a striking way.26 In The Hard Goodbye, Miller blends onomatopoeic words such as “BLAM” with the silhouette of a gun followed by a silhouette figure with an exploding head and the Christian symbol of a cross indicating that the person whose brains had been splattered in the confession booth was a priest. In his combination of text, sound effects, kinetic energy, and quick succession of widescreen panels, Miller’s synaesthetic style is highly cinematic. While Will Eisner’s work might be closer to the world of theater, Miller acknowledges that his own work features a close affiliation to the world of film. “I think [the filmlike quality] is reflected in the fact that I do put my books together like a film actor. As I’m working, I’ll go, ‘I need something here.’ It’ll feel like the timing needs a touch, so I’ll add an image or even a page or even two pages. I like to keep it as fluid as possible.”27 Despite its close relationship to film, Miller’s technique remains distinct. Striving for a synaesthetic experience, he emphasizes the graphic novel as his medium of choice. “I want bigger sound effects that really scream comic books right in their face.”28 Although sound effects continue to play an important role until the last issue of the Sin City saga, To Hell and Back (July 1999–Apr. 2000), the experimentation with onomatopoeia in the first installment is the most unusual and drastic.29 Sin City positions itself in a context of visual storytelling that has deep roots in the growing preoccupation of publishers with pictorial media in the early twentieth century and the rise of urbanization on both sides of the Atlantic. As Jan Baetens has argued, “visual print culture and visual storytelling [emerged] by way of engraving.”30 One striking example of visual storytelling in print media can be found in the so-called woodcut novels. The Belgian-born artist Frans Masereel coined the term “roman in beelden” (novel in pictures), which

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anticipates the modern term “graphic novel.” For a graphic artist working in newspapers, the low-grade paper stock created particular challenges. The highly recognizable visual style of Masereel’s cityscapes and urban dwellers evolved out of the necessity to create images of high contrast that could be easily reproduced. Ultimately, woodcuts offered a better solution than fine-lined detail, which was easily lost in the process of reproduction.31 Miller remediates the techniques of woodcut prints and their often cynical outlook on the devastating experience of urban life after World War I and during the Great Depression. For example, in Just Another Saturday Night (Aug. 1997), he draws on the early style of wordless graphic novels and woodcut techniques. The 15-page narrative “Silent Night” (Nov. 1995) in Miller’s Sin City saga tells its story exclusively through black-and-white silhouette images. Apart from the occasional onomatopoeic word to create a sound effect (“BLAM”), only one panel features a speech bubble with a soothing textual line uttered by Marv to the kidnapped girl Kimberly: “Your momma’s been after you Kimberly. Let’s get you home.”32 The flow of images resembles the vignette-like episodes of urban flâneurs that are so prominent in the European woodcut novels of the 1920s and 1930s. In his influential work Mon livre d’heures: 167 images dessinées et gravées sur bois (1919), which was later published under the title My Book of Hours and afterwards as Passionate Journey, Frans Masereel traces the arrival of a single young man in a large prototypical European city after World War I. The black-and-white images tell of moments of crisis, tragedy, and the isolation of urban life. Having become weary of civilization, the protagonist follows the path that painters such as Paul Gaugin and Winold Reiss, writers such as Katherine Ann Porter and Langston Hughes, and many other intellectuals were taking at the time: the search for redemption and inspiration in “primitivist cultures.” After his return to the city, the young man assumes a carefree attitude of complete freedom and independence. The world has become his oyster; the city resembles his own private circus. In his quest for redemption, he has assumed the role of the urban flâneur in the sense of Walter Benjamin, who celebrates the perspective of the high-flying connoisseur.33 One image depicts the hero floating high over the city on a swing with carousels, endless rows of houses and masses of people below him. Another sketch shows him as a towering giant on top of two high-rise buildings peeing, with a smile, on the city grounds. Undeniably, the wordless graphic novel Passionate Journey bears close relation to the world of modern comic strips. However, its themes are aimed at a different audience than, for example, the Yellow Kid newspaper comics, or the Katzenjammer Kids series, or even the Superman stories. In 1919, Masereel’s visual style emerged out of the fine arts. It

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would soon be appropriated by the commercial arts in the field of advertisement. Like his preceding effort, The Passion of Man (1918), Masereel’s work had a great influence on artists in other media such as writing, music, and film.34 In the United States, the German-trained woodcut artist Lynd Ward appropriated Masereel’s technique to provide an iconographic visual account of American urban city life during the Great Depression in works such as Madman’s Drum (1930) and Wild Pilgrimage (1932). While many of these woodcut images rely on delineation and the stylistic peculiarities of engravure, Miller’s technique also starts out with clearly delineated images. After completing the sketches, he seems to have asked himself how much information the reader needs to understand the narrative meaning. How little can be hinted at before the images loses its figurative quality? During the evolution of Sin City, Miller intensifies the level of omission.35 In Hell and Back, a comparison between the preliminary sketch of an attractive young girl disrobing and the final image in Sin City exemplifies how Miller reduces the lines to mere indications of shape and form in a stunning push toward omission. Ultimately, the lines vanish completely. What remains is a torso evoked by the contrasts of a light source from above. One of the developments regarding lighting can be found in a move from realistic approaches to more abstract effects. In many panels of The Hard Goodbye or A Dame to Kill For (Nov. 1993–May 1994), the light comes from a clearly identifiable angle. In later works, such as Lost, Lonely, and Lethal (Dec. 1996) or To Hell and Back, silhouette bodies tend to be defined purely by contrasts of black and white.36 Striking examples are the full-page image of Nancy dancing in her cowgirl outfit in That Yellow Bastard37 and an image of the naked Ava in The Big Fat Kill.38 In addition, black can even assume the function of a “color” as the blackness of faces in the operating room sequence in That Yellow Bastard suggests.39 In these instances, Miller remediates aesthetics which have become iconic in advertisement campaigns for the “New Negro” project during the Harlem Renaissance (I will come back to this issue below). While there are developments in the use of light sources and the use of color in the course of the Sin City saga, most of the techniques of Miller’s silhouette aesthetics are already in place in the first story.

Remediating silent film The specific visual language of silent film plays a crucial role in Miller’s aesthetic approach to Sin City. In the following, I show how he remediates elements of

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silent films in the short story “Silent Night.” When Thomas Mann was asked to write an introduction to the German edition of Mon Livre d’Heures,40 he could not help but point out the connection to film. Mann explained that Masereel’s wood engravings “are a silent film in black and white without titles.”41 Masereel achieved what the film director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau would soon strive to accomplish with his masterpiece The Last Laugh (1924): a silent film that relies completely on visual storytelling without the interruption of intertitles. With the dark looming shadows of figures such as Marv, Miller draws on the visual power which the expressionist film directors from Germany explored most forcefully.42 Shadows are effectively used to conceal and reveal inner desires.43 In many cases, Miller throws a dark shadow on his protagonists’ faces, thereby eliminating any recognizable features. For example, when the protagonists Wallace and Esther in “Last Hope Motel Vacancy” (To Hell and Back) enter the motel to make love, the blackened faces help to trigger an intense aesthetic transfer in the reader’s mind in the act of making sense of the silhouette figures. In the United States, the association of silhouettes with representations of racial otherness had different implications than in Europe. The rise of silhouette films coincides with what Alain Locke called the “New Negro” project. In the founding anthology of the Harlem Renaissance, The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), the visual dimension is as crucial as the short stories, articles, and poems.44 For the artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance, silhouettes promised to function as a persuasive and scathing visual commentary on racial stereotypes. At the same time, they could effectively substitute the old demeaning representations with a paradigmatic symbol for the project of the Harlem Renaissance by placing, for example, African American migrants at the center of the modern urban who are still able to ground their existence in a long line of cultural developments tracing its roots and routes back to Africa.45 The use of silhouettes by artists such as German immigrant Winold Reiss, the Mexican caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias, or the African American painter Aaron Douglas inaugurates an aesthetics of coolness by connecting black silhouettes with advertising Harlem and its night life. Silhouettes of African American protagonists, stylized with slit eyes over monochromatic background colors, emerge in front of towering black urban architecture on the dust jackets illustrated by Aaron Douglas for Claude McKay’s novel Home to Harlem (1928) and James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912, reissued 1927). Elements of what Thomas Cripps has identified as an “aesthetique du cool, the outward detachment, composed choreographic strides, and a self-possessed enigmatic mask,” are remediated in Sin City.46

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Just as Eisner wanted to achieve a “portrait of all cities” in his landmark graphic novel The Big City (1980), Miller tries to keep Sin City mythical.47 One fundamental experience of encountering big-city life is the confrontation between the horizontal perspective of rural environments and the vertical architecture found in global cities such as New York, London, Beijing, or Tokyo. Miller emphasizes this vertical dimension of cities (see Figure 13.1). In The Hard Goodbye, he evokes a black alley in the most minimalist ways possible. A black panel is split by a thin rectangular beam with silhouettes suggesting a trash can and the hunched over figure of Marv. The emphasis of the vertical might result from the shock of arriving in a big city such as New York for the very first time. Miller describes himself as a “country kid” who grew up in rural Vermont.48 Overall, the look of Sin City cannot be limited to the towering skyscrapers of New York City. Rather, Miller blends his biographical experience of coming from rural Vermont to New York and moving to Los Angeles, which he describes as an “illusion of a city.”49 The combination of images of urban metropolitan

Figure 13.1  Frank Miller, Sin City: The Hard Goodbye, 48. Used with permission.

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centers on both sides of the United States within a silhouetted landscape creates a universal impression of global cities.50

Conclusion Through processes of remediation, Frank Miller’s Sin City offers stylized versions of urban fantasies. The black-and-white images and silhouette bodies effectively convey feelings of disillusionment, alienation, self-destructive obsessions, anxieties, defeat, and the search for redemption. Following a strategy of amplification through techniques of extreme omission, Miller’s silhouettes become the most effective way to achieve a sense of doubling in the reader’s mind. The technique of omission leads to a seemingly abstract composition of lines and shapes that allow for complex visual storytelling. The narrative gains density depending on the visual literacy the reader brings to the graphic novels. The images draw on a rich repertoire of stylistic explorations of cityscapes ranging from woodblock printings popular during the Neue Sachlichkeit of the interwar years in Europe via the expressionist cinema of the Weimar Republic and advertisements of the Harlem Renaissance to the audiovisual idiosyncratic stylistic innovations of international film noir and later developments in neo noir cinema. Just as film noir, in the words of Winfried Fluck, represents a “fitting genre of postmodern times” since it “moves along a small borderline between the pulps and modernism, between thriller and art movie,” Miller’s remediation of silhouette aesthetics fits the world of global cities.51 Sin City offers a screen that activates our cultural memory and allows us to project our own urban desires and anxieties. Thereby, Miller invites us to transgress the thin veneer of civilization and enter into a brutal, hypersexualized, essentialist state of urban life. The hard-boiled silhouette bodies and reductionist cityscapes help flout any specific national association of Sin City. Miller’s art of omission turns his Sin City, in semiotic terms, into a sign without a referent. Looking at processes of remediation reveals how hard-boiled silhouette denizens become part of a global noir city. The use of silhouette—chiaroscuro—aesthetics and the art of omission open up a transnational perspective on Miller’s graphic novel series.

Notes   1 Surprisingly, American graphic novels are a latecomer to the genre of crime fiction due to their almost obsessive focus on superheroes since the 1950s. See, in

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Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives this context, the excellent reading of Sin City within the genre of crime fiction by Dolle-Weinkauff. Some of the early examples of American crime fiction include Chester Gould’s comics about the police detective Dick Tracy starting in the 1930s and Will Eisner’s crime fighting hero the Spirit, who emerged in 1940. Miller has repeatedly expressed his indebtness to Eisner, in particular his work on The Spirit and A Contract with God. See, for example, the interviews conducted by Charles Brownstein in Eisner/Miller (esp. 266). According to the most basic definition, the silhouette is an outline of something, especially a human profile, filled in with a solid color. The silhouette is closely linked to the origins of art. Historians such as Pliny the Elder trace it back to Egypt before it was passed on to Greece. In the United States, silhouette portraits gained popularity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries before daguerreotypes and photo cameras rendered the art form outdated. In the twentieth century, silhouettes have acquired new functions in visual storytelling in print culture and film. On these matters, see Stiegler. Harvey rightly explains that comics, with their “blend of word and picture,” are primarily a visual medium (Art of the Funnies 9). This common notion, however, is only a “half-truth” when it comes to understanding the artistic complexity of Miller’s work (“When Less Is More” 5). Panofsky 6. Kittler 717. Kittler’s understanding of media is crucial for the idea that a city can be regarded as a medium. Media, Kittler argues, are means by which data can be stored, transmitted, and processed. Since media consist of commands, addresses, and data, there is a direct link to cities defined by spaces of flows, nodes, and sites where these functions are performed. In only a few instances, Miller introduces a single color, for example, the crimson color of a woman’s dress in The Babe Wore Red or the biting yellow in That Yellow Bastard, where it works as a specific narrative device to emphasize the figure in an otherwise near-abstract environment. In To Hell and Back, color is used to visualize excessive hallucinations caused by narcotics. Concepts such as “sites of memory” (Toni Morrison), lieux de mémoire (Pierre Nora), and Erinnerungsräume (Jan Assmann) have been instrumental in analyzing commemorative practices in combination with the analysis of social, cultural, and political issues. See Boehm and Mitchell; Mitchell, Picture Theory; Mirzoeff. Jameson 68. Bolter and Grusin 18. Bolter and Grusin 18. Lenz 4. Lenz 4. Pease 5.

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Miller and Rodriguez, The Making of the Movie 15. Schrader 235. Cf. Fluck 287. Miller, The Hard Goodbye 39. In the psychologization of crimes such as the one in The Hard Goodbye lies one of the defining elements of film noir, as Frank noted in 1946: “[O]f sole importance is the enigmatic psychology of the various characters who are at the same time enemies and friends” (22). The tragic element of Miller’s The Hard Goodbye results from the main character’s psychological instability and weakness. Miller and Rodriguez, Making of the Movie 16. McCloud argues that what “happens between these panels is a kind of magic only comics can create” (92). Miller, “Sex and Violence” 92–3, 100–1. Cf. Miller, “Sex and Violence” 108. Cf. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? 211. In Comics and Sequential Art, Eisner refers to “sensory” aspects of the panel frame where sound effects add a “secondary intellectual level to the narrative” (46). Turning to examples of radio or telephonic transmission of sound, he explains that the jagged frame outline “conveys a state of tension” (46). Miller goes beyond this approach and uses onomatopoeic words such as “BLAM!” to render and highlight the overpowering sensory function of sound visually. Eisner et al. 83. Eisner et al. 37. Arnott has analyzed the function of sound effects in his well-researched article “BLAM! The Literal Architecture of Sin City,” in which he argues that the functions of sound effects in the last installment are “purely auditory” rather than providing the reversal of basic physical laws (light traveling faster than sound—now “sound travels faster than light”) which Arnott described in the first “Blam!” sequence (in Miller’s The Hard Goodbye, see esp. episode 6, 1–3, 8). Baetens 1138. Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann responded enthusiastically to the “novels in pictures,” writing introductions to the editions of Masereel’s books for the German publisher Kurt Wolff. For further information, see the introduction to Masereel’s Passionate Journey by Beronä as well as Florian Groß’s chapter (Chapter 12) in this volume. Miller, “Silent Night” 51. Benjamin’s reading of the city through the concept of “materialist historiography” as an assemblage of modern mass media that breaks down the differences between word and image offers another productive approach to Sin City (cf. 475). The Passion of a Man is reprinted in Walker, Graphic Witness 33–60. Harvey describes this process as “purifying” (“When Less Is More” 7).

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36 In The Art of Comic Books, Harvey describes the style of lighting in Sin City: “The lighting effects are wholly unrealistic but stunning in creating the uncompromisingly sordid world of Sin City” (261). This is, however, only partially true, as I will show in my current project on “Silhouette Aesthetics in Popular Culture.” 37 That Yellow Bastard, Feb. 1996–July 1996, here: #4, 1996: 27. 38 The Big Fat Kill, Nov. 1994–Mar. 1995, here: #2, 1994: 5. 39 Cf. Harvey, “When Less Is More” 8. 40 Masereel was in contact with the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, Romain Rolland, who had acquainted him with concepts of simplicity in Eastern thought. The “Chinoiserie” of the Weimar Republic was open to similar ideas and provided a fertile ground for the visual ideas of Masereel (cf. Walker 19–23). 41 Qtd in Walker 21. 42 I am in particular thinking of expressionist films such as Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and Faust (1926), but also Paul Wegener’s Der Golem; Oder, Wie er in die Welt Kam (1920), Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), and Walter Ruttman’s visual experiments—combining shadows and silhouette animation sequences—in Die Nibelungen (1924). On early modern film, see also Schönemann. 43 The art of silhouette figures culminated in Lotte Reiniger’s animated silhouette feature film The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), which critics at the time described as a mixture of bizarre motifs, childish dreams, and decorative effects. The visuals pay tribute to the “Chinoiserie” of the eighteenth century. Reiniger rewrites the original story and thereby reinvents the Arabian Tales for the 1920s silhouette art film to tell a story of Germanized orientalism. Silhouette artists such as Reiniger were impressed by American animation efforts referring, among other films, to the “rich grotesques of Felix the Cat or Oswald the Bunny” (Schönfeld and Rasche 22). 44 Gates has argued that “the Harlem or Negro Renaissance was born through the midwifery of Locke, who edited a special issue of Survey Graphic magazine titled ‘Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro’ in March of 1925” (3). 45 For a detailed overview regarding issues of cultural mobility and cultural translation of silhouette aesthetics in transatlantic contexts, see my essay “Portraying Transnational America.” 46 Cripps 12. 47 Eisner et al. 259. 48 Miller and Rodriguez, Making of the Movie 15. 49 Miller and Rodriguez, Making of the Movie 16. 50 With its creative appropriations, dense intertextuality, and extreme style of omission, Sin City recalls the narrative parameters Desser describes in the context of films as “global noir” (528). 51 Fluck 314.

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Works cited Acland, Charles R. Residual Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Arnott, Luke. “BLAM! The Literal Architecture of Sin City.” The International Journal of Comic Art 10.2 (2008): 380–401. Baetens, Jan. “Graphic Novels.” In The Cambridge History of the American Novel. Ed. Leonard Cassuto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 1137–53. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Beronä, David A. “Introduction.” In Masereel, Passionate Journey v–viii. Boehm, Gottfried, and W. J. T. Mitchell. “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn: Two Letters.” Culture, Theory and Critique 50.2–3 (2009): 103–21. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. “Remediation.” Configurations 4.3 (1996): 311–58. Chandler, Raymond, and Frank MacShane. Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. Cripps, Thomas. Black Film as Genre. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. Desser, David. “Global Noir: Genre Film in the Age of Transnationalism.” In Grant, Film Genre Reader III 516–36. Dolle-Weinkauff, Bernd. “Crime Fiction im Comic der 90er Jahre: Frank Millers Sin City.” In Unterhaltungsliteratur der achtziger und neunziger Jahre. Ed. Dieter Petzold and Eberhard Späth. Erlangen: Universitätsbund, 1998. 103–18. Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Tamarac: Poorhouse, 1985. —. A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories. New York: Baronet, 1978. —. The Spirit. New York: Vital, 1944–50. Eisner, Will, Frank Miller, and Charles Brownstein. Eisner/Miller: A One-on-One Interview. Ed. Charles Brownstein and Diana Schutz. Milwaukie: Dark Horse, 2005. Fluck, Winfried. “Mass Culture Modernism: Guilt and Subjectivity in Film Noir.” In Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Ed. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2009. 285–319. Frank, Nino. “The Crime Adventure Story: A New Kind of Detective Film.” Originally published in L’Écran Français 61 (Aug. 28, 1946): 8–9, 14. Trans. R. Barton Palmer. Reprinted in Perspectives on Film Noir. Ed. R. Barton Palmer. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996. 21–4. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Harlem on Our Minds.” Critical Inquiry 24.1 (1997): 1–12. Grant, Barry K., ed. Film Genre Reader III. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Harvey, Robert C. The Art of the Funnies: An Aesthetic History. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. —. “When Less Is More, An Entire City: An Introduction.” In Sin City: The Frank Miller Library. Set 2. The Art of Sin City. Milwaukie: Dark Horse, 2006. 5–8. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

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Kittler, Friedrich A. “The City as a Medium.” New Literary History 27.4 (1996): 717–29. Lenz, Günter H. “Redefinitions of Citizenship and Revisions of Cosmopolitanism Challenges of Transnational Perspectives.” Symposium: Redefinitions of Citizenship and Revisions of Cosmopolitanism—Transnational Perspectives. Journal of Transnational American Studies 3.1 (2011): 4–17. . Locke, Alain. The New Negro: An Interpretation. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925. Masereel, Frans. The City (Die Stadt): 100 Woodcuts. New York: Dover, 1972. —. The Passion of Man. 1918. Reprinted in Walker, Graphic Witness 33–60. —. Passionate Journey: A Vision in Woodcuts. Mineola: Dover, 2007. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993. Mehring, Frank. “Portraying Transnational America: Aesthetic and Political Dimensions in Winold Reiss’s ‘Plea for Color.’” In Re-framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies. Ed. Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John C. Rowe. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2011.164–92. Miller, Frank. Frank Miller’s Sin City: The Hard Goodbye. Vol. 1. 2nd edn. Milwaukie: Dark Horse, 2005. —. Frank Miller’s Sin City: The Big Fat Kill. Vol. 3. 2nd edn. Milwaukie: Dark Horse, 2005. —. Frank Miller’s Sin City: That Yellow Bastard. Vol. 4. 2nd edn. Milwaukie: Dark Horse, 2005. —. “Sex and Violence.” Sin City: The Frank Miller Library, Set 2. Vol. 6. Milwaukie: Dark Horse, 2006. 91–117. —. “Silent Night.” Sin City: The Frank Miller Library, Set 2. Vol. 6. Milwaukie: Dark Horse, 2006. 28–54. Miller, Frank, and Robert Rodriguez. Frank Miller’s Sin City: The Making of the Movie. Spicewood: TroubleMaker, 2003. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. An Introduction to Visual Culture. 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 2009. Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. —. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Panofsky, Erwin. Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1939. Pease, Donald E. “Introduction: Re-mapping the Transnational Turn.” In Re-framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies. Ed. Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2011. 1–46. Peirce, C. S. “The Icon, Index, and Symbol.” In Collected Works. Vol. 2. Ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931–58. 274–307.

