Cultures of War in Graphic Novels: Violence, Trauma, and Memory

Cultures of War in Graphic Novels

Cultures of War in Graphic Novels

Violence, Trauma, and Memory

Edited by Tatiana Prorokova and Nimrod Tal

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Prorokova, Tatiana, editor. | Tal, Nimrod, 1980– editor.

Title: Cultures of war in graphic novels : violence, trauma, and memory / edited by Tatiana Prorokova and Nimrod Tal.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017054291 | ISBN 9780813590967 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813590950 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Graphic novels—History and criticism. | War in literature. | Violence in literature. | Psychic trauma in literature. | Collective memory in literature.

Classification: LCC PN6714 .C85 2018 | DDC 741.5/9—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017054291

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

This collection copyright © 2018 by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Individual chapters copyright © 2018 in the names of their authors

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Contents

Introduction

Tatiana Prorokova and Nimrod Tal

Part I Representations

Chapter 1. A Clash of Arms to Be Eternally Remembered: War, Chivalry, and the Hundred Years War in Le Trône d’Argile and Crécy

Iain A. MacInnes

Chapter 2. Graphic Narrative and the War on Terror

Kent Worcester

Chapter 3. War in the Bosnian Graphic Novel

Emir Pasanovic

Part II Noncombatants’ Experiences

Chapter 4. The Sky Is Darkened by Gods: Spirituality, Strength, and Violence in Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers and Saints

Harriet E. H. Earle

Chapter 5. Unseen Scars: Recalling Traumatic Moments in Individuals with PTSD in War Brothers

James Kelley

Chapter 6. Nat Turner, Slave Revolts, and Child-Killing in U.S. Graphic Novels

Joe Lockard

Chapter 7. Sinne Fianna Fáil: Women, Irish Rebellions, and the Graphic Novels of Gerry Hunt

Christina M. Knopf

Chapter 8. The Children Internalize the Meaning of the Occupation: Growing Up under Israeli Occupation and a Culture of Resistance in Joe Sacco’s Palestine

Peter C. Valenti

Part III Memories

Chapter 9. The Malvinas War in Argentine Memory: Graphic Representations of Defeat and Nationalism, 1982–2015

Silvia G. Kurlat Ares

Chapter 10. The Haunting Power of War: Remembering the Rwandan Genocide in 99 Days

Tatiana Prorokova

Chapter 11. Blogging in Times of War: The July 2006 War in Lebanon and Mazen Kerbaj Imaging the Unimaginable

Yasmine Nachabe Taan

Notes on Contributors

Index

Introduction

Tatiana Prorokova and Nimrod Tal

Although the two world wars of the twentieth century have entered history as the defining wars of the modern era, today’s world has been shaped to no lesser degree by the myriad smaller conflicts that have been erupting continuously around the world in ever increasing numbers. Indeed, while only 940 conflicts took place between 1870 and 1945, 2,228 raged between 1946 and 2001.¹ Considering that the global War on Terror since the early 2000s has manifested itself more as a series of local conflicts than as a full-scale multiplayer international war, it seems that limited wars have been shaping the world we live in and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. At the same time, media usage has gained a central place in present-day conflicts and arguably plays a greater role than ever before. Revolutionizing the battlefield, it has forced strategists to revise their doctrines and compelled armies to adjust to hybrid warfare, which features, inter alia, massive media usage. As NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe general Philip M. Breedlove argued, for example, the Russians demonstrated in Ukraine in 2014 the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen in the history of informational warfare.² Stories about military conflicts and the ways that they are told and spread through the media have plainly become part of the modern battlefield.³ And while digital media are usually the focus of both professionals and the public when considering this transformation, the role of the traditional media should by no means be downplayed. As was cruelly demonstrated when several artists of the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo were shot dead by Islamist extremists in January 2015, comics have been integrated into modern warfare too.

It therefore seems a timely moment to present a volume that examines the connection between the graphic novel and conflicts that are limited and mostly local in scale and explores the representation of such conflicts in a medium that has received little attention in academic literature, which tends to focus on the few major conflicts of the last century. For this purpose, this collection brings together eleven chapters that address the representations of the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901), the Irish Troubles (c. 1916–1922), the Falklands War (1982), the Rwandan Genocide (1994), and the Lebanese-Israeli War (2006) in graphic novels, along with other conflicts that have taken place all over the world: from the Americas to Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

