(Studies in Comics and Cartoons) Katherine Kelp-Stebbins - How Comics Travel - Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies-Ohio State University Press (2022)

H O W C O M I C S T R AV E L
S T U D I E S I N C O M I C S A N D C A RT O O N S
Jared Gardner, Charles Hatfield, and Rebecca Wanzo, Series Editors
HOW COMICS TRAVEL
Publication, Translation,
Radical Literacies
KATHERINE KELP-STEBBINS
T H E O H I O S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
COLUMBUS
Copyright © 2022 by The Ohio State University.
This edition licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
NoDerivs License.
The various characters, logos, and other trademarks appearing in this book are the
property of their respective owners and are presented here strictly for scholarly
analysis. No infringement is intended or should be implied.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kelp-Stebbins, Katherine Laurel, author.
Title: How comics travel : publication, translation, radical literacies / Katherine
Kelp-Stebbins.
Other titles: Studies in comics and cartoons.
Description: Columbus : The Ohio State University Press, [2022] | Series: Studies in
comics and cartoons | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary:
“How Comics Travel looks at Metro, Tintin, Persepolis, and more to argue that
modifications to graphic narratives between publication sites produce meaningful
negotiations of translation, form, and print cultures”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021046190 | ISBN 9780814215043 (cloth) | ISBN 0814215041 (cloth)
| ISBN 9780814281963 (ebook) | ISBN 0814281966 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Comic
books, strips, etc.—History and criticism. | Graphic novels—History and criticism.
| Comic books, strips, etc.—Publishing. | Comic books, strips, etc.—Translating. |
Literature and transnationalism.
Classification: LCC PN6714 .K45 2022 | DDC 741.5/9—dc23/eng/20211213
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046190
Cover design by Andrew Brozyna

Text composition by Stuart Rodriguez
Text composed in Palatino Linotype
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992.
For Constance, who taught me to break codes, and for
Barbara, who taught me to break barriers
C O N T E N T S
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
INTRODUCTION Graphic Positioning Systems 1
CHAPTER 1 The Adventures of Three Readers in the

World of Tintin 22
CHAPTER 2 Graphic Disorientations: Metro and Translation 69
CHAPTER 3 Persepolis and the Cultural Currency of the

Graphic Novel 104
CHAPTER 4 Border Thinking and Decolonial Mapping in

Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’s Haida Manga 148
CHAPTER 5 Samandal and Translational Transnationalism 189
Bibliography 221
Index 245
I L L U S T R AT I O N S
FIGURE 1.1 Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics 28
FIGURE 1.2 Charles Burns, Sugar Skull 63
FIGURE 1.3 Charles Burns, Johnny 23 65
FIGURE 2.1 Joe Sacco, Palestine 72
FIGURE 2.2 Comparison of panel from Arabic, English, German,

Italian, and US Metros 88
FIGURE 2.3 Magdy El Shafee, Metro 90
FIGURE 2.4 Chip Rossetti trans., Metro 92
FIGURE 2.5 Ernesto Pagano trans., Metro; and Iskandar Ahmad

Abdalla and Stefan Winkler, trans. 94
FIGURE 2.6 Magdy El Shafee, Metro 97
FIGURE 2.7 Chip Rossetti trans., Metro 99
FIGURE 3.1 Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 1 and Satrapi, Persepolis:

The Story of a Childhood 125
xi
xii • ILLUSTRATIONS
FIGURE 3.2 Covers of Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 1, 2, 3 and 4 128
FIGURE 3.3 Cover of Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a

Childhood 129
FIGURE 4.1 Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Carpe Fin 168
FIGURE 4.2 Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, “In the Gutter” 176
FIGURE 4.3 Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Red: A Haida Manga,

full mural 178–79
FIGURE 4.4 Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Red: A Haida Manga,

page 83 182
FIGURE 5.1 Translation of Mazen Kerbaj, “Suspended Time Vol.

1: The Family Tree” 211
FIGURE 5.2 Assorted “flippy pages” from Samandal 216

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
The writing of How Comics Travel took place on Indigenous land.

Edward Said reminds us that culture and imperialism are, at base,
always questions of land, “the actual geographical possession of
land” (Culture 78). Dispossession of land and displacement from land
are processes that use “narratives to dispel contradictory memories
and to occlude violence” (132). A work about how books travel across
and between different places should acknowledge the peoples histor-
ically displaced in discussions of land. I began writing this book on
the villages and unceded lands of the Chumash people. Additional
writing and research was undertaken on Kalapuya Ilihi, the tradi-
tional Indigenous homeland of the Kalapuya people. Wherever in the
world this book finds you, know that the words in these pages were
formed on Indigenous land.
I am grateful for the institutional support that I have received.
This book was generously aided by a University of Oregon College
of Arts and Sciences Humanities and Creative Arts Summer Stipend.
Additional assistance was provided by the Oregon Humanities Cen-
ter in the form of a book subvention.
xiii
xiv • A cknowledgments
Some sections from chapter 3 were previously published in

“Global Comics: Two Women’s Texts and a Critique of Cultural
Imperialism,” Feminist Media Histories, 4.3 (2018): 135–56. I acknowl-
edge the University of California Press for their permission to use
this material.
So many brilliant people have given time and care to this project.
Rita Raley, Bishnupriya Ghosh, and Maurizia Boscagli all encouraged
me to write about comics, and it has made all the difference. Lindsay
Thomas, Alison Schifani, Mike Grafals, and Alston D’Silva offered
advice and commentary that helped shape and reshape my research.
Andy Warner suggested that I teach Mazen Kerbaj and reoriented my
research for the better. James Cox gifted me Red, which became a key
for how I conceptualize travel and graphic narrative.
My colleagues at the University of Oregon have been patient, gra-
cious, and insightful in equal measure. I am grateful to Karen Ford,
Tara Fickle, David Vazquez, and Fabienne Moore, who all gave won-
derful feedback on the project. Deserving his own place of recogni-
tion, festooned with loving admiration, Michael Allan not only read
and responded to the entire work, he has become family in Eugene.
I have had the great fortune to teach comics at three institutions
at graduate and undergraduate levels. The insights and inquiries that
my students have brought to this still-recent topic of academic study
have tremendously enhanced my own scholarship.
Among the translation studies and comics studies communities, I
am thankful for Andréa Gilroy, Emily Taylor, Anne Coldiron, Emmy
Waldman, Hillary Chute, Dominic Davies, Haya Alfaran, and the
many others who provided me space, opportunity, and time to speak
some of these words aloud and be met by helpful rejoinders.
Of all the supportive scholars in Comics Studies, I am especially
grateful to Susan Kirtley for sharing her wisdom and experience. As
a woman in a male-dominated field, I would like to thank men who
make this field more inclusive, and who treated my project like a nec-
essary contribution to Comics Studies. Rocco Versaci and Charles
Hatfield are two kind and sagacious comics scholars. Frederick Luis
Aldama is a role model, and I count myself lucky that he has encour-
aged my work.
Editors, agents, and artists conversed with me and made my
scholarship richer with their knowledge. To Edward Gauvin and
Chip Rossetti, in the spirit of traduttore traditore: I am honored to rep-
resent your words, and if I fail them, the fault is mine. Thank you
A cknowledgments • xv
for making comics more accessible. Gary Groth took the time to
answer questions about my “awfully arcane research project,” and
I am thankful for his assistance and for the incredible comics he
has brought into the world. Thank you also to Jacq Cohen for more
insights into Fantagraphics. This is not a book about superheroes, but
if there is a superhero in How Comics Travel, it is Anjali Singh, whose
conviction that there is an audience for comics about women of color
inspires and motivates my research. Thank you to Leila Abdelrazaq,
to Joe Sacco, and to Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas. I am in awe not only
of your art but of the ways that your lives shape your creativity, and
of the drive for justice that underpins your creation.
More colleagues and friends have generously read through por-
tions of this book and given me insight on making my way through
some of its thornier concepts. Thank you to Eion Lys, Liz Thaler, and
David Haan. I offer endless gratitude to Kacie Wills and Leila Estes,
who are both my most trusted readers and my favorite people to
write with.
Writing a book can be a lonely and maddening process. With-
out Jessie Goodell and Tien-Tien Yu, as well as Erin Whitaker, Shan-
non Micheel, Leah Kirkland, and Sally Dougherty listening to me
work through my ideas while running so many thousands of miles,
I would be far less sane. Without Joe Henderson and Rick Putnam
coaching me, I wouldn’t have run all those miles. Thank you to Neal
Benson and Alyse Stone for finding me a place to write that is full of
love. And thank you to Laura and Mike Allred for making me part of
the comics framily and encouraging me to sing when I couldn’t write.
I am grateful for my editor, Ana Maria Jimenez-Moreno, and
for her patient and attentive support. With tremendous love, I offer
thanks to my family, Barbara Stebbins, Larry Kelp, and Emma Kelp-
Stebbins, for all of your benevolent responses and immeasurable
help. Finally, thank you to Ben Saunders for making my career pos-
sible. And to Marcel Brousseau for making my life possible.
I N T R O D U C T I O N
GRAPHIC POSITIONING
SYSTEMS
Is the World of World Literature the World of

World Comics?
The world is being redrawn. Lines that divide places and pages
into discrete units likewise articulate relations of proximity and dis-
tance. Whether it be where the panel meets the gutter or where two
nations rub against each other, a border is a meeting place. Yet, in
an age of global pandemic, climate collapse, and massive human
displacement, conventional epistemologies of place are in urgent
need of new methodologies. Enter comics. This book contends that
comics provide alternative mapping tools and methods for reading
the world in its mutability. Instead of reading comics for how they
bridge cultures and offer seemingly universal meanings, I propose a
new methodological practice of reading transnational comics for dif-
ference. Reading for difference means not only looking at how comics
are successfully translated both within and between national contexts
but also examining points of disorientation and disjuncture among
source and target texts. This approach, I contend, offers anticolo-
1
2 • I ntroduction
nial, feminist, antiracist literacies that help us redraw the world as a

means of reworlding.
How Comics Travel explores the challenges and benefits of think-
ing through the idea of world comics as objects of analysis and as
tools for epistemological intervention. This project reflects a burgeon-
ing interest in framing and defining comics as a global medium. As a
testament to such efforts, in 2018 no less an authority than The Cam-
bridge History of the Graphic Novel avowed that “at the time of publi-
cation, the idea of a world literature for the graphic novel is gaining
momentum” (1). What would a world literature for the graphic novel
look like? Rather than presuming the givenness of both world litera-
ture and world comics, I propose that we draw from long-standing
debates in world literary studies to read world comics according to
1
their differences from—as well as similarities to—world literature.
As a paradigm, world literature encourages readers to feel connected
to other locations and cultures and to ignore the commercial practices
that grant them or deny them access to foreign texts. Comics, on the
other hand, are acutely indicative of the uneven flows of globaliza-
tion as well as the fluctuating business of international comics. This
book explores how divergent cultures of comics production, transla-
tion, reading, and circulation locate readers according to differential
frameworks of expectation, understanding, commercial interests, and
publishing industries.
The historical context for this book is based in market logics and
academic critique. A marked increase in the production of graphic
novels—as indicated by the existence of an entire edited Cambridge
volume on their history—has led to overlap between spaces of com-
ics and those of text-only books. In the US, literary publishers such as
Pantheon and Norton have added many graphic novels to their lists
in the last decade, and bookstores have also taken to shelving image-
texts alongside text-texts. However, the commercial proximity and
shared print form of the book should not conceal the visual, formal,
and economic distinctions between comics and literature, especially
in a worldly cast. As Michael Allan asserts, world literature “shares
in common a normative definition of literature linked to a particular
semiotic ideology” (7); that is, world literature assumes both a defi-
nite set of objects and a way of engaging them. Without discounting
nuanced work that so many of the literary theorists cited in this book
1. Cf. Chute, “Comics as Literature?”; Hatfield; Versaci.

G raphic P ositioning S ystems • 3
undertake to destabilize the boundaries of the literary and to suggest

new reading practices, the binary of literacy and illiteracy remains.
2
Comics, often satirized as indicators of illiteracy, are not so cohesive
in their anatomy, literacies, or milieu. Putting literary and transla-
tion theorists such as Emily Apter, Aamir Mufti, Rebecca Walkowitz,
Pheng Cheah, and Rey Chow into conversation with comics theorists
such as Thierry Groensteen, Bart Beaty, Rebecca Wanzo, Ann Miller,
Hillary Chute, and Frederick Aldama, I argue that global comics both
complements and challenges the precepts of world literature along
three areas of divergence: translation, form, and print cultures.
Translation
As verbal-visual media, comics present new possibilities for the-

orizing translation. Scholars have drawn attention to the unac-
3
knowledged role that translation plays in world literature, but its
continued efficacy remains indispensable for expanding readerships
beyond linguistic and national boundaries. Comics—as a hybrid
medium—undergoes translation in ways that are incomparable to
any other medium, even film, the closest cognate. Although works in
translation account for only 3 percent of the literary production in the
US, the share of comics in translation is closer to 30 percent. The case
studies I provide demonstrate how words and images in comics cre-
ate translational crises and opportunities for reading with a greater
awareness of cultural difference. Comics such as Magdy El Shafee’s
Metro, which I discuss in chapter 2, force a translator to choose how
much of the Arabic text to preserve and how to reformat panels and
pages according to the orientation of right-to-left Arabic text and left-
to-right English, Italian, or German text. Furthermore, although many
comics scholars contend that images are universal in their meaning,
the images in comics, which are sometimes altered in translation but
2. Or outright condemned; see Hatfield 34–36.

3. See Venuti, “World Literature” 180: “World literature cannot be conceptual-
ized apart from translation”; Apter, Against World Literature 3: “many recent efforts
to revive World Literature rely on a translatability assumption”; Spivak’s indictment
of “the arrogance of the cartographic reading of world lit. in translation” (Death of
a Discipline 73); as well as Casanova’s succinctly pragmatic “translation, despite the
inevitable misunderstandings to which it gives rise, is one of the principal means by
which texts circulate in the literary world” (World Republic of Letters xiii).
4 • I ntroduction
4
rarely completely redrawn, are always prone to the cultural specific-
ity of visual interpretation. Panels in comics are thus sites of encoun-
ter between translatable and untranslatable registers.
Form
The concept of global comics also demands a rethinking of the cul-

tural relations underlying form. The novel, which serves a key role
in the development of world literature, maintains a formal monopoly
in publication circuits. As a relatively recent development, the graphic
novel represents a move toward formal standardization of comics that
is both heterogeneous in its deployment—not all comics everywhere
are published as graphic novels—and an inexact response to formal
heterogeneity of comics—some comics are more or less adaptable to
5
the graphic novel format. Comics in the US have a vast array of for-
mal incarnations—strips, floppies, webcomics, graphic novels—while
mainstream bandes dessinées in francophone countries are uniformly
published in album format with distinctive formal standards (hard-
cover and larger trim sizes than comic books). As detailed in chapter
1, although Hergé’s Tintin albums are some of the most popular com-
ics worldwide, their lack of success in the US is often attributed to the
6
unfamiliar, large shape these books presented for American readers.
However, when smaller-sized versions were printed by Little, Brown
& Co., readers complained that the art was ruined by the resizing.
Given the importance of shape and size to the narrative and artis-
tic content of comics, these questions of form and the relationships
between formal traditions in different locations go well beyond liter-
ary trends like “the aesthetics of bookishness.” As described by Jes-
sica Pressman, many literary texts in the twenty-first century indicate
a renewed attention to the book as an art object as a way to respond
to the speculative “death of the book” in the digital age. Yet even
4. Although translations under copyright will generally preserve the artwork,

there are numerous cases of artists changing or revising their own work for transla-
tion or even reproduction, as well as a large community of fans and entrepreneurs
who practice different types of piracy as well as scanlation. See also Reyns-Chikuma.
5. See Lefèvre, “Importance of Being ‘Published’”; Rota, “Aspects of Adapta-
tion”; and Gabilliet, “Disappointing Crossing.”
6. An article in the New York Times referred to the books as “oversize comic
books” (Elsworth), in a neat bit of intercultural translation.
the examples Pressman describes, full of images or engaging visual

elements, do not approach the level of inseparability between form
and content that comics possess as a spatially determined and con-
strained medium. Thus, when considering how comics travel across
national borders, we must grapple with formal translation: Will read-
ers disregard a foreign-looking format like the albums of Tintin? Will
they see a slim, two-volume graphic novel and recognize the alterna-
tive French comics volumes, Persepolis, according to a domestic for-
mal register established by Art Spiegelman’s Maus? As I describe in
chapter 3, this formal translation was undertaken by US publisher
Pantheon, which not only published both Maus and Persepolis for US
readers but also changed the number of volumes of Persepolis from
four, as it had been printed in France, to two, as Maus had been
printed in the US—irrevocably altering the narrative divisions in the
two versions of Persepolis, while brokering its formal translation.
Print Cultures
Global comics also trace new circulation models for print cul-
tures. Unlike literary projects such as Goethe’s Weltliteratur (world
7
literature), comics do not always reflect national traditions and divi-
sions, owing both to comics’ association with lowbrow culture in
many areas and its transnational origins. Tintin comics were inspired
by comic strips from the US, republished in Mexican newspapers,
and brought back to Belgium by Léon Degrelle, a Belgian reporter
covering the Cristero War (Assouline 17). Alternately, when Metro
was originally published in Egypt, Hosni Mubarak’s government
banned it for obscene content, and its author—himself a Libyan émi-
gré—was arrested. The ban on Metro became a selling point for its
Italian and German translations and contributed to its publicity in
the US. These examples demonstrate the variegated peregrinations
7. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s invocation of a “universal world literature”

takes the nation-state as its a priori condition of possibility, even while advocating
for the bridging of national divisions. As quoted at the outset of Franco Moretti’s
“Conjectures on World Literature,” Goethe’s statement that “national literature
doesn’t mean much: the age of world literature is beginning” positions national
literature as textually and historically anterior to world literature, just as Marx
and Engels write “from the many national and local literatures, a world literature
arises” (54).
6 • I ntroduction
of comics, the role of transnational economies in comics distribution

and production, and the diverse cultural and ideological implications
of the multimodal medium. Because comics employ visual as well as
verbal idioms, their national origins or boundaries differ from other
text-based media: thus, Tintin transported the aesthetic and narra-
tive patterns of US strips like George McManus’s Bringing Up Father
into the Franco-Belgian marketplace, generating the singularly Euro-
pean ligne claire style—a style named by Dutch artist Joost Swarte
decades after its development in Belgium. On the other hand, Metro
was banned in Egypt precisely because of its importation of West-
ern visual storytelling and use of “offensive images.” Between these
two examples, a counterpoint of differential reading suggests that
corollary to a so-called borderless world are diasporic, colonial, post
colonial, and decolonial worlds of fragmentation, displacement, and
stoppage (Miyoshi).
Differences in the World
The recognition of the differences between literature and comics fur-

nishes an intellectually fecund space for imagining global media. A
welter of recent theoretical revisions of world literature indicate pos-
sible stakes for world comics—cultural imperialism, neoliberalism,
target optics—as well as potential models of literacy—contrapuntal
reading, planetarity, symptomatic reading, distant reading, the world
8
republic of letters, untranslatability, texts born translated. Most
pressingly, an ethical approach to world comics must resist the abun-
9
dance of seductive testaments to the universality of comics. Such
generalizations are understandable as endorsements of the impor-
tance and range of a frequently maligned, juridically challenged, and
financially tenuous medium. Yet such assertions are detrimental to
the study and appreciation of comics through their obfuscation of
its heterogeneity. If world comics can develop as a way of reading
for difference, its scope will be far greater and richer than a reading
program invested in seeing sameness always and everywhere. Rather
8. See Said’s Culture and Imperialism; Spivak’s Death of a Discipline; Chow’s The
Age of the World Target; Moretti’s “Conjectures” and “World-Systems Analysis”;
Casanova’s World Republic of Letters and “Literature as a World”; Apter’s Against
World Literature; and Walkowitz’s Born Translated.
9. E.g., Elder. See Neil Cohn’s Who Understands Comics? for a nuanced critique
of assumptions regarding the universality of comics.
than insisting that comics are intelligible identically everywhere,

world comics can insist on the points of (un)translatability, cultural
specificity, formal or commercial difference, and map out a wider,
more diverse, and more democratic terrain.
Reading for difference is not limited to the differences between
or among comics; nor does it resolve solely along nationally limned
comparative lines. Rather, as Chow stipulates in her conception of a
more just comparative literature: “To do its job properly, this kind of
comparative practice must be willing to abandon inclusionary taxon-
omizing habits and ready to interpret cultural narratives symptom-
atically, as fragments that bear clues—often indirect, perverse, and
prejudiced—to a history of ideological coercions and exclusions” (85).
Thus, the readings that accompany various chapters frequently seek
out disjunctures and erasures in the comics they examine. For exam-
ple, the approach to world comics enacted in this book does exam-
ine Metro in terms of its unique history and the sites of friction and
untranslatability that the text provides in its various forms and trans-
national movements. The book does not take Metro as synecdoche for
Egyptian comics in toto, as distinct from and opposed to, say, French
bande dessinée.
Differences inhere not only between national traditions but also
within traditions that may be national, but also international, or
transnational. Reading for difference requires the “border thinking”
espoused by Walter Mignolo, which insists on critically engaging the
logic of coloniality underpinning the project of modernity (Local His-
10
tories ix) so that a study of world comics may initiate productive
studies of the sites of difference in its own construction, seeking lim-
its and points of contention over the very terms world and comics. As
Shane Denson contends:
The act of reading a graphic narrative involves the reader in a pro-

cess of articulation, which prior to (and as a condition of) “expres-
sion” also implies both a drawing of distinctions between parts and,
simultaneously, an act of joining them together—that is, a double
determination of borders, both as points of contact and of separa-
tion. (271)
10. Mignolo describes border thinking as “the necessary epistemology to delink

and decolonize knowledge and, in the process, to build decolonial local histories,
restoring the dignity that the Western idea of universal history took away from so
many people” (Local Histories x).
8 • I ntroduction
Is Metro an Egyptian comic because it was originally published in

Egypt, or is it a transnational comic because it has spent more time
in print elsewhere? Should we study Metro according to traditions of
African comics, or should it be grouped with Arabic-language com-
ics to distinguish it from francophone or other linguistic groups of
African comics? These questions about the “world” of world com-
ics denote the sites of difference that expand its historical and geo-
graphic points of inquiry.
To conceptualize world comics as a way to contest hegemonic and
colonial worlding is to be mindful of the historical situation of world
literature, which has, in Aamir Mufti’s description,
functioned from the very beginning as a border regime, a system for

the regulation of movement, rather than as a set of literary relations
beyond or without borders. Put somewhat differently, we might say
that the cultural sphere now generally identified as world literature,
far from being a seamless and traversable space, has in fact been
from the beginning a regime of enforced mobility and therefore of
immobility as well. (9)
With Mufti’s account looming, how might we describe comics with-

out circumscribing them within immobile boundaries and producing
a catalog of nation- and language-based examples? Why not study
world contours through a methodology that considers seemingly het-
erogeneous events in the historical weft of graphic narrative?
I see in the profusion of titles by fellow travelers along this dis-
orienting terrain attention to the kinds of differences that determine
how comics might be located in the world. Aldama’s forthcoming
World Comics: The Basics uses a world systems approach to consider
how forms and works derived in one country flow into global sys-
tems of exchange. Dan Mazur and Alexander Danner’s Comics: A
Global History, 1968 to the Present highlights points of intersection
among its three main areas—Europe, Japan, and the US. Dominic
Davies’s Urban Comics: Infrastructure and the Global City in Contem-
porary Graphic Narratives hews closer to an area studies approach
informed by a focus on urban centers. The collected volumes Trans-
national Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads and
Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities employ transnational and
encounter-based modes of approaching their objects. Further, Nina
Mickwitz, Candida Rifkind with Davies, and Nhora Lucia Serrano,
among others, have all produced book-length scholarship that con-

sider comics in relation to refugee and migrant narratives and posi-
tionalities. Comics may be global, urban, transnational, postcolonial,
and displaced, and simultaneously all of the above.
In this work, I employ all these terms to indicate that comics are
above all worldly insofar as they describe practices of reading and
seeing that simultaneously make and remake the world. Comics are
also global, as they circulate through economic systems that send
texts drawn in Philadelphia to be printed in China before being sold
in France, or through platforms that circulate scans through data-
bases originating in and routed through divergent nodes along net-
11
works of reproductions of reproductions. Between the oft-theorized
antipodes of world and globe, I frame comics as unconfined within
the conditions of either, but rather, in their medial hybridity and cul-
tural heterogeneity, as a means for destabilizing the borders of both.
Differences in the Comics
Prevailing wisdom assumes that comics, by their formal nature, facil-

itate a universal semiotics united around transcultural and uncompli-
cated imagery. For instance, Derek Parker Royal asserts that “comics,
by necessity, employ stereotypes as a kind of shorthand to communi-
cate quickly and succinctly” and then avows that “given its reliance
on symbols and iconography, comic art speaks in a language that is
accessible to a wide audience, transcending many of the national, cul-
tural, and linguistic boundaries imposed by other media and giving
it a reach that is as democratic as it is immediate” (“Foreword” ix).
Yet the idea of a democratic stereotype is a contradiction in terms
that conceals the struggles for representation enacted in media flows.
Rebecca Wanzo analyzes how stereotypes are used to uphold racial
inequalities and to construct “black bodies as lesser human beings
and citizens” (20–21). By shifting the critical focus from examining
the universality of comics to questioning how comics enact resis-
tances to universality—sites of untranslatability—I demonstrate that
the transnational reach of stereotypes does not indicate democracy
but instead indexes the production, policing, and dissemination
11. For brief summaries of a long debate: Cheah, “World Against Globe:” and
What Is a World; Ganguly 19–24; Mignolo, Local Histories 39–43.
10 • I ntroduction
of local knowledges as global designs. Rather than a transcendent

shorthand, a stereotype marks a struggle for representation, wherein
certain groups are empowered with the ability to use and properly
understand the knowledge that the stereotype represents.
Comics index struggles for representation not only in their con-
tent but also in their formal existence in the world. This book does
not presume the fixity of discrete objects termed comics in anglo-
phone areas, bandes dessinées in francophone regions, manga in
Japanese-speaking regions, manhwa in Korean-speaking regions,
manhua (or even lianhuanhua) in Sinophone areas, fumetti in Italian,
historietas or tebeos in Spanish, and other variations (komiks, com-
icbunch, etc.) (Groensteen, “Definitions” 94–96). As literally trans-
lated, these drawn strips, inappropriate images, puffs of smoke, little
[drawn] stories, and “I see you”s together map out a world system
of “untranslatables,” as Apter describes “a translational humanities
whose fault-lines traverse the cultural subdivisions of nation or ‘for-
eign’ language, while coalescing around hubs of irreducible singu-
larity” (“Untranslatables” 584). Yet these markers of local histories
concurrently gesture toward the flip side of pluralistic terminology:
Apter allows that while “planetary inclusion” is often the goal for
lexical diversification, it can “paradoxically reinforce dependence
on a national/ethnic nominalism that gives rise to new exclusions”
(581). So Thierry Groensteen remarks how the “generalized semantic
imprecision in the lexical field of American comics” was “exported to
the whole world” under the terms “strip” and “comic” (“Definitions”
94). These uneven economies of objects and terms also lead to cross-
contamination and reformulation among international comics. Com-
paratively, as I explore in my final chapter, Arab comics, in search
of an appropriate nomination, risk obsolescence in lists such as the
preceding one. However, the founders of the first trilingual comics
journal published in Lebanon propose salamander (Samandal) as an
apt translation for comics.
Similarly, while I employ the term comics in a rather roughshod
fashion to account for an excessively diverse set of artistic products,
such a totalizing discursive act, despite its heuristic motive, gives rise
to a spate of questions over hegemonic terminology and the flatten-
ing of divergent cultural practices. Are Tintin albums comics because
they employ the hybrid mixture of words and images used in the
US comic strips that inspired them? Or are they bandes dessinées
because that is the term used to describe them in their country of ori-
gin? Are they still bandes dessinées in translation? As anticolonial

and feminist theorists contend, words matter, and discursive specific-
ity is always engaged in the politics of recognition—how we come to
know what comics are and how their borders are delineated. While it
is tempting to diversify our reading lists by including a wide range
of cultural products under the category of comics, this move toward
inclusivity risks erasing the historical and geographic differences
implicated in transnational circuits of comics.
Differences between types of image-text are mirrored by differ-
ences in scholarly approaches to their analysis. US studies of com-
ics tend to rely heavily on reading practices developed by Scott
McCloud, and they have only recently begun to incorporate Euro-
pean theoretical approaches drawn from semiotics and communi-
cations theory. McCloud focuses primarily on the gaps or gutters
between panels, a rift that he claims necessitates closure on the part
of the reader in order to create meaning from the otherwise separate
components (Understanding Comics 63). Disjuncture between panels
and between semantic elements or verbal and visual inscription is
essential to the study of comics, yet many theorists have taken issue
with the lack of attention McCloud pays to other functions of the
12
page. A long-standing Franco-Belgian theoretical tradition asserts
the central role of the tension between various scales and modali-
ties of reading. In 1976 French semiologist Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle
published his seminal article insisting that the linear readings of pan-
els—McCloud’s unilateral emphasis—while invested with fictional
depth, are disrupted by the simultaneous appearance of the page
13
as tableau. On any comics page there is a vacillation between the
“three-dimensionality” of the narration or sequence and the “two-
dimensionality” of the page as assembled tableau, operating in com-
positional unity of expression. As a way of trying to ground this
divergence between approaches, Belgian scholar Jan Baetens draws
from French theorists Pierre Masson and Harry Morgan (the pen
name of Christian Wahl) to suggest that US emphasis on the comic
strip may be the reason for increased attention in US scholarship to
linear over tabular/tableau-centric reading (“Hommage”). Baetens
does credit US scholars Hatfield and Chute with taking up the subject
12. For example, Frome 82–87; Groensteen, Comics and Narration 70–71, 73–74;
Cates 91, 97–98, 103 n23; Hatfield 36–37, 70.
13. Fresnault-Deruelle, “Du linéaire au tabulaire” 20. Fresnault-Deruelle’s formu-
lation of “tabulaire” allows for other forms of “tableau” beyond the shape of the page.
of tabular reading in the form of temporal consideration but notes

that the anglophone field has not reached the full range of rhetori-
cal analytics posited by francophone theorists including Fresnault-
Deruelle, Thierry Groensteen, and Benoît Peeters.
In many ways, what might seem like a minor discrepancy—a
focus on narrative linearity over full-page consideration—is itself
an indication of the impulse of many US scholars to situate comics
fully within the field of the literary over and at the expense of the
field of visual studies or alternative media studies. It is a theoretical
perspective in keeping “with the 19th-century middle-class tradition
that conceived of culture exclusively in terms of the book reigning
over all the other arts,” as media theorist Bernhard Siegert explains
(10). Instead of championing the literariness of graphic narrative,
how might one read comics in order to re-examine the process of dif-
ferentiation already at work in constituting the opposition between
literature and nonliterature or even between word and image? How
might comics challenge the self-apparency of the truth claims of
image and text?
By combining literary and visual arts, comics create what Groen-
steen dubs an “unnatural alliance” (“Why Are Comics” 8) simulta-
neously debasing the aesthetic value of both disciplines. Groensteen
points to the historical separation of text and image as being “an inte-
gral part of occidental culture” (8). For Groensteen it is the hybrid
nature of the comics form, imbricating both the logocentric and
visual, that goes against “the ideology of purity that has dominated
the West’s approach to aesthetics” (9). In Groensteen’s description,
comics provide a resistant approach to the imperium of Western aes-
thetics and offer ways to read image and text differently. In the chap-
ters that follow, I read for difference within comics, examining how
image and text produce friction within the spatial composition of
the page; among comics, exploring how different sites of production
dovetail and diverge in their approaches to comics production; and
between comics, ascertaining how translations or revisions can lead to
entirely different texts with entirely different literacies.
Methodology
Thinking about how comics travel is, in this book, a geographical

concern insofar as I question the processes by which comics objects
move across national borders and what happens when they become
entangled in different marketplaces and readerships. More conceptu-

ally, the comics studied in this book travel according to theoretical
ways of reading the world and to practices of reading in the world.
My subtitle relates through parataxis terms that work in concert to
delimit, to expand, to challenge, and to reinterpret world comics.
Publication and translation are both a priori and co-constitutive pro-
cesses attending the radical literacies this book considers. My project
resists an approach to world comics in which scholars from the US
and other Western nations describe the world of comics by selecting
representative “foreign” works in order to map aesthetic or narrative
trends. How Comics Travel provides an alternate model by which to
study world comics, cognizant of and invested in tracing the unequal
systems of power and access that create the conditions of possibility
for transnational media flows. At the same time, this book looks at
the ways in which imperial or colonial systems of culture and valua-
tion factor in to the critical appraisal of world comics, as in, for exam-
ple, the reception of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, which positions it as
both an authentic Persian artwork and an example of the universal
appeal of comics.
Instead of using national categories to structure the book, I look
at constellations of actants and issues woven together in the warp
and weft of comics around the world. Reliance on stable and divisive
geographic sectors of comics development has inflected much work
in the field. McCloud segments comics into exactly three geographic
areas with their implied concomitant appellations: comics in the US;
manga in Japan; and bande dessinée in Europe (76–80). This T-O map
of world comics has proved persistent. Tim Pilcher and Brad Brooks’s
book, The Essential Guide to World Comics, provides an overview of
many works from different global regions, paradoxically relying on
translations of many works yet asserting that “sequential art speaks
directly to us without the need for translation” (14). Seemingly with-
out critique, they frame global comics commerce in imperial terms,
describing how US superheroes “dominated the global comic book
market” until recently, when “the cultural tide has turned and a new
empire has risen; the manga, which has turned to tables on US com-
ics” (15). Methodologically, the research undertaken for How Comics
Travel instead maps out a new and conceptually emergent framework
that is both transnational and anticolonial.
My conceptual approach is indebted to the scholarly work of oth-
ers invested in tracing how colonialism and transnational exchanges
impact comics studies. Because of the long history of francophone
comics scholarship and the seriousness with which bandes dessinées

are treated critically, there are a number of books in French and Eng-
lish that consider the worldliness of comics from a Franco-Belgian
perspective while accentuating the colonial implications of such a
project. Mark McKinney has written about the “colonial heritage of
French comics” (Colonial Heritage) and postcolonial negotiations of
contemporary transnational comics (Postcolonialism). In Redrawing
French Empire in Comics, McKinney provides a valuable theoretical
model in the form of the affrontier—“a boundary . . . that divides and
connects” imperial and colonial cultures “and around which indi-
viduals and groups confront each other” (3)—and its role in colonial
and postcolonial representation. Likewise, Philippe Delisle tracks the
role of bande dessinée in the reproduction and circulation of colonial
ideology (Bande dessinée); Jean-Paul Gabilliet conducts historically
engaged research into transatlantic migrations of comics as well as
the national modes and values that inflect comics production (“Dis-
appointing Crossing”); and Ann Miller attends to the importance
of location in the representation and transgression of cultural and
national frames (“Les héritiers”).
A number of anglophone books also recognize the borders of the
world as sites of encounter and exchange through which comics are
mediated. Mazur and Danner begin their Comics: A Global History,
1968 to the Present by acknowledging the ever-present “cross-cultural
and transnational influences” in the development of comics (7), in
order to “provide a broader-than-usual map” (8) of the history and
development of comics. Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji character-
ize their edited volume Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities
as “a timely intervention within current comic-book area studies
that remains firmly situated within the ‘US-European and manga
paradigms’ and their reading publics” (4). Postcolonial Comics pur-
posefully collects scholarship on comics from a range of geographic
locales in order to “critically examine the issues at stake in represent-
ing the assembly of postcolonial conditions” (15). The volume Trans-
national Perspectives on Graphic Narratives similarly eschews treatment
of Anglo-American comics, Franco-Belgian bande dessinée, and Jap-
anese manga as “self-contained phenomena,” instead focusing on
“the ways in which graphic narratives have been shaped by aesthetic,
social, political, economic, and cultural interactions that reach across
national boundaries in an interconnected and globalizing world”
(1). The editors, Daniel Stein, Shane Denson, and Christina Meyer,
acknowledge local or national traditions of content and form that
comics take on in various instantiations, while pointing to “border-

crossings, interstitial relations, and cultural and material exchanges
between traditions” (3). The objective of their project is to trace how
“the multidirectional transactions uncovered by a transnational per-
spective problematize the foundational role of discrete national units”
(3). As the editors argue, amid the transnational transactions of com-
ics, “the particular is . . . rendered internally multiple as the traces
of exchange are discovered within, and not merely between, national
cultures, traditions, and identities” (3, emphasis in original). Other
anthologies, such as Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Inter-
play of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives (Berninger et
al.); and Crossing Boundaries in Graphic Narrative (Jakaitis and Wurtz),
indicate the shared scholarly interest in approaching comics “as
hybrid form, not simply in identifying the tension between images
and words, but in emphasizing its engagement with other genres and
cultural forms” (Jakaitis and Wurtz 21). While these volumes do not
share my focus on translation, they do insist on the complexity of
location in all studies of media and culture.
The Politics of Location
Following Adrienne Rich’s exhortation that feminist readers take

responsibility for where we are reading from (219), it is necessary
to give a theoretical framework for the sorts of designations I make
between cultural practices, as well as for how I situate myself accord-
ing to the comics I select for the project. As a scholar working within
the academic system of the US, I focus on comics available in English
in the US; however, this selection criteria is based on tracing precisely
the trajectories and material histories that brought these works—or
some versions of them—to my sites of reading and valuation. I argue
that these comics are not reducible to a singular point of origin or to a
standardized national practice.
My approach to these objects is grounded in translation, post
colonial, and feminist transnational theory. Susan Bassnett and Har-
ish Trivedi outline how translation studies recognizes inequalities
and power differentials among works:
translation studies research has followed a similar path to other

radical movements within literary and cultural studies, calling into
question the politics of canonization and moving resolutely away
from ideas of universal literary greatness. This is not to deny that

some texts are valued more highly than others, but simply to affirm
that systems of evaluation vary from time to time and from culture
to culture and are not consistent. (2)
Looking both at recognizable (Tintin, Persepolis) and less recognizable