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Schönemann, Heide. Paul Wegener: Frühe Moderne im Film. Stuttgart: Edition Axel Menges, 2003. Schönfeld, Christiane, and Hermann Rasche. Processes of Transposition: German Literature and Film. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Schrader, Paul. “Notes on Film Noir.” In Grant, Film Genre Reader III 229–42. Stiegler, Bernard. “Memory. Introduction by Mark B. N. Hansen.” In Critical Terms for Media Studies. Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 64–87. Walker, George Alexander, ed. Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels. Buffalo: Firefly, 2007. —. “Introduction.” In Walker, Graphic Witness 15–32.

14

The “Big Picture” as a Multitude of Fragments: Jason Lutes’s Depiction of Weimar Republic Berlin Lukas Etter

If—in accordance with the major current strand in American studies—we approach contemporary US culture as “discontinuous, uneven, fragmentary,” hence invoking notions of the “multi[tude]” or of transnational “interconnected[ness],” then Jason Lutes’s ongoing series Berlin (1998–) can serve as a fruitful case study.1 True, Berlin is the product of a US-American artist, but it is also stylistically indebted to the works of many Belgian, Spanish, Argentine, and even Japanese comics artists, not to mention the fact that it is set in Germany and published in Canada. As a result, the work illustrates the complexity of the cross-cultural interactions inherent in any cultural production from the United States—and thus in any US-American graphic narrative as well.2 But, at the same time, Lutes’s work also addresses this complexity through the multitude of characters it represents, some of whom are themselves concerned with the problem of artistically representing a society.3 The present chapter discusses the notion of plurality in order to bring these two levels together, effectively elaborating on the ways in which the complexity of transnational connectedness emerges in Berlin both on a formal level and at the level of content.

Out of many individuals: The multitude of stories Let me start with the latter of the two—the content-level address or representation of complexity. The notion of plurality is addressed in the series’ very prologue. Young prospective fine arts student Marthe Müller spends her time sketching in a Berlin-bound train. We learn that she is relocating to the capital, a city she has

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never visited before, thus radically and somewhat naïvely forcing herself into an adventurous new life. It is at this point that the journalist Kurt Severing joins her compartment and starts conversing with her about her plans. This prologue may, at first, appear to be an overly didactic allegory of the graphic narrative as a whole—as the prudently romantic encounter of two art forms, personified (with what W. J. T. Mitchell calls a traditional attribution of sex) as Miss Drawing and Mister Text on their way to the city of Berlin.4 But the conversation between Marthe and Kurt yields more than this; it is no less than an explicit setup for plurality as a guiding principle for the series’ content. Quite early on in their conversation, Kurt, who has lived in Berlin for years, offers Marthe a meaty summary of what she will face upon entering the city: “Communists, socialists, nationalists, democrats, republicans, criminals, beggars, thieves, and everything in between. All mixed up together.”5 Not places or buildings, but human beings— or rather, human types—constitute the capital, according to Kurt. Shortly after this exchange, the train reaches Berlin. Thus, the first “chapter” (i.e. installment of the series) starts, and Kurt’s sentences echo through the rest of the work. Contrary to the reader’s initial impression that Marthe will be at the center of the series, her story is only one of many stories. Switching in a high cadence from one milieu to the next, Lutes creates the impression of a broad spectrum of life in Berlin in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Communists, social democrats, conservatives, and national socialists try with their respective persuasive powers to recruit voters and party members or—in street fights—to numb their political opponents. We see World War I veterans seeking to cope with their traumata, African American jazz musicians making the dance floors tremble, Jewish children being chased through back allies, and the lumpenproletariat yearning for food while the cultural and economic elites indulge in drugs and sex bacchanals. Interspersed are the occasional guest appearances of a rather heterogeneous group of historical characters from Joseph Goebbels to Josephine Baker. The reader’s course through this multifaceted universe called Berlin, during which so many characters’ stories are broached, is perfectly in line with what Marthe calls her “intuiti[ve]” approach to life in the metropolis.6 Altogether, her sense of Berlin’s plurality is not only illustrated by her habit of seeing in the city a “connect[ion] [of] a thousand little worlds,” but it is also mirrored in her work as an artist.7 When drawing, Marthe does not allow herself any pretense of totality or overall coherence. This is why, from her very first day in the Fine Arts Academy, she is dissatisfied with the art instructors’ attempts to teach allegedly objective ways of representing the world around them. In addition to rejecting her instructors’ worldviews, Marthe is increasingly annoyed by the majority of her

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fellow students, obsessed as they are with repeating platitudes of contemporary artistic manifestos. Marthe wants to remain intuitive and naïve, groping for one detail after the other rather than attempting to grasp such a thing as the “big picture.”8 The longer the discussions among her fellow students continue, the more succinct becomes her denigration of such reductionist catchwords as expressionism, pittura metafisica, or Neue Sachlichkeit. While Marthe is clearly fed up with this milieu, she finds other ways of stilling her hunger for Berlin’s diversity, all of which have to do with her firsthand experience of life in the city. She finally finds satisfaction in the interviews she and Kurt conduct when the plot has reached June 1929. Following the methodological principles of oral history avant la lettre, Kurt questions a range of people concerning their experiences of the drastic Blutmai turmoil a few weeks earlier.9 Marthe, meanwhile, enjoys drawing the interlocutors’ portraits. Shortly thereafter, she is depicted from behind, sitting next to her new girlfriend Anna and contemplating her portraits of the city’s working-class and lower-middle-class inhabitants.10 Marthe’s reflections about her own pictures highlight the uniqueness of each person’s story. Indeed, as she is uttering “you can’t know a person’s story just by looking at them, can you? You can guess at it, you can see that they have a story, but you can’t know it,” her glance seems to meander.11 It traverses the portraits, which are scattered all over the wall in “salon hanging” fashion (Petersburger Hängung) and thus seems to turn them into single panels. Marthe connects the portraits to a rudimentary type of graphic narrative without words. Although she cannot grasp what exactly these pictures narrate, she gains from them an intuition of authenticity and dynamism and thus considers them representative of this city life, which, she feels, has turned her into “a completely different person.”12 The multitude of biographies that constitute Marthe’s—albeit vague and fragmentary—impression of the city finally reflects the multitude of plots that Lutes employs. While Marthe becomes aware of the impossibility of representing the world around her as a unified whole, the same effect is created for the reader. A multitude of characters are depicted with their strivings, hopes, and feelings; seemingly, the only unifying factor is the city’s name. Technically, they all breathe the same air, the same “famous Berlinerluft.”13 Yet, this air is filled with “objectivity” for some, while for others it exudes an unspeakable energy that helps them stay awake all night and still feel fresh. And for those who, like Kurt, are more susceptible to political life, the air is “consumed by chanted slogans and playground songs.”14 Playing with the provocation of the series’ simple title, Lutes actually seems to depict the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of adequately representing a society.

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What we should keep in mind is the fact that this representation of fragmentation takes place not just in any given medium, but in a comic. This is how the content-level address of fragmentation links to our second concern, namely, its illustration by the formal shaping of panels and by the plurality of styles which I discuss in the following section. Comics are not only the medium that has repeatedly been called “uniquely suited to describe the multiple fragments of human experience,” but they also formally “exploit [. . .] fragmentation-in-unity, a fragmentation enacted literally on the [. . .] page.”15 I will come back to the ways in which Lutes plays with the medium’s formal potentials and thereby illustrates the increasing transnational connectedness of American comics shortly. But in addition to Martha’s meandering gaze there is a second series of examples that illustrate and address the theme of fragmentation in terms of both form and content. The most intriguing example appears at the beginning of the second installment, which introduces the environment of Marthe’s fine arts academy. On the bottom of the first page of this chapter, a meandering gaze depicts three drawing students’ faces in three different panels.16 This quasi-polyptych, the reader soon learns, is the perspective of the nude model, who systematically scrutinizes her “scrutinizers.” What comes to mind here are Albrecht Dürer’s pedagogical drawing exercises known as “Underweysung der Messung” (published posthumously in 1538). Lutes quotes directly from the “Underweysung” in a later academy scene but leaves unmentioned the most intriguing of Dürer’s exercises, “Artist Sketching a Reclining Nude Woman.”17 In this exercise, Dürer suggests the trick of optically dividing the drawer’s view on a three-dimensional body into rectangular segments in order to facilitate the body’s reproduction in two dimensions. To come back to the example of the nude model, it can be said that Lutes—without explicitly referring to the exercise—reverses Dürer’s roles of agens and patiens, turning “artist beholds model” into “model beholds artists.” While Dürer uses fragmentation exclusively as a pedagogical sleight, Lutes goes one step further and subtly emphasizes the fact that graphic narratives, given their transferal of temporal succession into a spatially subdivided twodimensional page, inevitably fragment both the time and space of the diegetic world they create. In this example, it is again a character’s meandering gaze that directs attention to the sequential presentation of images while simultaneously playing with the immediate problem of adequately representing a group of human beings. At the first glance, we associate the thought bubbles (as well as the rather associative and volatile thoughts contained in them) in these panels with the scrutinizers’ heads, above which they appear. It is not before turning the

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page that we can finally identify these thoughts as belonging to the nude model. The problems of representing and the represented, and the problematic nature of such notions as “truth” in artistic portrayal, are put to the fore in this example, as fragmentation is both illustrated and addressed at the same time.

Out of many comics: The multitude of styles The notion of plurality is not only present in this parataxis of plots. It is also a guiding principle on a formal level. Generally speaking, Berlin is highly intertextual; it contains a potpourri of references that may be classified into two categories: direct quotations of late Weimar Republic art and literature, as well as more subtle allusions to styles of artistic representation by comics artists of all periods. Examples of the first category abound. They can be verbal in nature— Lutes cites authors such as Kurt Tucholsky, uses lyrics by Mischa Spoliansky and Paul Gerhardt, and integrates Nazi hymns such as the Horst-Wessel-Lied and “Die Wacht am Rhein.” They can also be of visual quality. Anthony Enns has recently pointed to several panels in which German photography and painting from the 1920s are referenced directly, while Matthias Köhler has identified German expressionist film as another medium of reference.18 There is a legion of examples that could be added to this list, such as iconic quotations from George Grosz’s paintings or Frans Masereel’s Mon livre d’heure, to name but two.19 Masereel’s picture narrative is already at the verge of my second category of intertexts: the more subtle allusions to artistic styles of comics artists from various decades and places, which will be my central concern in this section, given that they further demonstrate to what extent comics can serve as a “nexus of cultures” (Berninger, Ecke, and Haberkorn’s term) as well as of nations. Many critics have remarked on Lutes’s drawing style, yet most of them basically content themselves with associating the style with ligne claire.20 This kind of association, however, is not necessarily very specific. After all, the expression ligne claire has been attributed not only to the Belgian Hergé, but to several (often vastly differing) styles of a range of (mostly non-American) comics artists of the twentieth century—to a certain extent even the twenty-first. Berlin seems to allude to a full continuum of styles, only some of which are generally associated with the expression ligne claire. To start with, there are panels rich in detail—with a clearly character-focalized narration, few words, fast cuts (cinematographically speaking), and stark chiaroscuro contrasts—designed in the way in which artists such as the French

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Jean Giraud and the Argentine Alberto Breccia would depict action. A striking example can be found when two National Socialists chase a Jewish baker’s assistant out of his workplace (see Figure 14.1). The result of the Nazis’ brute force is presented in the last two panels of the page. Zooming out from the close-up of the victim’s maimed head in the second to last panel (which is accompanied by the laughter of the two Nazis), the lowermost panel indicates the end of the sequence with two pairs of boots leaving the scene of the crime at high speed. The panel renders the texture of both foreground and background in rich detail. Black areas put the focus ever more clearly on the object of interest, namely, the three figures and the segment of the building in front of which they are standing (or lying, for that matter). Notwithstanding their long shape, the panels resemble camera shots of a sports event: No motion lines or zip-ribbons are integrated, nor is there any other element that would extend or dilate the panel-time, or the temporal dimensions of the scenes depicted in the panels.21 The field of view is reduced to a minimum but still yields a sufficient amount of information to indicate that the Jewish baker was beaten up and that the Nazis are leaving the site. In stark contrast, some of the pages of Berlin are astoundingly “cartoony” in nature. One example can be found in a shoplifter subplot, set in Berlin’s

Figure 14.1  Jason Lutes, Berlin: City of Stones 141. Copyright 2011 Jason Lutes, Image Courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly.

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working-class milieu (see Figure 14.2). Two previously unknown, evidently maladroit, purloiners are caught by the shop owner Otto Spiegel in their attempt to escape with his horse and carriage. The depiction of this second chase scene has little in common stylistically with the one discussed above. Indeed, Lutes’s final panel represents an absolute reduction of the character lens. The base line of the frame equals the ground on which all three characters are running, thus creating what we may call a zero-perspective: a perspective that only the beholder of the comics panel can possibly have. The exaggerated brutality insinuated by the butcher’s knife in the last panel, but also the caricatured faces, the zip-ribbons, the symbolic black cloud over the head of the pursuer, and the drops of sweat from his prey, clearly give the scene a humorous flavor. In so ending, this page of Berlin stands in the tradition of short comic sketches such as those by the Spanish Francisco Ibañez and his Mortadelo y Filemón series, in which the last panel of a particular scene is consistently concerned with unmasking the main characters’ clumsiness and with the ways in which they are finally punished for it. While in Mortadelo y Filemón (known in English translations as Mort & Phil) the depiction of violence is regularly pushed to extremes and thus essentially loses all of its menace, Lutes—in spite of the humorous flavor—does not go as far here. In addition to referencing Ibañez, the scene is reminiscent of Hergé, who is generally considered the classical ligne claire artist.22 Many of Tintin’s chase

Figure 14.2  Jason Lutes, Berlin: City of Smoke 173. Copyright 2011 Jason Lutes, Image Courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly.

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scenes could be cited for comparison—scenes in which the humorous touch is a temporary diversion from an otherwise adventure-oriented plot.23 This is even more clearly the case for Hergé’s Quick & Flupke, whose escapades regularly result in the sudden abscondence from the site of their exploits and where a zero-perspective as in this example is frequently found.24 Furthermore, Lutes creates panels without words that are evocative of other illustrators and comics artists of the twentieth century. When it comes to the depiction of World War I battlefields in Berlin, Félix Vallotton’s comics-style woodcarving series “C’est la guerre” of 1915 seems to have been influential.25 This is not to mention the pages reminiscent of what Scott McCloud has termed the “stillness” and the “scattered fragment” found in Japanese manga, or the full palette of panel experiments in Berlin.26 Needless to say, such a list cannot possibly be exhaustive. Yet, even these few examples bring to the fore what could be termed Lutes’s Tarantino qualities, that is to say, his almost excessive quotation of more or less canonical examples of the medium. Despite the fact that no page in Berlin completely reinvents the (comics) wheel, Lutes displays a striking capacity to interlace and interweave allusions to other comics beyond the mere (spatially and temporally) distant setting. These allusions are not parodies or simply transplantations of comics material from one country to another. Rather, they display Lutes’s command of a broad variety of styles and a genuine subtlety of connectedness, all of which make these influences elements of a transnational nexus rather than merely the result of bilateral national exchange. Moreover, while Lutes’s ways of interweaving and interlacing styles may be idiosyncratic, his work is part of a larger ongoing change in American comics that started approximately in the 1970s. Roughly speaking, this change consists of the authors’ tendency toward presenting themselves as independent creators of their works and toward exploring more personal, documentary, often political and potentially controversial subject matters. More generally speaking, an increasing number of American artists have been turning away from the established superhero formulas and have started to explore the medium’s full range of creative possibilities, thus testing and often transgressing national borders and genre boundaries. In the world of English-language comics, this change is usually associated with the creative impact of Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s Raw magazine (1980–6 and 1989–91), as well as with the artistic and commercial success of Spiegelman’s seminal two-volume Maus (1986/1991), whereas critic Jan Baetens has rightly pointed out the “dramatically important role” that European traditions of text-picture narratives have played in the transnationalization of

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comics. And the same is true, as comics like Berlin indicate, for all kinds of nonAmerican influences—not just European ones.27

E pluribus pluria With Berlin, Jason Lutes has produced an ongoing graphic narrative that unquestionably deserves to be labeled “multifaceted” because it addresses and illustrates the transnational nexus on more than one level.28 What these levels have in common is that they speak to the dichotomy of the unified and the fragmented. The series’ title, Berlin, gives the whole venture a name and a seemingly unified character. And yet this impression is fallacious, its simplicity provocative. Although an end of the series has been announced, the series’ plots never seem to fit any teleological structure, and the high cadence of changing milieus and biographies suggests that such an ending is not what it is all about.29 Indeed, the dynamics at work are bound to leave any sort of ending looking like an unsatisfactory simplification. Lutes has chosen the German capital at a time when it was the heart of perhaps the most historically consequential collapse of an (officially) democratic system in the twentieth century. But this collapse, which readers in the twenty-first century will certainly have in mind as they peruse the work, is not present in the narrative itself as its unique telos. In fact, Lutes even leaves out altogether the very symbol of said collapse, the swastika, an otherwise popular object in American comics, and popular culture in general.30 In addition, the problematic nature of grasping the “big picture” is what Marthe’s fellow students struggle with almost explicitly. In their search for individual artistic expression, they try to find originality by grasping what they hope to be a good “sense of coherent anatomy.”31 And yet their individual endeavors to artistically represent the humans around them are bound to curtail the subjects of their drawings and rob them of their very individuality.32 This effect of plurality is brought home to the reader: Neither the “anatomy” of the epoch nor that of the city of Berlin can be fully grasped. It is through a variety of stylistic techniques and sometimes clichéd characters that the city is introduced. When Marthe witnesses a cross-gender dressing scene and comments “that even plain anatomy can lie,” this statement goes well beyond the scene in which it is uttered.33 We do not need to subscribe to the doctrines of any postmodernist school of thought to realize that in Berlin the idea of a unified Weimar republic capital is eroded long before the political collapse is introduced.

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This fictionalized city may be a place where people arrive filled with hopes for a new life, a place they hope to get their share of, thus turning the many into the one. The American artist Lutes may even be seen to evoke the “coordinated myths” of the terra incognita and the melting pot in the context of the German capital.34 But then Lutes permanently orchestrates his characters’ failure. Marthe’s “thousand little worlds” are never tightly “connected” or even unified—they remain, in Kurt’s words, simply “mixed up”; the city of Berlin is more like a salad bowl than a melting pot. Berlin skillfully demonstrates that the artistic representation of a society’s coherent anatomy is bound to be artificial and delusionary. This insight becomes all the more powerful given the formal fragmentation of the graphic narrative and given the stylistic potpourri of references throughout the history of comics. As if in illustration of the scope of transnational complexity—a complexity that informs but exceeds the representational address of the illustrated panels and the diegetic world they convey—it was prior to his ever having traveled to Germany that Jason Lutes began thus connecting the formal and content-level strands of fragmentation, thereby creating a robustly multilayered image of the transnational exchange of ideas, stories, and styles which the medium of graphic narrative—and contemporary culture in general—inevitably confronts.35

Notes 1 Grossberg 134; Pease 20. 2 Cf. Fluck 71. 3 The first two sets of eight installments have been published in the form of graphic novels so far. While the full titles are Berlin: City of Stones and Berlin: City of Smoke, I will reference them with the respective Roman numerals, followed by the page numbers in Arabic figures. 4 Mitchell, with reference to William Blake’s “A Vision of the Last Judgment” (1808), points to a tradition of images being connected with the feminine, while words are associated with the masculine (cf. 110). While it is true that Lutes may have been inspired by Käthe Kollwitz in her youth when drawing Marthe (cf. von Törne, “So schöne Köpfe” n.p.), it is probably no coincidence that the sexes of his characters correspond to the respective genera of the words in German, “Zeichnung” (drawing) being feminine, “Text” (text) being masculine. 5 Lutes, Berlin I 10. 6 Lutes, Berlin I 123. 7 Lutes, Berlin II 102.

