Editorial

This issue, in part, deals with the impact of war and violence on often young, vulnerable individuals, and in doing so it emphasises the ability of the comic form to deal with these complex issues. The papers deal with issues such as immigration, refugees, war and prospective apocalypse that are more than ever relevant to our everyday lives and they signal a growing trend and the broadening scope in comics scholarship.

The first two articles combine to make a major analysis of Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s 2019 graphic novel, Grass and highlight the trauma of the victims of war. Khushboo Verma and Nagendra Kumar’s ‘The space of “betwixt and between”: liminality and activism’ looks at the liminality of the central character, a young Korean girl forced to become a ‘comfort girl’ in WWII. Stella Oh’s ‘In the gutters of grief and shame: drawing displacement in Kim Suk Gendry-Kim’s Grass’ concentrates rather on both gendered violence and colonial impact on the central protagonist.

The impact on the vulnerable of two very different conflicts is examined in Chrisalice Ela Joseph, Snehal P Sanathanan & Vinod Balakrishnan’s ‘Representing the Unrepresented: Precarity of Refugeehood in Vanni: A Family’s Struggle through the Sri Lankan Conflict’ and Madhav Dubey & Nagendra Kumar’s ‘Visualising “unhomeliness” and tracing trauma in Malik Sajad’s graphic memoir Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir’. Joseph, Sanathanan and Balakrishnan discuss Sri Lankan refugees using a close reading of the comics form, particularly the panel, to focus on their plight. Dubey and Kumar’s paper deals with a graphic novel that is inspiring a growing number of submissions to the journal, Malik Sajad’s graphic memoir Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir. This paper uses Homi Bhabha’s notion of the unhomely in which trauma is experienced due to surveillance when the borders between private and public spaces are perceived to collapse.

The perhaps the more familiar role of comics in speculative fiction is dealt with in Namitha Soman & Swathi Krishna’s ‘Traversing Ruins: Kristen Radtke’s Post-Apocalyptic Dark Tours in Imagine Wanting Only This’ and Mike Classon Frangos’s ‘Comics Anthropocenes: visualizing multiple space-times in Anglophone speculative comics’. Both papers deal with the potential for apocalypse. In the former, Soman and Krishna analyse the landscapes of a post apocalypse drawing connections between the deserted citied and ruins with angst and death in the human psyche. Frangos’s paper examines a potential future apocalypse with ecological collapse using three case studies, Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham’s Nameless (2015), Warren Ellis and Jason Howard’s Trees (2014-2020), and Ram V and Filipe Andrade’s The Many Deaths of Laila Starr (2022). These papers show the possible repercussions of human thoughtlessness to our survival as a species.

The next paper deals with a significant moment in comics history and development. Ever since Fredric Wertham claimed, in 1954, that children reading comics was ‘tooling for illiteracy’ (Wertham 1954), there has been a debate about the impact of comic reading on young minds. Wertham’s damning denunciation of comics has overshadowed the medium ever since but recent archival research by scholars like Carole Tilley, thankfully, is based on more empirical evidence and has challenged Wertham’s legacy. Jordi Giner-Monfort and Magda Mengual-Morata’s paper ‘Comics, children and education research before 1954: a systematic review’ approaches the Wertham debate to locate it within the anti-comics rhetoric that laid the foundations for Wertham. They establish that before 1954 there were 35 academic publications, many from an enlightened social science background, that contributed to the early manifestation of the debate.

The final two papers deal with comics from the superhero genre. Eric Bao & A.J. Naddaff’s ‘Assimilation of anti-ideological motifs from Underground Comics into mainstream media: a Case of The Boys’ situates the television adaptation of The Boys within 1960s and ‘70s counterculture and comics subversive underground traditions, particularly R. Crumb’s Zap. Dan Santos & Anna-Sophie Jürgens’s ‘From Harleen Quinzel to Harley Quinn: Science, Symmetry and Transformation’ also delves into the origins and past of a character to identify how her scientific training and ambitions lead to her transformation from Dr Harleen Quinzel to Harley Quinn.

The issue ends with three interviews with practitioners. All three are connected by memory, two graphic memoirs and the third an interview about lived experiences. These interviews provide a vivid account of the struggles of individuals who want to change or challenge accepted norms. Chinmay Murali and Parvathy MS’s “‘I set out to make a comic that I would want to read’: A Conversation on Queer Motherhood and LGBTQ+ Comics with A.K. Summers “details the lived experience of AK Summers as a pregnant butch in a cis-normative culture. A.K. Summer’s aim was to highlight the reproductive experiences of the LGBTQ+ community and the problems it raises with medical assumptions. In Amritha R. Krishnan & Smita Jha “‘You are never done. You have to keep going.’: Teresa Wong On, Before, and After the Text “discusses Teresa Wong’s graphic memoir detailing her postpartum depression. and Darnel Degand discusses Andre LeRoy Davis’s work for The Source in ‘The Last Word’ from The Source: André LeRoy Davis’, his development as a comics creator and his contributions to Hip Hop and comics. The issue finishes with Nafiseh Mousavi’s review of Nhora Lucía Serrano’s Immigrants and comics: Graphic spaces of remembrance, transaction, and mimesis.

The papers in this issue cover increasingly timely topics in the world today. We hope you enjoy them.