85 IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 20, No.1 (2019)
How Comics Remember
Elizabeth “Biz” Nijdam
Maaheen Ahmed and Benoît Crucifix (eds.), Comics Memory
London & New York: Palgrave/Mazcmillan, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels 2018, 290 p.
Maaheen Ahmed and Benoît Crucifix’s edited volume Comics Memory: Archives and Styles (2018) fills a gap in comics scholarship that we didn’t even know existed. Work on the intersection of comics and memory is not new; in fact, the role of comics in memory culture and comics ability simulate or transmit memory has been an essential element of comics studies scholarship for decades. The work of Marianne Hirsch’s on postmemory via the family photographs in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, for example, provided academics with a new framework to examine the legacy of transgenerational trauma. This in turn paved the way for countless scholars, many of whom identify as women (#womenonpanels), to examine the role of memory in graphic autobiography and biography, also often in relationship to trauma, including Hillary Chute’s Graphic
Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (2010), Sidonie Smith, Gillian Whitlock, Candida
Rifkind, Jane Tolmie, Elisabeth El Refaie and Tahneer Oksman. Furthermore, recent scholarship by other comics scholars, myself included, has begun to investigate the role of memory and the aesthetics of memory in the representation of history. Again, Chute’s work on the relationship between witnessing, testimony and memory in Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (2016) warrants mention, while Nina Mickwitz’s Documentary Comics: Graphic Truth-Telling in a Skeptical Age (2015) similarly examines comics’ relationship with collective and living memory. Moreover, scholars Joshua Brown, Puneet Kohli, and Ana Merino have provided academics with other important interventions in the role of memory in comics – and particularly in Spiegelman’s Maus, investigating the problematic of memory as evidence, the representation of time, and the materialization of history itself. Then there’s Karin Kukkonen and Jared Gardner’s work on comics as cultural artifacts, which demonstrates how comics and comics culture open doors into national, popular, cultural and collective memory by looking at genre conventions and icons of popular culture as the shared knowledge of media audiences and comics as “archives of the forgotten artifacts and ephemera of American popular culture” (Gardner, Projections 150) respectively.
Yet while the role of memory in comics and comics in memory has clearly been the scrutiny of innumerable projects, no other single volume has tackled memory from the myriad of vantage points articulated in Ahmed and Crucifix’s collections of essays, which importantly approaches the intersection of memory and comics in both nonfiction and fiction comics. Positing new perspectives for scholars to conceptualize the role of memory in comics and with a particular interest in styles and new and existing definitions of the archive, Ahmed and Crucifix’s Comics Memory opens up new methodologies for comics scholars to incorporate memory studies into their research, while also inviting memory studies scholars to examine comics more closely as a site of national, cultural and collective memory in addition to a place for private recollection.
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The volume begins with an introduction that combines theories in memory studies, comics studies and scholarship on the archive into a new theory of “comics memory.” Unlike work on the intersection of comics and memory heretofore, however, this new methodology does not restrict itself to one specific perspective on the role of memory in comics; rather, Ahmed and Crucifix examine comics as a site “where different kinds of memories are in constant interaction,” thus capturing “the tension and the ambiguity between individual and collective memories” (2). Yet, Ahmed and Crucifix’s conception of the impact of memory in comics does not stop there. The authors incorporate the essential building blocks of the comics medium – including the drawn line, choice of color, and the cut-and-pasted material – as traces of bodily memory and thereby do not restrict the role of memory in comics to exclusively non-fiction texts (2-3). By theorizing the concept of “comics memory”, Ahmed and Crucifix expand the scope of current research in comics and memory to propose a more holistic understanding of the work of memory in comics, “where the medium and its history, personal (albeit not always autobiographical or even autofictional) and collective memories are not easily disentangled from each other” (3). By framing their investigation under the title “comics memory” instead of comics and memory or memory in comics, Ahmed and Crucifix’s volume seeks to reflect upon the multiple relationships between “comics as a medium for memory and the memory of comics as a medium” (3). With their guiding question “What do comics do with, and to, memory and what does memory do to comics?” Ahmed and Crucifix’s edited volume investigates not so much the innovative ways of representing personal or subjective memories – though it does that too – but rather the relationship between comics and memory’s mobilization, formation, and transmission in terms of representational modes or styles of drawing (as drawing memory and memories of drawing) in addition to comics as archives (sites and storehouses of cultural memory) (3).
