Abstract
This article draws attention to a medium that has escaped the attention of International Relations scholars: comics. Comics are combinations of text and drawings and they come in a variety of formats: as newspaper strips, as stories printed in magazines and as long narratives presented in free-standing books. Comics have been central to how generations of children have encountered foreign places and comics artists have successfully captured public attention, with comics offering explicit engagements with foreign policy events. Theoretically, comics provide a unique combination of text and images through which central questions on the research agenda of International Relations scholars working on visuality, practices and intertextuality can be pursued. Drawing on comics scholarship, this article presents a theoretical framework aimed specifically at analysing comics as international relations. Methodologically, it provides criteria for the selection of comics under study and a case study of three comics engaging the Bosnian War.
Introduction
The goal of this article is to bring comics onto the research agenda of International Relations (IR). Comics are a distinctive medium with a particular cultural, sociological and economic history and a way of using text and images that cannot be subsumed under the general category of popular culture or by relying on existing IR analysis of moving images or literary genres. Yet, although IR scholars have promoted the study of popular culture and made intertextual connections across a range of (seemingly) strange bodies of work for more than 25 years, the medium of comics has largely escaped attention (Der Derian and Shapiro, 1989). As of 2016, only two articles related to comics have been published in major IR journals and they have been on the pedagogical potential of using graphic novels as a teaching resource (Juneau and Sucharov, 2010) and on the specific genre of ‘current affairs comics’ (Thorsten, 2012). Although often critically acclaimed, such books make up only a fraction of what is produced through the medium of comics. The starting point for this article is thus that a thorough account of this medium in general and its significance for research in IR is warranted, and that there are at least four reasons why comics should be incorporated into IR research: they are an important form of popular culture; they may work as an outlet for critical, marginal discourses; comics and their creators are sociologically significant for the mediation and experience of foreign policy; and comics can generate and further research questions of importance to IR.
A first reason why comics should be brought into IR is that in terms of production, circulation and consumption, many comics carry the ‘mass audience’ and ‘fiction, entertainment, amusement’ connotations of popular culture (Rowley, 2015: 361–363) — whether popular culture is defined as a set of practices (Weldes, 2003: 6) or a category of artefacts — that engage explicitly with international politics. American superhero comics like Superman and Captain America have historically been published in large numbers and have dealt with the Second World War, the Cold War and the war on terror (Dittmer, 2005, 2013). As the most prominent figure of francophone comics, Hergé took the fearless reporter Tintin to the furthest corners of the globe, introducing children to places like the Balkans, Egypt, America, the Congo, Latin America and Tibet. The Adventures of Tintin, first published in French, have been translated into 50 languages, have sold more than 200 million copies and continuously sell more than 2 million copies per year. 1 The reasons why research on popular culture is important and how such research should be conducted are by now well established in IR. Providing analysis of a wide range of popular culture — movies, novels, television series and videogames — IR scholars have argued convincingly that it is important to study widely consumed cultural artefacts as these are crucial for the constitution of the social (Kiersey and Neumann, 2013; Neumann, 2001: 608; Neumann and Nexon, 2006; Robinson, 2015; Rowley and Weldes, 2012; Weber, 2006). Such artefacts may not come forth as explicit attempts to impact foreign policymaking or even as inputs to broader political debates, yet they rely upon and produce particular representations of international subjectivity and practices of significance for world politics, including, for example, diplomacy and military intervention.
The second reason for bringing comics into IR draws on the capacity of comics to offer critique of established political discourses or bring into analytical focus those who are not represented if international relations are defined exclusively as intergovernmental. As I have argued elsewhere, the study of marginal actors and discourses ‘becomes salient when analyzing where resistance and future rearticulations might occur’ and is particularly warranted when ‘governmental discourse has successfully hegemonized the political and media discourses’ (Hansen, 2006: 63). Looking to the history of comics, activists have adopted comics as a medium through which to communicate their causes. Over the past 15 years, comics journalism has been spearheaded as a genre by American-Maltese comics artist Joe Sacco, who describes his works as concerned with ‘those who seldom get a hearing’ as ‘The powerful are generally excellently served by the mainstream media or propaganda organs’ (Sacco, 2012: xiv). Marginalized discourses may also arise from human beings whose everyday experiences of world politics are narrated through the genre of graphic memoir (Enloe, 1989; Sylvester, 2013). Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, on childhood during and after the Iranian revolution in 1979, is a case in point.
The third reason for researching comics from an IR perspective concerns the political-sociological status of the medium and those who produce and use them. Approaching comics from this angle, there are two ways in which they connect with international relations. The first is through the observation that some comics artists have come to inhabit a position in the public sphere where they are constituted not only as producing aesthetically praised work, but also as capable of being public intellectuals or expert voices on foreign policy. The most prominent example in this respect is Art Spiegelman, whose Maus — a two-volume work that weaves the story of his parents’ personal experience of the Nazi Holocaust with his own difficulties of dealing with his ailing father — received a Pulitzer Prize, has been translated into more than 30 languages, has sold more than 3.1 million copies worldwide and has become the subject of lengthy academic analysis. 2 Spiegelman was on Time magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2005 and has been a central figure in debates following the Danish Cartoon Crisis in 2005 (Spiegelman, 2006) and the attacks on Charlie Hebdo in 2015. Another prominent ‘comics intellectual’, Marjane Satrapi, testified on Iranian election fraud to the European Parliament following the Iranian elections in 2009. 3 Theoretically, this raises the question of who become public voices of foreign policy authority, and how certain forms of knowledge become sociologically signified as having a status that may, in turn, allow someone to speak across a particular domain (Hansen, 2006; Lebow, 2007). The second political-sociological interface between comics and IR relates to the argument made particularly by IR feminist scholars that we should be concerned with the way that non-elites experience and practise international relations (Sylvester, 2013). At the level of everyday practice, comics have a long tradition of spurring community building among fans and followers. Korean War veterans, for example, commented on the accurateness of battle scenes on the ‘Combat Correspondence’ pages of magazines from the 1950s, thus finding a space to convey their experiences of war (Hilbish, 1999: 221). As the possibilities for interconnectivity have expanded dramatically with the advent of the Internet, there is now a wealth of sites through which opinions and experiences are shared (Sakamoto and Allen, 2007). Studying practices around comics might also reveal appropriations that negotiate the meaning of genre or particular comics. For instance, Nancy Rose Hunt (2002: 93, 96) traces how Tintin in the Congo — arguably a case of ‘colonial paternalism’ and ‘racist caricature’ — is turned into a ‘postcolonial joke’ in contemporary Zaire (on colonialism in The Adventures of Tintin, see also Frey, 2004).