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  8 Lutes, Berlin I 123.   9 The historical context here is the political uproar in the streets of Berlin between the first and third of May 1929. The event is commonly labeled Blutmai—an expression originally coined in a publication of the German Communist Party and meant to capture the severity of the police action and the number of casualties. Lutes not only depicts parts of this historical event but also renders Kurt’s and Marthe’s depiction of it. 10 Lutes, Berlin II 151. 11 Lutes, Berlin II 151. 12 Lutes, Berlin II 49. 13 Lutes, Berlin I 60. 14 Lutes, Berlin I 51; Berlin II 60, 206. 15 Berninger et al. 3; Fischer and Hatfield 85. 16 Lutes, Berlin I 31. 17 Cf. Lutes, Berlin I 103; cf. Koerner 446. 18 Cf. Enns 49; Köhler 46. On Lutes’s own description of his struggle to be historically accurate, see Pasamonik. 19 Cf. Lutes, Berlin II 37; Berlin I 39. 20 Cf. Hatfield 60. 21 Cf. Dammann 92–5; Berninger et al. 2. 22 Cf. Schüwer 190. 23 Cf. the panels 5 and 6 on page 26 of L’Île Noire (1965 version). 24 The last panel on page 32 of Pas de Quartier (album of 1987) may serve as an example. 25 For this observation, I am indebted to my conversations with Léonard Graf-Brugère from Basel. 26 McCloud 85, 79; cf. also Schüwer 175. For instance, page 179 of Berlin I, which depicts Kurt’s daydreams in an Edenic natural environment, is strongly reminiscent of Jiro Taniguchi’s Aruku hito, in which many panels are equally dedicated to the detailed depiction of nature, especially the blossoms of a cherry tree (100–2). A comparably Edenic landscape appears on pages 208–9 of Berlin I. Other panel uses include full-page splashes (cf. Berlin I 13), series of repetitive panels with only minor variations (cf. Berlin I 98; Berlin II 25–7), half-empty pages (cf. Berlin II 142), polyptychs (cf. Berlin II 112), and empty panels (cf. Berlin II 143). 27 Cf. Baetens 76. 28 Köhler 52. 29 Lutes has announced his intention to publish the series in a total of 24 installments (cf. Jensen n.p.). 30 Throughout the history of American comics, National Socialist Germany has been a popular topic, the palette ranging from the early “Captain Nazi” comics in the 1940s to the ongoing humorous webcomic series “Hitler Hipster” (2010–). 31 Lutes, Berlin I 33.

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32 Lutes’s work resonates with the present debate among scholars of American studies, as his characters realize the danger any representation of a society, scholarly description included, encounters. However motivated, the attempt to render “representable” the hitherto unrepresented is still an active participation, containing the risk of turning into a “monological” shaping and morphing of the human beings represented (cf. Lenz 468). 33 Lutes, Berlin II 103. The scene in question depicts Marthe’s frequenting (and commenting on) a lesbian club with her former fellow student Anna, with whom she has engaged in a romantic relationship at this stage of the plot. 34 Pease 21. 35 Lutes has stated in several interviews that he had never set foot on German soil before the completion of the first eight installments of Berlin (cf. von Törne, “Ein Traum von Stadt” n.p.).

Works cited Baetens, Jan. “Dominique Goblet: The List Principle and the Meaning of Form.” In Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. Ed. Michael A. Chaney. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. 76–92. Berninger, Mark, Jochen Ecke, and Gideon Haberkorn. “Introduction.” In Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives. Ed. Mark Berninger, Jochen Ecke, and Gideon Haberkorn. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010. 1–4. Dammann, Günter. “Temporale Strukturen des Erzählens im Comic.” In Ästhetik des Comic. Ed. Michael Hein, Michael Hüners, and Torsten Michaelsen. Berlin: Schmidt, 2002. 91–101. Enns, Anthony. “The City as Archive in Jason Lutes’s Berlin.” In Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence. Ed. Jörn Ahrens and Arno Meteling. London: Continuum. 45–59. Fischer, Craig, and Charles Hatfield. “Teeth, Sticks, and Bricks: Calligraphy, Graphic Focalization, and Narrative Braiding in Eddie Campbell’s Alec.” Graphic Narratives and Narrative Theory. Ed. Jared Gardner and David Herman. Special issue of SubStance 40.1 (2011): 70–93. Fluck, Winfried. “Theories of American Culture (and the Transnational Turn in American Studies).” REAL—Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 23 (2007): 59–77. Grossberg, Lawrence. “Toward a Genealogy of the State of Cultural Studies: The Discipline of Communication and the Reception of Cultural Studies in the United States.” In Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies. Ed. Cary Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar Gonkar. New York: Routledge, 1996. 131–48.

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Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Hergé. L’Île Noire. Tournai: Casterman, 1965. —. Pas de Quartier. Tournai: Casterman, 1987. Jensen, Van: “Jason Lutes Talks Berlin.” Aug. 19, 2008. . Accessed Aug. 12, 2011. Koerner, Joseph Leo. The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Köhler, Matthias. “Jason Lutes’s Berlin as Metafiction.” Beyond Moore, Miller, Maus: Literary Approaches to Contemporary Comics. Ed. Tim Lanzendörfer and Matthias Köhler. Special issue of ZAA: Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 59.1 (2011): 41–55. Lenz, Günter H. “Toward a Dialogics of International American Culture Studies— Transnationality, Border Discourses, and Public Culture(s).” In The Futures of American Studies. Ed. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. 461–85. Lutes, Jason. Berlin: City of Smoke. Montréal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2008. —. Berlin: City of Stones. Montréal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2000. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993. Mitchell, W. J. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Pasamonik, Didier: “J’adorerais être publié initialement en Europe.” Nov. 24, 2008. . Accessed Oct. 12, 2011. Pease, Donald. “Rethinking ‘American Studies after US Exceptionalism.’” American Literary History 21.1 (2009): 19–27. Schüwer, Martin. Wie Comics erzählen: Grundriss einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie der grafischen Literatur. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2008. Taniguchi, Jiro. Der spazierende Mann. Hamburg: Carlsen, 2009. Von Törne, Lars: “Ein Traum von Stadt.” Mar. 8, 2004. . Accessed May 12, 2011. —. “So schöne Köpfe zeichnet keiner mehr.” . Accessed Dec. 31, 2011.

15

“Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together”: The Cultural Crossovers of Bryan Lee O’Malley Mark Berninger

The six-volume comics series Scott Pilgrim (2004–10) has proved quite a surprising success. The series tells the story of Scott Pilgrim, a Toronto twenty-something who is “immature, usually broke and part of a possibly bad rock band called Sex Bob-Omb.”1 Scott has to defeat seven evil ex-boyfriends to win the heart of the mysterious American delivery girl Ramona Flowers, and his efforts have catapulted its formerly rather obscure author-artist Bryan Lee O’Malley to fame. They have also resulted in a quick succession of transmedial spin-offs, including a feature film adaptation (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, 2010), a video game (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game, 2010), a short anime series (Scott Pilgrim vs. The Animation, 2010) and—the most recent of additions—a version of the comic for smartphones (Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little App, 2011). This success might appear somewhat surprising, as Scott Pilgrim falls between the cracks of established comics categories. The comic clearly distances itself from the mainstream of North American comics production, which is still dominated by superheroes, but it also does not fit neatly into the graphic novel category, the section of American comics which has attracted most critical attention since the publication of the three mid-1980s milestones Maus (Art Spiegelman, 1986/1991), Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (Frank Miller, 1986), and Watchmen (Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, 1987). Although Scott Pilgrim has some underground traits, such as its focus on indie rock music, it is still miles away from the social satire and rough drawing style of underground comix. Instead, the series has been most frequently connected with the recent manga boom in North America. But it also differs considerably from Japanese models and from their already numerous American imitations, which are usually called

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OEL (“original English-language”) manga. And to top all this peculiarity off, Scott Pilgrim is also explicitly and very visibly a Canadian comic. It is exactly the formal hybridity of the series that has made it such a success with readers and has triggered adaptations into other media. For want of a fitting terminology, reviewers have frequently resorted to culinary metaphors to characterize Scott Pilgrim, describing it as “[f]usion cuisine—in this case, wannabe-rocker relationship comedy chili-peppered with loopy bursts of manga-style superbrawling” or as “a dab of indie rock, a pinch of manga and a sprinkling of video game know-how.”2 Food comparisons are, of course, a well-established way of addressing cultural crossovers, as food is one of the most ostentatious, widespread, and tangible fields of cultural hybridity. But, on a more specifically comics-related level, it is also expedient to locate Scott Pilgrim in the framework of what Frederick Luis Aldama has described as the “cross-pollination of genres in multicultural comics.”3 As I will show in the following, Scott Pilgrim is a prime example of why it makes so little sense to study comics in a purely national context. Scott Pilgrim is transnational in the sense that it stresses cultural influence and dialogue across national boundaries and thus questions a monolithic and purely US-centered perspective.4 The series’ rootedness in Toronto, a location which is at once outside of, and also in a direct “contact zone” with, the United States, allows O’Malley to explore cultural differences and crossovers. It should also be noted that he does this in a manner that sometimes accentuates contrasts or juxtapositions but usually allows for transcultural fusions that create a distinctively new kind of expression. Formally, the fact that the series integrates manga characteristics with elements of the graphic novel genre also points to the need for an “east-west geographical reorientation of ‘American studies’ in terms of the Atlantic and Pacific rims.”5 Finally, Scott Pilgrim is both transnational and transcultural, as it brings together not only different comics traditions and national backgrounds but also various aspects of youth culture. O’Malley integrates elements of video games, rock music, and film, which, in turn, have a strong transnational character of their own. In terms of form, content, production, and reception, Scott Pilgrim thus effectively concurs with the twofold aim of the present essay collection, namely, to illustrate how concepts of transnationalism can further comics studies and, conversely, to show how the study of comics can contribute substantially to debates about transnationalism. Most past and present comics criticism tends to absorb Canadian comics into the US context. A recent example is Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith’s otherwise highly illuminating The Power of Comics, in which the authors

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note: “The story of Canadian comic books is a history of give and take that has, with time, led to the acceptance of Canadian talent and publishing as an integral, although barely distinct, part of North American comics publishing.”6 Such a view only holds true if “North America” is seen not as a field of multidirectional dialogue but identified with a monolithic USA as its inevitable center of gravity. Authors from north of the border then appear as “part of a steady stream of Canadian talent that helps supply the American comics mainstream.” The “give and take” thus would not describe a mutual exchange, but an unbalanced relationship in which US comics provide the model to imitate, while the Canadian side supplies mainly “talent” to be integrated into that framework. At least, Duncan and Smith admit that “a separate comics tradition has existed in the French-speaking province of Quebec.”7 However, even this is not terribly helpful, since such a view simply exchanges one center of gravity (US comics) with another national focal point (Franco-Belgian bande dessinée) and thus stresses difference rather than crossover. Taking a different approach, Michel Hardy-Vallée views comics from Quebec as a hybrid and transnational expression when he speaks of the province as a cultural crossroads: “The Carrefour of Practice.” He draws attention to the Canadian “alternative market of idiosyncratic, innovative comics, in explicit rupture from Marvel/DC superhero production.” Hardy-Vallée further points to authors such as Julie Doucet, Seth, Guy Delisle, and Michel Rabagliati and stresses the fact that the two main Canadian publishing houses, Drawn & Quarterly and La Pastèque, “integrate 30 years of alternative production across the cultural landscape of North America.”8 While it is already problematic to treat Canadian comics as part of the US mainstream, such a nation-based view produces an almost counterfactual image when it comes to the interaction of American comics and Japanese manga. The dominant approach in Western comics studies is to treat manga as a rich comics tradition which is entirely distinct from its American counterpart. General surveys of the history of comics almost invariably mention manga these days, but they rarely fail to ascribe to them a distinctly “alien” character. Differences in iconography (e.g. the manga “snot bubble”9) and overall style (e.g. the slower pace of manga) are routinely stressed to demarcate two distinct comics traditions, thus suggesting that transitions are difficult and manga is difficult reading for a Western audience.10 This is, if at all, only true historically. Manga have by now ceased to be read by only a specialized audience in America and thus can no longer be termed “a subculture within a subculture.”11 Instead, manga have become a major force in comics publishing, with sales reaching $210 million

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in the United States in 2007.12 Translations from the Japanese still make up the largest slice, but US publishers have also started to launch homegrown products, the so-called OELs. These manga imitations, which originally grew out of fanboy/fangirl culture, offer a number of advantages for American publishers that range from easier access and licenses for anime versions to the possibility of presenting readers with English-speaking mangaka at fan conventions in the United States.13 The dynamics of the manga scene in America, with the connected phenomena of anime and manga-inspired video games, indicate that large portions of American teenage readers at the beginning of the twenty-first century no longer consider manga an “alien” variant of comics but have very much made it their own. It is precisely in the context of these developments that Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim is to be placed. The manga influence in this series is obvious and ranges from the tankôbon format of the comic to the style of drawing which, especially in the numerous fight scenes, is clearly modeled on manga traditions in terms of dynamics, pacing, and panel structure.14 A few examples can illustrate the extent of these borrowings. A typical manga device consists of “character captions” which appear next to the central figures and give quick information about the character in bullet-point style. This hails from the serialization of manga, and it allows readers to (re)enter an ongoing series and (re)identify the many characters who are sometimes difficult to distinguish visually. These character captions have become quite an elaborate device in manga in order to pass on additional background information about the characters. The captions may include the characters’ astrological signs, their blood types, or “ratings” of their sports performances or looks. Evidently, the use of the device is not modeled on the techniques of traditional narrative characterization but drawn from the coverage of pop stars in fan magazines or from the character statistics in video games. Such captions are also employed in Scott Pilgrim, such as when the characters first (re)appear at the beginning of volume 2 of the series and are furnished with descriptions bearing their name, profession, age, and a “fun fact.” However, it quickly transpires that O’Malley quotes this manga convention in half-ironic fashion when the mysterious love interest of the hero Scott Pilgrim is introduced as “Ramona Flowers. Ninja Delivery Girl. Age Unknown. Everything Unknown. Fun Fact: Unknown” (vol. 2, ch. 7). O’Malley also occasionally inserts short flashbacks into his overall narrative to tell episodes from the youth of his protagonists or include dream sequences. As in manga, which are usually produced in a rather hectic, serialized manner and rarely rely on a preestablished narrative plan, the narrative in Scott Pilgrim

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easily shuffles back and forth between a main narrative line and various subplots. The narrative therefore highlights the earlier “childhood” or “teenage” narratives with an exaggerated, childlike style of drawing (overly cute characters, anime-like simplicity, use of crayons, etc.). The drawing style here reflects the more exaggerated and more conventionally styled state of mind of the protagonists in their dreams and in their memories of their past.15 This artificiality is also reflected on the level of content. Scott remembers the beginning of his high school affair with Sex-Bob-Omb drummer Kim Paine in terms of a manga or video game fight. In this scene, the boys from a neighboring high school have raided Scott’s school and abducted Kim. Scott now has to rescue her by fighting his way through the enemies to the roof of the school, where Kim is chained to a drainpipe. Half-bored, she calls on her hero with the words, “Scott! This sucks!” (vol. 2, ch. 6). After an elaborate fight with Simon Lee, the enemy leader, the scene ends with a victorious Scott kissing the still chained Kim, but also with the indication to the reader that this adolescent fantasy is probably not what actually happened.16 This illustrates that O’Malley’s use of manga devices has a distinctly ironic touch, which presupposes that readers are familiar with manga conventions and recognize that these devices are used in a tongue-incheek fashion. Scott Pilgrim thus pays homage to manga, but it also transcends simple imitation. O’Malley has made clear that he does not see the series as an OEL manga, a genre which he considers epigonic: “[M]y own thing is derivative in a way, but it’s not completely derivative like I consider OEL manga to be completely derivative. I don’t think it has that much room for originality, like, at all. I mean, I used to do it, so I feel like I have a little bit of authority on the subject. I just think they should grow up, get out, and get over it.”17 O’Malley prefers the term “manga-influenced comic” or MIC, which is, in fact, sometimes used as a synonym for OEL.18 But it makes good sense to follow O’Malley and draw a distinction along the following lines: OEL are more or less faithful imitations of the Japanese manga style by artists from English-speaking countries; MIC pay homage to manga, but they mix Japanese styles and contents with Western traditions to form a new, hybrid comics style. Such a distinction also illuminates O’Malley’s mixture of manga conventions and their deliberate deconstruction. Examples of this deconstructive mixture are the “bonus sections” he includes in his volumes. In these sections, O’Malley addresses his readers in best manga fashion with apologetic commentaries about the problems of the creative process and a list of the music to which he had been listening while drawing the comic. Yet, the bonus section of volume 4, for example, ends with a “Stop! Arrêt!” page,

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which readers know from manga translations, where similar “Stop!” pages point out that manga are to be read according to Japanese conventions, that is, backwards and from right to left. The main fun, however, is not being poked at manga translations, but at those OEL manga that imitate this reverse reading direction and cultivate it as a sign of being true to the “authentic” Japanese tradition.19 The fact that O’Malley publishes his MIC in “Western” orientation thus becomes something of a programmatic statement. The difference between conventional manga traditions and Scott Pilgrim is also recognized by Japanese mangaka. O’Malley has recently published an interview he conducted with two of his heroes (Kentaro Takekuma and Koji Aihara). Takekuma and Aihara compliment O’Malley on his work, but they also politely point out that, while the fight scenes in particular read like true manga to them, Japanese audiences would certainly find the content of the series disturbing. They refer especially to the way in which the protagonist is characterized and the way in which his love life violates manga genre conventions: Takekuma: When I read Scott Pilgrim, I felt that in the beginning, it has a very different structure and style than Japanese manga. However once you reach the battle scenes, it feels very much like a Japanese manga, especially in how you structured the panels. [. . .] Aihara: I did feel the inspiration from Japanese manga, but it did not strike me as a ripoff of manga style, but a very unique way of expression. [. . .] Takekuma: I found the depiction of student life very interesting because it was so different from Japanese students’ experiences. Scott is pretty much a nerd, but he still experiences romance and has sex. Japanese romantic comedy manga depicting the life and love of a nerd never depict relationships with several women. [.  .  .] Scott has this cute girlfriend in Knives, but dumps her at the first chance he gets after he meets Ramona. In Japan, your editor would probably stop you from writing that. They would say readers would side with Knives, and your hero looks like an ass.20

O’Malley and his Japanese colleagues agree that Scott Pilgrim is a hybrid comic that has “a very strange, neither American nor Japanese atmosphere.”21 But while the manga references are quite obvious, the more subtle influence from the graphic novel genre is perhaps more difficult to detect. It helps to know that O’Malley’s first major work was Lost at Sea (2003), a melancholy road-trip story about a girl called Raleigh, who travels home to Vancouver from California.

