See Juliet Fall's most recent Society & Space contributions: Embodied Geographies, Naturalised Boundaries, and Uncritical Geopolitics in La Frontière Invisible and Reading Claude Raffestin: Pathways for a Critical Biography

The horror of the shooting at the editorial office of Charlie Hebdo, in Paris, on the 7th of January, 2015, is barely subsiding. Nobody yet knows what this means for the future, beyond the immediate numb shock that turned into moving city-wide silent vigils around the world. New powerful images emerged of pens held up silently. Dignified, angry and sometimes violent responses. Internet sites are awash with images, drawn and photographed, the purported causes of the violence and the multiple reactions to it. Whether we are lastingly, or not, all “Charlie Hebdo” – as so many Facebook and Twitter profiles proclaim – remains to be seen. Could I truly claim to be as shamelessly vulgar, funny, sharp, over-the-top, or as irreverently clever and as indomitably brave as them, if I chose to post “Je suis Charlie” as my social media profile picture? Growing up reading the paper, I certainly have had very mixed personal reactions to many of the images, a mixture of prudish shock mixed with admiration for the inventiveness of many of the comics. However, I never doubted that such images that castigated all and sundry should exist. They were simply there: part of the cultural context I was raised in. I knew that I could simply choose to turn the page if I wanted. So beyond the emotion of the events of the past days – or perhaps within and with the emotion – what can we learn about resistance, and about the subversive ability of drawn images to speak truth to power? How can the transgressive, uncomfortable and funny sides of comics be exploited to resist the madness, other than by suggesting that the pen, or crayon or felt-tip pen, are mightier than the sword, or than the ubiquitously horrible Kalashnikov. How can we resist with careful images without, as David Campbell put on it on his Twitter feed, “weaponising” other mediums?

As the press coverage of the atrocity made clear, the French weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo had been targeted before. The publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet had been instrumentalised by religious and political fundamentalists to gain audience. Many called for violence against specific individuals, declaring that these images were sacrilegious, and that anyone spreading them deserved death (Norton, 2011). The newspaper’s offices were burnt down in a symbolic autodafé, a twisted substitute to book burning. This led to a brazen reaction the following week: a newspaper cover showed two men kissing, one Muslim, the other apparently the cartoonist – signalling, of course, not only the debate on the right to free speech but also the specific debate in France about the right to marriage for all including same-sex couples. Love, and humour, they proclaimed, were always stronger than hate. Later on, the Charlie Hebdo editorial team were accused by some media outlets of further fanning controversy by publishing other irreverent drawings in yet another moment of global unease and violence, following the projection of an American B-movie deemed offensive to/by some Muslims.[1]  In the past days, new and old voices – some that perhaps many would hesitate to side with[2] – are heralding the dead as true heroes of free speech, although here again analyses follow political agendas. I cannot help thinking that the readers of the apparently 7 million copies of the latest issue (rather than the usual 60,000) might be a bit surprised to see exactly what sort of free speech they have been marching for. Clearly, Charlie Hebdo is the result of a very specific take on comic drawing and free speech, written and drawn within a particular generational cultural context and by a specific set of individuals who would probably be rather horrified to discover they were being made into international – and national – symbols. In parallel to events on the streets, there has been an outpouring of comments and interventions, focussing specifically on the (possible, debatable, clear, impossible, situated, relative) limits of free speech. Reactions from editorial teams, comic artists and scholars around the world have differed on what images should be shown. In a response to the atrocity, Joe Sacco, the author of ground-breaking autobiographical comics, chose to draw a comic strip that raises the question of free speech and the limits of satire. In this subtle piece, he wondered what it meant to draw certain things, addressing the question of “what it is about Muslims in this time and space that makes them unable to laugh off a mere image”, suggesting that the answer should be more subtle than just symbolically or literally holding up a finger, as some cartoonists have done,[3] and notwithstanding his assertion of their inalienable right to do so. In such charged situations, and the many debates on the difficult contexts that breed social alienation, racism and fanaticism, what specific tools can scholarship on comics offer us to make sense of what has happened?

