Representing Acts of Violence in Comics (2020)
“The varied theoretical approaches included here would moreover lend crucial nuance to courses in Political Science, History, or Peace and Global Studies [....] The editors have thoughtfully compiled a valuable tome which I hope inspires further treatments of the ubiquity of violence in this medium and the uses of its interactive dimension for sociopolitical critique.”
Representing Acts of Violence in Comics raises questions about depiction and the act of showing violence, and discusses the ways in which individual moments of violence develop, and are both represented and embodied in comics and graphic novels. Contributors consider the impact of gendered and sexual violence, and examine the ways in which violent acts can be rendered palatable (for example through humour) but also how comics can represent trauma and long lasting repercussions for both perpetrators and victims.
Contents
Representing Acts of Violence in Comics: Introduction (Nina Mickwitz, Ian Horton & Ian Hague)
Depiction
1. John Miers: Picturing National and personal acts of violence: modes of depiction in Barefoot Gen
2. Zanne Domoney-Lyttle: Bloody Murder in the Bible: Graphic Representations of the "First Murder" in Biblical Comics
3. Laurike in ‘t Veld: A Balancing Act: Didactic Spectacle in Jack Jackson’s "Nits Make Lice" and Slow Death Comix
Embodiment
4. Laura A. Pearson: Seeing (in) Red: "Thick" Violence in Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’s Red: A Haida Manga
5. Eszter Szép: Embodied Reading and Performing Vulnerability in Joe Sacco’s The Great War
Humour
6. Christopher J. Thompson: "Boiled or fried, Dennis?" Violence, play and narrative in ‘Dennis the Menace and Gnasher’
7. Nicola Streeten: Humour as a strategy in communicating sexual and domestic abuse of women in comics
Gendered and Sexual Violence
8. Maggie Gray: The risks of representation: making gender and violence visible in The Ballad of Halo Jones
9. Joseph Willis: Unmaking the Apocalypse: Pain, Violence, Torture, and Weaponizing the Black, Female Body
10. Jamie Brassett and Richard Reynolds: Killgrave, The Purple Man
Reviews