Abstract
Interpreting panels and contexts: New approaches to war and comics
War comics were a popular phenomenon across Western Europe throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The British comic book series Commando still exists today, but dozens of competing titles, providing mainly young male audiences with often stereotypical visual narratives of heroic soldiers engaged in battles during the major 20th-century conflicts, have ceased to exist. Yet the medium of comics has resurfaced in recent decades. Inspired by Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986–1991), a boom of graphic novels has appeared, expressing the medium’s self-reflective capacity for representing complex realities to adult readers.
Four recent studies by British and American scholars, focusing on both World Wars, Cold War conflicts and colonial warfare, make clear to what extent such nuanced representations are found in a variety of comics and graphic novels, how they mix entertainment with propaganda, but also how this flexible medium criticizes certain aspects of war. Despite the frequent representation of war in ‘sequential art’, war has not been the centre of attention for comics scholars. Until recently, the rapidly growing field of comics studies focused predominantly on autobiography and adventure in contemporary graphic novels but new studies analysing 20th- and 21st-century comic expressions of war reflect a broadening scope.
In Comics and Conflict, American historian Cord Scott studies the development of representations of war from WWII to the post-Cold War involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan in monthly publications of US comic books. The wide selection of comics analysed focuses on contemporary military action by the US, singling out famous authors considered representative of a given period. Scott argues that many comic books depict combat in heroic terms – ‘noble causes, courageous soldiers, and the “good death”’ (p. ix) – and deliberately conceal the harsher realities of combat. Assuming that comics, like other popular narrative forms, reflect the beliefs, hopes and fears that shaped the past, he sees a crucial yet overlooked role for comics in shaping the broader cultural perception of wars in the 20th and 21st centuries. From that perspective, comics not only serve as entertainment and propaganda but also as a barometer of social attitudes toward American military intervention. Scott even claims that comics offer a unique insight into their readers’ mindsets, assuming that ‘the creators’ perspective often reflected the views of their readers, if only because they had to fulfill their expectations enough to ensure future sales’ (pp. ix, 135–136). Although not unlikely, such a statement seems too bold, considering the lack of empirical information concerning comics readers and their reading experiences.
The historical overview presented by Scott illustrates how US war comics during and immediately after WWII were overwhelmingly patriotic with only a few publishers avoiding glorification of war or challenging government views. Post-Cold War comics, following representations in other visual media, gradually gave more space for realistic portrayals of violence and for personal introspection, capturing the frustration and agony experienced in war. Cynical soldiers, grappling with moral issues, became a dominant feature in re-emerging US war comics after 9/11.
This increasing absence of one-dimensional patriotism with its propagandistic aims is also visible in the more recent European comics analysed by literary scholar Jennifer Howell. In The Algerian War in French-Language Comics: Postcolonial Memory, History, and Subjectivity, she analyses how bandes dessinées represent the Algerian War of national liberation (1954–1962), marking the end of the French colonial empire. She acknowledges that the hybrid nature and multimodal narrative in which comics represent reality, resulting in multilayered texts, are suitable for expressing the complexities of war. Lacking a unified theoretical framework in which to study comics, Howell’s interdisciplinary close reading approach analyses the interaction between word and image.
War-themed comics were quite common in post-WWII France, but comics about the Algerian war were rare until the early 1980s, when attention also increased in public opinion and war historiography. Starting with Une education algérienne by Guy Vidal and Alain Bignon (1982), it became a topic for comic creators, who often recontextualized iconic, sometimes problematic, representations of ‘otherness’ and war. Howell illustrates the creators’ ambiguous relation with Orientalist imagery: they are drawn to the attractive visual tropes, yet their authenticating reproduction is problematic as it does not contribute to critiquing and understanding the colonial system. However, the paratextual material Howell includes in her analysis (prefaces, documentary images and bibliographies) helps to contextualize the narrative and to support the historical claim of comics.
Somewhat underestimating the flood of WWII comics, Howell claims that the Algerian fight for independence dominated French war comics in recent decades. She focuses on seven authors who challenged dominant ideology, such as Farid Boudjellal, Jacques Ferrandez, and Frank Giroud. Although not belonging to the first generation, they represent different memory communities (Algerian immigrants, Pied-Noir families, army veterans) and have created indirect ‘postmemories’ (Marianne Hirsch) based on personal memories of survivors, collective memory and French national history. These comics, often personalizing historical representation, do not necessarily represent the dominant memories of the French nation and can therefore be helpful in analysing the convergence of family stories, testimonies and institutionalized accounts of history and memory. Highlighting trauma and disrupted identities, they illustrate the impact of the war and reflect contemporary political issues such as multiculturalism, migration and Islam.
The resulting comics, with their potential to reach sectors of the population excluded by other media, invite readers to engage with this history. By creating alternative narratives, different from standardized textbook representations, they may stimulate dialogue about contradicting historical narratives and create a more inclusive historical memory and even, as the author claims, ‘disrupt official memory making and the politics of forgetting’ (p. 91). In this context, Howell considers the incorporation of fictional elements to fill in narrative gaps not necessarily as problematic, but validating such assumptions about the impact and potential of visual narratives requires a more precise, empirically based understanding of the preferences and reactions of buyers and readers of war comics.
