Freedman 2011 Literature Compass

Literature Compass 8/1 (2011): 2846, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00764.
Comics, Graphic Novels, Graphic Narrative: A Review

Ariela Freedman*
Concordia University
Abstract
Despite the popularity and critical impact of comics and graphic narrative, academics have been late
to the examination of the field, and critic-practitioners like Art Spiegelman and Scott McCloud
have been the most influential critics, advocates and spokespeople for the medium. This article pre-
sents a brief history of American comics and comics criticism, which has long defined itself as
emergent, oppositional and underground, alongside scholarly attempts to frame the impact and
importance of the medium. The mixture of advocacy and analysis, fandom and critique, amateur
and professional study, and artistic self-definition and critical examination characteristic of comics
criticism poses challenges to the border between high art and popular culture and between word
and image; it also confounds the distinction between academic and amateur scholarship. Comics
criticism, in other words, has the potential not only to incorporate this new medium into the field
of literary criticism, but to challenge and transform some of the basic assumptions of that criticism.
It may be both too late and too early to write a review of comics and comics criticism;
too late, because in many ways the medium is already well-established, and too early
because it is in flux. It seems that major new creative works come out monthly, while
the number of articles and monographs continues to increase.1 Graphic narratives and
graphic novels are routinely reviewed in major newspapers, works like Art Spiegelmans
Maus I and II (Special Pulitzer, 1992), Chris Wares Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on
Earth (Guardian First Book Award, 2001) and Alison Bechdels Fun Home: A Tragicomic
(Time Book of the Year, 2006) have won mainstream literary awards, broad readership
and critical acclaim, and The New York Times and the New Yorker have run comics serials.2
The publishing industry has responded to this revived interest in historical and contempo-
rary comics; early work from newspaper comics and the comics underground has been
reissued in new and beautifully designed editions, while mainstream publishers like Pan-
theon and Houghton Mifflin have joined specialty presses like Fantagraphics and Drawn
and Quarterly in printing new graphic narratives and graphic novels.3 In addition to pop-
ular comics conventions and publications, a number of academic conferences and journals
are now devoted to comics, and comics art festivals inspired by the one in Angouleme
have spread to Toronto, New York and London, providing a mixed forum for artists,
academics and fans. Museums have also participated in these changes: the pioneering
Comic Art exhibit at the downtown Whitney (1983), the Projects show on the making
of Art Spiegelmans Maus at New Yorks MOMA (1991), the touring Masters of Ameri-
can Comics exhibit (20052007) and the recent Vancouver Art Gallery blockbuster show
Krazy (2008) have helped establish the aesthetic and cultural significance of comics to a
crossover audience, while important archives have been expanded at the Victoria and
Albert Museum and new museums devoted to comics and cartoons have opened in New
York, Brussels and London.
Yet with some exceptions, academics have been late to the examination of the field,
particularly when we compare the nascent state of comics studies with the established
2011 The Author

Literature Compass 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
American Comics and Comics Criticism 29
scholarship on film or photography, which also emerged as mediums in the nineteenth

century.4 Rather than scholars, critic-practitioners like Will Eisner, Art Spiegelman and
Scott McCloud have been the most influential critics, advocates and spokespeople for the
medium, and their work forms the spine of an emerging comics studies canon.5 The liveli-
est loci for discussion have often been fan sites and other non-academic forums like the
trade magazine The Comics Journal (1976present), one of the most influential and serious
locations for comics criticism and interviews, put out by the influential alternative comics
publisher Fantagraphics. Significant comics collections remain in private hands, and web-
sites, blogs and comic book conventions make leading practitioners and knowledgeable fans
active participants in these informal comics conversations.6 Unlike Europe, where bande
dessinee belongs to an established and respected critical tradition, or Japan, where manga is a
dominant and omnipresent form (between a third and a quarter of the publishing market),
American comics and comics criticism has long defined itself as emergent, oppositional and
underground.7 This mixture of advocacy and analysis, fandom and critique, amateur and
professional study, and artistic self-definition and critical examination, means that the study
of comics, young as it is, is already fractured. The medium of comics not only challenges
the border between high art and popular culture and between word and image; it also con-
founds the distinction between academic and amateur scholarship and challenges the sepa-
ration of disciplines in the academy, since the study of comics involves art, semiotics,
literature, culture and history and blurs the borders of each of these categories.
As academic criticism makes inroads into the medium, it has been characterized by
three significant components: the development of a formalist criticism that emphasizes
the particular hybrid of word and image employed (McCloud, Spiegelman, Groensteen,
Lefevre, Chute), the establishment of the history and genealogy of the genre (Kunzle,
Witek, Wright, Hatfield), and the use of established interpretive models (trauma theory,
life-writing theory, psychoanalysis) and intertextual readings which serve to link comics
to other hermeneutic models and media.8 Scholarship with a literary and theoretical focus
has emphasized the creation of a comics canon, the establishment of comics as part of the
study of literature, and the creation of a formal and critical language both flexible enough
for the verbal and visual hermeneutics of the comics form, and sufficiently attentive to
theoretical and interpretive concerns.9 Scholarship with a pop culture and media studies
focus has produced useful comics histories and genealogies, studies of the Comics Code
and of comics in relation to social and political history.10 Indeed, though the field is rela-
tively new, the sophistication of the conversations and debates inside comics scholarship
and the wealth of new and recovered material can make entering it intimidating; there is
a dramatic knowledge gap between scholars working inside and outside of comics, and
little that can be assumed as common ground.11 This review aims to introduce the med-
ium and field to new readers through attention to its central terms and histories, while
pointing to other work that develops these in far more detail than I have the space for
here; I also want to indicate some of the gaps and elisions in these emerging histories,
and to outline promising new directions in comics studies. While I focus primarily on
English-language comics and criticism, I will argue that one of these central elisions is a
lack of an international focus. As more work in comics and comics criticism appear in
translation it will become easier to examine comics as a global medium.
Terms: What We Talk About When We Talk About Comics

Though the study of comics is rapidly growing, basic presuppositions and terms remain
amorphous. As Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven pointed out in 2006, There does
2011 The Author Literature Compass 8/1 (2011): 2846, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00764.x