Indeed, the graphic novel is now a global phenomenon with deep historical roots, which largely explains how the present collection can discuss such an extensive and varied set of examples drawn from around the world. In a way, it also explains why such an analysis should be done. In South Africa, Australia, and North America, preliterate societies used basic forms of narrative art from as early as twenty-six thousand years ago. Literate societies from the Middle East to Central America, India, and South East Asia also used visual narratives from early on, with the Egyptians and Assyrians doing so already in the fourth millennium BC. Comprising series of several images, visual narratives developed considerably in India in the fourth century BC and from there spread to Sweden, Spain, Japan, and Indonesia.⁴ Prints from China appeared as early as in the ninth century AD, whereas in Europe, strips and graphic narratives that featured sequences and other early traits of modern comics could be identified already in the fourteenth century.⁵

As Karin Kukkonen has argued, these and other early forms of graphic communication can hardly be considered comics. However, they demonstrate that communication through images has been part of the human experience throughout the globe from very early on.⁶ Evidently, communication through images was not subdued even by later, more modern forms of communication, such as writing, and kept its central place in the social life. In fact, new forms of communication often allowed for the spreading and popularization of communicating through images. Printing, for example, which was instrumental in increasing literacy, especially in early modern Europe, allowed also for the mass production of graphic narratives and changed them to the degree that they could become a popular and diverse medium.⁷ As discussed below, the internet and digital communication also allowed, inter alia, the popularization of comics and graphic novels.

And yet, notwithstanding its ancient and early modern roots, the graphic narrative in the medium of comics came into its modern form—that is, dramatic sequential action organized into brief moments shown in panels across the page⁸—in the nineteenth century, with the introduction of new printing technologies and the rise of cheap popular journalism.⁹ These took graphic narratives to an ever-widening audience and enabled them to explore new themes, such as politics and social matters.¹⁰ Moving from the single panel, as Jerad Gardner has shown, graphic narratives could now tell more complex stories with the combinations of text and image, dialogue balloons, recurring characters, and ongoing serial narratives.¹¹ By the early twentieth century, comics had become a regular feature in newspapers rather than only humoristic plots in illustrated magazines, especially in the United States.

The popularity and profitability of illustrated magazines, such the British Punch, together with the works of European artists—such as the German Wilhelm Busch (1832–1908), the Swiss Rodolphe Töpffer (1799–1846), and the French Caran d’Ache (Emmanuel Poiré, [1858–1909])—and the works of American cartoonists like Richard Felton Outcault (1863–1928) led to the widespread appearance of comics across Europe, Britain, and the United States between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹² And with European, British, and American imperialism, modern forms of comics and graphic narratives spread also to India, China, and Japan, where, as noted, traditional local forms of such narratives had already existed for centuries.

Thus starting from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several centers of comics culture can be identified, such as France and Belgium in continental Europe, Britain, and later also Japan. Among these centers, throughout most of the twentieth century, the United States led the comics industry. Although in the 1950s the American comics industry entered a difficult period with rising criticism of the genre as offensive and unsuitable for teens, with the introduction of the Comics Code (1954) and with the subsequent narrowing of the comics market, the 1960s saw the spread of comics into new fields, such as pop art, as well as the emergence of the underground comix that challenged the Comics Code to an evident, if not full, success.¹³ In the 1960s, for example, the American underground comix industry heavily influenced Europe and led, inter alia, to the popularization of adult graphic narratives across the ocean. Thus, even in that time, the dominance of American comics tradition was tangible.

Perhaps because of the dominance of these centers in shaping the global comics culture, the academic literature has focused mainly on their comics traditions. However, it would be misleading to look at these centers as autonomous and independent. To begin with, developments in the form and content of graphic narratives in Europe, Britain, and the United States have historically influenced each other. The mutual impact of the British and American industries on one another, in artistic terms as well as in terms of storytelling techniques and themes, is perhaps the clearest example.¹⁴ In the 1980s, Britain was a source of great influence on the American comics industry, challenging the limits of the genre. As Kukkonen writes, under the influence of the British Invasion, English-language mainstream comics had become a medium for social commentary, which is self-reflexive of its own involvements with ideology and full of artistic complexity.¹⁵

The development of the modern Japanese comics tradition, by now a major comics center, is a key example of the mutual influence of western and Asian traditions on each other and of their interdependence. After more than two hundred years of isolation, in the mid-nineteenth century, Japan began to open to the world. This allowed for the entrance of Western culture to the country, which, in turn, brought about cultural innovations as well as criticism. The local comics tradition was not exempt. As Robert Petersen has noted on this historical moment, Through that era of turmoil and transformation, the new comics industry, inspired by Western-style caricature and satirical prints, was a mix of Old World aesthetics and new modern forms.¹⁶ Manga, more specifically, was influenced by the encounter between Western and local art traditions, drawing mainly upon the combination of American trends and the Japanese painting style.