The fourth reason for bringing comics into IR is that the medium may allow us to further our understanding of questions of general significance beyond the study of comics. Comics, in short, are not just objects needing study in IR, they might be put in the service of IR theorizing and analysis. The potential of comics resides not only in the medium itself, but also in the rich literature devoted to its study. Broadly viewed, the interdisciplinary field of comics studies includes: cultural-sociological studies drawing on Bourdieu that examine the genesis and development of comics as a form of expression with creatives, production processes, distributors and consumers/readers, with a particular focus on whether comics gain cultural legitimacy (Beaty, 2007; Gabilliet, 2010); semiotic studies of the specific sign systems through which comics speak (Groensteen, 2007); and studies that analyse one or a small number of comics through a thematic lens, for example, how personal trauma is mediated in autobiographical works (Chute, 2010; Gilmore, 2011). This article draws on all these bodies of work in presenting a theoretical framework for the analysis of comics from an IR perspective. This framework consist of three analytical components: a study of the cultural legitimacy of the medium of comics and how comics ‘practise’ authority and knowledge; a theorization of the sign system that comics speak through; and, drawing on intertextuality, an account of how comics should be read through a substantial and specific question of importance to IR and how works might be selected. The article thus also seeks to move beyond the specific medium of comics to further discussions in IR on how images ‘speak’ (Hansen, 2011a, 2015; Möller, 2007) by adding a theorization of drawing to an agenda that has so far been oriented towards the photographic and cinematic (for exceptions, see Aradau and Hill, 2013; Lisle, 2006; Sylvester, 2001; Weber, 2014). More generally, it engages with current debates over intertextuality and qualitative methodology taking place in IR (Aradau and Huysmans, 2014; Bleiker, 2015). Through a case study of the Bosnian War, the article joins IR discussions of how genocide can be represented and responsibility for countering it can be assigned, particularly in the case of Bosnia (Campbell, 1998; Lowe, 2014).
The article proceeds in the following way. The first section provides a definition of comics and an account of its distinctiveness compared with other cultural media. The second section presents the theoretical framework. The third section lays out the more specific IR theme engaged in this article (the representation of and responsibility for genocide) and an analysis of three comics on the Bosnian War: Hermann’s Sarajevo Tango; Enki Bilal’s Le Sommeil du Monstre/The Dormant Beast; and Christmas with Karadzic by Joe Sacco.
Introducing comics: Definitions and distinctions
There is general agreement within comics scholarship that what defines comics as a medium is the use of both text and drawn images and that there has to be more than one of the latter; the free-standing editorial cartoon is thus not a comic. There are examples of works recognized as comics that rely exclusively on visuals except for a title or caption, and while drawing is the main form of expression, photographs are occasionally incorporated. The format comics are published within include the comics magazines in the American tradition of Superman and Spiderman and the European album like Tintin and Asterix. Comics also come in the form of newspaper strips and stories brought by magazines like Harper’s (Sacco, 2012). They have appeared within ‘regular’ books (see, e.g., Hedges and Sacco, 2012; Turnipseed, 2003), and moving beyond paper, comics drawn in a digital format are now recognized as having distinct features (Eisner, 2008: 167–172). In terms of audience, comics have a history of being primarily intended for children and adolescents, but there are also genres that explicitly address adults, including war comics, pornography and, more recently, ‘graphic’ novels and memoirs.
Two main theoretical approaches dominate the study of comics: the semiotic and the cultural-sociological. Each is concerned with different aspects of comics, namely, the way comics operate as a distinct sign-system and the social, economic and cultural relations within which they are produced and consumed. Based in the semiotic tradition, Groensteen (2007: 18) defines comics as ‘interdependent images that, participating in a series, present the double characteristic of being separated … and which are plastically and semantically over-determined by the fact of their coexistence in praesentia’. Groensteen further adds that there has to be horizontally as well as vertically arranged images. Comics are composed primarily by drawn images, and ‘the technical unit, market and aesthetic reference’ for the comic is the page (Groensteen, 2007: 20). In principle, a comic can be as short as one page if it has horizontally and vertically aligned sequential images. Coming from a cultural-sociological perspective, Gabilliet (2010: xvi) suggests expanding this definition to include all narratives that are characterized by the possibility of interaction between the visual and the textual, where the visual ‘does not function simply as adjuvant to the written but rather as an indispensable component to the formulation of the narrative’. This expansion allows, for example, for the inclusion of the comic strip that only features horizontal alignment when first published. This is the format of many newspaper comics, such as Doonesbury and Peanuts, and as Gabilliet’s detailed historical analysis of American comics shows, such strips have played an important role in the genesis of the comics magazine (Gabilliet, 2010).
Comics have distinct cultural-sociological histories and semiotic traits that set them aside from other cultural media and fields of study already engaged by IR scholars, including literature, film, television and photography. There are three distinctive ways in which comics communicate. First, drawing is the primary form of expression for comics, which sets them apart from photography and film. Photography makes an imprint of something that existed, whereas comics operate through drawings that are always a mediation of ‘the real’, even when cast in a realistic style. Comics artists have the possibility of drawing imagined places and scenes, and leaving questions of what is legally permitted aside, the only limitation on representation is thus comics artists’ imagination. In contrast to cinema, where staging is budget-dependent, the setting of comics is in principle cost-neutral. The ability of comics to inspire movies, for example, in the science fiction genre, is thus well known. 4 Second, comics include both images and text, yet do not prioritize between the two, something that differentiates them from both novels and from illustrated stories, where drawings are secondary to the text. As will be laid out in more detail in the following, text in comics is itself visual. Third, comics consist of multiple images with a particular sequentiality. This sets them aside from photographs, which can operate in singularity. Both comics and film (cinematic and television) involve multiple images, but their sequentiality differs. Comics consist of free-standing images arranged in a horizontal and usually also in a vertical sequence. Even when comics move slowly, with detail and continuity from image to image, they ‘lack the illusionist power of the filmic’ and ‘their connections, far from producing a continuity that mimics reality, offer the reader a story that is full of holes, which appear as gaps in the meaning’ (Groensteen, 2007: 10). These gaps have significance for the way that comics can articulate political discourse.
Comics as international relations: A poststructuralist framework
Cultural-sociological and semiotic theories of comics provide important starting points for developing a theoretical framework specifically concerned with how comics relate to international relations: the cultural-sociological approach theorizes comics as a social institution; the semiotic approach theorizes the particular way that comics communicate through images and texts. However, neither of those approaches provides an account of how comics can be read as text–image constellations that articulate political discourse. This section presents a three-part theoretical framework specifically focused on this issue. The first part concerns comics as objects in the world; the second approaches comics as objects that speak about the world; and the third addresses how to compose an IR reading of comics. All three parts draw on comics scholarship, but as read through a poststructuralist understanding of practice, discourse and intertextuality.