30 American Comics and Comics Criticism
not yet exist an established critical apparatus (770) for the field. This lack of critical con-
sensus on terminology and strategies extends to the various titles used to describe comics,
which include the graphic novel, graphic narrative, long form cartooning, picture novel,
sequential fiction art, long-range pictorial reading and both comics and comix. The terms
for the medium and its various modes are also often confused: the term graphic novel
has frequently become an umbrella for a wide variety of works, both fictional and non-
fictional. Nor are these terms neutral: each comes with its own set of assumptions and
priorities, inclusions and exclusions. Once we move from the term comics to the terms
graphic narrative and graphic novel, we have begun to inscribe a series of assumptions
about ambition, seriousness and quality.
Comics has from the beginning confused content, format and medium. It began, as
Robert Harvey points out, as a short-hand term for the comic strips or funnies in the
newspaper and ended up referring to both comical and serious cartoons, and cartoons
printed in strip formats and in magazine and book length; in other words, as an umbrella
term for a medium which mixed word and image in sequence while drawing from the
lexicon of comics art caricature, panels, speech balloons, etc. Robert Harvey advocates
cartoon as a more precise and exclusive term (20), but he admits that comics has the
virtue of common use. Critics have looked for a label that avoids what Joseph Witek calls
the generic connotations of the word comic and its association with the burlesque
and ridiculous (6) Witek argues for Will Eisners sequential art. But precisely because
of its low-culture baggage, the term comics has maintained a certain resiliency. In an
interview in Intelligent Life, Art Spiegelman said,
Im called the father of the modern graphic novel. If thats true, I want a blood test. Graphic
novel sounds more respectable, but I prefer comics because it credits the medium. [Comics]
is a dumb word, but thats what they are. (Art Spiegelman Wants a Blood Test)
Spiegelmans riff on paternity rejects not only the term but also the designation of a single
father; he emphasizes his place as part of a lineage rather than trying to help establish a myth
of self as the single originator.12 The retention of the term comics places Spiegelman in
relation to a comics tradition and emphasizes the centrality of comics history to his work.
The terms used to describe comics are for the most part deliberately chosen as a mode
of affiliation and as part of a critical claim: for Spiegelman, a way of insisting on his con-
tinued affiliation with newspaper comics and underground comix, despite his later main-
stream success; for Will Eisner, who championed the term graphic novel, a way of
claiming for comics the narrative scope and ambition of literature; for Hillary Chute and
Marianne DeKoven, who argue for graphic narrative, a way of emphasizing comics
non-fiction in book form and of gesturing towards a particular comics narratology. This
terminological proliferation is worth working through because it figures a series of rela-
tionships both to more established forms (graphic novel) and to different narratives of
origin (comix). I follow Spiegelman and McClouds example in using the word comics
as an umbrella term to refer to the medium, though I also use graphic narrative and
graphic novel to refer to formats and genres when appropriate. Comics as a name for
the medium keeps us tethered to a genealogy that includes newspaper cartoons and
superhero comics, rather than erecting a false barrier in order to sequester the high art of
graphic narrative from its embarrassing low art cousins. Spiegelmans retention of the
term is typical of his refusal to accept the distinction between high and low as cultural
categories. If comics drags along both the implications of the humourous and the
designation of a mass medium, those categories are still significant in working through its
aesthetic implications and cultural place.

Many of these terms imply genres or variations within the medium of comics, but
when talking about comics we may be best served, as the artist and critic Scott McCloud
points out, by the most expansive definition (UC 199). Comics is a language (1),
McCloud briskly asserts in his masterful comics primer, Understanding Comics, and this
claim is central and commonly accepted among critics and artists, in part because it shifts
the question away from what comics are to how they work. Comics comprise no single
thing, and no simple set of things: it is, as Thierry Groensteen writes, an original ensem-
ble of productive mechanisms of meaning (2). This ensemble includes in most cases both
word and image; some critics add time, as McCloud does in following Will Eisners analy-
sis of comics as sequential art, juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate
sequence, intended to convey information and or to produce an aesthetic response in the
viewer (UC 9). Both the emphasis on word and image and the role of sequence in com-
ics language have proved controversial as necessary elements of a definition of comics
because of what they exclude: McCloud points out that Art Spiegelmans economic
description of comics as a series of words and pictures designed for reproduction
(Conversations 155) leaves out the important genre of wordless comics, while McClouds
own rejection of single-panel caricatures and editorial cartoons as a style rather than a
medium in its own right (UC 20) has been called his Dennis the Menace problem
(Wolk 23) after the famous, long-running single-panel cartoon. Critics have also had
widely varying opinions about the respective weight of word and image in what Chris
Ware calls this bastard form of half-art half-writing (12). Harvey argues that the essen-
tial characteristic of comics the thing that distinguishes it from other kinds of pictorial
narrative is the incorporation of verbal content (25) while Groensteen emphasizes the
the primacy of image (3) and the paramount importance of visual codes (3). But trying
to determine the relative weight of word and image implies treating them as separate
entities, while comics entangles these two modalities as well as playing with their poten-
tial dissonance; drawings read as narrative and typography aspires to art. What makes
comics a language that cannot be confused with any other Groensteen writes,
is, on the one hand, the simultaneous mobilization of the entirety of codes (visual and discursive)
that constitute it, and, at the same time, the fact that none of these codes probably belongs
purely to it. (6)
As McCloud argues, the medium of comics is related to both art and literature, but is
contained by neither category. Film similarly employs word and image, but is a more
fluid and immersive medium. Even animation, though closely related to comics, fills in
the gaps formed by the panels and gutters, and abandons the basic two-dimensional archi-
tecture of the comics page. Comics offer, in Groensteens words, a medium-related plea-
sure that cannot be reduced to the sum of the other two (CSR 10). Poor comics
criticism judges comics by the standards and categories of other mediums; it makes no
more sense to criticize a comic for not being a work of fine art than it does to criticize a
painting for not being a photograph.
McCloud provides a useful initial framework for the basic visual and hermeneutic
vocabulary of the medium. Comics frequently, but not always, employ panels or frames
and gutters as a way of organizing sequence and structure and in McClouds terms these
serve as a general indicator that time or space are being divided (UC 99). Though the
language of comics is, in McClouds shorthand, often both expressionistic (conveying
emotion through drawing and colour) and synaesthetic (gesturing towards sound, taste,
touch and smell through verbal signifiers), the gaps or gutters between the panels defy
the visual and establish crucial space for reader participation. This gutter space will prove