(A Tale of Two Shamans, Samandal) world comics through the frame
of formal and linguistic translation, I extend Bassnett and Trivedi’s
insistence on translation studies as a mode of circumventing canoni-
cal valuations.
Pursuantly, this work comports with the ethical project of Tejas-
wini Niranjana’s Siting Translation, which “outlin[es] the impor-
tance of the translation problematic for the post-colonial project”
(49). Describing this book as a postcolonial project is at once a poli-
tics and a heuristic. As Mignolo states, the discourse of postcolonial-
ity “brings to the foreground the colonial side of the ‘modern world
system’ and the coloniality of power imbedded in modernity itself”
(Local Histories 93). This discourse also demands that historical geog-
raphies be brought to the fore of conversations about creative and
knowledge work. Nonetheless, as Sara Ahmed reminds us, postcolo-
niality can only ever operate as “a failed historicity,” one that “allows
us to investigate how colonial encounters are both determining, and
yet not fully determining, of social and material existence” (Strange
Encounters 10). As a failed historicity, postcoloniality does not gesture
toward a single shared past; it reveals that “history is not the continu-
ous line of the emergence of a people, but a series of discontinuous
encounters between nations, cultures, others and other others” (11).
Postcoloniality then functions meaningfully as a historically oriented
mode of foregrounding place, but not as a stable bounding of tempo-
ral or even geopolitical span.
As demonstrated by Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’s
Red—analyzed in chapter 4—one must work to avoid reading in a
way that replicates settler colonial imperialist practices of recogniz-
ing, dominating, and explaining others; further, one must resist over-
categorizing imperial entities like the US as homogeneous, unilateral
locations. Instead, this book also attends to what Inderpal Grewal
calls Transnational America. Grewal disputes totalizing theories about
US power and its territorialization, asserting that the US persists as a
hegemon of both “centralized and decentralized power through neo-
liberal regimes, technologies, and rationalities” (21). For Grewal, the
“global,” as a Euro-American fantasy, “is not and never was quite

global” (22). I follow Grewal’s lead in tracing the “heterogeneous and
multiple transnational connectivities” (22) that bring some but not
most comics into economies of world media and that resonate with
but do not replicate the economies of world literature.
In visualizing these alternate connectivities of relation and dis-
placement, we glimpse the potential for world comics to furnish the
counter to world literature in a fashion similar to Mufti’s vision of
the people’s library. As Mufti describes it in Forget English!: Oriental-
isms and World Literatures, “the people’s library embodies the desire
not just for different books—than those enshrined in national curri-
cula or literary cultures or in globalized commercial publishing, for
instance—but for different ways of reading, circulating, valuing, and
evaluating them” (7). It is precisely in this capacity, as a people’s
library for reworlding, that I designate the radical literacies offered
in these chapters.
Radical literacies imply practices that reroot and reroute the
process of reading according to different political, locational, and
material contexts. Throughout the book, I characterize resistance,
détournement, translation, reformatting, decolonial mapping, and flip-
ping as radical literacies, and thus potential ways of reading comics.
Resistance—which I examine in the form of a Congolese student’s
lawsuit against a Tintin album—is, as Wanzo notes, a way to “direct
the gaze at . . . producers and consumers of racist caricature” (27),
to draw attention to the injury of racist stereotype and to thus recre-
ate the work as a “manifestation of injury” (220, emphasis in original).
Détournement, a term for misappropriation or hijacking, is described
by Guy Debord and Gil Wolman as a form of “extremist innovation”
that uses elements taken from “the literary and artistic heritage of
14
humanity” and recombines them in revolutionary ways (15). Trans-
lation provides yet another form of reading that reorients literacy
according to the tensions between codes of signification (Hatfield
36); thus, in translating comics such as Metro, readers reveal diver-
gent cultural values and interpretative frameworks. Reformatting is
its own type of translation dependent on cultures of publishing work.
14. Describing D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation in terms equally applicable

to Tintin au Congo, Debord and Wolman assign the film tremendous formal impor-
tance due to its technical innovations yet note that it is a racist film that should not
be shown without a détourning that might remind the viewer of the horrors of impe-
rialist war and racial hatred.
Decolonial mapping—in the form of Yahgulanaas’s Haida manga—

is a related concept that reads comics according to experimental,
changeable, and culturally situated practices. Flipping is a material
maneuver by which comics multilingually world, or open a space for,
transnational subjectivity, expression, and political life.
A Map to Travel Through
The chapters conjugate world in its many verbal connotations, each

considering comics’ worlding through a different conceptual frame-
work. Thus, the first chapter examines the visual imperialism of Tin-
tin comics as a totalizing worlding in the age of the world picture.
Chapter 2 recognizes the multiple contests of worlding manifested
in translations, which—in their dissonance—provide a system much
like Apter’s world system of “untranslatables” or Édouard Glissant’s
“mondialité” or “worldness.” In Glissant’s discourse, worldness is
opposed to globalization in its insistence on relations, differences,
and creolizations (86); as I explore, the multiple translations of
Magdy El Shafee’s Metro generate intricate relations and heteroge-
neous cultural grammars. Chapter 3 draws from Spivak’s call to pro-
duce an “alternative historical narrative of the ‘worlding’ of what is
today called ‘the Third World’” (“Rani of Sirmur” 247) by revisiting
the publication and translation process of Persepolis. Chapter 4 asks
how Yahgulanaas’s decolonial Indigenous manga offer maps of the
world that disrupt settler colonial toponymic and demarcating sys-
tems. Finally, chapter 5 considers the emergent comics practices of
Samandal as tools for unlearning empire and creatively shaping alter-
native worlds.
Beginning with Tintin is an audacious gambit, in light of the
overabundance of critical texts and popular attention the series has
received. The twenty-four volumes of Tintin, published during the
period 1929–86, have been translated into over 110 languages and
circulated throughout six continents. They present a subject funda-
mentally engaged in the practice of ethnographic knowledge produc-
tion, wherein “foreign” culture is identified and represented as such
in paradigmatically clear lines. I shift my focus from the contents and
technical conditions of the series to more pointed analysis on who
reads Tintin and how, as framed by postcolonial and postmodern the-
ory. For this endeavor, I triangulate three readers: US comics theo-
rist Scott McCloud, Congolese student Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo,

and US comics artist Charles Burns. These three constellate different
literacies contingent on cultural contexts as well as racial categories.
Together, McCloud, Mondondo, and Burns model comics reading as
a multidimensional and emergent practice.
Chapter 2 examines the translation processes that accompanied
the publication of Magdy El Shafee’s Metro. Metro, the “first adult
Arabic graphic novel,” was originally published and distributed in
Cairo in 2008 and then quickly banned by Hosni Mubarak’s govern-
ment. In the following years, Metro was translated into Italian, Eng-
lish, German, and French; it has now spent more time in publication
in other languages than in the language of its original printing. For
Western readers, Metro in translation appears as an authentically
Oriental, yet recognizably Western, object—the graphic novel—that,
because of its banning, appears to be oriented toward the revolution-
ary zeitgeist. However, for all its indisputable transnational appeal,
Metro’s formal aspects create points of conflict in its translations.
Chapter 3 looks at how publishing economies position comics
according to expectations of reception and valuation. As Grewal and
Caren Kaplan argue in their discussion of transnationalism, “Cri-
tiques of Western reception can deconstruct the aesthetic and politi-
cal mystiques that govern the marketing and distribution of cultural
artifacts from the ‘Third World’” (16). Further, as these theorists
explain, understanding the role of reception in the manufacture of
economies of global cultural objects—such as world literature—fur-
nishes an inroad for demystifying the West as a cohesive or pure and
unhybridized vantage point. When a reviewer or scholar describes
Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis in terms of how the text visually trans-
lates Iran for a Western audience, what is lost in reception? The extant
discourse on Satrapi’s work rests almost entirely on the assumption
of a stable referent deemed Persepolis that acquires meaning through
cultural negotiations between Iran—the author’s birthplace and a
major setting in the works—and the West. However, displacing the
location of the text from its original site of publication in France and
the networks of translation and distribution that attended its success
risks complicity in a mode of Orientalism whereby knowledge of the
“East” is extended through Western products and consumer tenden-
cies. This chapter shifts the geographic territory of analysis from one
East-to-West transit to another, from Iran-to-“the West” to France-to-
the US.
Chapter 4 considers cultural syncretism and decolonial practice in

Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’s Haida manga. Bringing together Haida
artistic techniques and the Japanese form of manga, Haida manga
intervenes in comics traditions, visualization paradigms, and the
book as a commodity object. Yahgulanaas’s transcultural works com-
plicate layout practices considered conventional to comics, retraining
a reader of comics to recognize borders, contact zones, and sites of
translation as spaces full of meaning and contestation. For example,
Yahgulanaas’s book Red is composed of a series of pages segmented
by Haida formlines into panels of curving, labile connectivity. These
panels eschew the expected rectangular partitioning in favor of
Haida linework that poses a rebuke to colonial knowledge systems
whereby the whiteness of the comics gutter metonymically recalls the
terra nullius of settler colonial imagination. Yahgulanaas’s investment
in the diegetic, formal, cultural, and commercial borders of comics
reverberates across the preceding chapters and suggests radical new
reading practices for world comics.
Chapter 5 highlights the radical and experimental politics of the
Lebanese trilingual comics journal Samandal. Begun in 2007, Saman-
dal credits itself as “the first trilingual, amphibious comics magazine
open to submissions issued in the Middle East.” The amphibious ele-
ment refers to its situation between worlds of word and image, high
and low, and traditional and experimental. I argue that Samandal’s
multilingual object orientation compels readers to recognize not only
where they are reading but also where they are not reading. Unlike
global translations of Metro that attempt to negotiate between source
culture and target culture with minimal friction, Samandal visually
plots and materially enacts frictions among different reading cul-
tures. The magazine’s trilingual printing necessitates a trilingual for-
mat; readers must physically flip Samandal between stories in order
to orient themselves to the page. The act of flipping Samandal while
reading forces a reader to confront the physical orientations of lit-
eracy. This physical and cognitive situating is not limited to bodily
orientation, however; it also reflects the politics of production. Saman-
dal’s languages and linguistic orientations draw the reader’s attention
to the histories of violence underlying their co-presence in the work.
As their own contiguous yet delimited spaces, these chapters fol-
low local lines of inquiry while creating throughlines that shuttle
between and among each other. The book begins by asking how com-
ics world: what tools and practices do they supply for reimaging and
reimagining the world? By the final page, a multitude of possible

tools—from maps of water to salamanders—and tactics—from détour-
nement to flipping—are offered to describe an assemblage of world
comics. This world is neither static nor unilateral, and as you read
through the places of the following pages, you will encounter an ever-
expanding and shifting atlas of reading for difference. Safe travels.
C H A P T E R 1
THE ADVENTURES OF
THREE READERS IN THE
WORLD OF TINTIN
Introduction: World Comics through Three Readings

of Tintin
How do comics world? If images constitute ways of worldmaking, as

Nelson Goodman formulates, then comics, through their imagistic
multiplicity and image-text hybridity, hardly constitute a dominant
vision along the lines of Heidegger’s world picture. Given their—
albeit globally heterogeneous—relatively lowbrow cultural positions,
as well as their fragmentation of any singular view of the world, the
diverse array of objects loosely referred to as “comics” seem to have
much more in common with what Bishnupriya Ghosh would dub
“apertures to the popular.” As Ghosh claims of Global Icons, these
“mass-mediated images are precisely the widely and cheaply avail-
able means for apprehending global interconnections” (11) to the
extent that some participate “in worlding, in conjuring a shared glo-
bality” (41). Yet, as this book contends, it would be a false start to
make any global assumption about both world comics and comics in
the world. Where then, to begin?
22
THE ADVENTURES OF THREE READERS IN THE WORLD OF TINTIN • 23
Within the field of global comics, one series stands out in its scope
and worldliness. Debuting in 1929, Les Aventures de Tintin, or The
Adventures of Tintin, is unparalleled as an artifact of world comics and
provides a fecund source for inquiry and analysis. Created by Hergé
(Georges Remi), Tintin comics have sold over 230 million copies
1
worldwide and have been translated into more than 110 languages.
The scope of their influence is likewise demonstrated by the scores of
2
secondary works published on both Tintin and Hergé, as well as by
the emergence of the transnational identity category of Tintinologist,
3
or Tintin expert. Taking The Adventures of Tintin as an urtext of world
comics, this chapter analyzes what the series reveals about the lines
connecting and delineating local and global readerships, how these
lines are technically effected and reproduced, and how the global
designs of colonialism and modernism determine how comics travel
the world.
Tintin is patently synonymous with travel: a series about the
adventures of a peripatetic hero, it has itself traversed the globe as
printed material and ideological content. The transnational flows of
Tintin books in the economy of world comics so parallel the inde-
fatigable protagonist’s own fictional international journeys that one
may interpret the observation by Tintinologist Philippe Goddin that
“Tintin travelled every corner of the globe” to refer equally to both
fictional character and textual corpus (Reporters 87). However, the
global influence of Tintin extends beyond its representational capa-
ciousness and marketplace saturation. The manners of making Tin-
tin—the formal and technical components of the comics’ production
and reproduction—established a number of conventions for Franco-
Belgian bande dessinée as well as for transnational graphic narrative.
Of creator Hergé’s ligne claire (clear-line) style, comics scholar Paul
Gravett attests that “no other aesthetic model has exerted such a sig-
nificant and ongoing influence on comics, in Europe and beyond.”
Ligne claire describes a style that “gives equal weight and consid-
1. As of 2020. This information comes from https://www.tintin.com, the official

site of the copyright holder, Moulinsart.
2. When Tintin: Bibliographie d’un mythe, a book-length annotated bibliography
of secondary texts on Tintin, was published in 2014, the authors noted more than
500 such texts (Roche and Cerbelaud).
3. Although Tintinologist is standard, Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle instead refers to
himself and like-minded scholars as “Hergéographers” (“Moulinsart Crypt” 122).
24 • C hapter 1
eration to every line on the page” (Pleban). Yet, as I explore in this

chapter, these clear lines do more than distinguish background from
foreground within panels; they are instead a medium for ideological
expression. Luc Sante describes ligne claire as enclosing every “parti-
cule of the visible, no matter how fluid and shifting, in a thin, black,
unhesitating line”:
The style makes the world wonderfully accessible, in effect serv-

ing as an analogue to its hero’s mission: Just as Tintin, a mere boy,
can travel the world and navigate its dark passages and defeat its
oppressors without himself succumbing to corruption, so you, too,
whether you are seven or seventy-seven . . . can confront the over-
whelming variousness of the perceptual universe and realize its
underlying simplicity without sacrificing your sense of wonder.
(“Clear Line” 30)
Theorist Bruno Lecigne argues that ligne claire trains its reader to
4
understand the world as a legible text while concealing the mecha-
nism that generates this legibility. As an interpellative subtext, which
conveys to the reader an authorized and authorizing reading of the
world, ligne claire is thus exemplary of what Rebecca Wanzo calls
“visual imperialism,” or the “production and circulation of racist
images that are tools in justifying colonialism and other state-based
discrimination” (4). The visual, formal, and material cohesiveness of
Tintin’s world is, as this chapter will explore, belied by difference.
To frame difference as a problematic, this chapter convenes three
divergent readers of Tintin. The use of these readers is inspired by
Edward Said’s traveling theory in its insistence on how ideas are
shaped according to the differential calculus of power and context
(World 226). Scott McCloud, the foundational theorist of US comics
studies, serves as an ideal reader, or, to adapt Mary Louise Pratt’s
formulation, a “reading-man”: a reader who, in his identification
with and appraisal of Tintin, seeks to “secure [the] innocence” and
“anti-conquest” neutrality of Hergé’s project, while at the same
time asserting its cultural prowess and knowledge power (7). As an
American, McCloud geographically connotes the westward course of
4. “That which the maximum legibility gives for reading is not the real world,
nor even an idea of the world, as in a direct connection, but on the contrary, the
idea that the world is legible” (Lecigne 40, emphasis in original). Translations by the
author unless otherwise noted.
empire, as well as the oft-desired and rarely attained US market for

European comics in the age of neoliberal globalization. In his prosely-
tizing of Tintin to the US, McCloud invests in Tintin as the epitome
of the formal properties of comics. His formal reading overlooks the
inherent politics of racialization or the technical histories of represen-
tation that inform ligne claire. McCloud thus normalizes ligne claire
and its stereotypical processes as a lingua franca for comics creation
and assumes a white subject, as represented by Tintin, as the univer-
sal subject.
In contradistinction, Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, a Congo-
lese émigré to Belgium, provides a protest, a reading that rejects
the authority and normalization of Tintin as visual imperialism. By
5
bringing his case against Tintin au Congo to a court in Belgium, Mon-
dondo lobbed a postcolonial challenge to the authority of Tintin’s for-
mal and aesthetic regime as well as its erasure of the Black subject.
Mondondo’s case provides a direct rebuke to McCloud’s reading; he
indicts the stereotypical rendering of Africans as a form of racism,
identifying the depiction as a production of what Marie-Rose Maurin
Abomo calls “La Nègrerie en Clichés” (154, 158). Furthermore, Mon-
dondo proposed a new paratext to qualify the content of the book. By
grounding his critique in European law as a way of reading for differ-
ence and investing his own legal body in the complaint, Mondondo
rematerialized the mechanisms of lisibilité occluded by McCloud’s
attention to surface.
Finally, another US artist, Charles Burns, represents a postmod-
ern engagement with Tintin that undoes the authority of Tintin’s
worldview while also amplifying the alienation of Tintin’s formal and
material properties. In Burns’s détournements, the stable, national-
istic identity of Tintin is itself revealed to be a white mask (one the
reader can also potentially wear, a mask of paper). By deterritorializ-
ing the formal and material components of Tintin, and by pirating his
own Tintin-esque series, the Nitnit trilogy, Burns nods to the ambiv-
alence of colonial discourse always already threatening the author-
ity and cohesiveness of Tintin. As Tom McCarthy notes, anxiety over
“the culture of the copy” is “what Hergé’s work was always about”
(156–57), and Burns’s own copies—and copies of copies—aestheti-
cally, formally, and materially position Tintin as a transnational agent
5. For a complete chronology of Mondondo’s case, see Pasamonik, L’Affaire

Tintin.
26 • C hapter 1
of Western imperium while playfully undercutting the exclusivity,

if not the significance, of the series’ claim on global culture. Burns’s
copies, compared with Mondondo’s legal challenges, also reveal the
disjuncture between the postmodern and the postcolonial as modes
for confronting the coloniality of power and the progress narrative
of modernism. Considering Burns and Mondondo as contrapuntal
readers to McCloud’s reading-man, this chapter ultimately comes to
rest in the perennially open question of Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is
the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” As Appiah
notes in that essay, postmodern culture, including readings such as
Burns’s, “is global—though that emphatically does not mean that it is
the culture of every person in the world” (343).
The readings of McCloud, Mondondo, and Burns thus triangulate
the ways in which Tintin functions as a global comic. The different
subject positions drawn together through these divergent readings
provides a framework for mapping how comics world, or how they
open and delimit a space for subjectivity, for expression, for political
life. Tintin not only uses comics forms to compel a reader’s belief in
the correspondence between the series’ clear-lined fiction and their
own lived reality; it further interpellates a reader to believe in recur-
sive colonial stereotypes of race and culture. Arguing that this iden-
tificatory process cannot be separated from the technical substrates
of comics, I seek to trace the genealogies of print culture that cohere
in Tintin’s colonial phantasmagoria. Following Wanzo’s critique of
visual imperialism and Nick Mirzoeff’s concept of the “complex of
visuality” (Right 5), I approach Tintin by unfolding the logic of ste-
reotype. In this instance, stereotype does not refer exclusively to por-
trayals of different peoples within Tintin; it describes the exigence of
iterability and visual authority vis-à-vis media technologies and print
cultures.
A stereotype, in its basic, technical definition, is a system of mov-
able type, remodeled for maximum reproduction. However, prior to
its casting, each stereotype consists of so many possibilities of mov-
ing furniture, leading, and type, of which the stereotype represents
but one permutation, itself subject to error, degradation, revision,
and disuse. As McCloud’s, Mondondo’s, and Burns’s divergent read-
ings show us, the symbolic stereotype—as in the reproducible carica-
ture—is contingent on mediality and context. McCloud demonstrates
an acceptance and belief in the rationality of Tintin as stereotype, as a
legibly reproducible worldview in which racial and ethnic others are
clearly distinguished. Yet underlying this view of the world is a tech-

nical genealogy of material parts and social interpretations that come
together in conjunction with imperialist political economies. Moving
from McCloud’s reading-man promotion of Tintin to Mondondo’s
civil complaint as an apotheosis of global discontent with Tintin’s
worldview and then finally to Burns’s reworking of Tintin’s stereo-
typology, the chapter shows how even this most worldly and legible
series reveals the fissures and inequalities within world comics.
“Lines to See” and “Lines to Be,” or Ligne Claire,

Black Skin, and White Masks
McCloud provides his telling gloss on the “‘clear-line’ style of Her-

gé’s Tintin” in his magnum opus Understanding Comics: The Invisible
Art. In the last panel of page 42, McCloud describes ligne claire as
consisting of “very iconic characters” and “unusually realistic back-
grounds.” Continuing on to page 43, two panels present McCloud’s
interpretation of the style, showing a white character against a
detailed background in the first, and the same character—now
whited out—against a background—now blacked out—in the sec-
ond (see figure 1.1). The text accompanying the first, richly detailed
panel explains that the clear line allows readers “to mask themselves
in a character and safely enter a sensually stimulating world.” Mean-
while, the second panel, with its white figure against a black back-
ground, provides what one assumes, through iconic parataxis, to be
an appositive of sorts: “One set of lines to see. Another set of lines
to be” (43, emphasis in original). Unmentioned in this visual calcu-
lus is that the transformation of the detailed background and iconic
character in the first panel into a white shape on a black background
in the second panel reduces all lines to one line—the line separating
the character from the background, or the line separating white from
black. The convergence of the lines into a single black/white divi-
sion correlates to the ambiguity of the parallel textual construction,
with its mixture of transitive and copulative verbs. Perhaps one set of
lines is seen; perhaps it is the means of seeing. Regardless, the being is
clear, and clearly white.
Here, McCloud’s reading artfully, if uncritically, reduces Tintin to
binaries: a white subject against a black background. This two-panel
example furnishes a lucid illustration of the distinction between read-
28 • C hapter 1
FIGURE 1.1. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics, page 43
ing difference and reading for difference. Although a preposition

may not seem so significant, it distinguishes a practice of consump-
tion—reading difference—from one of critical inquiry—reading for
difference. As McCloud promotes it, Tintin’s complex of legibility is,
at face value, a mode for training a reader to consume difference as
naturalized binaries of seeing and being, subject and background,
and black and white. By internalizing these binaries, as mediated
by ligne claire, the reader in McCloud’s formulation is hailed as a
reading-man, able to see the world, and to be in the world, through
an innocent process of self-identification with white and black lines.
Thus, although McCloud does not explicitly address Tintin as a
white European colonial hero, his explanation of ligne claire extends
beyond the pages of Tintin to encompass and embrace a worldview
of visual imperialism.
Against McCloud’s uncritical practice of using Tintin to read dif-
ference as a means for knowledge power and self-identification, I
posit the practice of reading for difference. An act of reframing and
anticolonial resistance, reading for difference is a way of thinking
about the global not simply as it is imagined by texts such as Tintin
but also from the world of its imagining. As such, it is a material-
ist critique that investigates the perspective from which Tintin’s view
of the world arises, bringing forth that which has been the vanish-
ing point—the white mask made of paper—through which the world
is seen, but which is not itself seen in its materiality or mechanics.
When reading for difference, I ask how Tintin’s legibility is con-

structed through a heterogeneous media framework, replete with
revisions, edits, and omissions. I also seek out the points of disjunc-
ture and ambiguity at work in Tintin’s visual logic. This work would
be unrealizable without the rigorous scholarship already undertaken
by so many theorists in their contrapuntal readings of Tintin’s colo-
6
nial legacy and influence. Numerous scholars provide critical read-
ings of Tintin that reveal what the clear lines suppress, and that
explicate “when the lines are not so clear,” as a recent volume on Tin-
7
tin’s creator Hergé stipulates.
Reading for difference elucidates Tintin as what Mirzoeff calls a
“complex of visuality,” or an “imbrication of mentality and organiza-
tion . . . forming a life-world that can be both visualized and inhab-
ited” (Right 5). As such, Tintin functions as a “visualized deployment
of bodies and a training of minds, organized so as to sustain both
physical segregation between rulers and ruled, and mental compli-
ance with those arrangements” (5). This is to say that the potential
for seeing and being that McCloud identifies in Tintin is already
enmeshed in a “set of social organizations and processes” and corre-
lated to a “psychic economy” that cannot simply be sublimated into
what McCloud calls “audience involvement,” “viewer-identification,”
and “world popular culture” (Mirzoeff, Right 5; McCloud 42). Tin-
tin precisely enacts what Mirzoeff identifies as an “imperialist com-
plex . . . of visuality and countervisuality” in that Tintin develops a
graphic language that correlates to “the shaping of modernity from
the point of view of the imperial powers” (Right 196). The “imperial-
ist visuality” that Mirzoeff defines as a “means of ordering biopower”
according to “the hierarchy of the ‘civilized’ and the ‘primitive’”
(196) produces the visual imperialism described by Wanzo. Imperi-
alist visuality cum visual imperialism are not bound by a particular
imperial power or geographical delimitation. Rather, the “production
and circulation of racist images that are tools in justifying colonial-
ism and other state-based discrimination” (Wanzo 4) attain currency
precisely through their reproducibility in contexts outside the specific
imperial structures they depict. Hence, as Philippe Delisle stipulates
of Tintin and the entire Franco-Belgian school of comics production,
the “vision of dominated peoples that it cultivates” extends beyond
6. See, e.g., Delisle, Bande dessinée; McKinney, Colonial Heritage; Miller, “Les héri-
tiers”; Dony, “Writing and Drawing Back”; Frey, “Contagious Colonial Diseases.”
7. Sanders.
30 • C hapter 1
the specific colonies of French and Belgian occupation or control:

“Stereotypes about Africans, Asians, and Oceanians can be found in
8
bandes dessinées that in no way depict colonies” (Bande dessinée 51).
McKinney similarly reads the celebrated duo of Le secret de la Licorne
9
(1943) and Le trésor de Rackham le rouge (1944) as texts that do not
explicitly show colonized peoples but that champion colonial inheri-
tance and contribute to “the imperialist, eurocentric mapping of the
world” (Colonial Heritage 7). In this context, McCloud’s reading of
Tintin’s formal design as an invitation for self-identification is a call
for assimilation not merely to a historically colonial but to an actively
colonizing Eurocentric worldview that travels to readers and delivers
“iconic characters” and “realistic backgrounds” as stable referents for
the world.
Writing in the US in the early 1990s, McCloud demonstrates how
the “being” afforded by ligne claire enables the visual world of Tin-
tin to transcend its moment of composition. Writing in the UK in the
early 2000s, novelist and Tintinologist Tom McCarthy claims that
“everybody wants to be Tintin: generation after generation,” indicat-
ing that the white mask offered by Tintin and claimed by McCloud
seems a universal inheritance (106). These white male authors both
ascribe to Tintin an identificatory and even ontological potential
that appears all-inclusive and transcendent of history, albeit imagi-
nary on the part of the reader. Such thinking precedes McCarthy and
McCloud: in 1984 author Jean-Marie Apostolidès argued in The Meta-
morphoses of Tintin that it is precisely because of the “barely flesh and
blood” character of Tintin that “everyone can readily identify with
his ‘full-moon’ face and project onto it all their desires” (10). How-
ever, Apostolidès qualifies the capaciousness of Tintin, saying that he
invites reader identification “because he himself embodies a certain
ideal: he incarnates Western Christian values at a precise moment
in history” (10). Apostolidès’s analysis is a rejoinder to any ahistori-
cally identitarian reading of Tintin in that Apostolidès discerns Tin-
tin’s stereotypical milieu as a mode for establishing the worldview
of the colonial Belgian state, and/or the “technologically advanced
West” (33). In this light, a reader’s act of “mask[ing] themselves in
[Tintin]” is an act of identifying with the white Belgian subject, who
8. As an example, Delisle cites the first adventure, Tintin au pays des Soviets,
which features caricatures of Chinese people.
9. The Secret of the Unicorn (1959) and Red Rackham’s Treasure (1959) were the
basis for Stephen Spielberg’s film adaptation The Adventures of Tintin (2011).
is colonialist, or more generally, with the white European, who is an

enlightened liberal subject.
Juxtaposing McCloud’s identificatory reading of Tintin with Apos-
tolidès’s historical critique of the character shows Tintin operating at
10
the level of Barthesian myth. In “the eyes of the myth-consumer”
such as McCloud, the ideology structuring the visual economy that
allows for the ready separation, identification, and consumption of
others is understood “not as a motive, but as a reason” (Barthes 129).
A reading-man of Tintin sees its graphiation not as a system of (hier-
archical) values but as an inductive representation (Barthes 131). In
this regard, McCloud reads Tintin as a “global sign,” or, as Barthes
conceptualizes it, “the first term of the greater system which it builds
and of which it is only a part” (113), with the greater system being
an imperialist complex of visuality that structures comics readers’
“viewer-identification” in terms of colonial semiotics (McCloud 42).
In testament to this complex, Hergé biographer Pierre Assouline
remarks that “the adventures of Tintin . . . reflect not only a world, its
history and geography, but a whole society with its codes and rituals;
that they come to constitute an international language is their great
accomplishment” (xi). Tintinologist Philippe Goddin asserts, “Tintin
is a language in himself” (Reporters 217), and others have espoused
the coherence and mythic quality of the oeuvre: it is “everlasting,”
“timeless,” “global,” “immortal” (Serres). Correlate to the idea of Tin-
tin as global sign and system, McCloud’s reading also reveals Tintin
to be what Walter Mignolo calls a “global design,” in that Tintin’s
complex of visuality references “European local knowledge and his-
tories” in the forms of Franco-Belgian literary—graphic—techniques
that compose a “classificatory apparatus” (Local Histories 17). As such,
Tintin enacts the “coloniality of power” by inscribing the “colonial
difference”—or the “conversion of differences into values”—and
“projecting [such Franco-Belgian colonial values] onto universal his-
tory” (17, 160, ix). As a global sign, or a global design, Tintin exem-
plifies the process by which the imperialist complex of visuality
overdetermines the world of world comics.
However global or transcendent, the myth of Tintin can be read
contrapuntally by attending to its local conditions of possibility.
In the identitarian reading proposed by McCloud, the legibility of
Tintin is predicated on ligne claire’s binary between “iconic char-
10. See also Baetens and Frey, “Modernizing Tintin.”

32 • C hapter 1
acters” and “realistic backgrounds,” whereby a reader may “be” a

character and, in so doing, “see” the “world.” A closer look at the
discursive and material conditions of Tintin’s production and repro-
duction, however, makes it possible to “dereif[y] and complicat[e]”
the binaries of character and background—and of seeing and being—
by revealing another dichotomy, namely what Shu-Mei Shih terms
“the binary division between the West and the non-West” (22). The
“mask” of legibility that Tintin provides is an ideologically driven,
efficient framework for reproduction that, while first indicative of the
colonial Belgian state, has come to endow global comics with tech-
niques of recognition that far exceed “character” and “background.”
As Shih asserts of global literature, these techniques are responsible
for producing “‘the West’ as the agent of recognition and ‘the rest’
as the object of recognition, in representation” (17). I emphasize four
techniques of Tintin comics—the album format, the abandonment of
the typeset récitatif, the ligne claire style, and habitual revision—as
components of Tintin’s complex of visuality, determining how—and
for whom—the “safe” characterization and “sensually stimulating
world” of Tintin were constructed.
The Album
Global comics, however mythic, are forged with local materials. The
Adventures of Tintin began in a weekly supplement of the Belgian
11
newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle in 1929. The appearance of Franco-
12
Belgian comics or bandes dessinées in newspapers was standard at
the time. Less standard, although not unheard of, was the collection of
many strips (bandes) into a book or album format. Usually hardcover
and approximately A4 in size, the album may now seem synonymous
with Franco-Belgian comic book production, but in 1929 it was still
relatively rare. Publication formats change over time, but the album
13
remains the standard for a single-story French-language comic book.
11. The paper’s director, Father Norbert Wallez, wanted “to give a new life to
the journal” and “had the idea to launch a weekly illustrated supplement for chil-
dren: a page of the journal folded into quarters” (Hergé and Sadoul 15).
12. Laurence Grove points out that this term does not become standardized
until long after the appearance of many of the most influential francophone “BDs”
(15–16).
13. See Lefèvre, “Importance” 99–101; Beaty 44–69.
The French series Bécassine is generally considered the first bande

dessinée published in album format beginning in 1913 (Dine 195),
yet it was Tintin that definitively established its use. Belgian com-
ics scholar Catherine Labio goes so far as to describe the album as
“initially an offshoot of Hergé’s codification of Les aventures de Tin-
tin” (84). Tintin albums were published from the outset of the series,
beginning with Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1930). These durable,
collected formats immediately appended the newspaper printings of
the narrative arc. As Matthew Screech notes, the “high quality hard-
back albums[ ] transformed infantile ephemera into lasting, aesthetic
objects” (“Introduction” vi). Delisle traces the formula of the album
to Tintin while describing this material development as an “inescap-
able vector at the heart of Franco-Belgian production” (Bande dessinée
8–9). According to some, Tintin’s cross-market mobility, its success in
album format, “was its most significant contribution to the History
of Comics” (Lofficier and Lofficier 15). The doubled printing formats
meant that Tintin was doubly marketable, simultaneously available
in the newsstand and the store. Compared with the newspaper, the
album engenders longevity (it lasts longer than a newspaper), com-
mercial valuation (it costs more than a newspaper), and the auton-
omy of media technology (the comics no longer share space with
entirely textual stories).
Between the newspaper and the album, two media flows are
yoked in order to facilitate and authorize Tintin’s reproduction. This
dual format allows for a bivalent worlding: Tintin could centripe-
tally present the world to the Belgian state through the newspaper
and centrifugally travel the whole of francophone (and, later, even
more languages) Europe through the album. In Imagined Communities,
Benedict Anderson insists on the importance of the newspaper for a
specific type of world-building: “the very conception of the newspa-
per implies the refraction of even ‘world events’ into a specific imag-
ined world of vernacular readers” (63). Just as “Hergé authenticated
Tintin by making him a reporter for Le Petit Vingtième, the newspaper
in which the strip itself appeared” (Screech, Masters 18), the world
liness of the newspaper strip gave it an authority over the world of
its dissemination:
The character, Tintin, was a journalist, a special envoy sent to the

furthest corner of the world, a correspondent charged with report-
ing his impressions of his journeys to those at home. He was an
34 • C hapter 1
observer, authorized to relay the picture he had of the country in

which he found himself. (Goddin, Reporters 29)
While Goddin describes a character that seems innocuous enough in

his fictionality, Delisle grounds Tintin’s mission in terms of his colo-
nial location. Tintin as fictional character and Tintin as print media
emphasize the newspaper’s import for nation-building and imperi-
alism. As Delisle states, “despite the development of nationalisms,”
the period 1930–60 corresponded both to “the golden age of Franco-
Belgian bande dessinées” and European “colonial domination espe-
cially in Africa” (Bande dessinée 8). In its verbal visualization of “the
furthest corner of the world,” Tintin could report for an intended
audience of Belgians while being capacious enough to support a far
broader audience.
As an image-text designed for reproducibility in multiple plat-
forms, Tintin’s local and global circulations exemplify the tension
that Charles Hatfield refers to as “text as experience vs. text as object”
(58). The dual newspaper (later magazine) and album format is
essential to Tintin’s establishment of its relevance in time and in space.
At the level of story, Tintin was the first bande dessinée to prolepti-
cally construct album-worthy narrative arcs. Tintin stories followed a
journey out into the world and traced its return, marking the borders
of the story according to the time of the voyage. Tintin was there-
fore instrumental in creating the standard of single-story albums,
14
using the colonial patterns of travel literature as the basis for their
punctuation. At the level of publication format, Tintin harnessed
the co-productive print technologies of newspapers and albums to
give unparalleled authority to its contents. These stories of Tintin’s
encounters with others in the world were both “timely”—arriving
with current world news in Le Vingtième Siècle—and “timeless”—col-
lected as single-story albums.
From a spatial perspective, the young Belgian reporter who trav-
els to foreign locations in order to report back to his audience of
Catholic readers was—little by little—delocalized or relocalized while
14. Michel de Certeau delineates the travel account into three stages: (1) the
outbound journey, “the search for the strange . . . illustrated by a series of surprises
and intervals (monsters, storms, lapses of time, etc.) which at the same time substan-
tiate the alterity of the savage, and empower the text to speak from elsewhere and
command belief”; (2) “a depiction of savage society”; and (3) “the return voyage”
(Heterologies 69–70).
Hergé and his editor, Father Norbert Wallez, sought a larger audience
for the comics. When the strips were syndicated by other European
newspapers and magazines, localizing textual elements were substi-
tuted: “Liège” became “Paris” in the French Coeurs Vaillants version
of Soviets (Goddin, Art Vol. 1 66–67), and in the Portuguese syndi-
cation of Tintin au Congo, in O Papagaio, “Congo” became “Angola”
(Goddin, Art Vol. 2 50). Thus, in its ephemeral, newspaper and maga-
zine circulation, Tintin could be reworked for a local readership, and,
as McCloud asserts, readers all over Europe could see themselves
(and “their” places) in the series. Meanwhile, albums were edited
over time: Delisle tracks how colonial sites like “the Belgian Congo”
became “less and less Belgian” as the albums were revised over the
decades (Bande dessinée 14). Most albums were eventually reworked
to add color and standardize length. However, Tintin au Congo was
edited in its 1942 black-and-white reprinting so that references to Le
Petit Vingtième and to Antwerp could be removed (21). Then, in 1946,
the colorized album, despite retaining the titular reference to Congo,
was stripped of all other references to the Belgian colony, favoring an
“image of a rather vague colonial Africa” (23) ready to be sold to a
range of imperial readers.
Examining the material instrumentality of comics is part of the
project of demystifying Tintin’s relationship to Belgium’s imperial
world in space and time. For example, in some of the early panels of
Congo, Tintin and Snowy visit the department store Bon Marché in
order to equip themselves for their colonial travel. McKinney makes
the point that comics such as this were instrumental in bridging the
distance between Europe and its colonies, “in part by circulating
in both spaces” but also because they fostered colonial familiarity
15
through their use of visual rhetoric (McKinney, Colonial Heritage 16).
In its visual narrative, Tintin sells the empire at the same time that it
establishes its own reproductive existence within the empire’s eco-
nomic and material flows.
15. Assouline comments: “The newspaper L’Essort colonial et maritime praised

Tintin for its fantasy by reminding its readers that true propaganda begins in the
schools: ‘You will laugh till tears come to your eyes because the Congo presented
by Herge will make you forget about the other one, the one you saw’” (29). This ref-
erence to “the one you saw” is likely actually a reference to Albert Londres’s Terre
d’ébène, written about the French Congo, indicating the substitutability for European
readers between colonial locations.
36 • C hapter 1
The album made a discrete, consumer object of Tintin’s worldly

adventures. It simultaneously asserted the divisibility of the world
into bordered cultural zones—as noted by each titular venture (Land
of the Soviets, Congo, America, Tibet, etc.)—and the divisibility of the
series into authoritative objects. Harold Innis argues in his seminal
text Empire and Communication for a correlation between the par-
ticularities of media and the methods that are used in the imperial
management of vast expanses of space and time (138). Although
commercial objects, Tintin comics have come to function as imperial
media in their command of space and time. Through the use of dif-
ferent materials, methods, and markets of reproduction, the album
and newspaper created widespread and durable economies for Tin-
tin’s encounters. While first widely disseminated as ephemeral news-
paper or magazine strips, Tintin achieved longevity as albums, the
form in which it is still read today. By printing albums, publishers
Le Vingtième Siècle and, later, Casterman asserted the monetary and
cultural value of Tintin—it would not simply become yesterday’s
papers—as well as the conditions of possibility for legally authorized
versions and uses of Hergé’s creation. Tintin’s simultaneous claims to
currency and timelessness are integral for the authority of its world-
view, yet inextricable from its techniques of reproduction.
Text and Image
Before the development of the album as a consumer object, another

local innovation had transformed francophone comics. Preceding
and following the publication of Tintin, convention dictated print-
ing a caption beneath panels to explain what happens in the pictures
(Grove 32). In francophone comics of the early twentieth century,
these explanatory texts were generally typed, producing an aesthetic
dissonance between registers of inscription and of reproduction.
Although Tintin’s abandonment of this system may seem obvious to
a contemporary reader, the move away from an image-text disjunc-
ture was not inevitable. Theorizing the shift from the separate caption
to the word balloon, Thierry Smolderen cautions against teleologi-
cal assumptions regarding the development of the language of com-
ics. As Smolderen asserts, the transparency with which contemporary
readers consume comics does not entail the naturalness or simplicity
of the language of comics: “what its transparency suggests is that we
are able to read it fluently” (137).
Both Smolderen and Benoît Peeters credit Swiss artist Rodolphe