While Japanese manga stylized itself much in reaction to the American comics and in constant interaction with it and American culture more broadly, it was shortly to have an enormous influence on the American comics industry, on which it first relied and drew. Especially after World War II, Japanese narratives and the artistic style were translated into American features, such as the case of Disney’s Lion King, which drew on Japanese manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka’s work, himself heavily inspired by American works and artists.¹⁷ Since the 1980s, once manga fans in America adopted the visual code, many began to learn to draw the manga way, creating hybrid comics called Amerimanga.¹⁸

Furthermore, beyond the interdependence of the above comics centers on each other, the impact and influence of other, allegedly peripheral comics cultures on the development of comics and graphic novels should not be downplayed, even in those centers. In Europe, for example, the dominant Franco-Belgian comics industry has both influenced and been influenced by other continental comics industries and traditions.¹⁹ In the cross-cultural encounter between comics traditions, both the more dominant and the somewhat fringe comics cultures underwent changes. Moreover, despite the immense global influence of the United States and Japan, local traditions never succumbed to them completely, keeping artistic and thematic independence. For example, keeping in line with some of the Western characteristics of the comics, graphic narratives in Asia have dealt with domestic historical and contemporary events, including Western colonialism, and their own religious ideas, local politics, and domestic social processes. Wherever it arrived, the graphic narrative took a distinct shape, unique to the local society. In some way, then, it seems difficult to speak of a specific local comics tradition in a globalized world. As Jan Baetens and Steven Surdiacourt have argued, Questions such as ‘where did it all start?’ and ‘how did national traditions develop?’ are interesting but not decisive.²⁰

Therefore, discussing center and periphery in graphic narratives seems a bit misleading. It might be more helpful to consider the development of graphic narratives, especially in the interconnected modern world, in the spaces that were created between the places in which they appeared. In these spaces (e.g., the Atlantic arena or the inter-European area), cultural agents (from magazines to artists, businesspeople, and tourists) travel and enrich, inspire, merge, and mash local traditions with foreign ones. Alan Moore—one such cultural agent—is, for example, known for having been influenced by both British and American narrative strategies. Likewise, comics giants, such as DC and Marvel, employ creators from around the world.²¹ As scholars such as Thomas Bender, Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, and Daniel Rodgers have shown in different contexts, cultural perceptions about contemporary and historical events develop in the spaces between cultures and by cultural agents that transmit ideas across geographical areas. In this light, Gienow-Hecht has stressed the importance of decentering the United States when examining modern international and transnational cultural processes. Instead, she suggests giving more room to non-American societies, both in shaping their local cultures and in shaping American culture itself during the encounters between American and non-American cultures.²² In other words, the graphic narrative is and has always been a global and transcultural phenomenon, and it should be examined as such.

Following in the footsteps of comics as well as the literary novel, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, graphic novels came to the fore. The graphic novel, a term that was popularized by Will Eisner in the late 1970s, has arguably developed as a new kind of literature, close to the novel. Monika Schmitz-Emans argues that stemming from pulp magazines that were regarded as artistically inferior products of mass culture and as a kind of fast food for readers, the graphic novel is now broadly accepted in the circle of ‘respected’ literary art forms. Numerous genres of graphic novels can be identified, such as nonfiction, autobiographic, and historical novels.²³ From that period, graphic narratives began to resemble novels in their complex plot and developed characters.

Leading the way of popular graphic narratives was Japan: No nation at the start of the third millennium can compare with Japan in terms of the extent to which sequential art infiltrates and informs the everyday life of the populace.²⁴ However, in a globalized world and as web comics become more and more widespread, comics and graphic narratives are evidently more international than ever before.²⁵ It thus seems more relevant than before to decenter Japan, the United States, France, Belgium, and Britain and their representations of the big wars and unearth graphic novels from other cultures that depict their wars.

War has been a defining human experience, cutting across historical periods, places, and cultures much like graphic communication itself. As military thinkers and intellectuals like Sun Tzu, Niccolò Machiavelli, Carl von Clausewitz, Basil Liddell Hart, and Michael Howard have argued, war has been a major agent of social and political transformation throughout history.²⁶ Certainly since the rise of the so-called New Military History in the 1960s, which drew ever more connections linking warfare, society, and culture, war has become an increasingly popular subject of professional and popular inquiry.²⁷ Moreover, war provides a good story, uniquely bringing together universal themes, such as the battle between good and evil, and offering tales of heroism and transcendence, tragedy and heightened drama. Unsurprisingly then, graphic novels and comics about war are perhaps the most established and most popular genre of graphic narratives. As Kees Ribbens has observed, such narratives seem to be popular even in countries with weak traditions of comics reading.²⁸