to be a fruitful one, both in relation to the readers experience and as a space for critical
interpretation and analysis. McCloud writes, Several times on each page, the reader is
released like a trapeze artist into the open air of imaginationthen caught by the
outstretched arms of the ever-present next panel (UC 90) (Fig. 1). The use of the gutter
exemplifies what McCloud calls a silent dance of the seen and unseen, unique to com-
ics (UC 92) and uniquely dependent on the readers involvement. Several critics and
artists have pointed to degree of reader involvement in the medium; Chris Ware writes,
Comics are an art of pure composition, carefully constructed like music, but structured into a
whole architecture, a page-by-page pattern, bought to life and performed by the reader a
colourful piece of sheet music waiting to be read. (12)
Attempts to define the essence of comics are, as Groensteen argues, doomed to failure,
since each definition only actualizes certain potentialities of the medium (12). If we look
at the full range of comics, from George Herrimans Krazy Kat to Kim Deitchs The
Boulevard of Broken Dreams, or from Marjorie Henderson Buells Little Lulu to Aline
Kominsky-Crumbs autobiographical comics, we see what Wittgenstein calls a compli-
cated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities
(PI 66). Wittgenstein goes on,
I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than family resemblances;
for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait,
temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way. (PI 67)
Fig. 1. Comics Code Authority Seal, reprinted in Sabin, 78.

Wittgensteins theory of family resemblances is useful for a non-restrictive definition of

comics because it offers a flexible, broad and mutable set capable of yoking together even
disparate examples and able to respond to changes in a fluctuating medium (e.g. the
introduction of web comics and the rise of graphic journalism). In addition, the better
and more fully we learn the field of comics, the more apt we become at noticing con-
nections and playing the game; the more we read, the more we see.13
Histories and Genealogies

Histories of comics have been important parts of establishing the antiquity, centrality and
range of the field: these range from material histories of changing methods of production
and distribution, biographies of key figures, and surveys of genres and movements. It is
important to note that many of these histories are excellent but partial, and describe one
development in the medium or another; for instance, Bradford Wrights Comic Book
Nation (2001) focuses on superhero comics, while Joseph Witeks Comic Books as History
(1989) concentrates on artists associated with the comics underground. Indeed, this his-
tory is far too extensive for any single book to tell, but sometimes this partial emphasis
has implied a monolithic narrative, and has involved the explicit or implicit exclusion of
certain strands in comics history. These histories act as genealogies intended to draw
attention to a specific movement or set of artists in contemporary comics and to mini-
mize others. In this section, I provide a brief but inclusive account of these filtered histo-
ries, in order to argue that a full picture of the comics medium needs to encompass a
broad spectrum of work and acknowledge the porousness and intertextuality of comics
genres and the valuable multiplicity of comics history in its currently critically celebrated
(underground comics), undervalued (superhero comics), and understudied moments (hor-
ror and romance comics). I bring this history all the way up to current work in comics,
to suggest that many of these separate strands of comics history have recently come
together in the work of contemporary comics artists.
As part of the effort to establish a comics genealogy, practitioners and critics have been
insistent on its antiquity and centrality. The pioneering graphic novelist Will Eisner mod-
estly claims, In the beginning, God made comics, and we drew on the walls of caves trying
to tell everybody how we captured a mastodon that afternoon (Will Eisner Symposium).
Scott McCloud begins Understanding Comics with a pre-Columbian manuscript, sketches of
hieroglyphics and the Bayeaux Tapestry. Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven mention
William Blakes poems and drawings of heaven and hell, Brueghels large-scale narrative
paintings and William Hogarths satirical etchings as important historical precedents. To this
illustrious list, others have added Trajans column, emblem books, illustrated fables, carica-
ture, and editorial cartoons, which include among their pioneering practitioners Benjamin
Franklin, who in 1754 published the first American editorial cartoon. While some of this
history is strategic and retroactive, meant to tie the new medium of comics to a longer tradi-
tion of hybrid verbal visual narrative what W. T. Mitchell calls imagetext the ubiquity
and importance of sequenced pictorial language throughout history suggests that the mix of
word and image is less historical exception than norm.
Though newspaper comics begin in the nineteenth century, some trace the print his-
tory of the medium back much further. The pioneering comics historian David Kunzle
argues for the centrality of print in the development of comics in The Early Comics Strip:
Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825 (1973),
while his second volume of comics history, The Nineteenth Century, focuses on its
flourishing and development in the hands of comics pioneers including William Hogarth,

George Cruikshank, and Wilhelm Busch. The Swiss artist and novelist Rodolphe Topffer
(17991846), has emerged as the most important of these early figures. David Kunzle calls
him the virtual inventor of the comic strip (ix) for his use of an appropriate, speed-dri-
ven comic strip graphic style, as well as a fantasy-driven narrative (ixx) and for his con-
sciousness of the hybridity of this novel medium (x). Topffers parodic, illustrated
sequential narratives were produced for friends and students until Goethes admiration
convinced him to mass-produce them through a lithographic process he termed autogra-
phy.14 Topffers albums attracted international attention, numerous imitators, and the
dubious compliment of extensive pirating, and introduced many of the conventions that
mass-produced comics were later to employ (Fig. 2). Les Amours de M. Vieux Bois (1837),
which charted the hapless adventures of a lovestruck elderly gentleman in a series of illus-
trated stories, was published in an unauthorized English translation in Great Britain in
1841, and was then serialized in the New York newspaper Brother Jonathan in 1842.15
Topffer was also an early theorist of the medium. His Essai de Physiognomonie (1845) pre-
sented an early semiotics of caricature and line drawing. In Europe, his example inspired
Wilhelm Busch, whose picture book Max und Moritz (Fig. 3) later led to the Rudolph
Dirks American comic strip The Katzenjammer Kids (1897present). Alongside Father of
the Comic Strip, Kunzle has edited a complete collection of Topffers comics (2007); the
cartoonist Chris Ware writes, in a review of Kunzles work, that its clear not only that
Topffer invented the modern comic strip, he also invented the modern cartoonist
(Bookforum). As Heer and Worcester write, there is an emerging consensus (CSR xii)
on Topffers paradigmatic importance.
The popularity of newspaper funnies or comic strips exploded in England with the
cartoon character Ally Sloper (18671916) and in America with Richard F. Outcaults
Hogans Alley (1895), followed by a series of comics that developed and established a
Fig. 2. George Herriman, Krazy Kat (Sept. 20, 1925). Reprinted in Krazy and Ignatz: The Complete Full Page
Comic Strips, p. 50.

