European Comic Art

The article offers an overview of the history and cultural representations in visual media from the 1860s onwards of French penal colonies or bagnes, and their status as graphic lieux de mémoire. It focuses specifically on French Guiana and New Caledonia and seeks to contextualise the portrayal of the motif in a varied corpus of bandes dessinées. The article argues that graphic history provides a unique forum in which aspects of the penal colonies about which there is little understanding – the transcolonial itineraries of convicts; the penal everyday; the role of carceral heritage as part of a useable past – are elucidated. Although some works primarily foreground celebrity bagnards such as Eugène Dieudonné or Henri Charrière (Papillon), albums such as those of Stéphane Blanco and Laurent Perrin allow the potential of the bande dessinée to create connections that are multilayered and multidirectional.

Edward Lear has secured a prominent position in the history of literature and travel writing thanks to his nonsense books and his journals; he is considered one of the most innovative zoological illustrators of the nineteenth century and is being rediscovered as a landscape painter in watercolour and oil. This article argues that he also deserves to be remembered among the precursors of modern comic art. His picture stories, though never published in his lifetime, represent an early instance of autobiographical graphic narrative, while his limericks, never out of print since 1861, introduced a radically innovative caricatural style and a conception of the relationship between pictures and text that strongly influenced modern comic artists.

This article aims to analyse the origins and development of the comics industry in Argentina from a comparative and transnational perspective, positing its business model, professionalisation of artistic and editorial work and adoption of certain styles as part of a triangle in which Argentine comics are in constant dialogue with European (mainly Spanish, French and English) and US comics traditions. The article places a special emphasis on the latter. As part of the overall process of cultural modernisation, the early twentieth century encompasses a period in which the production of comics grew, was established and modified its creative patterns in all the countries involved in the study. Comics in Argentina consistently moved between innovation and imitation, with some original narrative and formal solutions that were sparked by a process of adaptation and mistranslation.

In Sweden, publication of original feminist comics started in the 1970s and increased during the following decade. This article describes and analyses the Swedish feminist comics published in the Swedish radical journals Kvinnobulletinen and Vi Mänskor, as well as in the Fnitter anthologies. These comics, representing radical feminism, played an important role as forums for debate in a time when feminist comics were considered avant-garde. The most prominent themes were, first, the body, love and sexualities and, second, the labour market and legal rights. The most frequent visual style was a black contour line style on a white background, recalling the comics of Claire Bretécher, Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Franziska Becker. Humour and satire, including irony, were used as strategies to challenge the patriarchy and to contest the prevailing idea that women have no sense of humour.

With Marie Duval, virtual creator of the ineffable Ally Sloper (first appearance 1867) and mainstay of a new magazine named Judy founded that year, we find a new kind of cartoon character, a new kind of caricature and a new kind of journal aiming, unlike Punch, at a female and lower-class audience. The moment was propitious: after two decades of national prosperity during which the GNP almost doubled, the demand (a push from below) was felt for some cultural irreverence and novelty. Maybe the 1850s and 1860s were the first ‘Age of Leisure’ rather than the succeeding one, that of Duval, proposed by the authors here (7); the later age, of Duval, was that of increased and lower-class leisure, for sure. This caricaturist and artist is a quite recent discovery: before the late 1980s and 1990, she was virtually unknown. She was Europe's first female professional exponent of caricature (as distinct from a few sisters in conventional cartooning), and her initials and name took credit for the long-term development of an extraordinary artistic property, which quickly became a new sociological phenomenon: a dissolute trickster called Ally Sloper. He attained wild popularity in the 1870s and 1880s, and beyond. He was the first of many British comic characters to become a household name, and the first such comic character to be widely commercialised.

David Kunzle, Cham: The Best Comic Strips and Graphic Novelettes, 1839–1862 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019). 566 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4968-1618-4 ($90)

Tatiana Prorokova and Nimrod Tal, eds, Cultures of War in Graphic Novels: Violence, Trauma, and Memory (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018). 237 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8135-9095-0 ($29.95)

Stephen E. Tabachnick, ed., The Cambridge Companion to The Graphic Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 244 pp. ISBN: 978-1-107-51971-8 (£21.99)

Louie Dean Valencia-García, Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain: Clashing with Fascism (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). 248 pp. ISBN: 978-1-350-03847-9 ($114)