While cultural studies scholars have not neglected comics and graphic novels about war, their research has been selective: the studies tend to focus on major conflicts, privileging those that were fought in the twentieth century and that involved western powers, such as the Great War (1914–1918), the Korean War (1950–1953), the Vietnam War (ca. 1955–ca. 1975), and above all, World War II (1939–1945).²⁹ Accordingly, cultural studies tend to examine comics and graphic novels from the countries involved in those conflicts. These are mainly American, British, and Japanese works, such as DC Comics’ Enemy Ace (1965), All-American Men of War (1956–1966), and The Other Side (2006); Shueisha and Chuokoron-Shinsha’s Barefoot Gen (1973–1974); Charlton Comics’ Fightin’ Army (1956–1984); and IPC Magazines’ Battle Picture Weekly (1975–1988). In a way, this academic attention seems to correspond to the genre itself. To borrow from Ribbens, as a rule, World War II functions as content or inspiration for [war] comics.³⁰

Focusing on the major wars of the twentieth century, scholars have contributed to the understanding of the ways in which the graphic novel represents war experiences as well as of the medium’s social, cultural, and political roles during a conflict. For example, in the introduction to their recent collection The 10 Cent War: Comic Books, Propaganda, and World War II (2016), James J. Kimble and Trischa Goodnow contend that comics helped forge a united home front by cultivating a patriotic sensibility that celebrated both American triumphalism and virtue, shrewdly underscoring the power of graphic narratives of the war not only as literary texts by their nature but also as political instruments.³¹ The abovementioned and many other graphic novels on the major wars of the previous century outline and solidify a tradition of the war graphic narrative that not only is symbolic of the time when the conflicts were still fresh in the memories of survivors and observers but also was crucial for the development of the war graphic narrative as a genre.

Moreover, since numerous comics and graphic novels deal with major conflicts, studying such narratives has allowed people to explore the changing relationship between comics and society. In Britain, for example, the Great War led to the emergence of comics that tackled serious issues related to the war, thus breaking out of the dominant humoristic and satirical framework for teens within which they had resided before.³² Instead, comics started to deal with different aspects of the British wartime experience and reflected the Great War’s impact on British society on the front and back at home. The war was thus an important turning point in the history of comics in Britain, after which it became a more central part of the country’s social, cultural, and political life and a more versatile tool of expression in all those spheres.

Finally, the scale of these conflicts, and particularly the totality of the two world wars, have rendered them rich sources to explore war experiences in graphic narratives.³³ The erasure of the clear-cut separation between the battlefront and the home front, for example, enabled the exploration of how comics not only re-created war events and experiences but also influenced the minds of those who remained away from the battle lines. The role of women in war; massive social, political, and economic mobilization; the turning of citizens into soldiers; and the impact of war on the home front are but a few examples of the experiences that the major conflicts of the twentieth century allowed graphic novels to explore from various new angles and on different levels.³⁴

However, the uniquely large scale of these conflicts also limits the explanatory force of the graphic novels that explore them and subsequently also the scholarship on these novels. These wars were so particular and special that they and their representation in graphic novels do not tell us much about the more common and widespread human experience of war and its representation in graphic novels. After all, most wars were and are relatively limited and small-scale conflicts.

Therefore, much can be gained by shifting the focus away from these major wars. For one thing, a deep, nuanced look at the periphery allows one to take a fresh look at the center. That is, examining the representations in graphic novels of relatively small-scale conflicts, such as the 2006 Lebanese-Israeli War, presents a new set of works through which to revisit the scholarship on the representations of large-scale wars. Furthermore, expanding the investigation to other wars, regions, and cultures sharpens the picture and thus our understanding of the representations of war in graphic novels worldwide. Voices from Africa, the Middle East, North and South America, and Asia are necessary for this purpose, especially when placed alongside new narratives from Europe and the United States. Additionally, as historians have shown, other conflicts, while of a lesser scale than World War II or the Vietnam War, nonetheless had important ramifications (certainly for those involved in them and their descendants) that can be traced and studied anew by exploring local comics. The Falklands War (1982), for example, though now largely forgotten outside Argentina, has left deep and lasting marks on Argentine society and culture. As Silvia G. Kurlat Ares ably shows in her chapter, much can be learned about this impact from Argentine graphic novels. The same is true for the war in Bosnia (1992–1995), the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (1919–1922), and other wars that have influenced local history and culture in these specific cases, if not always those of the world. Finally, as noted above, the approach of the third decade of the twenty-first century makes it relevant to explore the connection between a major cultural medium and smaller-scale conflicts, which have been shaping our culture and discourse in recent decades and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Graphic narratives, of course, are hardly the only medium to tackle war. Film and literature, for instance, each have long traditions of depicting wars and their dreadful ramifications.³⁵ Graphic novels have much in common with other media in the way they represent stories. As Robert Petersen has noted, for example, like melodramas, graphic narratives rely on representing things in a way that is predicated on our cognition of how we make sense of our known world. In this respect, the visual elements in a graphic narrative are like objects on stage: they are animated with potential signification, adopting meanings beyond what they may simply represent in the everyday world.³⁶ Moreover, the visual-verbal peculiarity of graphic novels is conjoint: the verbal is not reduced to the text, and the visual is not merely about the image. However, the visual-verbal mode of representation is not characteristic of graphic novels only. Indeed, it has also defined the modality of rather traditional literary and visual texts, such as novels and films. For example, novels have incorporated various photographs, (excerpts of) letters, graphs, maps, and so on, which has allowed scholars to talk about a noticeable transformation of the concept of narrative discourse from a traditionally word-based genre of the novel to a multiliterate act.³⁷ The addition of such semiotic resources significantly contributes to the processes of meaning making and communication.³⁸ The interdependency of verbal and visual components is striking in film too.