Fig. 3. Winsor McCay, Little Nemo (December 5 1909), reprinted in The Complete Little Nemo in Slumberland,
Vol. 1, p. 19.
lasting iconography and a formal language of speech bubbles, speed lines, anthropomor-
phic characters and comic scenarios: Winsor McCays Little Nemo in Slumberland and In
the Land of Wonderful Dreams (19051926), Bud Fishers Mutt and Jeff (19071982) and
George Herrimans comic strips, especially Krazy Kat (19131944) (Figs 4 and 5). These
comics were the crucial beginnings of a particular symbolic language that later artists
would expand and elaborate upon. They were also read by modernist writers and artists:
Mutt and Jeff have a cameo in Finnegans Wake, and Marcel Duchamp submitted his
readymade fountain, constructed from an upside-down urinal, under the name R. Mutt.
Alongside the popular legacy of comics strips in newspapers, artists and historians have
also drawn attention to the revival of the woodcut in the depression-era wordless novels
of Lynd Ward, inspired by the image novels of Franz Masereel.16 The populism and
ingenuity of newspaper comics and the avant-garde political expressionism of Lynd
Wards novels have both been important influences on the later development of comics,
not as antonyms but as mutually reinforcing expressions worked through a hybrid high -
low medium.17 Spiegelman pastiches early comics in In the Shadow of No Towers and ver-
sions of newspaper comics characters like Little Lulu, Krazy Kat and especially Charlie
Brown wander through the recent work of Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes.
Once we get to the appearance of the first Action Comic in 1938, starring the new
hero Superman, we reach a contentious moment in comics history. The tremendous
popularity and influence of the superhero genre has served both as background and alter-
ego to contemporary work in comics. Though there are many popular and trade histories
of superhero comics and creators, academic criticism has generally scanted the genre, with
the exception of cultural histories like Bradford Wrights Comic Book Nation. This to
some degree follows the cues of contemporary cartoonists: writers like Art Spiegelman
have defined their work against the aestheticized and fascistic heroism of comics, and
even Scott McCloud has bemoaned the amount of space superhero comics have taken up

Fig. 4. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, p. 66.
on the comics shelf. But though some alternative comics artists have tried to write super-
hero comics out of their individual genealogies, other influential artists, including Alan
Moore and Grant Morrison have extended and complicated the superhero genre in their
own reinvention of comics. While alternative comics react against the superhero genre,
any full account of the history of comics needs to acknowledge its tremendous influence
and centrality. The visual and thematic language of artists, including Steve Ditko, Stan
Lee and Jack Kirby shadows much subsequent comics production, even though it some-
times does so through contrast and opposition. In addition, a complete picture of the
comics medium will acknowledge that the subversion of the aesthetic values and ideology
of the superhero genre has been folded into the form in ways that complicate any clean
distinction between superhero comics and other graphic narratives.
In addition to superhero comics, the 1940s saw a proliferation of other genres: crime
comics, horror, fairy tales, science fiction, romance, satire. With the exception of David
Hadjus excellent The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed
America, there is little work on this period, though these genre comics, especially those
produced by EC Comics, were both aesthetically innovative and ambitious in their con-
tent. But their days were numbered; in response to the psychologist Frederic Werthams
book The Seduction of the Innocent (1954) and the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delin-
quency (1954), the Comics Code Authority (CCA) established an approval system which
included, among its prohibitions of sex perversion, illicit sexual relations, vampires,
werewolves and zombies, the requirement that in every instance good shall triumph over
evil.18 Indeed, more explicitly than superhero comics, the code targeted the genre
comics horror, crime, romance which by then had eclipsed superhero comics in

Fig. 5. Rodolphe Topffer, The Complete Comic Strips, p. 234.
popularity. While CCA approval was not legally binding, it was required by most comics
distributors; this requirement put some comics artists out of business, while it inspired
others towards alternate methods of publication and distribution.19 In Seal of Approval:
The History of the Comics Code, Amy Nyberg argues that the damping effect of the comics
code on the industry has been overstated. Nyberg claims the the comic book market
was glutted in the 1950s the problem was not the code but the depressed state of the
industry (124). But Nyberg acknowledges that the industry suffered in part because of
the bad publicity of the senate hearings; certainly, to many artists, the Comics Code
seemed complicit in the collapse of the industry.20
The Comics Code censored the superhero comics that continued to be produced, and
closed down the genre of horror comics, whose very subject matter was forbidden. EC
cancelled all its titles but Mad, which it shifted to black and white magazine format to
evade CCA control. Mad magazine, in turn, had a formative influence on comics artists
as it emphasized a mode which was parodic, grotesque, sceptical, oppositional, and
obscene, and became a foundational publication in the establishment of an alternative cul-
ture. This alternative comics culture came to fruition in the underground comix scenes
in the 1960s and 1970s, through small-press and self-published comics, magazines and
chapbooks that were sold in head shops and on street corners, rather than comics stores.
Charles Hatfield has claimed that underground-friendly shops were arguably the root of
the direct market (21): or, the new distribution model that sold comics directly through
comics shops rather than newsstands, and developed and disciplined its clientele (24) by
helping create a culture of connoisseurship and fandom. The underground comics move-
ment established the careers of artists, including Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, R. Clay
Wilson, Gilbert Shelton, Justin Green, Aline Kominsky and Lynda Barry and participated
in the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Underground comics were titled comix
in homage to the counterfeit pornographic comics of the 1920s to 1940s known as
Tijuana Bibles, which featured familiar comics characters engaged in explicit sexual activ-
ity; the x signalled both their different from CCA stamped comics, and their frequently