Cultural legitimacy and comics practices
Understanding comics as artefacts that contribute to international relations requires a theorization of the authority and legitimacy that comics enjoy. For example, if comics are perceived as childish entertainment, they have a different status than if comic books are praised by critics and prominent academics as major intellectual and aesthetic achievements. Cultural-sociological analysis of comics emphasizes that the institutions of production, circulation and consumption are significant for understanding the societal status of the medium and that their historicity therefore needs to be considered. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, Gabilliet (2010: 248) theorizes comics as a ‘field’, that is, ‘a synchronic state of power relations between actors and institutions engaged in the search for all sorts of capital (economic, but also social and/or symbolic) around a common stake’. Any society includes political, scientific, religious and artistic fields, and comics as a (potential) form of culture has a tension-ridden relationship with the latter. An inclusion in the artistic field demands that the cultural form is not anonymous mass production, but carried out by artists with distinct styles and creativity and that the medium is granted cultural legitimacy. Cultural legitimacy is not something that simply derives from the object or medium itself, but is socially produced through and evidenced by there being critics, collectors and academics engaged with the cultural form.
Genre distinctions are crucial for the social status of a cultural artefact (Kiersey and Neumann, 2013: 5–6). For example, the successful introduction of ‘graphic’ terms such as ‘graphic novel’, ‘graphic narrative’ and ‘graphic memoir’ in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1990s was, in part, to signal a distance between this genre and the ‘children’s magazines’ — and ‘low culture’ more broadly — connotations that ‘comics’ held (Chute and DeKoven, 2006). The format through which an artefact is presented is also significant. The album in the Franco-Belgium tradition has a production quality that assigns comics a higher aesthetic status than the normal mode of publication in the American context, where book sizes are smaller and colour is less frequent. As a consequence, the two settings provide different possibilities for identifying comics that engage with international relations. In general, the choice in the US context is more constrained and dichotomized, with comics magazines in the superhero tradition, on the one hand, and the critically acclaimed, but commercially less successful, sub-genres of the ‘graphic’, including graphic novels, graphic memoir and graphic journalism, on the other.
Gabilliet (2010: 249) holds that, historically, comics ‘carry the stigma of a low-ranking position in the cultural hierarchy, regardless of the important “works” produced by these forms’. Yet, there are temporal and spatial nuances. In the French and Belgian cases, a shift takes place in the 1960s when ‘the intelligentsia and the middle class almost simultaneously elevate comics from the subordinate cultural position that they had long occupied’, whereas in the US, a comparable ‘consecration’ of the medium has not taken place (Gabilliet, 2010: 278). The difference in cultural legitimacy within the broader public sphere has also been mirrored in academic practice. In the context of France and Belgium, the academic study of comics has been firmly established since the 1970s, with Marxist, structuralist, psychoanalytical, semiotic and poststructuralist approaches all making contributions (Groensteen, 2007: 1–2). In the US, even within the study of popular culture, comics have received little attention and only very recently have key francophone books of comics scholarship been translated into English (Gabilliet, 2010: 297–299, 304–306). Given that IR is (still) a field dominated by anglophone texts and institutions, it is thus not surprising that comics have not yet been much addressed.
The Bourdieu-inspired cultural-sociological approach presented most explicitly by Gabilliet provides a valuable starting point for studying comics as artefacts that can contribute to international relations. Yet, it also has limitations as it is concerned with the legitimacy of comics at a very general societal level. For example, in Gabilliet’s analysis, the lower print-runs of ‘graphic’ works become a testimony to the genre’s inability to overcome comics’ stigma. This approach provides limited room for identifying and studying comics and ‘comics practitioners’ who challenge established genres and formats and who become capable of speaking with authority in public debates despite relatively low print-runs and/or sales. As noted earlier, IR scholars are concerned not only with the general status of a cultural form of expression, but also with particular instances that become publically recognized and/or provide critical accounts of international events and practices. To better account for the importance of such instances, we need to examine the publication, circulation and reception processes at the level of specific comics. Theoretically, this can be facilitated by introducing the poststructuralist-inspired understanding of practices as both general and specific (Hansen, 2011b). The importance of general practices, that is, habits, routine performances and institutionalized ‘doings’, have been brought out by scholars bringing Bourdieu and ‘the practice turn’ into IR (Adler and Pouliot, 2011; Adler-Nissen, 2008; Pouliot, 2008). Yet, there are also specific performances of practices that break with the habitual: ‘Even uncontested specific “routine” practices are crucial to the reproduction of general practices, and we should therefore keep the relationship between specific and general practices open and examine the (potential) gap between them’ (Hansen, 2011b: 281). For example, drawing a comic book is a performance of a specific practice that either asserts itself as a ‘routine’ general practice (how comics are generally drawn) or as a practice that challenges general practice. Thus, while comics are positioned within a social realm with general ‘routine’ practices performed by artists, publishers, journalists, reviewers, critics and readers, one should study how particular comics ‘practise’ in relation thereto.
Comics as text–image discourse
Theorizing comics as international relations also requires a consideration of the particular way in which comics use text and images to produce a narrative. In comics scholarship in the neo-semiotic tradition, the following terminology has been developed to describe the relationship between images and text. The most general term is that of the frame, which closes off and confers a particular form onto a space; perhaps the most easily identifiable frame is the panel, that is, ‘a portion of space isolated by blank spaces and enclosed by a frame that ensures its integrity’ (Groensteen, 2007: 25); the horizontal alignment of panels is a strip; the space between panels in a strip and between the last panel in a strip and the first panel in the strip below is the gutter; the margin is the space that runs from the border of panels and towards the edges of the page; and balloons are spaces used to present speech or thought. The page is the main unit of analysis and is described as a hyperframe. As many comics consist of more than one page, ‘pages situated opposite each other are dependent on a natural solidarity, and predisposed to speak to each other’ (Groensteen, 2007: 35). As Groensteen (2007: 30) puts it, the moves from the strip to the magazine and album indicate ‘systems of panel proliferation that are increasingly inclusive’.
The theorization of the specificity of comics discourse within neo-semiotic scholarship can be brought to bear on the question of whether images are able to ‘speak’ independently of words, a question that has been much discussed within research on visuality in IR (Bleiker, 2015; Hansen, 2011a, 2015; Möller, 2007). At one level, this is an ontological question, but the way it is answered has crucial analytical and methodological implications (Aradau and Huysmans, 2014; Bleiker, 2015). Möller (2007) has, for example, argued that images make such ambiguous utterances that it is impossible to assign them a securitizing status independently of spoken or written discourse. In contrast, drawing on the iconological tradition of Panofsky, Heck and Schlag (2013: 899) hold that the image has an ‘auto-activity’ and ‘the ability to affect, confirm and transform beliefs in relations to spectators and producers’. Positioned between these positions and adopting a poststructuralist theorization of language as relational and inherently unstable, I have argued that neither the word nor the image can speak in the absence of linkages and differentiations to other signs (words and/or images) (Hansen, 2011a). However, certain images — and words — can be repeatedly discursively constituted, thus assuming a position where they appear to be ‘speaking’ in and of themselves.
