Introduction Chapter 1

Notes Introduction 1. Edward Said’s foreword in Sacco’s Palestine (2003) is an example of how the authority and credibility of a well-known supporter can be used to frame a text and paratextually orientate potential readers. 2. ImageTexT, published by the English Department at the University of Florida, International Journal of Comic Art, Image [&] Narrative (bi-lingual; French and English), European Comic Art (Liverpool University Press), Studies in Comics (Intellect) and Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (Taylor and Francis). 3. To overstate the polarity of these approaches would misleadingly infer that they are necessarily applied in a mutually exclusive fashion. It is nevertheless possible to discern between writers on comics who emphasize word-image relations (Carrier, 2000; Hatfield, 2005; Versaci, 2007) and those whose work primarily concerns narrative sequence and spatial relationships (Groensteen, 2007; Peeters, 2007). 4. Gunter Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen (1996, 20) identify modes as systems of signification. Comics, utilizing words, images, and sequences can thus be under- stood as utilizing multiple modes for their narration, as do film and television. Chapter 1 1. Jan Baetens (2011b) has proposed that color, and by extension the choices to avoid it in favor of a monochromatic aesthetic, is an aspect of comics that often remains overlooked. Baetens suggests that this, too, to some extent has been a consequence of critics coming from scholarly contexts that do not necessarily equip them with the appropriate analytical tools or sensitivities (ibid, 113). 2. This scathing assessment by Robert Vigus (1942, 168) explicitly raises color and print quality as an indicator of comics’ overall inferiority as cultural prod- uct: “An examination of thirty picture magazines on the newsstands in Nash- ville Tennessee, during the month of December, 1941, reveals that in general, the first ‘adventure story’ in the booklet is about as well drawn as the average newspaper strip, while the majority of the other pictorial paroxysms look as if they had been done by high school students during their study periods. Inex- pensive color processes, together with the use of cheap printing inks on pulp paper, make comic books garish and tawdry.” 162 NOTES 3. Barker’s more recent writing in which he compares critical and audience responses to Joe Sacco’s work suggests that he would not be a stranger to such a suggestion. 4. Grierson’s 1947 definition of documentary film is explicit in its inclusion/ assimilation of construction when he describes it as “the creative treatment of actuality” (Hardy, 1966, 13), a definition used to mark an intentionality beyond that of newsreel and actuality footage. Documentary for Grierson signified the deliberate construction of a narrative, and the authoritative voice (underlined by the disembodied narrator) of Griersonian era documentary shows little sign of apprehension, or sense of conflict, when it comes to either staging scenes or expressing its views as undisputed fact. 5. Thanks to Alex Fitch for pointing me toward Pedro and Me. Chapter 2 1. For accounts that convincingly challenge the indexicality of the photograph as trace-function, see Hainge (2008), Doane (2007), and Gunning (2007). 2. See John Tagg’s (1988) The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. 3. Pekar himself, when recollecting the initial insight that “comics can be about anything,” suggests that this meant a realization that comics anecdotally com- menting on life experiences did not necessarily have to be about the underground scene (Wiater and Bissette, 1993, 131). 4. It is striking that this comparison reproduces a particular conception of comics, as defined by one of its historically dominant genres. 5. There are exceptions to this in webcomics and comics published in association with audio material (see Hague, 2012, 105–106). 6. My argument in relation to categorization does not involve documentary typologies, but for more on documentary, docu-drama and drama-documentary, see Paget (1990), Petley (1996), Rosenthal (2005), and Ward (2008). Chapter 3 1. Hayden White, Birkbeck College, University of London, 23/02/2012. 2. Assman’s point of departure consists of two unrelated attempts to formulate a concept of cultural or social memory as a counterpoint to theories of cultural memory as a biological attribute. This discursive shift toward social and cultural theories was constituted by sociologist Maurice Halbwachs’s focus on memory in relation to the group and art historian Aby Warburg’s work on memory as inscribed in cultural forms (Assman, 1995, 129). 3. The idea that rites and traditions are cultivated in order to promote and natu- ralize values and identifications that preserve particular societal structures and interests, that Assman hints at here, has also been argued by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983). NOTES 163 4. According to Michael Chanan’s (2007, 264) account, the Thames Television series The World at War(1973–1974), was an influential early exemplar of this approach, its contribution significantly helping establish television as a purveyor of popular history. Steve Humphries (2008, cited by Bell and Gray 2013, 12) traces the incorporation of televised oral history to the earlier The Great War series (BBC, 1964). 