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This “dreamy, introspective book, that plunge[s] into the depths of its characters’ psyches to drag truths to the surface, one at a time,” uses the regular panel style common in graphic novels.22 It varies between clear, rectangular six-panel (3 × 2) or nine-panel (3 × 3) grids, a page setup of three “cinemascope” landscape panels, and occasional splash pages. Here, O’Malley also copies the expressive use of black-and-white contrasts in many graphic novels, including changes of the panel and page backgrounds to black in order to heighten the emotional impact of the images. While Lost at Sea is thus far removed from the more dynamic and free-flowing pages and panel rhythms of Scott Pilgrim, there are still sections in the later comic where echoes of Lost at Sea and the graphic novel format can be detected. One such scene occurs in volume 2, chapter 10, when Scott takes an unexpected telephone call from his ex-lover Envy Adams. This eight-page episode starts with a double splash page, with one page just showing a shocked Scott in profile against a white background and the other page only containing a jagged (i.e. telephone) speech bubble reading, “Hi, Scott.” This double page breaks the foregoing dynamic rhythm of the comic. The six remaining pages of this emotionally tense phone call revert to a strict nine-panel grid. The change to graphic novel format is further highlighted by a large blank area at the bottom of the page, which marks the transition from tankôbon format to the wider layout used by most graphic novels. The nine individual panels per page also reflect Scott’s emotional disintegration at this moment. They combine into a larger, page-wide picture of Scott seated in a chair with telephone in hand. Yet, some pieces of the jigsaw contain flashbacks of Scott’s past with Envy, such as some iconic “couple/fun shots” from a photo booth, the stripe format (3 × 1) of which echoes the setup of the panel grid. Wide-eyed Scott is juxtaposed here with his past self, smiling next to Envy in the photo booth. Subsequently, entire rows of the 3 × 3 panel grid are displaced and merge with unconnected close-ups of the scene, such as views of the telephone cord or of Scott’s elbow. To match the overall effect, Scott happens to be wearing a dark T-shirt whose increasingly dislocated skull logo is echoed throughout the six pages. The dark background of the panels further produces the chiaroscuro effects which O’Malley had already cultivated in Lost at Sea. However, Scott Pilgrim quickly switches back into a more manga-influenced, less realistic, and more comically exaggerated style after the sequence, when Scott’s flatmate Wallace returns hours later to find an almost unconscious and slobbering Scott lying on the floor. O’Malley’s mixing of American and Japanese styles can be detected in his use of what is probably the most striking, and certainly the most intensely

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discussed, characteristic of manga—the overlarge “manga eyes.” This literally eye-catching characteristic of many Japanese comics is central to Western debates about the reception of manga because it touches on the friction between the concept of “kawaii” (cuteness) and racial stereotypes about “slit-eyed” Asians.23 O’Malley uses manga eyes throughout the comic—but ironically only for the Caucasian, or “round-eye” characters. In fact, Asian characters are rare in the comic. The most important exception is Knives Chau, the Chinese girl Scott dumps for Ramona. While her parents are depicted in a stereotypical, “slit-eyed” manner with invisible irises (for instance, in vol. 1, ch. 1; vol. 4, ch. 25), Knives has dark eyes which would appear normal in non-manga comics but are suggestive of Asian features when compared to the other characters in Scott Pilgrim. The marginality of Asian characters is remarkable when one considers O’Malley’s own half-Korean background. While O’Malley invests the Scott Pilgrim character with a number of autobiographical facets, such as his North Ontario childhood, his musical exploits, and his teenage addiction to video games, the Asian part of O’Malley’s identity is split from the protagonist and relegated to secondary and tertiary characters. In that regard, O’Malley avoids writing a multicultural comic with a political program. He does not use manga characteristics to stage and debate questions of Asian Canadian identity. Manga, like video games and music, appear in the series as elements of a transnational youth culture that is only indirectly connected to discourses about minorities. In contrast to his evasiveness about Asian identity, O’Malley is very explicit when it comes to depicting Canadian identity, which is indeed a defining feature of the series. Probably the most striking instance of the comic’s regional rootedness is the glaring use of Toronto landmarks. The emblematic CN-Tower recurs frequently, especially as a backdrop for romantic scenes between Ramona and Scott (for instance, in vol. 1, ch. 4; the final page of vol. 4).24 There are also innumerable instances of other typically Canadian and Toronto locations (Dundas Street Coach Terminal, the Rockit club, Second Cup and Tim Horton’s café chains, Shoppers Drug Mart). Most interesting, however, is the use of Casa Loma (vol. 2, ch. 9) and Honest Ed’s (vol. 3, ch. 14) as arenas for fights between Scott and evil ex-boyfriends. Here, the setting is not just a backdrop but actively determines the framework and outcome of the fights. This cue has been taken up in the cinematic adaptation of the comic, which was shot on location in Toronto and specifically preserves the original setting of the Casa Loma fight. Notably, director Edgar Wright decided to keep the film

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visibly Canadian. While many American movies and television productions are actually shot in Canada for tax reasons, the usual procedure is to disguise Canadian cities as American: “Vancouver could double for middle America, Toronto could stand in for New York City (especially if the director avoids wide shots), and Calgary can pass for the American West.”25 Wright, however, was clever enough to include an ironic reference to the specific filmic location in the movie. Lucas Lee, Ramona’s second evil ex-boyfriend, is a film star and thus stages Scott’s fight with him at Casa Loma on a film set, which works with a matte painting of an American city in order to turn Toronto into a generic US metropolis. Yet, Scott is pushed through the painting during the fight and thus reveals the Toronto skyline with the CN-Tower.26 Although this scene does not appear in the comic, it is still entirely in line with O’Malley’s use of metafictional commentary to stress transnational hybridity precisely by highlighting Canadian identity. Both the comic and its film adaptation use cultural and media conventions for the creation of a transnational nexus in which different cultural strands are effectively interwoven and form one of the many possible transnational foci. The frequent references to video games and indie rock music work parallel to the use of manga or film references in this transferal from the local, to the transnational, to the universal. A few last examples may illustrate this point: The very name Scott Pilgrim is taken from the title of a song by Plumtree, a 1990s girl band from Nova Scotia. The name of Scott’s friend and Sex-Bob-Omb guitarist Stephen Stills alludes to the American singer/songwriter of the same name, while Stills’s colleague (and most famous musical Toronto native) Neil Young is alluded to in the character of Young Neil. The title of volume 3 of the series (Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness) echoes the second Smashing Pumpkins album (Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness), and the soundtrack of the movie adaptation brings together a vast array of Canadian, American, British, and Japanese musicians. This panoply of cultural references demonstrates that neither Scott Pilgrim nor indie rock music can be adequately described within a national framework alone but must be addressed as transnational phenomena. The same applies to Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter, the two main video game sources of Scott Pilgrim. Both were developed in Japan but have transcended any national framework and have become an integral part of global youth culture. Like manga aesthetics, these originally Japanese but now global products are blended into Scott Pilgrim to create a new kind of text that is simultaneously local and transnational, derivative and original.

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Notes   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9

10

11 12 13 14

15

Gustines n.p. Russo n.p; Gustines n.p. Aldama, “Multicultural Comics Today” 7. Cf. Lenz 4. Rowe n.p. Duncan and Smith 300. Duncan and Smith 303, 302. Hardy-Vallée 90. This much quoted example points out that sleep in manga is not “symbolized with a string of ‘zeds’ but with a bubble emanating from the character’s nose” (Sabin 228; cf. also Duncan and Smith 296). Sabin claims that Japanese manga were slower to catch on in the Anglophone world than Franco-Belgian bande dessinée because Japanese culture was more alien (cf. 227). From a twenty-first-century perspective, this argument seems as problematic as Sabin’s view that “[p]erhaps the fact that there has not been a success comparable to that of Akira in the years since is a sign that the [manga] fashion is dying out” (234). A different view is taken by recent publications that devote similar space to American comics and manga (see Petersen) or even discuss their interactions in the wake of the global manga boom (see Johnson-Woods). Sabin 227. Cf. Reid 10; Duncan and Smith 82. Cf. Cha and Reid 30. In Japan, manga are usually published in black and white in numerous installments in manga magazines like Shonen Jump, Ribon, or Morning that contain several ongoing series at the same time. If successful, a series is reissued on its own in tankôbon format, in which several installments (“chapters”) are collected into up to two dozen volumes of the series (cf. Masanao and Wiedemann 5, 570). The tankôbon resembles a small paperback book and makes manga instantly recognizable in comics shops as the format differs visibly from the traditional American “superhero format” (individual issues, relatively thin, of a larger format, in full color). It is closer to the recent graphic novel standard, which resembles traditional book publishing formats. Graphic novels, however, tend to be larger (corresponding roughly to B5 format) than tankôbon and usually present self-contained, single-volume works. O’Malley uses this device with increasing intensity as the series progresses and more and more background stories are introduced. See, for example, Scott’s memories of his first spell of work experience in his favorite restaurant,

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17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24

25

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“The Gilded Palace of Flying Burritos” (vol. 2, ch. 11), or his dream sequence in fantasy adventure-game style at the beginning of chapter 21 in volume 4 with its reprise at the beginning of chapter 24. However, not only Scott’s memories are depicted in this way. See also Ramona’s account of her relationship with Todd, her third evil ex-boyfriend (vol. 3, ch. 15). This is contrasted with Envy Adams’s retelling of her romance with the same boy (vol. 3, ch. 17). All of these inserted sequences have a strongly ironic touch, which highlights and questions the alterations, simplifications, and exaggerations of narratives based on memory. This suspicion is confirmed when Kim and Scott discuss their past (vol. 6, ch. 34) and it turns out that Simon Lee was just a weedy, bespectacled “Chinese Kid” Kim used to date. The similarity in name, appearance, and North Ontario background of the author with this deflated antagonist suggests a wonderfully self-mocking commentary by O’Malley. O’Malley and McAlpin n.p. Cf. Cha and Reid 30. Cf. Malone 232. O’Malley et al. n.p. O’Malley et al. n.p. McElhatton n.p. The depiction of Asian characters in non-Asian comics indeed highlights the problematic relationship of comics and graphic racist stereotyping. See Gardner for an analysis of how contemporary multicultural comics artists like Gene Luen Yang, Adrian Tomine, and Derek Kirk Kim deal with the tension of depicting Asian characters without resorting to the racist stereotypes that have dominated traditional comics. On Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006), see also Elisabeth El Refaie’s contribution (Chapter 2) to this volume. Another, almost clichéd emblem of Toronto (and Canada) is the snow piling up in the streets in volume 1. O’Malley uses the whiteness of the snow to heighten the visual contrast between his solid black and white areas. A good example is Scott and Ramona’s first date, which ends in a snowstorm, the increasingly dense white flakes almost completely canceling out the black night sky. This appears like a quote of the significance of snow in Craig Thompson’s Blankets (2003) or of Hergé’s famous use of white in Tintin au Tibet (1960). It thus subtly connects O’Malley’s comic both to the contemporary graphic novel and the classic bande dessinée. However, O’Malley drops the snow images in later volumes of Scott Pilgrim and introduces less cliché-laden images of Canadian spring, summer, and autumn. Epstein n.p.

26 Cf. Anklewicz n.p.

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Works cited Aldama, Frederick Luis, ed. Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. —. “Multicultural Comics Today: A Brief Introduction.” In Aldama, Multicultural Comics 1–25. Anklewicz, Adam M. “Never Had to Fight.” Aug. 17, 2010. . Accessed Dec. 26, 2011. Berninger, Mark, Jochen Ecke, and Gideon Haberkorn, eds. Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010. Cha, Kai-Ming, and Calvin Reid. “Manga in English: Born in the USA.” Publishers Weekly, Oct. 17, 2005. 30–6. Duncan, Randy, and Matthew J. Smith. The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture. New York: Continuum, 2009. Epstein, Edward Jay. “Northern Expenditure: Why Are So Many Movies Still Being Shot in Canada?” Slate, Feb. 13, 2006. . Accessed Jan. 3, 2012. Gardner, Jared. “Same Difference: Graphic Alterity in the Work of Gene Luen Yang, Adrian Tomine, and Derek Kirk Kim.” In Aldama, Multicultural Comics 132–47. Gustines, George Gene. “Scott Pilgrim Heads South, Brining His Creator.” The New York Times, Feb. 6, 2009. . Accessed Aug. 9, 2011. Hardy-Vallée, Michel. “The Carrefour of Practice: Québec BD in Transition.” In Berninger, Ecke, and Haberkorn, Comics as a Nexus of Cultures 85–98. Johnson-Woods, Toni, ed. Manga: An Anthology of Global and Cultural Perspectives. London: Continuum, 2010. Lenz, Günter H. “Redefinitions of Citizenship and Revisions of Cosmopolitanism Challenges of Transnational Perspectives.” Symposium: Redefinitions of Citizenship and Revisions of Cosmopolitanism—Transnational Perspectives. Journal of Transnational American Studies 3.1 (2011): 4–17. . Malone, Paul M. “Mangascape Germany: Comics as Intercultural Neutral Ground.” In Berninger, Ecke, and Haberkorn, Comics as a Nexus of Cultures 223–34. Masanao, Amano, and Julius Wiedemann. Manga. Cologne: Taschen, 2004. McElhatton, Greg. “Review of Scott Pilgrim Vol. 1: Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life.” Read About Comics. Aug. 9, 2004. . Accessed Aug. 9, 2011. O’Malley, Bryan Lee. Lost at Sea. Portland: Oni, 2003. —. Official Homepage. . Accessed Dec. 26, 2011. —. Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness [Scott Pilgrim Volume 3]. Portland: Oni, 2006. —. Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together [Scott Pilgrim Volume 4]. Portland: Oni, 2007.

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—. Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe [Scott Pilgrim Volume 5]. Portland: Oni, 2009. —. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World [Scott Pilgrim Volume 2]. Portland: Oni, 2005. —. Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour [Scott Pilgrim Volume 6]. Portland: Oni, 2010. —. Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life [Scott Pilgrim Volume 1]. Portland: Oni, 2004. O’Malley, Bryan Lee, and Gordon McAlpin. “An Interview with Bryan Lee O’Malley.” Gordon McAlpin Blog. May 24, 2006. . Accessed Aug. 11, 2011. O’Malley, Bryan Lee, Kentaro Takekuma, Koji Aihara, and Philipp Knall. “Bryan Lee O’Malley Talks ‘Monkey Manga’ with the Men Who Influenced Scott Pilgrim.” Comics Alliance. July 14, 2011. . Accessed Dec. 28, 2011. Petersen, Robert S. Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels. Santa Barbara: Praeger-ABC-CLIO, 2011. Reid, Calvin. “Fork in the Manga Road.” Publishers Weekly, Aug. 1, 2011: 10–11. Rowe, John Carlos. “Transnationalism and American Studies.” Encyclopedia of American Studies. . Accessed Dec. 28, 2011. Russo, Tom. “Review of Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness.” Entertainment Weekly, June 16, 2006. . Accessed Aug. 9, 2011. Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art. 2nd edn. London: Phaidon, 2001.

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A Disappointing Crossing: The North American Reception of Asterix and Tintin Jean-Paul Gabilliet

While American newspaper comics were translated and reprinted extensively in Francophone Europe as of the 1930s, it may be regarded as a paradox that the post–World War II bande dessinée franco-belge—the body of high-profile graphic novel series issued by the Belgian publishers Casterman, Dupuis, Le Lombard, and the French publisher Dargaud from the late 1940s to the early 1970s1— proved very difficult to export to North America’s English-speaking markets.2 Hergé’s Tintin (created in 1929), Edgar-Pierre Jacobs’s Blake et Mortimer (1946), Morris’s Lucky Luke (1946), André Franquin’s Spirou et Fantasio (1946), Jacques Martin’s Alix (1948), Peyo’s Les Schtroumpfs (1958), René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo’s Astérix le Gaulois (1959), and many other series were household names to young readers growing up in Western European countries in the 1950s and 1960s, while, with the exception of Quebec, they remained largely unknown in North America. Seen in the light of cultural history, the North American reception of “classic” Franco-Belgian comics exemplifies the way certain cultural products fail to replicate their domestic success and fame upon migration to another country, continent, or language, arousing only limited interest on arrival. Accordingly, this chapter investigates the unsuccessful cultural transfer of the twentieth century’s two most popular Western European graphic novel series, Hergé’s Tintin and René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo’s Astérix.3 These emblematic examples of failed cultural acclimatization to North America, it is argued, are indicative of a context in which the transnational marketability of middlebrow cultural commodities such as comics—however consecrated they may be in their home countries—is commensurate to the cultural proximity or distance between importing and exporting countries.

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From BD to comics Tintin first appeared as a comic-strip serial in Le Petit “Vingtième,” the weekly children’s supplement to the Brussels daily Le Vingtième siècle, in January 1929; its first story arc was collected in book form and published under the title Au Pays des Soviets in 1930. Three decades later, the comics character Astérix made his debut appearance in the first issue of the French weekly comic magazine Pilote in October 1959; the first album, Astérix le Gaulois, came out in 1961.4 In Francophone Europe, these two series were the flagships of a slow cultural mutation as, thanks to them, the comic-strip medium gradually overcame the childlike, sometimes controversial, reputation attached to it since the early twentieth century, and it enjoyed various forms of cultural recognition sometimes mistaken by the comics industry and news media as signs of irreversible legitimization.5 By the late 1960s, Tintin and Astérix had become the mainstays of so-called Franco-Belgian comics, a notion that emerged after World War II to designate the segment of comics output that enjoyed the highest visibility within the mass media and the general public in France and Belgium. Initially, this segment was structured primarily around the Belgian comic weeklies Tintin (published by Editions du Lombard in Brussels) and Spirou (published by Editions Dupuis in Marcinelle) and the graphic novel series released by both publishers (exclusive of récits complets and petits formats, the cheap periodical pamphlets with low production values that accounted for the bulk of France’s national comics output). These soft-bound and hard-bound books owed their popularity as much to their intrinsic qualities as to the impact of the French law of July 16, 1949, on publications for children, which de facto protected the Francophone comics industry from foreign competition, particularly that of the United States.6 During the same period, comics in North America had developed in two formats largely distinct from their European counterparts: newspaper strips, which had been the main form of comics for the general public since the 1890s, and periodical comic books, the cheap saddle-stitched pamphlets primarily geared toward children and teenagers (regardless of their adult readerships), mass-produced from the late 1930s onwards. This was the editorial context in which the first attempt to issue American translations of Tintin took place in 1958. The project was the brainchild of Georges Duplaix, a French-born writer and publisher of children’s books living in the United States since the 1930s.7 When he read an enthusiastic Times Literary Supplement review of Methuen’s recently released first English-language translations of Hergé’s

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books (“The Epic Strip Tintin Crosses the Channel,” 1958), Duplaix contacted Tintin publisher Casterman to discuss the possibility of producing specifically American translations of the series. Among the numerous problems that had to be worked out, one of the thorniest was the depiction of black characters (who were replaced by Caucasians with generic ethnic features so as not to jeopardize the marketing of the books in the country’s southern states) and Captain Haddock’s alcoholism (which led to the pure and simple suppression of the panels in which he was seen drinking). Once the pages with controversial contents had been redrawn to meet the American public’s prerequisites, four books (the same as the Methuen titles, i.e. The Crab with the Golden Claws, King Ottokar’s Scepter, The Secret of the Unicorn, and Red Rackham’s Treasure) came out under the Golden Press imprint in time for Christmas of 1959. Notwithstanding an extensive advertising campaign, the public’s response was disappointing, both because of the “exoticism” of the books’ contents and their $1.95 retail price, a high sum in a country where a traditional comic book still cost a dime. Despite a very positive Newsweek review in February 1960 (“Here’s a GOOD Comic,” 1960), the next two books—Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon—were released with little if any publicity, bringing the Tintin graphic novels’ first American venture to an abrupt end. The character started to develop limited popularity in the United States only by the mid-1960s, thanks to the airing of the Belvision animated cartoon series, the serialization of the Methuen translations in Children’s Digest beginning in 1966, and the gradual availability of the titles not initially published by Golden Press. In 1974, Atlantic, an affiliate of Little, Brown, took over the American publishing of the British translations, and the company retains American publication rights to this day.8 The American reception of the French Astérix was quite different. On September 12, 1966, the New York Times ran a 700-word article by John L. Hess titled “Political or Simply Funny, Asterix the Comic-Strip Hero Has Captured France’s Heart.” Hess, then editor of the Parisian New York Herald Tribune, was a Francophile and gourmet (he would become the New York Times’s food editor in the 1970s) who kept a keen eye on the cultural trends of 1960s France. Despite the enthusiasm with which he addressed this new French cultural phenomenon, his article did not touch off any collective American interest in France’s latest fad. It is important to note that, at that time, Astérix’s North American fame was at best confined to limited Francophone and Francophile circles. One such niche was the Quebec market, where the books published by Dargaud were available, as were all Franco-Belgian comics, thanks to the preexisting network of Catholic

