Articles – Graphic Narrative

‘The Tension of History: An Interview with Nic Watts and Sakina Karimjee.’ Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (April 2024), pp.1-13.

Nic Watts and Sakina Karimjee are the co-creators of Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History (2023), a graphic novel adapted from a play by the anti-colonial historian C.L.R. James. It tells the story of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) as a slave-led uprising of world-historical significance. This interview provides in-depth discussion of several aspects of the graphic novel, including its origins and inspiration, the parallels between theatre and comics, the use of graphic narrative to picture world-historical events, and the enduring importance of the Haitian Revolution today. Read more.

‘Contingent Futures and the Time of Crisis: Ganzeer’s Transmedial Narrative Art.’ Literary Geographies 8.2 (October 2022), pp.154-174.

This article explores the work of the Egyptian street artist and graphic novelist, Ganzeer, who describes himself as a ‘contingency artist’. Developing this idea of contingency, the article shows how Ganzeer’s work responds to the time of crisis as something that is narrated and performed, especially in the era of image capitalism. It begins with a discussion of Ganzeer’s use of street art during the Egyptian Revolution, showing how graffiti strategically emphasised the time of crisis as a momentary rupture in order to connect local political movements with a global media and international viewership. The article then turns to a close reading of Ganzeer’s more recent graphic novel, The Solar Grid (2016-present), to show how the medium of comics allows him to construct more elongated narratives in which the time of crisis is modernity itself. In conclusion, the article reads Ganzeer’s street art and graphic novel together, highlighting their transmedial connections to argue that it is through the revelation of ‘crisis’ as a productive category, rather than an observable condition, that Ganzeer builds contingent and sometimes revolutionary futures. Read more.

‘Witnesses, graphic storytellers, activists: an interview with the KADAK collective.’ Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 12.6 (April 2022), pp.1399-1409.

In this interview, several members of the South Asian womxn’s graphic storytelling collective, KADAK, discuss the group’s recent projects, their collaborative production processes, and the themes that are most central to their work. After a brief introduction, the discussion turns to the benefits and difficulties of self-publishing, working online and offline, and nationally and internationally, and the collective’s first book-length, crowd-funded project, The Bystander Anthology, which was published in 2020. Read more.

With Filippo Menga. ‘Apocalypse Yesterday: Posthumanism and Comics in the Anthropocene.’ Environment and Planning E: Nature & Space 3.3 (August 2020), pp.663-687.

It is widely recognised that the growing awareness that we are living in the Anthropocene – an unstable geological epoch in which humans and their actions are catalysing catastrophic environmental change – is troubling humanity’s understanding and perception of temporality and the ways in which we come to terms with socio-ecological change. This article begins by arguing in favour of posthumanism as an approach to this problem, one in which the prefix ‘post’ does not come as an apocalyptic warning, but rather signals a new way of thinking, an encouragement to move beyond a humanist perspective and to abandon a social discourse and a worldview fundamentally centred on the human. The article then explores how the impending environmental catastrophe can be productively reimagined through graphic narratives, arguing that popular culture in general, and comics in particular, emerge as productive sites for geographers to interrogate and develop posthuman methodologies and narratives. Developing our analysis around two comics in particular – Here and Mad Max: Fury Road – we show how graphic narrative can help us to move beyond the nature–society divide that is rendered anachronistic by the Anthropocene. Read more.

‘Dreamlands, Border Zones, and Spaces of Exception: Comics and Graphic Narratives on the US-Mexico Border.’ a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 35.2 (March 2020), Special Issue: Migration, Exile, and Diaspora in Graphic Life Naratives, pp.383-403.

This article explores the connections between the spaces of exception along national borders and the bordered architecture of graphic narratives in Charles Bowden and Alice Leora Briggs’ Dreamland: The Way Out of Juarez (2010) and Jon Sack’s La Lucha: The Story of Lucha Castro and Human Rights in Mexico (2015). Drawn to the US-Mexico border, both of these graphic narratives make visible the routine violence of a nation-state system that devalues human life through the production of spaces of exception—spaces which gather especially at this global regime’s ever-hardening borders. Yet they also begin to make visible—and participate in—the array of spatial practices that challenge the violence these borders inflict, countering a refusal to “see” these spaces and self-reflexively detailing the processes by which the identities of border victims are recovered and documented. Read more.

‘Graphic Katrina: Disaster Capitalism, Tourism Gentrification, and the Affect Economy in Josh Neufeld’s AD: New Orleans After the Deluge.’ Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics 11.3 (2020), pp.325-340.