pornographic content, and their covers often featured parodies of the official CCA seal
(Fig. 6).21
Some comics critics and historians have argued that underground comics played the
crucial role in comics history. Joseph Witek writes,
The underground was the defining event in contemporary comics history. The truly significant
break with all previous comics that the undergrounds made, and the one that continues to fuel
the movement of contemporary comics, was that the underground comix artists regarded the
comic book form as primarily a medium for personal expression. (ImageText)
Charles Hatfield echoes Witeks argument, claiming that The countercultural comics
movement scurrilous, wild and liberating, innovative, radical, and yet in some ways
narrowly circumscribed gave rise to the idea of comics as an acutely personal means of
artistic exploration and self-expression (ix). It is true that in this period artists associated
with the comix underground turned increasingly towards autobiography, aesthetic inno-
vation and deliberate experiments in transgression. Harvey Kurtzmans comics anthology
Help! (19601965), Crumbs Zap (19682005) and Griffith and Spiegelmans Arcade
(19751976) served as important venues for underground artists, while the Wimmens
Comix (19721992) helped establish a voice for female artists and served to critique some
of the misogynist tendencies of comics scene.22 The comix underground was more
obscene, exploratory and explicitly political than many of the comics that had preceded
it. However, aesthetic innovation was not exclusive to the comics underground; ECs
horror comics were also aesthetically ambitious and exploratory, while mid-century news-
paper comics like Pogo were praised by Walter Ong as early as 1951 for their radical
avant-garde experimentation with montage, collage, and a disintegrated and reassembled
language (100). Nor was the underground entirely successful in avoiding censorship, as
the obscenity arrests and trials following the publication of the Robert Crumb incest car-
toon Joe Blow in Zap 4 demonstrate (Estren 235). The underground comics movement
was important in establishing new aesthetic goals, iconologies, strategies and means of
production for comics, but it is a mistake to overemphasize their role: newspaper comics,
genre comics and underground comix all influence contemporary comics, and are fre-
quently layered as references and influences in a manner that complicates any separation
of these strands of comics history.
Underground comics and superhero comics are frequently imagined as opposites, and
certainly artists like Spiegelman and Crumb have explicitly figured their work as an expli-
cit rejection of superhero aesthetics, narratives, workshop methods and values. But it is
important to note that superhero comics contributed to aesthetic innovation and sophisti-
cated, multidimensional narrative, and helped develop the direct market and the adult
comics reader that led to the aesthetic and commercial successes of the last few decades.
By the late 1970s, the underground comix industry had exhausted some of its initial
impetus and some of its original members moved towards less shocking and more care-
fully curated material: Art Spiegelman and Francoise Moulys graphic magazine and pub-
lishing company Raw (19801991) introduced European artists to a North American
audience, and helped the underground move beyond some of the repetition-compulsions
of counterculture comics.
Most comics histories take 1986 as a turning point. That year, the first volume of Maus
was published in book form, Frank Millers Batman: The Dark Knight Returns was pub-
lished in a collected volume, and Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins began to
publish Watchmen, later collected in a spined edition and marketed under the title gra-
phic novel. While 1986 is a convenient bookmark, it is not entirely an accurate one,

Fig. 6. Wilhelm Busch, Max Und Moritz reprinted in The Genius of Wilhem Busch: Comedy of Frustration, p. 25.
since each of these works were serialized over several years, and other important works
concurrently pushed graphic narrative onto bookstore shelves and bestseller lists, and to
the attention of book reviewers, award committees, and, eventually, academics. These
founding graphic narratives began as serialized stories though they were conceived as
extended ones, and as Charles Hatfield points out, the current critical focus on the gra-
phic novel or book-length graphic narrative rather than the serialized instalment threatens
to be insensitive to a constitutive element of comics publishing history and aesthetic
development. The year 1986 was less of a turning point than a tipping point; the accu-
mulation of ambitious and interesting comics had led to a wider critical conversation
about comics in the media and in academia.
Artists working after Spiegelman, in an autobiographical and or testimonial mode, have
been the most prominent in critical conversation inside academia. Some of these works I
have already mentioned, but I will briefly describe them here: Marjane Satrapis Persepolis

books, that recount growing up in pre-revolutionary Iran and subsequent displacement

and exile (first published in French), Alison Bechdels Fun Home: A Tragicomic, which
juxtaposed the story of the authors coming-out with a narrative of her fathers closeted
existence and suicide, and Joe Saccos graphic journalism (The Fixer, Palestine, Safe Area
Gorazde and others) which concentrates on conflict zones in Bosnia and Palestine. These
memoirists have focused on the author artist as protagonist, placed personal narratives
against powerful historical backdrops, and have depicted experiences of displacement and
trauma in relation to the complication of narrative and representation. They have also
attracted the lions share of recent critical attention: Hillary Chute argues that the most
important graphic narratives explore the conflicted boundaries of what can be said and
what can be shown at the intersection of collective histories and life tales (459). These
works richly deserve to be taught, written about, and read, but their prominence in rep-
resentation and discourse has helped create a curiously flat picture of the medium, one
both acknowledged and mocked by a 2008 article in New York Magazine subtitled Young
Dash Shaw has written the graphic novel of the year and its not even autobiographical
(<http://nymag.com/arts/books/profiles/47808/>).
In addition to the memoir, the last decade of comics has exhibited an astonishing range
in style and genre. The decade saw important new books by Chris Ware, Seth, Art
Spiegelman, Charles Burns and Daniel Clowes (Spiegelman 2008). Noteworthy titles
include Craig Thompsons lovely, dreamy autobiographical novel Blankets; the compila-
tion of The Complete Love and Rockets by Los Bros. Hernandez; Chester Browns simply
drawn but morally complex Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Autobiography; the first two volumes
of Jason Lutes Berlin trilogy, a historical novel focusing on the Weimar Republic; and
One! Hundred! Demons! and What It Is by Lynda Barry, which experimented with collage
alongside painting and drawing and merged autobiographical writing, fantasy, and creative
self-help. Superhero revisions and adaptations continued to win prizes and attract atten-
tion: Frank Miller and Lynn Varley returned with Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again
(20012002) while Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely re-imagined All Star Superman
(20052008) and Morrison continued to publish The Invisibles; fantasy works also became
more elaborate and sophisticated as Alan Moore and Kevin ONeill extended their mot-
ley pastiche of literary characters and imagined histories in The League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen (1999ongoing). Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly responded to the rela-
tive stagnation of childrens comics by commissioning leading artists for the anthology
Little Lit, while Jeff Smiths Bone and Linda Medleys Castle Waiting continued to develop
the genres of epic, fairy tale and fantasy. This past year, the most acclaimed new graphic
narratives have included David Smalls Stitches, a memoir of childhood illness and
betrayal; Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth (Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos H. Padimitriu,
Alecos Papadatos, Anne Di Donna), a collaborative graphic biography of Bertrand Rus-
sell; Robert Crumbs illustrated (graphically depicted!) The Book of Genesis, whose cover
warns that adult supervision is recommended for minors; Seths George Sprott: 1894
1975, first serialized in The New York Times Magazine; David Mazzuchellis stylized, meta-
fictional and metamorphic Asterios Polyp; and Daniel Clowes brand new novel Wilson.
This list of comics, though partial, is overwhelming, but that is part of my intention; I
would like to draw attention to the tremendous variety, creativity and excitement of the
medium.
There are a few trends visible in recent years: the expansion of genres explored through
the comics medium (Brown, Barry, Tan, Doxiadis et al.), the influence of graphic design
and typography (Ware, Seth, Burns), the pastiching of comics history (Spiegelman, Ware),
the increasing globalization of comics and the influence of manga (OMalley), the ambition

