Editorial 15:4
Every year the editors of this journal take part in helping to organise The International Conference of Graphic Novels and Comics, along with different higher education institutions and the journal, Studies in Comics. This year the conference theme is technologies. Comics and cartoons, of course, have advanced through publication technologies for hundreds of years from the broadsheets and publications of Töpffer, development of lithography, the four colour print process that instigated the popularity of American comics and the development of digital and internet technology in the 21st century. Computers have become useful in comics research in discussing the huge amount of data in comics collections, tracking reader’s eyes and scanlation (the capacity to analyse huge amounts of data). But technology can be used and misused.
AI poses problems for creators in the comics industry as discussed in ‘The Raise of the Machines: AIs, Comics Creation, and Comics Labor’, a paper presented by Giorgio Busi Rizzi at last year’s Joint Conference of the International Graphic Novel & Comics and the International Bande Dessinée Society. He argued AI-generated images raise ethical issues for notions of creativity, intellectual property and work for the comics industry. In research and Higher Education, there is also concern about the threat posed to intellectual honesty in the submission of AI generated papers. It is certainly one of the issues we shall be discussing in the conference this year and will become more of a pressing concern as AI becomes more sophisticated.
The first three articles in this issue deal with the production and use of comics in educational settings or as educational tools. In the first article, ‘Your translated memory or mine? Re-membering graphic novels in performed audio descriptions for The Cartoon Museum, London’ Dimitris Asimakoulas uses translation studies to analyse audio described comics produced for the partially sighted or blind at London’s Cartoon Museum. This is where technology can be beneficial in an educational setting. The Cartoon Museum produced a pilot project to analyse the effectiveness of audio described comics in three stages, focused interviews, scripting and performance of three examples and feedback from visitors. In ‘Integrating mathematics and science to explain socioscientific issues in educational comics for elementary school students’, Fadhlan Muchlas Abrori, Theodosia Prodromou, Mara Alagic, Reka Livits, Houssam Kasti, Zsolt Lavicza and Branko Anđić propose that comics can be useful in helping elementary school students to engage with socio-scientific content. The authors produced comics on earthquake-related issues in Indonesia for this purpose using mathematical principles to guide the design. The third article by Eleftheria Karagianni ‘On the distinction between creative and non-creative labour and on making comics in Guy Delisle’s graphic memoirs. From “travelogues” to “laborlogs”’ analyses the graphic journalism of Guy Deslisle. Karagianni argues that rather than thinking of Deslisle’s work as ‘laborlogs’ to emphasise the significance of work and toil in their construction.
The next two articles deal with the monstrous and its relationship with nation and culture. Melissa Ericko Poulsen analyses Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s Monstress (2015) about a woman created from many monsters. Poulsen argues that the excessive nature of her monstrosity celebrates multi-raciality and the agency of mixed race characters to challenge the limitations of the narrative and stereotypes. Patriycja Pichnicka Trivedi maps the changing representation of vampires, specifically Dracula in French bande dessinee. Trivedi aligns these tales with Western European stereotypical notions of Eastern Europe concluding that ‘The representation of Eastern Europe in BDs reveals itself to be surprisingly in line with the 19th-century Vampire Narrative: Eastern Europe is a disturbing, un-real, exotic space of radical Otherness or an in-between “Secondary Empire”.’
The following two articles raise timely and growing concerns over the environment. Zohreh Baghban analyses the reading strategies involved in understanding Shaun Tan’s Tales from the Inner City (2018) in ‘Respect the power of the beast: an ecocritical analysis into interspecies relationships in Shaun Tan’s Tales from the Inner City.’ Baghban uses critical approaches that focus on biopolitical and animal/human relationships to reconsider the power relationship between animals and humans. In a close reading of Crude: A Memoir (Pablo Fajardo) Sathyaraj Venkatesan and Maureen Burdock, ‘Politics of extractivism, grassroot justice and crude’ consider how the extraction and processing of oil impacts on local people, animals, water and environments.
The final article and interview deals with inequality. ‘In her hands: navigating [sexual] identity and gender roles in a Portuguese graphic novel for young adults by Joana Estrela’ by Fátima Susana Mota Roboredo Amante analyse Pardalita a graphic novel by Portuguese writer and illustrator Joana Estrela. The protagonist, Raquel, challenges prejudice and is empowered when she joins a theatre group. Inequality of the caste system is explored by Nandhitha Muruganandan and Sathyaraj Venkatesan in an interview with Samarth about their graphic novel Suit. Suit narrates the lives of scavengers in Mumbai and scavenging’s alignment with caste. In this interview, they emphasise the importance of telling these stories to raise issues of oppressed or marginalised groups like the Dalits.
The issue is rounded off by two book reviews by Gareth Brookes and Rounak Gupta and Partha Bhattacharjee.
We hope you enjoy the issue.