Töpffer with conceptualizing the mixed image/text language of com-
ics, explicitly in his introduction to Monsieur Jabot (1837), wherein
Töpffer explains the inextricability of image and text in his narrative
for the sake of cohesion and legibility (Peeters, Lire 103–11; Smolderen
34–51). However, as Peeters claims, Töpffer’s lesson would be forgot-
ten because of advances in printing and a shift toward typescript text
beneath images in graphic narratives of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. This seemingly small change in where and how
the text accompanies the image created a fragmentary relationship
between the components of the narrative, challenging the fluency of
reading. For Peeters, the use of typed script meant that francophone
bandes dessinées leading up to and past 1900—Mossieu Réac (1848),
Bécassine (1905), Pieds Nickelés (1908), and so forth—favored a pre-
dominantly verbal form, while comics in the US, following Richard F.
Outcault’s use of speech balloons in “The Yellow Kid and His New
16
Phonograph” (1896), favored a predominantly visual form.
Hergé became an innovator in francophone graphic narrative as
a result of his implementation of intrapanel narration, in the form of
word balloons and small notes (bulles and ballons), instead of extrapa-
nel narration (typed récitatifs and legendes). Even in his Totor (1926–
27) series, which preceded Tintin by three years, a typed legend
beneath each panel bears the bulk of the narrative, while humor is
generated from the sometimes dissonant tonal registers of image and
text. Hergé qualifies Totor and its ilk as “illustrated text” or “draw-
ings with captions” (Hergé and Sadoul 13), noting that he sometimes
risked inserting exclamation points or other types of visual dialogue
within the panels of Totor but relied on the print legend for the nar-
ration. Peeters characterizes the development of bande dessinée as
a “succession of amnesias” (Lire 116) from which Hergé awoke to
remember Töpffer’s lesson as it was already being transatlantically
practiced by American artists Rudolph Dirks, George McManus, and
Winsor McCay. Smolderen, for his part, conceptualizes the separate
American development of dialogue balloons as an unprecedented
creation of an audiovisual stage on paper, informed by phonographic
media (136–47). Beginning with “The Yellow Kid and His New Pho-
nograph,” word balloons in modern comic strips came to eschew an
indexical relationship to an “authored text”; instead, they acted to
16. Peeters posits that the rise of visually narrative comics first in the US and
then in Belgium might be explained by the lack of a consecrated literary tradition in
these countries, as opposed to France or the UK (Lire 118).
38 • C hapter 1
“entangle the sound image produced by the character in the kinds of

spatial relationships and mechanical forces that define visible objects
17
and bodies” (147). Hergé subsequently developed Tintin by shift-
ing away from the use of the more literary extrapanel récitatif and
légende toward the concrete visuality of intrapanel narration. Peeters
describes the formal development in semiotic terms:
Influenced by American comics, the author has moved on from the

illustrative concept seen with [his earlier strip] Totor to that of a new
language where text and picture complement each other without
repeating themselves. (Hergé 26)
Tintin was not the first modern Franco-Belgian bande dessinée to

18
use word balloons or phylactères. However, by excising the typed
text below the images and using balloons to express discourse, Tin-
tin was decisive in developing the coherence and autonomy of bande
dessinée form. Rather than articulating between divergent manual
and machinic print systems, spatially separated into discrete areas of
the page, Tintin unified the reading areas within one spatial unit and
technical system of reproduction. In the shared space of all images
and texts, neither asserted definitive authority over the representa-
tional aspects of the story, and both were necessary in order to fully
understand the narrative. Coincidentally, typesetting, as used in the
printing of récitatifs and legendes, gave way to handwriting, creating
a closed system of graphisme. The similitude of lines in text and image
composed a complex of visuality that signified the world in a single
semiotic system of line.
The novelty of this unilinear system is evident at the outset of
the first Tintin adventure. The first panel is filled with handwritten
text, explaining to the reader that Le Petit Vingtième, in order to stay
abreast of foreign affairs, is sending one of its top reporters to Soviet
Russia. The primary text is accompanied by a note: “N.B. The edi-
17. The inspiration of contemporary American comics on Hergé is well docu-

mented: Hergé procured comics by US artists that were translated into Spanish,
and published in Mexican newspapers, from his colleague Léon Degrelle, who was
covering the Cristero War for Le Vingtième Siècle at the same time that Hergé was
working as a photographic reporter and cartoonist for the newspaper (Assouline 17;
Hergé and Sadoul, 15; Cf. Peeters, Hergé 37).
18. That distinction is generally given to Alain Saint-Ogan’s Zig et Puce (Delisle,
Bande dessinée 13).
tor of ‘Le Petit Vingtième’ guarantees that all these photographs are
strictly authentic, taken by Tintin himself, aided by his faithful dog
Snowy!” (Hergé, Soviets 4). Despite its joking tone, McCarthy inter-
prets this panel as the sign that Tintin would depart from light-
hearted comics fare by laying claim “to social and political insight.”
As he explains, the expository text in the panel signals how the car-
toon format needed to “invoke notions of documentary rigour” while
19
“making no attempt to disguise” the ultimate fiction of the story (4).
Yet, the first adventure of Tintin is important not just for what its pan-
els say but for how they say it, in the sense that they undo the disjunc-
ture between machine-produced word and hand-produced image,
20
literally drawing all the compositional elements into synthesis.
The style and thickness of lines in Soviets are identical not only
for drawn images and written text but also for the outlining of panel
borders, or frames. By delimiting what is framed—and how—panel
borders profess the interiority of a composition. Unifying image, text,
and frame in a single form of line, Tintin consolidated a meaning sys-
tem specific to comics, whereby narrative was streamlined to move
from panel to panel with no outside semiosis, less like an illustrated
story, and more like film, which Hergé sought to remediate (Peeters,
Hergé 23, 38). Where the typeset légende had produced a schizoid vac-
illation between reading the text beneath the caption and looking
up at the images, Tintin effected a single-panel unit that compelled
bande dessinée readers to read verbally and visually within the
same frame. Furthermore, while the légende structure constrained
the mobility of panels, by tethering each image to its correlate text,
the concrete image-text panel is easily moved, recropped, or even
excised. This plasticity facilitated the reproduction of Tintin in album
form, and the re-editing and revision of albums for new editions.
19. Alternately, Peeters reads this as an “in-joke” referencing the duties of

“reporter-photographer that Abbot Wallez had initially assigned to the young Hergé
. . . duties that he never actually managed to fill” (Hergé 35).
20. Upon syndicating Tintin strips in 1930, the French magazine Coeurs Vail-
lants added a conventionally typeset legend beneath the strips, fearing that readers
would not be able to understand Tintin’s new “language.” However, “the addition
of these legends to pages whose layout was not designed to include them made
reading the pages almost impossible. . . . the two characteristics were fundamentally
incompatible” (Peeters, Hergé 38). See also the description in Hergé and Sadoul:
“That same year, Coeurs vaillants undertakes the publication of Tintin au pays des
Soviets, but begins to print an accompanying explanatory text with each image.
Hergé protests” (15).
40 • C hapter 1
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets inaugurated Hergé’s develop-

ment of an increasingly autonomous comics form that encapsulated
the world within a universalizing verbal-visual line. As an imperial-
ist complex of visuality, Soviets asserted Belgian global mobility and
political superiority through a hand-drawn “imbrication of mental-
ity and organization” that neither needed nor permitted an outside,
despite its debt to flows of global comics from the US and Mexico
(Mirzoeff, Right 5). However, shifting focus to the medial conditions
of newspaper comics production reveals a technological exteriority
closer to home, in the sense that Tintin’s “lines to see” and “lines to
be” universalized the world not merely as standardized image-text
but as mechanically reproducible image-text (McCloud 43). Or, to put
it another way, the “strictly authentic,” hand-drawn “photographs”
announced at the beginning of Soviets actually are photos (4).
Ligne Claire
A complicated history—Belgian imperial annexation and colonial

expropriation of the Congo, the devastation of World War I, Hergé’s
“Catholic and traditionalist” schooling and youthful “adventure[s]”
in scouting, “conflicts everywhere” in Belgium “between French and
Flemish speakers . . . socialists [and] Catholics,” the creep of postwar
fascism and anticommunism (Peeters, Hergé 5–27; Assouline 3–14)—
informs the imagination of Tintin’s early narrative, but it is the tech-
nology of photogravure printing that conditions the image of Tintin’s
clear line. According to Didier Pasamonik, the universal verbal-visual
line innovated by Hergé for Soviets not only concretized the signifying
codes of the page; it was practicable for the print conditions of photo-
gravure (qtd. in Peeters, Hergé 30), which was developed at separate
junctures in the nineteenth century by William Fox Talbot, Charles
Nègre, and Karel Klíč and became the state of the art for commer-
cial printing in the early twentieth century (Stulik and Kaplan). Both
Pasamonik and Peeters attest to the exigency of photogravure for the
development of Hergé’s ligne claire style (qtd. in Peeters, Hergé 30).
Prior to creating Tintin, Hergé had worked as a photo engraver at
Le Vingtième Siècle, and he understood the mechanics of photogra-
vure, which uses a technology similar to photography, whereby acid
and gelatin are used to transfer an image to a plate (Smolderen 119).
Planned for photogravure, Tintin was drawn for maximal reproduc-
tive efficacy. Clear lines, no shading, and the banishment of all ambi-
guity would come to dominate Hergé’s ligne claire style.
Thus the reference to photography that launches Tintin in the first
panel of Soviets refers not only to the diegetic content of the panels
but also—whether intentionally or not—to the printed page of Tintin,
which is not, in itself, a drawing, but a kind of photograph of one.
Tintin’s seemingly “[un]remarkable debut” panels establish the com-
ic’s capacity for worlding not only through hybrid use of text and
image but also through metareference to its reproducibility (Peeters,
Hergé 35). With text and image unified for photogravure, neither
maintains what might be its traditional authority in other media con-
texts; instead, they share the same plane of presentation. As Peeters
declares:
Georges Remi’s experience with photo-engraving had proven deci-

sive, stamping on his mind the simple and obvious fact that a press
drawing is made to be reproduced; therefore it must be readable,
effective, and clear from the start. (Hergé 30)
Although Hergé’s style would become established as what is now

known as ligne claire in subsequent stories, programming Tintin’s
earliest adventures for their means of reproduction influenced the
rest of his career. Assouline contextualizes the clear-line style thus:
Hergé’s aversion to shading and toning down the colors stemmed

from the days when such techniques were prohibited by the poor-
quality paper. It coincided with his tendency to focus on only the
essentials, with just one goal: maximum comprehension. Hergé
played the card of absolute clarity to the point of transparency. (155)
As Peeters notes, the terms that Töpffer had used to validate the uni-
form and inextricable simplification of text and image in his early pic-
ture stories would be nearly identical to those that Hergé would use
almost a century later to qualify ligne claire (Lire 106). The “Tintin
style,” as Hergé, called it, dictated that graphic elements must “be
neither too simplified nor too detailed, that each of them stays in its
place and is based on the whole” (Hergé and Sadoul 45). Beyond
facilitating protogravure, the outcome of Tintin’s calculated stylistic
simplification—Hergé’s “privileging” of “line drawing,” as Peeters
describes it—is its “gain in readability [lisibilité]” (Lire 106). Ligne
42 • C hapter 1
claire catalyzes the worlding of Tintin by refocusing the constraints

of its reproduction into a rhetorical strategy. The clarity of style that
facilitates Tintin’s publication also advances its universality, its syn-
dication in foreign markets, its exponential reproduction, and, ulti-
mately, its global influence.
The semiotic effects of ligne claire have, in turn, been capaciously
and globally analyzed. As mentioned above, in Les Héritiers d’Hergé,
which examines ligne claire’s influence on myriad comics, Lecigne
argues that the clear-line style trains its reader-viewer to understand
that the world is legible while concealing the mechanism that gener-
ates this legibility (40). Lecigne asserts that legibility does not func-
tion as realism. Rather, as is evident in Hergé’s later works and in
the revisions of earlier Tintin albums, lush ornamentation is added
to the backgrounds in order to suppress a reader’s recognition of its
artifice. Moreover, Hatfield stipulates that ligne claire does not sim-
ply suppress potential illegibility in the world; it appears to denature
the comics object as such, in that it “seems to deny the materiality of
the comics page, relying on precise linework and flat colors to cre-
ate pristine and detailed settings into which simply drawn characters
are inserted” (61). Implicating these effects in the gestalt of Tintin’s
thematization, Miller explains that the simplifying, universaliz-
ing rhetoric of ligne claire promotes the reader’s identification with
“the apparent mastery of Tintin.” In her view, it is not only events
in Hergé’s storytelling but the graphic style of the comic that aligns
the reader’s sense of control with the protagonist, whose focalization
is “emphasized through the harmony of the ligne claire, which seems
to offer the ‘single, primary, literal meaning’ sought by the conscious
mind, which blocks out the variable and multiple meanings gener-
ated by the unconscious” (Reading 206). In the light of such rhetorical
and psychological appraisals of ligne claire’s semiosis, the confidence
that McCloud shows in the “mask” of Tintin is idealistic, if not will-
fully hallucinatory (43).
However, if the clear line hides its own artifice, as Lecigne asserts,
or “blocks out” alternate meanings, as Miller argues, then the ques-
tion remains what is behind or beyond ligne claire’s mask? From a
medial-technical standpoint, ligne claire is a method of ensuring the
meaning of a message by managing the “fundamental relationship
. . . between communication and noise” in the practice of photogra-
vure, wherein Hergé inscribed verbal-visual stories as uniform lines
in order to prevent errors and ambiguities inherent in the process of
transferring an image from page, to photo, to plate, to publication

(Siegert 21). Insofar as “communication is the exclusion of a third,
the oscillation of a system between order and chaos,” and technic-
ity conditions rhetoric (Siegert 23), then ligne claire’s totalizing style
enacts an ideology of control, of mediating a world “neither too sim-
plified nor too detailed” so as to mask complication and confusion
(Hergé and Sadoul 45). As technicity conditions rhetoric, it also pro-
cesses politics. In this regard, French semiologist and visual theo-
rist Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle considers Hergé’s style to be a global
design, arraigning “ligne claire as a process of cataloging or label-
ling from which any hybridity, métissage or ambiguity is excluded”
(Hergé 8). More pointedly, McKinney indicts clear-line as an impe-
rialist complex of visuality, declaring that “ideology, historical con-
text and form are inextricably intertwined in the ligne claire drawing
school of Hergé . . . its clear-ness, its legibility, is to a considerable
degree an imperialist, orientalizing, eurocentric manner of reading
the world” (Colonial Heritage 10). While analyses such as these have
inspired Apostolidès to declare that “there is no innocent reader [of
Tintin] any longer” (qtd. in Mountfort 34), we may still question the
worldliness of a reader who does not doubt the assimilation of the
world within one untroubled line. Between simplicity and detail,
ligne claire masks the noise of empire.
Revisionism
Translatio imperii: Empire carries across time and space, revising its
complex of “visuality against countervisuality,” rearticulating the
“claim to authority” in its “configurations of . . . material systems”
(Mirzoeff, Right 5–8). Having established above some of the relays
between local histories and global designs that materialize Tintin’s
complex of visuality, a question emerges: how can Tintin travel
through space and time, such that despite debuting in a Catholic
newspaper supplement for children in Belgium in the late 1920s, it
commands global attention up to the present day, encouraging white
Western anticonquest readings such as McCloud’s and postcolo-
nial countervisual critique such as Mondondo’s, and be one corpus?
The answer? Tintin is not one corpus. Or, if it is one corpus, it is not
inviolable but instead plastic and rhizomatic, constantly under revi-
sion, reformatting, repackaging, and remediation. Tintin’s revisions
44 • C hapter 1
correlate with its travels into other complexes of visuality, as when

Hergé excised Black characters at the request of his first US publisher,
Golden Press (Owens). Also, echoing its formal development, Tintin’s
revisions respond to technical predicates, as when, in 2006, the hand-
lettering of translations of the series was replaced by a digital text
meant to imitate hand-lettering. While the former case reveals cracks
in Tintin’s global design, whereby Hergé acquiesced to the authority
of “US censors” in order to expand Tintin’s empire (Owens), the latter
case indicates that Tintin’s ethnographic opportunism is matched—
and potentially explained—by its industrial pragmatism. To justify
the adoption of a standardized Tintin font for all “foreign” language
versions, a Casterman representative cited the “evolution of technol-
ogy,” and reasoned that
books used to be printed from offset films and for Comics and
Graphic novels the texts were normally hand-made. Now the print-
ers work from computer files and the lettering for comics is now
performed on computer. (qtd. in jock123)
Despite enmity from Tintinologists—particularly fans of the Eng-

lish translations lettered by Neil Hyslop—this late shift in Tintin’s
reproduction—which undoes Hergé’s unilineal textuality and seems
to flout his love of lettering—is itself only an evolution in the series’
imperialist custom of reworking its visuality.
As Tintin became more capacious, the world it created and
claimed through its album format, unified image-text layout, and
ligne claire style underwent an iterative process of deletion and revi-
sion in order to remain coherent. McCarthy asserts:
The books are both full of erasure and subject to it themselves: as

Hergé transferred the stories from their original newspaper and
then magazine versions to the album format in which we now read
them, he reworked them, covering up material he considered out of
date or below par. (30)
Albums created authoritative versions of the stories but also could

be reworked any time a translation or a new printing was under-
21
taken. Hergé and his many unacknowledged collaborators reviewed
21. A number of insightful texts have sought to rescue the labors of Hergé’s
collaborators from obscurity (Lecigne; Assouline; Mouchart; Mouchart and Rivière;
Bourdil and Tordeur). As Assouline states, Hergé would not give credit to the oth-
the albums, changing numerous aspects to bring the series into an

ever-more synthetic unity of style and content (Soumois; Assouline
148–83). In addition to these copious, minute changes that Hergé
and his uncredited colleagues undertook, the albums were all reset
to a length of sixty-two pages as the agreed-upon “norm for Tintin
books” (Farr 25). Color was added to early black-and-white albums,
controversial or distasteful historical elements were excised, and the
time-frame of the works was manipulated to establish a specific Tin-
tin “world time.” Consequently, after revisions, Tintin reads a book
on German rocket engineering in World War II, despite the war’s
nonexistence in the Tintin oeuvre. More famously, Tintin’s colonial
geography lesson to Congolese students in Tintin au Congo shifts, in
revision, from instruction on the great “fatherland” of Belgium to a
simple arithmetic lesson.
Repeatedly changing Tintin albums drove the oeuvre’s visual
economy into constant modernization and global expansion. How-
ever, the earlier Tintin albums did not disappear, resulting in a bib-
liographic palimpsest of worlding. For example, Tintin in the Land
of Black Gold was redrawn no fewer than four times, each version
evincing further attempts to manage difference. The story began its
serialization in Le Petit Vingtième in 1939, but work was interrupted
by the Nazi invasion of Belgium. Originally set in Palestine during
the British Mandate, Black Gold contained references to Zionism that
were subsequently removed from panels set for syndication in Coeurs
Vaillants in occupied Paris (Soumois 213–15). Hergé resumed work
on the story in 1948, revised it in 1950, and again in 1971, remov-
ing over time all references to the British Mandate in Palestine. Haifa
became Khemikal of Khemed, and British troops were redrawn wear-
ing vaguely “Arab”-looking uniforms (Soumois 213–24). There is vio-
lence in these erasures, wherein colonialism is first hidden and then
mystified. The history of Palestine is eradicated through simple com-
mutations of toponym and costume. Tintin’s processual commodi-
fication and management of difference in the revising of Black Gold
reveal the discrete entities and political borders of Palestine/Israel to
be too unwieldy and politically charged after European colonizers
have withdrawn.
Tintin’s branching corpus itself became a problem of intellec-
tual property management. For example, after Tintin in the Land of
ers who worked on his books, “in his view their work belonged to him because
they were paid to follow his directions. He found it normal to take credit for their
ideas” (202).
46 • C hapter 1
the Soviets was not reissued along with most of the early works, a
number of pirated editions began circulating. Hergé was report-
edly offended by the poor quality of the drawings, while Casterman
was offended by the threat to their market share. In 1973 Casterman
published a single volume collecting Tintin’s first three adventures
(Soviets, Congo, America) in an attempt to “eliminate the market for
counterfeit books” (Assouline 205). This omnibus did not stop the
flow of pirate editions, which, as Peeters recounts it, left only one
recourse, “to publish a true facsimile edition of the original Tintin in
the Land of the Soviets” (Peeters, World of Hergé 27). Finally, an official
reprint of Soviets was published in 1981. However, the true facsim-
ile of Soviets, intended to disenfranchise “pirated editions of ‘Sovi-
ets,’ which had acquired a false authenticity” (Goddin, Reporters 208),
also complicated the canon, as the album was not revised verbally or
visually, marking its anachronism among the other multiply revised
albums. However, with so many authentic changes over the decades,
the anachronism of any Tintin album is only a revision away.
Ironically, the album format, image and text synthesis, and clear-
line style that made Tintin so fit for travel, circulation, and distribu-
tion also made it ripe for piracy. The proprietary nature of each work
is the subject of constant anxiety (and litigation) on the part of pub-
lisher Casterman and copyright holder Fondation Moulinsart. Even
these designations were put under revision following a 2015 ruling
in a Dutch court that Casterman, not Moulinsart, owned the rights
22
to the series. This anxious ownership shows a tenuous commercial
border patrolling Tintin’s local and global transit, strained by Cas-
terman’s and Moulinsart’s protectiveness of Tintin’s world, and its
command of the world comics trade. If Tintin’s imperium is as fragile
as it seems capacious, it would match Gayatri Spivak’s analysis that
imperial worlding “reinscri[bes] a cartography that must (re)present
itself as impeccable” (“Rani” 263–64). Therefore, although the world
of Tintin is under relentless surveillance—such that Bart Beaty has
accused Moulinsart of policing “the Tintin copyrights even to the
22. The ruling occurred after Moulinsart sued a Dutch Tintin fan club for using
original Tintin images to illustrate their newsletter (Cascone). Despite the ruling, in
2019 Moulinsart “asserted its leadership over Casterman” by publishing a new digi-
tal version of Tintin au Congo under its own imprint, Éditions Moulinsart (Detournay,
“Pour le 90e anniversaire”), furthering long-standing speculation that Moulinsart
was planning to sever financial ties with Casterman (Detournay, “Tintin quitterait
Casterman?”).
point of discouraging academic study of the Tintin books” (qtd. in

Cascone)—litigiousness is an anticonquest—legal—method of indem-
nifying Tintin against peripheral challenges to its empire. Assured of
safe travel on the map of Tintin, however, many readers have come to
see, and to see themselves to be, the peccancy beyond the mask.
The World of Tintin and Its Discontents
A stereotype is valued for its reproducibility, which in turn enables

its mobilization. As Delisle and many others establish, one of the leg-
acies of Tintin—particularly in relation to its second volume, Tintin in
the Congo—is the tradition [“lignée”] in “the Franco-Belgian school”
of mobilizing “the colonial stereotypes” (Bande dessinée 8). As I will
show, this tradition has not gone unchallenged. Mirzoeff declares,
“Any engagement with visuality in the present or past requires estab-
lishing its counterhistory.” Thus, it is not enough to champion the
hybrid form of comics without taking seriously their use of caricature
and stereotype, and the ways in which such techniques are “always
already opposed and in struggle” as they work to naturalize dif-
ference (Right 6). In this regard, Tintin functions as a case study for
showing how recognition becomes naturalized. As argued above,
the ideologies of Tintin all too easily appear at the level of depoliti-
cized signified if the series is read as representing difference without
attention to how comics actually encode difference. To attend to this
role is to consider visual imperialism in terms of its historicity and
technicity.
Critics have taken issue with Tintin’s blatant colonialism, Euro-
centrism, and racism, yet debates over the series, the character, or
creator Hergé’s specific stance vis-à-vis racism seem to lead only to
23
a discursive impasse. The “implicit and explicit imperialism of the
albums” (Frey, “History” 301) has heretofore been examined mostly
in the diegetic aspects of the Tintin series, with critical dispute occur-
ring on an album-by-album level. Some Tintin scholars like Apos-
23. Tintin’s mission civilisatrice, as Ann Miller and Jean-Marie Apostolidès note,
changed over the forty-seven years of his oeuvre. While the specific stance Tintin
adopted changed from album to album, the moral and cultural superiority of his
position never waned. Alain Reys specifically calls Tintin the good conscience of the
bourgeoisie, “colonialist when it is necessary, decolonialist when it befits” (qtd. in
Miller, “Les héritiers” 307–9).
48 • C hapter 1
tolidès argue that it is as early as the fifth adventure in the series,

The Blue Lotus (1936), that Tintin demonstrates opposition to (Japa-
nese) colonialism and “really opens up to a non-Western world, [for]
the first time [letting] himself listen to the Others rather than sim-
ply impos[ing] his own values on them” (Apostolidès, Metamorphoses
26). On the other hand, Paul Mountfort argues that the same album
is “unable to shake off an Orientalist gaze” (34). Further, Mountfort
claims that Hergé’s “most damning” offense lies in The Shooting Star
(1942) because of the inherently antisemitic caricature of the villain
Blumenstein (later changed to Bohlwinkel), which he created for the
collaborationist newspaper Le Soir, under Nazi occupation (42). On
yet another hand, Frey has argued against scholars who see the post–
World War II albums The Seven Crystal Balls (1948) and Prisoners of
the Sun (1949) as increasingly mature (“Contagious” 178). Frey reads
these two works together as an exercise in neofacism, where the fear
of race-mixing is transferred from a no longer acceptable Semitic tar-
get to Incas. For Maxime Benoît-Jeannin, Hergé’s racist paternalism
is evident in the series’ unchanging caricatures of Africans, which
extend through albums from 1931’s Tintin au Congo to 1958’s Coke en
Stock (78).
Maurin Abomo notes of Tintin in the Congo that its combination
of text (in all its manifestations) and drawings, as well as its specific
division and organization of the page, coalesced into an ideogram-
matization. This ideogrammatizing system is a cultural technique
that creates a machine for reading others: the colonial comic. In other
words, the production of Tintin au Congo creates a system for the
clear demarcation between those who are read—the objects of the
colonial fantasy of nègrerie—and those who read—subjects interpel-
lated by the complex of visuality. In reading the comic, a colonial
subject and a reading subject are simultaneously and coterminously
produced. Through the mastery of reading—facilitated by the mark-
ing and design—this subject becomes a superior reader, one whose
superiority is inscribed in and by his difference from the objects of
his reading, objects (i.e., colonized Africans) stigmatized by their
own misreadings. Abomo points out how the “Congolese” of Tin-
tin struggle with language, political organization, costumerie, and
so forth. However, as argued above, the coloniality of Tintin in the
Congo is not reducible to its content; it is a fulfillment of the complex
of visuality by which the content is instrumentalized. By melding
verbal and visual regimes and normalizing the disjuncture between
fanciful images and the historical plenitude of toponyms and “petit

nègre,” Tintin au Congo produces a graphically novel colonial reading
24
subject.
Hergé is neither the first nor the last comics artist to use caricature
or stereotype in narration. Derek Parker Royal argues that graphic
narratives routinely valorize a specific ethnic group and mark “the
Other” as such (Royal, “Introduction” 8). The relegation of detail or
ambiguity in the service of plot is standard for the form. Iteration of
characters and settings favors easy recognition; thus, the basic formal
structures of comics are prone to normalization of stereotypes (Royal,
“Introduction” 7). If the first panel depicting Tintin’s encounter with
the Congolese in Congo is shocking in its “visual stereotype of the
ape-like African” (Rifas 230), then by the final page this caricature has
become standardized by its reiteration. As Mountfort shows, in Tintin
such normalization constitutes the “progressive dehumanization” of
marked “Others,” which “immerses the reader in a fully-fledged cul-
tural myth” (Mountfort 35). Wanzo argues that racist caricature “has
typically functioned as propaganda supporting white supremacy” (31,
emphasis added). Even if the “frame the caricature inhabits some-
times suggests a challenge to bigotry” (31), Wanzo asserts that this
framing requires a reading that thematizes the “white gaze” (218) as
the intended recipient for these images. Visual imperialism is a pro-
cess wherein “white people literally and figuratively create black sub-
jects that are left out of the nation” (218), just as McCloud delineates
blackness as outside the reader’s figuration of being.
Many readers have critically framed Tintin’s visual imperialism
in order to read Hergé’s works for difference. Historian Nancy Rose
Hunt investigates the colonial and postcolonial production and cir-
culation of Congolese comics and comics in Congo as a means of
interrogating Tintin’s iconicity and placing “the colonial-minstrelsy
rubric of Tintin within a larger context” (97). Questioning both the
oft-repeated claim that Tintin in the Congo was most popular among
Congolese and Zairian readers and the “canard [that] Tintin au Congo
had once been so detested that it was banned [in Congo],” Hunt dis-
covers this discursive construct’s relation to “the Hergé-Casterman
enterprise to prove the acceptability of Tintin au Congo to postcolo-
nial Congolese” (111, 93). Furthermore, Hunt discerns the complex
24. Frédéric Soumois describes the creation of a “‘géographie’ congolaise élé-
mentaire” that aids the reader’s understanding of how to read space thanks to its
fantastical elements “exotiques” (33).
50 • C hapter 1
relationality of Congolese readers to Tintin, which enshrines “the

colonized world” of a European imaginary that compels “native
colonial Africans . . . [to identify] themselves with the hero [Tintin],
not with the degraded savages” (96, 111). Hunt notes that the self-
identification offered by Tintin’s “colonial screens of blackness” rei-
fies “a colonial gaze,” a sublimation of the “ever-lurking white look”
that stereotypes the Black body (111–13). Thus, Tintin provides either
the “possibility of identifying with the [white] hero” or—as Hunt
quotes Kaja Silverman, referencing Franz Fanon—“‘identify[ing] with
an image that provides neither idealization nor pleasure’” (111).
In 2011 Nadim Damluji completed his project of traveling to “the
places where Tintin traveled, where the comics are actively mar-
keted, and where there is a budding or strong contemporary com-
ics culture” (“Introduction”). A companion piece to Damluji’s Hooded
Utilitarian column, “Can the Subaltern Draw?,” his Tintin-tracking
project, chronicled at https://tintintravels.com, reflected his desire to
“understand how artists have historically resisted Hergé’s Oriental-
ist depictions and how contemporary comics creators have managed
to create vibrant political communities using the same medium.”
Damluji received a grant to travel to Belgium, France, Egypt, the
United Arab Emirates, Taiwan, and China. In each location, Dam-
luji chronicled the reception of Tintin as well as the comics scene in
the area. One example of Damluji’s remarkable findings is Egyptian
magazine Samir’s “bootlegging” of Tintin comics twenty-three years
before they were officially translated into Arabic. Damluji reveals
how “illegal” translations of Tintin in Samir “put Hergé into dialogue
with—instead of opposition to—his Arab counterparts” (“Samir Mag-
azine”). Damluji catalogs how Hergé—drawing from a geographic
and cultural distance—often used squiggly lines to represent Arabic
25
and other scripts, an analysis that aligns with other examinations of
how the speech of non-European characters in Tintin—the Congolese,
Indigenous North Americans, African pilgrims, and so forth—is ren-
26
dered as pidgin or broken French. Drawing heavily from Edward
25. See also Bentahar, who qualifies these as “squiggly lines that were supposed
to be Arabic and not meant to be understood by readers in the original French” (43).
26. As Farr reports of the album Coke en Stock / The Red Sea Sharks: “It offered
Hergé scope to prove that he was not racist . . . However, his well-intentioned por-
trayal of the trapped African pilgrims liberated by Tintin was to backfire.” Farr
recounts Hergé’s stunned response: “Oh there, once again, I am a racist. Why?
Because the blacks speak pidgin!” In his “amendment” of the offensive speech,
Said’s critique of Orientalism, Damluji’s travels led him to argue that

Tintin produces normative visions of Asia and Africa predicated on
a colonial imaginary of the inferiority and alterity of non-Western
Europeans.
Hunt’s and Damluji’s projects reveal Tintin’s systematic and aes-
thetic dispossession of the civilization of non-European others to be
a process of mystification carried out from the metropole. By visiting
sites that Hergé did not see, yet made consumable, Hunt and Dam-
luji offer alternate worldings that expose the fallacies behind Tintin’s
oft-noted realism. Some readers have gone so far as to object to the
continued commercial circulation of Tintin. The centenary of Her-
gé’s birth, 2007, saw numerous such condemnations amid renewed
attention to The Adventures of Tintin. While so-called Tintinophiles
staged tributes and events celebrating Hergé’s life and career, other
global readers protested the colonial phantasmagoria of Tintin in
the Congo. In the UK, human rights lawyer David Enright success-
fully petitioned for the English translation to be affixed with a warn-
ing label and removed from the children’s sections of bookshops in
Great Britain. In the US, Brooklyn Public Library patron Laurie Burke
requested that the book be removed from circulation; it was subse-
27
quently placed in an appointment-only special collection. Mean-
while, Congolese national Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, a student
who had lived in Belgium for many years, brought a claim against
the book—specifically against Moulinsart and Casterman—in Belgian
28
court, stipulating that it violated Belgium’s antiracism legislation.
In the same year, three reading subjects used an encounter with
Tintin to orient three different interventions into commercial, insti-
tutional, and juridical discourses. While, in their respective nations,
Enright and Burke emerged as politically correct readers, Mon-
29
dondo lost his case in court, where his reading was adjudicated as
a misreading. The Belgian court found against Mondondo and his co-
plaintiffs, stipulating that Hergé’s 1931 book was paternalistic but not
the characters are still not depicted as speaking the same French that Tintin does;
instead, Hergé improves their grammar but “adopts the American practice of drop-
ping letters” (152–53).
27. Her Request for Reconsideration of Library Material noted that “culturally we
have progressed beyond” (qtd. in Cowan) the racist depictions of Tintin in the Congo.
28. Mondondo was joined in his suit by Le Conseil Représentatif des Associa-
tions Noires.
29. Delisle cites this schism as one that indicates longstanding division between
the Anglo-American and francophone worlds (“Reporter” 267).
52 • C hapter 1
racist because “given the context of the era, Hergé could not have been
motivated by such intention” (Le Monde.fr and AFP). The decision
against Mondondo was upheld on appeal, with the court citing Vol-
taire as another text that would be considered racist but must not be
banned. Underscoring Mondondo’s perceived folly, Alain Berenboom,
one of two lawyers representing Moulinsart and Casterman, added
to the court’s canon of unbannable racist world literature, claiming
that banning Tintin in the Congo would be akin to opening a Pandora’s
box, leading to bans on “Dickens . . . Mark Twain, the Bible” (“Student
Sues Publishers”). Constellating Tintin among these great works of lit-
erature, Berenboom denies the central component of what makes both
Tintin and pursuantly Mondondo’s claim distinct: visuality.
Using Belgium’s 1981 antiracism law as their basis, Mondondo
and his co-plaintiffs entered a primary and secondary injunction for
what Mirzoeff would call the “right to look.” As Mirzoeff explains,
the right to look is visuality’s opposite (2): it lodges a claim to “a
political subjectivity and collectivity” as a form of countervisuality
(1), “challenging the law that sustains visuality’s authority in order to
justify its own sense of ‘right’” (25). If visuality, in the form of Tintin’s
cohesive worlding, claims authority to naturalize the visual evalu-
ation of human difference as a prerequisite for colonial modernity,
then Mondondo claims the right to look as an autonomous reader,
and to reject Tintin’s forms of segregation and classification by inter-
vening in their proliferation, and thus their legibility. Of the two pri-
mary claims in Mondondo’s suit, the first demanded the cessation
of all commercial exploitation, circulation, and printing of Tintin au
Congo. Explaining his rationale during an interview with Pasamonik,
Mondondo characterizes the images in the album as “unaccept-
able” and explains the personal injury he felt: “I filed the complaint
because I felt that there was an attack on my image” (Pasamonik,
“Bienvenu”). In his language, Mondondo asserts the harm of visual-
ity, not simply—as Berenboom would have it—racism.
When Pasamonik, in the course of the interview, uses the same
logic as Berenboom, arguing that banning great literature would
encompass so many “worldly” works, Mondondo locates his spe-
cific right according to local history and in keeping with his second-
ary injunction. As noted in the suit and its appeal, the cessation of
commercial exploitation—that is, ceaseless reproduction—was fol-
lowed by a secondary request, for framing. In the event that the court
refused to order the total cessation of sale and reprinting of Tintin
au Congo, Mondondo asked that the album at least be revised with

a warning or a preface explaining the work as an “affirm[ation] of
colonial prejudices of the time” (Pasamonik). Using the decision by
the British publisher Egmont—compelled by Enright’s complaint—as
a model, Mondondo averred that the outcome in England (the ces-
sation of the sale of Tintin in the Congo to children and its affixing
with a warning label) established a certain right to look according to
“the equality of the races” that had been previously unthinkable in
Belgium (Pasamonik). In the event that it was properly framed, Mon-
dondo also allowed that Tintin in the Congo might lead to an other-
wise suppressed discussion about colonialism in Belgium, but only if
it were “critical” (Pasamonik). In relation to such a scenario, Wanzo
provocatively suggests that caricature and stereotype might be means
for antiracist and decolonial ends. However, she declares that such
iconography must be read through a framework that acknowledges
how “Black caricature always deals in pain because historically it has
been a way of inflicting injury.” Furthermore, Wanzo advises that
critical uses of caricature and stereotype should ask whether a given
work’s “narrative and visual structure that it shapes may be doing
work other than, or something more than, the injury” (220). The pres-
ent version(s) of Congo and Moulinsart’s long-standing efforts to sup-
press its historical context demonstrate that critical discussions such
as these will not be taking place from its side.
Both of Mondondo’s claims to the right to look—either a full
intercession in the commercial profit from the reproduction of rac-
ist caricature or the historical framing of the colonial injury—were
denied by the court in an unsurprising rejection of his reading and
of his “autonomy to arrange the relations of the visible and the
sayable.” In its ruling, the court furnished its own reading, which
re-established the value and innocence of Tintin while denying Mon-
dondo a place “from which to claim rights and to determine what
is right” (Mirzoeff, Right 1). The court justified its ruling by citing
Belgian legal precedents and cultural needs, acclaiming Tintin in the
Congo as “above all a testimony to the shared history of Belgium and
Congo at the given time” (La cour d’appel). In a unique conflation of
the character of Tintin and the character of the album itself, the judg-
ment even interprets the plot of Congo to support the case of Tintin,
opining that Tintin is presented as an ideal hero to emulate, and that
everyone is sad when he leaves the Congo. In its reading of Congo,
the court not only performs an uncritical McCloudian consump-
54 • C hapter 1
tion of difference, it also mirrors a scene in the original work itself,

wherein Tintin educates Congolese children on how to read a map of
Belgium, “votre patrie.” Thus, the verdict produces a colonial mise-
en-abyme in which a graphic imperial agent named Tintin teaches
colonial subjects in the Congo how to read a map-image of their Bel-
gian “fatherland” within an image-text named Tintin that a Belgian
court uses to educate a Congolese student émigré in Belgium on how
30
to read colonial patrimony.
Media coverage of the trial, particularly in Europe, tended toward
condescension and even outright hostility toward Mondondo. The
cover of the Belgian weekly Télémoustique featured a caricature by
Pierre Kroll in the style of Tintin in the Congo’s Congolese characters
(specifically le roi de Ba baoro’m) exclaiming over the book—which
he is reading upside down—“Ça y en à raciste!” [“Dat’s racist!”].
Kroll’s application of Tintin’s iconography is a reminder that the
post- of postcolonialism does not mean past, insofar as the work of
historical reckoning continues. Through his suit Mondondo sought to
“clear a space,” in Appiah’s terms, from the colonial stereotypology
of Congo by “appeal[ing] to an ethical universal” that would include
Belgium in a larger project of reckoning with coloniality and rac-
ism—a project shared, incidentally by England, and more distantly,
by the US (342, 353). In its declamation of Mondondo’s misreading,
it is the court, in fact, that misreads Mondondo’s case as an attack
on Belgium’s cultural heritage or European literary tradition rather
than as an allegation that visual imperialism should be marked as
passé or relegated to the past to clarify shared antiracist values in
the postcolonial present. Although Mondondo’s challenge failed to
amend the imperialist complex of visuality represented by Tintin in
the Congo, his “space-clearing gesture” is a testament to readers “who
will not see themselves as Other” in the face of the stereotypes of
global comics (Appiah 348, 356).
Nitnits and Other Tintins, or Tintin and the Pirates!
If the post- of Mondondo’s postcolonial stance indicates “challenges

to earlier legitimating narratives,” then his resistance is obliquely
30. Note that the court also justifies the images in the album by asserting that
they might be readily compared to “photographs from the 1930s,” wherein one
would be “struck by the similarity of the situations” (La cour d’appel).
shared by the post- of postmodernist critique of Tintin (Appiah 353).