and prominence of new adaptations (Crumbs Genesis, Mazzuchelli and Karasiks City of
Glass and an upcoming Antigone using Anne Carsons translation). But more evident is that
in style, theme and variety, comics have outpaced conventional definitions and boundaries,
and that Peter Schjeldahls surprisingly tone-deaf 2005 prediction in The New Yorker that
the major discoveries of the graphic novels new world of the imagination have already
been accomplished (Words and Pictures) was a mistake. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the
reports of the death of the medium have been greatly exaggerated.
When faced with this tremendous wealth of material, comics scholars must resist frag-
menting and hierarchizing the field. As Charles Hatfield writes,
it makes no sense, and indeed, would be bitterly ironic, to erect a comics canon, an authori-
tative consensus that would reproduce, within the comics field, the same operations of domina-
tion and exclusion that have for so long been brought to bear against the field as a whole. (xiii)
Though Hatfield ultimately focuses on alternative comics, arguing that a critical stance
that posits no meaningful distinctions among comics cannot do justice to the art form
(xiii), he does warn against the danger of repeating critical exclusions (xiii). In a letter of
response to Hillary Chutes PMLA article Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narra-
tive, Ben Saunders claims that the nascent field of academic comics studies is already
divided from within, along lines that replicate the most basic divisions of the American
comic book marketplace: the division between genre works (dominated but not limited
by superhero stories) and what we might call literary non-fiction (192) (Saunders and
Chute 2009). This division is at times writ large when it comes to the distinction
between academic criticism and the large body of criticism outside the academy, con-
ducted by both fans and artists, which is distinctive in its breadth, expertise and avidity.
The history of comics itself is in part a history of these divisions, but they are ultimately
part of the same narrative. Comics today increasingly reject distinctions in form and con-
tent: Charles Burns and the Hernandez Bros. have revived the genre comics of horror,
romance and science fiction, superhero comics by Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and
many others routinely incorporate irony, reflexivity and meta-fictional commentary, and
alternative comics artists like Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware have developed revisionist
superheroes alongside their casts of comics icons and American misfits. In other words,
important recent work by cartoonists has rejected the antinomy between high and low
comics; scholars need to follow their cue.
The recent A Comics Studies Reader, edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, is an
excellent example of an anthology that operates inclusively and provides a full picture of
current comics scholarship. It offers a valuable international perspective and includes
French and Belgian critics, and Manga and Chilean comics. The anthology also ignores the
high low or alternative mainstream hierarchy, with essays not only on Watchmen but also
on the Disney artist Carl Barks. Notably, the anthology doesnt only include academics:
Heer and Worcester write, freelance critics, amateur historians, and cartoonists have pro-
duced outstanding comics scholarship, a fact that is reflected in this reader (xiii). The
upcoming The Best American Comics Criticism (Fantagraphics, 2010) includes almost no aca-
demics among its contributors. This does not mean that comics scholars in the University
have no role to play, but it does mean they need to continue to work inside and outside
the academy, and to act as mediators between fans and the general scholarly community.
There is also value in bringing some of the tools of contemporary scholarship (research
methods, semiotic analysis, connections to other texts and fields) into the general comics
conversation Groensteens post-Barthian neosemiotics are a good example of this.
Scholars also have the opportunity to embark on long and sustained projects that the

market may not support, like Kunzles two-volume comics history, and can be important
participants in the establishment of comics studies by assigning texts in their classes, encour-
aging the establishment of archives in their libraries and adding their voices to the critical
debates.
But it is important for scholars embarking on this process of institutionalization not to
restrict themselves to a narrow and exclusive range of literary comics. Alan Moore and
Frank Miller have continued to revise, expand and subvert versions of superhero and
action genres, but with the exception of these two authors few other artists who have
chosen to work inside the thematic and aesthetic vocabulary of the superhero genre have
also achieved broad readership and critical acclaim inside the academy. Academic articles
on collaborative comics, when they do appear, tend to focus on the writer rather than
the artists or colourist, though all three of these are vital contributors to the work: this
reductive literary emphasis needs to be rectified by interdisciplinary scholarship which
acknowledges both multimodal quality of the work and the significance and extent of
collaboration in works like The Watchmen, where the artist, illustrator and colourist con-
spired on storyline and characters.
And even as scholarship shifts to the medium-specific examination of comics, it is cru-
cial that comics remain in dialogue with other modes: there is still good work to be done
on the intersections of comics with other media film, which has a particularly intimate
relationship with comics, photography, which has recently been incorporated into some
graphic narratives, art and literature. These intersections are profound and multidirectional:
reading comics within literature departments not only means expanding the canon to
include works like Maus or Watchmen or even The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay;
it also means watching for moments of influence, overlap, resonance and simultaneity. To
take one example, Clarence Browns Krazy, Ignatz and Vladimir: Nabokov and the
Comic Strip, traces not only comic book references but the visual signature of comic-
bookishness or what Brown terms the bedesque (after la B.D. or la bande dessinee) in Nabo-
kovs fiction. A recent panel at the Modernist Studies Association conference on Graphic
Modernism looked at Marinettis graphic futurism, Ralph Ellisons relationship to Fredric
Wertham, and Gertrude Stein in relation to Winslow McCay. As Kuskin writes, the read-
ing of comics cannot help but rebound on our own reading of canonical literature (9).
Though the interdisciplinarity of comic studies can be diffuse, I would hesitate to see
comics studies isolated and concentrated into particular departments: as important as it is
for comics scholarship to participate in non-academic conversations on comics, it is equally
important for comics studies to remain connected to other disciplines in the University.
These, then, are the challenges ahead: to understand comics as a global phenomenon
rather than inside national paradigms, as Groensteen and Hatfield begin to do, particularly
now that these influences are increasingly cross-pollinating; to resist the temptation to
detach comics from its low-culture roots and corollaries (a point the curators of the
Vancouver exhibit made by combining an exhibit of graphic narrative with video games
and anime); and to continue to benefit from the work of artists, fans and advocates with-
out either lapsing into the tones of the enthusiast or establishing an academic distance out
of touch with the vitality and motility of this medium. Indeed, the growing pains of aca-
demic criticism on comics illuminates some of the constraints of the field of academic
criticism more generally: a general linguistic parochialism, a paucity of vocabulary for dis-
cussing hybrid languages of text and image this Hatfield correctly marks as one of the
potentially significant contributions of comics studies a discomfort with collaborative
work, a disdain for genre fiction, resistance to taking short work as seriously as long
work, an underdeveloped theory of humour, and a difficulty navigating mixed academic

