European Comic Art

This special issue of European Comic Art presents articles on the diversity of contemporary feminist comics in the Nordic region. The Nordic countries have seen an explosion in feminist comics and graphic novels since the first decade of the twenty-first century. In Sweden, feminist comics have become commercial successes, winning prestigious prizes, and appearing in exhibitions, Instagram, and other social media. Recently, a new generation of artists has entered the scene with a renewed focus on queer and intersectional issues. This special issue directs attention to feminist comic art throughout the Nordic region—with representation from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden—by established creators as well as emerging voices. The history of feminist comics can be traced back to the social movements of the 1970s, but the energy and creativity of contemporary feminist comics is new, reflecting both international trends and conditions specific to the region and to each national context.

In the 1990s and 2000s, three Finnish comics magazines were established for comics made by women. Drawing from a multidisciplinary framework of studies on feminism, gender and humour, this article argues that the magazines used the comics form to discuss feminist issues and to disrupt essentialist conceptions and expectations about gender. The common denominator for the magazines was the use of humour as a tool, although humoristic strategies and understandings of gender varied. This article gives an overview of the development of Finnish feminist comics by situating the magazines within the discussion of women's comics that was ongoing in Finland in the early 1990s and 2000s, and by reflecting on the magazines’ impact on present-day feminist comics in Finland.

This article discusses two queer comics from Finland in the 2010s, H-P Lehkonen's Life Outside the Circle (2017–2018) and Edith Hammar's Homo Line (2020), analysing them as identity work and acts of queer world-making. Both comics depict migration and foreground identity formation in relation to place. The analysis focuses on the intersectionality of queer identities, marked as minority positions with regard to power structures related to gender and sexuality—where a binary conception of gender and heteronormativity dominates, with systemic hierarchies related to place and different national and regional cultures. Utilising the genre conventions of romance and autobiography, the comics renegotiate hetero- and cis-normative identifications and envision alternative queer spatial formations.

The aim of the article is to analyse how a feminist critique is expressed in the graphic novels Det känns som hundra år [It feels like a hundred years] (1999) and Deras ryggar luktade så gott [Their backs smelled so good] (2014) by Åsa Grenvall. The theoretical framework draws from the concept of skewedness, a variation of queer theory, and theories of queer temporality. Grennvall delivers a feminist critique by exposing the norms of girlhood as unattainable and by visualising skewedness in relation to girlhood and the lifelines of the protagonists, a result of both gender norms and emotional neglect.

This article examines how transgender themes are conveyed in two Swedish graphic narratives. Olivia Skoglund's debut graphic memoir, Nästan i mål! En komisk transition [Almost there: A comical transition] (2020) follows Olivia who navigates as a trans woman through a clueless cis society, while Elias Ericson's graphic novel Diana & Charlie (2021) depicts the relationship between two transgender friends and their struggle to find emotional stability in a heteronormative society. Drawing on Elisabeth El Rafaie's visual metaphor theory of pictorial, spatial and stylistic metaphors, it is argued that both Skoglund and Ericson place bodily experience, appearance, and perception at the centre of their concerns of being transgender, conveying the struggle for gender recognition as well as showing the misgendering of trans people by society.

Within the landscape of current feminist comics production in the Nordic region, Rikke Villadsen is a comics artist notable for works that challenge gendered sexual norms through genre play and visual pastiche. This article explores how Villadsen's style of comics-making draws on processual aesthetics, a term offered and explored in conversation with Villadsen's comics and queer theory. Villadsen's work brings central tenets of second-wave feminist thought into the contemporary context of feminist body politics, resulting in tensions on and beyond the pages of her comics. The article discusses the ways Villadsen's comics enact feminist trouble through representations of transgressive sexuality, gender roles, and the materiality of the comics as physical objects.

This article provides a close reading of Fødselen [The birth], a powerful and provocative comic by cartoonist, blogger, and nurse Hanne Monge Sigbjørnsen aka Tegnehanne in which she depicts her own negative experiences with childbirth during the COVID-19 pandemic. I first place Fødselen in a historical and sociocultural context, highlighting how Tegnehanne draws on the legacies of Nordic feminist comics, participating in recent trends such as COVID-19 comics and graphic reproduction, and tapping into central feminist debates in contemporary Norwegian feminist activism. I then discuss the complex and engaging ways in which Sigbjørnsen depicts the pain of labour and how Fødselen gives important insights into the negotiation of touch in obstetrics during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Collin McKinney and David F. Richter, eds, Spanish Graphic Narratives: Recent Developments in Sequential Art (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan 2020). 315 pp. ISBN: 9783030568221 (£59.99)

Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey and Stephen E. Tabachnick, eds, The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 677 pp. ISBN: 9781107171411 (hardback, £125)

Renaud Chavanne, ed., with Adam Rusek, Wojciech Birek, Jerzy Szyłak, and Piotr Machłajewski, Histoire de la bande dessinée polonaise. Translated by Anna Morawska. (Montrouge: PLG, 2019). 186 pp. ISBN: 9782917837344 (€15.00)

Mark McKinney, Postcolonialism and Migration in French Comics (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2021). 400 pp. ISBN: 9789462702417. (€65.00)