The subsequent six sections seek to answer these questions through a variety of vantage points. Part I, “Remembering,” focuses on the power of comics to encourage remembrance. Giorgio Busi Rizzi’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Nostalgic: Seth’s It’s a Good Life if You Don’t Weaken” examines the poetics of comics nostalgia. Looking to the work of Canadian comics artist Seth, Rizzi examines nostalgia in terms of both content and formal characteristics. Mel Gibson, on the other hand, looks at how comics as object evoke a range of memories in “It’s All Come Flooding Back”: Memories of Childhood Comics”. Based on interviews conducted by the author, this chapter demonstrates how comics memory is culturally constructed and a cultural practice that includes buying, reading, playing.
Part II, “Memory Styles,” shifts our conceptions of genre to revisit two comics texts and reinterpret their relationship with the archive as well as definitions of archive all together. Here, Bettina Egger’s “Archives and Oral History in Emmanuel Guibert’s Le Photographe” proposes “oral history comics” as a way to negotiate the division between autobiography and biography and the complicated mediation of multiple voices in a nonfiction comics. This chapter highlights the layered nature of archival work in these kinds of comics, which simultaneously seeks to reveal one archive (that of the photographer’s photographs), while creating another (the “meta-archive” of the research, transcriptions and other materials that went into creating the comic). Pedro Moura’s “The Ever-Shifting Wall: Edmond Baudoin and the ‘Continuous Poem’ of Autobiography” looks at Baudoin’s non-autobiographical books through the lens of autobiography as a “self-making project” that engages with his personal archive, which Moura defines abstractly as “a repository of the entirety of the past” (80). Through a variety of repeating leitmotifs, characters, and thematic images in Baudoin’s texts that examines the same event from different vantage points, Moura posits Baudoin’s oeuvre – by way of Walter Benjamin – as one long poem.
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Part III, “Comics Embodiment”, investigates the relationship between comics, memory and bodies. Rachel R. Miller examines texts as objects that function as embodied artifacts of the author through their status as diaries in “Keep Out, or Else: Diary as Body in The Diary of a Teenage Girl and Cruddy”, arguing that these works are stand-ins for their authors’ own bodies. Eleanor Ty’s “The Un-Erotic Dancer: Sylvie Rancourt’s
Melody,” on the other hand, comments on the genre of graphic autobiography by looking at the role of
memory in the narrative’s shifting perspectives in Rancourt’s Melody. Ty thereby shows how the shifting perspectives and temporalities that exists in Rancourt’s autobiography complicate and nuance the life of sex-workers, demonstrating how acts of remembrance and authorship contribute to self-empowerment and enlightenment.
Part IV, “Reading Comics History,” examines the histories marked in records of comics publications as well as on the page itself through the representational modes or visual styles mobilized. Here, Chris Reyns-Chikuma’s “Panique en Atlantique: Bridging Personal and Collective Memories of L’Association and Comics History” traces the politics of L’Asso through the publications its members released in 2010, while Christopher Pizzino’s “Comics History and the Question of Delinquency: The Case of Criminal” traces the history of comics public reception in the aesthetics of a crime series. Pizzino’s chapter artfully demonstrates how the stylistic changes in comics’ modes of representation can impact a reader’s interpretation of a narrative arch, producing additional interpretive layers by recalling different traditions and conventions in comics styles. Not memory in a personal sense but in a collective sense, comics creators mine the history of their form and through intertextuality and reference develop meaning through the memories they mobilize visually on the comics’ page. Pizzino thereby argues that when memories of comics – or rather the history/ archive of comics’ past – is mobilized, it adds depth to a graphic narrative.