This debate has engaged ‘the image’ in general or singular, free-standing images in the form of photographs or cartoons, with a tendency to constitute the relationship between text and image as a binary. Turning to the medium of comics effectively deconstructs this binary in that comics are by definition both textual and visual. As noted earlier, in comics, drawings are not simply illustrations of text, but integral to the constitution of a narrative. Moreover, text not only conveys a written discourse, but is itself part of the visual. Choosing different sizes of font is a visual choice that operates through a particular epistemological register. For example, according to Eisner (2008: 26), ‘Typesetting does have a kind of inherent authority but it also has a “mechanical” effect that intrudes on the personality of freehand art’. The size of font to represent different degrees of urgency and insecurity — from ‘danger’ to ‘DANGER’ — is another visualization of text through which a comic may mobilize an emotional response and securitize. The placement of text is also visually significant, speech balloons can, for example, be used to create a connection between two panels, thus knitting a story together.
The fact that writing is, at least in the case of comics, itself visual recasts the debate on visuality in IR from that of whether images can speak independently of words, to that of how text and image constellations constitute meaning. Asking the how question allows us to trace how text and images work with and perhaps against each other without privileging either image or writing. To not assign privilege is to underline that there is an inherent instability, in that words and images are simultaneously part of the same comics narrative and two distinct utterances: the image can never be exhausted by the text and the text can never be exhausted by one image. This inherent instability connects theoretically with the poststructuralist understanding of identities as never fully stable: while subjects are constituted through discourse in the attempt to make their identities look natural and given, there is always a surplus of meaning that destabilizes closure and certainty (Der Derian and Shapiro, 1989; Hansen, 2006; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). Subjects are constituted as having ‘an’ identity, yet an individual subject can never fully represent that identity. When analysing comics, therefore, one should study how text and images are mobilized such that coherent identities are produced, for example, through representations of human subjects. However, one should also ask where and how such ‘cohesion’ is destabilized through specific characters — visually and textually — that challenge representations of homogeneous collective identity.
Theorizing comics as text–image discourse also draws attention to how meaning — and stability and instability — is produced not only through what is put into words and images, but also by what is not. As noted earlier, the virtual absence of limitations on what can be drawn makes comics a uniquely positioned medium through which to trace boundaries of representation. In the wake of the Nazi Holocaust, Theodore Adorno and the Frankfurt School asked if there were events of such profound suffering and evil — genocides, atrocities, torture — that they defied representation. If the answer was ‘yes’, then any attempt to represent them would inevitably trivialize their radical status (Ray, 2003). In IR, this question has been engaged in the context of art photography’s ability to communicate events like the Rwandan genocide and the war in Bosnia (Lisle, 2011; Möller, 2009; on comics on the Rwandan genocide, see Chaney, 2011). Comics’ strategies for engaging the limits to representation include the relaying of events through text only or through the use of blank or mono-coloured panels that visually indicate that something exists but cannot be shown.
Understanding how comics engage with the question of representation is also related to the status of the gutter. The role of the gutter is crucial because the medium of comics operates, as noted earlier, through panels that are separated from one another. Yet, even long comic books only have a limited number of panels through which to narrate compared to the medium of the novel or the film. The challenge is that for a comic to be sensible, the reader has to be able to see some continuity from one image to the next and something needs to be filled in to make that continuity. That ‘something’ has a crucial status as simultaneously absent and present: absent in that it is located in the gutter that separates panels, present in that it is required for us to string the panels meaningfully together. The gutter becomes the space that it is assumed that the reader can most easily fill in, but it might also be a demarcation of the limit to what can be represented. In the latter usage, the gutter is not something that connects reading, but where reading stops; it articulates where a visual-textual discourse can no longer fully account for what is or has taken place. As a consequence, we should ask not only what is depicted in images and stated through text, but what takes place between panels and frames.
Connecting comics: A practical intertextual approach
Approaching comics from an IR perspective, we should understand them as always intertextually situated (Der Derian and Shapiro, 1989; Weldes, 2001). The theory of intertextuality holds that texts simultaneously quote other texts, yet are also destabilized through such quotations (Aradau and Huysmans, 2014; Hansen, 2006). Quotations can be textual, but we might also think of imagery as providing ‘visual’ intertextuality. Given the medium of drawing, comics have a wide-ranging register through which to make intertextual ‘quotations’ to other texts and images. Such quotations can run through a factual epistemic register, but they might also be satirical, ironic or beautifying. From an IR perspective, the question is how comics make references to events and practices in world politics and how they engage with discourses already articulated within the broader public sphere.
Yet, intertextuality does not simply reside within the text itself; it is one that analysts constitute in a particular manner by selecting specific texts, by posing specific questions to these texts and by reading them in relation to one another. In short, the analyst makes a series of substantial and methodological choices when an intertextual study is carried out. Aradau and Huysmans’s analysis of the differences between Julia Kristeva’s theorization of intertextuality and the intertextual approach presented in Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War is instructive in this respect, particularly as concerns the selection of cases and texts (Aradau and Huysmans, 2014: 605–606; Hansen, 2006; Kristeva, 1980). For Kristeva, argue Aradau and Huysmans (2014: 606), ‘the world is in the first instance inside the text and not connected to institutional sources and political contestation’; this implies that ‘Any text can be used to analyse the non-foundational nature of meaning’. Security as Practice, in contrast, provides a set of specific methodological guidelines for which texts should be read based on ‘relative quantity of being referenced’ and ‘the institutional sources of the text’ (Aradau and Huysmans, 2014: 606). Aradau and Huysmans point out that intertextual theory can lead to different methodological choices, and that textual selections are driven by substantial — and different — research interests. Kristeva is a semiotician concerned with the sign system of language; Security as Practice is focused on the empirical study of foreign policy discourse.
Taking this to the study of comics as international relations, a third position located between Kristeva’s ‘any text’ and the quite specific guidelines of Security as Practice might be advised. Drawing on the general intertextual insight that there is not one given intertextual ‘pattern’ that arises from within texts themselves, the choice of question through which we assemble and read text becomes important. No comic generates by itself an IR question, nor is there ever only one question that can be asked to one or a body of comics. The choice of IR question can be driven by a range of theoretical and empirical research concerns, and these concerns should, in turn, be considered when specific comics are selected for analysis. To connect to Aradau and Huysmans’s analysis, contra a Kristeva-derived approach, selection criteria do seem warranted, yet contra the approach advocated in Security as Practice, these should be allowed to vary depending on the particular objective of the comics study. The choice of IR question and the choice of comics selection criteria should, in short, be matched.