This article explores the ways in which Josh Neufeld’s documentary comic, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, which was published first online from 2007 to 2008 and then collected in book form in 2009, offers a radical visual commentary on the processes of disaster capitalism and tourism gentrification that have reshaped New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Whilst A.D.’s biblical imagery evokes the proto-corporate language of the ‘blank canvas’ in order to critique regimes of disaster capitalism, its vertical multi-scalar perspectives meanwhile resist the racism of media coverage of the event. Through colouring and other aesthetic choices, the comic also challenges the subsequent propagation of an ‘authentic image’ of New Orleans that promotes tourism gentrification. Where previous critics have emphasised the emotional appeal A.D. makes on its readers, I instead discuss the comic’s identification of the structural conditions that have violently impacted the city’s most marginalised inhabitants. Nevertheless, the article qualifies these contentions by acknowledging that A.D. also contributes to an ‘affect economy’ that has exacerbated the privatisation of previously public infrastructure and social services, often to the detriment of pre-Katrina residents simply trying to return to their city. Read more.

‘Braided Geographies: Bordered Forms and Cross-Border Formations in Refugee Comics.’ Journal for Cultural Research 23.2 (October 2019), pp.123-43.

This article offers a close analysis of a trilogy of ‘refugee comics’ entitled ‘A Perilous Journey’, which were produced in 2015 by the non-profit organisation PositiveNegatives, to conceive of comics as a bordered form able to establish alternative cross-border formations, or ‘counter-geographies’, as it calls them. Drawing on the work of Martina Tazzioloi, Thierry Groensteen, Jason Dittmer, Michael Rothberg and others, the article argues that it is by building braided, multi-directional relationships between different geographic spaces, both past and present, that refugee comics realise a set of counter- geographic and potentially decolonising imaginaries. Through their spatial form, refugee comics disassemble geographic space to reveal counter-geographies of multiple synchronic and diachronic relations and coformations, as these occur between different regions and locations, and as they accumulate through complex aggregations of traumatic and other affective memories. The article contends that we need an interdisciplinary combination of the critical reading skills of humanities scholars and the rigorous anthropological, sociological and theoretical work of the social sciences to make sense of the visualisation of these counter-geographic movements in comics. It concludes by showing how the counter-geographies visualised by refugee comics can subvert the geopolitical landscape of discrete nation-states and their territorially bound imagined communities. Read more.

‘“Comics on the Main Street of Culture”: Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, Laura Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah, and the Politics of Gentrification.’ Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 4.3 (October 2017), pp.333-361.

Through a comparative discussion of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell (serialized 1989−96, collected 1999), which is now widely marketed as a ‘graphic novel’, and Laura Oldfield Ford’s more self-consciously subcultural zine, Savage Messiah (serialized 2005 to 2009, collected 2011), this article explores the correlation between the gentrification of the comics form and the urban gentrification of city space − especially that of East London, which is depicted in both of these sequential art forms. The article emphasizes that both these urban and cultural landscapes are being dramatically reshaped by the commodification and subsequent marketization of their subcultural or marginalized spaces, before exploring the extent to which this process neutralizes their subversive qualities and limits democratic access to them. In conclusion, however, the article demonstrates that comics artists tend to collect their ephemeral comics and publish them as marketable graphic novels not to commodify them, nor to maximize their profits. Rather, they do so in order to reach a wider readership and thereby to mobilize their subversive, anti-gentrification political content more effectively, constituting radical urban subcultures that resist the reshaping of London into a segregated and discriminatory cityscape. Read more.

‘Comics Activism: An Interview with Comics Artist Kate Evans.’ The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship 7.1 (November 2017), p.18.

This is an interview with comics artist Kate Evans, author of Red Rosa (2015) and Threads: From the Refugee Experience (2017), as well as a number of other comics, about her recent work, which operates at the intersection of several of the most exciting genre developments in comics in recent years. In the interview Evans reflects on recent shifts in comics journalism, as well as other trends in the field such as the rise of graphic memoir, through examples taken from Evans’s own work as well as that of Joe Sacco, Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel and others. Read more.

‘Comics Journalism: An Interview with Josh Neufeld.’ International Journal of Comic Art 18.2 (October 2016), pp.299-317.

In this interview, Josh Neufeld talks about the phenomenon of comics journalism, his personal development as an artist and journalist, as well as his book, A.D., and the story behind its creation. He also discusses one of his most recent projects, a comic published in Foreign Policy magazine, entitled ‘The Road to Germany: $2400’, which integrates original reporting by Alia Malek and photographs by Peter van Agtmael to tell the story of Syrian refugees as they attempt to cross into Europe. He reflects on the difficulties and productivities of working collaboratively with other writers and journalists, and some of his current projects and ideas for the future. Read more.