European Comic Art

The articles in this edition of European Comic Art cover a range of themes, including adaptation, whether from an Ibsen play or a range of classic novels, and a corresponding scrutiny of the affordances of the comics medium, along with a reflection on the differential apportioning of artistic prestige from the eighteenth century through to the twenty-first. An in-depth interview with an award-winning translator brings in further angles on comics as a transnational medium, and an essay by an eminent semiologist revisits the linear/tabular distinction that has been the basis of much formal analysis of comics. The issue of pedagogy recurs both as subject matter of primary texts and in the form of a constructive proposal for enlightened curriculum development. Politics pervades all the articles: the environmental crisis and media collusion in obfuscation, the process of achieving change in education, the responsibility of a satirist to adhere or refuse adherence to one camp or another, the negotiations and frictions that arise out of relocation into new contexts of reception, and an exploration of the borderline regions of the social unconscious.

This article presents a comparative analysis of Henrik Ibsen's play En folkefiende [An Enemy of the People, 1882] and its adaptation into a graphic novel by Javi Rey (2022). The plot revolves around Dr Tomas Stockmann's discovery that the water of the touristic baths of his hometown is polluted and his futile attempt to convince his fellow citizens to take action. I argue that this can be read as an allegory of specific aspects of the Anthropocene. Moreover, while both works address the production of ignorance about human environmental change, the graphic novel possesses medium-specific ways of depicting the gap between knowledge and action. Finally, while the play is a black comedy, the graphic novel conveys a stronger faith in democratic pedagogy, adapted to twenty-first-century discourses on climate.

Graphic adaptations of literary works originated in the Golden Age when Albert Kanter first produced comic versions of canonical texts in Classics Illustrated. By mid-century, these adaptations were so widely used in schools that Frederick Wertham disparaged their presence as ‘a serious indictment of American education’. Graphic adaptations remained in secondary schools throughout the twentieth century, but almost always in pedagogical purgatory: deemed less literary than their source texts, used to entice struggling readers, most often read alongside the original, and judged solely by fidelity to their source. These teaching practices linger today, even as graphic adaptations have proliferated and improved in craft, ingenuity, and ambition. This article proposes a new framework for teaching graphic adaptations, moving away from the fidelity standard and positioning them as independent comics.

This article re-evaluates Thomas Rowlandson, and his historic dismissal as a ‘hack caricaturist’ (Gatrell), by quantitatively analysing his political caricatures from 1780–1827, exploring their range, political affiliations, and satirical techniques. Qualitative analysis of selected prints provides context and showcases his effectiveness and distinctive style of attack. A unique focus is placed on Rowlandson's publishers and their potential influence. The article aims to reposition Rowlandson as a prominent caricaturist of the medium's ‘golden age’, highlighting the value in his satirical artistic output and challenging the assertion that his caricatures were ‘pot-boilers, which cannot bear artistic comparison with his watercolours’ (Bryant and Heneage, eds.).

In this interview, award-winning translator and author Edward Gauvin reflects on his practice as a translator of over four hundred graphic novels, including works by major French comics artists, illustrators, and scriptwriters, such as Gébé, Marjane Satrapi, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Emmanuel Guibert, Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, Zeina Abirached, Christophe Blain, Philippe Druillet, Enki Bilal, Blutch, and so on. He discusses how he approaches the theoretical and practical problems he has encountered as a translator—from well-trodden topics like speech balloon fit to his dynamic understanding of genre fiction. He also offers an insider's perspective on translators’ (often precarious) position within the larger the comics industry and talks about his favourite translations, as well as his current and future projects.

This article draws on examples ranging from Richard F. Outcault's early twentieth-century newspaper strips to the more complex work of the German artist Wilhelm Schulz in a late nineteenth-century anarchist magazine to show how the format of sequential images can allow a play upon different levels of reality. Their simultaneous presentation, not time-bound like that of cinema, can subvert linear narrative progression and create a disturbing universe in which the boundaries between ontological levels become blurred. Schulz's image of a threatening sea monster encroaching upon the shore is compared to work by Expressionist, Symbolist and Surrealist artists in which the appearance of such creatures in liminal spaces evokes repressed psychic material, as waking life gives way to the irrational and the nightmarish.

Alison Halsall and Jonathan Warren, eds., The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader: Critical Openings, Future Directions (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2022). 364 pp. ISBN: 9781496841353 ($30.00)

Jorge Catalá, Benoît Mitaine, Lisa Maya Quaianni Manuzzato and José Manuel Trabado, eds., Multimodalidad e intermedialidad: Mestizajes en la narración gráfica contemporánea ibérica y latinoamericana (León: Universidad de León, 2022). 299 pp. ISBN: 978-84-18490-37-8 (€20.00)

Barbara Margarethe Eggert, Kalina Kupczyńska and Véronique Sina, eds., Familie und Comic: Kritische Perspektiven auf Soziale Mikrostrukturen in Grafischen Narrationen (Berlin: De Gruyter Comicstudien, 2023). 287 pp. ISBN: 978-3-11-078636-1 ($109.99)