The spatial visuality of comics

There is an increasingly strong scholarship on political comics, in a variety of disciplinary traditions. In a paper on two autobiographical books that deal with intellectual freedom in Iran following the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Whitlock, for instance, invites us to wonder how we can “continue to imagine that comics can hold on to some freedoms in thinking and imagining now, when cartoons so obviously go to war” (Whitlock, 2006: 970). While one can discuss the appropriateness and usefulness of the term ‘going to war’ to describe politically-engaged positions, it is clear that it is difficult to have dispassionate debates about visual culture when lives are at stake: when deciding whose life is valuable, and whose is disposable is at the centre of politics. A recent book edited by Dittmer (2014) invites geographers and comic scholars specifically to reflect on the uses, spatialities and roles of comics. Several of these chapters addressed comics as counter geopolitical objects, as they explicit invited those seeing them to imagine the world otherwise (Dittmer, 2014; Fall, 2014; see also Fall, 2006). But what, if anything, might be specific about the spaces of comics, about pictures crafted and drawn, be they single images or sequential art?

Comics, in single images or strips, are first of all distinctive in that “current practitioners are also its theorists, its historians, and its critics” (Whitlock, 2006: 966). Perhaps this is in part because for a long time they were considered a minor genre. McCloud, a comics author himself, has for example gained cult following for his book that lays out in visual form the theories and conventions of visual narrative (McCloud, 2006). Scholars have coined new terms to describe comics, partly as a strategy for requesting respectability for what has often been a marginalized and frequently trivialized genre compared, for example, to painting, cinema or photography. Whitlock speaks of ‘sequential narrative’ (Whitlock, 2006), but the term ‘graphic narrative’ is also frequently found (Holland, 2012), while some authors explicitly prefer to self-identify with ‘comic journalism’ (Sacco, 2011). But all these authors write about what are recognisably comics: a term seems more immediately understandable in English and that has a longer history, although this is inevitably specific and situated (see Holland, 2012: 115 and notes 55 & 56 for more on the choice of terms; McKinney, 2008: xiii for similar comments on the French term bande dessinée).[4]

Secondly, like all media, comics are hybrid, with a specific genealogy that some have traced back to the nineteenth century (Marion, 2011). They have emerged from the hybridization of various traditions of narratives, drawings, estampes, press illustrations and caricatures, as well as sequential figures that draw from chronophotography. Within scholarship, this question of the spatial visuality of comics has received useful attention. Scholars have identified “the particular importance of the comics in meditating on the conjunction of visual and verbal texts now, and (adopt) the term ‘biocularity’ to grasp the distinctive verbal-visual conjunctions that occur in comics” (Whitlock, 2006: 966). Reading back and forth between images and texts makes concrete the paradoxical materiality of words and the concurrent discursivity of images. The act of reading comics is a specifically embodied and learnt activity – as, of course, is reading – with unique codes that are absorbed such as, for example, the conventions of reading boxes and text bubbles from left to right (or right to left) (see McCloud, 2006: 37-39 for discussions of spatial grammar, including the intrinsic ambiguities and strategies for challenging conventions). This also means that comics have specific styles: ways of drawing and authorship of particular images are recognisable, mobilising word and image in specific, personal artistic ways. An author is choosing to make a specific, personal and signed intervention: comics are not disembodied; they are clearly crafted by someone.

Thirdly, McCloud notes that the power of cartooning to move readers – or in the case of Charlie Hebdo’s irreverent style that shocks, horrifies, angers, amuses or makes you think – is specific in that it commands viewer involvement and identification through its distinctive devices, vocabulary and grammar. As a reader, we observe the parts but sense the whole. The reader is engaged, actively producing meaning in the act of reading. While there is some hyperbole in McCloud’s suggestion that “no other art form gives so much to its readers while asking so much of them as well” (McCloud cited in Whitlock, 2006: 968), this is undoubtedly a visual form that requires readers to actively labour to produce meaning. As Dittmer has written “reading comic books requires the internalisation of a specific visuality involving the ability to translate the spatiality of two-dimensional sequential images into four-dimensional narrative (…). Indeed, ‘a comic strip is literally a map of time’ in that its producers are attempting to render the passage of time visible through the use of static, sequential images” (Dittmer, 2010: 222).[5] While these are constructed with the reader in mind, Holland notes that “they leave open for the reader the question of interpretation, as the spatiality of the presentation does not entrench a specific reading” (Holland, 2012: 107; see also Dittmer, 2010). We must therefore be cautious when reading these as simple combinations of ‘texts’ and ‘images’, for the combination of the two leads to something uniquely hybrid – and the form lends itself to being self-aware in reflecting critically about the production of images themselves. Social scientists need new interpretative skills for discussing such comics, as Whitlock noted:

“the vocabulary of comics represents figures and objects across a wide iconic range from the abstraction of cartooning to realism; its grammar is based on panels, frames, and gutters that translate time and space onto the page in black and white; and balloons both enclose speech and convey the character of sound and emotion. This grammar makes extraordinary demands on the reader to produce closure” (Whitlock, 2006: 968).

While it may indeed theoretically make ‘extraordinary demands’ it is also very intuitive: in contexts where comics are part of the literary landscape, many children learn to read with them and get involved as a natural step from picture books. Yet fundamentalists seeing comics as sacrilegious and threatening aren’t visual theorists: perhaps instead they can simply see how immediately accessible, threatening and subversive such images can be. The space of the page becomes a threat to specific world-views based on controlling, and forbidding, certain images.

Images that circulate

But comics are also spatial in another way: through their ability to travel. In our visually-obsessed world, texts and images circulate – and have always circulated – notwithstanding more and different technological networks to facilitate it. Attempts to govern and control these circulations suffuse human history. Yet these are times when the specific control and dissemination of images have taken on a new urgency. Not all pictures are worth the same thousand words: they create affect differently. This is not just a theoretical debate: as recent events show us, images can be deadly and dangerous, perhaps more than some of us ever thought. Much of recent debate has been about what can and should be shown, and how contexts matter. Clearly, much is often lost in translation, a point aptly made by Philipps (2015) discussing how often the Anglophone left misunderstands the specific French tradition of satire. If there is a lesson to be learnt, “it is that images travel far from their origins into very different communities of interpretation; their meanings are always contextual, social, cultural, and political as well as aesthetic” (Whitlock and Poletti, 2008: ix). Similarly, in a discussion of Susan Sontag’s work on photographs that communicate the suffering of others, Whitlock argues that what is at stake are “fundamental questions about the interpretation of visual images and about their power to relay affect and invoke a moral and ethical responsiveness in the viewer regarding the suffering of others” (Whitlock, 2006: 965). So, perhaps for these reasons, this debate about comics feels different than the one that followed on the publication of landmark photographs. While there has been some debate about the use of the screen-shot of the dead policeman mercilessly executed outside the Charlie Hebdo office, for example, this is a very different debate to the one about the comics, the former being somewhat similar in nature to that on the use and circulation of the images of Abu Ghraib.

In his opening words to Joe Sacco’s landmark autobiographical comic book Palestine published in 2001, Edward Said wrote about how liberated and subversive he felt as a child, reading his first comic book. He went on to add that “as we also live in a media-saturated world in which a huge preponderance of the world’s news images are controlled and diffused by a handful of men sitting in places like London and New York, a stream of comic book images and words, assertively etched, at times grotesquely emphatic and distended to match the extreme situations they depict, provide a remarkable antidote” (Said, 2011: iii). That some of these drawn antidotes are now circulating around the world in many of these hegemonic networks is delightfully ironic, notwithstanding the fact that these are read and received very differently in different places, something that Sacco hints at in his response mentioned earlier. If comics are to be truly effective in imagining alternatives, including uncomfortable one, then allowing those viewing them to get some feeling for other standpoints, from whatever side they might be, is crucial.

So perhaps there is something about comics, within the implicit craft and authorship that underpin them, that does something different to the viewer than a photograph does. Marianne Hirsch, amongst many others, has written that countless new restrictions on images of war shape a new and urgent context for a sustained discussion of words and images, of reading and looking (Whitlock, 2006: 965). As Judith Butler (2010) has argued, it is specifically forms of dissent that are the object of intense scrutiny in such contexts, as these are systematically excluded or controlled in order to maintain a climate of fear that serves the interests of the powerful. Perhaps there is something unique about comics, about the explicit authorship, recognisable style, humour and craft that make them uniquely important as necessary forms of dissent. We will never again know what Charb, Cabu, Honoré, Tignous and Wolinski’s unique take on the news is, but others will take their place. These other individual, idiosyncratic and alternative world-views will help us imagine another possible worlds, filled with the deep understanding that the human condition and human affairs are so absurd that they are only worth laughing about. As Sacco’s work has shown, and beyond the immediate shock value of specific images, the power of comics lies also in its ability to create alternatives, to reimagine the world.