Appiah asserts that postmodernism, in its ungroundedness, has not
readily been “the basis” for the “reject[ion of] Western imperium” in
Africa or amid the African diaspora (353). In a general global context,
however, postmodernist tactics have magnified the comics medium
while mocking Hergé’s message in a proliferation of pirated Tintins.
Modernism, Appiah contends, “saw the economization of the world
as the triumph of reason” (346). The commitment of Tintin’s publish-
ers and copyright-holders to produce and protect authorized ver-
sions of Tintin’s corpus is thus a decidedly modernist symptom of a
rational economy wherein Tintin symbolically masters the world that
Tintin encompasses in commodity form. Yet the authorized object
conditions the possibility of the unauthorized object. Since its incep-
tion, illegitimate Tintins have undermined Tintin’s economy, form-
ing their own material and symbolic global flows. Some of these
are traced over the “original” Tintin albums and recopied; some are
drawn anew, with varying degrees of likeness to the original pages.
This counterfeit economy has spanned eras of analog and digital dis-
tribution. In 2011 an iPad App entitled “Tintin: The Complete Collec-
tion,” retailing for the price of $4.99 (US), was revealed to be “nothing
more than some hastily assembled photocopies [with] many of the
pages sized incorrectly for the iPad, but . . . not even sized consis-
tently incorrectly, and due to shoddy scanning work, [with] colors
[that] aren’t even always consistent within a single book.” On the IFC
blog where this “fraud” was reported, the author contends not that
the poor-quality pages are not actually copies of Tintin adventures
but merely that they are not licensed and thus “bogus and created
using pirated material” (Sitterson).
Some pirated Tintins follow the Situationist practice of détourne-
31
ment. Using the characters, ligne claire style, or actual pages and
panels from a Tintin album, authors create “new” Tintin adventures,
much to the chagrin of the corporations guarding the myth. One of
the first Tintin détournements immediately followed the liberation
of Belgium in 1944. The Belgian paper La Patrie published Tintin au
Pays des Nazis (“Tintin in the Land of the Nazis”) in order to criti-
cize Hergé’s work for the collaborationist paper Le Soir. A subsequent
story showed Tintin leading a division to discover the secret to man-
31. As McCarthy points out, Guy Debord’s Situationist International featured a
“‘détourned’ version of The Crab with the Golden Claws,” replacing the word “Crab”
with “Capital” (186).
56 • C hapter 1
ufacturing the V2 rocket before the Germans can use it; this strip was
titled “in the manner of Mr. Hergé, who is indisposed due to the Lib-
eration” (Assouline 106). Thus, as Appiah notes of postmodernism,
the piracy of Tintin “revels in the proliferation of distinctions that
reflects the underlying dynamic of cultural modernity” (346), resus-
citating the differences, shadows, and ambiguities repressed by the
modernist taxonomy of reason through which Tintin transcends its
own historical context.
A thorough accounting for all of the détournements of Tintin
would take volumes beyond even existing collections such as Alain-
Jacques Tornare’s Tint’Interdit: Pastiches et Parodies. Pastiches and
parodies of Tintin occur in manifold countries and languages, with
myriad attitudes toward Hergé’s originals. McCarthy breaks such
détournements down into three categories: pornographic, political,
and “art” (186). In the last category, McCarthy hails French artist
Jochen Gerner’s TNT en Amérique—wherein pages of Tintin in America
are completely covered in black save a few words and symbols—as a
form of symbolic “burial.” Gerner’s work goes beyond responding to
the “meaning” of Tintin to focus on the form, challenging the limits of
legibility of the album page. Such tactics demonstrate how the same
discrete, moral, clear, attributes that make the world of Tintin effec-
tive as myth also make it open to perversion. Certainly ligne claire, in
becoming a style so emblematic of European culture, has been an apt
technique for deformation. Lecigne heralds Jacques Martin and Bob
de Moor, both colleagues of Hergé, as héritiers d’Hergé who unwit-
tingly revealed the artifice at the heart of ligne claire. Uncredited as
artists on Tintin, the men famously created an imaginary page from
an unwritten adventure and left it on Hergé’s desk, provoking out-
rage. Their interoffice détournement threatened the sovereign bor-
ders of the world of Tintin, demonstrating that Hergé’s clear line was
merely a style to be imitated (Lecigne 49). A number of later héritiers,
such as the Belgian artist Jijé, the French artist Yves Chaland, and the
Dutch artist Joost Swarte—who coined the term ligne claire—would
appropriate the style not for détournements but for their own charac-
ters and adventures.
Other détournements focus on exposing Tintin’s ideological con-
ceits. Swiss artist Exem’s Zinzin, maître du monde or Québécois artist
Henriette Valium’s “Nitnit in Otherland” both fulfill this role, sub-
jecting the main character to all manner of sordid affairs in order to
undermine the innocence of the series. In a similar vein, South Afri-
can artist Anton Kannemeyer’s reworking of Tintin au Congo for Bit-

terkomix uses much of the same imagery from the original, yet subtly
revises it to show the violence underlying Tintin’s paternalism. For
example, Kannemeyer (as Joe Dog) redraws one scene from Tin-
tin au Congo as Pappa in Afrika, substituting African children for the
dozen antelopes that Tintin accidentally shoots, believing each to
be the same antelope. Describing Pappa in Afrika, Christophe Dony
characterizes the work as an example of postcolonial “writing back”
“whereby artists adopt and adapt colonial traditions and discourses”
(“Writing and Drawing” 22) “as a mode of contesting and revising
ideological, political, and narrative authorities” (25). Dony’s celebra-
tory reading of Kannemeyer’s “difficult” (33) works relies on the
ability of the white artist to use derogatory “golliwog iconography”
(33) as an appeal to postcolonial justice. In Dony’s analysis of Kanne-
meyer’s détournement, the racist iconography can be preserved yet
used for antiracist ends. Pace Dony, I assert that although Pappa in
Afrika is a provocative postmodern deconstruction of Tintin’s visual
imperialism, it is not antiracist, as it relies on the continued injury of
the Black caricature for its rhetorical effect.
I focus on US artist Charles Burns’s détournements of Tintin
because Burns mobilizes comics-specific elements without reproduc-
ing wholecloth their stereotypical colonial idiom. Burns’s Nitnit tril-
ogy is, as Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey have argued,
a springboard to a broader, more general interpretation of the work

(in this case the reworking of the Tintin model to achieve a disquiet-
ing merger of observer and observed, reality and dream, body and
mind, culture, imagination and troubled social relations). (“‘Layout-
ing’” 200)
McCloud’s reading uncritically consumes the binaries that Baetens

and Frey set out as they are visually constructed in Tintin; Mondondo
challenges these binaries directly; Burns “reworks” them. Consider-
ing how Burns mobilizes and adapts medial practices from the Tintin
series provides a less cohesive but more historically attuned view of
Tintin’s mythic world.
Some comics theorists view all of comics production—with its low
cultural standing, reproducibility, and spatial poetics—as, if not out-
right postmodernism, aligned with “postmodernism’s critical ethic”
and located within “the context of postmodernism” (Chute, “Popu-
58 • C hapter 1
larity” 357). However, Appiah’s description of how postmodernism

inheres in art is especially telling in this context: “there is an anteced-
ent practice that laid claim to a certain exclusivity of insight, and . . .
‘postmodernism’ is a name for the rejection of that claim to exclusiv-
ity, a rejection that is almost always more playful, though not nec-
essarily less serious, than the practice it aims to replace” (342). For
world comics, this antecedent practice is Tintin’s visualization of the
world, and the rejection of exclusivity is lodged by Burns’s use of for-
matting, swiping, denaturing clear line, and self-plagiarizing.
Formatting
The Nitnit trilogy was originally published in three serialized

albums, beginning with X’ed Out (2010), followed by The Hive (2012),
and, finally, Sugar Skull (2014). Burns’s use of the serial album format
for his work suggests a transatlantic mistranslation of sorts, as the
appearance of albums among American graphic novels is irregular.
Burns describes an uncertain response to his use of the album format
from readers familiar with his earlier series cum graphic novel Black
Hole, describing their response as “‘what’s that? what happened?’”
Burns qualifies this reaction, by speculating, “I think the fact that
there’s more serialized books in France and Belgium—you know,
it was based on the album format, which certainly doesn’t really
exist in the US” (Guilbert). An album in the US marketplace does
not evoke the familiarity that made Tintin’s oeuvre so cohesive and
authoritative elsewhere in the world. Indeed, as Jean-Paul Gabilliet
asserts, the “failed cultural acclimatization” of Tintin to US audiences
in the late 1950s and early 1960s is at least partly due to the album
format’s large shape impeding sales (“Disappointing Crossing” 257).
Similarly, Gabilliet notes name recognition as a system limited by
class and culture, asserting, “to the overwhelming majority of North
American mainstream comics readers, Tintin and Asterix are names
associated, if at all, with esoteric foreign comic-strip traditions” (263).
Despite today’s market featuring American graphic novels of vary-
32
ing shapes and sizes, the volumes of Burns’s Nitnit trilogy operate
32. For example, Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers and Chris Ware’s
Acme Novelty Library Annual Report to Shareholders have used the approximate shape
of the broadsheet to gesture to the origin of comic strips in the supplements of US
newspapers.
in a material register immediately apparent to European audiences

familiar with the album format but, conversely, as Gabilliet declares,
relatively foreign—or specifically not recognizable as a standard for-
mat—to US audiences.
The Nitnit albums’ cloth bindings, coupled with their covers’
fonts and imagery, invoke Tintin works. However, the dark col-
oration of Burns’s artwork, and his use of a non–ligne claire chiar-
oscuro style, ambiguate this recognition. Further, as a “concession
to [his American] publisher” (Guilbert), Burns allowed Pantheon to
publish a collection of all three Nitnit albums as one large volume,
called Last Look, more evocative of a large-format US graphic novel.
This omnibus was not made available in European markets; Burns
assumed an affinity there for the discrete albums, saying, “in France
or Belgium or Germany or Italy, I think everyone can understand:
well, here’s a series, and they fit together and you read them and re-
read them and you go back to them and see how they fit together”
(Guilbert). This transatlantic commercial distinction concedes that the
trilogy of albums are “out of place” in the US market, requiring an
assimilation to the graphic novel format. At the same time, the series’
US origin makes it foreign in Europe, regardless of its appropriate
size and shape. The commercial and cultural asymmetry of trans-
national formatting is explored in even more detail in chapter 3, but
Burns’s Nitnit series provides a useful primer in how an artist, rather
than pursue an authorized global standard for their work, can use
formatting to make comics that will be playfully out of place wher-
ever they are in the world.
Swiping
The Nitnit trilogy’s visual translations of Tintin extend beyond refer-

ence to parodic resonance and subversive reiteration. On X’ed Out’s
cover, the pattern of the mushroom from Hergé’s The Shooting Star
now adorns a gigantic egg; The Hive and Sugar Skull have covers
that use a melange of Tintin imagery, from the stalactites depicted
in Explorers on the Moon (1954) to the rocky promontory of The Black
Island (1938). The collected volume Last Look features a mask that
Doug, the protagonist of the stories, wears to become his alter ego,
Nitnit. The Nitnit mask floats, looming over a landscape with white
blanks for eyes. This mask, resembling Tintin, unwittingly thematizes
60 • C hapter 1
and inverts McCloud’s interpretation of Tintin as a safe and sensu-

ally stimulating mask, by directly—if unseeingly—gazing back at
the reader-consumer. Within the books, other skewed referents from
Tintin proliferate. The intercom figured in the Tintin adventure The
Secret of the Unicorn becomes a motif recurring throughout the series,
featured in X’ed Out as the central image of the endpapers and later
presented in a triptych next to a panel showing a circular orifice in
a pink wall and a panel showing a storm drain emitting a stream of
dark-red substance. The “intercommunication” between the world of
Tintin and the world of the Nitnit trilogy is made grotesque in these
iterations, where the intercom as a familiar technological device is
rendered less legible by every repetition. Where Tintin relied on a
knowledge of such communication devices and codes to decipher the
ambiguities or mysteries of foreign locales, the symbol of the inter-
com is repeatedly denatured in X’ed Out, exemplifying the hazards of
transmission. In Tintin, the iteration of stereotypes or familiar forms
cohere to form a rational narrative discourse, but in the Nitnit trilogy,
icons and shapes recur in disjuncture from the narrative, interpolat-
ing visual stoppages, strings of signification, and literally disturbing
flows in the story.
In his study of Burns’s art, Benoît Crucifix examines Burns’s
long-standing use of “swiping” as a comics practice, even before his
explicit engagement with Tintin. A “swipe” in comics terminology
is the widely used yet often maligned practice of copying the work
of another artist in the form of a panel or an entire page. Showing
that Burns’s oeuvre is full of swipes that metareflexively comment
on comics as a medium of reproducibility, Crucifix asserts that “the
very practice of swiping expresses an attachment to comic book
culture and an iconophilic collecting, gathering and redrawing of
visually striking images” (318). Burns uses swiping throughout the
Nitnit trilogy not only to reference comics history but to combine
and transform transnational comics genres as an experimental pro-
cess of production. Crucifix traces how the storyline of protagonist
Doug—and especially that of his alter ego, Nitnit—“is composed of
panels swiped by Burns’s preferred canon of Tintin and romance
comic books” (325), resulting in a nonlinear and fragmented narra-
tive “based on a densely braided network of recurring images” (323).
Alongside Crucifix, Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey declare that Burns
“reprograms” (“Modernizing Tintin” 111n3) Tintin imagery through
a “deviant and demythifying appropriation of the Tintin character
and style” resulting in the “most complete attempt to destroy and

reinvent Tintin” (107). They explain his use of swipes through the
structure of virology, noting how Burns “relies on the insertion of
small capsules of Tintin-like material that proliferate as dangerous
cells through the work that hosts them” (109). As all three theorists
assert, Burns swipes to destabilize the legibility of the image on its
own or as a narrative unit, and to make indiscernible any authentic-
ity regarding the image as a “Tintin pastiche or Burns original” (109).
There is yet another mode in which Burns’s swiping subverts its
source. Intertextuality is a bivalent system of renegotiation predi-
cated on a two-way feedback network. Baetens and Frey confirm
as much by reading Burns’s swiped images as a “structure capable
of launching new interpretations” (“Modernizing Tintin” 108) that
could “remythif[y] Tintin” (111). Applying this logic to material
practice, one can accordingly read Burns’s swiping as a reproduc-
tion of Hergé’s own research practices, with a difference. Because
Hergé drew the world without leaving Europe until later in his life
(Assouline 178), he relied on myriad colonial swipes: Postcards, pro-
spectuses, articles, and the Musée Royal du Congo in Tervuren all
became material for Hergé’s own iconophilic redrawing (Delisle,
Bande dessinée 15–16; Delisle, “Le reporter” 270; Hergé and Sadoul
45). Michael Farr references Hergé’s “constantly swelling archive
files” as the symptom and source of his swiping: “He was almost
obsessive about keeping material that could on some occasion be
of possible use. As a result his files bulge with information of every
kind, from picture postcards to furniture catalogues” (8). Compar-
ing Hergé’s and Burns’s swipes allows for an anticolonial reading of
the Nitnit trilogy wherein Burns’s playful swiping of Tintin uncovers
Hergé’s more serious imperialist complex of visuality, which treats
the world as picture, full of visual objects ripe for the swiping. The
swiped imagery in the Nitnit trilogy and its narrative ambivalence
indicate Burns’s postmodernist rejection of the exclusivity of Tintin’s
visual referents drawn as if from the real and assembled as seamless
clear-lined graphic narrative.
Denaturing Clear Line
As detailed above, Tintin’s innovative use of image and text drawn

together in ligne claire style established an ideologically motivated
62 • C hapter 1
means to draw the world together in story. The cohesion of ligne

claire ensures Tintin’s legibility: “Tintin should be recognized what-
ever the context, that is what is meant when the ‘clear line’ is spoken
of” (Goddin, Reporters 217). The Nitnit trilogy ambiguates this recog-
nition by fragmenting its narrative between two styles of alternating
authority. As Baetens and Frey contend, clear line is not only a style
of drawing, “it is also a form of storytelling that relies on the readabil-
ity of both the images (easy to decode and immediately recognisable)
and the readability of the storyline (easy to follow, while permanently
full of small twists and surprises)” (“‘Layouting’” 194). In the light
of this definition, the Nitnit trilogy “undermines both page composi-
tion and storytelling, which lose their Clear Line transparency” (197).
The trilogy’s narrative revolves around the protagonist, Doug, who
shifts between a chiaroscuro world, richly shaded with Burns’s usual
33
feather-lines, and a ligne claire otherworld where he becomes his
34
alter ego, Nitnit (see figure 1.2). Between these two graphical worlds
the trilogy is marked by the oversaturation of imagery. As analyzed
above, Burns’s vivid panels oversignify in the context of the narrative,
offering too many connections and possibilities to allow one clear
message. The stylistic fragmentation between ligne claire and chiar-
oscuro makes it harder to determine which panels are meant to be
read according to codes governing representations of diegetic real-
ity and which according to those of fantasy. This obscurantist code-
switching heightens the reference to Tintin and to Tintin’s ability to
clearly read other cultures. It is suggested through Doug’s transposi-
tion into the Nitnit character that the world of Tintin may be just as
imaginary as that of Nitnit.
33. Of his own style, Burns notes: “I try to achieve something that’s almost like
a visceral effect. The quality of the lines and the density of the black take on a char-
acter of their own—it’s something that has an effect on your subconscious. Those
lines make you feel a certain way. That kind of surface makes you feel a certain
way” (Chute, “Interview”).
34. Jean-Paul Gabilliet qualifies the entirety of Burns’s style as a confusion
between ligne claire and what Gabilliet dubs ligne noire. For Gabilliet, Burns’s entire
oeuvre similarly stages the miscegenation of ideological and symbolic registers con-
noted through these distinct styles: “Tintin was as absent from American homes as
it was omnipresent within those of Europeans. Hence the remarkable uniqueness
within the trajectory of [Burns]: of all the American artist of his generation, Burns
is the only one to have constructed a graphic identity based on a fusion between
the clarity of the Hergéen line and the darkness of the brush inking of a number of
comics produced within the 1903s and 1950s” (“Sutures génériques”).
FIGURE 1.2. Charles Burns, Sugar Skull, n. pag.
Although the images in the clear-lined Nitnit sections are brighter

and bear a resemblance to Tintin’s panels, their position in the tril-
ogy’s narrative destabilizes their claims to clarity or legibility. Doug
wears a Nitnit mask in certain chiaroscuro panels to perform his
“cut-up” poetry à la William S. Burroughs. Yet Doug’s mask becomes
his face when he enters the clear-lined otherworld of his imagining.
The “masking” cited by McCloud as an essential component in Tin-
tin becomes monstrous in Burns, a form not of safe self-escape but
of imprisonment within the self without recourse to an outside.
When Nitnit enters the ligne claire world, it visually recalls the for-
eign bazaars of Hergé. However, this “Interzone” is populated not by
familiar ethnographic caricatures but by creatures uttering unintel-
ligible signs whose appearances blur the distinction between human
and nonhuman. Doug’s—Nitnit’s—encounters with the “Others” of
this world reframe Hergé’s imagined “Others” as creatures of the
Western cultural imagination.
Hergé draws Tintin as a subject “in the differentiating order of
Otherness” (Bhabha, “Remembering” 117), but Burns challenges
this claim to cultural location. As postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha
describes the process, Tintin becomes a subject, as does the audience
that identifies with him, through encounters with those who must be
recognized for their difference from the seeing subject. Tintin’s trav-
els establish who we—the good readers of its visual economy—are
not. Tintin’s travels make otherness readable and manageable; as
Goddin states, “the adventures of Tintin unify the diversity of the
64 • C hapter 1
world” (Reporters 224). Nitnit’s travels, however, involute the “order

of Otherness,” locating it as an internal aspect of subject-formation
rather than as a reality of the “world.” Doug/Nitnit’s identification as
subject “is always the return of an image of identity which bears the
mark of splitting in that ‘Other’ place from which it comes” (Bhabha,
“Remembering” 117). Confronted by the Nitnit trilogy, the totality of
Hergé’s visual corpus is made to display its seams amid “the atmo-
sphere of certain uncertainty that surrounds the body” and which
“certifies its existence and threatens its dismemberment” (117). Nit-
nit’s oversignified panels and fragmented narrative pose contamina-
tion, or a lack of secure borders—clear lines—between the subject, its
others, and modes of visually containing and consuming difference.
No more safely disclosing a sensually stimulating world, Nitnit’s
mask portends a hazardous, frightening, uncertain world that under-
mines the narrative stability of reader and referent in turn.
Self-Plagiarism
By destabilizing the codes of Tintin’s authority, Burns’s work also

destabilizes the authority and familiarity of its legible world. The
fragmentation of the Nitnit trilogy is perpetuated further in Burns’s
pirating of his own work. In addition to X’ed Out, The Hive, Sugar
Skull, and Last Look, Burns released a number of “unofficial” compo-
nents of the work: Johnny 23 is a limited-release “pirate” version of
X’ed Out, published in 2010 by French publisher Le Dernier Cri. Incu-
bation, published in 2015 by Pigeon Press in Oakland, California, col-
lects rough sketches in pencil and pastels. Vortex, published in 2016
by French publisher Cornélius, collects spoof covers and fragments
of stories never used in the trilogy. Both Vortex and Johnny 23 use a
foreign-looking cipher, but the latter is structured as a graphic nar-
rative throughout. It is formatted in a smaller, horizontal trim size,
which “evokes the Chinese bootleg versions of Tintin in the lianhuan
hua format ubiquitous in China” (Crucifix 325). Not sold in Ameri-
can bookstores, available only via mail order, Johnny 23 is now out
of print. Pirate Tintins flourished in locations where the authorized
album was not available or too expensive; Johnny 23 instead creates a
demand for a “deauthorized” version in the market where X’ed Out
is readily available, signaling shifting flows in the economy of world
FIGURE 1.3. Charles Burns, Johnny 23, n. pag.
books. Moulinsart’s desire for commercial and material authority over

“official” Tintins is inverted in Burns’s establishment of an alternate
economy built on the desire for the unofficial, secondary versions in
which no single publishing entity can claim ultimate provenance over
all of the works.
Many panels in Johnny 23 appear to be directly taken from X’ed
Out, but they are composed in a different order and layout, remind-
ing a reader of Hergé’s own process of revising and recomposing
panels between newspaper, magazine, album, and revised album
printings. In Johnny 23, the text within panels is composed of a
mono-alphabetic cipher of American English (see figure 1.3), gestur-
ing toward the position of American English as the ultimate key of
35
all language in the age of globalization. The reader must become
like the detective Tintin, breaking the code to gain knowledge over
35. The casting of American English as the universal code can also be read in
reference to Hergé’s decision, when accused of racism in Coke en Stock, to replace
the “Petit Negre” spoken by the Muslim pilgrims with a style drawn from French
translations of “romans américains” (Goddin, Reporters 259).
66 • C hapter 1
the narrative. Yet, once the intrepid decoder begins “translating”

the invented characters, it is evident that this encoded text is not as
“familiar” as the anglophone reader may have initially surmised.
Johnny 23’s form and “text” is constructed in a mode allusive to Bur-
roughs’s cut-up methods, deterritorializing the “uncoded” phrases,
and again disrupting the seamlessness of the narrative or its compo-
36
sition. The verbal messages in panels seem to have little relevance
to the image content. Some of the lines are song lyrics (e.g., “Noth-
ing can become of nothing” from Lydia Lunch’s “3X3” or “Always
crashing in the same car” from David Bowie’s so-titled song; 40),
some are direct quotes from or references to Burroughs’s work (e.g.,
“your dull dirty naked lunch”; 38), some appear to be references to
Burns’s other work (as in the reference to Eliza, a character from
his Black Hole series / graphic novel; 7). The proliferating piracy and
disjuncture between verbal and visual codes in X’ed Out and Johnny
23 thus draw from the material, iconic, and stylistic aspects proper
to Tintin in order to denature or deform the clear borderlines of its
authority.
Burns distributes thin cardboard Nitnit masks at some con-
vention appearances and with certain copies of his work. Coupled
with the bemusing ciphers in his détourned offprints, Burns reveals
McCloud’s metaphorical “mask” to be literally and figuratively
paper-thin. In the chiaroscuro of Burns’s work, all of Tintin’s delib-
erate ease of recognizing, reading, and consuming the world is
made strange, difficult, laborious. The Nitnit trilogy and its pirate
offspring clearly engage in what Appiah calls a space-clearing ges-
ture (348) through the “construction and the marking of differences”
(342) elided or obfuscated in Tintin’s production. However, the Nit-
nit trilogy’s visual tressage of pollution, miasma, and fecundity does
not so much distance readers from visual imperialism as illustrate
that in Tintin’s “broad circulation of cultures . . . we are all already
contaminated by each other” (354). As Burns’s work, via Appiah’s
theorization, reminds us, there is no “autochthonous echt-African cul-
ture” (354), but there is also no Belgian or US culture without Africa.
Rather, it is in the co-constitution of each place that inequalities are
masked, protested, or reimagined.
36. This form itself recalls the OuBaPo works with Tintin, especially those by
Francois Ayroles and Jochen Gerner.
World Comics in Three Dimensions
Comics present immersive worlds with little recourse to an outside.

As we have seen in Tintin, sometimes the surface of the page seems
more real for its being only surface. Yet the worlding of comics does
not occur in isolation of frameworks beyond the panel frames. Even
in a style as pure as Tintin’s, “it is noteworthy that the world with-
out shadows portrayed through the conventionalized and diagram-
matic realism of the ligne claire can nonetheless betray the presence of
repressed material” (Miller, Reading 214). The cultural construction
of media is predicated on shifting assumptions of visual and discur-
sive legibility.
In the system of ligne claire as well as that of récitatif-less comics
and revised albums, a fullness is offered to the subject, a plenitude at
the level of line, panel, and book. This fullness appears natural, and
conceals the many lines that were erased in the process, the many
strips and panels that were spliced together for the album and then
edited and reprinted. What the media technology of Tintin offers to
the reader is a sense of clear material boundaries. These boundar-
ies also inhere in the adventures that reassert the clear lines between
other places and peoples. The toponyms and ethnographic markings
that denote specific races and places are thus always already natural-
ized within the system. Regardless of any debate as to whether Tintin
is racist to the “Congolese” or “Saudi Arabians” or “Japanese,” the
series manifests the creation of a system in which these markers are
ultimately interchangeable or prone to revision and completely bereft
of the complex historical and material circumstances of their fabrica-
tion. The problem of recognition precedes the specific content of any
album and lies in the visual economy, the system of mapping others
that is both unquestionably accepted and promulgated by Tintin.
McCloud’s reading, in its collapse of the boundaries between the
lived world and the seen world—the world on paper and the world
in which the paper is held—reveals Mirzoeff’s “complexes of visual-
ity” (Right 4): overt structures of political power and authority that
operate through regimes of seeing. Comics are rarely considered as
significant apparatuses for such regimes, but Wanzo’s work reminds
us that comics partake in visual imperialism in ways that are all the
more effective for the inattention paid to them. Cultural constructions
such as race, legibility, and the legibility of race should be traced in
68 • C hapter 1
comics’ playful medial instantiations. It is in adolescent forms that

proclaim the innocence of the discourse and the audience alike that
protean techniques for reading the world are inculcated.
Critical readers like Mondondo embody the truth that Tintin,
for all its transnational influence, is not read the same by everyone,
everywhere. With their iconic register, comics simultaneously enable
cross-border recognition without recourse to translation—as the
enterprising individual who recast Tintin in Angola understood—and
complicate this recognition—as Mondondo’s “misreading” exem-
plifies. Rather than a transcendent shorthand, a stereotype marks a
struggle for representation, wherein only certain groups benefit.
Obliged to assign a monetary value to his suit, Mondondo asked
for the sum total of €1. Moulinsart and Tintin’s publisher Casterman
both countersued Mondondo for €15,000 each for “vexatious proceed-
ings.” Having dismissed Mondondo’s suit, the court also dismissed
Moulinsart’s and Casterman’s countersuits. Although the court
decided against Mondondo’s claim, the same juridical body evalu-
ated Mondondo’s claim as having some value to the extent that it did
not merit compensation for those corporations that felt their time had
been wasted. Mondondo’s gambit, his intervention in the economy
of world comics, forced those who benefit from the unmarked con-
tinuation of visual imperialism to account for their readings. Mon-
dondo compelled Moulinsart and Casterman to justify their readings
in court and drew attention to the disparity between those who profit
from such readings and those who suffer from them.
The following chapters ask how comics, by making visible ques-
tions of translation and medial production, provide tools to rethink
world literacy. Mondondo’s case highlights the necessity for think-
ing of media in three dimensions and moving beyond the representa-
tional aspects that may compose a dominant culture’s interpretation.
If we think of the space of the page as but one component of the
encounter that a reader makes with a media object in a historicized,
geopolitical context, how might we implicate other components of
that encounter in new considerations of the local and the global?
C H A P T E R 2
GRAPHIC DISORIENTATIONS
Metro and Translation
A Passage to Cairo
In its etymology, the verb translate denotes spatial movement, and it

signifies both a placement and a displacement. To carry something
across, either from one language to another or from one geographic
site to another, engenders a new and uneven relationality between
sites. In this chapter, I examine the friction generated in comics trans-
lation. More specifically, I look at the divergent transnational edi-
1
tions of Magdy El Shafee’s Metro that proliferated after its banning
in Egypt, observing how each edition differently interprets the roles
and relations of the images, texts, and maps in the graphic novel.
These interpretations reveal a great deal about audience expecta-
tions, relational geographies, and ways of reading comics. Ultimately
these translations exemplify the ambiguity at the heart of translation
scholar Lawrence Venuti’s “domestication” versus “foreignization”
1. Transnational in a number of ways, but specifically in that the editions are
linguistically rather than nationally determined: e.g., the English translations are
circulated through the UK, Canada, and the US; the German translation is produced
by a Swiss publisher, etc.
69
70 • C hapter 2
dialectic. Even as Venuti allows that these terms are not binaries, but
2
instead ethical and variable “attitudes,” the translations of Metro
evince greater instability than an attitude might afford. Among the
Arabic, Italian, German, and English editions, the graphic elements
frequently work in tension with or direct opposition to each other,
complicating the situation of a reader to the linguistic, pictorial, and
locative aspects of the Cairo underground.
Metro provides a salient case study owing to its unique publica-
tion history; its formal combination of maps, images, and linguistic
elements; and its realism. The plot of Metro follows a fictional story
of a bank robbery that exposes political corruption, yet its setting in
Cairo in the early twenty-first century is replete with detailed draw-
ings of the city and accurate subway maps. The combination of fic-
tional plot and nonfiction setting creates a unique challenge for
translation in terms of how to balance these two registers. Relatedly,
the place-based aspect of the work entails cultural negotiations of
the local and the global. Metro employs comics formatting in ways
that are specific to Cairene linguistic orientation and also drawn from
external visual referents, especially a layout from Maltese American
author Joe Sacco (Edwards, American Century 57–58).
Sacco’s Palestine could not—by any stretch—be considered a book
about Cairo. Cairo (as a verbal and visual denotation) only appears
in roughly 1 percent of the work—or three of 285 pages, to be exact.
The word Cairo and the pictorial representation of Cairo as a setting
share only two of these three pages. And yet, I begin my analysis of
El Shafee’s Metro with Sacco’s Palestine because of the way it orients a
reader to Cairo as a diegetic space and because of its influential rela-
tion to Metro, a book entirely about and set in Cairo. Brian T. Edwards
states that El Shafee himself was inspired by Sacco’s formal use of
space, and that Sacco’s work “was a visual innovation within graphic
fiction [sic] representing Egypt specifically” (American Century 59).
For El Shafee, it was the way that Sacco used the space of the page
in order to represent the crowdedness of Cairo that was revelatory,
and influential on his own work. Shafee’s acknowledgment of Sacco’s
influence leads to a preliminary examination of how Sacco, as a for-
eign journalist, mobilizes space within the constraints of the comics
2. “The terms ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’ indicate fundamentally

ethical attitudes towards a foreign text and culture, ethical effects produced by the
choice of a text for translation and by the strategy devised to translate it” (Venuti,
Translator’s Invisibility 19).
G raphic D isorientations • 71
page and the graphic narrative. Thereafter, I examine El Shafee’s own

mobilization of paginal design and the translational differences that
ensued upon Metro’s global distribution.
Sacco’s Palestine was originally published as a serial comic and
then collected into two book-size versions—Palestine: A Nation Occu-
pied (1993) and Palestine: In the Gaza Strip (1996)—by publisher Fanta-
graphics, before finally being published as a single volume in 2001.
Palestine, in book form, has been translated into at least thirteen lan-
3
guages, including Arabic, the official language of Egypt. The work
chronicles Sacco’s journalistic travels through Israel and Palestine in
1991 and 1992 and offers a counterpoint to Metro due to the location
of Cairo in terms of both the work’s narrative and the book’s material
construction.
On the first page of the work (see figure 2.1), “Cairo” appears in
large block letters only slightly occluded by small narrative boxes.
The place-name is represented as itself obstructing great amounts
of city “traffic,” while a policeman is drawn giving a “stop” signal
toward the top left corner of the page. The narrative boxes function as
a curving road for the reader to follow from the policeman’s signal,
across Cairo and down to the bottom of the page. Simultaneously,
these boxes indicate that readers’ (linguistic) journeys through Cairo
and their ability to locate it as such come at the expense of the city’s
inhabitants, who are shown struggling behind words. The large block
letters interrupt the space of composition in the panels of the first
page, and the regimes of toponymic location, pictorial representation,
and textual expression are assembled to suggest hierarchical relations
among them. Sacco’s work maps Cairo as a space of dense urban traf-
fic (traffic of bodies and vehicles in space as well as traffic of words,
images, and locative tools) and as a point of transit to other destina-
tions. Cairo’s appearance in a work called Palestine draws attention to
Sacco’s position as an outsider to these places and orients the reader
similarly, as one who is not immediately in Palestine but who must
move through other spaces in order to arrive there.
Sacco’s use of the page as a compositional framework evokes the
tension between linear and tabular reading models—as described by
3. Allen Douglas and Fedwa Malti-Douglas stipulate that while Arabic dialects
are closest to the Western style of comic book writing, these dialects are normally
not written and are mutually incomprehensible: “only one dialect is sufficiently well
known in the region to have any pretensions to wider accessibility, and that is the
dialect of Cairo, Egypt” (4).
FIGURE 2.1. Joe Sacco, Palestine, page 1
Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle in the seminal text “Du linéaire au tabu-

laire”—whereby a reader of comics reconciles the composition of the
page as a unified surface with that of the fragmented and perspectiv-
ally dissonant story space (“surface et espace” 17). Edwards quotes El
Shafee as stating that Sacco’s use of layout was the first time that he
saw the comics page used effectively to represent zahma, or the traf-
fic jam, of Cairo (American Century 57). Edwards riffs on this claim to
further argue that Sacco’s layout offers a “new way to represent the
hisa [noise] of Cairo” (57) and to assert that the visual innovation of
Sacco’s layout was directly tied to its representation of “Egypt spe-
cifically” (58). For Edwards, then, Sacco’s layout and its particularly
jammed or noisy composition links foreign forms with the represen-
tation of Cairo in terms of the unique balance of surface tension.
El Shafee’s appreciation of Sacco’s layout as a way to rhetori-
cally represent Cairo led to similar compositions in Metro. Sacco
and El Shafee tend toward page compositions that theorist Benoît
Peeters has categorized as “rhetorical layout.” In his work on differ-
ent “conceptions of the page,” Peeters describes how the layout or
the mise-en-page will work in tandem with (or against) the break-
down of the story or the découpage. Peeters categorizes four types of
mise-en-page: (1) conventional—in which the layout is standardized,
(2) decorative—in which the layout is guided by aesthetic effect, (3)
rhetorical—in which the layout reflects the narrative, and (4) produc-
tive—in which the layout of the page directs the narrative (Lire 49).
Challenging and expanding Peeters’s schema, Thierry Groensteen
in his System of Comics stipulates that the relative conventionality or
decorativity of a layout will depend on the context of the page and
whether it is consistent across the work itself or whether the work
features heterogeneous layouts (98–99). Both Sacco and El Shafee use
what one might call consistently inconsistent mise-en-page. That is,
their layouts change every page along with the narrative content.
This dynamic use of the space of the page poses an interpretive chal-
lenge for translators who must determine how to change aspects of
the découpage or the relationships between panels without irrevoca-
bly shifting the compositional unity of each page.
Further, the effect of the format on how a reader encounters the
site of Cairo in the narrative of Sacco’s Palestine reminds us that com-
ics is “an art of tensions”—in the words of Charles Hatfield. As Hat-
field describes, readers negotiate multiple tensions in reading comics:
(1) the basic tension of code versus code or word versus image, (2)
74 • C hapter 2
the single image versus the image in series, (3) sequence versus sur-
face (a nearly identical formulation of linear vs. tabular), and, finally,
(4) text as object versus text as experience (36). These tensions work
together in complex ways, and we may see in the situation of Cairo
in Palestine the work of all of Hatfield’s tensions—how the word Cairo
works against and with the images it tops, how the images on the
page simultaneously form a unitary collage as well as individual
moments in space and time, and how the distinctions between print
formats delineate different reading experiences. Hatfield proposes a
somewhat static conception of “comics’ materiality, includ[ing] not
only the design or layout of the page but also the physical makeup
of the text, including its size, shape, binding, paper, and printing”
(58); however, his description of the tension is capacious enough to
account for the significance of changes made to the comic as object
that both Palestine and Metro demonstrate. That is, rather than a sta-
ble design, layout, or physical makeup, Palestine materially exists as
single-issue editions, two-volume collections, and a single graphic
novel, all multiply translated (not to mention the special edition); and
Metro exists as multiply translated, excerpted, digitized, and refor-
matted volumes. Hatfield’s focus on how, for example, the reader’s
awareness of the page weight will shift the experience of the narra-
tive is readily complemented by recognizing that different readers
are presented with different objects under the guise of a similar “text
as experience.” Just as the visual and narrative role of Cairo changes
depending on which format of Palestine one is reading, the entirety
of the visual cohesion of Metro is changed according to the physical
ramifications of its translations.
Locating Metro
By beginning this chapter on Magdy El Shafee’s Metro with a section

about Joe Sacco, I hope to achieve a number of comparative aims,
much like the scene of Cairo in Sacco’s Palestine. Like Palestine, Met-
ro’s publication as a graphic novel was an essential component of its
transnational circulation—as well as a key element in its marketing.
The Italian edition of Metro even features a circle with the words—
in English—“Graphic Novel” on the cover. Similarly, the relation-
ship between space and place in both works is noteworthy. As noted,
Metro is a fictional story, yet it uses the real Cairo subway system,
incorporated into the book as subway maps, as a way to visually situ-

ate the narrative and the reader. Temporal shifts are demarcated by
sections of the Metro map with circles around the stations at which
subsequent narrative events occur. And as Palestine uses the word
Cairo in a toponymic and visually affective way, so Metro’s subway
maps are both locative and visually counterposed with the action
of the narrative, which concerns a robbery, political corruption, and
growing popular unrest. The maps weave these elements together
and work in contrast to El Shafee’s impressionistic drawing style.
Finally, and most importantly, both works are instantiated as world
comics only through acts of translation.
As a journalist, Sacco describes a place for those who are not
there. Hence, he writes Palestine in English and uses a translator to
interview subjects in the work. El Shafee’s book is instead written
in Arabic, with a readership slightly more ambiguous than Sacco’s.
While Egyptian professor Iman Hanafy argues that the translation of
Metro into German, English, and Italian confirms that Metro gained
“a world-wide acceptance after it [was] banned in Egypt” (422),
Edwards argues for the untranslatability of Metro outside of Egypt,
and James Hodapp and Deema Nasser contend that the book can be
qualified as a work of African literature, reflecting broad concerns
and cultural traditions from the continent. Considering how each of
these scholars interprets Metro, its translations, and its translatability,
I seek to push argumentation about Metro beyond the literary consid-
eration of the graphic novel’s translation as a matter of language and
themes. As I demonstrate, Metro’s singular status as “the first” Egyp-
tian graphic novel and the unique graphic tensions that it embodies
as such—its nonstandard layout, its onomatopoeias, its verbal-visual
semantics, its interpolation of cartography—create the conditions for
disorientation among the readers of the book’s multiple translations.
Although read as a theoretically consistent narrative across transla-
tions, the differing global versions of Metro register the struggle and
dissensus that occurred in the process of carrying Metro across lan-
guages and geographic regions.
Following Venuti, I concur that every text is translatable, because
every text can be interpreted (Scandals x), and yet—as Metro makes
clear—a graphic narrative is a composite of translatable and untrans-
latable elements, owing to the commingling of word and image. That
is not to say that the images are not themselves interpreted, and I will
both adumbrate and consider how these interpretations have been
76 • C hapter 2
undertaken by critics and translators alike. However, the images and

layout of Metro create a translational paradox that the existing criti-
cism on El Shafee’s work has largely overlooked. Hanafy, Edwards,
and Hodapp and Nasser focus on the interpretation of the words of
Metro as a way to gauge its translatability, but as any comics theorist
will attest, words and images are not easily sundered in this medium.
Although Chip Rossetti and Dominic Davies both consider the spatial
composition of Metro in terms of mise-en-page and narrative, neither
examines how his own theses compare with the other’s given that
Rossetti is working from a copy of the Egyptian book, and Davies
from Rossetti’s 2012 English translation.
Indeed, Metro foregrounds the instability of domestication and
foreignization in translations of graphic narrative. Fragmentary Eng-
lish and Spanish digital translations; book-length Italian, German,
and English translations; and the book’s Arabic reprinting all consti-
tute unique editions and unique attempts to manage the diversity of
semiotic forms—dialogue, onomatopoeias, images, panels, maps—
alongside vernacular cultural practices. Each edition constitutes a
reinterpretation of the hierarchical organization of these elements in
the construction of narrative and the situation of the edition vis-à-
vis Cairo as an imagined and historically real location. The compari-
son of these editions illustrates that this negotiation between textual,
visual, cartographic, and historic Cairos produces dissensus within
and among editions, disallowing a neat categorization of foreign and
domestic in the work.
Metro: A Story of Cairo