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publishing houses between Quebec and Belgium. Another circle was that of French teachers. The first known North American publication to mention Astérix was a short piece about three contemporary illustrated book series to be used in the French-language classroom; it appeared in the April 1966 French Review, the journal of the venerable American Association of French Teachers.9 At this point in time—three years prior to the first British translations (released by Brockhampton Press in 1969) and one year prior to the first animated feature film Astérix le Gaulois (which was never released in American theaters)—the character and the books in which he appeared were to all intents and purposes an all-French specialty. They were as difficult to understand as Gaullism, bérets, and baguettes for the overwhelming majority of North Americans, and they were likely to appeal only to highbrow readers. Three articles of the coming years typify this perception of Astérix as a cultural curiosity. An unsigned article published in the Christmas 1966 issue of Time Magazine included much of the information found in Hess’s New York Times piece and referred to a recent article by the then famous columnist Robert Escarpit in the daily newspaper Le Monde (“Hail the Great *!” 1966). Five months later, Marc Slonim devoted an article to European cultural trends in the May 28, 1967, New York Times, and he addressed several French fads of the day, such as Jacques Lacan, photo-novels, romans de gare (pulp paperbacks)—and comics, whose most representative exemplar was Astérix. Two years later, the New York Times ran an article titled “Le Gaulois extraordinaire” in which Marese Murphy, a London-based independent journalist, wrote about the publication of the first British translations of Astérix. After this piece, 15 years went by until the Asterix comics character was mentioned again in the New York Times— Paris correspondent Richard Bernstein’s 1984 article “Asterix: All Gaul and 25” celebrated the series’ quarter-century existence and discussed the French public’s infatuation with comic art. As far as the publishing market is concerned, the British translations of Astérix were available in the United States soon after they came out in the United Kingdom.10 But it was not until the mid-1980s that Dargaud attempted to Americanize its property. Why did no US publisher attempt to market this promising comic? Because it did not appear promising enough, at least to Americans. According to the character’s cocreator, cartoonist Albert Uderzo, as cited in a 1996 article, the first attempts to export the series were fruitless because the US publishers contacted by Dargaud in the late 1960s allegedly demanded that the Astérix stories take place in America. Whether or not this anecdote is true (it has never been repeated, much less confirmed), cultural

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parochialism was not the only issue accounting for the unsuccessful exportation of Astérix.11 For decades, European comic albums failed to penetrate the US book market because they were not welcome in general bookstores, where “graphic novel” sections have only been established since the 1990s. The only “comics” traditionally carried by bookstores were essentially collections of magazine cartoons (e.g. by New Yorker artists or editorial cartoonists) or syndicated comic strips (such as Pogo, Peanuts, Garfield, etc.) that were shelved together in “humor” sections. European-type softcover comic albums posed marketing issues because of their size, which was atypical by American standards, and their comparatively high retail prices. Indeed, they were not even welcome in children’s books sections, where any material comprising panels, strips, and balloons was typically banished. Only the largest big-city bookstores were likely to carry a few European comic albums. The difference in format was not the only factor that underscored the weight of preexisting cultural habits and the difficulty of adjusting foreign products to them. Another unsuccessful attempt to expose American readers to the Astérix character took place in the late 1970s, when Field Newspaper, then the second largest press syndicate in North America, offered its customers serialized adaptations of five Asterix books (Asterix the Gladiator, Asterix and Cleopatra, Asterix and the Great Crossing, Asterix and the Big Fight, and Asterix in Spain) from November 1977 to February 1979. The page layout was reedited into daily one-tier strips and Sunday pages, panels were deleted wherever syndicate editors felt necessary to maintain the pace and consistency of daily installments, the translations were altered with respect to the British graphic novels, and many puns and witticisms were dropped in order to make the strip more palatable to the family audience of newspapers. The Asterix daily strip was off to a relatively promising start, as over 200 out of the United States’ and Canada’s then 1,800-odd newspapers started carrying it.12 Yet, the experience soon turned into a fiasco: Only 15 newspapers ran it for more than a few months. Asterix appeared briefly in the Orlando Sentinel Star and Toronto Sun, for instance, but reportedly none of the newspapers ran it throughout its 14-month career in syndication.13 Rather, it seems that the syndication of Asterix as a newspaper comic was one of the first steps taken independently by Dargaud to break into the US market, several years before Belgian-born cartoonist Michel Greg was commissioned to head the publisher’s North American affiliate Dargaud International in 1981. But in the ultracompetitive world of syndicated comic strips, which last only as long as they appeal to a sufficiently large readership, it was unrealistic to believe that Asterix had the potential of becoming a new Peanuts.

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Dargaud’s venture continued with the release of five albums between 1984 and 1995, translated for the North American market by Robert Steven Caron: Asterix and the Great Crossing (1984), Asterix the Legionary (1992), Asterix at the Olympic Games (1992), Asterix in Britain (1995), and Asterix and Cleopatra (1995). Besides Dargaud’s poor distribution of these books, they suffered from comparison with their British counterparts, especially as the names of several recurring characters were altered.14 The confusion has subsequently persisted as Distribooks, the distributor that has handled the Asterix stories in the United States and Canada since 1994, lists the five titles translated by Caron alongside all the other titles in British translation. Still, the animated feature film Asterix in America (Astérix et les Indiens in French) went unnoticed by US media when it came out in American cinemas on February 23, 1996 (with British dubbing in which Asterix spoke with actor Craig Charles’ Liverpool accent). Nowadays, however, all eight Asterix feature films are available on DVD with British soundtracks in North America.

Readers In the November 18, 2007, episode of The Simpsons, “Husbands and Knives,” Lisa Simpson is seen walking into a hip, superhero-free comic bookstore, saying in front of a rack of European graphic novels: “Asterix! Tintin! I heard these only existed in high school French classes!” As so often in Matt Groening’s animated series, satire is very close to the truth. Who are the North American readers of Tintin and Asterix, apart from native French speakers? Testimonies in web forums outline a few significant trends.15 First, the Tintin character generally holds more appeal than Asterix; many readers respond more positively to the Belgian reporter’s straightforward adventures than to the Gaul’s wit-and-pun-filled stories.16 Another important factor is sociocultural: Some readers who spent their youths in the Midwest discovered the European characters only when they went to college or via television (in the case of Tintin). By contrast, other readers who grew up in the cosmopolitan areas of Philadelphia or Berkeley were exposed to the graphic novels at an early age. Similar patterns are found with Canadian children growing up in southern Ontario or Quebec’s Anglophone enclaves.17 A broad generalization of these patterns indicates that Tintin and Asterix have gotten across as “European” cultural products in North America since the 1970s, that is to say, as comics marketed in a relatively expensive book format to be read either in French or British English and thereby catering primarily to urban

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children raised in cosmopolitan middle-class milieus—typically (although not exclusively) children of the educated elite. Another important subcategory is formed by knowledgeable readers of non-American comics, who are familiar with the Gaul and the Belgian detective not due to parental cultural influence but because they are interested in foreign comic strips and/or patronize the few sophisticated big-city specialty comic stores that carry European albums. But to the overwhelming majority of North American mainstream comics readers, Tintin and Asterix are names associated, if at all, with esoteric foreign comic-strip traditions.18 Although Tintin has been translated into over ninety languages (see “Tintin— Translation Overview”) and Astérix into over a hundred—including unauthorized translations—both have fundamentally proved difficult to export to the United States as Francophone cultural commodities. Ironically, the main barrier has not been linguistic. Still, as cultural exportation requires that the outbound commodity be susceptible to easy consumption—both “edible” and “tasty”—for the people of the destination country, everything in this case seems to indicate the existence of a cultural barrier just as insurmountable as the allegedly “average” American’s notorious dislike of frog legs, escargots, raw oysters, and foie gras. Why? According to Helen Laville, “Asterix is not so much French as non-American.”19 This dichotomy, however seemingly contentious, is borne out by statistical evidence. The second largest market of Astérix books after the Francophone area (France, Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec) is the German-Austrian market, with 100 million copies sold as of 2008.20 Among the 42 countries whose Google homepage featured a special design celebrating Astérix’s fiftieth anniversary on October 29, 2009, were Canada and Puerto Rico, national areas enjoying long-standing historical affinities with Europe, but not the United States.21 And regarding Tintin, Laurence Grove has pointed out the ocean-wide gap separating Brits from Yankees in their respective appreciations of Hergé’s character, while acknowledging that “[e]ven in the British Isles, Tintin’s following tends to be cult rather than mass devotion.”22 One might, as a result, postulate a European specificity that would explain why only those Americans who harbor strong affinities with European culture are liable (though not systematically) to become familiar with Astérix and Tintin. This would, then, account for the difference between the covers of the European and US editions of the July 22, 1991, issue of Time Magazine. Although the contents of the magazine were identical on both sides of the Atlantic, the European cover featured a headline about “The New France” with a superb drawing of Astérix and Obelix, whereas the US edition sported a Colorado River-themed cover.

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Beyond each cover’s domestic appeal, the appearance of the Gallic characters clearly epitomized the extent to which they were likely to resonate as emblems of France to European readers of Time. Now a healthy fifty-something, Astérix remains fundamentally alien to US mass cultural consumption because—as narrative, object, commodity, and reservoir of collective representations23—he partakes of symbolic configurations that are meaningful only in the context of the European middle-class literate culture of the latter part of the twentieth century. Astérix and Tintin are auteur works that have experienced mass- to mid-cultural fame in Europe but are still too deeply embedded in the Western European cultural backdrop to become successfully acclimatized to the environment of American mass cultural consumption. The cultural strength that has made for the lasting popularity of the Gallic warrior and the youthful Belgian detective for decades in Europe has proved an economic and cultural weakness every time the latter crossed the Atlantic. The very fact that they retained their original flavor has made them unpalatable to the vast majority of the American public.

The dialectics of market and culture Any observer of transatlantic cultural circulation in the twentieth century knows of many commodities labeled “mass culture” in the United States that were greeted as art as soon as they hit the shores of France—for example, jazz after World War I or hard-boiled detective fiction (soon aptly renamed roman noir) and 1940s black-and-white crime movies (film noir) after World War II.24 These forms characteristically traveled to Europe either unchanged (jazz) or with the minimal modifications entailed by translation (fiction and film). Conversely, translating Tintin and Astérix books into English was not enough to make them popular in America to the same extent as they were in Europe. A case in point is the one successfully Americanized Belgian comic strip, Peyo’s Les Schtroumpfs, which enjoyed enormous popularity by extensive mass-culturizing as the Smurfs in the 1980s.25 The Saturday morning cartoon series produced by Hanna-Barbera that started airing on NBC in 1981 relied on a twofold alteration—the comics became animated cartoons that retained only the visual universe of Peyo’s original graphic novels, but the show’s scripts became increasingly removed from the Belgian cartoonist’s initial concept. While it appears understandable that comic-strip stories designed for a Belgian comic magazine in the 1950s and 1960s necessitated substantial adaptation work

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to appeal to 1980s American preteen television viewers, the final product was so different from the original that The Smurf King and The Astrosmurf (the British versions of Le Schtroumpfissime and Le Cosmoschtroumpf translated a few years before by the UK’s official Astérix adapters Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge) were released by Random House in 1982 to utter public indifference, completely overshadowed by the flood of merchandise that made the Smurfs into one of the most lucrative toy franchises of the 1980s. The translated graphic novels were predictably out of sync with the new North American cultural, mass-media, and business environment of Peyo’s characters.26 The early 1960s, Belgian-born comic strip Schtroumpfs bore very little resemblance, except visually, with the 1980s American Saturday morning television cartoon Smurfs. A comparison along similar lines can be drawn between two 2011 movie blockbusters based on Franco-Belgian icons, Raja Gosnell’s The Smurfs and Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin. While extensive adaptation was brought to bear in transposing these characters to the silver screen, Spielberg proved more faithful—or less unfaithful—to the original work than Gosnell. The latter, except for a passing allusion to the Belgian comics in which the Smurfs and evil sorcerer Gargamel were born, handled them as entirely malleable franchised characters, setting them in present-day New York City with barely a single substantial plot element drawn from Peyo’s original run. Spielberg, on the contrary, went out of his way to stick fairly closely to two Tintin books (The Secret of the Unicorn and The Crab with the Golden Claws, two titles with otherwise no mutual connection in the Tintin mythos) over two-thirds of his film—the final third being much more a pastiche of the Indiana Jones franchise than of the Tintin canon. While the transnational reception of cultural commodities in general, and comics in particular, necessarily involves a measure of distortion, Tintin’s and Astérix’s ill-fated crossings to the United States in the second half of the twentieth century exemplify how preexisting collective cultural representations and formats may resist the penetration of foreign products exceptionally resonant with their original cultures. Unlike the bulk of the United States’ cultural industry, Franco-Belgian comics were never designed with exportation goals uppermost in mind. Their initial popularity derived from their successful inscription in the collective psyche of postwar Western Europe’s children, teenagers, and families, not from their potential as global entertainment fare. Hence the subsequent difficulty of adjusting them to the predefined criteria of US mass cultural profitability. As far as the transnational circulation of cultural products is concerned, it will come as no surprise that translation—meaning, the respectful transposition

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of contents with as little interference as possible from the receiving language and cultural context—is essentially a form of red-carpet treatment reserved for high-art, highbrow, or otherwise consecrated cultural commodities. Meanwhile, for middlebrow and lowbrow products, adaptation is the name of the game. Its rules are typically set in accordance with the destination market’s own domestic context of consumer habits and expectations (putting aside the question of whether said habits and expectations are objective realities or consumer trends cultivated by cultural suppliers reluctant to take the economic chance of offering their ever-fickle and elusive audiences unusual narrative and/or packaging formats). Franco-Belgian comics could not travel westward as successfully as American jazz, hard-boiled fiction, and crime films had traveled eastward essentially because the Europeanization of American masscult and midcult products is a culturally upward process, while the Americanization of European-made midcult products is a “dumbing-down” process. The transnational adaptation of cultural commodities takes place along a spectrum. At one end is translation, in its most faithful “literary” incarnation; at the other end are the most extreme forms of transposition designed to adjust foreign concepts to the domestic cultural industry’s expectations, retaining only the original commodities’ most superficial features. What travels best in the transnational exchange of comic strips is the visual dimension of idiosyncratic characters. The circulation of narratives is more problematic, especially when they participate in middlebrow consumption practices, of which both Tintin and Astérix have been emblematic instances in Western Europe since the 1960s. In the dialectical power balance between market and culture, commodities travel more easily, although with often disappointing commercial results, than the consumption practices in which they are embedded back home. In this respect, the Americans’ perennially lukewarm reception of classic Franco-Belgian comics should not appear as a more puzzling phenomenon than the equally long-standing enthusiasm of the French over Jerry Lewis movies.

Notes   1 For convenience’s sake, the age of “Franco-Belgian comics” here designates a period starting with the birth of the weekly Journal de Tintin in Belgium in September 1946 and ending with the last issue of the weekly Pilote in May 1974. Other periodizations are possible as the very notion of Franco-Belgian comics refers to a complex historical and cultural context that did not comprise every single comic published in France and Belgium during that 30-year span.

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  2 This is a revised and expanded version of a French-language lecture titled “La (non-) réception de Tintin et Astérix sur le marché nord-américain” given during the “Circulations, transferts et adaptations dans la bande dessinée” symposium organized by Caroline Moine and Sylvain Lesage at Université Versailles-Saint-Quentin on May 18, 2010. Part of the talk was based on a paper focusing on the Asterix character previously given during a conference held at the Sorbonne in October 2009 (Gabilliet 2011, 59–70). Thanks to Dr Lucy Edwards for her careful reading and suggestions.   3 In this chapter, whenever Astérix is not italicized, I refer to the comics character in the French original. The elimination of the acute accent means that I am talking about the American/British translation of the character. Italicizations of Tintin and Aste/érix indicate that the names are (part of) book titles.   4 For a general presentation of Astérix in English, see Gabilliet, “Astérix.”   5 Concerning the popularity of Astérix in France, see Bourque Dandridge.   6 See Crépin and Groensteen.   7 Georges Duplaix headed the New York office of Western Printing. This huge publishing company founded in Racine, Wisconsin, in 1907 went on to become the parent of Dell, the biggest American comic book publisher of the 1940s and 1950s.   8 See Owens.   9 The article referred to Astérix, but also René Goscinny and Jean-Jacques Sempé’s bestselling series of illustrated Le Petit Nicolas stories and Laurent de Brunhoff ’s Babar (cf. “Books” 831–2). 10 Cf. “Asterix in Britain: The Untold Story.” 11 See Riding; Hughes. Nine days after running Alan Riding’s article citing Uderzo’s claim, the New York Times ran a letter from former William Morrow & Co. executive Lawrence Hughes in which he denied that such a request was ever made when his company tried to market the first British translations in the United States in 1970. 12 Cf. Decker 20. 13 See the Wikipedia entry “English translations of Asterix”; see also Hoogeboom and Selles. René Goscinny died at the age of 51, three weeks before the first daily strip came out on November 27, 1977, and there is no evidence that he was at all involved in this project (cf. “Rene Goscinny Dies in Paris”). 14 The characters whose names were changed by Caron were druid Magigimmix (Great Britain: Getafix), village chief Macroeconomix (GB: Vitalstatistix), his wife Belladonna (GB: Impedimenta), village elder Arthritix (GB: Geriatrix), bard Malacoustix (GB: Cacofonix), fishmonger Epidemix (GB: Unhygienix), and Obelix’s love interest Philharmonia (GB: Panacea). 15 See Holbo. 16 One instance of the typical American unresponsiveness to Goscinny’s sort of humor is found in the “Astérix” entry of Horn’s 1976 World Encyclopedia of Comics:

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Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives “There are a few good things in Astérix (the clever use of balloons, drawing which is clean and uncluttered, and some genuinely funny situations) but the basic plot is tiresome and Goscinny’s endless stream of bad puns and chauvinistic asides make this quite unpleasant as a strip” (90). I derive this information from many conversations with Canadian fellow students when I attended the University of British Columbia from 1989 through 1991. The use of Goscinny and Uderzo’s Gauls as visual citations confirms their status as characters meaningful only to those North American readers versed in European comics lore. Two examples are the appearance of a menhir-carrying character in the background of a panel on page 41 of Alan Moore’s superhero-pastiche title Supreme #10 (Moore, “Double-Exposure Doom!” 18) and two spectators bearing a very strong resemblance to the Gaul duo sitting among the audience of futuristic circus games in Top Ten #9 (Moore, “Rules of Engagement” 16). In 1986, the Franco-American duo of Randy and Jean-Marc Lofficier (signing their comic book scripts as R. J. M. Lofficier) wrote a story in which Superman found himself in a very recognizable Gallic village whose inhabitants nicknamed him “Superix” (“Prisoners of Time!”). Predictably enough, the writers of these stories have strong European connections, Alan Moore being a Briton and Jean-Marc Lofficier being a Frenchman. Laville n.p. Cf. Cros 20. The countries whose Google homepage featured Astérix and Obelix on October 29, 2009, were Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Belize, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Israel, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Salvador, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Ukraine, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Grove n.p. See my article in Critical Survey of Graphic Novels. Cf. Ory, L’Aventure culturelle française 33–4; Ory, “L’américanisation” 254–5. Cf. Thompson 38–9. This discrepancy is epitomized clearly by the “impossible” adaptation for American readers of Les Schtroumpfs noirs, the first title in the Belgian graphic novel series, in which the Smurfs stung by a mysterious black fly become insane and black-skinned. While the story had no racial overtones whatsoever in its original cultural context, translating it without altering the skin color of the diseased Smurfs was not an option for the racially sensitive American market—hence the transposition to purple-skinned Smurfs for US television viewers and readers.

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Works cited “Asterix in Britain: The Untold Story (or how Asterix crossed the Channel and was published in English).” Asterix NZ, 2009. . Accessed July 28, 2009. Bernstein, Richard. “Asterix: All Gaul and 25.” New York Times, Oct. 25, 1984. . Accessed Oct. 9, 2009. “Books.” French Review 39.5 (1966): 831–2. Bourque Dandridge, Eliza. “Producing Popularity: The Success in France of the Comics Series ‘Astérix le Gaulois.’” Unpublished Master of Arts Dissertation in History (European Area Studies). Blacksburg, Virginia: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2008. . Accessed Oct. 9, 2009. Crépin, Thierry, and Thierry Groensteen, eds. On tue à chaque page! La loi de 1949 sur les publications destinées à la jeunesse. Nantes: Editions du Temps; Angoulême: Musée de la bande dessinée, 1999. Cros, Bernard. “Du village d’Astérix au village global: historique de cinquante ans de succès.” In Le Tour du monde d’Astérix: actes du colloque tenu à la Sorbonne les 30 et 31 octobre 2009. Ed. Bertrand Richet. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2011. 19–38. Decker, Dwight R. “Asterix: ‘These Frenchmen Are Crazy!’” The Comics Journal 38 (Feb. 1978): 20–31. “English Translations of Asterix.” Wikipedia. . Accessed July 28, 2009. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. “Astérix en Amérique: la réception d’Astérix sur le marché nord-américain.” In Le Tour du monde d’Astérix: actes du colloque tenu à la Sorbonne les 30 et 31 octobre 2009. Ed. Bertrand Richet. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2011. 59–70. —. “Astérix.” In Critical Survey of Graphic Novels: Independents and Underground Classics, vol. 1. Ed. Bart Beaty and Stephen Weiner. Ipswich: Salem Press, 2012. 65–9. Groening, Matt (prod.). “Husbands and Knives.” The Simpsons episode no. 407, Fox, original airdate Nov. 18, 2007. Grove, Laurence. “Confused by the Cult of Tintin? You’re Not Alone.” BBC News, Jan. 9, 2009. . Accessed May 6, 2010. “Hail the Great *!” Time Magazine, Dec. 23, 1966. . Accessed Oct. 9, 2009. “Here’s a GOOD Comic.” Newsweek, Feb. 22, 1960. Hess, John L. “Political or Simply Funny, Asterix the Comic-Strip Hero Has Captured France’s Heart.” New York Times, Sept. 12, 1966: 9.

