Unrepresentability as an Affordance in Comics About Transition

• In Event: Margins, Gutters, and Futures: Comics as Sites of Critical Literacy and Speculative Cultural Resistance

Abstract

Based on its presence-absence-presence rhythm, the comics medium is well-suited to telling stories about transition—from place-to-place, state-to-state, and identity-to-identity (McCloud, 1993). In a U.S. political landscape that has and continues to criminalize transitional identities (transnational and transgender people alike), comics operate as a literary medium that normalizes transition through their structures and affordances.
This presentation focuses on the comics medium itself, highlighting numerous examples of comics that represent change, and delves into the images, layouts, and gutters in between panels. As Oyola (2014) writes,
In comics, the middle spaces, the spaces between panels, are called “the gutter,” but the reader-provided closure that occurs in that space is a little too amazing to be relegated to the curb. Closure of that kind (or resistance to closure) isn’t just happening in comics. It is all over the place, especially in navigating the identity politics of transnational America, where disparate images are sewn together to make a narrative of self and/or community (n.p.).
Comics are well-equipped to tell stories of movement, transformation, and becoming. They can spatially resist doing so linearly on the page. Comics allow for messy storytelling that breaks time and space constraints, with colliding words and images and the ambiguous silences between them. These effects are often achieved through focalization, fragmentation, and interpenetration (Mikkonen, 2012). Comics are thus “structurally equipped to challenge dominant forms of storytelling” (Chute, 2008, p. 456). For these and other reasons, the medium is often employed by authors to represent societal anxieties about change, whether generational, political, personal, physical, or transresidential. (In superhero, science fiction, and horror comics, such anxieties are regularly refracted through metaphors like mutancy, lycanthropy, and other superhuman bodily transformations.)
Comics texts that will be examined for this presentation include Maus II (Spiegelman, 1991), Nat Turner (Baker, 2006), As the Crow Flies (Gillman, 2017), The Best We Could Do (Bui, 2017), Ms. Marvel: Stretched Thin (Shammas & Ali, 2021), Galaxy: The Prettiest Star (Axelrod & Taylor, 2022), and the autobiographical comics produced by a newcomer immigrant high school student to the U.S. from Southeast Asia. Each will provide examples that bring readers’ attention to transition—even if the change happens off the page, so to speak, in an interstitial gutter.
The comics medium possesses a “tolerance for visual fragmentation and radical text/image interplay” (Hatfield, 2005, p. 97), which is, in other words, a tolerance for competing meanings. Due to this toleration – no hateration, no holleration – comics conveys productive tensions in its basic structure “that present and underscore hybrid subjectivities” and “push on conceptions of the unrepresentable” (Chute, 2010, p. 2). In these times (and others), when those with marginalized identities are especially vulnerable to state-sanctioned violence, it is incumbent to examine the fugitive affordances of unrepresentability, for what can be conveyed (and concealed) in the spaces between.

Author

• David E. Low, California State University - Fresno