and amateur forums of criticism. Comics criticism, in other words, has the potential not
only to incorporate this new medium into academia, but to challenge and transform some
of the basic assumptions of academic criticism.
Acknowledgement
Thanks to Fiona Duncan, who contributed a great deal to this article and kept me think-
ing, and to the anonymous reviewers who prodded me in helpful directions.
Short Biography
Ariela Freedman is an Associate Professor at the Liberal Arts College, Concordia Univer-
sity, Montreal. Her research focuses on British literary modernism, particularly James
Joyce, and she also writes about postcolonialism, the First World War, and graphic narra-
tive. She is the author of Death, Men and Modernism (Routledge, 2003) and her articles
have appeared in numerous publications, including most recently The Journal of Modern
Literature, Joyce Studies Annual, Partial Answers and Texas Studies in Language and Literature.
Notes
* Correspondence: Liberal Arts College, Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve W., Montreal, Quebec
H3G1M8, Canada. Email: ariela@alcor.concordia.ca
1
Comics criticism is not entirely new and the excellent Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium, edited
by Jeet Heer and Ken Worcester (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), collects essays by prominent
writers between the beginning of the twentieth century and the 1960s in order to establish an early history of com-
ics criticism. However, much of the early history of this criticism is still in the process of reclamation.
2
Film adaptations of comics books recently, Kick Ass and the upcoming Scott Pilgrim have also drawn attention
to the medium and graphic adaptations of popular novels like Twilight have been recent bestsellers. But my concern
in this article is primarily with comics that crossover into the academy, though I am aware of the danger of high -
low distinctions in the field, and would argue that the comics studies should aspire to a broader spectrum than they
currently cover.
3
This publishing victory is not entirely assured, since publishing long comics is expensive. Charles Hatfield points
out, Since the first mainstream success for the graphic novel circa 1986, several American publishers (Peguin, Avon
Marlowe and Co, Doubleday) have launched but then abandoned graphic novel lines. Comics publishers Fanta-
graphics and Drawn and Quarterly have been central players in the industry, and have picked up artists dropped by
their mainstream publishing labels notably, Lynda Barry.
4
Much of this pioneering work has been published by University of Mississippi Press, which has included comics
histories, monographs and books of interviews in its list since the 1970s. Early important works include Joseph Wi-
teks Comic Books as History (1989) and David Kunzles The History of the Comic Strip (1973, 1990).
5
For useful and influential articulations of the language of comics by leading critic-practitioners, see Scott
McClouds Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (Harper, 1994) and Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Tech-
nology are Revolutionizing an Art Form (Harper 2000); and Will Eisners Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative (Nor-
ton, 2008) and Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist (Norton 2008). Trina
Robbins has published several books on women in cartoons, including From Girls to Grrrrlz: A History of Womens
Comics from Teens to Zines (Diane Pub Co, 1999). Much of this internal comics conversation occurs in the medium
of comics itself: McClouds critical books are articulated through the medium of comics, and Daniel Clowes, Art
Spiegelman and Chris Ware frequently incorporate a running history and analysis of comics into their works.
6
Neil Gaiman (<http://journal.neilgaiman.com>), Alison Bechdel (<http://www.tcj.com/tag/journalista/>) and
Scott McCloud (<http://scottmccloud.com>) are among the many comics artists who keep blogs, though
McClouds is the most focused on comics as a subject and industry. The Comics Journal sponsors several blogs
which frequently feature criticism, links and interviews: <http://www.tcj.com/?tag=journalista>, <http://
www.tcj.com/guttergeek> and <http://www.tcj.com/hoodedutilitarian>. The Comics Reporter and ComicsCo-
mics are also useful sites: <http://www.comicsreporter.com/> and <http://comicscomicsmag.com/>.
7
Bande dessinee and manga today frequently overlap with English-language comics production; Spiegelman and
Moulys Raw was instrumental in bringing European comics artists and influence into North American circulation,