However, the graphic novel also defers significantly to other visual media in its ability to represent a story. In one way, as Petersen has observed, the drawings that make up the story are not at all dependent on being real objects in real space and real time to establish the story; rather, the images are compiled in the reader’s mind, and inferences are drawn from the similarities and differences between the available visual forms and how that information correlates to real experience.³⁹ As discussed later in greater detail, the role of the reader in de- and reconstructing the story in the graphic novel is of great importance to the understanding of the novel as a mediator between real or imagined historical events and the reader. In other words, the novel occupies the space between the active reader and the described events and mediates between them. That this mediator is not neutral and should be seen as an independent agent in its own right makes both the novel and the mediation process important to understand.

Moreover, graphic novels in a unique way combine the visual and verbal modes of representation. William Murray, for example, has pinpointed the peculiarity of blending visual and written forms in graphic novels and has noted that the marrying of these two media allows for new and engaging ways of transmitting stories, and in graphic novels the visual and written components often work to create competing and contradictory narratives that complicate and challenge familiar stories.⁴⁰ In turn, Hillary L. Chute, whose recent work is devoted to the investigation of war comics as a documentary genre, writes, Through their wide range of aesthetic experiments with word and image, mark and line, comics sets new terms for visual-verbal reports, accounts, and histories. Driven by the urgencies of re-seeing the war in acts of witness, comics proposes an ethics of looking and reading intent on defamiliarizing standard or received images of history while yet aiming at communicate and circulate.⁴¹ What scholars have already acknowledged, then, is the power of the comics form to simultaneously narrate and visualize events in order to tell a war story from a unique vantage point and explore phenomena in ways that other media cannot. One might argue that the graphic novel’s power as a cultural medium to transmit its message both visually and verbally influences the perception of the audience by intensifying the process of consuming and interpreting the story on various levels. Thus visualization and narration complement each other equally and are inseparable within the comics medium.

The way graphic novels or comics employ the visual-verbal mode of representation thus differs significantly from how a novel or film does it. To specify, while a novel can arguably still function as a complete narrative when deprived of intended visual means, this is not the case with graphic novels or comics. Furthermore, if we often experience a film or novel as a kind of virtual reality in which we forget that we were, in fact, watching a movie or reading a book, such forgetting is never truly possible when reading a comic.⁴² Forgetting is impossible because of the way graphic novels and comics employ the image and the text: while a novel and film offer their reader/viewer an opportunity for reading/watching a smooth and coherently organized narration, graphic novels and comics can never do that. The reader will always stumble upon the images and the text in juxtaposition. To support this claim, we would like to refer to Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith, who argue the following: As the reader follows the sequencing of panels and moves from one panel to the next, the element of juxtaposition comes into play. The reader performs an ongoing construction of meaning by considering each panel in direct relationship to the one immediately before it, as well as in the context of all previous panels. The understanding of the next panel can also be influenced by a number of the panels yet to come. . . . And each next panel has the potential to provide new information . . . [to develop] the meaning of one or more previous panels.⁴³ Reading a graphic novel is, therefore, hard work. While graphic novels and comics possess both visual and verbal methods to convey the meaning, spatially and temporally they do not work in the same way as a novel or film. (Stating that, we by no means want to undermine the complexity of novels and films; moreover, it is significant to note that taken separately, a novel and a film work in modes distinct for each medium.)

The visual-verbal peculiarity of graphic novels and comics is, in a