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Holbo, John. “Tintin Coming Out in America?” Weblog Out of the Crooked Timber. Jan. 17, 2009. . Accessed Oct. 9, 2009. Hoogeboom, Hendrik Jan, and Hans Selles. “Asterix Speaks English (US)—United States.” Asterix Around the World—the Many Languages of Asterix. 2011. . Accessed July 24, 2012. Horn, Maurice, ed. The World Encyclopedia of Comics. New York: Chelsea House, 1976. Hughes, Lawrence. “Asterix in America.” New York Times, Oct. 24, 1996. . Accessed Jan. 2, 2013. Laville, Helen. “A Little Star.” The New Statesman, June 4, 2001. . Accessed Oct. 9, 2009. Lofficier, R. J. M., writer. “Prisoners of Time! (1986 A.D. to CCLIII A.D.).” Action Comics 579 (May 1986). New York: DC Comics. Moore, Alan, writer. “The Double-Exposure Doom!” Supreme #10 (Aug. 1996). Berkeley: Image Comics. —, writer. “Rules of Engagement.” Top 10 #9 (Oct. 2000). New York: America’s Best Comics. Murphy, Marese. “Le Gaulois extraordinaire.” New York Times, May 4, 1969: 3, 51. Ory, Pascal. L’Aventure culturelle française, 1945–1989. Paris: Flammarion, 1989. —. “L’américanisation: modernisme et culture de masse.” In L’Esprit de l’Europe tome 3—Goûts et manières. Ed. A. Compagnon and J. Seebacher. Paris: Flammarion, 1993. 252–61. Owens, Chris. “Tintin Crosses the Atlantic: The Golden Press Affair.” Tintinologist.org. Oct. 2004, updated Jan. 2007. . Accessed Oct. 9, 2009. “Rene Goscinny Dies in Paris; Created Noted Comic Strip.” New York Times, Nov. 7, 1977. . Accessed Oct. 9, 2009. Riding, Alan. “Asterix, France’s Superman and Ego.” New York Times, Oct. 15, 1996: C11. Slonim, Marc. “European Notebook.” New York Times, May 28, 1967: 31–3. “The Epic Strip Tintin Crosses the Channel.” Times Literary Supplement, Dec. 5, 1958: 698. Thompson, Kim. “Smurfin’ USA.” The Comics Journal 75 (Sept. 1982): 38–9. Time Magazine. American Edition, July 22, 1991, cover page [“The Colorado”]. —. Time Atlantic Edition, special issue, July 22, 1991, cover page [“The New France”]. “Tintin—Translation overview.” Tintin Around the World, 2012. . Accessed July 24, 2012.

Afterword: Framing, Unframing, Reframing: Retconning the Transnational Work of Comics Shane Denson

“To read,” according to Roland Barthes, “is a labor of language. To read is to find meanings, and to find meanings is to name them; but these named meanings are swept toward other names: I name, I unname, I rename: so the text passes: it is a nomination in the course of becoming, a tireless approximation, a metonymic labor.”1 Whatever its merits may be for a phenomenology of literary appreciation, Barthes’s beautiful description of the reading process is limited in its ability to account for comics and graphic narratives, where reading is not just a labor of language. In comics, because of the central collusion between verbal and visual forms, it is not just naming but also framing that enables the passage of the text; visual, material, and narrative frames of various scales and orders irreducibly structure graphic texts, parse their units of significance, and condition the dynamics of their reading. The act of reading a graphic narrative involves the reader in a process of articulation, which prior to (and as a condition of) “expression” also implies both a drawing of distinctions between parts and, simultaneously, an act of joining them together—that is, a double determination of borders, both as points of contact and of separation. The frame of the panel is the most obvious unit of such articulation, but as I shall endeavor to demonstrate, the borders at stake in the act of reading graphic narratives stretch from intrapanel frames, such as those demarcating speech balloons, to the macro-scale borders between nations and national traditions. The creation and appreciation of meaning in graphic texts depends crucially on interactions, exchanges, and movements between the frames defining all such scales. Thus, to rephrase Barthes’s observations on reading for the visual-verbal medium of comics: “I frame, I unframe, I reframe: so the graphic text passes” from panel to panel, page to page, across medial boundaries, and—by means of this same inherent dynamic—across national and cultural boundaries as well.

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This afterword aims to articulate a framework that explains the transnational work of comics and graphic narratives—their propensity toward various acts of border-crossing, adaptation, and reimagination—as a more or less natural extension of volatile core processes at work in the act of reading comics. Grounding my efforts in a consideration of comics’ formal techniques of visual and narrative framing and sequencing, I seek here to identify a set of crucial liminalities and reversible oppositions—for instance, between the inside and outside of framed panels, between the temporal and spatial orderings of sequences—that are centrally at work in, and perhaps even partially constitutive of, the medium of comics.2 At the limit, this formal-phenomenological investigation suggests that liminality or marginality pertains not only to the “internal” relations or constitution of the medium, but that it is also a basic fact of comics’ “external” relations to other media and the world at large. Above all, the serial forms typical of comics’ narration witness the medium positioned in an emphatically plurimedial field, where boundaries are continually negotiated, annexes claimed, and permeable borders policed. The figures that populate ongoing comics series, in particular, move between diegetically closed narrative worlds, the integrity and continuity of which is often highly strained, and open multiverses that encompass not only alternative realities within the medium of comics but also alternative existences in other media as well. Attention to the way that serially and plurimedially instantiated figures (superheroes such as Batman and Superman, but also iconic figures like Frankenstein or Tarzan) negotiate the relations between diegetically open and closed serialities promises, finally, to shed media-theoretical light on the social question of the dynamics of comics’ transnational proliferation and reception—which involves superheroes and other comic figures in both global and local contexts, in internationally standardized forms and national or regional adaptations. In a different context, Benedict Anderson has identified a competition between “bound” and “unbound” serialities at work in the modern constitution of nations as “imagined communities”—a competition, that is, between the totalizing closure of a territory and numbering of its occupants as effected by a national census, as opposed to the categorically open and ongoing iterability and reproducibility of events as modeled in the media of newspapers and photography.3 Refocusing Anderson’s perspective onto comics’ serial and plurimedial negotiations of “bound” and “unbound” formations—understood in relation to the marginalities and reversible boundaries that mark the frames, sequences, and media of popular culture generally and graphic narratives in particular—this chapter links comics’ plurimedial relations and their

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transnational imaginings through the emergent seriality of framing, unframing, and reframing as a locus of ambiguous intersection and border-crossing.

Toward a media-theoretical backstory: The frame What is the transnational work of graphic narrative forms? In one way or another, all of the contributions in this volume aim to answer that question or illuminate a particular facet of the answer. Due to the processual nature and flux of transnational encounters, and because these involve a dynamics of ongoing, open-ended, and qualitative change, it may very well be impossible to provide a comprehensive answer. Rather than attempting one, then, I will instead take up some of the leads provided in the various chapters of this volume and work from there to explicate a set of enabling conditions that are, I believe, of general relevance to the question of comics’ transnational work. In effect, the goal of this afterword is to provide a sort of conceptual retcon, a broad media-theoretical backstory for the various case studies addressed throughout this volume. My overarching concern, specifically, is to provide a medium-specific link between content-level expressions of transnational exchange and the formal and material means of their representation in comics; between diegetic and extra-diegetic (including broadly social and cultural) phenomena of transnational interaction in and around graphic narratives; and between concrete cases of such interaction (including the transnational adaptations, influences, collaborations, and encounters explored by the contributors to this volume) and a more general potential or tendency of graphic narratives as a medium or set of medial forms toward entanglement in various transnational relations.4 Like Aryn Bartley, who in her contribution explores how a “narrative mobilizes the potential of graphic nonfiction to envision—quite literally—historical and present-day suffering,” I am interested in literal, material connections between the narrative content or expression of transnational encounters and the graphic-textual form of their presentation. While the literalness of vision afforded by pictorial illustration is amenable to a wide range of stylistic and thematic appropriations, the graphic quality of comics’ images retains an irreducibly concrete materiality that persists quite apart from representational conventions, artistic intentions, or other discursive overlays and significances. As a result, the reader’s encounter with the image is capable of being transformed into the site of a rich affective encounter (e.g. with subjects of “historical and present-day suffering”) that frames the transnational in terms that are not reducible to a

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mere thematic treatment or commentary on border-crossing and cultural exchange. The reader’s encounter with the image, that is, is not equivalent to the reader’s encounter with the representational content of the image; relations between the two nevertheless obtain, and thus the concrete image is capable of imprinting itself upon the reader in such a way as to forge a material link between the reader’s apprehension of the image and the political import of the narrative in which that image participates—for example, between the fear I feel as a reader upon encountering a subjectively framed image in which soldiers’ guns are aimed at “me” and the many layers of historical, cultural, and national interactions involved in American and global mediations of a conflict such as that between Israel and Palestine. Similarly, the silent images discussed in the chapter by Georgiana Banita “cede the position of firsthand witness to the reader,” such that “we engage in a dialogue of a material, somatological kind— not captioned, but lived.” This is one sense in which graphic narratives are capable of establishing concrete, literal connections—rather than merely abstract or allegorical ones— between the medial vehicle of the image and the verbal-visual representation of transnational exchange. At the same time, this visual (or visceral) “directness” of the image should not, as Florian Groß makes apparent in his chapter on the limit-case of wordless graphic novels, be mistaken for a quality of universal, transparent communicability. The links between images and their mediated contents and significances are much more complex, and this is in part due to a potential—which, as we shall see, is particularly heightened in graphic narratives—of images to vacillate phenomenally between perceptions of their representational objects, that is to say, of the objects depicted in images, on the one hand, and apprehensions of those same images as objects, on the other. This reversibility of the image is due to the fact of framing; a frame (whether physically manifest or only virtual, existing as a condition of perceptual selection) marks a boundary that defines the image as a unit, thus separating it from the space around it, but it also marks a zone of connection and in fact invites the viewer to cross its threshold, to pass into the territory it defines and behold it from an engaged—at the ideal limit, immersed—perspective. But just as it enables engrossment or absorption into the image, this possibility of the Gestalt-shift also opens up the image to the outside, where it is subject to the unpredictable vicissitudes of contextualization. The image, then, is rendered mutable, and this is not without consequence for the viewer, who is invested in the image by way of his or her perceptual intentionality. Indeed, here we may seek the deeper roots of the connections—as explored in the chapter by Elisabeth El Refaie—between the

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fluidity of embodied subjectivity and graphic narratives’ use of shape-shifting as a metaphor or instrument for the negotiation of transnational identities. Perceptual multistability is not particular to comics, of course, but common to all visual media—and indeed perhaps to all media of any type, in so far as they are subject to framing of some sort. In his meditations on the “parergon,” Jacques Derrida connects the flickering dynamics of the frame with what he takes to be the outermost frame of human experience, that of écriture, and exploits the image of the frame for a wide-ranging deconstruction of Western philosophy. It would, of course, be problematic to seek a medium-specific link between comics’ images and an alleged proclivity toward transnational exchanges at this level of generality, and yet the reversible dynamics concretely enacted by picture frames are an important key to understanding those connections. For the frame, as Derrida shows with the example of a painting, is hardly neutral in the reversals of inside (the painting’s representational content) and outside (the painting apprehended as an object); instead, the frame takes on an uncanny substantiality as it alternates between two mutually exclusive positions: between (a) its function as the ground upon which the figure of the painting can emerge, and (b) its absorption into the figure when the painting is seen against the larger background of the wall. By opening a space between the inside and the outside, I suggest, the frame around a picture—whether a painting or a single panel in a graphic novel—institutes a dynamics of reversibility that is centrally at work in comics’ negotiations of transnational relations. Though neither exclusive to graphic narratives nor sufficient for comics’ transnational proliferations, the multistable frame is, I contend, an enabling condition or catalyst that lays the ground, in miniature form, for the sorts of interchanges between the dual perspectives juxtaposed by Lukas Etter in his chapter on Berlin—namely, for an alternation between the series’ diegetic address of transnational exchange (its thematic concern with multiethnic characters in an emphatically and in many ways plural metropolis) and its more-than-diegetic illustration of transnational influence and transfer (its incorporation of various nationally inflected stylistic influences, as well as its embodiment, on the levels of material production and reception, of networks of global interconnections). Somewhere between address and illustration—which, thus conceived, together generate a volatile, self-reflexive bond between content-level and formal enactments of transnationalism—there is the multistable frame, operating from a liminal position, serving as a transducer between insides and outsides, enabling passage and exchange. But how, exactly, do we get from the small-scale instantiation of these dynamics in the single framed image to the high-level

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relations and processes identified by Etter? The link between these levels, if it indeed exists, can hardly be of a simple nature. The task of locating it will require us to go beyond the common ground that comics share with isolated images and visual media in general; we shall have to reinsert comics’ panels back into the strips, sequences, and series from which they have been abstracted. When we do so, however, we find that the multistable reversibility of the framed image, far from being annulled or arrested, is in fact exacerbated in the medium of comics, where it is essential to the production and legibility of narrative meaning.

Of sequences, series, and states: Unframing and reframing I began this chapter with a passage from Roland Barthes, which I reformulated for the purposes of understanding the reading process specific to graphic narratives: “I frame, I unframe, I reframe: so the graphic text passes.” What this indicates, in the alternation between moments of framing and unframing, is that the multistability of the frame is essential to the emergence of sequentiality— essential to the very ability to cross the boundaries between panels and perceive them as sequences.5 Philosopher David Carrier has asked: “How, from discrete images, do we generate a continuous narrative?”6 Following Scott McCloud, who speaks of “closure” as the inferential activity of the reader who supplies a causal link between panels, Carrier claims that the gutter, the space between panels, is “not always a mere background, [but] may become an active part of the image.”7 I would go one step further and claim that the gutter is never a mere background, as it is always caught up in the flickering of the frame between ground and figure and thus constantly alternating between passive and active functions. The panel border must be permeable, the site of functional reversals between, on the one hand, defining and focusing a certain view of the diegetic world and, on the other hand, being absorbed into the panel-as-figure so that it can stand side by side with another panel or set of panels against a larger background, constituted by a higher-level frame. The sequence takes shape in this back and forth, this oscillation of views between looking through the panel frame onto the story world, then seeing a set of framed units, before zooming back into the next frame, and so on. An emergent seriality takes root, as these oscillations continue at the level of pages and at the level of books. In each case, a gap between discrete units is bridged or made passable, “closed” by means of an alternation between a view of the unit in isolation and its reframing as part of a group, apprehended as a series. The passage from one issue of a comic book series to the next depends,

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therefore, on the same dynamics of framing, unframing, reframing that drives the passage from one panel to the next. But especially at higher levels of serialized framings, where it is no longer possible to survey a complete set of units in a single view, discrepancies inevitably arise as a result of the recursive nestings of frames and the multilevel multistabilities at work. Various frames and frame levels conflict with one another and fail to mesh, especially in long-running and multiple-author series. The technique of retcon, which retrofits the series with continuity by means of a revisionary view of past events, provides an answer to this problem that itself depends on the nonabsolute, negotiable character of multistable frames. And the proliferation of frames goes in the other direction as well, as alternative universes and what-if scenarios reframe characters in several diegetic realms, several slices of the multiverse at once. Significantly, many comic book characters are themselves designed as multistable frames in their own right; the superhero, in particular, follows a long-established pattern of serialized narrative forms by endowing the central figure with an alter ego that brokers traffic between otherwise separated, disparate times and spaces (e.g. between a criminal underground or a world of mythical powers and the world of normal, law-abiding citizens). Such figures therefore constitute a thematic embodiment of the medium’s formal dynamics of the multistable frame, but they also mirror the structural logic at work in the consumption of serialized media such as comic books: Such serial forms are medially mobile forms, discretely packaged and consumed in a variety of times and spaces (at home, on the subway, etc.), consumed episodically but synthesized into overarching spatiotemporal continuities or diegetic universes (which, however, regularly defer completion and resist coherence as a result of their multistable framing). Serialized characters with liminal, hybrid, double, or secret identities therefore embody a relatively high-level frame that repeats the low-level oscillations between discontinuous framings and continuous sequences.8 Precisely such resonances are at work in the case of Spider-Man India, in Spider-Man’s manga adaptations and transcreations, and in the transnational proliferations of Batman, as examined in the chapters by Shilpa Davé, Daniel Stein, and Katharina Bieloch and Sharif Bitar. It is these dynamics, which trace back to the role of the multistable frame in both structuring and destabilizing comics’ narratives, that also help make the superhero genre attractive for authors such as Warren Ellis, who—as Jochen Ecke demonstrates in his contribution— performs his authorial role in such a way as to institute “the permeability between the author function and his protagonists.” Accordingly, superheroes

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constitute a natural site—though by no means an unproblematic one, as Stefan Meier demonstrates in his chapter on the Muslim superheroes of The 99—for various forms of transnational exchange, staged in such a way as to connect Etter’s levels of diegetic “address” and extra-diegetic “illustration,” hence irreducible to a merely thematic concern with cross-border encounters. And this is especially true in an era of increasingly global networks of media production, distribution, and reception, accompanied by convergence trajectories that situate superheroes in cross-media and transmedial settings.9 Comics’ serial figures, which already occupy the threshold between various diegetic and nondiegetic realms, have long demonstrated facility in migrating from comics to a variety of other media, including radio, television, film, and video games. Such a figure is itself a locus of intersection between various medialities, each framing their own serial progressions that alternately mesh and fail to mesh with one another, articulating diegetic universes that respect, fail to respect, or marginally respect the framing boundaries of diegetic continuity. This plurimedial expression, which continues to resonate with the low-level multistabilities of the frames and sequences that structure the medium of comics, serves in turn as a catalyst for the even higher-level acts of framing, unframing, and reframing that constitute the transnational negotiations of imagined communities in the reception of comic book series and characters. The social question, therefore, of the dynamics of comics’ transnational proliferations and exchanges—which involve superheroes and other comic figures in both global and local contexts, in internationally standardized forms and national or regional adaptations, and in cross-border networks of influence and collaboration—cannot legitimately be divorced from formal questions concerning the means and modes by which serially and plurimedially instantiated figures negotiate the relations between diegetically open and closed serialities. These resonate, I suggest, with comics fans’ transnational renegotiations of the boundaries at stake in the imagination of “nation”—in the establishment and negotiation of national borders as themselves multistable frames. Whether or not such borders are fixed along natural boundaries (such as rivers, mountains, and coastlines), they also encompass a cultural imagination that is far less determinate, and that is subject to a variety of forms of mediation. As I mentioned at the outset of this chapter, Benedict Anderson has linked the institution of the nation to the concept of seriality, and specifically to a competition between what he calls “bound” and “unbound” serialities. The former aims at the totalizing closure of a territory, and it is mediated paradigmatically by a national census, which numbers and categorizes the occupants of the territory. Unbound

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seriality, on the other hand, refers to a categorically open and ongoing iterability and reproducibility of events as modeled in the media of newspapers and photography.10 Comics, which are closer to the latter—in Anderson’s view more democratic—media of unbound seriality, probe the bounds of national, ethnic, and cultural difference in transnational appropriations such as Spider-Man India, transnational reimaginings such as Batman Incorporated, or the transnational migrations of producers and products as exemplified in the British invasion or in the global explosion of manga. Clearly, though, such exchanges are inherently ambivalent, never clearly and necessarily liberating but always also potentially at the service of ethnocentric nationalisms and the neo-imperialist tendencies of globalized capital. In this regard, comics’ transnational relations attest to the inseparability of bound and unbound serialities, as put forward by Partha Chatterjee against Anderson’s one-sided championing of the latter.11 What we see here, in effect, is a sort of transnational multistability—a flickering of the border frames of nations as imagined communities, a multivalent dynamic by which national borders are both questioned and reinforced, alternately and unceasingly, in the exchanges between real and imagined geographies as they take shape in and around the medium of comics.