Two studies by British media scholar Jane L Chapman and her University of Lincoln team represent a rather different take on comics and history in order to fill the gap in media and cultural studies where comics have largely been neglected. For Chapman et al., war-related sequential visual narratives are a tool within New Cultural History to widen sources, topics and content. The innovative aim of Comics and the World Wars: A Cultural Record is to make clear how historians can extend their source material and research techniques by focusing on the nuanced historical content of these cultural records. Like Howell, these authors stress that comics are not necessarily a factual record of the past but they can nevertheless reflect, implicitly or explicitly, the circumstances and context of their creation with ‘metaphorical aptness’. As such, they act as markers of the mentalité(s) of the time and provide a sense of the non-tangible (pp. 6–7, 26).
The case studies concentrate on the period of the two World Wars because of the appropriation of the comics format by an adult market during WWI and because the omnipresent phenomenon of total war made comics a suitable indicator of Zeitgeist. Yet, the authors redirect the attention from the somewhat limited genre of war comics to wartime comics, a field that has received less attention. The two do not fully overlap as comics influenced by their wartime creation process – resulting in explicit or implicit references to the conflict – also incorporate genres such as political propaganda, humorous comics or superhero comics, while war comics are often created post-event. Focusing on these contemporary war-influenced comics, the Chapman team has given priority to various lesser-known and forgotten English language comics from the Allied nations – Australia, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand and the US – during both World Wars.
The usually patriotic comics are carefully scrutinized in detailed and rich analyses of the different ways in which the impact of war both on soldiers and civilians was expressed. Using a methodology based on close reading of both image and text, and on thorough historical contextualization – a solid approach but perhaps less innovative than suggested by Chapman – the authors show the important role of humour as an effective tool, particularly in propaganda comics. The ridiculed depiction of the German enemy in British WWI Daily Mirror cartoons by William K Haselden indicates the relevance of assumptions about national character. The stereotypes result in compact and recognizable images, highly suitable for the medium of comics, but they also served contemporary readers in understanding life in the wartime chaos. As such, these comics help researchers to understand the Home Front.
Humour also played a role in the trenches, as a case study of two-panel cartoons in trench newspapers illustrates. These (self)censored cartoons, apart from strengthening cohesion among soldiers in their frontline community, frequently focus on ironic anti-heroism or reveal absurdities, using the mechanism of self-mockery to keep control of the situation and to boost morale. Another important thread in Comics and the World Wars is the idea that comics acted as a democratic format that was ‘accessible, low-brow and aimed at ordinary people’ (p. 175). Examples of WWI working-class cartoons and WWII comics from the British Communist Party published in the Daily Worker, or the ‘Wanda the War Girl’ comics created by female artist Kath O’Brien for the Australian Sunday Telegraph, reflecting the changing role of women, can be seen as proof of this development. But the question remains whether access to such publication platforms, both for comics creators and readers, was any easier than for other (textual or visual) contributions to those same newspapers.
Going beyond 1945, Chapman and her co-authors investigate retrospective postwar sources in the unfortunately sparsely illustrated Comics, the Holocaust and Hiroshima, focusing on extreme trauma experiences of child survivors in the French Holocaust comic Paroles d’étoiles and the Japanese autobiographical manga Barefoot Gen. The authors clarify how Paroles d’étoiles – a collection of childhood memories interpreted by various artists – illustrates the medium’s suitability for presenting a narrative combining two temporal perspectives. According to Chapman et al., ‘the condensed symbolism of iconography allows for a flexibility in juxtaposition of thoughts with events and easy recognition of concepts and happenings’ (p. 42). Bombarding readers with a montage of multiple images, ideas and emotions, while touching on conceptual binaries of language/art and realism/symbolism in a compact, personalized representation, should convey the confusion of trauma and the need and inability to create a coherent narrative. This perceived unique ability of comics is regarded as an effective representation of the incomprehension experienced during and after a traumatic event. Yet, the extent to which this ability might also be present in other visual media is largely neglected in the other books reviewed here.
Somewhat similar to Howell’s argument, the authors doubt whether ‘too much imagination [would be] inappropriate’ to represent traumatic history (p. 6). In this context, they stress the inherent self-consciousness of the comics form, referring to its transparent construction with the literal framing and borders that are supposed to draw attention to its own artificiality. However, none of the authors gathered here research to what extent comic readers are actually aware of the constructed nature of comics, creating a certain risk that the researchers equate their own critical approach with that of a more average reader.
Although mostly limited to national frameworks, these four well-written and clearly structured books, fruitfully covering developments in various decades, are stimulating examples of the multidisciplinary character of today’s growing field of comics studies, illustrating that comics are not just about entertaining children. Comic strips may be less widely read than in previous decades – a development not always sufficiently reflected in the reviewed studies – but the authors rightfully emphasize how the versatile representations of both military warfare and civilian involvement in this popular medium deserve attention. There should be no doubt that both factual and fictional comic narratives reflect the cultural and political mindset in which war is perceived during and after the conflict.
Nevertheless, analysing the impact of war representations and mentalities in comics requires more reflection on the uniqueness of this medium, on the factual and less factual sources of comic creators, and on the transnational (and commercial) aspects of comic distribution and consumption – aspects largely missing in the publications discussed here. Once these elements are more fundamentally taken into account, specific findings concerning enemy stereotypes, the representation of violence and the increasing inclusion of more non-military aspects of total warfare, as well as the healing (in)capacities of comic narratives, can certainly contribute to our understanding of the possibilities as well as the limitations of comics in the field of war studies.