Editorial

The cover of this issue is a page from Ajuan Mance’s ‘Any Day Now,’ an eight-page comic,¹ anthologized in MK Czerwiec’s edited volume Menopause: a comic treatment (2020), which received two Eisner awards in 2021.² It encapsulates many of the most striking features of the comics form:

• it is composed of rendered pictures (usually drawn);

• that most often are juxtaposed with text;

• where a single panel can stand alone as a composition;

• but is usually only one representation in a sequential narrative.

• Most comics are about people who are almost invariably depicted in a highly individualized yet caricatured fashion;

• And whose quests as protagonists, supporting cast, and/or antagonists usually portray them as recognizable social and personality types.

• Comics utilize an array of symbolic graphic conventions to create mood, underscore action, and convey emotion.

Longer-form comics are often referred to as graphic novels, and for very good reason. Some of the best-known and highly regarded examples of this medium, like Will Eisner’s A Contract with God (1978), are fictional narratives using many of the literary conventions of the novel. Nevertheless, the medium also encompasses work composed as memoir, journalism, history, fantasy, science fiction, and educational instruction, so that the term comics has been used to more adequately encompass the variety in this form. The term itself is derived from ‘the comics,’ which refers to short (four to eight panel) strips that first appeared in mass circulation newspapers in the late 1890s and continue regularly to this day. As many, if not most, of these had a comic intent, they were popularly called the ‘funny papers,’ or ‘comics.’

The 1930s witnessed the development of ‘comic books,’ which were longer pulp paperback collections of short stories focused on a particular protagonist (Superman, for example), longer novella-like treatments, and sometimes serials. By the 1980s, more and more work with serious artistic ambitions was being published in hard-cover format, Art Spiegelman’s Maus (Volume 1 in 1986 and volume 2 in 1991), being the best known, and the first – and as yet the only – comic to receive a Pulitzer Prize. The medium is international and different countries – like Japan and Korea – have distinct styles and conventions, although there is a great deal of mutual influence between the various national industries. Increasingly, comics are being recognized – and published – by influential journals and newspapers. In the United States these include The New Yorker, and the New York Times. By focusing on the comics, this issue of Visual Studies is also announcing a new feature of the journal, the special section, which assembles several articles already published on-line – as well as solicited pieces – that explore a common topic or research technique. An issue with a special section will generally include many more articles that reflect the general range covered in Visual Studies.

Kevin Wolf’s new media review leads off our coverage of the comic form with a magisterial account of the rapidly growing movement for Graphic Medicine and documents the suppleness of the medium to examine many aspects of the abiding human concern with the experience of illness and its treatment. Wolf skilfully segues between historically informed analysis of the patterns of development in the field and sensitive accounts of particularly illuminating work by graphic artists, and conclusively establishes that the comic form is not only uniquely suited to deploying an aesthetic sensibility and practice in telling reflexive and compelling stories about how people manage their life course and passage through institutional worlds, but also is now so widespread that it demands critical attention.³

Wolf’s review is followed by four articles that were previously published online and illustrate different approaches to the study of the comic form by visual scholars. Silvia Adler and Ayelet Kohn’s ‘When the Cannon Roar, comics panels fall silent: on silent representations of traumatic events in Israeli comics and graphic novels’ is concerned with how silence – or panels where nothing seems to happen – can function as a signifier, enabling the artist to accentuate the moral turning points that unspeakable trauma may engender. In another piece Kohn and Rachel Weissbrod’s ‘It’s just a comic’ – Or is it? Addressing the past in Rutu Modan’s the Property’ follows a young woman and her grandmother on a trip from Tel Aviv to Warsaw to recover the deed to a property lost during the Holocaust, which embroils them in a complex tangle of relationships, incomplete disclosure, and misperception. Kohn and Weissbrod document the power of the comic medium to tell a complex story, illuminating ambiguity and ambivalence about the moment and the telling of the moment. Both articles demonstrate how important the study of fictional worlds is to making sense of the actual worlds that produced, and were touched by, them, which is an issue that has long bedeviled the social sciences as Wolf Lepenies documents in his Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology (1988).