Within this more flexible, yet theoretically driven, approach to ‘comics intertextuality’, the following selection criteria should be considered: the number of comics (intertextual analysis usually requires a thorough analysis of a smaller number of texts, yet one might also want to account for the dispersion of a phenomenon, which would require a larger body of comics); the impact on foreign policymaking and diplomacy (there are a few cases of comics in this category, though not many); circulation (comics as part of popular culture); comics as marginal, critical discourse; comics that are granted higher cultural legitimacy (through academic engagement and by critics); comics that break the general practices of comics production, circulation and reception; style and genre (similarity or variation); and the ability to further theorizing in IR. The discussion so far has been centred on an intertextual model where an IR question guides the selection of comics. One should note, though, that comics might also be part of ‘mixed-media’ studies including other forms of textual and visual expression.
A case study: The representation of genocide and the Bosnian War
The IR question chosen in the following case study is how warfare, atrocities and genocide should be responded to and by whom. The choice of this question is theoretically and pedagogically driven insofar as it facilitates an illustration of the theoretical framework laid out earlier emphasizing, in particular, the way in which comics negotiate limits to representation. To ease comparison between comics and their visual-textual discourses, three works dealing with the same event — the Bosnian War — have been selected: two are albums in the francophone tradition; one is a graphic journalism story first published in a leading independent American comics magazine. 5 Between them, they show specific practices that comply, as well as contrast with, routine comics practices. All three comic artists, Hermann, Enki Bilal and Joe Sacco, are highly ranked in terms of cultural legitimacy, yet there is variation in terms of the sub-genres and styles they appropriate. All engage with the two discourses that competed in Western media and policy circles during and after the Bosnian War. One discourse constituted ‘Bosnia’ as a ‘Balkan’ war driven by ancient hatreds that the international community neither could nor should intervene to address; the rival discourse held that a ‘genocide’ was taking place and that the international community had the responsibility for stopping it (Campbell, 1998; Hansen, 2006; Ó Tuathail, 1996). The Bosnian War began in the spring of 1992, with Serbian forces advancing rapidly, subjecting ethnically mixed and non-Serbian locations to ‘ethnic cleansing’. Adopting a ‘humanitarian responsibility’ position that sought to bridge between ‘genocide’ and ‘Balkan’ representations of the war, Western governments deployed the peacekeeping operation UNPROFOR and promoted a series of peace plans between 1992 and 1995. After the July 1995 massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the so-called ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) undertook Operation Deliberate Force and Richard Holbrooke negotiated a settlement with the three parties in Dayton, Ohio.
Sarajevo Tango
Sarajevo Tango might at first seem like a routine comics performance: the format is the standard Franco-Belgium album, published in colour, on glossy paper and the French-language version in hardcover by Belgium comics heavyweight Dupuis. It was published in nine languages with a print-run of 75,000 copies, including 600 in a deluxe edition. 6 These numbers testify to the prominent status of its creator, Hermann, one of the leading figures on the Belgian comics scene since the late 1960s. Hermann is the drawer of popular series, including the western Comanche and the action-adventure Bernard Prince, and the drawer and writer of the acclaimed The Towers of Bois-Maury and post-apocalyptic Jeremiah. Yet, Sarajevo Tango was in crucial respects an unusual comics performance. Published in the autumn of 1995, it opens with a page-long written ‘Comment’ dated 10 July, the day before the massacre at Srebrenica. Ambiguously part and not part of the album, such explanatory openings are unusual outside of the genres of graphic journalism and autobiography. Written in the summer of 1995, Hermann’s text provides a strong articulation of the genocide discourse that had been voiced by journalists, artists and part of Western media since 1992 (Hansen, 2006: 179–210). The international community — ‘whose leading representatives showed a genuine sympathy for the killers’ — is condemned by Hermann for its unwillingness to stop the Serbs from ‘repeated slaughter’ and running ‘concentration camps’. 7 This discourse becomes personalized as Hermann describes the fate of his agent in Sarajevo, Ervin Rustemagic, who got trapped in the Bosnian capital when the war began and whose mother was murdered outside her nursing home. As another unusual performance, Sarajevo Tango opens with a long list of politicians and representatives from international institutions and humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who have received copies of Sarajevo Tango. Through the opening text and the account of the targeted distribution of the comics, Hermann is ‘practising’ Sarajevo Tango as an uncommonly political album with an explicit intertextual connection to contemporary events.
Moving into the drawn pages, Sarajevo Tango illustrates aptly how subjectivities and atrocities can be represented through the medium of comics. Sarajevo Tango unfolds along two intersecting narratives: a fictive story and the Bosnian War. The fictive story follows Zvonko Duprez, a former member of the French Foreign Legion, who is being paid by a wealthy Swiss woman, Sylvia, to go to Sarajevo to retrieve her daughter, Maja, who has been kidnapped by her father, Sylvia’s ex-husband. As Zvonko runs through the snow on the book’s last pages carrying Maja to the safety of an armoured United Nations (UN) vehicle leaving the city, Maja loses her stuffed rabbit. Returning to retrieve it, Zvonko is shot dead, presumably by Serb snipers. While narrating this story, Sarajevo Tango uses recurring wordless panels to ‘quote’ events, institutions and scenery that, by 1995, would be familiar to Western readers: massacres at the Sarajevo marketplace, shelling of apartment buildings, snipers shooting civilians and cramped hospital quarters. In terms of narrative pace, the story of Zvonko is that of a sequence of events, whereas the story of the Bosnian War is one of repetition: of Serbian violence and the failure of the international community.
Focusing more closely on the constitution of the Serbian subject, Hermann adopts a number of techniques. The first is to use the medium of drawing to homogenize and radicalize. In Figure 1 (reproduced in colour in the online version of this article), we are looking directly at a row of square-faced, empty-eyed soldiers marching towards us. The words ‘First there was Vukovar.. then Dubrovnik …’ mark them as Serbian as these are the places of atrocities inflicted by Serbian troops during the Croatian War that preceded the one in Bosnia. This visual construction of identity effectively works to constitute Serbian Otherness through brutality, inhumanity and the lack of individuality as each soldier seems hard to distinguish from the next. The menacing appearance and absence of differentiation can also be seen as evoking a particular construction of military ‘hyper-masculinity’ as disciplined, yet lacking the humanity of a more ‘just warrior’ (Duncanson, 2009; Elshtain, 1987).
Hermann, Sarajevo Tango, p. 6.