and manga outside Japan has grown in popularity and influence in the last decade. At the same time, some artists,
including Spiegelman, have seen manga as a threat to the future of independent comics (TCJ 300). Since the scope
of this article is already broad, I will not have space to discuss the roles of manga and bande dessinee, but I will note
that as the industry becomes increasingly borderless and globalized, moments of overlap, synthesis and hybridity
between these three separate comics traditions will continue to become more evident. In Britain, comics also has a
distinct earlier history: see Paul Gravett, Great British Comics (Aurum, 2006). While Canadian comics have fre-
quently been overshadowed by their American counterparts, John Bells Invaders from the North: How Canada Con-
quered the Comic Book Universe (Dundurn, 2006) has charted both the early history of Canadian comic books and the
contemporary prominence of Canadian artists like Chester Brown, Julie Doucet and Seth in the international com-
ics scene.
8
The first two I have tried to represent in this paper; the third is probably most prevalent, but sometimes suffers
from what William Anthony Nerrichio terms hermeneutic lag with regard to the realm of the visual (82). Extensive
bibliographies of comics criticism can be found at <http://www.library.yale.edu/humanities/media/comics.html>,
<http://www.comicsresearch.org/academic.html>, <http://www.readyourselfraw.com/links/index_links.htm>.
9
Thierry Groensteens semiological study The System of Comics (University Press, of Mississippi, 2007) is particu-
larly influential. The MLA collection Teaching the Graphic Novel (MLA, 2009) focuses on theoretical and literary
readings of comics in relation to the literary canon, and most of the essays in the MFS collection also focus on the-
ory, analysis and close reading.
10
In addition to the histories already mentioned, see Bradford Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of
Youth Culture in America (John Hopkins UP, 2001), Thomas Inges Comics as Culture (University Press of Mississippi,
1990), David Hadjus The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America (Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2008) and Bart Beatys Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture (University Press of Mississippi,
2005), which argues for a nuanced approach to Werthams legacy.
11
Comics scholars have responded to this gap with a plethora of introductions: Marianne DeKoven and Hillary
Chutes introduction to the Modern Fiction Studies issue on Graphic Narrative, Chutes later introduction in PMLA,
the introduction to Charles Hatfields Alternative Comics, Robin Varnum and Christina D. Gibbons introduction to
The Language of Comics: Word and Image and Jeet Heer and Kent Worcesters introduction to A Comics Studies Reader
all aim to orient the new reader and introduce them to some of the central concepts and works of comics studies.
Indeed, this need for repeated introduction is symptomatic both of the novelty of the field and of resistance to it;
comics scholars seem to still have to prove that their field is worthy of study.
12
Elsewhere Spiegelman uses the term comix, in part as tribute to the adult content of the underground comix
scene of the 1970s that helped him come of age as a cartoonist, in part as homage to the co-mix of word and
image, the central hybridity that defines the medium.
13
I am indebted to Fiona Duncan, who inspired this use of Wittgenstein, and whose thesis I WANT YOU TO
SEE MORE establishes a tool for charting some of these intersections and relationships. <http://www.fadbla-
gue.com/comics/>
14
See Rodolphe Topffer: The Complete Comic Strips ed. David Kunzle (Uiversity of Mississippi Press, 2007).
15
It is interesting to mark the dominance of plagiarism, pastiche and theft in comics history, which are so prevalent
as to nearly be a constitutive element of the medium.
16
Wards influence is evident in Spiegelmans early style. His books have recently been re-released by Dover
Press.
17
To take one familiar example, Maus uses both the thick dark lines and heavy chiaroscuro of Wards woodcuts
and employs the playful animism of newspaper cartoons and animations that depict animals with human concerns
and lives, though with a darker, uncanny effect.
18
Nyberg 1669.
19
See Fred Von Bernewitz and Grant Geissman Tales of Terror!:The EC Companion (Fantagraphic 2000). There is a
current resurgence of interest in genre comics, whose influence is less ubiquitous than that of superhero comics or
newspaper strips, but is central and legible in the work of a number of comics artists, including Los Hernandez
Bros. and Charles Burns.
20
The Comics Code was revised in 1971, after a conflict that saw the scandalous and pedagogic tendencies in
comics come into a comical tension. The Department of Health, Education and Welfare asked Stan Lee to write
a comic highlighting the dangers of drug use; Lee agreed, and Amazing Spiderman #96-98 depicted Peter Parkers
best friend Harry Osborn hospitalized for drug addiction. When the CCA refused to approve the comic because
it portrayed drug use Lee went ahead without the seal, and the success of his comic helped lead to the Codes
revision.
21
For an introduction to the comics underground, see Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature
(University of Mississippi, 2005). Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels: A History Of Comic Art (Phaidon, 2001) by Rob-
ert Sabin provides an inclusive history which includes European and Japanese comics while Douglas Wolks engag-
ing, opinionated Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean (Da Capo, 2007) provides both a
visual vocabulary for comics and a review of key works in the medium, with a focus on American comics.
22
See Trina Robbins, From Girls to Grrrrlz: A History of Womens Comics from Teens to Zines (Diane Pub Co, 1999).

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Literature Compass 8/1 (2011): 2846, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00764.

Comics, Graphic Novels, Graphic Narrative: A Review

2011 The Author

scholarship on film or photography, which also emerged as mediums in the nineteenth

Terms: What We Talk About When We Talk About Comics

2011 The Author Literature Compass 8/1 (2011): 2846, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00764.x

2011 The Author Literature Compass 8/1 (2011): 2846, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00764.x

2011 The Author Literature Compass 8/1 (2011): 2846, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00764.x

Fig. 1. Comics Code Authority Seal, reprinted in Sabin, 78.

2011 The Author Literature Compass 8/1 (2011): 2846, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00764.x

Wittgensteins theory of family resemblances is useful for a non-restrictive definition of

Histories and Genealogies

2011 The Author Literature Compass 8/1 (2011): 2846, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00764.x

2011 The Author Literature Compass 8/1 (2011): 2846, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00764.x

2011 The Author Literature Compass 8/1 (2011): 2846, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00764.x

Fig. 4. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, p. 66.

2011 The Author Literature Compass 8/1 (2011): 2846, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00764.x

Fig. 5. Rodolphe Topffer, The Complete Comic Strips, p. 234.

2011 The Author Literature Compass 8/1 (2011): 2846, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00764.x

2011 The Author Literature Compass 8/1 (2011): 2846, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00764.x

2011 The Author Literature Compass 8/1 (2011): 2846, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00764.x

books, that recount growing up in pre-revolutionary Iran and subsequent displacement

2011 The Author Literature Compass 8/1 (2011): 2846, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00764.x

2011 The Author Literature Compass 8/1 (2011): 2846, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00764.x

2011 The Author Literature Compass 8/1 (2011): 2846, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00764.x

2011 The Author Literature Compass 8/1 (2011): 2846, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00764.x

2011 The Author Literature Compass 8/1 (2011): 2846, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00764.x

2011 The Author Literature Compass 8/1 (2011): 2846, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00764.x

Medley, Linda. Castle Waiting. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2006.

2011 The Author Literature Compass 8/1 (2011): 2846, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00764.x

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