(2008/2010/2011/2012/2013/2015)
Metro’s realist depiction of Cairo as a place contributed to the book’s

material displacement from Egypt. Metro was initially released by
Egyptian publisher Malamih in 2008, and banned on its first print-
ing. Officials cited the book for offensive language and sexual con-
tent, and El Shafee and his publishers were arrested and fined. Metro
was specifically condemned for “offending public morals.” While
there is a brief scene of nudity, many people, including translator
Rossetti, believe that the rationale behind Metro’s ban was “its bleak
view of late-Mubarak-era Egypt” (“Translating” 306). Or, as transla-
tor Humphrey Davies suggests, some of the visual details were too
recognizable, such as a corrupt politician character who “bears an
unfortunately close resemblance to a known public figure . . . This
4
almost guaranteed that it would be confiscated” (“Davies”). Because
the book balanced a tension between the “fictional” narrative and the
realist depictions of location and context, the combination of image
and text presented the risk of a certain interpretation by political fig-
ures in Cairo. “All copies” (C. Davies; Hanafy 421) of the book were
seized by authorities, who “forbade the publisher to print Metro
again. The police also ordered booksellers to deny all knowledge of
the book and delete any relevant data from their computers” (S. Har-
ris). These stipulations resulted in the book’s unavailability in Egypt
for five years (Holland; Evans-Bush). Thus, the work that would be
touted as Egypt’s first graphic novel spent little time in circulation in
Egypt.
Outside of Egypt, however, Metro circulated and proliferated. In
2008 an excerpt was translated into English by Humphrey Davies
and published on the website of the organization Words Without Bor-
ders. In 2010 Ernesto Pagano produced an Italian translation of the
work that was published by il Sirente. In 2011 a second edition in
Arabic was released in Lebanon through the Comic Shop, an Arabic-
language comic book publisher. And in 2012 the Henry Holt and
Company imprint Metropolitan Books published the first book-
length English edition, translated by Chip Rossetti, while Swiss
publisher Edition Moderne produced a German edition from transla-
tors Iskandar Abdalla and Stefan Winkler. It was not until 2013 that
Arabic-language editions of Metro were again sold in Egypt (Qualey;
5
Jaquette). Later, in 2015, the Spanish organization Fundación al
4. El Shafee himself confirms this point: “‘The political and business figures in
this book, they are easily recognisable to the Egyptian public,’ said Shafee, who can-
not name them publicly for fear of arrest.
‘These are very corrupt and disgusting people who rule Egypt, who are in the
pockets of the regime, and it is the ordinary people who love Cairo who are suffer-
ing’” (Koutsoukis).
5. Cf. Kirk, who states that the book reappeared in Egyptian bookstores in
August 2012: “While it’s possible that the Morsi regime allowed the return of the
book, being all too happy to support negative depictions of its former opponent, it’s
more likely that the chaotic, less regulated atmosphere of publishing post-Mubarak
had more to do with it.”
78 • C hapter 2
Fanar published a fragmentary translation by Mona Galal, Mónica

6
Carrión, and Pedro Rojo on its website.
Hodapp and Nasser imply that Metro’s peregrinations are note-
worthy given the Egyptian government’s desire to suppress the work
and its author: “Metro’s ability to travel, given its specific cultural
milieu, has been the subject of considerable attention, particularly in
the light of the internationally publicized and protracted court pro-
ceedings against el-Shafee that threatened him with several years in
prison” (26). Metro not only represents spatial transit in its form and
content; it became a work in transit, spending more time in print and
digital circulation throughout countries and linguistic regions other
than Egypt.
Frequently cited as lacking a precedent or a national tradition in
Egypt, Metro is alternately referred to as “Egypt’s first graphic novel”
7
(Jaggi) or as the “first adult Arabic graphic novel” (H. Davies, “from
Metro”). As M. Lynx Qualey notes in Egypt Independent, more than
Metro’s content, it is perhaps Metro’s graphic novelty and thus trans-
national generic comprehensibility that made it rotten for Egyptian
censors and ripe for cultural translatability:
Many far racier books remain on the local market. Yet few paint as
vivid a picture of corruption at the opening of the 21st century. And
perhaps none are as accessible as “Metro,” which is written in a col-
loquial language that is spicy at times, and illustrated in Shafee’s
hyper-kinetic, multi-layered, sometimes chaotic style.
6. Denominations for editions are difficult owing to the linguistically ambig-

uous yet politically inflexible borders through which Metro passes. Both editions
from Dar al-Malāmih and the Comic Shop are in Arabic, yet I use the 2008 edition
(which I refer to as the Arabic edition), as it also provides the basis for most of the
other editions. Meanwhile, although I frequently call Abdalla and Winkler’s version
“the German translation,” this is a heuristic, as the publisher is Swiss. Although
both Abdalla and Winkler frequently reside in Germany, Abdalla emigrated from
Egypt, making it not entirely incorrect, if unbearably wordy, to refer to this book as
an Egyptian-German-Swiss text. Moreover, because both Davies and Rossetti write
their translations in English—with the distinction of British vs. US provenances—I
frequently refer to their translations by the translator’s name, or specify Rossetti’s
as the US edition. Yet I do so fully aware that, especially in the case of a large cor-
porate publisher like Henry Holt, many others contribute to the editorial process
and the production of the text. Further, because Holt is a multinational company,
calling Rossetti’s the US edition ignores its circulation in Canada and other anglo-
phone nations.
7. It is worth noting that the “Godfather of Egyptian Graphic Novelists,” as
Jaggi terms him, was born in Libya.
Therefore, its seeming incongruity or originality makes Metro sus-

ceptible to both national sanction and transnational imagination. El
Shafee notes that it is forbidden to mock politicians in cartoons in
Egypt (Jaggi), and yet the book’s taboo determination to expose pre-
revolutionary corruption is often cited by critics as its most important
reflection of Egypt. Metro’s literal and material translatability is bro-
kered by its untranslatability as a singular national object received
by extranational consumers as an authentic, generic representation of
the revolutionary zeitgeist.
The narrative follows engineer Shehab and his friend Mustafa as
they rob a bank in order to escape from a loan shark and inadver-
tently become caught up in a murder conspiracy. Shehab’s love inter-
est, Dina, is a reporter who frequents protests, and much of the book
explores class hierarchies, political and economic corruption, and
police violence. As the US translation’s book jacket notes: “Magdy
El Shafee has delivered a prescient portrait of a crumbling society
and Egypt’s coming eruption . . . Metro sounds the cry for a better,
freer, future” (Rossetti n. pag.). This perception of the work, shared
by many US reviewers, reveals how a so-called Western reader, read-
ing in English, might orient themselves to the work in light of recent
geopolitical events in Egypt.
The same incongruity that led to its banning in Egypt thus
appeals to a Western imaginary. Indeed, much of the press coverage
and marketing of Metro’s translations reflect only slightly subtler ver-
sions of Swiss publisher Edition Moderne’s announcement “In Ägyp-
8
ten verboten!” The specific terms of the ban—immoral images and
similarities to living political figures—are used as a marketing device
on the back cover of the Italian translation. El Shafee’s US literary
agent actually states that he “was working with Magdy before the
revolution but I waited until Mubarak resigned to sell it” (qtd. in C.
Davies), making explicit the investment in a retroactive reading of the
book as a Western-oriented explainer of recent events. How can one
understand the so-called Arab Spring and its source? Just read Metro.
Metro’s literal and material translatability is facilitated by its
untranslatability as a singular object—the first Arabic graphic novel.
It orients Western consumers as an authentically Oriental, yet recog-
nizable object—the graphic novel, that, because of its condemnation
by governmental forces, appears to be oriented toward the revolu-
8. This selling point is listed on the publisher’s website, https://www.edition-

moderne.ch/buch/metro-kairo-im-untergrund/.
80 • C hapter 2
tionary zeitgeist. Hanafy goes so far as to call the graphic novel “a

revolutionary genre” (422) and to claim of Metro that “in light of
what occurred in 2011, El Shafee’s novel almost looks as if it ushered
in that critically important Egyptian event: the Egyptian Revolution”
(430). Indeed, Humphrey Davies refers to the book as “uncannily pre-
scient” (“Davies”) in its ability to depict a historically accurate Cairo
on the verge of upheaval.
From this account, it would seem that Metro presents the Western
reader with a proximity to danger in the trope of a backward regime
incapable of understanding literary forms (specifically, the graphic
novel) that have already been embraced in Europe and the US. As
marketed through its association with risk, the book affirms the supe-
riority of the Western reader in collusion with the burgeoning demo-
cratic spirit of the Arab Spring. Consequently, the Western reading
subject, intellectually prepared for novelty to enter the world, under-
stands the value of Metro as an object of world literature. The book
that was impossible in its originary location finds a new home in
exile thanks to translational appeal.
Whence and Whither Metro?
Although Metro has been heralded as a ready-made export for West-

ern consumption, not all scholars are in consensus about its trans-
latability; nor are all readers engaging with the same Metro. Even
Hanafy, writing from Benha University in Egypt, uses Rossetti’s
translation as the basis for her critical reading of Metro. She char-
acterizes the book in a didactic framework that presumes a reader-
ship outside the immediate context of the book’s setting: “El Shafee’s
graphic novel helps the readers to understand partially what caused
the riots that led to overthrow of Egyptian President Mubarak” (432).
By contrast, other scholars have challenged such an assessment of the
graphic novel’s intended audience or exigence.
In his book After the American Century: The Ends of US Culture
in the Middle East, Edwards constructs a provocative thesis regard-
ing commerce between the US and the Middle East. Edwards argues
that digital pathways of cultural transfer as well as shifting attitudes
toward the US in the twenty-first century have, contrary to popular
opinion, not extended the hegemony of American culture so much as
fragmented the meanings of “American cultural objects and forms”
(1) in North Africa and the Middle East. Edwards investigates a num-
ber of case studies of what might otherwise be referred to as glocal-
ization—the local revision of globally circulated cultural products
(films, poems, books, literary forms, etc.). The chapter “Jumping Pub-
lics: Egyptian Fictions of the Digital Age” examines transnational
exchanges that take place in literary forms and genres between Egypt
and the US in order to see how some objects or concepts “jump pub-
lics.” For Edwards, while it is assumed that US cultural forms and
products circulate widely throughout global networks of neolib-
eral transactions, in actuality, some cultural products represent end
points of circulation. Edwards thus explores the “limits of American
models of democracy as they are imagined in the West as export-
able products” (35). He focuses on Cairo and shows how the “Arab
Spring” in 2011 led to a revisitation of the “narratives by which
Orientalist tradition had previously translated a storied city” (35).
As Edwards contends, the narratives around the #Jan25 uprising in
America reflected more about US ideologies and imaginations than it
did about Egypt (42).
Mutatis mutandis, Edwards tracks how US forms were reimag-
ined in Cairo, devoting the majority of his chapter to Metro. He cites
both Sacco’s page from Palestine and American superhero comics as
sources from which El Shafee formally and culturally borrows in
Metro (59). Yet Edwards critiques the assumption that the reception
of comics in Cairo is part of a process “in which US cultural forms
contribute to making a new Egypt, a new Arab world, crafted in an
image with which the West can . . . feel comfortable” (55). Instead, he
considers how these American forms were excavated of translatable
meaning and how Metro, in particular, “leav[es] behind the register
familiar to Western readers. It is an example of the end of circulation
from which an outside form cannot return to legibility. Metro cher-
ishes its very locality” (56). Although he offers few specific examples,
Edwards contends that the references in Metro are not intelligible to
a reader who is unfamiliar with the locations and situations depicted
in the work. Metro, in Edwards’s view, does not intrinsically speak to
the West but instead takes a “Western form”—comics—and creates a
work that is explicitly addressed to a Cairene reading public. How-
ever much Edwards credits Metro with “foreshadowing the #Jan25
movement of 2011” (61), he also stipulates that the work does not
“jump publics” to the US as a “translatable value.” Edwards further
describes his own struggles in translating a different El Shafee comic,
82 • C hapter 2
given that the “Egyptian Arabic used is especially colloquial” (68). As

Edwards contends, El Shafee’s comics ultimately prove impossible to
translate because the intended reading public for his work must be
conversant in the transnational references and form of comics as well
as the local Egyptian references and dialect.
Edwards’s argument that Metro contains a number of references
that only an Egyptian readership would grasp is countered by James
Hodapp and Deema Nasser in their chapter “The Complications of
Reading Egypt as Africa: Translation and Magdy el-Shafee’s ‫المترو‬
(Metro).” For Hodapp and Nasser, Edwards and similarly inclined
theorists have done a disservice to the study of Metro by positioning
it always as “World literature and Arabic literature rather than Afri-
can literature” (22). They consider Metro against Rebecca Walkowitz’s
category of literature that is “born translated” or “written for transla-
tion from the start” (Walkowitz 3). Although one might assume that
Metro, a worldly text from its first publication and subsequent cir-
culation, is the type of book Walkowitz describes when considering
those works that “start as world literature” (2), Hodapp and Nasser
demur by examining the original Arabic work and its US translation
to argue that “Metro is a graphic novel with an inherent African read-
ing public” (25). As Africanists, the authors claim that Edwards fails
to acknowledge Metro as an African work by concentrating solely on
the relationship between Cairo and the US.
One basic problem they find in his analysis is the myopia with
which Edwards considers the “West” and the “Middle East” as the
only nodes in a circuit of translation and transnational exchange for
Metro. As Hodapp and Nasser stipulate, both English and Arabic are
primary or national languages in a number of African nations, which
share other cultural and political points of comparison with Cairo.
The authors stress that reading Metro as an African text is not easy
but is important for the recognition and establishment of African lit-
erary studies. Such a unified field is undermined by the “rift” instan-
tiated through readings like Edwards’s as well as by the specifics of
Metro’s translation.
Hodapp and Nasser also take issue with Rossetti’s translation
and the way in which it changes or Westernizes Metro. They analyze
how Rossetti’s translation both “flatten[s] experiences in the narra-
tive that would resonate with African publics” and “reorients politi-
cal elements to support the claim by Metro’s American publisher that
it presages the 2011 Tahrir Square demonstrations often characterized
as part of the ‘Arab Spring’” (32). They do not lodge the same cri-
tiques against Humphrey Davies’s partial English translation, which
they contrast with Rossetti’s in terms of accuracy and intent. They
object further to specific translations of lines within the text as well as
the US version’s attribution of a line in the book to Hosni Mubarak.
For Hodapp and Nasser, these translational particulars are further
evidence of the intent to demonize Mubarak and depict protagonists
like Shehab and Dina as liberal proto-revolutionaries. This particular
interpretation, they argue, goes against the narrative itself, in which
no revolution actually occurs:
Metro is not about revolution though and ends bleakly with one
character betraying another to escape and two others finding no
solution to their predicament . . . It is this sense of being over-
whelmed, rather than optimistic, that imbues the novel, gesturing
away from Western, particularly American narratives of meritocracy
towards more historically prevalent African ways of living in the
corrupted ruins of empire. (34)
Admittedly, Hodapp and Nasser offer a broad-brushstrokes concep-

tualization of divergent reading publics. Nevertheless, their analysis
serves as a valuable reminder that translation is necessarily interpre-
tive. Their central point of critique turns on the way that Rossetti’s
translation interprets Metro for Western readers, and they use coun-
terinterpretations to justify their thesis.
On the other hand, Edwards questions the translatability of El
Shafee’s comics—not only Metro but also “The Parkour War”—by
looking specifically at ways in which his comics “defy translation”
(83) or fail to reproduce the specific relation of the work to “the pub-
lic it addresses” (69). The view on translation that Edwards proposes
is what Venuti would call instrumentalist, suggesting the possibil-
ity of a direct transfer of meaning from source to target, one that is,
in this case, defied. But, and this is essential, insofar as Edwards is
correct that certain formal elements—what Venuti calls interpretants
(Contra 2)—may serve as direct or indirect impediments to an instru-
mental translation, El Shafee’s works are translated. In fact, Edwards
himself translated “The Parkour War,” a short collaboration work
by El Shafee and Ahmed Alaidy. In Edwards’s own translation, the
question of trying to make the meaning legible to a new audience is
the central focus, rather than the question of how to translate form.
84 • C hapter 2
Given that Edwards describes Metro as “about the cage of Cairo

and the impossibility of escaping it” (61), the role of spatiality in the
composition of the book is an intrinsic component of its central the-
matic and one that creates an issue for translators. While Edwards’s
examination of the translatability of El Shafee’s comics extends
beyond the linguistic translation, his claim that “the graphics advance
its meaning more surely than do plot or text” (63) demonstrates a
misrecognition—perhaps founded on his reliance on McCloud for
formal analysis—of the imbricated way that images and text corre-
late to narrative in comics. Instead of imagining comics as composed
of separable or even quantitatively comparable meaning-making
forms, the project of reading for difference must attend to the insepa-
rable combination of “graphics” with text in space and diegetic time.
Among the diverging views of Hanafy, Edwards, and Hodapp and
Nasser, translatability is assessed according to how Metro is inter-
preted by readerships in spaces outside of Cairo, but for the sake of
comics studies, it is just as important to consider how different read-
erships—translators—have interpreted spaces inside of Cairo as they
are graphically composed in Metro.
Translating Sound
Already well established in French-language comics scholarship,

theories of page layout such as those noted above by Fresnault-
9
Deruelle, Peeters, and Groensteen have been much slower to infil-
trate scholarship in the US, perhaps owing to McCloud’s focus on
sequence over page surface as the central model for understanding
comics. Although sequence—as in the sequential succession of pan-
els, images, and words—is a central component of the technicity of
comics, a singular focus on sequence often obscures the ways that
comics, as Hatfield states, “exploit format as a signifier in itself; more
specifically, that comics involve a tension between the experience of
reading in sequence and the format or shape of the object being read”
(52). Hanafy, Edwards, and Hodapp and Nasser focus most of their
interpretation of Metro on its translatability as a story pictorially and
verbally developed in sequence.
9. Also belonging on this list: Baetens, Lefèvre, Smolderen, and Chavanne,

among others.
Focusing instead on the translations of form, or formal elements,

gives a very different picture of Metro’s translatability. Metro’s page
layouts require concerted attention to the shifts enacted through
translation. That is not to say that layout is separable from other page
elements, as Groensteen explains:
The page layout does not operate on empty panels, but must take
into account their contents. It is an instrument in the service of a
global artistic project, frequently subordinated to a narrative, or, at
least, discursive, aim; if it submits a priori to some formal rule that
constrains the contents and, in a certain way, creates them, the page
layout is generally elaborated from a semantically determined con-
tent, where the breakdown has already assured discretization in suc-
cessive enunciations known as panels. (92)
Among the varying Metros in existence, a number of idiosyncrasies

are notable in the relationship Groensteen articulates between the
contents, panels, and formal constraints. Similarly, in the transla-
tions, different prioritizations of sequence or surface cohesion create
entirely different texts.
The different texts meaningfully demonstrate how comics provide
new vantages onto translation theory. Rather than staid concepts of
foreignization and domestication, translations of comics feature mul-
tiple points of translatability that are sometimes at odds with each
other or with the compositional themes of a work. In order to orient
an English reader to the text, the Rossetti translation flips the direc-
tion of the pages from the right-to-left orientation of the Arabic. None
of the other translations follow in the flipping of pages, but they fea-
ture other translational markers to alert readers to the “difference” of
the text.
Some of these differences multiply through the tension of code
versus code, or “image and written text” (36), as articulated by Hat-
field. As Hatfield notes, in comics this distinction is not a stable
dialectic:
Comics, like other hybrid texts, collapse the word/image dichotomy:

visible language has the potential to be quite elaborate in appear-
ance, forcing recognition of pictorial and material qualities that can
be freighted with meaning . . . conversely, images can be simplified
and codified to function as a language. (36–37)
86 • C hapter 2
Translation scholar José Yuste Frías elaborates further to contend that

in a translation the text will “guide the interpretation of the image”
while the “image provides an orientation for the reading of the text,”
yet images are not universal, complicating further this complemen-
tarity (255). Metro’s use of language is frequently inextricable from or
extricable only at the expense of the images it accompanies. Thus in
the English, German, and Italian versions, the translator and/or edi-
tors interpret panels and image-text combinations variably.
Among many categorizations of text types in comics, Nadine
Celotti identifies “four loci of translation”: balloons, captions, titles,
and the whole group of “verbal signs inside the drawing: inscrip-
tions, road signs, newspapers, onomatopoeia, sometimes dialogues,
and so on” (38–39). While the first three text types will generally
undergo a translation (Celotti says “always”), the fourth provides the
most variability, as some translators will treat “sound words” and
inscriptions as part of the picture rather than as a linguistic element
(39). For Celotti—as for other comics translation scholars—the rela-
tive shape and containment, or lack thereof, will play a large role in
determining how much and whether texts within and outside the
panels will be translated. Federico Zanettin describes the assump-
tions underlying this “constrained approach” to comics translation,
which treats only words enclosed in boxes or balloons as translata-
bles and assumes the universal meaning of images (21). Instead, as
Yuste Frías, Celotti, and Zanettin all argue, visual elements, including
verbal signs within a drawing, are culturally interpretable as well,
entailing that a translation will determine whether and how to trans-
late these verbal elements in ways that prioritize one interpretation at
the expense of others.
The German translation of Metro includes a note on the “sound-
words” which were left in Arabic in order to produce a story that was
“faithful to the original.” But given the state of the work as a banned
text, the ability to discern the significatory import of all the mark-
ings on the page was not always easy; nor was concretization of “the
original” Metro necessarily possible for its translators. In conversa-
tion, Rossetti explained the difficulties that he had with obtaining a
full text for his own translation:
It was hard to get a copy that was not a copy of a copy . . . I would
go to book fairs in the Arab world and would desperately look to
see if anyone has a copy of El Shafee’s Metro. It was a Borgesian
book that didn’t exist. I really had to ask Magdy himself: “I can’t
read what’s here because it’s greyed out.” I knew there were things
where I could see that it wasn’t right, and I could only see when
I finally got the proofs at the end. Magdy was being very careful
about what he would send out online. He may not have had the file
from Egypt, it might have been stored elsewhere. I had to keep ask-
ing: “Do you have a better resolution of this? I can’t see what’s on
this page.” (Telephone interview with the author)
In Rossetti’s description of Metro’s Borgesian existence, the concept

of the “original” is thrown into doubt. Karen Emmerich has argued
that it is in fact translations and later editions that create “originals.”
Rather than derivative “copies” or lesser versions, Emmerich asserts
that translations are interpretive forms (26) that simultaneously indi-
cate the instability of literary originals and create the concept of an
10
original text which they interpret.
Every version of Metro evinces different choices that in turn ges-
ture toward differing interpretations. Owing to the proliferation of
sound words throughout the book, there are countless sites of trans-
lational deliberation, from a panel with a subway train rushing into
the station to a phone ringing. The subway train appears on the sec-
ond page and is overwritten with a series of ‫و‬s (wāws). In the short
Spanish excerpt, the Arabic letters appear without any translation.
In Davies’s translation of the same page, the original Arabic letters
accompanying the train are overlaid with a series of “w”s; the Ger-
man similarly preserves the Arabic while adding “RATTATTAT”
below. Pagano’s and Rossetti’s translations both erase the Arabic let-
ters, but in the Italian version, the Arabic is replaced by “w”s, while
the US translation adds the word “WHOOSH.” Each version of the
same panel (see figure 2.2) demonstrates a distinct interpretation of
the relation between the onomatopoetic letters and the image.
Based solely on these differences in the interpretation of a single
panel, one can acknowledge, as W. J. T. Mitchell states, how “the
relationship between words and images reflects, within the realm of
representation, signification, and communication, the relations we
posit between symbols and the world, signs and their meaning” (43).
Floating letters indicating the sound of an approaching train relate
10. And as Thomas A. Bredehoft notes, comics are “always implicated in an

economy of reproduction” (134).
88 • C hapter 2
FIGURE 2.2. Left to right, top to bottom: Comparison of panel from Arabic, English, German,
Italian, and US Metros
to the space of the page as well as to the relative correlation between

image, letter, sound, and context, and result in consistently inconsis-
tent interpretations of how a “sound word” functions within a pic-
torial plane. The rendering of the “word” itself, at an angle parallel
to the train, suggests that a reader see it as a pictorial element, tak-
ing part in the two-dimensional representation of three-dimensional
space. An orientation to the sound word as a pictorial, as opposed
to linguistic, element, corresponds to the Spanish translation’s deci-
sion to leave the letters in Arabic. On the other hand, Davies, Abdalla,
and Winkler treat the letters as verbal enough to need a translation
mounted atop or below them, yet pictorial enough to demand their
inclusion alongside the “translations.” As suggested by Pagano’s and

Rossetti’s texts, these translations all vary in terms of whether they
treat the ‫ و‬as representative of a sound requiring an aural correlate
(“RATTATTAT” or “WHOOSH”) or as a letter that may be transferred
into a Latinate script as “w” with no further modification.
These differing interpretations of how the image and text unify
in the service of the narrative present a limited example of what
amounts to a profusion of differing ideas about signs and their mean-
ing within the contexts of comics composition writ large and Metro
in particular. Metro is chock-full of sounds emanating from people,
electronic devices, various forms of transportation, and weapons. The
translations’ approaches to these letters indicate differing orienta-
tions within linguistic and cultural systems of recognizing sound as
image or text. Each translation encodes implicit readerly and view-
erly assumptions about how to render an image-text that complicate
the distinction in meaning between the terms “image” and “text.”
Translating Space
Metro offers another form of code-based tension through its employ-

ment of maps and map fragments. A Cairo subway map—a digitally
produced, abstract representation of space—begins every narrative
section, showing where the characters are, based on the nearest sub-
way stop. Throughout the book, Metro juxtaposes one specific car-
tographic orienting technique with others. The maps in panels, as
background, or as full splash page, share representational space with
images of landmarks, characters moving through space and time, and
words announcing location as well as transit between locations (see
figure 2.3). The multiplication of these techniques destabilizes the
sovereignty of any one and creates multiperspectival tabular compo-
sitions, where the map of the subway station is interwoven with the
surrounding cityscape (as drawn images) and the narrator’s commen-
tary (as text). Accordingly, the translations’ varying methods of deal-
ing with the maps as spaces of representation or representations of
space produce epistemologically diverse grasps of the spatiotemporal
situation of maps within the book.
Scholars have interpreted Metro’s repeated use of maps in differ-
ent ways. For Dominic Davies, the map is used in such a way to
90 • C hapter 2
FIGURE 2.3. Magdy El Shafee, Metro, pages 32–33
evoke[ ] the flattening, telescopic perspective of the neoliberal urban

planner. The gridded infrastructure of the metro, which transforms
the heterogeneity and density of Cairo’s urban fabric into a series of
regimented lines and clearly labelled locations, functions metaphori-
cally as both a cartographic and material embodiment of oppressive
urban governance. (Urban Comics 62)
Davies largely supports his interpretation through the final scene

of the narrative in which Shehab and love interest Dina realize the
hopelessness of their predicament and decide to “get out of this tun-
nel” (Rossetti, Metro 91). Yet Davies also allows that at times Shehab
is able to use the subway tunnels as a way to avoid capture amid the
omnipresent surveillance state aboveground.
Rossetti instead describes the metro system as the book’s organiz-
ing metaphor, one which “symbolizes the hidden lines that connect a
city of vast socioeconomic differences” (“Translating” 307). Rossetti
contrasts the visual composition of panels that tend to represent the
vertical hierarchy of the city through angles viewing subjects either

from above or below with the hidden, unseen, horizontal network of
connections shown through the “neat lines” of the metro map (318).
For Rossetti, there is a direct tension between what Hatfield would
describe as single image versus image in sequence in that the maps
and the panels create different perspectival orientations—evoking a
sense of socioeconomic difference.
Although their readings differ, both Davies and Rossetti concep-
tualize the maps metaphorically, even using the term metaphor in
their analyses. However, from a comics studies vantage, it is impor-
tant to think beyond the hermeneutic, in order to analyze how the
maps work in variegated semiotic and material registers. As Zanet-
tin asserts: “From a semiotic point of view, the translation of com-
ics is thus concerned with different layers of interpretative activities,
which can be variously conceptualized as inter- or intra-semiotic or
systemic, depending on one’s definition of system” (12). To return to
Hatfield’s conception, maps create a triplicate dilemma of encoding
and decoding in that they are positioned in the same picture plane as
the pictorial images, and yet they function as a distinct way of rep-
resenting three-dimensional space through text and image. Whether
a translation treats the map as a linguistic or a pictorial signifying
space differs in each edition’s approach.
The Pagano translation replaces all the subway maps from the
Arabic edition with other maps of the Cairo subway but makes no
change in the book’s singular use of a street map. Thus, for the Ital-
ian text, there is a meaningful difference between what a subway
map says and what a street map shows. The subway maps are inter-
changeable in their content and composition—they give information.
The street map must then—by dint of the difference in treatment—
11
visually or aesthetically signify in meaningful ways.
Alternately, the Rossetti translation replaces all maps, using the
subway map in place of the street map (figure 2.4), as if to edit the
Arabic edition through visual coherence. This translation marks a cat-
egorical difference between map and image, ultimately determining
that a map is not an image insofar as it can be replaced with no effect
11. I was unable, in my research, to locate the distinct map objects used in the
different versions of Metro. However, a simple Google search reveals images that
resemble the network maps, including one attributed to R. Shwandl at UrbanRail.
net, and updated 2006, 2012, and 2014, and one located at Wikimedia commons,
authored by Jpatokal and dated 2008.
92 • C hapter 2
FIGURE 2.4. Chip Rossetti, translator, Metro, pages 36–37
on the visual composition. Hodapp and Nasser object to this inter-

pretation and explicitly critique the decision to replace the maps as
more evidence of the “cultural manipulation” of the US translation.
They argue that the replacement maps efface the Egyptian history
expressed in the originals and do not even “depict the same geo-
graphic spaces that are in the original” (34). To be sure, as Hodapp
and Nasser point out, this change in the map itself constitutes an
interpretive rewriting of the graphic work. By determining that the
graphic appearance of the map was not integral to the visual narra-
tive, the US translation devalues the map’s function in the visual nar-
rative to merely locating the characters.
Here Hatfield’s tension between image and text must be reimag-
ined in order to account for the tensions between different spaces of
representation and representations of space. That is, maps, text, and
images have their own culturally situated, epistemological models
by which a reader orients herself to the marking system. Fascinat-
ingly, between the Italian and US translations, two distinct views of
the map as—in Tom Conley’s terms—a cartographic idiolect in the

context of the comics idiom emerge. As Conley specifies of a simi-
lar encounter—the appearance of a map in the field of a film—the
appearance of maps in the planche or compositional plane of comics
introduces issues of “perspective, visual style, narrative economy,
scale, [comics] and history, the stakes of mimesis, and reception” (2).
The Italian edition treats the subway map as an informatic image-
text. Its appearance is contained by the representational plane of
the page in a way that does not interact with the picture plane but
is instead ancillary to it. For the US translation, all maps are given
merely an informatic, positioning function. These systems only artic-
ulate location as opposed to representationally or aesthetically signi-
fying within the composition.
The Italian and US translations also leave untranslated the con-
tents but not the headlines of a newspaper depicted on page 45,
while the German translation also renders the contents of the arti-
cles in German, again drawing attention to how each translation or
edition treats the relationship between representational regimes and
the world. Do maps or even newspapers function as representations
of space, or are they merely units within spaces of representation?
The varying interpretations evince radically different approaches to
cultural techniques such as cartography, typography, and drawing
within the space of the same page.
Nodes and Networks
By Hatfield’s schema, the use of maps engenders a crisis in the ten-

sion of code versus code. The maps (and newspaper contents) seem
to form differential readings between the imagistic and the verbal,
yet the maps also create different readings in terms of the other
tensions described by Hatfield—specifically those of single image
versus image in sequence, and sequence versus surface. The imbrica-
tion of cartographic, textual, and pictorial marking systems locates
both reader and characters in the city through multiple transitions
between places and times. It also creates translational dilemmas
between space and sequence.
Metro’s narrative temporality is mapped, literally, in that the nar-
rator, Shehab, begins at Mohamed Naguib Station in the narrative
present, until four pages later the subway map showing the station
94 • C hapter 2
FIGURE 2.5. Ernesto Pagano, translator, Metro, page 27 (left); and Iskandar Ahmad Abdalla and
Stefan Winkler, translators, Metro, page 31 (right).
precedes a flashback sequence keeping the characters in the same

spatial proximity while delineating the temporal lapse. The return to
“the present” is later indicated with a full-page spread of the metro
map, with Mohamed Naguib Station outlined and, in the Arabic, Ital-
ian, and German editions, also highlighted in white (figures 2.3 and
2.5). This splash-page map recalls the earlier fragment of the map
with a difference: as Groensteen notes, narration in comics is “pluri-
vectoral,” meaning that a reader makes sense of a given panel based
on preceding panels as well as on panels that are within the same
page or picture plane as the panel itself. Thus, the reader understands
the second map of Mohamed Naguib Station as being larger than, as
well as a black-white color-inverse of, the earlier map.
How the map then relates to narrative sequence or overall the-
matic and aesthetic import depends on what Groensteen calls tressage,
or braiding. Groensteen’s schema differs from Hatfield’s in that it
describes the system of comics in terms of mise-en-page (or layout),
sequence, and braiding. Groensteen describes iconic solidarity as the
definitional tenet of comics: “interdependent images that, participat-

ing 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” (System 18). As he notes,
these images, in the form of panels, may be apprehended at once,
enter into dialogue across a page, or even across the work itself,
“establishing relationships among non-adjacent pages” (“Braiding”
89). The maps of Mohamed Naguib Station thus shift their meaning
in the narrative based on their repetition. The text spurs a reader to
visually recognize the map the second time it is shown and to inter-
pret this repetition.
In this particular instance, the second map is overlaid with text
that, in Arabic, states as a direction to the reader, “‫عودة العو لبدء‬,” or,
“return to the start.” The Pagano and Davies translations both ren-
der the text similarly: “Ritorno all’inizio” and “Return to the pres-
ent. Shihab and Mustafa set off to rob a bank,” respectively. Pagano
translates literally, as if secure in the ability of the reader to recog-
nize that the Mohamed Naguib Station is also where the story began
and that the reader will understand the return to the narrative pres-
ent from the map and the verbal directive. On the other hand, Davies
gives the reader slightly more of a narrative synopsis as a way to
further explain what “return to the present” means in the context of
the narrative. Alternately, both the German and the US translations
reprint the opening line of narration from the first page (“Ich Weiss
Nicht Mehr, Wann Sich All Dieser Zorn in Mir Angestaut Hat” and
“I don’t remember when I became so angry”) on top of the map, as a
means of verbally signaling how the map and the text work together
(see figure 2.5 and figure 2.7). The German edition also keeps the
Arabic text, creating a profusion of signs in which the German line
from the start of the book fulfills—literally—the Arabic injunction
above it, changing the meaning of the map from a spatiotemporal
signifier to a background image.
Further, because the US edition standardizes all the maps—even
the street map—into subway maps, the appearance of the street map
on page 37 at Anwar Sadat Station is deprived of its particular sig-
nificance in the network of map images (see figure 2.4). Hodapp and
Nasser decry the substitution’s focus on train stations at the expense
of roads labeled with English and French place names (34) as well as
the complete erasure of the accompanying quotation from Sadat. As
they write:
96 • C hapter 2
[The excised quote] translates into: “This isn’t a popular uprising . . .