Conclusion, or: To be continued . . . With the figure of the reversible, multistable frame—which I have shown to play a dynamic, enabling role in the sequential structuring and readability of graphic narratives, and which continues to reverberate in higher-level serial and plurimedial formations and expressions—I have aimed to provide a sort of media-theoretical backstory to the transnational work of graphic narratives and to identify a mechanism for its execution that would connect the levels of form and content, diegesis and extra-diegetic reality, textual and sociopolitical articulation, as they are joined in the process of framing, unframing, reframing. In this way, I have been concerned to show that comics’ transnational work, as Michael A. Chaney puts it in the title of his chapter on graphic slave narratives, is “not just a theme.” Finally, though, several loose ends remain to be tied up, and several potential objections remain to be answered. First, it must be clear that my “conceptual retcon” does not constitute a comprehensive answer to questions concerning the nature or possibility of transnational exchange in the medium of comics. In particular, it might be found objectionable that I have focused so extensively on

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the superhero genre, thus belying my own roots in the culturally and nationally biased traditions of mainstream American comics. While claiming to discover dynamics inherent to the process of reading graphic narratives in general— reversible dynamics that link framed images into sequences, giving rise to series that stretch across pages, books, and even media—it is in fact questionable whether the analysis applies to national traditions that are less centrally invested in serialization. Moreover, with the rise of the graphic novel, which institutes structures of nonserial closure or collects previously serialized works into a total package (thus constituting a somewhat different sort of “bound seriality”), it is unclear that the strictures of national boundaries are still opened to interrogation in the same manner. In response, I will not deny that the American mainstream is the graphic narrative tradition with which I am most familiar and that this experience undoubtedly informs my argument. However, I maintain that the figures populating long-running series in the traditions of Franco-Belgian bande dessinée and Japanese manga, for example, are just as fraught with the reversible potentials exhibited by American superheroes of alternately strengthening or destabilizing national imaginations. Astérix, for example, is a prime example of a figure who, over the course of his serialized adventures, explores national and cultural identities (Gallic/French, Roman, English, Belgian, German, etc.) as radically multistable potentials, in equal parts ridiculous and essential. A manga character like Detective Conan, on other hand, is an indeterminate amalgam of Japanese and Euro-American traditions, combining narrative and visual elements of an increasingly global media culture with the iconic recognizability of one of the best-known plurimedial serial figures: Sherlock Holmes. Such figures are no less capable than Spider-Man or Batman of highlighting and renegotiating the multistable boundaries of various transnational cultural geographies. And even beyond such explicitly serialized graphic narratives, a form of emergent seriality remains inherent to the medium, no less present (though differently articulated) in closed volumes and nonserial graphic novels. Thierry Groensteen lays the groundwork for this recognition with his semiotic analysis of graphic narratives, which he subdivides into studies of “spatio-topia” and of “arthrology.” The latter term, which designates the system of interconnections between comics’ panels, from whence linear and translinear narrative significance emerges in the reading of comics, is of particular interest in the present context. Deriving from the Greek arthon (articulation), Groensteen’s concept emphasizes the formal connection that I introduced at the beginning of this chapter between framing and articulation—which reversibly combines the distinct but

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interconnected processes of joining together and of parsing distinct units, and which I understand to be the most basic condition of multistability at work in the reading process of “framing, unframing, reframing.” In Groensteen’s system, the linear, sequential dynamics of panel-to-panel transitions are described under the heading of “restrained arthrology,” while a “general arthrology” describes nonlinear, networked relations between distant panels—linkages arising within the systematic deployment of nested framings, which put panels into relation with and across a variety of larger frames, including “hyperframes” (which encompass the panels on a page while typically preserving a passepartout-like margin with respect to the page’s edge) and the “multiframe” (a term which emphasizes the fact that multiple images are simultaneously visible to readers, thus enabling connections between contiguous and distant images). Here, in the domain of general arthrology, Groensteen describes intrabook serialities that emerge through these translinear relations or “braidings” of distant panels— forms of seriality that are structurally homologous to the nonlinearly branching, plurimedial serialities that, as I have argued, leverage superheroes’ transnational potentials. Proliferating as a result of graphic narratives’ nested multistabilities, Groensteen characterizes this emergent seriality as a “supplementary relation” that is “inscribed like an addition that the text secretes beyond its surface.”12 Thus, even within the covers of a single book, graphic narratives can be seen always vacillating between the linear narrative sequence and the translinear network, defining their seriality as a space of the in-between. As such, they remain poised for transnational interventions by preserving the margin of reversibility that articulates (in both senses) the borders of frames and of nations alike. This does not, of course, mean that this potential will necessarily be realized in practice—that the formal resonances will be activated, linking diegetic and nondiegetic negotiations of the transnational, aligning form and content in the execution of transnational performances, migrations, adaptations, or problematizations. If, as I suggested above, Astérix succeeds on some level in staging national identities as multistable, it is important to recall that the series largely failed to realize this potential outside of Europe, as Jean-Paul Gabilliet details in his account of “the disappointing crossing” to North America. What accounts for such failure, and what can explain the apparent successes documented in this book? I have been suggesting that formal or medial resonances play a significant role in the equation: Scott Pilgrim’s ability to “get it together,” as Mark Berninger’s chapter demonstrates, involves stylistic and content-level crossovers between increasingly converging cultures and media alike; in a very different way, as Daniel Wüllner shows, Warren Craghead III

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also brings together cultural contents and media channels for the purposes of political expression; Frank Miller’s silhouette aesthetics, as Frank Mehring argues, enact a multistable oscillation between “images in media” and “images of media” that set the stage for a transnationally articulated sort of remediation; and R. Kikuo Johnson’s transnational perspective on Hawaii, as explored by IrisAya Laemmerhirt, is negotiated through an elaborate set of correspondences between the visual and verbal, material and diegetic, natural and social. But such correspondences may or may not strike a chord with audiences and hence continue resonating outwards across real and imagined borders. In any case, it has not been my purpose to describe the multistability of framing as a guarantee of the transnational effectiveness or relevance of comics. Based on the attention I have devoted to the border-crossing movements that connect framed images into sequences and series of panels, though, and coupled with my insistence that the links I have sought between comics’ formal properties and their negotiations of the transnational are “literal,” nonallegorical, and “not just a theme,” it is easy to see why I might be taken to be guilty of the “vulgar deductivism” against which Michael A. Chaney rightly warns. However, the formal dynamics described here are not only far from constituting sufficient conditions, they are probably not even necessary conditions for the transnational exchanges that are possible in and around graphic narratives. What they are, though, are potent catalysts capable of accommodating and expediting a wide range of transnational relations in the medium of comics, proceeding from the deceptively simple act of reading: framing, unframing, reframing.

Notes   1 Barthes 11.   2 As indicated above, I think the relevant properties and dynamics can be found at every scale of graphic narratives’ formal articulation, from the smallest to the largest. Thus, though I will not go into it in the present chapter, many of the observations I make here about panels and strips or sequences apply also at the level of the speech balloon. On the latter, see Carrier; Balzer and Wiesing.   3 See Anderson’s Imagined Communities and The Spectre of Comparisons. I return to Anderson’s ideas later in this chapter.   4 The attentive reader will notice that I alternate between the terms “comics” and “graphic narrative,” and that I leave open questions of whether these are “media” or “medial forms.” In fact, this is a principled sort of vagueness, as the relations between these terms are, in my view, neither completely determinate

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nor hierarchically ordered. In theoretical terms, I follow Niklas Luhmann’s media theory (inspired by psychologist Fritz Heider), according to which medial substrates can become medial forms and vice versa depending on the observational frame. So for me, comics is a medium, while it may also be treated as a composite of other media (image and text, or even other components), and it need not necessarily serve narrative ends (though it usually does), whereas graphic narrative is also a closely related but not quite identical medium, and one that might also with some justification be claimed as the broader category, capable of subsuming graphic novels, comic books, comic strips, bandes dessinées, manga, and the like. The argument put forward in this section has been made, with a somewhat different focus and framing (so to speak), in my “Frame, Sequence, Medium.” Carrier 50. Carrier 51. The connection between a double identity and the recurring instantiation across a variety of media is typical of what Ruth Mayer and I call “serial figures.” See our “Grenzgänger.” For an application to the medium of comics, see also my “Marvel Comics’ Frankenstein.” See also Stein. See The Spectre of Comparisons, ch. 1. See Chatterjee. Groensteen 146–7.

Works cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd edn. London: Verso, 1991. —. The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World. London: Verso, 1998. Balzer, Jens, and Lambert Wiesing. Outcault: Die Erfindung des Comic. Bochum: Ch. A. Bachmann, 2010. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill & Wang, 1974. Carrier, David. The Aesthetics of Comics. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. Chatterjee, Partha. “Anderson’s Utopia.” Diacritics 29.4 (1999): 128–34. Denson, Shane. “Frame, Sequence, Medium: Comics in Plurimedial and Transnational Perspective.” In Transnational American Studies. Ed. Udo J. Hebel. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012. 561–80. —. “Marvel Comics’ Frankenstein: A Case Study in the Media of Serial Figures.” American Comic Books and Graphic Novels. Ed. Daniel Stein, Christina Meyer, and Micha Edlich. Special issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies 56.4 (2011): 531–53.

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Denson, Shane, and Ruth Mayer. “Grenzgänger: Serielle Figuren im Medienwechsel.” In Populäre Serialität: Narration—Evolution—Distinktion. Zum seriellen Erzählen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert. Ed. Frank Kelleter. Bielefeld: transcript, 2012. 185–203. Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. Stein, Daniel. “Popular Seriality, Authorship, Superhero Comics: On the Evolution of a Transnational Genre Economy.” Media Economies. Ed. Marcel Hartwig and Gunter Süß. Forthcoming.

Index Aaron, Jason  173, 176n. 38 Abstract Comics  95 ACK  142n. 31 Acland, Charles R.  212 agency  83, 88, 89 Akira, Yamanaka  Spider-Man J  145, 151, 152–5 Alaniz, José  75 Aldama, Frederick Luis  244, 252n. 3 Al-Mutawa, Naif  191nn. 12, 18, 192n. 31 The 99  181–90, 278 American comics mainstream, transnational author performance in  163–4 see also Ellis, Warren American cultural narratives, translation and transcreation of  127–9 and heroic origins problematic transcreation  137–40 Spider-Man and American/global identity  131–3 Spider-Man India transcreation interrogation  133–7 and transcultural exchange  129–31 American exceptionalism  114 Amerimanga  157 Anderson, Benedict  5, 9n. 13, 16, 28, 30n. 16, 272, 278, 282n. 3 Anderson, Ho Che  King  18 Andrews, Kaare  Spider-Man Mangaverse  145, 146, 155–7 Anklewicz, Adam M.  253n. 26 Apollinaire, Guillaume  96, 107, 108n. 18 Calligrammes  98–100, 103 Appadurai, Arjun  9n. 12, 92nn. 1–2, 97, 108n. 8, 160n. 29, 182, 184, 186–8, 191nn. 11, 20, 25, 192nn. 29, 32 Modernity at Large  83 Appiah, Kwame Anthony  51, 52, 62n. 5 Arab Spring  102–6

Arnott, Luke  223n. 29 arthrology  280–1 Asamiya, Kia  Batman: Child of Dreams  151 Aufderheide, Patricia  80n. 8 Austin, John  165, 175nn. 14–15 authenticity  37, 49, 60, 74, 86, 118, 166, 231, 248 discourse of  164, 166, 175n. 4 authorial complicity  167 authorial doppelgängers  167 Avital, David  8n. 1 Baetens, Jan  216, 223n. 30, 236 Bainbridge, Jason  158n. 9 Baker, Kyle  28 Nat Turner  18, 19, 21, 24–7 Balzer, Jens  282n. 2 banal moralism  56 Banerjee, Sarnath  Corridor  142n. 31 Banita, Georgiana  49, 61n. 2 Barash, Moshe  92n. 9 Barthes, Roland  271, 276, 282n. 1 Bartley, Aryn  63n. 35, 67, 80n. 17, 273 Bates, Scott  99, 108n. 25–7 Guillaume Apollinaire  100, 101 Batman, as transnational icon  113–15 nightrunner primer and  115–17 transcultural influence on  117–19 and transnational relations  119–21 Bauman, Zygmunt  16, 29n. 3 Bazambanza, Rupert  Smile through the Tears  60 Bechdel, Alison  61n. 1 Dykes to Watch Out For  17 Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic  17, 18, 49 Beck, Ulrich  56, 62nn. 6–8, 169, 176n. 21, 192n. 30 “War Is Peace: On Post-National War”  51

286

Index

Bendis, Brian Michael  175n. 3 Benjamin, Walter  27, 30n. 14, 217, 223n. 33 Bennett, Andrew  163, 170, 174n. 1, 176n. 24 Berndt, Jaqueline  9n. 8 Berninger, Mark  9n. 9, 239n. 15, 243, 281 Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives  4 Bernstein, Richard  260 Beronä, David  202, 208n. 1, 209n. 15, 223n. 31 Bhabha, Homi K.  The Location of Culture  35 Bieloch, Katharina  113, 141n. 2, 160n. 32, 277 Bilderverbot  23–4 bimedial comics  200 Biro, Charles  Crime Does Not Pay  171 Bitar, Sharif  113, 141n. 2, 160n. 32, 277 Blake, William  238n. 4 body and identity  36, 37–9 dys state  39 Boehm, Gottfried  222n. 9 Bohn, Williard  108n. 19 Bolter, Jay David  212, 222nn. 11–12 Bourne, Randolph  205 Bourque Dandridge, Eliza  267n. 5 Bradford, Clare  209n. 20 Brah, Avtar  44n. 5 Breccia, Alberto  234 Brevoort, Tom  150, 159n. 17 Brogdan, Marcus  81n. 27 Bromley, Roger  44n. 3 Brooker, Will  123n. 1 Brooks, Daphne  30n. 7 Brownstein, Charles  222n. 1 Brubaker, Ed  175n. 3 Buell, Lawrence  29n. 4 Buhle, Paul  175n. 9 Busch, Wilhelm  1 Butler, Judith  44n. 10, 52, 62n. 10 Cain, James M.  215 Caron, Robert Steven  262 Carrier, David  276, 282n. 2, 283nn. 6–7 Cha, Kai-Ming  252n. 13, 253n. 18 Chabon, Michael  201, 209nn. 24–6, 28, 30 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay  199, 205–7

Chandler, Raymond  213, 215 Chaney, Michael A.  15, 60, 63n. 40, 279, 282 Graphic Subjects  163 Chatterjee, Partha  279, 283n. 11 Chute, Hillary  8n. 2, 63n. 24, 67, 71, 80nn. 3, 15 Graphic Women  163 Claremont, Chris  God Loves, Man Kills  15 Uncanny X-Men  15 Clifford, James  103–4, 109n. 39 Cockburn, Patrick  79n. 1 Comic Bom Bom magazine  152 comics journalism and graphic silence  49–52 and “freedom is slavery” concept  52–5 and “ignorance is strength” concept  59–61 and “war is peace” concept  55–9 contact zones  34–5 Coogan, Peter  182, 191nn. 7–8 Cooke, Rachel  71, 80n. 18 Coombes, Annie E.  44n. 5 cosmopolitanism  51–2, 58, 67–9 documentation of  77–9 and Sacco as civil model  69–72 and universal empathy  72–5 and violence of empathy  75–7 cosmopolitan Muslim superhero  181–3 and fighting for truth, justice, international harmony and cooperation  185–8 and Muslim media franchise making  183–5 and team-up as transnational experience  188–90 Costello, Matthew J.  192n. 39 countercultural commix movement  174n. 2 Covarrubias, Miguel  219 Craghead III, Warren  95–6, 108n. 17, 109nn. 34, 36, 40, 281 How to Be Everywhere  95, 96, 98–102, 106, 107 seed toss, kick it over  96, 102–7 Creative Commons license  105 Crépin, Thierry  267 Cripps, Thomas  219, 224n. 46 critical cosmopolitanism  78 Cros, Bernard  268n. 20

Index cultural crossovers  243–51 cultural flows, global  182 cultural imperialism  115, 116 Cunningham, Phillip Lamarr  42, 45n. 29 Czetkovich, Ann  71 Daniels, Les  45n. 30 Davé, Shilpa  127, 158n. 2, 160n. 32, 277 Davis, Alan  175n. 17 Davis, Rocío  24, 30n. 10 DC Comics  113, 123n. 3, 174n. 2, 175n. 3 Elseworlds series  127 Batman Incorporated  128 Justice League of America  184, 188, 190 Red Son  127 see also individual entries Decker, Dwight R.  267n. 12 DeKoven, Marianne  8n. 2, 67, 80n. 3 Delano, Jamie  175n. 17 Delaunay, Robert  98 Delisle, Guy  61, 62nn. 11–13, 63n. 30, 245 The Burma Chronicles  53 Chroniques de Jérusalem  53 Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea  50, 52–5, 58 DeMott, Benjamin  16, 29n. 1 Denson, Shane  1, 8n. 1, 159n. 12, 209n. 30, 271 Derrida, Jacques  212, 275 Desmond, Jane  86, 92n. 5, 93nn. 10–11 Desser, David  224n. 50 Devarajan, Sharad  130, 133, 139, 140, 142nn. 29–30, 158n. 2 Diamond Comics  142n. 18 Dimock, Wai-Chee  16, 29n. 4, 80n. 10 Residues of Justice  69 Dissanayake, Wimal  108nn. 14–16 Global/Local  98 Ditko, Steve  158n. 8 diversal rationalism  52 Dolle-Weinkauff, Bernd  222n. 1 Doucet, Julie  245 Douglas, Aaron  219 Doyle, Laura  165, 170, 175nn. 10, 12, 176n. 25 Du Bois, W. E. B.  16, 29n. 2, 30n. 7 Duggan, Lisa  128, 141n. 5 Duncan, Randy  174n. 2, 175n. 3, 252nn. 6–7, 9, 12 The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture  1, 244–5 Duplaix, Georges  258–9, 267n. 7

287

Dürer, Albrecht  203, 232 Dyroff, H.-D.  9n. 6 EC Comics  171, 176n. 30 Ecke, Jochen  123n. 3, 163, 175n. 13, 277 Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives  4 Eclipse Comics  150 Eichmann, Adolf  79 Eisner, Will  175n. 13, 208nn. 7–8, 209n. 27, 216, 222n. 1, 223nn. 27–8, 224n. 47 The Big City  220 Blackhawk  42 Comics and Sequential Art  199, 223n. 26 The Spirit  206 Ellis, Warren  165, 166, 176nn. 17–19, 22, 33–4, 36–7, 277 Come in Alone  172, 173 Crécy  167 Do anything  176n. 34 Doktor Sleepless  167 Frankenstein ’ s Womb  167, 168 Global Frequency  169 Planetary  167, 169, 172, 175n. 3 Transmetropolitan  167 El Refaie, Elisabeth  33, 253n. 23, 274 emancipatory cosmopolitanism  78 empathy  58, 78, 79, 81n. 20 narrative  80n. 20 universal  72–5 violence of  75–7 empirical-analytic cosmopolitanism  51 Enderwitz, Susanne  181, 190n. 4, 191nn. 10, 14–15, 23–4, 26 Ennis, Garth  176n. 17 Enns, Anthony  233, 239n. 18 Epstein, Edward Jay  253n. 25 Escarpit, Robert  260 ethnographic graze  86 ethnoscapes  183, 186 Etter, Lukas  229, 275 exotic, image and imagination in construction of  85–7 fatality  28 Fattah, Hassan  190n. 1, 191n. 10 Feelings, Tom  20, 24, 27, 28, 30n. 8 The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo  18–23, 27

288

Index

Field Newspaper  261 Fingeroth, Danny  45n. 28, 175n. 9, 191n. 9, 209n. 29 Fischer, Craig  239n. 15 Fishkin, Shelley Fisher  2, 4, 7, 9nn. 4, 8, 9n. 21, 175n. 8, 191n. 9, 201, 205, 208nn. 12–13, 209n. 21 flexible citizenship  191n. 27 Flood, Finbarr Barry  190n. 4 Fluck, Winfried  6, 7, 9nn. 16, 18, 221, 223n. 18, 224n. 51, 238n. 2 Folman, Ari  51, 61, 63n. 38, 81nn. 23–4, 27 Waltz with Bashir  50, 60, 72, 74–5, 81n. 21 Foucault, Michel  164, 175n. 5 Fraction, Matt  173, 176n. 38 fragmentation, significance of  231–3 frame  see media-theoretical backstory Franco-Belgian comics  257–66 Frank, Nino  223n. 20 freedom is slavery concept  52–5 French Review  260

