Contexts of Violence in Comics (2020)
“Manifesting the vision of the editors [...], the authors provide important commentaries on the need to contextualise violence in the sphere of graphic narratives. [....] The inputs that emerge from this volume are valuable additions to the ongoing discourses in the field of Violence Studies.”
Contexts of Violence in Comics asks the reader to consider the ways in which violence and its representations may be enabled or restricted by the contexts in which they take place. It analyzes how structures and organising principles, be they cultural, historical, legal, political or spatial, might encourage, demand or prevent violence. It deals with the issue of scale: violence in the context of war versus violence in the context of an individual murder, and provides insights into the context of war and peace, ethnic and identity-based violence, as well as examining issues of justice and memory.
Contents
Contexts of Violence in Comics: Introduction (Ian Hague, Ian Horton & Nina Mickwitz)
History and Memory
1. Lynn Fotheringham: Doing justice to the past through the representation of violence: Three and ancient Sparta
2. Enrique del Rey Cabero: Comics do not forget: Historical memory and experiences of violence in the Spanish Civil War and early Francoism
3. Claire Gorrara: Legacies of War: Remembering Prisoner of War Experiences in French Comic Books about the Second World War
4. Mihaela Precup: "I think we’re maybe more or less safe here": Violence and Solidarity during the Lebanese Civil War in Zeina Abirached’s A Game for Swallows
War and Peace
5. Michael F. Scholz: In a Growing Violent Temper: The Swedish Comic Market during World War II
6. Malin Bergström: Will Eisner and the Art of War: Educational Comics in the American Defence Industry
Urban Conflict
7. Jörn Ahrens: Bringing the War Back Home: Reflecting Violence in Brian Wood’s DMZ
8. Dominic Davies: Infrastructural Violence: Urbicide, Public Space, and Postwar Reconstruction in Recent Lebanese Graphic Memoirs
Law, Justice and Censorship
9. Golnar Nabizadeh: The Lives of Others: Figuring Grievability and Justice in Contemporary Comics and Graphic Novels
10. Alex Link: Scales of Violence, Scales of Justice, and Nate Powell’s Any Empire
11. David Huxley: Oink: The Story of a Dangerously Funny Comic
Reviews