This is a thieves’ uprising” . . . The statement is significant in light of
the original context as it detaches itself from inciting sentiments of
popular revolt and instead insinuates that those demonstrating are
not innocent but rather those who want to take as much power as
12
they can for themselves. (34)
From a visual perspective, the street map is unique in its mimetic and
representational capacity, especially as an incongruity in a series of
other maps. Its appearance forces greater attention to the page and
the context. As in Groensteen’s formation, its presence is overdeter-
mined by the co-existence of other maps in near identical composi-
tion but with entirely different symbolic idioms. The US version
instead creates a continuity of maps throughout the book, making
a visually consistent, yet distinct interpretation of how and why the
maps are included.
Sequence versus Surface
For Rossetti, Metro “depicts the character of the city through the spa-
tial organization of images” (“Translating” 314). Rossetti points to
the necessarily spatialized narrativity of all comics, and specifically
examines how the “anti-human nature of space in Cairo” (315) is
enacted through El Shafee’s use of “spatial organization of the illus-
trations” (320). Yet, this organization is changed in the very trans-
lation Rossetti worked on. Considering how the maps and the page
layouts play into Hatfield’s tension of sequence versus surface reveals
further differences in interpretations and readerly orientations.
In Rossetti’s translation, pages with more than one panel are
flipped so that a reader follows the narrative from left to right. The
subway maps are separately reproduced for the English version, thus
operating as an indicator of the reorientation of the work, in that they
are not flipped along with the page but are reproduced in order to
keep the same schematic as the original. This decision is indicative
of a particular set of culturally and ideologically inflected judgments
about reading and visual interpretation. From the perspective of
page layout, the unique simultaneity of the page “as sequence and as
12. In our interview, Rossetti attested that he had translated the quotation and
could not explain why it was not included in Metropolitan’s published version of
Metro (telephone interview with author).
FIGURE 2.6. Magdy El Shafee, Metro, pages 42–43
object, to be seen and read in both linear and nonlinear holistic fash-
ion” (Hatfield 48) is changed entirely through the US recomposition
of map space.
One telling example demonstrates how the flipping of pages and
maps intervenes in the relations between surface and sequence. Pages
33 and 43 in the Arabic version resemble each other in terms of com-
position (see figures 2.3 and 2.6). Both feature splash-page maps with
a black background and toponymic information rendered in white.
Both pages occur at pivotal moments in the story and work as a coun-
terbalance to pages 32 and 42 in terms of narrative and composition.
These two maps bring a reader “forward” visually and narratively,
with curving lines that draw focus to the end of the two-page spread
and toward the next page. The first map—as mentioned above—is the
subway map at Mohamed Naguib Station that brings the reader “back
to the start.” The panels on the preceding page stand in contrast based
on their all-white composition as well as their narrative position in
the past, at the moment that Shehab decided to rob a bank. The full
two-page planche, or composition, thus brings together present and
98 • C hapter 2
past, and narratively leads a reader “forward” from the panels depict-
ing Shehab’s decision directly to the “Back to the start” text, which is
positioned adjacent to Shehab’s speech balloon and leads the reader
visually from balloon cum bank-robbery decision to narrative exhor-
tation to symbol of the station on the subway map, positioned at the
leftmost edge of page 33. The composition provides narrative momen-
tum as the reader visually moves from past to present and to the edge
of the page, which, when turned, begins the bank-robbery sequence.
Page 42 depicts the end of the robbery sequence and shows She-
hab and his accomplice, Mustafa, departing into the subway in the
final panel of the page, which directly leads to the large street map
on page 43. The page again draws the reader from the event forward
into a new space, one limned on the leftmost edge by the Nile. These
two compositions create a narrative counterpoint: the two moments
provide the exigence for the narrative arc. Although it is not known at
the moment, page 42 also provides a key panel that is later repeated
as a way to explain the corruption that Shehab and Mustafa unwit-
tingly enter into through their robbery. Pages 33 and 43, by their jux-
taposition, are “predisposed to speak” (Groensteen, System 35) to the
preceding pages and, by means of what Groensteen calls tressage, or
braiding, they will also speak to each other through their composi-
tional similarities such that these pages become “isomorphs” and res-
onate with each other across multiple pages.
Yet, in the US version, the specificities of the mise-en-page on
pages 33 and 43 (or 27 and 37 in the US version)—the way the maps
work as organizational units within a contiguous composition—are
fundamentally changed. The subway map on 27 no longer curves
toward the edge of the page; it now curves inward toward the book
spine and precedes the accompanying text, shifting the narrative
sequence within the composition (figure 2.7). Because the subway
map is used on both pages 27 and 37, the text no longer draws atten-
tion to the important difference between the subway and the street
and to what this difference might visually imply for the composition
(see figure 2.7 and figure 2.4). A judgment is made about the relative
importance of the map as it references a space external to the page
and the map as an internal unit of spatial design.
The judgment that the US edition evinces in terms of linguistic
versus compositional orientation has a radical transformative effect
for the panel contents. Because the direction of panels—but not
maps—is made to follow the direction of English, the majority of pan-
els have images and texts that are backwards. The drivers of cars and
FIGURE 2.7. Chip Rossetti, translator, Metro, pages 26–27
trains suddenly appear on the right side of their vehicles, the oppo-
site of where drivers are situated in Cairo. Arabic-language inscrip-
tions on buildings, or in other “background” spaces of panels, are
printed backwards, and buildings and statues are reversed, such as
the statue of Ibrahim Basha, who now points with his left hand rather
than his right. Because a couple of panels are not flipped, the main
character, Shehab, suddenly becomes ambidextrous. From Rossetti’s
view, the changes were made for an intended audience of US read-
ers, who would be unlikely to notice the incongruities; as Rossetti
notes, “even a real Cairene might not remember which way the Pasha
statue is pointing” (telephone interview with the author). However,
the flipped images and unflipped maps posit a certain theory of real-
ism and signs: the map is understood as a visual object from outside
the narrative, one whose visual reality must be preserved even at the
risk of the composition.
What’s more, while the US edition is generally the most egregious
in its revision of sequence and surface relations, the German edition
100 • C hapter 2
is likewise noteworthy in its curious vertical flipping of the fourth-

to-last page. In the Arabic edition, this page appears upside down
as a kind of hidden response to Shehab’s question at the end of the
preceding page as to why the bank robbery was never reported. The
upside-down page features a small narrative box next to an image
of Shehab and explains “What Shehab didn’t know . . .” The upside-
down panels—which a reader must flip to read—begin with a panel
from page 42, in which the bank director is ordered by a corrupt poli-
tician to disavow the politician’s involvement. In the subsequent pan-
els, the director orders his subordinates to destroy all evidence of the
money ever having existed at the bank. As Rossetti describes the lay-
out of this page:
In flipping the book upside down to view the otherwise “hidden”

panels and illegible words, the reader participates as both protag-
onist and author: like the protagonist, he finds a truth that exists
below, one that must be brought to the surface to be understood—in
this case, the corrupt means by which the bank will keep the loss of
the stolen money off their books. The reader also becomes his own
graphic novelist, as he manipulates the visual space of the page in
order to construct the narrative. (“Translating” 320)
In both the US and the German editions, this page is (despite Rosset-
13
ti’s interpretation) not printed upside down. Of the three full trans-
lations, only the Italian retains the vertical flipping. The US edition
does not even include the narrative box with small Shehab icon at
the top of the page; the German edition keeps this box but places it
at the top of a page in which the box is no longer set in opposition to
the direction of the panels below, and therefore no longer indicates
the “hidden” truth Rossetti describes.
Text as Object versus Text as Experience
The specificities of print cultures are also evident in the tension—

Hatfield’s fourth—between Metro as a reading experience and Metro
as a physical object. The Humphrey Davies translation of Metro, as
13. Rossetti expressed dismay at this decision by editors: “I think it was a missed
opportunity to retain some of those themes that I say obviously the artist wanted in
there and would not have hurt the book much or made it incomprehensible to read-
ers” (telephone interview with the author).
an online fragment, presents a distinct reading experience in that all

pages are displayed in a vertical scroll, allowing a reader to appre-
hend all of them at the same time. Pages are not flipped; they are
presented with Arabic text in word balloons replaced by type in Eng-
lish. At the top of the page the reader is exhorted with an arrow and
printed directions to “please read right to left.” This disjuncture is in
and of itself remarkable in that the reader still reads the English text
left to right, but the instructions emphasize the reading of the panels,
positioning the text as a mere subunit, or creating a mildly paradoxi-
cal instruction (should one also attempt to read the English text right
to left?).
The digital versions—both Humphries’s and the Spanish
excerpt—comport with what Aaron Kashtan claims about digitiza-
tion practices in Between Pen and Pixel: Comics, Materiality, and the
Book of the Future. Kashtan considers digitization of print comics “in
terms of translation or adaptation rather than simple copying” (182).
When the pages of Metro are produced in a digital scroll composi-
tion, the tabular reading of the work irrevocably shifts as a result of
the co-presence of so many pages within the same viewing surface.
Every translation of Metro into a Romance or Germanic language
must grapple with how to orient a reader accustomed to left-to-right
linguistic progression when faced with a book with right-to-left pro-
gression; yet the online versions add a vertical reading vector that
encompasses multiple pages at once.
Even print translations feature a number of material modifications
that reflect cultural standards. The Italian translation of Metro uses a
different trim size from the other editions, following the shape and
size of the common Italian format of the bonelliano (Rota, “Aspects”
82). Despite the overall change in shape, the translation retains the
Arabic right-to-left reading system, which is disclaimed with a curi-
ous announcement to the reader: “Questo libro comincia dalla fine
e si legge come un manga giapponese.” Paradoxically, the reader of
Italian is informed that this book begins at the end and is exhorted
to read this Egyptian graphic novel as if it were a Japanese manga.
In much the same way, Metro in German features a warning page
to announce the reading direction. The instructions note that the
story begins on the last page of the book, and a “graphic” (Grafik) is
included to demonstrate, through numbers and arrows, how to pro-
ceed through each page.
Both the Edition Moderne and il Sirente editions still print the
cover in a left-to-right orientation, meaning that a reader “opens” the
102 • C hapter 2
book at the end. Yet the Edition Moderne Metro bemusingly reprints
the cover as endpapers at the beginning and end of the print body,
creating an internal mirror limning the contents. The physical format-
ting of both these versions creates an idiosyncratic book in which the
cover(s) work at odds with the contents, and—in the Edition Mod-
erne edition—the covers multiply to the point where one can no lon-
ger be sure what a cover is even supposed to signify.
Thus, each formatting element that is meant to orient a reader to
the text also reminds a reader of textual difference. The graphic novel
as an international form does not only—as Edwards argues—work
as a homogenizing export of American values and form. It also leads
to a fragmenting and fascinatingly diverse series of formal and mate-
rial interpretations and transformations among the editions of the
“first Egyptian graphic novel.” To track these interpretive changes as
a reading practice is an essential way to produce counternarratives to
the bugbear of Edwards’s book—the hegemony of US culture in the
era of globalization.
Siting Translation
Whether we hold with Venuti’s hermeneutic view of translation or

not, we can observe among the Rossetti, Davies, Pagano, and Abdalla
and Winkler translations vastly different interpretations not only of
the plot and its relevance but also of the book as a whole. As shown,
while the Rossetti translation interprets Metro as a precursor to the
#Jan25 uprisings, it does so at the expense of the work’s realism. In
the flipping of pages and the creating of a sort of “backwards” world
visually, elements of realism from the original are lost, thus produc-
ing a paradox between the “real” precedent and an inverted fantasy.
Alternately, the Abdalla and Winkler text, in its stated desire to
produce an “unverfälscht,” or authentic story, creates a compositional
palimpsest, replete with layers of multilingual strands of words and
phrases that transform the compositional unity of the work as well
as its aesthetics. Panels where German words and letters now under-
line their Arabic counterparts appear more cluttered and busy than El
Shafee’s regular kinetic and spare drawings. By keeping the Arabic
sound words, the translators and editors privilege one view of fidel-
ity to the original, preserving the appearance of linguistic signifiers
rather than the pictorial composition.
The translation of Metro is a remarkable indication of how cultural

techniques of inscribing and marking location can orient, reorient,
and disorient a reader in space and time through multiform liter-
acy. The specificity of print cultures and reading practices brushes
up against linguistic and cartographic spatial organization. All trans-
lations, rather than extending the Western reader’s mastery, engage
a reader’s awareness of herself as a reading subject in an encoun-
ter with another reading subjectivity. The reader’s disorientation
toward Metro additionally reorients the process of translation itself.
The translations take space as work that travels, while the represen-
tations of space within the work force the reader to physically travel
the reading space in disorienting ways. The works thus call attention
to literacy as a spatialized and physical labor, one that is often taken
for granted. As readers, we repeat movements with our eyes, hands,
and fingers that orient us to our labor. These repeated movements
structure our approach to our work. They physically overdetermine
how we engage our reading texts.
The term read is often used in a decidedly figurative way: to
describe “reading globally” is to describe knowledge work that
entails a certain ethical, cultural, moral but not physical disposition.
Comics such as Metro reassert the physicality of reading and even the
politics of where we are reading from. The Italian instructions to the
reader of the translated Metro reveal the act of reading and translat-
ing to be a physical as well as mental endeavor. A reader of Italian
physically shifts her relation to the book; one “begins at the end”—
not in terms of narrative. One begins at the end of the standard pub-
lication format for Western books. The reader moves eyes right to left
along the page and left to right along the text within panels. These
movements produce friction within the disciplined reader’s body.
The disorienting reading motions also reorient the reader to the fric-
tions spatialized in the place from which she is reading against the
place where she is not.
C H A P T E R 3
PERSEPOLIS AND THE

CULTURAL CURRENCY OF
THE GRAPHIC NOVEL
How Newness Enters the Discourse about Persepolis
In the years since Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis became an interna-

tional phenomenon, selling millions of copies, adapted into an
award-winning film, and added to a number of school curricula,
the text has inspired a cottage industry of critical responses consid-
ering the work in terms of culture. Yet the focus of the extant dis-
course on Persepolis rests almost entirely on the cultural negotiations
between Iran, a major setting in the works and the birthplace of the
author, and the West, imagined alternately as a homogeneous site
of freedom and prejudice, or in terms of specific locations such as
France (when authors need to make a point about the hijab ban) or
the US (when authors need to make claims about 9/11). Providing a
shorthand for this conventional analysis of Persepolis, Hillary Chute
calls Satrapi “a translator of East to West” (Graphic 137). Inspired by
Chute’s claim, this chapter reorients such analysis onto the other
translation at work—the one Chute is reading, which is a US adapta-
tion of a French book.
104
P E R S E P O L I S A N D T H E C U LT U R A L C U R R E N C Y O F T H E G R A P H I C N O V E L • 105
Situating Persepolis as a work that brings Iran to the “West” pro-

vides an obvious reward as well as a scholarly risk: as Satrapi herself
states in the foreword to the US version of the first volume of Perse-
polis, the books intervene at a particularly fraught historical moment
in which stereotypical views of Iran prevail amid the ongoing myth
1
of the clash of civilizations. It is therefore a boon to cross-cultural
exchange that comics and literary scholars have used Satrapi’s text
as a platform for research and discussion of Persian miniature aes-
2
thetics and the tropes of the Shahnameh. Conversely, casting the text
as an Iranian work displaces Persepolis, as a cultural object, from its
original site of publication and the networks of translation and distri-
bution that attended its success. Such inattention to the material his-
tory of the work risks complicity in a mode of Orientalism whereby
knowledge of the “East” is extended through Western products and
3
consumer tendencies.
This chapter insists on the specificity of geographic territory, and
the need to analyze Persepolis according to a far more materially situ-
ated East-to-West—or West-to-West—transit: France-to-the-US. It is
Satrapi, not Persepolis, who moves from Iran to France, or “the West.”
And while a biographical approach to reading may seem suitable for
an autobiography, such a framework obscures the real relations of
power, access, and comics production that attend Persepolis’s transat-
lantic publication. A critical examination of the publication of Persepo-
lis first in France and then in the US furnishes a mode of analysis that
intervenes in the monolithic imagining of the West as a homogeneous
site of reader expectations and values. The commercial trajectory of
Persepolis highlights the need for an analysis of comics translation—
both literal and cultural—within regions of the so-called West. I focus
on how the rise of the comics auteur triangulated graphic memoirists
Art Spiegelman, David B., and Satrapi in a transnational US–France
circuit of influence such that each author’s success provided a frame-
work for familiarizing readers with the other authors. In its function
1. Edward Said debunked the myth of Samuel Huntington’s texts (“Clash?”;

Clash)—in a number of lectures and publications including the article “The Clash of
Ignorance.”
2. See, for example, Chute (“Texture” 99; Graphic 144–45), Ostby (560), Leservot
(118–19), A. Miller (“Marjane” 43). for examples of such analyses.
3. See, for example, Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts” 243; Mufti 19–20. Clearly
the urtext for this discussion is Said’s Orientalism.
106 • C hapter 3
as a matrix of domestication, this circuit also reflected cultural differ-

ences conditioned by the transnational marketplace; these differences
become visible through a detailed material history of the changes
made in the translation of Persepolis for a US readership.
Ultimately, these two poles of analysis—the rise of a certain type
of author figure in international graphic narratives and the material
transformations of books according to diverse reader expectations—
dovetail in a complex of familiarity and difference. While Satrapi is
continually cast as a “foreign” author and Persepolis as a “foreign”
work, these categorizations work in conjunction with associations
made among her and white male authors in France and the US. The
book as a commodity object and the author as a correlate figure are
made legible through specific types of comparisons; this is how the
readers of the New Yorker come to understand and appreciate graphic
novels as objects like Maus and Persepolis. At the same time, as Homi
Bhabha writes of cultural translation, Persepolis in its “foreignness”
exposes the “performativity of translation as the staging of cultural
difference” (Location, 325). As a graphic novelist, Satrapi is familiar-
ized according to standards set by David B. in France and Art Spie-
gelman in the US, yet as a cultural figure and object, Satrapi and
Persepolis are exoticized as foreign. To some extent this is merely a
condition of the frisson of the new or the foreign as a condition for
productivity in capital-driven markets. Yet, in the case of Satrapi, this
fetishization of difference takes on a neo-Orientalist cast that directs
all consideration of her work away from the milieux of production in
France and the US and toward an exotic “Middle East.”
This continuing exoticization becomes more visible in the recep-
tion of Zeina Abirached’s Angoulême award-winning book, Mourir,
partir, revenir: Le jeu des hirondelles (2007; A Game for Swallows: To
Die, To Leave, To Return, 2012). Upon release of Abirached’s book, in
French and in translation, reviewer after reviewer, in a number of
disparate publications, staged a praeteritio in which they compared
Abirached to Marjane Satrapi through the disavowal of the value
of such a comparison. This strange noncomparison comparison of
two women working in bande dessinée or francophone comics was
so glaring as to demand further inquiry. By examining the transla-
tions of Persepolis, its comparison to earlier precedents, Maus and
L’Ascension du haut mal, and its comparison to subsequent work like
Abirached’s, I seek to reconstruct ex post facto the Orientalist impli-
cations that condition the recognition, marketing, and reception of
Persepolis. I argue that these implications are concomitant with, rather

than separate from, contradictory marketing strategies used to broker
the publication of Persepolis between France and the US. To return
to Bhabha’s formulation—Satrapi and her work lie at interstices of
foreignness and familiarity even within a seemingly unified field of
Western print cultures.
A number of commenters explicitly highlight the cultural transla-
tion that Persepolis enacts, focusing on its author, its genre, its style,
its medium, or some combination of all these criteria. Rocío G. Davis
credits Persepolis with no less than a “reconstruction of the memoir”
which she claims is “necessarily inflected by the relationship between
creative writing and immigrant or ethnic configurations of subjectiv-
ity and national affiliation” (265). For Davis, Persepolis’s revision of
the genre of memoir “destabilize[s] ideology and conventional strat-
egies of meaning in order to enact distinct sociocultural situations”
(265). Much as Bhabha describes cultural translation as the mode
by which “newness enters the world,” according to Davis, Satrapi
revises the memoir genre, and provides a new way of writing the self.
Patricia Storace, writing for the New York Review of Books, instead
places the preponderance of cultural translation on the formal prop-
erties of the medium:
Like a pair of dancing partners, Satrapi’s text and images comment

on each other, enhance each other, challenge, question, and reveal
each other. It is not too fanciful to say that Satrapi, reading from
right to left in her native Farsi, and from left to right in French, the
language of her education, in which she wrote Persepolis, has found
the precise medium to explore her double cultural heritage.
Storace’s account is somewhat ambiguous as to the seemingly figura-

tive way in which these linguistic and visual registers combine under
the calculus of cultural heritage. Is comics the precise medium only
because of Satrapi’s bilingual (later multilingual) upbringing? Or is it
the precise medium because Satrapi depicts growing up in two dif-
ferent countries?
Among others, Davis and Storace demonstrate how readers have
approached Persepolis as a particular kind of border-crossing work,
producing a number of sometimes contradictory analyses. To be sure,
the resounding success of Persepolis prompted a tremendous amount
of scholarship considering the cultural heritage or situation of Satra-
108 • C hapter 3
pi’s work, but little consensus. Readers have called Persepolis “femi-
nist” (Chute, “Retracing” 94), “humanizing” (Whitlock, Soft Weapons
189), “self-aggrandizing” (Singer 154), “didactic” (Place-Verghnes
258), “Iranian exilic” (Malek 354), “the first Iranian comic book” (N.
Miller 15), “full of traces of the globalism of the Persian miniature
aesthetic” (Ostby 568), “very Western” (Bahrampour), “avant garde”
(Chute “Retracing” 99), “draw[ing] on an ancient and transnational
precedent” (Ostby 560), “nation-centered . . . yet thoroughly global”
(Ostby 562), “democratic” (Mazhari 290), “postcolonial” (Naghibi and
O’Malley 235), “a mosaic of Middle Eastern and Western” (Hajdu),
“complicat[ing] the simplistic scripts Westerners have assigned to the
region labeled ‘the Middle East’” (Tensuan 952), “neoliberal” (Singer
154), and “beyond a global, neoliberal agenda” (Gilmore 157). These
disparate claims leave a reader wondering just how to locate Satrapi
and her work.
Many have even located contradictory meanings or messages
within the work itself. Nima Naghibi and Andrew O’Malley claim
that Persepolis “upsets the easy categories and distinctions that it
appears to endorse,” a claim they extend both to questions of cul-
ture and identity and to the comics medium (243). For Naghibi and
O’Malley, Clifford Marks, Shadi Mazhari, Amy Malek, and Marie
Ostby, Persepolis draws from Western traditions and audience expec-
4
tations while subverting these expectations. Marks praises Persepolis
for the way it “introduces a relatively underdiscussed and misunder-
stood culture . . . to a Western audience that has mostly been per-
suaded to identify Iranian culture inaccurately with Arab culture”
(164). Mazhari stipulates that Persepolis simultaneously confirms
reader expectations—“Western readers have heard numerous testi-
monies of human rights violations in Iran, a fact that disposes them
to trust Satrapi’s life story with its litany of lost, exiled, tortured or
executed friends and relatives”—while using this trust to subvert
stereotypes (297). Furthermore, Malek argues that Satrapi appropri-
ates Western cultural forms (specifically comics and autobiography)
in order to “express and preserve Iranian culture and historical iden-
tity” (359).
4. See also Mostafa Abedinifard: “By choosing to present her story through the
medium of comics, Satrapi further establishes a dialogue with the Other, in the form
of her engagement with the established Western attitudes and aesthetic values that
surround the production and reception of comics” (84).
The complicated discursive tangles about the rhetorical situa-

tion of Persepolis have even been schematized by Alex Link as break-
ing down into four categories: (1) Persepolis promotes cross-cultural
understanding, (2) Persepolis contributes to Orientalist projections, (3)
Persepolis is an example of “indigenous Orientalism,” and (4) Perse-
polis frustrates attempts to essentialize “Persian cultural identity, by
opposing attempts to foreclose upon it by both the Iranian regime
and the Western media” (241). In between the third and fourth cat-
egories, one might add Typhaine Leservot’s contention that Persepo-
lis actually depicts Iranian Occidentalism (116), intervening in Iran’s
construction of the West.
I argue that ultimately these positions reveal more about the crit-
ics occupying them than about the actual relationship that Persepolis
engenders between Iran and “the West.” The one point of similar-
ity that disparate critical stances all seem to share is the stability of
the “West” as a unified area of consumption and reception. Rather
than revisit the thoughtful and provocative questions raised by
many scholars about Satrapi’s use of Persian miniature aesthetics
or her repurposing of such an aesthetic framework for a defamiliar-
izing effect, this chapter considers the ways in which Persepolis was
simultaneously foreignized and domesticated as a graphic narra-
tive. Previous scholarship has located Persepolis as a book in tran-
sit between Iran (where it was never officially published) and “the
West.” As I analyze in what follows, the West is a heterogeneous site
for comics publication and reception, marking areas of difference and
disjuncture.
Authors like Bart Beaty have diligently inscribed Persepolis within
a particular moment of Franco-Belgian comics production, and I
contend that it is imperative to note the changes made to Persepolis
as it became a successful book in the US as well. It does not detract
from Satrapi’s accomplishments to materially study her texts, not as
“culturally and aesthetically global” (Ostby 573) but as works that
undergo cultural translation even between seemingly similar mar-
kets in the West. Persepolis is an example of the burgeoning trend of
autobiographic graphic novels in both anglophone and francophone
comics production, which means that many readers, even literary
scholars, tend to conflate the information offered in the narrative of
Persepolis with the historical biography of its author, Marjane Satrapi.
The text, as an autobiography, invites certain readings of the narra-
tive based on the influence of Persian art or Iranian ideology, yet this
110 • C hapter 3
type of reading frequently conflates the story of Marji the protagonist

of Persepolis with the material history of Persepolis the graphic nar-
rative. Similarly, as Beaty notes, Satrapi’s work highlights “the diffi-
culty that many literary critics have when evaluating a narrative form
that is primarily visual” (248). The relevant question is not how did
Persepolis come from Iran to the West but, instead, how did this text
reach particular readers in France and the US at particular moments
in time? What were the transcultural negotiations and translations
that accompanied its material production? And how did readers
learn to place this work?
Marjane Satrapi: A Girl David B. or a Childlike

Art Spiegelman?
At the initial appearances of Persepolis in France (2000) and the US

(2003), critics and readers positioned its author as a certain kind
of inheritor of certain kinds of comics traditions. When her work
was first released in France, Satrapi was predominantly compared
to artist David B. (the pseudonym of bande dessinée artist David
Beauchard), while in the US she was mainly compared to Art Spie-
gelman. As central figures of the rise of the graphic memoir genre,
these artists constellate transnational networks of comics, genres, and
forms, while often overdetermining market conditions, publishing
concerns, as well as the fraught politics of identity, otherness, and
authenticity. Further, these three authors—Satrapi, David B., and
Spiegelman—are inextricably bound up in a transnational historical
moment tracked throughout this book—the production of the literary
graphic novel. The comparisons made between these authors reveal
the underlying commercial development of the world economy of
graphic novels and show that this development required some trans-
atlantic negotiation.
5
Writing for the French alternative comics site, du9, in 2001,
Appollo (the pseudonym of Tunisian-born novelist and bande dessi-
née writer Olivier Appollodorus) begins his review of Marjane Satra-
pi’s first book of Persepolis with the following line:
5. The name du9 is a play on the dual meanings of neuf—“nine” and “new”—
which in this case refers both to the ninth art (le neuvieme art), as comics are known
in France, and the newness of the material that the site covers compared with more
mainstream comics.
The first thing that you think opening Persepolis is “Look, it’s a girl
David B.,” and it is true that Satrapi’s art exudes influences from the
central figure of l’Association.
Appollo’s assessment is far from the only instance in which these two
authors are directly compared. The working relationship between
David B. and Satrapi, their superficial stylistic similarities, and the
diegetic corollaries between their works make the comparison seem
almost self-evident. Both David B. and Satrapi’s most recognized
works—L’Ascension du haut mal and Persepolis, respectively—are auto-
biographical, interweaving elements of fantasy or imagination in nar-
ratives spanning many years of the authors’ childhood, adolescence,
and adulthood. Both works were published by French avant-garde
bande dessinée publisher L’Association during overlapping time
6
periods, and David B. even wrote the preface for tome 1 of Persepo-
lis. Given that Persepolis and L’Ascension du haut mal were published
in black and white by the same Parisian publishing collective after
their authors met while working at l’Atélier des Vosges—David B.’s
work appearing in six volumes between 1996 and 2003 and Satrapi’s
in four between 2000 and 2003—“a girl David B.” may well have been
the first thought for a number of readers opening Persepolis.
However, the New York Times review of Satrapi’s first book of
Persepolis invokes a different figure for comparison. As Fernanda
Eberstadt writes in 2003, “Like [Art] Spiegelman’s ‘Maus,’ Satrapi’s
book combines political history and memoir, portraying a country’s
20th-century upheavals through the story of one family. Her protago-
nist is Marji, a tough, sassy little Iranian girl.” The period in between
Eberstadt’s sentences acts as a contrapuntal bridge and a subtler
version of Appollo’s exclamation: it links Spiegelman and Satrapi
while presenting her “girl”-ness as a (sassy) marker of distinction.
In the same newspaper’s review of the second volume of Persepo-
lis, a year later, Luc Sante invokes Spiegelman’s Maus in the second
sentence, and then proceeds to contrast the works not on the basis
of gender (at least not explicitly) but on the relative maturity of the
styles: “Like Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus,’ it is a ‘graphic memoir’ . . . but
unlike ‘Maus’ it is executed in an apparently simple, childlike draw-
6. I use tome consistently in this chapter to refer to the European versions of the
serialized installments of Persepolis and L’Ascension du haut mal. Each tome number
is italicized as a way to indicate the title of the French volumes.
112 • C hapter 3
ing style” (“She Can’t Go Home Again”). The plot thickens. Marjane
Satrapi: a girl David B. or a childlike Art Spiegelman?
To complicate matters further, reviewing Epileptic, the US transla-
tion of L’Ascension du haut mal, for New York magazine in 2005, Doug-
las Wolk writes that David B.’s book “is being marketed as a comics
memoir in the vein of Art Spiegelman’s perennial Maus and Marjane
Satrapi’s recent two-volume hit Persepolis. (B. was Satrapi’s mentor
and teacher.)” (“Sweet”). Wolk goes on to disservice all three authors
by contrasting B.’s work with that of the other two memoirists on two
points—Wolk stresses that David B.’s artwork is superior to Spiegel-
man’s and Satrapi’s, and that his book lacks any engagement with
7
history. Furthermore, Wolk’s parenthetical again positions Satrapi as
the acolyte of David B. despite his book’s relative position in Wolk’s
schema. Her work may be the hit that his emulates, but she is still a
8
student to his teacher.
Marjane Satrapi, girl David B.? Marjane Satrapi, David B.’s stu-
dent? Marjane Satrapi, childlike Art Spiegelman? Every apposition is
also an act of comparison (even enacted through apostrophe, period,
or parentheses). I draw attention to the specificity of these compari-
sons here as a way of explaining how Satrapi, who was only deemed
the “Persian star of French comics” (Libération) after the success of
her first three tomes, was familiarized—differently—to readerships
in francophone and anglophone areas as a mode of marketing and
domestication. Amy Malek explains how David B. and Spiegelman
functioned in the reception of Satrapi’s text: “The success of these
forebears readied a readership for Persepolis, whose embrace led to
its translated publication throughout Europe, the United States, and
Canada, where it has enjoyed enormous popular and critical success”
(370).
Persepolis reveals the ways that certain discursive forms of same-
ness or difference are foregrounded by critics, scholars, and publish-
ers alike, while others are implicitly or explicitly overlooked for the
sake of the cohesion of aesthetic or commodity registers. There are
many similarities between Persepolis, L’Ascension du haut mal, and
7. Cf. Ostby, who describes L’Ascension as “a personal and national reckoning

with the specter of the Algerian War” (571).
8. Even Marc Singer, whose chapter on Satrapi otherwise assiduously—and
vitriolically—argues for her debt to David B., allows that Wolk’s characterization
of Satrapi as David B.’s student is unsubstantiated (156). On similar “patronizing
evaluations” of Satrapi, see Tensuan 957.
Maus, yet too frequently, unacknowledged assumptions about the

West and the rest determine how Marjane Satrapi is recognized as
a subject—albeit sometimes a slightly lesser, girl, student, subject—
in the same vein as the authors to whom she is compared. These
assumptions also overlook different precedents by which Persepolis
may be read in France and the US. How a US reader recognizes a
graphic novel published by literary imprint Pantheon differs signifi-
cantly from how a French reader recognizes what Beaty refers to as
avant-garde, “legitimate art” (54), bandes dessinées, published by
L’Association.
The Symbolic Life of Marjane Satrapi
Within national, linguistic, and transnational frameworks, Spiegel-

man, David B., and Satrapi are all indicative of a specific break in
comics grounded in modes of autobiography and auteurism that
lead to the development of specific types of author figures and
author functions. Spiegelman’s, David B.’s, and Satrapi’s birthdates
are separated by a decade each—1948, 1959, and 1969, respectively.
Maus begins in the pages of RAW magazine in the US in 1980, while
L’Ascension’s first tome is published in France in 1996, and Persepo-
lis’s in 2000. Each of these points in time marks a materially distinct
historical and epistemic moment. Each also establishes the possibility
for lines of influence between preceding and subsequent authors and
works. All three are symbolic, in interrelated yet distinct ways, of the
rise of the author of comics, in terms of an auteur, an autobiographical
figure known through artistic, antimainstream production.
In his book Breaking the Frames, Marc Singer claims that scholar-
ship on Persepolis has erroneously sought to “authenticate Satrapi’s
9
work by locating it outside the tradition of comics” (153). Singer goes
on to state within one paragraph that “David B. is routinely cited by
comics critics as a profound influence on Satrapi’s style” (155) and
that “much of the academic scholarship on Satrapi downplays or
9. Cf. Tensuan, who, writing a decade before Singer, stipulates that “only a
handful of critics situate Satrapi’s work in an artistic and cultural matrix that takes
account of the influences stemming from her participation in the French collec-
tive of comic artists known as L’Association, thus attending to the ways in which
one might read Persepolis in a heterogeneous and transnational cultural context”
(956–57).
114 • C hapter 3
minimizes this influence when it doesn’t ignore David B. outright”

(156). Although Singer lists a number of scholars who mention David
B. in their research on Satrapi, these mentions do not seem to meet
his quota and are explained away in a variety of increasingly creative
dismissals. Yet there are at least two fundamental issues with Singer’s
premise: the first is the concept that there is a single homogeneous
“tradition of comics” to which both Satrapi and David B. belong.
The second is the assumption that Satrapi’s and David B.’s works
travel unchanged between France and the US. Because Singer focuses
entirely on anglophone, and mostly US, scholarship in his critique of
the “minimization” of David B., he ignores the wealth of francophone
scholarship devoted to this comparison as well as the anachronism
of such a comparison in the US, where the publication of Satrapi’s
books preceded that of David B’s.
Singer’s contention that Satrapi’s work has been overly compared
to the tradition of Persian miniature painting to the detriment of the
tradition of comics raises evocative questions regarding authors,
national cultures, artistic traditions, and the transnational boundaries
of comics production. Although Singer never explores the Oriental-
10
ist implications of situating Satrapi’s work in a Persian lineage —he
is far more interested in faulting her for being a neoliberal hero—the
scholarly labor of locating Satrapi as an author working in a Middle
Eastern tradition is inextricable from a host of related projects, from
Michel Foucault’s author function to Spivak’s worlding of the Third
World to the continuing development of “world comics.” Interro-
gating the precepts that allow one to “locate” Satrapi as an author-
subject according to certain aesthetic values and expectations is a way
of treating world comics as a meaningful yet problematic canon.
However, Singer instead seeks to return Satrapi to a “tradition
of comics” by stressing her debt to David B. There are neocolonial
implications in this effort—Satrapi has qualified early statements
11
she made regarding her indebtedness to David B. —but even more
10. This structure of comparison also implies a denial of co-evalness. Because

Persian miniature painting is viewed as an ancient form, by linking one of the
most avant-garde comics artists to this tradition, her currency is tempered with a
backwards-facing view of her cultural production; cf. Gikandi 641–42.
11. In a telling exchange in the Independent, Satrapi is asked: “You once said that
David B drew like a god, whereas you were less gifted.” “‘Yeah,’ she says, with only
the hint of a smile. ‘Well I’ve changed a bit since then. I have my own style. I’ve
learnt to communicate emotion using very little detail’” (qtd. in Chalmers).
vexing is the misrecognition of Persepolis, L’Ascension (Epileptic), and

Maus as traditional, given that each of these texts originates in decid-
edly alternative modes of comics or bande dessinée production.
Indeed, the triangulations between David B., Satrapi, and Spiegelman
are indicative of nationally differentiated and yet transnationally bro-
kered kinds of comics or bande dessinée production directly opposed
to “tradition.”
In the definitive English-language treatment of the subject,
Charles Hatfield describes the rise of Alternative Comics in the US as
being especially indebted to “iconoclastic” publications like Spiegel-
man’s Maus (x). As Hatfield recounts, Spiegelman and other artists
contributed to a “reenvisioning of comics” through the “rejection
of mainstream formulas” (x). Furthermore, “Spiegelman’s achieve-
ment, unprecedented in English-language comics, served to ratify
comic art as a literary form; the reception of Maus suddenly made
serious comics culturally legible, recognizable, in a way they had
not been before.” Hatfield concludes that Maus in fact represented
a “revolution in [comics] reception and practice . . . Spiegelman’s
success only crystallized a larger trend of which he had been a part:
the development of a new breed of cartoonists and comics writers,
for whom comics were first and above all an acutely personal means
of literary expression” (xi). Far from traditional, Maus challenged
the US comics tradition so decisively that its influence would ripple
across the Atlantic.
In the definitive English-language treatment of the subject, Bart
Beaty describes the rise of avant-garde comics in France as being
especially indebted to the “revolutionary” nature of publisher
L’Association and to publications like L’Ascension du haut mal and
Persepolis. Beaty demonstrates how these works and others like them
were intrinsic components of the rise of Unpopular Culture, or, as
the subtitle of Beaty’s book would have it, they were responsible for
“transforming the European comic book in the 1990s.” Beaty charts
how these books, through their aesthetics, material components,
autobiographical focus, and alternative market practices, forced a
reconsideration of “what is meant by the term ‘comic book’ in the
contemporary cultural landscape” (3). The “innovative and avant-
garde cultural practices” (6) enacted through publications from
L’Association and other small-press, bande dessinée producers “fun-
damentally altered over the course of the past fifteen years of comics
production in Europe” (7). Far from locating Satrapi within a Euro-
116 • C hapter 3
pean comics tradition, Beaty places her alongside David B. and other
artists engaged in remaking francophone comics production entirely.
It would be irresponsible to claim that these authors have no
relation to preceding models and products of comics publishing. It
is, however, more revealing to recognize the cultural position these
authors share with each other in producing comics that did not rep-
licate existing traditions but instead broke in visibly consequential
ways from the forms, styles, subject matter, and publishing mod-
els established in Europe and the US. Instead of claiming Satrapi as
belonging to a “tradition of comics,” pace Singer, one must recognize
her reception and role in both France and the US as belonging to a
recent alternative, revolutionary development of a new kind of com-
ics that necessitates an auteur, and of which Satrapi is both a practi-
tioner and a leading figure. As Foucault notes, the proper name of the
author is not simply an “element in a discourse” because it “performs
a certain role with regard to narrative discourse, assuring a classifica-
tory function” (“Author” 210):
Such a name permits one to group together a certain number of

texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to oth-
ers. (210)
The author’s name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive

set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a
culture. (211)
Thus, as an auteur, Satrapi, alongside Spiegelman and David B., has

become inextricable from the alternative comics category of auto-
biographic graphic novels because she figures so prominently in
the historic construction of this internationally recognized genre. As
12
autobiographies, books such as Maus, L’Ascension du haut mal, and
Persepolis moved comics away from the “tradition of comics” into a
recognizable literary tradition that could be categorized according
to authors, who could in turn be grouped according to categories of
national and transnational culture.
12. Maus is not an autobiography per se as much as it is a “collaborative autobi-

ography” (Iadonisi).
The Material History of Persepolis
The discursive appearance of comparable author subjects operates

in conjunction with the coalescence of an internationally recognized
category of narrative discourse. Yet, at the protean stage that I have
been tracing in reverse, the aesthetic and commercial domination of
the literary graphic novel was in no way predetermined; nor was its
genealogy identical from a national framework. While Maus, Perse-
polis, and L’Ascension map out distinct territories within the broader
scope of bandes dessinées and comics, I argue against critics like
Singer who conflate the four-tome French Persepolis (2000, 2001, 2002,
2003) with the two-volume Persepolis (2003, 2004) in English trans-
lation. The dominant publishing trends that Maus, Persepolis, and
L’Ascension responded to differed significantly according to location
and time. As Valerio Rota stipulates, “Each culture produces different
kinds of comics: the size and contents of publications, for historical
and practical reasons, vary from nation to nation, accommodating to
the tastes and expectations of the different reading public” (“Trans-
lation’s Visibility”). To give an overgeneral description: US comics
production prior to and even following the rise of the graphic novel
was characterized by the studio system of collaborative production,
serial issues in color, with issues measuring about 16.8 × 26 centime-
ters (6.625 × 10.125 inches). As described in chapter 1, Franco-Belgian
bandes dessinées were sold as albums, bound color books, with usu-
ally forty-eight A4 (22.5 × 30 centimeters or 8.85 × 11.8 inches) pages.
Maus, as an irregular, small trim-size text, represented a challenge
for publishers when Spiegelman first attempted to sell his account of
his parents’ survival during the Holocaust. As Spiegelman recounts,
after Maus’s publication in RAW, he unsuccessfully attempted to pub-
lish the series with “every reputable publisher” (MetaMaus 78). The
idea of publishing a small, black-and-white graphic narrative with a
US literary bookseller in the 1980s was unthinkable, as borne out by
the rejection rate. It was only through the intervention of Louise Fili,
the art director at Pantheon, who showed the work to the publisher,
André Schiffrin, that Maus became the book that would so influence
the success of the black-and-white graphic novel.
The form and genre of Maus are co-determinate and reflect the
zeitgeist of the graphic novel. In their book The Graphic Novel: An
Introduction, Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey explain that Maus’s inter-
118 • C hapter 3
vention “to tell a serious life story in a serious mode through texts
and images—set up a model repeated in significant future produc-
tions, including, of course, autobiography” (99). Baetens and Frey,
among other comics scholars, have gestured to the rise of nonfiction
and autobiographical comics as a correlate of the literariness of the
graphic novel format. Although the rise of autobiographical comics
was variegated across the US and Europe, where publishers like Ego
comme X in France began anthologizing autobiographical comics in
1994, the autobiographical content of Maus proved a transnational
influence, in much the same way that the formal aspects of the book
contributed to a profusion of the graphic novel.
Spiegelman’s innovation influenced the founding of L’Association
by a collective of artists, including Jean-Christophe Menu, Stanis-
las, Mattt Konture, Killoffer, Lewis Trondheim, Mokeït, and David
B. in 1990 (L’Association). According to Dan Mazur and Alexan-
der Danner, L’Association’s focus on autobiographical comics as
a way to distinguish their products from “the escapist mainstream
. . . reflected the influence of Art Spiegelman’s Maus” (254). Pursu-
antly, L’Ascension was a similarly consequential work in the develop-
ment of autobiographical comics. The volumes detail the struggles of
David B.’s family as they grapple with his older brother’s epilepsy.
The story interweaves the minute details of Beauchard family life—
for instance, attempting holistic and macrobiotic lifestyle changes to
combat Jean-Christophe’s condition—with fantasy, dreams, and an
underlying story of the author’s own development as an artist.
Trondheim and David B. met Satrapi after she moved to Paris
(Spurgeon) and encouraged her to write her own comics, which
were first published in installments in L’Association’s anthology
series Lapin. Persepolis was published in the Ciboulette collection, and
tome 1 won the Coup de Coeur award for an author’s first book at
the Angoulême International Comics Festival. With the publication
of the three following tomes, Persepolis became a best seller, by some
13
accounts saving L’Association.
However, the unprecedented commercial success of Persepolis
acted almost in tension with the antimainstream aesthetics of the
publishing collective. The guiding aesthetic ethos of L’Association
was a reaction to the standardized, color, glossy album that pervaded
13. “Their first major and defining hit was Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (1999–
2004), which made L’Association a robust commercial actor in European comics and
helped secure its positioning in bookstores” (qtd. in Wivel).
bande dessinée production (Beaty 29–30). L’Association publications

favor heavier paper, black-and-white artwork, smaller formats, and
genres more closely aligned with literature, such as autobiography.
Menu describes the different collections of L’Association publications
in a discourse that bridges the print cultures of bande dessinée and
littérature: “Ciboulette is graphic-novel like, Eperluette gets the classic
‘album’ size (even if we don’t use this word) . . . Mimolette is a brand
of 30-page comix, Côtelette has a more ‘literary’ orientation” (Menu
and Harkham). Among these varied series, Persepolis’s publication in
the Ciboulette collection was especially influential in its reception. As
Beaty states of this collection:
The resemblance to novels has helped L’Association to position

themselves as significantly different from other comic book publish-
ers, and the conception of the comic book as novel has resulted in
the books being regarded as akin to literature. Certainly Marjane
Satrapi’s four-volume autobiography Persepolis (2000–2003) benefits
from the perception that it is simply a novel with pictures. (38–39)
Thus, although David B.’s preface in the premier tome of Persepolis

refers to it as “the first Iranian bande dessinée album” (“le premier
album de bandes dessinées iranien”), formally, the original pub-
lication of Persepolis is indicative of a shift in Franco-Belgian comics
production, enacted by L’Association, that positioned works like
Persepolis as literature according to European readers’ expectations.
Within this context, while Maus serves as a precursor to David B.’s
work, Persepolis’s comparison to L’Ascension has added geographic,
temporal, and commercial relevance. On the other hand, both Maus
and Persepolis shared the distinction of originating in an antimain-
stream comics or bande dessinée model aligned with literature over
glossy escapism, yet both achieved unprecedented—or unexpected—
commercial success.
Menu states that “when they found out what the print run of
Persepolis was, booksellers were shocked to realize that Maus was
not an isolated case, and that the same coup could be brought off
again. It would be naive to think that Persepolis has had no influence
on this renewed infatuation for the black and white small-format
comic book” (“Patch” 328). Menu here sketches a reciprocal dynamic
between the publishing conventions of L’Association, which shaped
the format of Persepolis, and the success of Persepolis, which increased
120 • C hapter 3
the popularity of L’Association’s aesthetic. He also triangulates this

system of aesthetic influence and extends it across the Atlantic by
invoking Maus, which was the key to Persepolis’s US publication.
Satrapi herself is more than cognizant of the Maus comparison,
having stated in an interview that she apologized to Art Spiegelman
for the fact that every graphic novel is now compared to Maus. She
added:
It’s not a problem for me. Maus is a masterpiece. To be compared

to Maus is nothing but a compliment. But for him that should be
extremely tiring. If I was him I would have hated all these younger
graphic novelists being compared to myself. So that is why I called
him once, to tell him that none of this propaganda is being made by
me, that it is other people who say this. (Qtd. in Tully)
Satrapi’s humility notwithstanding, the comparison of Persepolis and