Part V, “Archival Memory,” looks at how comics’ universes, legacies and individual cartoonists are remember. Jean-Matthieu Méon’s “Sons and Grandsons of Origins: Narrative Memory in Marvel Superhero Comics” compares narrative continuity of the marvel universe to “a memory ready to be activated and to be, like an archive, mined for new stories, with an already established engagement from the readers” (194). Méon thereby develops a theory of continuity for mainstream superhero comics as modeled by Marvel, fleshing out the history of its come to being and how it constructs continuity through editorial decisions, comic book content, reprints and paratextual materials as a collaboration between publishing houses and fans. In Nicolas Martinez’s “A Trip Down Memory Lane: Reprints and Canonization of Morris’ Lucky Luke Series,” on the
other hand, the author examines the memory of the comics medium itself. By looking at Morris’ Lucky Luke
series as a case study, Martinez demonstrates how reprints of the original comics and memorialization initiatives have contributed to the afterlife and memory of notable comics series of the past. Then in Michael Connerty’s “Selective Memory: Art History and the Comic Strip Work of Jack B. Yeats,” the author contemplates the role of comics and cartooning in the career of Yeats. By examining how both the artist himself as well as art historical discourse intentionally obfuscate this essential aspect of his early work,
Connerty challenges the conventional view of Yeats’s art to position him as a professional comic strip artist
in the early years of his career.
In the last section, Part VI, “Archiving by Other Means,” examines other systems and problems in preserving, remembering and archiving comics and their legacies. Here, Simon Grennan assesses the role technology can play in intervening in the constitution of the comics cannon in “The Marie Duval Archive: Memory and the Development of the Comic Strip Canon”. By utilizing the latest advances in digital archiving – such as chronological browsing, accessibility to the public and the identification of previously unattributed work –
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The Marie Duval Archivebrings about a fundamental change in the ways in which scholars can experience Duval’s oeuvre, which has heretofore been substantially overlooked by scholars. Roel Daenen’s “The Tremendous Treasure: The Curious Problem of Preserving Belgian Comics Heritage”, on the other hand, outlines the institutionalized threats to the preservation of Belgian comics culture. He thereby demonstrates how the market compromises private and public collections in the escalating value of individual pages, which encourages artists to sell their work, breaking up their personal archive, while discouraging institutions to
buy them. Furthermore, with the Belgian Comic Strip Centre not developing their collection and only a
limited collection of The Royal Library, Daenen criticizes the Belgian culture industry, whose apparent high
esteem of comics cultural heritage will not likely be translated into governmental policy anytime soon. Then
in “Fanzines and Swedish Comics Memory,” Gunnar Krantz examines the discourse on comics cultivated in and between the crudely printed fanzines of early Swedish comics fandom, which were crucial in the
formation of the cultural field of comics in Sweden, while Philippe Capart’s “Store Memory” remembers the
forgotten figure of Michel Deligne, a bookstore owner and publisher in Brussels who pioneered the second-hand selling of used bandes dessinées, arguing that in showcasing and recirculating old comics, Michel preserved an important part of Belgian visual narrative heritage.
Finally, Ahmed and Crucifix return in “Coda: A User Guide to Comics Memory,” in which the volume’s editors position memory in and by way of comics in relationship to Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire (spaces of memory) and Michael Rothberg’s noeuds de mémoire (knots of memory), arguing that comics memory fluctuates between Nora’s spaces and Rothberg’s knots “to echo the material–immaterial dynamics comics partake in” (282). They then rearticulate the volume’s red thread, proposing styles and archives as multifaceted and interlinked approaches for apprehending comics memory. Lastly, this final chapter closes with Ahmed and Crucifix offering a series of observations to serve as a theoretical roadmap through the terrain of comics memory as well as a starting point for further thought and work on comics memory, bringing all eleven chapters of the volume in dialogue with each other and offering a holistic account of the way future scholars can conceive of the relationship between memory and comics.
While this edited volume was not at all what I expected, that may be its greatest strength. Comics Memory succeeds at addressing the role of memory in comics and the role of comics in memory from new vantage points, opening up new avenues for research on the subject. Furthermore, as a collection of case studies from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, not only does Comics Memory provide unique ways to think about the intersection of memory and comics, it also proposes new methodologies to examine memory and memory culture more generally.
Bibliography
Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. , 2012. Print.
Elizabeth "Biz" Nijdam is Visiting Assistant Professor, German Studies and Film & Media Studies, Whitman College.