Saddam Issa’s ‘Picturing Atrocity: visual representations of ISIS in Arabic political cartoons’ chronicles how cartoonists in the Arab world depict what is often designated as ‘Islamic terrorism’ in the West by showing how their violent behaviour departs from Islamic religious values, rather than conflating those behaviours with that belief system. Issa considers single-panel editorial cartoons, which antedate the comics, but whose elaboration of caricature has played a seminal role in the development of various strands of graphic art. Golda Cohen and Pascal Moliner’s ‘Analogic and symbolic dimensions in graphic representations associated with patient information leaflets for medicines’ is an example of an engaged social science that mobilizes research to arrive at informed policy choices. By asking their subjects to draw representations of prompts about common medical situations, they determine that their research establishes a dire need to use health pictograms in medical information that should help address the needs of those with limited education. All too often, medical information – in the form of leaflets, posters and other forms of mass communication – assumes that just using visuals of any sort is sufficient. In contrast, Cohen and Moliner show that those with ‘low literacy’ prefer analogic (or mimetic) representations rather than more symbolic ones, and presumably better understand them.

Finally in this special section, Christopher Bishop, a medieval historian, examines the work of Gareth Brookes, a comic-form artist that Kevin Wolf discusses in his article and who has a remarkable imaginative and emotional range. His work often maneuvers through the intersection of physical malady and emotional disruption, not to mention gender. Throwing history into the mix, as Brookes does, enriches his narrative art, but also encourages caution. Why? Bishop worries about what Brookes in The Dancing Plague has made of an extraordinary instance of collective mania, when a single un-named woman began to dance publicly and seemingly uncontrollably in Strasbourg in 1518, challenging the social order for no apparent reason. The history of the event – as much as can be made of it – certainly enriches our understanding of the sources of the Reformation, and why antagonism to the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church might have been so deeply rooted in popular experience, only waiting for a spark to explode it. Still, the aesthetics of Brookes’ Dancing Plague raise many questions. In the first place, the book is dazzling. Many of the pictures in the book are created by pyrography and embroidery on cloth. It is true that both pyrography (using fire to trace a picture) and embroidery have long standing histories as techniques of graphic representation both in Europe and Asia. But, as Bishop points out, many of the pictorial compositions that Brookes draws on for his iconography are late medieval rather than post-Renaissance. They are beautiful, and they attract us to the story, but do they not also distort the historical record? This concern is very familiar to social scientists working with visual data in the present but is easy to neglect as we go deeper into the past.

In addition, our special section includes a Picture Talk by John Grady who in the ‘The Social Life of Private Thoughts’ discusses the assumptions embedded in a picture designed for the cover for a 1970 ‘underground’ comic the cartoonist Robert Crumb. In conclusion, the book review section of this issue includes two assessments of cartoon caricatures and comics about African American experiences.

While it is true that reports of actuality abound in the comics – being represented by memoirs, biographies, historical accounts, instruction manuals and other informational and educational purposes – it is unclear what role the medium might have to play in more standard kinds of social scientific analysis and communication. We have not encountered any such material. But the fact that ethnographic work routinely relies on constructing models based on ideal types, and that ethnomethodologists, for example, tend to transform their visual data of interaction into cartoon like caricatures as a way of focusing an analyst’s attention on gesture by eliminating distracting photographic detail, suggests that the boundary between the comics form and conventional social science intent may be more porous than we currently imagine.

Patricia Widener’s Visual Essay ‘The visual opportunity spaces of oil: in promotion, protest, and warning’ documents that the pervasive place of advertisements, billboards and the like promoted by the fossil fuel industry – especially when compared to the sparse representation of critical and oppositional images – tends to normalize the consumption of oil products as well as engender fear about what a world without gas and oil would be like.