Maus was a central component of the transatlantic constellation of
auteurs working within the new discursive parameters of the literary
graphic novel. This comparison is also a functional instrument in the
France-to-US cultural translation of Persepolis.
14
To understand the anglophone Persepolis that is, one must con-
sider the Persepolis that almost was. Seattle-based Fantagraphics
Books is a publishing company with a genealogy more comparable
to L’Association’s than to that of Pantheon. Like L’Association, and
15
unlike Pantheon, Fantagraphics mostly publishes comics, and its
catalog is devoted to what is called either indie or alternative comics,
by artists like Joe Sacco, Charles Burns, and the Hernandez Broth-
ers. Given certain parallels between L’Association and Fantagraphics,
Persepolis seems like a fitting addition to the Fantagraphics list, and it
was actually included in a listing of upcoming publications as a result
of owner Kim Thompson’s negotiations with L’Association editors.
But the Fantagraphics version of Persepolis exists only as a line
in a spec sheet. In the words of owner Gary Groth, “Kim was not
very proprietary,” and before Fantagraphics could publish its trans-
lation of Persepolis, the US rights were acquired by Pantheon. Groth’s
14. The UK publisher, Jonathan Cape, is a subsidiary of the same corporation
that holds Pantheon.
15. Douglas Wolk’s article for Publishers Weekly refers to Pantheon as “the GN
[Graphic Novel] Imprint That Isn’t.”
description of his own reaction is illuminating: “At the time, I remem-

ber thinking it was annoying, but I didn’t realize how well it was
going to sell. It was just another foreign book and those things never
sold very well” (telephone interview with the author). Although Fan-
tagraphics and L’Association shared similar roles in the development
of alternative comics traditions in both the US and France, Groth inti-
mates a disjuncture even between these print cultures and hints at
the importance of recognition and reception.
As noted in the introduction and in chapter 2, to domesticate
a foreign comic is not a simple question of changing the words in
the speech balloons. Because comics are a visual medium, but also
a medium with strong literary parallels, a number of elements such
as how the work looks, its form, and its author and language must
be accounted for in the translation of a graphic narrative from one
location to another. Groth’s partner Thompson was a champion of
“foreign” comics in the US, having grown up in a number of coun-
tries and being fluent in at least four languages. But, as Groth notes,
Thompson’s desire to publish Persepolis did not correspond to a suc-
cessful market precedent. Beaty stipulates that among the “signifi-
cant differences between the comics communities of the United States
and Europe” is that “the American comic book market has been more
resistant to the idea of comics as books.” Furthermore, the US mar-
ket is far less welcoming to comics in translation, with one exception:
“Aside from Marjane Satrapi, few European cartoonists of the small-
press movement have fared as well in the United States” (114). The
US market for European comics was thus a tenuous prospect without
pre-existing success stories. But another editor, Anjali Singh, saw in
Persepolis a work that could be not only artistically unique but also
commercially successful in the US. It was Singh’s recognition of Perse-
polis as not just another “foreign” work that instigated its translation
and publishing at Pantheon.
The role of Pantheon in the publication of both Maus and Persepo-
lis is noteworthy given its history as a literary publishing company
originally founded by European immigrants to the US, who were
especially invested in English translations of European texts. As the
son of one of the founders and a former editor-in-chief, André Schif-
frin, describes, Pantheon was the project of European exiles deeply
concerned with cross-cultural literary exchange. Schiffrin was infa-
mously forced out of the company, but not before he published the
122 • C hapter 3
16
first volume of Art Spiegelman’s Maus in 1986. Despite Schiffrin’s
support for Maus, Spiegelman stayed with Pantheon for his second
volume rather than moving to Schiffrin’s nonprofit New Press, stat-
ing: “I loved publishing with Andre, but I need more money for the
time it takes to finish a book” (qtd. in Italie). Thus, a complex condi-
tion of possibility preceded Persepolis’s translation: Pantheon had a
history of publishing literary works in translation and had achieved
financial success with its publication of the graphic novels Maus I
and II, but Schiffrin’s expulsion demonstrated the company’s priori-
tization of financial success, making a risky acquisition of Persepolis
improbable.
As Singh describes it, the decision by Pantheon to publish Perse-
polis was a contingent—and in no way inevitable—event. Despite
the commercial and critical success the publisher had achieved with
Maus, as a primarily prose-based publisher, Pantheon did not have a
specific process for developing graphic narratives. In 2003 Dan Frank,
Pantheon’s editor-in-chief, characterized the publisher’s graphic novel
selection process as predicated on “mutual enthusiasms.” Speaking to
Dan Nadel at Publishers Weekly, Frank stipulated, “We publish what
we like—we meaning myself, Chip Kidd, and now Anjali Singh.”
Nadel editorializes on this trio: “Kidd and Frank are well known for
their enthusiasms; Singh, however, is less familiar.” In Nadel’s usage,
one supposes that “less familiar” refers to Singh’s newness to the pro-
fession (Vintage was her first editorial position), but it also carries a
racial and gendered charge when used to describe the only woman of
color in a group otherwise composed of white men.
By her own account, Singh fought hard to get Persepolis published
because of the scarcity of works authored by and representing the
experience of women of color. The “less familiar” aspects of Singh
initially extended to her most successful acquisition, and at least one
colleague “told [Singh] she just didn’t see an audience for it” (qtd. in
Gagliano). Kidd himself responded to an interview by admitting, “I
mean, I’ll be totally honest, I thought ‘Persepolis’ was a great, wor-
thy project, but I never ever thought that it would become as huge
as it was” (qtd. in Dueben, “Kidd”). Singh had to actively counter
these doubts, and what she describes as the subjective bias of edi-
torial acquisitions, or “who gets to decide that there’s an audience”
16. Schiffrin addresses his ouster from Pantheon in both The Business of Books:
How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read
(2001) and Words and Money (2010).
(qtd. in Gagliano). Singh highlights the role of identity politics in the

publishing world as well as the importance of transcultural or trans-
linguistic interest. For Singh, the publication of Persepolis was at least
aided if not made possible by the specific group of gatekeepers at
work in the Knopf Publishing Group at the time: Singh credits Knopf
editor-in-chief (Knopf acquired Pantheon in 1961) Sonny Mehta, him-
17
self internationally raised and educated, for giving the go-ahead to
18
Persepolis. Singh also notes Frank’s ability to read French as a con-
19
tributing factor for the situation of Persepolis at Pantheon. Of course,
Singh’s own ability to read and translate French was a prerequisite
for the project, and she has subsequently credited Satrapi’s command
20
of English for 90 percent of the book’s success.
Certain proclivities toward foreign or unfamiliar projects influ-
enced the acquisition, but it was also Singh’s recourse to a domes-
tic precedent that convinced Pantheon to acquire Persepolis. While
Persepolis was already an unprecedented financial success for
L’Association, Singh pitched it as “the next Maus,” discursively
situating Persepolis in the same network as Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-
winning project: “Now Persepolis, like Maus, reached a huge reader-
ship because it overlapped with so many other categories—memoir,
history, Middle East studies, coming-of-age—but we still had a firm
platform from which to launch it” (telephone interview with the
author). Alternately, she cautions, “You could also have looked at it
as a comic book about the Islamic Revolution by an unknown Ira-
nian author based in France” (qtd. in Gagliano). In this comparison,
Singh outlines the tension between the points of domestication and
foreignization in Persepolis’s cultural translation.
The local specificities of avant-garde comics production in Paris
and corporate American publishing houses must be brokered or
17. He “grew up all over the world” (Eggers).

18. A veteran of transatlantic literary acquisition at Paladin, before making the
transatlantic move to Knopf, Mehta was known for publishing books by US authors
that were otherwise unknown in the UK.
19. “I was lucky enough that the first person who could give me the go ahead,
Pantheon’s wonderful editor-in-chief, Dan Frank, could read French and supported
that acquisition” (qtd. in Gagliano).
20. “I feel like 90% of Persepolis’ success was due to the fact that we had an
incredibly charismatic author that went on the road tirelessly. Otherwise that could
have been just this graphic novel that was going around that a few people had heard
of. The question of the editors speaking another language, but also having connec-
tions with other editors in other countries[,] is a really big one” (qtd. in Valenti).
124 • C hapter 3
translated so that Maus and Persepolis come to circulate in, determine,

and even overdetermine the commodification of the international
graphic novel. Plying Maus as a precursor helped Singh convince
Pantheon to acquire Persepolis. Conversely, the comparison between
the two comics was essential for convincing L’Association to sell the
rights. As Singh declares, “The French publisher was initially reluc-
tant to work with a big American corporate house and said no. But
. . . I wrote them an impassioned letter about why we should publish
it, and it really helped that I could say we had published Maus” (qtd.
in Lee). Understanding Maus as a historical and local precedent for
the US acquisition and publication of Persepolis counteracts Singer’s
confusion about why US scholars tend to compare Satrapi to Spiegel-
man but not to David B.; so, too, does an examination of the ways
that Persepolis was Maus-ified for US audiences.
The Translations of Persepolis
Contra the authors of the blog Marjane Satrapi: Persepolis, who claim
that “the English translation of Persepolis first appeared in 2003: the
art was unaltered,” the Pantheon production of Persepolis diverged
in ways both artistic and cultural from the French version. Discrep-
ancies between Persepolis, tomes 1 through 4, and the US volumes
worked subtly but consequentially to make the books appear more
familiar to a US audience that might know Maus but wouldn’t be
familiar with titles from L’Association. The US volumes were physi-
cally smaller in terms of page size but longer in terms of page count.
They shifted from the original four tomes, which were 16 × 24.5 cen-
timeters and between 71 and 95 pages, to two volumes, which were
14.75 × 22.5 centimeters and 153 and 187 pages.
In France, the trim size of Persepolis corresponded with an aes-
thetic tendency toward books rather than bande dessinée albums.
Beaty notes of the books in L’Association’s Ciboulette collection that
“the resemblance to novels has helped L’Association to position
themselves as significantly different from other comic book publish-
ers, and the conception of the comic book as novel has resulted in the
books being regarded as akin to literature” (39). However, the page
size in the US Persepolis volumes is noticeably smaller than the origi-
nals. Singh attributes the difference in size to two reasons—a stan-
dard trim size cuts production costs, and it also tells readers “this
FIGURE 3.1. Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 1, n. pag. (left); and Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a
Childhood, page 26 (right)
book is like other books. This book is not out of the box. This isn’t
like an oversize book” (Skype interview with the author). These two
considerations—publishing costs and familiarity on the part of read-
ers—coincide in a number of the changes made to the US translation,
but here we see the familiarity of US readers diverging from that of
Franco-Belgian readers. What makes a graphic narrative look “like
other books” varies across the two print cultures. Furthermore, alter-
ing the page size necessitates a complete rearrangement of the pages,
where opening banners announcing each section are resized in the
US version so that they no longer fill the width of the page (see figure
3.1). In the French tomes, these introductory panels extend across the
entirety of the page; in the US edition, they are truncated, changing
the visual cohesion of the page.
Reader familiarity and the ability to market a book in a new con-
text affected not only the physical size of the pages but also the page
126 • C hapter 3
count of the US works. Persepolis was published in two volumes in

21
the US, just like Maus, but also because—as Singh notes, “from an
American perspective or you know corporate, commercial publish-
ing, an eighty-page book isn’t going to fly” (Skype interview). In
France, the page count of each tome already signaled an increase
from the standard forty-eight pages for albums. But in the US, page-
count expectations for a literary publisher like Pantheon led to an
22
entirely different set of products.
For comics studies, the changes between formats are artistically
and narratively meaningful. As Pascal Lefèvre describes in his chap-
ter “The Importance of Being ‘Published’: A Comparative Study of
Different Comics Forms”: “Format will always be decisive. Even the
dimensions of the publication are important” (92) because of the role
of materiality in the visual and narrative aspects of comics produc-
tion. Lefèvre stipulates that formats are defined not only by material-
ity but also “by [their] temporal aspects” (98). Thus, Persepolis’s shift
from four to two volumes for the US market fundamentally changed
its visual storytelling. In the age of “binge watching,” the distinc-
tions between serial and contained narratives might be more difficult
to parse, but as Lefèvre reminds his readers, “each analysis of com-
ics has to start with a study of the form in which it is being pub-
lished” (99). Neither the French nor the American version of Persepolis
quite comports with any of the standard formats that Lefèvre lists,
for the most part because neither L’Association nor Pantheon have
any history of “mainstream” bande dessinée and comics produc-
tion. Yet even if both houses represent a similar aversion to the for-
mats of the mainstream, each Persepolis aesthetically and temporally
reflects a standardization in its site of publication through divergent
covers, narrative sequence, and titles, as well as paratexts such as
introductions.
As a component of the shift in format, the reduction and change
of cover art in the US version further denotes the temporal-aesthetic
21. Maus was itself only published in two volumes because of Spiegelman’s
desire to get the book out before the film premiere of An American Tale, which he
felt was a sanitized rip-off of Maus (MetaMaus 78–79).
22. Jennifer Worth specifically claims: “By choosing to present her story through
the graphic novel, Satrapi is clearly placing herself outside the mainstream. The
American editions of the books try to downplay this aspect by publishing Persepolis
on thick, creamy paper in two hardback volumes as a way of marking its cultural
cachet and seriousness as a piece of literature” (153).
change between works. The covers of each of the L’Association tomes

of Persepolis reference the contents figuratively, much like the albums
of L’Ascension du haut mal. Each tome of L’Ascension is only addi-
tionally titled with a number 1 through 6 and features, on the cover,
the main characters, brothers Pierre-François and Jean-Christophe,
as they age from five and seven years, respectively, into adulthood.
Behind the characters appears a mass of black, monstrous figures that
“ascend” or grow from tome to tome against the yellow background
until the sixth volume, where this figurative “haut mal”—“high evil,”
representing Jean-Christophe’s epilepsy—has become a black back-
ground against which the adult characters stand. The covers reflect
the progression of Jean-Christophe’s illness as well as the ages of the
characters in the central narrative. The four covers of Persepolis like-
wise have a locative and narrative function: Tomes 1, 2, and 4 each
feature mounted riders on horses facing right (or East, according to
post-Ptolemaic cartographic convention) (see figure 3.2). Ostby ana-
lyzes the first two riders as representative of Persian heroic figures
from the Shahnameh, and the narrative is likewise oriented East, as the
majority of both books is set in Iran. The figure’s increased pugilism
on the cover of tome 2 (galloping forward with sword in hand) cor-
responds to the diegetic onset of the Iran–Iraq War in tome 2. Tome
23
3 features a rider in European attire and a Napoleonic pose riding
in the opposite direction, and the book describes the main character
Marji’s exile from Iran to Austria (going East to West, or cartographi-
cally leftward). The fourth cover shows an adult Marji on a horse fac-
ing right again and signifying her return to Iran. Thus, as preceded
by the covers for L’Ascension, the covers for Persepolis demonstrate
narrative progress and correspond spatially to the settings of each
volume and the protagonist’s emigration from Iran to Europe and
back again.
The US volumes of Persepolis instead feature portraits of Marji
surrounded by decorative ornamentation (see figure 3.3). The first-
edition hardcovers were die-cut to form a window framing the por-
trait. As Singh states, “The idea with Pantheon books in that graphic
novel line is that the package should be really beautiful” (Skype
interview). These covers were designed by Satrapi and Menu work-
ing together and represented a major shift in the narrative correspon-
23. Insofar as the image bears a visual similarity to Jacques-Louis David’s Napo-
leon Crossing the Alps.
128 • C hapter 3
FIGURE 3.2. Covers of Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 1, 2, 3, and 4
dence between the cover and the text. Among anglophone scholars,
Naghibi and O’Malley read these covers as indicative of a clash of
familiarity and difference. The veiled child on the cover of Persepo-
lis: The Story of a Childhood represents the “radical other,” but “at the
same time, the image is familiar because it is of a perceived universal
figure: the child” (229). Simultaneously, because the image is “framed
by stylized Persian art,” this framing “evokes difference” (230), in
their view.
Covers may seem paratextual, but examining the visual differ-
ences of the initial print runs demonstrates how the books were
FIGURE 3.3. Cover of Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story

of a Childhood
packaged for and presented to distinct audiences in France and the

24
US. Because paratextual elements represent a category of creative
production that is not always under the author’s control, these dif-
ferences reveal distinctions between readers and markets in both
areas. Singh notes that the L’Association covers “would never fly
in our market” (Skype interview). Elements taken for granted in
the materiality of translation attest to cultural differences between
24. The collected volumes of Persepolis in French and English, both released in
2007, also have entirely different covers from each other and from the initial print
runs in France and the US.
130 • C hapter 3
reading publics and print cultures. In the case of Persepolis, the cov-
ers required “domestication” in ways that significantly changed the
appearance of the books. The different covers also metonymically
link the books to their narrative resegmentation as a progression
from childhood to adulthood.
The titles of the books also reflected the changes in narrative struc-
ture. The four volumes in France each had only a number for sub-
designation within the series, while the two US volumes—again, like
Maus—acquired subtitles. Writing of the original title, Leservot argues
that through her use of the Greek name for the ancient capital of Per-
sia, “Satrapi symbolically identifies her work as western in name
only, but deeply, truly Persian, a political gesture aimed at an Islamic
regime which refuses Iran’s diversity of opinions and identities” (128).
Although Satrapi felt that this nuance would be well understood by
an English-language readership, Singh insisted to Satrapi that Amer-
icans would not be as familiar with the connotation of Persepolis as
readers in Europe, and that a generic reading line was necessary.
Singh went with something “that anyone could read and understand”
(Skype interview). Thus, the first Pantheon volume of Persepolis col-
lected tomes 1 and 2 under the subtitle The Story of a Childhood.
The title ascribed to the first volume led a number of anglophone
critics and scholars to read the entirety of Persepolis—which extends
to Marji’s mid-twenties—in the context of childhood. Such an inflec-
tion is obvious in the distinction that both Eberstadt and Sante make
between Spiegelman as adult and Satrapi as child. A number of
scholars also use the titling to make claims such as “Satrapi’s autobi-
ography is the ‘story of a childhood,’ and Persepolis’s style reflects this
perspective” (Chute, Graphic 146). Chute is hardly alone in basing an
entire aesthetic analysis on the title of the US translation of the first
volume. However, this line of analysis indicates a broader trend in
the impact that seemingly small differences in publication between
two “Western” sites have on the global interpretation of the work.
More egregious is the titling of Persepolis II, which would have
riled up devotees of spoiler alerts. Persepolis II collected tomes 3 and
25
4 under the subtitle The Story of a Return. The entirety of tome 3 is,
in fact, the opposite of “The Story of a Return”; it is instead the story
of Marji’s exile in Austria. Only on the final pages of tome 3 does the
25. An indication of how Singh’s titling has influenced interpretation is also evi-
dent in Mostafa Abedinifard’s claims that “Satrapi’s use of the word story in the
subtitles of both Persepolis and Persepolis 2 is noteworthy” (104).
character prepare to return to Iran. Tome 4 does depict Marji’s return

to Iran but then concludes with another departure, as Marji leaves for
France. By collecting tomes 3 and 4 together under a title that only
describes the latter, the Austrian section is minimized in importance,
as is Marji’s conclusive leaving of Iran.
As a sequential medium, comics and bande dessinée are formally
shaped by progression and cessation. Each issue, volume, album,
or tome will end, but it will also gesture toward the next installa-
tion. Thus, tome 1 of Persepolis ends with a death—Marji’s uncle—but
also with the verbal intrusion of a beginning “It was the beginning
of the war . . .” (“C’était le début de la guerre . . .”). The ellipsis on
the final page verbally draws a reader onward, while its composi-
tion is in direct tension with the facing verso page, which begins with
Marji’s “last meeting” (“dernière rencontre”) with her uncle and an
unframed panel announcing his execution in the newspaper. From a
tabular reading perspective, this two-page spread artistically mobi-
lizes a tension between an end, which the reader can sense by vir-
tue of the last page itself, and which is also metaphorically rendered
through Anouche’s death, and a beginning, announced through the
literal “début” and ellipsis.
The shift in narrative progression is marked by Persepolis’s fur-
ther division of each tome into sections, the rhythm and relations of
which are changed in the transition to volumes. In the first US vol-
ume—The Story of a Childhood—the ultimate section of the original
tome 1, “The Sheep” (“Les Moutons”), leads directly into “The Trip”
(“Le Voyage”). Yet, in the original tome 2, the use of “Le Voyage” as
the opening section establishes symmetry with the final section “The
Dowry” (“La Dot”). Both sections involve voyages away from Iran,
but “The Trip” is a family vacation escape to Italy and Spain that lasts
only one splash page and six panels, while “The Dowry” concludes
with Marji’s separation from her family as she prepares to travel to
Austria alone. From a narrative standpoint, the symmetry between
“The Trip” as the opening words to the start of tome 2 and Marji’s
anguished face from the airport window at the end of the tome is lost
in the US Persepolis, where there is no longer any indication of the
original division of sections. The narrative relationship between “The
Sheep” and “The Trip” is made slightly confusing since the Iran–Iraq
war—which “begins” at the end of “The Sheep”—begins again at
the end of “The Trip” in the antepenultimate panel, where Marji’s
grandmother announces the news to the family. Thus, in Persepolis:
132 • C hapter 3
The Story of a Childhood, the Iran–Iraq war “begins” twice, while in

Persepolis, it is foretold at the end of tome 1 and announced in the first
section of tome 2, allowing readers new to the series or in need of a
reminder to pick up where the last tome ended. Therefore, from an
artistic and narrative perspective, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
and Persepolis, tomes 1 and 2, differ in the symmetry and redundancy
of their composition.
Other changes between the L’Association and Pantheon publica-
tions highlight how the former aligns Persepolis implicitly and explic-
itly with the work of David B., while the latter appears intended as
the “next Maus.” These changes also reflect divergent geopolitical
climates of each publication. Tome 1 from L’Association features an
introduction by David B., which details the history of Iran up until
the American involvement in and exploitation of the Iranian govern-
mental structure for the sake of acquiring oil. Written before 9/11, this
introduction provides a trenchant critique of US incursion in sover-
eign nations and goes so far as to lay responsibility for the political
and religious turmoil described in Persepolis on US interference. The
Pantheon version, published almost concurrently with the US inva-
sion of Iraq in 2003—making the bundling of tomes 1 and 2, in which
Iraq and Saddam Hussein are repeatedly denounced by the protago-
nists, quite auspicious—instead features an introduction by Satrapi
where the American influence is shifted to a mostly supporting role
for British interference. The CIA-instigated coup is mitigated as being
performed by “the CIA, with the help of British intelligence” follow-
ing a British retaliatory embargo on oil exports.
In her introduction for Pantheon, Satrapi describes the exigence of
Persepolis not in the nationalist terms of David B.—“the first Iranian
26
bande dessinée album”—but rather as a work of cultural translation.
In the wake of so many negative stereotypes, Satrapi knows that the
image of Iran is “far from the truth” and wants to correct it. Writing
in 2002, when a number of media outlets had already begun discus-
sions of US military action in Iraq, Satrapi concludes her introduction
with a penultimate line mentioning those “Iranians who died in the
war against Iraq,” aligning Iran and the US substitutively through a
common enemy.
Introductions are also paratextual, and while their composition
is generally retroactive to the manuscript, they can tell us about the
26. See also Malek 380.

context and the audience expectations that were imagined at the time
of publication. In the case of publication histories, David B.’s and
Satrapi’s separate prefaces indicate different rhetorical situations for
the L’Association and Pantheon publications. Given Satrapi’s denun-
ciation of the popular image of Iranians as terrorists and fanatics in
her introduction, the excision of David B.’s drawings accompanying
his introduction—one of which poses a young Marji on a horse with
a large gun—seems a logical adaptation in light of US Islamophobia.
As subtle as it is, the shift between introductions refigures Satrapi
from a victim of US and British intervention in Iran who became a
comic artist under the aegis of famous French artists into a cultural
ambassador hailing from a country that suffered a common enemy in
the form of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
While the scholarship on Satrapi tends to conflate France and
the US under the umbrella of “the West,” radically variegated his-
tories and geopolitical relations map the transits among Iran and
these Western nations. As Leservot argues, “Over the course of the
twentieth century, the discourse of Iranian intellectuals about the
West became increasingly divided between the long-standing, rather
positive view of France and an increasingly negative view of Anglo-
Americans” (119). Books are not published in geopolitical vacuums,
and recognizing how factors like the Franco-German alliance against
the US invasion of Iraq—and the ensuing Freedom Fries movement—
affect how and why a book is received as a French or an Iranian work
is essential to breaking away from problematic reading practices
whereby responders evaluate a work based on its universal appeal
while ignoring the material and cultural translations that accompany
its international reception.
Years of translation scholarship have insisted on the acknowledg-
ment that a translation and an original are fundamentally different
texts. This universal difference—every word is different—between
translated texts in some ways works to obscure the actual work of
translation. Lawrence Venuti’s Contra Instrumentalism insists on the
radical difference between a text and its translation:
For a text is a complex artifact that sustains meanings, values, and

functions specific to its originary language and culture, and when
translated this complexity is displaced by the creation of another
text that comes to sustain meanings, values, and functions spe-
cific to a different language and culture. Any correspondence or
134 • C hapter 3
approximation thus coincides with a radical transformation. As

a result, no translation can be understood as providing direct or
unmediated access to its source text. (2)
Yet Venuti’s hermeneutic model of translation does not fully account

for what happens in a work like Persepolis, where some aspects do
provide direct or unmediated access to unchanged drawings, layouts,
paneling, and tabular composition.
Rather than a universality of difference as in linguistic transla-
tions, comics represent heterogeneity of difference. Materially, the
translations between the French and English Persepoleis reveal the
complexity of the type that Venuti mentions between the originary
culture and the translating culture, but they do so because other
aspects remain unchanged. It is through this variegated field of dif-
ference and sameness that one must address the translation of Perse-
polis as, in Venuti’s terms, “an interpretive act that necessarily entails
ethical responsibilities and political commitments” (6). Without lay-
ing the entirety of a complex of decisions and deliberations on her
shoulders, I have highlighted the necessity of Singh’s interpretation,
seeing Persepolis as the next Maus and modifying the work in ways
that might allow “everyone” to “read and understand.”
Alternately, as Singh asserts, one might attribute to the work a
type of ungovernable or unsaleable position due to its “unknown Ira-
nian” author, or, in Groth’s words, its status as “a foreign book.” In
highlighting the material and formal translations of Persepolis from
France to the US, I want to trace how a foreign work is domesticated
and made familiar, at the same time attending to the aspects that—as
a graphic narrative—escape translation. We have seen how Satrapi
was first compared to two successful, white male predecessors as a
way to broker her unique and unprecedented role as author of “the
first Iranian comic book.” Yet, once the domestic success of Persepolis
was assured in both Europe and the US, Satrapi’s cultural capital as
well as her cultural role shifted again. Her success made her into a
brokering figure of a different order.
Satrapi as Precedent
Persepolis’s transatlantic border crossing made familiar—and also

marketable—certain kinds of texts. We have already noted a number
of occasions where reviewers cite Persepolis’s success as the precedent

for any number of possibilities in publishing—graphic novels, autobi-
ographies, commercial successes, translations. Yet the author function
of Satrapi took on other folds of connotation and translatability. In
some ways this is a problem of genre, or even gender—Satrapi’s text
is a woman’s memoir of boundary crossing. From this unique cat-
egorization, the comparisons to David B. and Spiegelman seem fac-
ile. However much Satrapi, Spiegelman, and David B. constellate a
transnational economy of comics, it is Satrapi, above all, who comes
to metonymize the global in what Arjun Appadurai terms “the global
cultural economy” (295).
For Menu, Satrapi’s East-to-West, France-to-the-US success cre-
ated an new condition of possibility for global economies of comics:
I also think that a lot of so-called “independent” French or European

comics can find a US readership. I was always surprised in the years
before that so few of them had been translated, and I’ve noticed a
change in the last few years in the States. Maybe the success of Pan-
theon’s English version of Persepolis helped; it had kind of paved
the way in France for big publishers to include the (so-called again)
“graphic novel” approach, mainly only reached before by the small
independent publishers. (Menu and Harkham)
Thompson similarly told the Comics Reporter, “‘Art comics’ have

achieved enough big successes now, Persepolis in particular, that we
may be stuck with the image of book-sized graphic novels as being
serious literary work” (Thompson and Spurgeon). Certainly, it was
not until after the second volume of Persepolis was published by Pan-
theon that the company also acquired David B.’s L’Ascension du haut
mal from Fantagraphics, translated and collected in one volume as
Epileptic. Hence the inversion of publication order, whereby David
B.’s L’Ascension preceded Persepolis in France, but Epileptic was pub-
lished after Persepolis in the US.
Furthermore, despite Spiegelman’s own immigrant history, or the
setting of Maus in Poland, it is Persepolis, not Maus, that is read again
and again as a text of cultural translation. This reception is especially
legible in the comparisons made between Satrapi and other women-
of-color graphic artists. While being compared to Spiegelman or David
B., in Singer’s terms, embeds an artist in the comics tradition, being
compared to Satrapi seems to entail a different comparative appa-
136 • C hapter 3
ratus. Drawing from Gayatri Spivak’s 1985 article “Three Women’s

Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” I question how Satrapi’s author
function shifts from that of inheritor of white male authors’ prece-
dent to Middle Eastern cultural translator. Spivak asserts that the lack
of attention to the role of imperialism in the reading of nineteenth-
century British literature demonstrates the “continuing success of the
imperialist project, displaced and dispersed into more modern forms”
(243). In the case of global comics, the displacement suggested in her
formulation is especially appropriate. How are “foreign” products
sold in European and US markets, and how is this commodification
elided or amplified by the discourse attending these products?
I begin by analyzing the welter of critical receptions that compare
Satrapi and Zeina Abirached. The same could be done for a number of
authors, as everyone from Palestinian American author Leila Abdel-
27 28
razaq to Franco-Syrian author Riad Sattouf to Magdy El Shafee has
been compared to Satrapi. Yet the pairing of Satrapi and Abirached,
as two women originally born outside Paris who published their
work there, serves a specific analytic function. This analysis is guided
by questions regarding global comics as an emergent textual form
that complicates world literature as a system of cultural recognition:
What role does the emphasis on these two women authors as Middle
Easterners play in the reception of their books in Europe and the US?
How do transnational literatures capitulate to Orientalist projections?
How do comics, by introducing new criteria for literary assessment,
compel us to radically remap the location of culture?
Black and White and Brown All Over
Upon the publication and translation of Zeina Abirached’s Mourir,

partir, revenir: Le jeu des hirondelles in France in 2007, translated as A
27. Among others, Alex Mangles, in reviewing Abdelrazaq’s book Baddawi for
the LA Review of Books, notes, “It’s hard not to think of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis
when reading Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi.”
28. To cite two of the most parallel among hundreds of examples, Adam Shatz,
writing for the New Yorker, notes, “Not since ‘Persepolis,’ Marjane Satrapi’s mem-
oir of her childhood in Khomeini’s Iran, has a comic book achieved such crossover
appeal in France,” while Rachel Cooke, for the Guardian notes, “Not since Persepolis,
Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir of revolutionary Iran, has a comic book seemed
so important, or been so acclaimed.”
Game for Swallows in the US in 2012, a curious trend developed. In a

range of popular, academic, French, US, and UK online, print, and in-
person reviews, blog posts, interviews, and introductions, Abirached
and Satrapi were explicitly denied comparison through an implicit
comparison. The comparisons indicate a homogenizing “Western”
conceptualization of graphic novels. Unlike Persepolis, which was
alternately compared to Maus or L’Ascension (or even Persian min-
iatures), A Game for Swallows, or Le jeu des hirondelles, is consistently
compared to Persepolis in an array of national and cultural platforms
and settings. We might read this as Satrapi and her work outstripping
her predecessors to become the predecessor nonpareil. Or we might
examine these points of reception more closely. As Caren Kaplan
states of reception: “Too often, Western feminists have ignored the
politics of reception in the interpretation of texts from the so-called
peripheries, calling for inclusion of ‘difference’ by ‘making room’ or
‘creating space’ without historicizing the relations of exchange that
govern literacy, the production and marketing of texts, the politics of
editing and distribution, and so on” (138–39). Following Kaplan, it is
not enough to recognize or even celebrate the inclusion of two “Mid-
dle Eastern” women’s books in the publishing circuits of graphic
novels between France and the US. We must work to understand
what the inclusion of these texts indicates about access, marketing,
and consumer expectations. Without diminishing the artistry of each
woman, we must consider what their conflation says about the cul-
tural positioning of the reviewers, as well as the editors, translators,
and publishers involved in the process.
Pamela Paul’s New York Times review of Zeina Abirached’s A Game
for Swallows begins with the line “It is hard not to think of Marjane
Satrapi’s groundbreaking graphic memoir, ‘Persepolis,’ while read-
ing Zeina Abirached’s moving account of her childhood in Lebanon
in the 1980s.” As described at length above, Satrapi’s Persepolis is a
multivolume autobiographical account of her life in Iran before and
after the 1979 revolution and her subsequent emigration to Vienna
and later return to Iran. Abirached’s book recalls a single night of her
family’s life in Beirut in 1984, during intense shelling in the Leba-
nese Civil War. Thus, the scope and location of the books is quite
distinct, and Abirached is slightly more than a decade younger than
Satrapi. However, these differences have not stanched the outpour-
ing of comparisons. Paul’s review is hardly the first or last space in
138 • C hapter 3
which the graphic narratives of Abirached and Satrapi have been

