European Comic Art

Krzysztof Gawronkiewicz and Krystian Rosenberg's Achtung Zelig! recounts an unabashedly absurd story about the Second World War, involving an encounter between a Nazi commander who was a former clown and a Jewish father and son with monstrous faces. To understand the construction and function of the Polish comic's narration of the war, this article introduces the concept of media memories. Such memories encompass techniques and works that ‘haunt’ cultural productions. Achtung Zelig! interweaves key media and contexts, layering its story through the media memories of carnivals, comics (e.g. Maus) and films (e.g. The Great Dictator). In instrumentalising media memories, the comic engages in a heavily mediated dialogue with the issue of representing traumatic realities.

Gérard Genette's transtextuality theory serves as the basis for a hermeneutic inquiry into Horst Rosenthal's Mickey au camp de Gurs. Multiple levels of meaning emerge from transtextual links to other literary genres and works of Western culture, from Disney's early animations to fairy tales and satire, concluding with Dante's Inferno. This article analyses Rosenthal's transtextual discourse and shows how his use of the comic genre to depict the horrors of the Gurs internment camp involves readers in what happened there and produces a text that speaks to all. Using Mickey Mouse, the international cartoon hero, alongside referencing the Inferno, a cornerstone of the Western canon, turns Rosenthal's experience into a universal one and permits author and reader to focus on the emotional level that transcends all rationality.

This article compares Gudrun Pausewang's 1987 West German young adult novel Die Wolke to Anike Hage's 2013 manga adaptation. In so doing, it charts the development of West/Germans’ relationship to the outside world over the quarter-century separating the texts. I begin by considering the perceived threat of German annihilation – whether nuclear or environmental – in each era, as well as the change in German attitudes to democratic institutions since reunification. I then analyse each Germany's relation to its respective role in the Second World War, before examining how West/Germans in each text express either a German or a European identity. The article finds evidence in Hage's adaptation of a decided shift in German thinking from a predominantly nationalist perspective towards an informed, pan-European and increasingly international outlook.

Barr's Irn-Bru (previously Iron Brew), Scotland's best-known soft drink, was promoted by recurrent comic strip advertisements in Scottish newspapers from 1939 to 1970. ‘The Adventures of Ba-Bru’ featured an eponymous Indian character who was joined by a kilt-wearing companion known as Sandy. This article explores how what the firm presents as the longest-running promotional comic strip in history has helped shape the construction of Scottishness in the drink's advertising. The exotic nature of the central Ba-Bru figure provides a counterpoint to manifestations of local particularism but also grounds the drink's discourse on Scottishness in a wider imperial and unionist context. The comic strips also generate examples of intermedial transfer that underline the impact of quotidian consumption habits in a national identity shaped by popular culture.

This article investigates the applicability of certain aspects of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to the study of visual satire and/or caricature. Lacan's treatment of the phenomenon of visual anamorphosis can provide a fruitful new way of thinking about the art of caricature. The visual exaggerations and distortions central to the art of caricature function as they do, as works of social or political satire, by virtue of the extent to which they expose the psychological emptiness or hollowness (castration) which inheres in all human social or symbolic activity. This argument is then applied to the political circumstances prevailing in late Georgian England: in particular, the visual satirical treatment devoted to the nature and status of the monarchy during this period is examined in the light of foregoing arguments.

Thierry Groensteen, The Expanding Art of Comics: Ten Modern Masterpieces, trans. Ann Miller (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017). 240 pp. ISBN: 978-1-49-680802-8 ($65)

Nina Mahrt, Die Darstellung realer Kriege in Comics (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2016). 471 pp. ISBN: 978-3-631-67658-5 (€84.20)

Anna Maria Jones and Rebecca N. Mitchell, eds, Drawing on the Victorians: The Palimpsest of Victorian and Neo-Victorian Graphic Texts (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017). 386 pp. ISBN: 978-0-82-142247-2 ($80)

Chris Murray, The British Superhero (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017). 240 pp. ISBN: 978-1-49-680737-3 ($65)