In this issue we are happy to share two contributions to our Gallery space, both of which were recipients of awards this year from the International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA). Julie Patarin-Jossec was awarded the 2022 Rieger Award for Visual Sociology for her visual ethnography of the work of cosmonauts, while Gina Kim received the ACAR-VA Award 2022 for Visual Activism for Tearless, a virtual reality installation about South Korean comfort women.

Other articles in this issue reflect the on-going concerns of visual researchers. E. A. Hodson’s ‘The Painter’s Discipline: aesthetics and form in Scottish painting,’ is based on an ethnographic account of the Glasgow painter, Louise Hopkins, whose present-day work exemplifies a commitment to modernist aesthetics while using her art to capture the materiality of life in a Scottish city. Siyuan Zhao’s ‘The “phantom mask” in Phoenix (2014) and See You Up There (2017)’ examines two recent European films to determine how the experience of collective trauma can be renegotiated at the individual level to provide a pathway to personal recovery. Isobel Elstob’s ‘The “spinster” and her Jellyfish: Dorothea Cross Medusae (2003) and historiographical storytelling’ similarly looks at how an imaginative documentary video can reconstruct the life of an obscure late Victorian British naturalist and put her personal situation and work in context. Hadi Azari Asqandi, Ashgar Fahimifar and Ali Sheikhmehdi’s article ‘From Commitment to Expressionism: a survey on the changing concept of photography in Iran’ demonstrate how changing political circumstances following the Islamic Revolution in 1979 eventually created a space for a more expressionist photography, yet another variation on the theme of how the demise – or is it compromise? – of the political can encourage a growing focus on the situation of the individual.

In Sonal Jha’s ‘Framing the shot: tracing the dialectical development of sports discourse in India through advertising images’ we see how changing technologies and economic development have encouraged the emergence of new themes in sports advertising that utilize narrative conventions to increasingly democratize the enjoyment of sports and have expanded the growth of a fan base with global connections and interests. Trevor Vermont Morgan’s ‘Visuality and socio-political communication in Nigeria’s banknotes’ examines a visual data source that is only recently beginning to be explored – pictures embossed on various kinds of state documents. In this case, the subject matter is how political figures are represented on banknotes and what this has to say about the political trajectory of Nigerian society. Visual social science in many ways began with finding application for photography in research. It is fascinating, then, to realize that social scientists still find inspiration in the ancient craft of drawing, or rendering pictures by hand. Simone Shu-Yeng Chung’s ‘RE/MAP 2.0 in Tokyo: drawing on local stories to draw out hidden realities’ builds on the pioneering work of the American urbanologist, Kevin Lynch, and a Japanese artist Wajiri Kon who documented how residents rebuilt their neighbourhood following an earthquake. More than a score of graduate students in architecture and sociology, use drawings to convey how residents envision a neighbourhood undergoing renewal. V. Tedder, an author quoted approvingly by Chung, provides an apt summary of the rationale for the approach:

The tactile nature of needing to write, draw and make demonstrations on paper as part of the process of analysis should not be understated. This is a vital part of gaining an understanding before such ideas can be fully put into words and something that has been particularly useful.

The study reports a rewarding dialogue between academic social science, ethnography and applied sociology where the medium of drawing not only illustrates the process, and its findings, but also permits a ‘deep dive’ into the realities on the ground that engage the students’ imaginations in a striking way.

