Artifacts of Dissent: Comics and Emotions in Dark Times

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Talk Format

Abstract

In response to the recent election and inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the United States, many groups of artists have mobilized their art as a method of dissent and protest. Primarily, these interventions have occurred on the terrain of emotions, evoking negative affects like fear, grief, rage, and disgust. The comics and cartooning community has been particularly active in this regard. Newspaper strips, webcomics, and independent print comix have used the various platforms available to them to make their dissent known and even the superhero intellectual properties of Marvel and DC Comics have been used, although in unsanctioned capacities, as icons of dissent in ways that either call upon their histories as artifacts of World War II anti-fascism or consider mainstream American comics’ recent, if halting and incomplete, movements towards broader inclusivity.

This panel seeks to begin a conversation about the possibilities that emotions have within comics as media of dissent, specifically by considering the relationship between comics style and what Deborah Gould has called the emotional habitus of comics’ various publics. Because of the popularity and reach of the graphic memoir genre, most notably Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and the comics journalism of Joe Sacco and others, comics scholarship has long considered the way that graphic narrative allows both cartoonists and the public to wrestle with questions of trauma and witness. These studies do not always consider the emotional effects of a work on its audience, but recent books like Ramzi Fawaz’s The New Mutants point the way towards thinking comics and their audiences together.

Developments in the field of affect suggests that American Studies and its adjacent disciplines broaden their understanding of what happens when humans interact, not only with each other but also with other species and inanimate objects, and asks us to be attentive to the possibility that out of those interactions arise questions that contemporary analytical categories are unable to answer. This panel proposes that, as a visual medium where image and text come together, comics is uniquely positioned to consider such relationships. In particular, a cartoonist’s line allows for a great number of stylistic variations that enables them to marshal various kinds of emotional and affective energies difficult to achieve in other artistic forms. Moreover, while a standard critique of comics is that mainstream cartoonists use this function within the superhero genre to evoke a juvenile, masculinist power fantasy, the papers featured on this panel further show that the emotional possibilities at the confluence of image and text are just as often, if not more often, used to resist such hegemonic cultural narratives. We offer analyses of the ways comics in various genres work to resist sexual, neurological, political and familial norms using emotional means in order to demonstrate that comics are an effective form for the dissemination of radical ideas and that they are, therefore, valuable not only for processing the way things are, but also for considering the way things could be.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Frederik Byrn Kohlert, University of East Anglia

Individual Presentations

• Listening to Sexualities of Difference in Underground Comix - Yetta Howard, San Diego State University

• Depression as Radical Resistance in Black Hole, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, and Cruddy - Rachel Miller, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor

• A “Static, Wasted Sea”: A Reading of Ben Passmore’s Comics as Poetic Elegies - Brian Cremins, Harper College

• Leave it to Linus: Charles Schulz’s Peanuts and Parents as the Children of the Fifties - Joshua Kopin, University of Texas at Austin