Another technique used by Hermann is to ‘quote’ — or remediate — iconic photographs most strikingly in Figure 1 (Hansen, 2015; Hariman and Lucaites, 2007). The panel taking up the lower half is based on a photograph by Ron Haviv (see Figure 2; reproduced in colour in the online version of this article). The intended verisimilitude is so strong that Haviv’s copyright is noted underneath. Haviv’s iconic photo, into which Hermann had added ‘Then others’ in the top-left corner, is from the first days of war in Bosnia in early April 1992, from the town of Bijeljina, showing members of ‘Arkan’s’ elite unit ‘The Tigers’. 8 This invests Hermann’s drawing — and Sarajevo Tango — with an element of realism, for example, through the detailed reproduction of the clothing of the three victims and the body postures of the three soldiers. Yet, Hermann’s image elaborates on the original photo, heightening the degree of destruction with bombed-out houses and burning doors added and blood pouring into the foreground from a source outside the frame. 9 By 1995, when Sarajevo Tango came out, the use of Haviv’s image is temporally significant in dating the atrocities as having gone on for more than three years, thus underscoring that the international community has immorally stood by watching genocide unfold.
Ron Haviv/VII, ‘The Tigers and their victims during the attack on Bijeljina. Spring 1992’ ©.
The constitution of the Serbs as undifferentiated cyborg killers is one side of their subjectivity. The other side is that of an unruly, primitive, barbaric identity that lacks control, a theme personified in ‘Isteriko’, an unkempt, smoking, drinking ‘weekend Chetnik’ sniper who comes down from Belgrade on Fridays. In Figure 3 (reproduced in colour in the online version of this article), the temporal constitution of this subject is accomplished as the windshield mirror look at the drunken Serbian snipers shifts to a depiction of medieval barbarians, a decapitated head added to the scene. The move from seeing the group framed by the windshield mirror to a direct, unframed image leaves an ambiguity as to whether this is Zvonko’s subjective, personal ‘view’, or whether it is Hermann informing us of an essential Serbian subject whose origin goes back centuries. In the final panel, Dave, a journalist, asks Zvonko if ‘the barbarians disgust you?’ Here, the text is, in fact, superfluous as the representation of ‘barbarism’ has been established through the preceding panel. As a discourse on the Bosnian War, this resonates with the variation of the genocide discourse that situated Serbian responsibility with ancient identity rather than modern nationalism (Hansen, 2006: 186–189).
Hermann, Sarajevo Tango, p. 29.
The critique of the international community is visually enhanced by the use of satire, caricature and metaphors. As Hall (2014: 228) points out, those using satire ‘intend to make their audience angry, uncomfortable, discontented, restless or irritated with the subject of the satire’. The ‘warnings’ extended from the UN to the Bosnian Serbs are ridiculed as inconsequential ‘wagging fingers’ balloons that are mocked and easily shot down by the Serbs. This use of a visual metaphor within an otherwise realist style of drawing creates a vivid, absurd mixing of the real and the imagined. The visual construction of the impotence of the UN Secretary General is tied in with an embodied impotence ‘on the ground’ through the depiction of the UN peacekeepers, colloquially known as ‘blue helmets’, with blue caps akin to those worn by the children comics characters, the Smurfs. The complacency of Western citizens is also attacked through them being drawn with heads in the shapes of animals and footballs, passively consuming television news on the war and the absent international response.
Overall, the discourse articulated through Sarajevo Tango is consistent in assigning culpability to the Serbs and complicity to the international community. Yet, there is one reply from Isteriko that deconstructs the constitution of Serbian fighters as inhuman Others. On the question of why he became a sniper, Isteriko replies that ‘Those bloody Muslims! They beat up my sister.… And that was not the only thing they did! It took her several months to recover. I have never forgotten that.’ This allusion to Isteriko’s sister being raped literally hangs in the air in a speech balloon over the house never to reappear. There is no visualization of this instance of violence, a striking absence in the light of the numerous, graphic depictions in Sarajevo Tango. Thus, where Hermann draws the limit to representation is with a depiction of a (Serbian) woman being raped.
Le Sommeil du Monstre
The second comic, Le Sommeil du Monstre/The Dormant Beast by Enki Bilal, was published in 1998 and illustrates both a different set of comics practices and a different approach to the representation of the Bosnian War. Bilal has been a key figure in the French comics world since the 1970s, with legendary albums from the early 1980s being part of the move ‘toward a more mature, “literary” bande dessinée’ (Mazur and Danner, 2014: 133–135). 10 In terms of cultural legitimacy, Bilal is one of the ‘most consecrated’ on the French comics scene: his work is critically acclaimed by academics and critics for its artistic qualities and its ability to engage empathically and prophetically with important political issues (Beaty, 2007: 21, 26; Gabilliet, 2010: 281). It is also popularly received in terms of sales (Beaty, 2007: 56). Bilal’s status was evident in the practices surrounding the release of Le Sommeil du Monster: it was published simultaneously in 14 countries, the French edition with a print-run of 350,000, and a worldwide sale of 400,000 copies. 11 The album was nominated for the Best Album Prize at the Angoulême festival, the most prestigious comics festival in the world, and there were numerous interviews with Bilal in the French media that validated his artistic accomplishments, as well as his ability to speak with insight on Bosnia. Bilal’s ‘sublime graphics’ are achieved by changing from drawing at a table to painting standing up, thus working in a ‘painterly manner’ with acrylic, pastel, gouache and Chinese ink (Beaudoin et al., 1998). 12 The outcome is a very different visual style from ‘normal’ comics, as evidenced in Figure 4 (reproduced in colour in the online version of this article). In terms of cultural legitimacy, this reception situates Bilal’s work as comparable to that of ‘real’ painting and his practice as that of an artist. Through these interviews, Bilal’s extra-comic discourse enters into the public constitution of Le Sommeil du Monstre: Bilal consistently stresses that the wars of the former Yugoslavia began as past atrocities were being forgotten, and that memory is the key to avoid future wars. Living in Paris since the age of nine, Bilal’s authority to speak about Bosnia is linked to him being of Yugoslavian decent with a Czechoslovakian mother and a Bosnian father. In stark contrast to Sarajevo Tango, Bilal explains how he found it impossible to show the events of the war through pictures.
Bilal, Le Sommeil du Monstre, p. 8.