Finally, our remaining five articles also exhibit the extraordinary range of visual research sensibilities and methodologies. César Barros A.’s ‘Frame, value, and (in)visibility: Vik Muniz’s Deslocamentos and the political economy of images’ uses the work of a visual artist concerned with documenting invisibility – empty space – to, in the words of the author, ‘underscore the inextricable relation between frame, singularity, repetition and value.’ Ya’ara Gil-Glazer’s ‘The photo-monologue: critical device and activist practice’ explores a technique of photographic rhetoric that had its origins in early documentary photography. It entails the display of a portrait or small-scale interaction – whether taken by the subject or someone else – combined with verbal testimony by the person so depicted. Gil-Glazer shows how useful this can be used in gallery installations and in the classroom. Samantha Edwards-Vandehoek’s ‘The graffiti within: the reactivation and politicisation of Sydney’s subterranean’ is a rich study of how graffiti artists transgress the public space of the infrastructure as a way of challenging the hegemony of the state over its meanings. Hervé Saint-Louis and Rhonda McEwen’s ‘Diagrammatic mental representation: a methodological bridge’ is an experimental study that focuses on how computer analysts use mental representations to understanding digital systems. These concerns may be unfamiliar to most of our readers, but it is interesting how people in fields dominated by mathematical models, find that the very physicality of representations and their placement are influenced by their visibility and tactile affordances. Finally, Chahid Akoury’s ‘A phenomenological ground for relational perception’ is an ambitious attempt to ground aesthetics in a phenomelogical and pragmatic appreciation of human cognition. It represents an extremely sophisticated exploration of our investment in material existence at the cognitive and experiential level that visual social scientists will find challenging, but extremely rewarding.

COVER IMAGE: AJUAN MANCE, ‘ANY DAY NOW'

The cover image is an excerpt from 'Any Day Now,' an autobiographical comic that first appeared in Menopause: A Comic Treatment, an anthology edited by MK Czerwiec (2020, Penn State UP). I created the comic to explore some of the ways that the common portrayal of menopause as a feminine rite of passage excludes queer, nonbinary, masculine-of-center, and trans folks, as well as those who identify with womanhood but not femininity. As a genderqueer Black nerd who will experience this life stage sooner than later, I have been disappointed but unsurprised by how many of the resources on menopause place an emphasis on assuring their readers that the end of their fertility does not mean the end of their femininity. I understand and even admire these sources' interest in moving beyond the clinical details of menopause to address the social and cultural needs and concerns of their perceived audience. My comic, however, highlights the relative isolation of those whose cultural needs and social roles are overlooked and unaddressed, even by some of the most well-intentioned health advocates. The focus on women for whom femininity is important ignores the many ways that menopause might complicate certain elements of gender performance and identity for those who fall outside of that group, including many queer, nonbinary, masculine-of-center, and trans folks.

In creating this and other comics, I use simple line drawings and a minimalist color palette to leave space for readers to create their own meanings, to contemplate, and to find the humor in the circumstances presented. While the erasure of the experiences and needs of marginalized communities is never a laughing matter, that it has taken centuries to achieve the fairly widespread, though often reluctant, acknowledgement of the value of all humans is so absurd that, at least from where I stand, one has to either laugh or dissolve into hopelessness. Whenever possible, I choose the former.

Ajuan Mance is a Professor of English at Mills College and an instructor in the Illustration and Comics programs at California College of Art. Her comics and illustrations have appeared in several anthologies, including Menopause: A Comic Treatment, edited by MK Czerwiec. Ajuan is the author and illustrator of 1001 Black Men: Portraits of Masculinity at the Intersections (Stacked Deck Press) and the upcoming Living While Black: Portraits of Everyday Resistance (Chronicle Books).

Notes

1 There is confusion about the best term to apply to the expressive medium that Scott McCloud has defined as ‘Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer’ (1994, 20). We will follow McCloud and use ‘comics’ as a generic term to encompass everything from four panel comic strips to book length fiction and non-fiction graphic narratives.

2 The Eisner awards were first given in 1988 and are the comic-form equivalent of the Oscars. They are named after Will Eisner (1917–2005), who was a leading figure in the evolution from the comic book to the ‘graphic novel.’

3 Two recent indicators of growth in the comic book industry indicate very rapid growth of the industry: Albanese (2022) https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/libraries/article/89976-librarypass-says-comics-plus-circulation-has-doubled-in-first-half-of-2022.html ; Library Pass (2022) https://librarypass.com/2022/07/19/comics-plus-doubles-circulation-in-first-half-of-2022/