Grande, Edgar  192n. 30 graphic novels  252n. 14 see also individual entries Gravett, Paul  8n. 1, 9n. 11, 158, 159n. 17, 160n. 31 Green, Avi  124n. 16 Greg, Michel  261 Grell, Mike  175n. 13 Grewal, Inderpal  7, 9n. 15, 9n. 22, 128, 134, 141n. 6, 142nn. 22–3 Groening, Matt  262 Groensteen, Thierry  267, 280–1, 283n. 12 Groß, Florian  197, 223n. 31, 274 Grossberg, Lawrence  238n. 1 Grosz, George  233 Groth, Gary  63n. 21, 79, 80n. 7, 81n. 33 Grove, Laurence  263, 268n. 22 Grusin, Richard  212, 222nn. 11–12 Guibert, Emmanuel  62n. 3, 80n. 13 Gupta, Sanjay  134 Gustines, George Gene  252nn. 1–2

Gabilliet, Jean-Paul  107n. 2, 170, 176nn. 26–7, 257, 267nn. 2, 4, 281 Gaiman, Neil  123n. 3, 175n. 17 Gardner, Jared  42, 44n. 24, 45nn. 27, 34, 253n. 23 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.  224n. 44 Gauguin, Paul  92n. 8, 217 Noa Noa  86 Two Tahitian Women”  86 Georgiou, Myria  7, 9n. 20 Gerhardt, Paul  233 Ghirlandaio, Ridolfo  22 Gibbons, Dave  Watchmen  18, 243 Giles, Paul  97, 101, 108nn. 9, 29 Gilroy, Paul  18, 20, 21, 24, 30n. 6 Gipi (Gianni Pacinotti)  Notes for a War Story  62n. 17 Giraud, Jean  234 Glozer, Letitia  150 Goscinny, René  267nn. 9, 13, 16, 268n. 18 Astérix  see North American reception, of Asterix and Tintin Gosnell, Raja  The Smurfs  265 Gotham Entertainment Group  127, 140 Gould, Chester  222n. 1

Haberkorn, Gideon  Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives  4 Hajdu, David  176n. 31 Hammett, Dashiell  215 Hannerz, Ulf  4, 9n. 7, 97, 108nn. 10, 11, 13 Hardy-Vallée, Michel  245, 252n. 8 Harlem Renaissance  219, 224n. 44 Harvey, Robert C.  199, 208n. 6, 222n. 4, 223n. 35, 224nn. 36, 39 Hatfield, Charles  174n. 2, 239nn. 15, 20 Hawaii, transnational perspective on  83–4 and image and imagination in construction of exotic  85–7 and society, ecology, and search for roots  87–92 Hawaiian Cultural Renaissance  88 Hebel, Udo J.  8n. 1 Heider, Fritz  283n. 4 Hergé  233, 235, 253n. 24 Quick and Flupke  235 Tintin  257–9, 262–4 Hess, John L.  259 Hesse, Hermann  209n. 14, 223n. 31 hieroglyphs  198 Hine, David  115, 116

Index Hirai, Kazumasa  150 Hitchens, Christopher  56, 62n. 19 Hogarth, William  A Harlot’s Progress  208 Holbo, John  267n. 15 Holland, Sharon Patricia  28, 30n. 16 Hoogeboom  267n. 13 Horn, Maurice  9n. 6 Hughes, Langston  217 Huston, Warner Todd  124n. 16 Huyssen, Andreas  24, 30n. 9 hybridity  35 Ibañez, Francisco  235 Mortadelo y Filemón series  235 Ickstadt, Heinz  6, 9n. 17 ignorance is strength concept  59–61 Ikegami, Ryoichi  151 Crying Freeman  150 Mai the Psychic Girl  150 Spider-Man the Manga  145, 146–51 Indrajal Comics  142n. 18 Instagram, significance of  102 international and transnational perspectives  2–4 Islamic iconoclasm  190n. 4 Iwabuchi, Koich  145, 158n. 1 Jackson, Peter  123n. 6 James, Henry  101 Jameson, Fredric  212, 222n. 10 Japanese Daze  152 Japanese Knights  152 Jenkins, Henry  8n. 1, 124n. 20, 128, 141nn. 3–4, 159n. 23, 191nn. 17, 22 DC: The New Frontier  128 Jensen, Van  239n. 29 Johnson, James Weldon  The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man  219 Johnson, Mark  35 Johnson, R. Kikuo 93nn.  12–14, 18–20, 24–5, 282 Night Fisher  84, 85–92 Johnson-Woods, Toni  9n. 8, 158n. 9, 160n. 32, 252n. 10 Jones, Gerard  175n. 9, 191n. 9 Journal of Transnational American Studies  69

289

Juhish, Abu  76 justice, textualization and historicization of  69 Kane, Bob  191n. 9 Kang Jeevan J.  142nn. 25, 28 Kaplan, Amy  Cultures of United States Imperialism  69 Katsuhiro, Osomo  Akira  150, 252n. 10 Kauanui, Kēhaulani J.  93nn. 17, 21–3 Hawaiian Blood  90–1 Kavalier, Joe  The Golem  see The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay Kawash, Samira  44nn. 8, 13 Keen, Suzanne  80–1n. 20 Kelleter, Frank  6, 9n. 16, 158n. 3 Kennedy, Liam  124n. 12 Kent, Clark  Smallville  133 Kerber, Linda K.  192n. 37 Khalili, Laleh  80n. 6 Kidd, Chip  158n. 6 Kim, Derek Kirk  253n. 23 Kingston, Maxine Hong  Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book  40, 44n. 20 Kirby, Jack  157, 175n. 13, 176n. 34 Kittler, Friedrich A.  212, 222n. 6 Koerner, Joseph Leo  239n. 17 Köhler, Matthias  233, 239n. 18 Kollwitz, Käthe  238n. 4 Kövecses, Zoltán  35 Kroes, Rob  169, 176n. 20, 192n. 28 Kunka, Andrew J.  30n. 13 Kuwata, Jiro  Bat-Manga  147 Lacan, Jacques  260 Laemmerhirt, Iris-Aya  83, 282 Lakoff, George  35 Lauter, Paul  191n. 9 Laville, Helen  263, 268n. 19 Leder, Drew  38–9, 44nn. 15–17 Lee, Stan  141n. 12, 158n. 8, 172, 176n. 32 Bullpen Bulletin  171 Stan’s Soapbox  171

290

Index

Lee O’Malley, Bryan  160n. 31, 252n. 15, 253nn. 17, 20–1, 24 Lost at Sea  248–9 Scott Pilgrim  243–51 Lefèvre, Didier  62n. 3, 80n. 13 Leibovitz, Liel  74 Lent, John A.  8n. 1 Illustrating Asia  9n. 6 International Journal of Comic Art  3 Pulp Demons  9n. 6 Themes and Issues in Asian Cartooning  9n. 6 Lenz, Günter H.  2, 4, 6, 9n. 5, 34, 44n. 2, 116, 120, 123nn. 2, 5, 124nn. 17, 22–3, 129, 141nn. 7–9, 213, 222nn. 13–14, 240n. 32, 252n. 4 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim  5–6, 9n. 14 ligne claire  233, 235 Liquid Comics  140–1 Little, Ben  165, 175n. 11 Locke, Alain  219, 224n. 44 Lockerbie, S. I.  99, 107, 108nn. 20–1, 28, 31, 109nn. 37–8, 41–2 Lofficier, R. J. M. [Randy and Jean-Marc Lofficier]  268n. 18 London, Jack  86 Lowe, John  44n. 20 Luhmann, Niklas  283n. 4 Lutes, Jason 239nn.  8–14, 16–19, 29, 31, 240nn. 32–3, 35 Berlin  229–38 Lyons, James  8n. 3 The Rise of the American Comics Artist  2 McAlpin, Gordon  253n. 17 McCloud, Scott  57, 63n. 22, 176n. 35, 208nn. 3, 9–10, 223n. 22, 235, 276 Understanding Comics  198, 200 McCoy, Horace  215 McCrea, John  184 McElhatton, Greg  253n. 22 McFarlane, Todd  Spawn  157 McGregor, Davianna  93n. 15 McKay, Claude  Home to Harlem  219 McKenzie, Roger  211 McLain, Karline  142n. 20 McLuhan, Marshall  212

Maini, Irma  44n. 20 Malone, Paul M.  253n. 19 manga  198, 244, 245–50, 252nn. 9–10, 14, 280 OEL and MIC  247, 248 see also Spider-man manga versions Mann, Thomas  209n. 14, 219, 223n. 31 Marvel Comics  113, 127, 132, 133, 138, 174n. 2, 175n. 3 X-Men  184 Marvel Mangaverse series  128 see also individual entries Marvel Entertainment  127 Masalha, Nur  68, 80n. 4 Masanao, Amano  252n. 14 Masereel, Frans  206, 209n. 18, 216, 219, 224n. 40, 233 The City  199, 201, 202–3, 209n. 14 The Idea  209n. 14 Passionate Journey  209nn. 14, 19, 217 The Passion of Man (25 Images de la Passion d’un Homme  202, 209n. 14, 218 Massumi, Brian  44n. 12 Mathur, Suchitra  133–4, 142n. 21 Mayer, Ruth  45n. 29, 209nn. 23, 30, 283n. 8 meaning making  42 mediascapes  184–5 media-theoretical backstory  273–6 Mehring, Frank  211, 282 Meier, Stefan  160n. 32, 181, 278 Melville, Herman  86 Merica, Dan  191n. 12 metaphors  89 see also shape-shifting methodological cosmopolitanism  169 Meyer, Christina  1, 159n. 12 Middle Passage  19–20, 22, 25–9, 30n. 7 Mignolo, Walter  52, 62n. 9, 69, 77–8, 80n. 9, 81n. 31 Miller, Frank  123n. 7, 127, 159n. 25, 176n. 17, 222n. 7, 223nn. 16, 19, 21, 23–4, 26, 29, 32, 224n. 48–9, 282 Batman: The Dark Knight Returns  243 The Big Fat Kill  218 A Dame to Kill For  218 Daredevil  156, 211 Dark Knight  211 The Hard Goodbye  216, 218, 220

Index Holy Terror  175n. 13 Just Another Saturday Night  217 Lost, Lonely, and Lethal  218 Ronin  156, 211 Sin City  211–21 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles  156 That Yellow Bastard  218 To Hell and Back  216, 218, 219 minicomics  102–6, 109n. 33 Mirzoeff, Nicholas  222n. 9 Mitchell, W. J. T.  222n. 9, 223n. 25, 230, 238n. 4 Modern Fiction Studies  67 Moore, Alan  123n. 3, 165, 268n. 18 Saga of the Swamp Thing  175n. 17 Watchmen  18, 243 Moore, Stuart  191n. 21, 192nn. 33–6, 38, 40 Morrison, Grant  123n. 3, 124nn. 21, 25, 165, 175n. 17 Batman: Incorporated series  114–22 Supergods  119 Morrison, Toni  19, 23, 24 mothers, depiction of  24 Mouffe, Chantal  69, 74–5, 78, 79, 81nn. 25–6, 32 Mouly, Françoise  236 multiculturalism  5, 6, 29n. 1, 84, 89, 121, 129, 140, 213, 244, 250, 253n. 23 multidirectional transactions  3 multiracialism  15–16 Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm  224n. 42 The Last Laugh  219 Murphy, Marese  260 Murray, Chris  175nn. 6–7, 17 Murray, Laura  8n. 1 Nakazawa, Keiji  Barefoot Gen  149 narrative empathy  80n. 20 Nassar, Hala Khamis  80n. 5 Nastume, Yoshinori  Batman: Death Mask  151 national emergence, theory of  28 nation-state  17, 189, 213 Ndalianis, Angela  190n. 6 New York Post  183 New York Times  79n. 1, 259, 260 New York World  41 Nicieza, Fabian  184

291

Nielsen, Jens R.  198, 208n. 5 Nolan, Christopher  123n. 7 Batman Begins (film)  133 normative-political cosmopolitanism  51 Norris, Craig  158n. 9 North American reception, of Asterix and Tintin  257–62 and dialectics of market and culture  264–6 and readers  262–4 Noyes, Roger  95 Nückel, Otto  206 Nussbaum, Martha  51, 52, 62n. 5 O’Hara, John  215 O’Rourke, Dan  142n. 20 Obama, Barack  181 Ondaatje, Michael  57, 63n. 20 Ong, Aihwa  191n. 27 onomatopoeia  216 oral history, significance of  68 Orwell, George  51, 52 1984  52, 55 Ory, Pascal  268n. 24 Ostendorf, Berndt  107, 108nn. 5–6, 109n. 43 Outcault, Richard Felton  1 Yellow Kid series (comic strip)  41 Owens, Chris  267n. 8 Panofsky, Erwin  212, 222n. 5 PAO  142n. 31 Pasamonik, Didier  239n. 18 Pearson, J. Stephen  44n. 20 Pease, Donald E.  16, 29n. 4, 114, 123n. 8, 213, 222n. 15, 238n. 1, 240n. 34 Cultures of United States Imperialism  69 Pedri, Nancy  70, 80nn. 12–13 Peirce, C. S.  212 Pelc, Gene  146, 158nn. 4–5 performance theory  165–6 Petersen, Robert S.  160n. 28, 252n. 10 Peyo (Pierre Culliford)  265 Les Schtroumpfs  264 Peyser, Andrea  183, 191n. 12 Phalangists, Christian  72 Picasso, Pablo  98 plurality  229, 237–8 of stories  229–33 of styles  233–7

292

Index

plurimedial expression  272, 278, 279, 280, 281 political nonfiction  70 Polonsky, David  63n. 38, 74, 81nn. 22–4 pop cosmopolitans  128 Porter, Katherine Ann  217 Pratt, Mary Louise  34, 44n. 4 Pries, Ludger  118, 124n. 19 Rabagliati, Michel  245 Rabkin, Eric  8n. 1 Raimi, Sam  Spider-Man (film)  133 Raj Comics  142n. 20 Ramazani, Jahan  9n. 23 Rancière, Jacques  30nn. 17–18 Rao, Aruna  142n. 20 Rasche, Hermann  224n. 43 Rat (comic strip)  41 Raw magazine  236 reciprocity  74, 75, 107, 114 Reid, Calvin  252nn. 12–13, 253n. 18 Reid-Pharr, Robert  27, 30n. 15 Reiniger, Lotte  224n. 43 Reiss, Winold  217, 219 Reynolds, Richard  138, 142nn. 26–7 Richter, Steffi  9n. 8 Riding, Alan  267n. 11 Rodrigues, Pravin A.  142n. 20 Rohmer, Sax  42 Rolland, Romain  224n. 40 Romanticism  35, 167, 170 Rowe, John Carlos  252n. 5 Royal, Derek Parker  4–5, 6, 9nn. 10, 22, 83–4, 92nn. 3–4 Multicultural Comics  4 Russo, Tom  252n. 2 Ruttman, Walter  224n. 42 Sabin, Roger  8n. 1, 62n. 4, 252nn. 9–11 Sacco, Joe  49, 51, 52, 57, 58, 62n. 15, 63nn. 25, 28, 32–7, 80nn. 2, 7–8, 14, 17, 19, 81nn. 29–30, 33–4 The Fixer  55, 58–9 Footnotes in Gaza  55, 59, 67–73, 75–8 Palestine  18, 55, 63n. 36 Safe Area Goražde  55, 56, 59, 77 War Junkie  56

Saffell, Steve  141n. 10 Said, Edward  56, 57, 62n. 16, 63nn. 24, 27, 31 Satie, Edward  98 Satrapi, Marjane  Persepolis  17, 24 Schönemann, Heide  224n. 42 Schönfeld, Christiane  224n. 43 Schrader, Paul  214, 223n. 17 Schwalbe, Michael  44n. 14 Scott, Ridley  Blade Runner  215 Searle, John  165 Sempé, Jean-Jacques  267n. 9 sequential art  199 Seth (Gregory Gallant)  245 shape-shifting  33–4 and cultural allusions and resonances  40–3 and cultural identity, metaphor, and embodiment  34–40 Shimizu, Yuko  160n. 30 Shuster, Joe  191n. 9 Siegel, Jerry  191n. 9 Silbermann, Alphons  9n. 6 silent panels  see comics journalism and graphic silence silhouettes, hard-boiled  211–13 and film noir remediation  213–15 and silent film remediation  218–21 and sound effects and wordless woodcuts remediation  216–18 Simon, Jim  141n. 11 Simon, Joe  141n. 11 Singer, Marc  41, 44n. 24, 45n. 28 Slater, Jerome  80n. 8 Slonim, Marc  260 Small, David  Stitches  49, 50 Smith, Andy  Drawing American Manga Superheroes  158 Smith, Matthew J.  1, 174n. 2, 175n. 3, 252nn. 6–7, 9, 12 The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture  1, 244–5 Smith, Sidonie  55, 62n. 14, 175n. 4 social spaces  118 spatial metaphors  33–4, 35, 43

Index Spider-Man India  127, 129–40, 145, 277, 279 Spider-man manga versions  145–6 Spider-Man J  152–5 Spider-Man Mangaverse  145, 146, 155–7 Spider-Man the Manga  145, 146–51 Spiegelman, Art  236 Maus  9n. 24, 17, 24, 149, 236, 243 MetaMaus  9–10n. 24 Spielberg, Steven  The Adventures of Tintin  265 Spillane, Mickey  213 Spoliansky, Mischa  233 Sreenivas, Deepa  142n. 20 Starre, Alexander  8n. 1 Stassen, Jean-Philippe  51, 61, 63nn. 39, 41 Deogratias  50, 60–1 Les Enfants  50 Stein, Daniel  1, 8n. 2, 141n. 10, 145, 158n. 3, 159n. 19, 277, 283n. 9 Stiegler, Bernard  222n. 3 Stone, Rosetta  198 Studies in Comics  163 superhero comics genre  see individual comics Swan, Curt  171, 176n. 28 Switzer, Tom  123n. 4 Tan, Shaun  201, 209n. 22 The Arrival  199, 204–5 tankôbon  246, 249, 252n. 14 Teshkeel Media Group  181, 183 Tezuka, Osamu  5, 9n. 11 third space  35 Thompson, Craig  253n. 24 Thompson, Kim  268n. 25 Thorne, Frank  171, 176n. 29 Time Magazine  260, 263 Tomine, Adrian  253n. 23 Töpffer, Rodolphe  1, 208n. 9 transculturality  see transcultural perspective transcultural perspective  5, 24, 113–14, 117–19 Trask, Haunani-Kay  93n. 16 trauma, historical  21 Tucholsky, Kurt  233 Tyree, J. M.  123n. 9

293

Uderzo, Albert  260, 268n. 18 Astérix  see North American reception, of Asterix and Tintin unconsciousness  77 unframing and reframing, of narratives  276–9 universalism  52 US slavery visual narratives  15 Vallotton, Félix  235 Vanderbeke, Dirk 61m  63nn. 26, 42 Vannini, Phillip  44n. 10 Vaughan, Brian K.  173 Versaci, Rocco  58, 63n. 30 Vertovec, Steven  97, 108nn. 4, 7, 12 von Törne, Lars  240n. 35 vulgar deductivism  18, 19, 21 Wald, Priscilla  8, 10n. 25 Walker, George Alexander  197, 198, 201, 208nn. 1–2, 11, 209n. 14, 223n. 34, 224nn. 40–1 Walker, Tristram  62n. 18, 63nn 23–4, 29 Wanzo, Rebecca  30n. 13 Ward, Lynd  201, 206, 209nn. 19, 22, 218 Gods’ Man  199, 200, 203–4 Madman’s Drum  218 Wild Pilgrimage  218 Ware, Chris  61n. 2 Jimmy Corrigan  49 war is peace concept  55–9 Waskul, Dennis D.  44n. 10 Watson, Julia  175n. 4 Wegener, Paul  224n. 42 Weimer Republic Berlin depiction  see plurality Weiss, Gail  44n. 11 Whitlock, Gillian  45n. 35 Wiedemann, Julius  252n. 14 Wiene, Robert  224n. 42 Wiesing Lambert  282n. 2 Wilder, Billy  Double Indemnity  215 Williams, Paul  8n. 3 The Rise of the American Comics Artist  2 Wilson, Rob  108nn. 14–16 Global/Local  98 Wirth, Uwe  165, 175n. 16 Wolff, Kurt  209n. 14, 223n. 31

294 Wolk, Douglas  49, 61n. 2, 63n. 30 word/image relation  200 wordless graphic novel, transcultural displacement narratives in  197–9 and The Arrival  204–5 and The City  202–3 and comics  199–201 and Gods’ Man  203–4 The Golem  205–7 and transnational silence  201–2 world comics  158 Wright, Bradford  141n. 14 Comic Book Nation  132

Index Wright, Edgar  250, 251 Wüllner, Daniel  95, 281 Wyman, Sarah  24, 30nn. 11–12 Yang, Gene Luen  43, 44nn. 18–19, 23, 45nn. 26, 31–3, 253n. 23 American Born Chinese  33, 36–43 Yishai, Ron Ben  74 Young, Lola  35, 44n. 6 Zapf, Hubert  108n. 30 zero-perspective  235