Speaking truth to power, showing that the king has no clothes on, or simply providing a personal, signed take on one or several topics and thereby imagining another possible world are what makes comics uniquely powerful tools. In these fearful and uncertain days, it seems to me that we need clear ways to understand how to harness such tools, and new scholarship to help us think through this, in particular in order to understand how multi-layered comics often are, and how they use intertextuality creatively. Like the Charlie Hebdo images that merged debates about Islam with national discussions of same-sex marriage, comics play on multiple registers and themes. This also means that, removed from the contexts the authors are relating to, circulating through new international conduits, they are sometimes difficult to make sense of. We need to be aware of this, and find ways of making them legible. In parallel, it is necessary to continue debating institutionalised racism and exclusion while discussing free speech, and in this it helps specifically to have a clear understanding that not all images are equal, and not only because it is harder to have a photo – rather than a cartoon – of a leading dead religious figure. 

Notes

[1] For details, see the newspaper’s website http://www.charliehebdo.fr/ or for more details in English of the latest affaire, see http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/09/the-charlie-hebdo-affair-laughing-at-blasphemy.html[2] See the debate within French newspapers on whether the (far-right) Front National should take part in a ‘Republican march’ (marche républicaine), for example :http://www.liberation.fr/politiques/2015/01/08/marcher-ou-non-avec-le-fn-une-union-nationale-a-geometrie-variable_1176586.[3] See for example the title page of the newspaper The Independent, 8th January 2015.[4] Terms of course follow different cultural contexts and traditions (see McCloud, 2006, page 246), and – for instance – the French term bande dessinée has a more legitimate meaning than the English term ‘comic’ which may evoke trivia, children’s literature and comedy.[5] If comics are maps of time, their further links to maps as visual objects would benefit from further explicit exploration, as I tried to begin discussing in Fall (2006).

References

Butler J (2010) Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? New York: Verso.

Dittmer J (2010) Comic book visualities: a methodological manifesto on geography, montage and narration. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35(2): 222-236.

Dittmer J (2014) Comic Book Geographies. Mainz: Coll. Media Geography. Franz Steiner Verlag.

Fall JJ (2006) Embodied geographies: naturalised boundaries and uncritical geopolitics in Schuiten and Peeters’ La Frontière Invisible. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24(5): 652-669.

Fall JJ (2014) Put your body on the line: autobiographical comics, empathy and plurivocality. In: J Dittmer (ed) Comic Book Geographies. Mainz: Coll. Media Geography, Franz Steiner Verlag, pp 91-108.

Holland EC (2012) To think and imagine and see differently: popular geopolitics, graphic narrative, and Joe Sacco’s ‘Chechen War, Chechen Women’. Geopolitics 17(1): 105-129.

Marion P (2011) La guerre prise de vue: de Shooting War au Photographe. In: V Alary and B Mitaine (eds) Lignes de front: bande dessinée et totalitarisme.  Chêne-Bourg) pp 287-312.

McCloud S (2006) (2007 for French edition) Faire de la Bande Dessinée. Paris: Delcourt.

McKinney M (2008) History and Politics in French-language Comics and Graphic Novels. Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi.

Norton A (2011) The Danish Cartoon Controversy and the Challenges of Multicultural Politics.Perspectives on Politics 9: 606-609.

Phillips L (2015) Lost in translation: Charlie Hebdo, free speech and the unilingual left. ricochet January 13, Available at: https://ricochet.media/en/292/lost-in-translation-charlie-hebdo-free-speech-and-the-unilingual-left

Said E (2011) Introduction. In: J Sacco (ed) Safe Area Gorazde: The Special Edition Seattle: Fantagraphics Books.

Whitlock G (2006) Autographics: the seeing ‘I’ of the comics. Modern Fiction Studies 52(4): 965-979.

Whitlock G and A Poletti (2008) Self-Regarding Art. Biography 31(1): v-xxiii.