In terms of visual-textual discourse, Le Sommeil du Monstre is science fiction, featuring flying cars, new galaxies, androids, clones and human–animal morphing characters. As Krygier (2015) points out, the narrative includes so many intersecting themes (world order domination, art as destruction, religion, infectious animals) that the overall impression is complicated, if not confusing. Read as a comic on the Bosnian War, however, it is considerably more straightforward. Opening in a dystopic 2026 New York City, Le Sommeil du Monstre is structured around two temporal levels of narration: that of a story unfolding from 2026 and onwards; and that of the first 18 days in the life of Nike Hatzfeld, Amir Fazlagic and Leyla Mirkovic, three orphans brought into the hospital in bombed-out Sarajevo in 1993. Those 18 days are told by Nike as he recovers his memory, starting with day 18 and ending on day one. We learn that Nike’s father — and probably his mother — were shot by Amir’s father, a Serbian sniper. The day after, Amir is born and his Bosnian Muslim mother dies in childbirth, causing Amir’s father to commit suicide. Sharing the same bed, Nike swears to protect Amir and Leyla when he is 16 days old, and not even the discovery that his father was killed by Amir’s changes this. Having regained his memory of Amir and Leyla — they were separated when Nike was 27 days old — Nike embarks on a quest to see them reunited, a quest that continues across three additional albums, the three finally meeting at the end of the fourth and final album, Quatre?, published in 2007. 13 Le Sommeil du Monstre — and the tetralogy overall — provides a more complicated engagement with the Bosnian War than Sarajevo Tango’s construction of Serbs as perpetrators of genocide and the international community as complicit. As Nike recovers the memory of day two, he notes that ‘this damn war is awaking The Beast’, an amalgam of enmity and violence nurtured through history and a general human propensity for destruction, perhaps even evil. A second war in 2012 is also mentioned in passing, thus underscoring the volatility of the Dayton Peace Accord. Yet, the story that links Nike, Amir and Leyla is one of care and compassion, and of the human ability to overcome even deeply personal violent pasts.
In marked contrast to Sarajevo Tango, Le Sommeil du Monstre does not construct a Serbian or any other Other. In an opening passage, shown in Figure 4, the violence of assigning collective identity to human subjects is communicated through text and drawing. The question asked by the journalist in the cab leaving, as an afterthought, is whether Nike is a Serb, a Croat or a Muslim. Nike does not answer her — or the reader — but the question provokes a vibrant red curtain engulfing the departing cab and Nike, the onset of the red is so powerful that it even overflows into the gutter below the panel. Bilal’s use of red in this panel supports Guillaume et al.’s (2016: 50) argument that ‘colour can be an important visual modality, whereby the use of colour in security practices is not innocent’. As Mazur and Danner (2014: 134) point out, the use of red/blood is significant in other works of Bilal, not least The Hunting Party, where ‘the characters’ memories visually “bleed” into the present’. On this page of Le Sommeil du Monstre, the use of blood might be read in a similar vein: the question posed to Nike makes him recall the painful memory of the bloodletting that took place during the Bosnian War, as well as perhaps his own personal trauma of the double early loss of his parents and Amir and Leyla. Another reading is that the blood not (only) signifies Nike’s memory, but that the question itself is, in David Campbell’s (1998: 24–25) words, a ‘violent performance’ in that it suggests identities with fixed boundaries and beyond transformation.
As was pointed out by Bilal in interviews, Le Sommeil du Monstre does not provide graphic depictions of the Bosnian war, with one exception: the opening panel that accompanies Nike’s first text panel in which he speaks of looking up through the gaping holes in the hospital. This image has an abstract, womblike form and surface far removed from what an actual building would look like. As Leigh Gilmore (2011: 161) has argued, using Satrapi’s Persepolis as a case in point, the decision not to draw something that has been witnessed ‘expands the repertoire of trauma’s representation to omission, silence, and a depiction of the void’. The visual absence of the Bosnian war in Le Sommeil du Monstre provides a similar mediation of the limits of representation: the horror of the Bosnian War cannot be drawn, but can be recalled by the reader through the words that describe it. The textual account appears as black text panels using typeset font, which tell the story of the first 18 days of Nike’s life as he regains his memory (the panel in Figure 4 refers to day 17). These text panels are also used for making references to events, places, people and decisions familiar to observers of the Bosnian War, yet without assigning culpability. In the text panel of day nine for example, ‘I remember I heard the names of the camps’ followed by a listing that begins with those controlled by the Serbs but followed by Croatian and Bosnian ones, indicating that camps were run by all sides (p. 45). On the album’s last page, the text from the opening black panel of day 18 is repeated, but now in a hand-lettered rather than typeset font, visualizing that the two narrative temporalities have caught up: Nike has recovered the story of 1993 from his memory, and he has found one of the two other orphans: Leyla. As the search for Amir goes on in the next volumes, the font remains in hand lettering. Interestingly, Bilal has opted for the opposite usage of mechanical-emotional font as one would expect from Eisner’s account as the 1993 narrative (the mechanical font) is the most emotionally charged, positively through repeated expression of love and devotion to Amir and Leyla, and negatively by accounts of the brutality of the war. As a contribution to discourses on the Bosnian War, Le Sommeil du Monstre offers a post-genocide representation where atrocities are recognized, yet where the circle of violence can be overcome by the individual capacity for resisting the collective identity that one is being assigned.
Christmas with Karadzic
The final comic is Christmas with Karadzic by Joe Sacco, first available in 1997 in Zero Zero, a magazine published by Fantagraphic, ‘at the head of independent creator-driven production’ in the US in the 1990s (Gabilliet, 2010: 107). As such, this publication was in a niche market in terms of print-runs, but critically noted by the comics avant-garde. In 2005, Christmas with Karadzic was reprinted in the album War’s End: Profiles from Bosnia 1995–96 (Sacco, 2005). By that time, Sacco had published Palestine in a 2001 collected edition, with a foreword by Edward Said that signified legitimacy beyond comics circles. Sacco is, as noted earlier, now credited with having invented the genre of comics journalism and is the recipient of multiple awards, including a prestigious Eisner Award in 2010 for Footnotes in Gaza.
First in a series of works on Bosnia, Christmas with Karadzic provides an account of Sacco and two fellow journalists going in search of Radovan Karadzic during the Orthodox Christmas in January 1996, just months after the Dayton Accords had been concluded. At this point, Karadzic had been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague but no arrest warrant had been issued and Karadzic was still making occasional public appearances. Somewhat coincidentally stumbling on Karadzic as the latter shows up for church service in Pale, the unofficial capital of the Bosnian Serbs, the climax of the story is when Sacco realizes that he feels ‘nothing’ in the presence of Karadzic, a man he has despised for years. As such, Christmas with Karadzic raises the question of how responsibility for genocide can be embodied, depicted and responded to.
Christmas with Karadzic is a story of Sacco struggling with his inability to respond emotionally to the physical presence of ‘the Other’, in the form of Karadzic. Sacco conveys in a text panel what does not sink in as he watches Karadzic:
not the rapes, not the concentration camps, not the ‘cleansing’, not the throats slit and the bodies dropped into the Drina, not the prisoners machine-gunned in their thousands and dumped into mass graves, nor the boggling amount of other corpses and crimes that lie at this man’s feet. (p. 60)
Yet, these remain unseen; in fact, the only panel that provides a visual flashback to the war is a relatively peaceful one of tanks sitting on top of Mount Igman facing down at Sarajevo (p. 50). Sacco also abstains from the exaggerated style that he normally draws in for the depiction of Karadzic (see Figure 5). In short, by making Karadzic appear to the reader as ‘real’ as he did for Sacco and without the visualization of the atrocities for which he is held accountable, Sacco is negotiating the question of representation such that not only is he telling the story of what he felt like, he is also giving the reader the ability to undergo a similar process of seeing, experiencing and reflecting. As such, Sacco is reiterating Hannah Arendt’s (1964: 54) famous experience at the Eichmann trial, that ‘Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a “monster”’, that it might be impossible ever to have genocide and mass atrocities be embodied by any individual human being.