5. Regardless of its ambivalence, the Zapruder footage has nonetheless, as Øyvind Vågnes (2011, 9) asserts, been hugely significant in the formation of the Ken- nedy assassination as cultural memory. 6. Sacco’s comic Palestine (the first issue released in 1993) was awarded the Ameri- can Book Prize in 2009. His Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992– 1995 (2000) received substantial press attention on its release, and he became the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001. Footnotes in Gaza went on to receive a Ridenhour Book Prize in 2010 (https://www.fantagraphics.com/ artist-bios/artist-bio-joe-sacco.html). 7. This use of spatial relations to express past events as insistently asserting their presence has also been noted in Maus (Chute, 2006, 210–213) and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (Chute, 2011, 109). 8. After Cope’s death in 1999, Guibert visited California and Germany, seeking out places and meeting some of the people he had been told about, thus being able to add to his depictions through first hand observation. 9. The photograph itself, or rather a reproduction of it, can be found among the “photographic memories” in the very last section of the book. Chapter 4 1. Delisle’s publications include two further travelogue comics, Burma Chronicles (2009) and Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (2012) in which the over- seas stays are occasioned by his partner’s work for Médecin Sans Frontières. 2. Thompson’s earlier Blankets (2003) had been well received by critics and went on to be awarded with seven industry awards in 2004. 3. Lewis Trondheim is one of the founding members of L’Association, the French comics publishing house. 4. Dean MacCannell (1973) set out a model of the social space of tourism that posited “staged authenticity” as its central and constitutive concern. This work has been widely and comprehensively criticised for failing to see tourisms as multiple, varied and including practices and experiences for which the ques- tion of “authenticity” has little meaning. The scheme is applied here not as an analysis of tourism, but in a more limited and precise sense as it correlates to desires and projections in encounters with cultural difference. 5. India on Four Wheels (BBC2 2011) and China on Four Wheels (BBC2 2012) with presenters Justin Rowlatt and Anita Rani facilitate two contrasting perspectives on the growing and increasingly motorized economies of India and China. The programs are constructed according to blatantly gendered identifications. Rani 164 NOTES invariably drives a luxury car and tours the country on the most newly built highways, using palaces and top end hotels for her pit stops. Meanwhile, driv- ing a low budget and commonplace vehicle, Rowlatt takes “the road less trav- elled” to explore remote villages and get stuck on dirt tracks. Here, a dichotomy between authentic and modernized functions as a structuring principle and central theme. 6. “A common feature of autobiographical underground commix is an emphasis on the inadequacy or ineffectualness of their subjects” (Naghibi and O’Malley, 2005: 240). 7. Extending Judith Butler’s concept of gender melancholy Daniel Worden (2006) has identified “masculine melancholy” (2006: 905) in comics characters from Charles M. Schulz’s Charlie Brown to Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan. 8. Tintin au Congo/ Tintin in the Congo (1931) was withdrawn from the children’s section in Waterstones and Borders bookshops after a campaign in newspapers in 2007, protesting against its racist stereotyping and colonialist tropes (Vacla- vik 2009: 229). 9. Chute (2010:146) draws a comparison between Satrapi’s privileging of block shapes over line and flattened picture plane with examples from the western modernist tradition, such as Cézanne and German expressionism. However, the most immediately discernable influence is probably that of David B.’s Epi- leptic (2005), discussed in chapter five. Chapter 5 1. Mat Johnson and Simon Gane’s Dark Rain: A New Orleans Story (2010), con- versely, sets a fictional heist storyline against the backdrop of the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina. Although situated in a specific and attentively depicted his- torical time (the hurricane and its aftermath) and space (New Orleans), this comic presents a moral universe in which fictional characters are divided into (flawed, yet ultimately honorable) protagonists and their (irredeemably cor- rupt) adversaries as part of generic narrative structure and resolution. 2. The term “vigilante” holds a strong emotive charge, but I use it here to denote a self-appointed group of citizens who have taken up the role of upholding order and doing justice. 3. Ian Williams’ website, www.graphicmedicine.com, lists over sixty titles of illness-related comics.

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