Sacco, Christmas with Karadzic, p. 61.
Sacco frequently inserts his own figure into the story, always drawing himself with blank glasses; thus, as Bartley (2008: 65) points out, he ‘portrays himself both visually and anecdotally as an ambiguous figure whose instinct for self-preservation and gratification sometimes outweighs his ability to be an ethical witness’. This ambiguity allows for two readings of Figure 5 — and Christmas with Karadzic more broadly. One reading is that of Western self-absorption as Sacco’s attempts to produce an emotional response through chanting Karadzic’s statement from when Sarajevo was under siege that ‘Sarajevans will not be counting the dead, they will be counting the living’ not only fails, but is visually and textually contrasted to the excitement of the three journalists. Moreover, in contrast to the puzzled men in the background, the journalists literally and metaphorically are able to walk out, of the frame, of Pale and of Bosnia all together. Another reading is that it is precisely by exposing their concern with getting the story, rather than the substance of the atrocities committed, that Sacco opens up for a self-reflexive critique of journalistic practices, and perhaps, more broadly, of the West and its waning interest in Bosnia after the conclusion of the Dayton Accords (Holland, 2014).
Conclusion
This article has made the call for why comics should become one of the mediums of expression that IR scholars engage. Given the virtual absence of theory on comics and international relations, the article has devoted space to the introduction of the medium of comics and its distinctiveness as a cultural form of expression, as well as to the elaboration of a theoretical framework composed by three components: cultural capital and comics practices; the particular text–image discourse of comics; and an intertextual approach to the composition of specific studies. This might not be the only way to theorize comics from an IR perspective. Those coming to comics from the perspective of international political economy might, for example, foreground the way in which the global comics market works through processes of translation and marketing and how this connects with the cultivation of cultural legitimacy and audience reception. Gabilliet’s (2010: 105) argument that the supply of Japanese comics was ‘the most dynamic segment of the [American] graphic novel market following their introduction in the middle of the 1980s’ could be the starting point for such studies.
There are also possibilities for further developing the theoretical framework presented earlier. One such development would be to consider the possibility that comics can enrich debates over how to bring the ‘silent subject’ into analytical and political view, which is central to critical IR scholarship. Dingli (2015: 730) argues that the question of silence has usually cast those being silent as suffering from a violence waiting to be represented by the theorist (Hansen, 2000). The understanding of the gutter as simultaneously absence and presence might provide a way to rethink the dichotomy between silence–speech at the heart of this debate (see also Parpart, 2010). Rather than either speaking or silent, the subject might be constituted as ambiguously situated as both speaking and not speaking at the same time, as both present and absent. Another theoretical and empirical line of research could move the cultural-sociological study beyond the US and Europe to the third centre for comics production, Japan/Korea, as well as to less known locales like Africa, where comics are also used and produced (Chaney, 2011; Hunt, 2002). At the semiotic level, we should raise the question of whether theories like Groensteen’s fully account for the way that comics communicate across the globe.
A final component that could be engaged theoretically and empirically is the study of how comics are received — or practised around — at the level of readers. Gabilliet (2010: 191) laconically notes that ‘Data concerning the historical readership of comic books are disparate, few in number, and inconsistent in quality’. Print-runs and sales numbers provide some measure of how comics meet readers, but suffer from the fact that print-runs might not equal sales, that publishers have an interest in presenting high sales numbers, that sold books might not be read and that the ‘pass-along circulation’ number is hard to estimate. Readership is also influenced by the availability of libraries and their acquisition and lending practices. With the digitization of paper comics and the development of the distinct medium of the digital comic, such numbers become even harder to identify. However, social media also opens up new practices that accentuate the international aspect of comics. The immediate circulation of images of Tintin crying on social media in response to the terrorist attacks in Brussels on 22 March 2016 can, for example, be understood not only as a testimony to this comics figure’s iconic status, but also as a mediation of a dramatic event at the non-elite level. 14 Such instances also take comics studies beyond the analysis of those very devoted readers that form fan communities.
Ending on a concrete note, there are multiple interfaces between comics and other IR themes and questions worthy of further pursuit. For instance, those analysing the role that trauma and stigma play in foreign policy (Adler-Nissen, 2014b; Edkins, 2003; Fierke, 2004) might note that there is substantial literature examining the mediation of personal and collective trauma in comics (Adams, 2008; Chute, 2010). Intertextual study could compare the representation of the 9/11 attacks in acclaimed comics produced by artists witnessing the attacks (e.g. Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers and Henrik Rehr’s Tuesday), the comics adaptation of the 604-page official investigation into the attacks on the World Trade Centre, The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, and IR intertextual studies of 9/11 such as Cynthia Weber’s (Britten, 2010; Jacobson and Colón, 2006; Weber, 2008). Recent works on diplomacy as an everyday practice resonate nicely with the winner of the 2013 Best Album Prize at Angoulême, Quai d’Orsay/Weapons of Mass Diplomacy by Antonin Baudry, who worked as a speech writer for the foreign minister of France Dominique de Villepin during the run-up to the Iraq War (Adler-Nissen, 2014a; Neumann, 2012). Situating the comics on Bosnia in a wider intertextual study, one might compare these to photography representations of the war, as well as attempts to commemorate its aftermath (Lisle, 2011; Lowe, 2014) . These are just examples in a closing call for reading comics in and for IR.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this article have been presented at seminars in the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, at the International Studies Association’s Annual Conference in New Orleans, 18–21 February 2015, and at the British International Studies Association’s Annual Conference in London, 16–19 June 2015. I wish to thank fellow panelists, discussants and audiences on those occasions for their valuable criticism and questions. I am particularly grateful to the following for their detailed feedback: the two anonymous reviewers, the editors of the European Journal of International Relations, Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Kristoffer Kjærgaard Christensen, Simone Molin Friis, Bertel Teilfeldt Hansen, Megan H. MacKenzie, Iver B. Neumann, Kitt Plinia Nielsen, Karen Lund Petersen, Nick Robinson, Alexei Tsinovoi, He Wei, Michael C. Williams, Anders Wivel and Marysia Zalewski, as well as to Katrine Emilie Andersen, Sari Youssef Saadi and Johan Spanner for comments and excellent research assistance.
Funding
Research for this article was carried out as part of the project on ‘Images and International Security’ funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research — Social Sciences, Grant number DFF — 1327-00056B.