29
compared. Some media outlets, like the French culture and lifestyle
magazines Télérama and L’Express, attempt to qualify the comparison
by specifically enumerating the similarities between Abirached and
Satrapi: their mutual use of black and white, their similar characters,
their Eastern and/or wartime settings, and autobiographical and/or
childhood-memory narration styles:
Same use of black and white, similarity of characters, Oriental con-

text, autobiographical inspiration: the style of Zeina Abirached
immediately makes one think of Marjane Satrapi’s style. For all that,
to reduce The Game for Swallows to a sub-Persepolis is purely bad
faith. (Jarno)
From the graphic perspective, the style of the album [The Game for
Swallows] is reminiscent of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: same fullness
of the black-and-white drawing, same false naïveté of the narration,
same setting of a wartime city, same childhood memories. But the
comparison stops there. (Bisson)
These two lists provide a rubric for how one might compare Abi-
rached to Satrapi while implying that the limits of the list indicate
the insignificance of that comparison. In both reviews the lists take
subjunctive form: one could compare them—here are the criteria by
which to do so—but why would one?
In fact, the comparison has become its own trope to the extent that
Cameron Hatheway of Bleeding Cool, a UK-based comics blog, avows
that his review of A Game for Swallows will not function solely to com-
pare the two works—unlike other, unnamed and uncited reviews—
a claim that seems rather discredited by the review’s opening and
closing paragraphs, which both mention Satrapi. Hatheway, via para-
leipsis, structures an entire review of A Game for Swallows from start
to finish—literally—in comparison with Satrapi, while simultane-
ously claiming a unique exemption from this specific comparison.
29. Previously, the French Embassy in the US offered a game on its website,
https://frenchculture.org, that allowed users to play “Marjane Satrapi vs. Zeina Abi-
rached.” Players were shown a series of ten black-and-white images and offered
only two options: “Marjane Satrapi” or “Zeina Abirached.” The user scored points
for correctly identifying which images—taken from a range of works by both
authors—are by which artist.
Other cultural critics go further in stressing the error of the

comparison. du9 begins its review of Abirached’s Le jeu des hiron-
delles by highlighting the fundamental difference in the two artists’
approaches: “Her approach is fundamentally different from another
Middle Eastern author with whom she is too frequently compared,
Marjane Satrapi . . . and with whom she has but one ultimate point
of comparison, that of being a female graphic artist recounting in
black and white the difficult moments in the recent history of her
country” (Voitachewski). While du9’s Voitachewski insists on the
fundamental difference between the two authors, he too offers crite-
ria for comparison.
By way of introducing Abirached at Duke University, Professor
Claire Tufts critiqued reviews such as Paul’s (whom she refers to as
“one critic . . . in the New York Times”) for comparing the two authors.
In this critique, Tufts echoes both the caveat and the criteria listed
by Télérama and L’Express and contends that “the similarities between
[Abirached] and Satrapi don’t go much beyond the fact that both
writers are women from the Middle East, both work in black and
white, and both have written graphic novels about war as seen
through the eyes of a child narrator” (“Beirut Partita”). She supports
her claim by noting that Satrapi’s work is frenetic and more taken
with representing war, while Abirached’s is more “warm” and con-
cerned with familial relations. In A Game for Swallows, she explains,
war is often figured as a “white panel or blank page” (“Beirut Par-
tita”). Herein, although the comparison has already been disavowed,
Tufts, a professor in the Romance Studies division, continues to com-
pare the two works. She uses a close reading to demonstrate the
divergences that most other reviews allude to only through the dis-
avowal of comparison.
As a comparatist myself, I am compelled to argue for the exigency
of recovering the material and aesthetic histories that are mystified in
these preceding comparisons. Despite the heterogeneity of the recep-
tions, culled from a number of different cultural spheres and span-
ning rarefied, comics-specific criticism as well as broader cultural
or lifestyle interests, they share a rhetorical approach that requires
further examination. Why do these readers feel the need to stage a
praeteritio of comparison? What forms of cultural capital are enabled
through the trope of a denial of comparison which itself enacts a
comparison?
The rhetorical situation of Abirached’s reception in French, US,
and UK publications reveals a particular unease on the part of these
140 • C hapter 3
“Western” readers. They evince a recalcitrance to use Satrapi as a met-

onym for otherness or a token of difference in their efforts to discur-
sively “domesticate” Abirached’s work. These critics do not want to
reproduce an Orientalist cultural imaginary whereby female graphic
memoirists from Iran and Lebanon are understood to be similar,
regardless of their divergent sociopolitical lifeworlds and cultural
products. And yet the very invocation of Satrapi demonstrates that
the same readers find themselves unable to not use her as a figure by
which to read Abirached and the complex circuits of commodities,
artists, and aesthetics at work in marketing the graphic Middle East
to a Western audience. Speculating about the mentality informing this
contradiction, it stems from the lack of a legible array of successful,
transnationally circulated comics by women alone, and by women of
color in particular. Each comparison also acts as an effort by a reader
in “the West” to place Abirached without resorting to Orientalism.
Thus, readers disavow the connection to Satrapi as a way to disavow
Orientalism, implicitly revealing its presence through negation.
The Global Graphic Novel
Just as I considered how the translations of Satrapi indicated more

about the lack of coherence of the “West” than any reader seemed to
acknowledge, I hold that the comparisons of Abirached and Satrapi
reveal more about the establishment of a transnational graphic novel
market than these readings manifest. With all due respect to Tufts,
there are more similarities between A Game for Swallows and Perse-
polis, and they are more materially fundamental than those that she
and many other readers list. Both texts were originally published in
Paris—a fact that goes unmentioned in every one of the reviews cited
above. Rather than situating the comparison of these women in their
birthplaces nearly fifteen hundred kilometers and a decade apart, let
us acknowledge the role of the location in which their works were
bought, published, and marketed just over six kilometers and less
than five years apart.
Without flattening the unique and heterogeneous histories that
preceded the publication of Persepolis and A Game for Swallows and
that express themselves in the author functions of Abirached and
Satrapi, I maintain that the bande dessinée and graphic novel pub-
lishing industries must be foregrounded in questioning the similari-
ties and differences between these books. Following Spivak, I want

to draw attention to how the study and consumption of literatures
in an age of globalization runs the risk of complicity in the contin-
ued “worlding” that began under imperialism to produce the “Third
World.” Spivak writes, “To consider the Third World as distant cul-
tures, exploited but with rich intact literary heritages waiting to be
recovered, interpreted, and curricularized in English translation fos-
ters the emergence of ‘the Third World’ as a signifier that allows us
to forget that ‘worlding,’ even as it expands the empire of the literary
discipline” (243). In figuring Abirached and Satrapi as Middle East-
ern artists, telling similar stories, with a similar black-and-white aes-
thetic, a discrete and consumable “style” is artificially identified and
attributed to works from a heterogeneous area.
Our alternative is to attend to the market forces and histories that
brought Persepolis and A Game for Swallows to us and to the aforemen-
tioned reviewers at specific points in time. By discursively placing
Abirached and Satrapi in mystified relation to the spheres of pro-
duction where their labor takes place—and to their own emigration
and/or exile—these reviewers become unwitting participants in con-
tinued cultural imperialism. By ambiguously referencing aesthetic
similarities without attending to the medial conditions of the work,
they obfuscate the relation of industry to the networks of cultural
production and critical valuation that inscribe these women and their
graphic narratives in networks between Beirut, Rasht, Paris, London,
New York, and even Minneapolis.
Persepolis and A Game for Swallows are texts by women born in
Iran and Lebanon, but their existence as media objects is owed to a
coincidental rise of French independent comics publishing and the
graphic novel in anglophone discursive regimes. The uncritical com-
parison of a woman who left Iran as a self-described political exile
and a woman who explains her emigration to Paris in terms of a
lack of comic book publishing opportunities in Lebanon creates a
false equivalence. At the same time, this comparison estranges these
women from their own unique orientations and transnational biog-
raphies in order to domesticate the products of their labor within
an imaginary of the Middle East as an area othered from the West.
Instead, a critical comparison recognizes that the commonalities
between Persepolis and A Game for Swallows implicate France and the
US (as well as Lebanon and Iran) through print cultures, centers of
productions, and geopolitics.
142 • C hapter 3
Abirached has stated that she moved to France to attend the École
nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs and because, as she explains,
“We do not have a comics tradition in Lebanon, and in all the Mid-
30
dle East” (qtd. in Dueben, “Beirut”). Abirached studied graphisme at
Atelier de Recherche ALBA, a division of the Académie libanaise des
Beaux-Arts, and cites among her influences David B., Jacques Tardi,
Emmanuel Guibert, and a number of other bande dessinée artists.
[She does not list Satrapi and has said—as she does in an interview
with L’Express—that she does not really feel filiation with Satrapi:
“Je ne me sens pas vraiment de filiation avec elle” (qtd. in Bisson).]
Abirached’s explanation for her relocation in Paris invites a critical
retracing of the lines of comics production, circulation, and reception
that fully accounts for her and Satrapi’s awareness of the industry in
relation to their own self-location. Such a retracing locates the art-
ists as participants in a global media industry with a major node in
Paris, which is informed by cultural and material histories of comics
publishing.
The Graphic Novel and the Anxiety of Influence
Publisher Frédéric Cambourakis cites Persepolis as a turning point for

introducing a new audience to comics, one that led to the appear-
ance of many publishing houses, including his own, Éditions Cam-
bourakis. In 2006 Cambourakis contracted Abirached’s first book,
[Beyrouth] Catharsis, written (and originally published) in 2002 when
Abirached was a student at ALBA. His investment in Abirached
paid off when her third book, Le jeu des hirondelles, was nominated
at Angoulême, became a best seller, and was translated into English
as A Game for Swallows five years later. Cambourakis insists that her
success is based on the quality of her book and downplays the com-
parison of Le jeu des hirondelles to Persepolis. In Cambourakis’s words,
following such a polémique as the comparison between the two wom-
en’s books, either popular success (plébiscite) or boycottage will follow.
In Abirached’s case, “the public overwhelmingly responded” (qtd. in
Pasamonik, “Cambourakis”).
30. Cf. di Ricco; Douglas and Malti-Douglas. Nadim Damluji, among many proj-
ects in his “improbable side career as ‘Arab Comics Scholar,’” maintains the blog
Majalat: The Art of Arab Comics.
It is telling that A Game for Swallows was the first of Abirached’s

books to become financially successful and be translated in the US, as
its physical shape is much closer to that of other recognized and rec-
ognizable graphic novels than her first two works.
Abirached’s oeuvre features a format progression that differs from
31
Satrapi’s, which was shaped by L’Association’s influence. Unlike a
graphic novel or an album of bande dessinée, Abirached’s first book,
Catharsis, is a very small, single-panel-per-page book with a die-cut
cover. As its name and subject suggests, her second book, 38, rue
Youssef Semaani, has a long, building-like rectangular shape; when
opened, it unfolds to show the numerous denizens of the apartment
complex at the titular address. Before this work’s completion, Abi-
rached “arrived in Paris with [Beyrouth] Catharsis and a proposal for
a graphic novel, in search of a publisher” (Pasamonik, “Camboura-
kis”). Cambourakis published both of her more idiosyncratically
shaped works in 2006 prior to the breakout success Le jeu des hiron-
delles in 2007. Just like Persepolis, Le jeu des hirondelles gained prom-
inence once it was selected for the Angoulême Festival, but, unlike
Abirached’s previous texts, this book was recognizably—as she calls
it—a “graphic novel.”
Although Satrapi herself has rejected the term graphic novel—
“Editors call me a graphic novelist and my work a graphic novel.
However, this is a term I don’t like because I’m a cartoonist and what
I make are comics” (“State of Mind”)—this formal designation gained
in transnational appeal following Satrapi’s success, such that David
B. complains of its francophone adoption:
The term graphic novel has been widely adopted in France by jour-
nalists who don’t know anything about it, but who feel like they’re
selling something new with it. Same for editors, who before didn’t
want to use the term. (qtd. in Evenson)
31. As she describes, in order to develop her first book, Abirached began a
casual form of fieldwork in order to research the street where she lived during the
Lebanese Civil War before “the rebuilding of Beirut . . . when they were carefully
erasing all the traces of the war” (“Artist’s” 70–71). This research would eventually
inform all three of her first publications. Using “words and images, to try to under-
stand” (“Artist’s” 71), she drew Catharsis. Having “explored the space of the street”
in Catharsis, Abirached’s next work, 38, rue Youssef Semaani, describes “the life of
[her] building” (“Artist’s” 73).
144 • C hapter 3
Following Satrapi and others, graphic novel, as David B. alludes

to, connotes not only a format but a transnational marketability,
whereas the designation of graphic novel—following Foucault—
involves a commercial calculus for standardizing the author-artist as
a cultural figure. What Menu wrote of the influence of Persepolis on
the size and aesthetic of a particular type of book, Beaty extends to
Satrapi as well: “In terms of the industry, her success really cemented
a desire to find the next great graphic novelist. The French industry
is no different from the American: look and see what sells, try to find
100 more of those” (qtd. in Spurgeon). By these descriptions of the
market forces, it is easier to understand Abirached’s success less as a
function of “Middle Eastern,” “black and white” drawing and more
as a sign of the graphic novel market as a normalizing field.
Abirached’s work did not travel from France to the US materially
unchanged. Just like Persepolis and Epileptic, its publisher, Graphic
Universe, a Minneapolis-based imprint of Lerner Books, made a
number of alterations to the size, page weight, and cover. And, again,
anglophone readers did not attend to the comparisons between Le
jeu des hirondelles and A Game for Swallows; instead, they focused on
the similarities and differences between Abirached and Satrapi. Prior
to the US publication of A Game for Swallows, Abirached’s translator,
Edward Gauvin, noted that
at first glance, the parallels between Abirached’s Swallows and Mar-

jane Satrapi’s Persepolis are obvious, and probably something many
critics will remark on: memoirs of childhood by Middle Eastern girls
drawn in a black and white, deliberately naïve style. To be slightly
cynical, ever since Persepolis, American publishers have been look-
ing for the next French graphic novel that would prove as big as
Satrapi’s hit. (“Game”)
As cynical as such a description might sound, it goes a long way

toward demystifying how Persepolis and A Game for Swallows have
been linked according to industry expectations. Here Gauvin sup-
plies precisely that point of comparison elided in the same lists pro-
vided by the reviewers cited above: commerce. Rather than reading
the works as purely narrative or aesthetic objects, a feminist material-
ist approach recognizes the influence of economic factors in the pro-
duction, consumption, translation, and valuation of graphic novels.
In the geopolitical specificity of Satrapi’s and Abirached’s stories, we
can discern the complex interplay between graphic novels, as local

stories, and global markets with variegated readerships and reader
expectations.
Graphic Aesthetics: Comics as a Problem for

Literary Reception
The conflation of Abirached’s and Satrapi’s artwork is symptomatic

of literary inattention to the aesthetics of comics, and of the privi-
leging of story as text over graphic narrative, in which image and
32
text are inextricably enunciative. In form, as in other areas of recep-
tion, the critical discourse about Satrapi’s and Abirached’s art reflects
more on the reviewer than on the work itself.
The issues that attend the reception of texts from West Asia are not
new, but the ways in which the transnational circuits of the graphic
novel affect and are affected by these issues are far more recent. As
Beaty writes of the reception of Persepolis, while it was lauded for its
topic, it was sometimes, especially in the US, criticized for its draw-
ing style. For Beaty this criticism not only denotes an international
division, wherein European appreciation for comics as art diverges
from US attitudes toward the form, but also indicates the problems
that literary scholars have in analyzing comics.
According to Beaty, rather than appreciate that comics art gen-
erally serves a narrative function, and thus operates in a different
register from fine art, critics too frequently appraise the art style of
comics according to the criteria they might a painting (249). Chute
echoes this sentiment, dismissing criticism of Satrapi’s drawing style
by explaining that the technical efficiency of drawing in graphic nar-
rative is in fact subservient to “the discursive presentation of time as
space on the page” (Graphic 146). Additionally, the frequency with
which critics use “black and white” as a point of comparison between
Abirached and Satrapi reflects a misunderstanding of the role of col-
ors in graphic narrative. In his article on the use of color in comics,
Baetens explains that while it is frequently assumed that black and
white is chosen for economic reasons, this is not true in all cases, and
he cites Satrapi as the most notable exception. He goes on to claim
32. Although Tensuan specifically notes that these types of evaluations reflect
a “gendered bias” and rarely see application in relation to male artists like Mark
Beyer or Jeffrey Brown (957).
146 • C hapter 3
that black and white is viewed as having more of an “auteur” qual-

ity (just as in photography) that is associated with graphic novels
as opposed to childish, brightly colored comic books (“Black and
White” 112). Ann Miller further asserts that for francophone com-
ics, black and white “has come to connote an album presented as a
work of art rather than a commercial product” (Reading 95). Although
Miller allows that there are exceptions in France, and Baetens notes
exceptions in the US as well, their role as exceptions indicates the pre-
33
dominance of black and white in graphic novels.
Other scholars view this predominance as another way in which
the graphic novel capitulates to a literary format. A book-size, black-
and-white object that features adult genres like nonfiction, war, and
autobiography is much more likely to be found in a US bookstore,
marketed to adult audiences, or reviewed in the New York Times. A
reviewer accustomed to letters over images is less likely to attend to
the unique parameters governing what Philippe Marion calls graphia-
tion, or the whole account of markings and visual enunciation on the
comics page. To compare Satrapi and Abirached on the basis of their
mutual use of black and white is almost as meaningful as comparing
prose writers who use the same font. While the color palette reflects
an artistic and aesthetic choice, it also reflects industry standards; cri-
tique of its use can occlude deeper attention to artistic style.
Gauvin, who has translated works by both artists, states of A Game
for Swallows: “I was taken by its strong design sense, complex motifs,
and idiosyncratic use of sound effects in characterization; its use of
B[lack]&W[hite] is, needless to say, very different from Satrapi’s, and
I tried when I could to help the book get out from under that shadow
by emphasizing that” (“Re: Katherine Kelp”). As Gauvin notes, black
and white alone is a thin point of comparison and one that, in the case
of these two women artists, relegates one to the shadow of the other.
Framing Comparison
As transnational commodities, Persepolis and A Game for Swallows

represent the migration of artists from Iran and Lebanon to Europe.
They also represent aptitudes and proclivities within European and
US markets for specific forms of cultural production. These aptitudes
33. See also El Hak 76.

P ersepolis and the C ultural C urrency of the G raphic N ovel • 147
are not uniform across the imagined “West”; nor are they ahistorical.
A Game for Swallows is necessarily related to Lebanon, just as Persepo-
lis is to Iran in ways irreducible to a Western categorization of “Mid-
dle Eastern” art. Similarly, the relations of both works to France and
to the French language, and to English and the US, are neither ahis-
torical nor inevitable, but their erasure in discourses about Abirached
and Satrapi demonstrates a reluctance to acknowledge the role of
capital and geopolitics in literary reception.
In her discussion of orientations and Orientalism, Sara Ahmed
stipulates that “we can see how making ‘the strange’ familiar, or the
‘distant’ proximate, is what allows ‘the West’ to extend its reach”
(Queer Phenomenology 126). For Ahmed, Orientalism is a way of gath-
ering objects and manufacturing differences among those objects.
The West orients itself to the Orient as an object of desire, and then
domesticates this Orientalism by differentiating between proximi-
ties, familiarities, and strangeness. The receptions of Persepolis and A
Game for Swallows in the twenty-first century in Europe and the US
denote an orientation toward the “Middle East” at specific moments
in time, as well as a concomitant desire to orient the works of Satrapi
and Abirached in the service of imaginative or affective economies.
The rhetorical paraleipsis of the comparison of Abirached and Satrapi
reveals the desire to align these women in the imaginative economy
of “Middle Eastern” art while espousing a liberal reluctance to deny
each product a unique market value. Regrettably absent from the dis-
cussions of identity and difference that attend the interpretation of
the narratives and graphic aesthetics of the works is a consideration
of the heterogeneous “Western” publishing industries that allow
readers to subtly insist that they know more than one “Middle East-
ern” woman who draws comics without ever asking why.
C H A P T E R 4
BORDER THINKING AND

DECOLONIAL MAPPING
IN MICHAEL NICOLL
YAHGULANAAS’S
HAIDA MANGA
Decolonizing Comics
What would it mean to “decolonize comics”? This injunction has

made its way through a number of comics studies conferences, email
1
discussion lists, and publications (e.g. Howes; Dony). Yet its general
tenets seem diffuse and sometimes bound only to the linguistic—a
call for comics in languages other than English, French, or Japanese—
or the topical—a call for comics about areas other than the North
Atlantic. In many iterations, the concept of “decolonizing” comics
slides unmarked into the call for more attention to “international”
comics. Without detracting from the worthwhile project of promoting
scholarship on international comics—for which the present volume
1. This phrase has been employed innumerable times and claims its own Face-
book discussion group (“Decolonizing Comics,” https://www.facebook.com/Graphic
Academia/), and talks at UC Davis (“Decolonizing Comics,” https://culturalstudies.
ucdavis.edu/events/decolonizing-comics-avy-jetter) and the Modern Language
Association (“Decolonizing Comics and/as Activism,” https://graphicnarratives.
org/2020/02/19/mla-2021-special-session-cfp-decolonizing-comics-and-as-activism-
deadline-03-15-20/), etc.
148
B order T hinking and D ecolonial M apping • 149
evidences my own dedication—I would like to counter the substi-

tution of “international” for “decolonial” by focusing on the Haida
manga of Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas and their relationship to decol-
onization, transnationalism, and cultural syncretism.
As Eve Tuck (Unangax̂ ) and K. Wayne Yang assert, “decoloniza-
tion is not a metaphor,” and the employment of the term in inexact
or figurative ways allows “the real and symbolic violences of set-
tler colonialism to be overlooked” (2). Tuck and Yang warn that the
“easy absorption, adoption, and transposing of decolonization is yet
another form of settler appropriation” (3), one visible in the equivo-
cation at work in the conflation of international comics with decolo-
nial comics or the project of decolonizing comics. For Tuck and Yang,
decolonization entails the “repatriation of Indigenous land and life”
(21), a project that Yahgulanaas has pursued through his activism and
art for decades.
2
Yahgulanaas is Raven of the Haida First Nations Indigenous
3
Peoples, based in Haida Gwaii, off the coast of British Columbia. A
descendant of acclaimed Haida artists Isabelle Edenshaw, Charles
Edenshaw, and Delores Churchill, and a relative of artists Robert
Davidson and James Hart, Yahgulanaas began creating politically
motivated comics in the 1970s to draw attention to deforestation and
the threat from resource-extraction industries to Haida Gwaii (Levell,
Seriousness 16; Park 4). His first full-length comic, No Tankers, T’anks,
was published in 1977 for the Coalition Against Supertankers and the
4
Islands Protection Society, as part of an ultimately successful cam-
paign to block the transport of Exxon Valdez crude oil through the
Hecate Strait. Yahgulanaas would go on to publish a number of com-
ics critiquing environmental and political spoliation by the Canadian
government and commercial interests, including work in most issues
5
of Haida Gwaii–based SpruceRoots Magazine (1995–2005). Yahgula-
naas also served as the CEO of the Old Massett Village Council and
on the Council of the Haida Nation. Organizing and participating in
2. Raven and Eagle are the two moieties of the Haida. See Nika Collison’s
explanation of the roles and interactions of the clans (Augaitis et al. 59–62).
3. Yahgulanaas himself discredits “First Nations” as a “politically convenient
and legally soft term” that does not have the same protection of law afforded by
“Indigenous Peoples” (qtd. in Park 5).
4. For the history of the Islands Protection Society (formerly the Islands Protec-
tion Committee), see May; Takeda.
5. See the interview in Park 34–46.
150 • C hapter 4
numerous antilogging actions and protests for Haida sovereignty,

Yahgulanaas was arrested as part of the Lyell Island blockades in
1985. These efforts led to the establishment of the Gwaii Haanas
Agreement and are depicted or referenced in many of Yahgulanaas’s
early comics.
Even in his later, larger narrative works, Yahgulanaas’s art indi-
cates the inextricability of art from land. While Tuck and Yang cri-
tique the value of epistemological decolonization without territorial
repatriation, Seneca scholar Mishuana Goeman stresses the necessity
of employing literature and imaginative responses to (re)map space.
For Goeman, “(Re)mapping is about acknowledging the power of
Native epistemologies in defining our moves toward spatial decoloni-
6
zation, a specific form of spatial justice” (4). Thus, Goeman’s writing
considers imaginative repatriation as a meaningful form of decolo-
nial work. The Native women writers Goeman studies use stories
as tools for “reframing the project of decolonization and globality”
(202), in much the same way that Yahgulanaas’s stories remap both
Haida land and the space of the comics page. Further, as a culturally
syncretic work, Haida manga also corresponds to Goeman’s insis-
tence that (re)mapping is a reconceptualization of space as a product
of encounters between different peoples (6). A form constructed in
opposition to the North American settler colonial conceptualization
of space, Yahgulanaas’s Haida manga uses transpacific cultural and
artistic affinities in order to reimagine, literally and figuratively, the
terms and lines dividing space and place.
Yahgulanaas works in a variety of artistic mediums, and his art
is frequently credited with either challenging or reinventing “tra-
7
ditional” Haida art. Yahgulanaas has produced a number of sculp-
ture exhibits and installations, in addition to his production in Haida
manga, an art form demonstrated in a number of short works as well
6. As Goeman notes, she uses the term “‘Native’ when referring to those
indigenous to North America and ‘Indigenous’ to refer to indigenous people on
a global scale.” I follow this custom here, and I follow her convention to use the
terms “Native” and “Indigenous” in “the context of someone’s work who utilizes
the [respective] term[s]” (213n1).
7. Marie Mauzé asserts that “Yahgulanaas strives to go beyond traditional
art practices with his hybrid visual art,” while Louise Loik describes his work in
slightly more violent terms: “Revolting against neatly packaged ‘authentic Indian’
art, he took cultural expectations and tossed them aside by mixing art genres and
mixing mediums from unexpected components of modern and ancient, Japanese
Manga, Chinese brushstrokes, North American Indigenous, serious, and comical
influences.”
as books, including A Tale of Two Shamans (2001), The Last Voyage of

the Black Ship (2002), War of the Blink (2006), Red (2009), and Carpe Fin
(2019). The author of The Seriousness of Play, a monograph on Yah-
gulanaas’s practice, Nicola Levell, notes: “Through [his] creative mix
or creolisation, Haida manga has emerged as a vibrant visual idiom
for retelling Indigenous oral histories and other narratives and for
offering different ways of seeing and knowing cultural complexes”
(8). This particular formulation of how Haida manga engenders new
optics aligns it with a comics studies application of what Walter
Mignolo theorizes as “border thinking.”
In his seminal work Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Sub-
altern Knowledges, and Border Thinking, Mignolo describes decoloniza-
tion in concert with the “transformation of the rigidity of epistemic
and territorial frontiers established and controlled by the coloniality
of power in the process of building the modern/colonial world sys-
tem” (12). Mignolo postulates a mode of thought that does not rein-
vest the epistemological difference between knower and known and
between subject and object with epistemological privilege (17). Thus,
his border thinking is a “machine for intellectual decolonization”
(45), one which troubles dichotomies inherent in all forms of knowl-
edge production, such as inside/outside (338) as a mode of distin-
guishing where knowledge is and is not. As Mignolo describes how
border thinking might work in a place-based parameter, in order to
get away from thinking of places as “an ‘area’ to be studied, we need
a kind of thinking beyond the social sciences and positivistic philoso-
phy, a kind of thinking that moves along the diversity of the histori-
cal process itself” (69). Mignolo’s call converges with Goeman’s in its
incitement to “think beyond the ontologization of an area to be stud-
ied and move to a reflection on the historicity of differences” (69).
Goeman and Mignolo provide a framework through which to
understand Yahgulanaas’s work as it enacts a decolonizing form of
“spatial justice.” As I contend, from a decolonial standpoint, it is dis-
ingenuous to read Yahgulanaas’s work as sui generis without reflect-
ing on the encounters, contexts, and constraints that figure into the
creation of Haida manga. But it is likewise unhelpful to conceptual-
ize Yahgulanaas’s work as merely reactionary. Instead, Haida manga
mobilizes border thinking for the project of spatial decolonization,
implicating in the process a wide swath of encounters between peo-
ples, cultural techniques, nomenclatures, spatial demarcations, and
commodity objects. I focus on his mural/book compositions as proj-
ects remapping the relations between the global and the local includ-
152 • C hapter 4
ing the terminology used to describe the work, the space of the page,
the linearity of narrative, and the commercial situation of the codex.
Just as “epistemology implies and is embedded in a politics of loca-
tion” (Mignolo, “I Am” 236), so Yahgulanaas’s Haida manga must be
understood in its situatedness.
The Time and Place of Indigenous Art
As a number of scholars of Indigenous art and literature have writ-

ten, practitioners such as Yahgulanaas are frequently relegated to an
imagined artistic undertaking in which Indigenous tradition con-
stitutes a cloistered and unchanging system of production. Anthro-
pologist Peter MacNair insists that “given the constraints of a
centuries-old formalized art form, it is a great challenge to produce
unique and ground-breaking variations” (Augaitis et al. 117). And
while MacNair’s might be read as a false binary between formaliza-
tion and variation, curator Nicole Stanbridge notes that discussions
of First Nations Indigenous art are always fraught with imposed cat-
egories of traditional versus contemporary. This problematic divide
functions as a means by which Indigenous art is qualified in terms of
its “authenticity” or “indigeneity,” while ensuring that these qualifi-
ers connote past or nonmodern.
Contemporary Indigenous artists, curators, and theorists have
long grappled with how or whether to address the problematic of
traditional versus contemporary. Art historian Charlotte Townsend-
Gault asserts that the very word tradition is highly contested in
Northwest Coast art, as “many stakeholders, including collectors and
dealers, have vested interest in defining what tradition is and how
it looks” (914). Representative curators in the Decolonize Me (Ottawa
Art Gallery 2012) catalog from the influential exhibit of Canadian
Indigenous artists vacillate between a complete denial of the rele-
vance of such a structure (Loft 76) and the possibility of reworking
these two terms in the service of a cyclical rather than linear view of
artistic development (Candice Hopkins and Christine Lalonde qtd. in
8
Stanbridge 16). While there is no consensus among these curators
as to whether or how to grapple with the oft-externally constructed
8. See also Ariella Azoulay’s critique that “in most of the languages spoken
outside of Africa, too, including European languages, there is no old word that
effectively translates the word art as we know it today . . . The mastering of time is
a key aspect of imperial violence that separates objects from people and places them
and evaluated legitimacy of tradition, Stanbridge stresses that such

debates about identity and Indigenous art are a necessary counter to
“the suppression of the Indigenous voice, not only in Canada’s his-
tory but globally” (16). These contentions regarding the role of tra-
dition as a problematic formulation illustrate the tension between a
myopic approach to Indigenous art based on constraining imaginings
of the time and place of authentic Indigeneity, and the realities of
9
contemporary, globalized art.
In rejoinder to such debates, Yahgulanaas speaks about the
10
“tradition of innovation,” asserting that these two words, while
rarely combined, are actually co-constitutive (Sostar McClellan 38).
Although Yahgulanaas allows that many conceptualize tradition as
static and innovation as hybridity, he characterizes his great-great
grandfather, master carver Charles Edenshaw, as demonstrating
through his work the “tradition of innovation” (“Michael Nicoll”).
The same can be said of Yahgulanaas’s own work, which stages and
formally depicts encounters and interrelations between Haida and
other national configurations while at the same time acknowledging
“colonial spatial process as ongoing but imbued with power strug-
gles” (Goeman 11). Even in his early comics from the 1970s, Yahgu-
lanaas’s art has focused on how claims have been discursively or
violently enacted over the Haida land by other First Nations peoples,
by Canadian settlers, by the Canadian government, and by corporate
interests—some Canadian and some multinational.
In Old Growth, editor Liz Park collects many of Yahgulanaas’s
early works, including editorial cartoons and longer works such as
No Tankers, T’anks. In his early work, Yahgulanaas already grapples
with questions of place and authenticity as they take shape in art. A
11
note inside No Tankers qualifies the cover art by John Broadhead:
in a progressive, linear timeline (‘art history’ is paradigmatic) in which colonized

people and colonizers occupy different positions and roles” (60).
9. Cf. Reg Davidson: “There is a fashionable notion that ‘traditional’ art forms
don’t really exist anymore, that ‘traditional’ art is attached to a specific historical
time period . . . this ideology has the unfortunate consequence of releasing us from
the responsibility of caring for the sources of the traditional materials on which
these art forms depend” (Augaitis et al. 38).
10. In his study Northwest Coast Indian Art, Bill Holm avers: “It seems that every
Haida artist of any consequence was an innovator, and each developed his own dis-
tinctive handling of form and space within the prescribed system” (23).
11. Broadhead would go on to become co-director of the Gowgaia Institute,
committed to producing planning maps for the Haida Nation (Takeda 8; Maher).
154 • C hapter 4
The graphic style of the Northwest Coast Indians used here cannot
be considered accurate or authentic. It was produced by a mem-
ber of the Canuck Tribe. The “formline” style was borrowed for its
allegorical capabilities, and its use was inspired by the fact that, for
whatever reasons, the Native Peoples at one time did a much cleaner
job of caretaking the planet than we seem to be doing today. (Qtd.
in Park 23)
This qualification locates the formline—which would become cen-

tral to Yahgulanaas’s later work—and the graphic narrative it cov-
ers in a particular site of encounter. While we might wonder at the
dichotomy staged between “accurate and authentic” and “allegori-
cal,” the particular inscribing technique of the formline is claimed as
a necessary practice despite the tribal affiliation (or lack thereof) of
the artist. This note itself marks the publication of Broadhead’s form-
line cover as a politically motivated prioritizing of aesthetic intent
over authenticity. The note’s ostensible purpose of justifying a non-
Native appropriation of Native art serves the rhetorical purpose of
alerting the reader to the appropriation of the style and justifying its
12
usage based on a historical legacy of Native Peoples. Rhetorically,
the formline’s use by a non-Native artist is necessary because of what
it represents in the artwork itself. This justified appropriation presages
Yahgulanaas’s own shift to working in “manga” as well as his contin-
ued advocacy for attention to cross-cultural technicity.
Yahgulanaas’s Haida manga has become almost synonymous with
“cultural hybridity,” but the majority of such descriptions rely on
each noun—Haida and manga—in syntagmatic conjunction as the lit-
eral rationale for such an interpretation. Cultural hybridity, as theo-
rized by Homi Bhabha among others, is a framework that both fulfills
the urgent necessity to rethink cultural production in (post)colonial
or global systems of exchange and problematically leads to a num-
ber of critics from privileged readerships making unqualified state-
ments about so-called other cultures. The latter position is reflected in
descriptions such as a Vancouver Sun article describing Yahgulanaas’s
work as a “distinctive hybrid of Northwest Coast formline and the
visual language of Asian graphic novels” (Griffin), whereas Yahgula-
naas has, in his own paratextual descriptions of his work, highlighted
points of tension, contestation, or even what Jean-François Lyotard
12. Cf. Nika Collison’s stipulation that the formline is intellectual property
(Augaitis et al. 60).
would call “le différend.” This unassimilable discursive situation, in

which the claim to justice by one party cannot be articulated in the
discourse of the rule of judgment, reverberates throughout Yahgula-
naas’s work as well as his paratextual explanations of the negotia-
tions and conflicts inherent in cultural production.
Rather than approaching Haida manga as a seamless or even
paratactically aligned hybrid, I argue that Yahgulanaas’s work can
and should be read for how it cultivates cultural difference as tech-
nical practice. No mere synthesis of two cultures, Yahgulanaas’s art
compels a reader to question and rethink ways of seeing, reading,
and knowing, while simultaneously highlighting points of disjunc-
ture or untranslatability in modes of discourse and inscription. Levell
cites Yahgulanaas’s 2001 book, A Tale of Two Shamans, as “the advent
of Haida manga proper” (Seriousness 30), representing for her many
of the elements that Yahgulanaas would go on to reproduce in other
books. Less comic than picture book, the story features “bold asym-
metrical calligraphic formlines” that Levell links to Haida design
while noting that they structure the page and “[lend] a cadence and
pace to the imagery, manga-style” (30). Aside from Levell’s designa-
tion of the manga-style construction of images, the first edition of
the book bears paratextual evidence of Yahgulanaas’s approach to
cultural specificity. The work begins with a note stipulating that the
story is a “blend of accounts recorded at the turn of the nineteenth
century in three of the once numerous dialects of the Haida language”
(Tale n. pag.). A reader is likewise cautioned that the images through-
out are “interpretations informed by [Yahgulanaas’s] own cultural
composition and life experiences,” and the end matter features an
interlinear translation of the text of the book. The paratext thus high-
lights the situatedness of Yahgulanaas’s work—according to which
the book’s audience and constraints engender hybridity as a symp-
tom of border thinking—while alluding to the incommensurability of
different systems of discourse and inscription. Here, dialects, orality,
and cultural composition and life experiences delimit how this “blend
of accounts” can be translated into a verbal-visual composition. Con-
straints of form—the interpretive nature of the images, unassimilable
differences in the interlinear translation—situate the work in the con-
text of cultural encounters and a tradition of innovation.
Yahgulanaas’s 2002 The Last Voyage of the Black Ship—which fea-
tures the words Haida Manga on its cover—more overtly resembles
later works like Red in that pages are all filled with images broken
into panels by framelines, with small narrative and dialogue boxes.
156 • C hapter 4
In this work as well, the relative position of audience and work is

accented through two footnotes explaining the trees in the cypress
family and the location of Haida Gwaii. A large map on page 6
interrupts the visual coherence of the narrative in order to illustrate
coastal logging of the Pacific Northwest with accompanying text
asserting the necessity of cedar conservation efforts.
These earlier works establish a precedent by which Yahgulanaas
asserts his right to bring together culturally distinct styles and dia-
lects while attending to the rationale for doing so. This reasoning
poses a challenge for “authenticity” while preserving its meaning as a
signifier in Native cultural production. That is, Yahgulanaas gestures
toward an “authentic” Native culture, one that he claims knowledge
of enough to know what does and does not adhere to this formula-
tion. Yet, in Yahgulanaas’s works, this authenticity is pliable enough
that it may be used in inaccurate, inexact, or even inauthentic ways
because of rhetorical or aesthetic necessity. It is from this negotiation
of “authentic” cultural production that one might analyze the border
thinking inherent in Yahgulanaas’s practice, and his development of
Haida manga.
Comics versus Manga
TERMINOLOGY
Although Yahgulanaas has drawn comics, or what might at times be

termed editorial cartoons, for over forty years, his critique of the term
comics stems from its cultural situation. Yahgulanaas states that he
chose manga specifically because of its association with Pacific cul-
ture and because “it is not part of the settler tradition of North Amer-
ica” (qtd. in Levell, Seriousness 10). Park suggests a rhetorical more
than a formal connotation for the term, arguing that just as his work
uses Haida tradition “flexibly,” so too,
“manga” itself is a term that the artist uses with a degree of elasticity.
Haida Manhwa and Manhua are variant terms he has used, in Korean
13
and Chinese contexts respectively. This changing term suggests that
Haida cultural productions can adapt and evolve in an ever-shifting
world without compromising their basic cultural integrity. (Park 6)
13. See Chie Yamanaka, “Domesticating Manga?” and “Manhwa in Korea.”

Park’s characterization of Haida cultural production would seem to

obscure the specificity of manga, manhwa, and manhua as cultural
products with their own geographically inflected histories. Indeed,
an article for Canada’s National Observer stipulates that “identifying
with the Manga graphic cartoon style was more of a political state-
ment than stylistic” (Loik). While we may allow the political motive
for selecting one term over another, such a claim problematically
14
assumes the separation of politics and style. Alternatively, one must
grapple with both the politics of style and the historical location of
manga within and without Yahgulanaas’s employment of the term.
To do so is to understand the complex of relations among manga,
Japan, Haida, and Canada.
The question of whether Japan functions in Haida manga as a real
site of production, or as an imagined other, is fraught. Brenna Clarke
Gray has characterized the role of Japan in Yahgulanaas’s discourse
as “an imagined space of distance from Canada’s colonial history,”
but one that “is anti-colonial only in relation to Haida experience”
(183). Gray is ultimately critical of the way this usage attains cultural
significance only through the evacuation of its Japanese cultural sig-
nificance. It is not that Yahgulanaas does not recognize Japan and Jap-
anese culture in his conceptualization of his work. Yahgulanaas has
spoken of his own personal and ancestral connections to Japan, ref-
erencing stories told to him as a child of “Haida fishermen pursuing
northern fur seals across the Pacific Ocean on hunts that would last
months at a time and take them as far away as the shores of Japan”
(Medley). In an interview with Kristine Sostar McLellan, Yahgulanaas
stated that in his family “there were some ancestors who welcomed
the opportunity to go to Japan and get away from Canada because it
was so terrible to be an Indigenous person here. Haida men in Japan
were treated like full people, like human beings” (39). Further, Yah-
gulanaas relocates his use of manga to Japan; while on a trip, Yahgu-
lanaas attributes the adoption of the term to Japanese readers: “the
use of the term manga to describe the kind of images he creates was
14. In response to a question as to “whether art is cheapened or made more

potent when infused with politics,” Yahgulanaas stipulates that “if you take a beau-
tiful pole out of the village where it means these things and take it and place it way
over there, does it mean the same thing? And I realized it doesn’t mean the same
thing . . . When art becomes in service of political and social contemporary issues, I
think that’s when it’s really working well . . . And, now, when I have an exhibit or
produce work, I see that as an opportunity to produce material culture in service of
other issues and not simply to be a new type of wallpaper” (qtd. in Roberts-Farina).
158 • C hapter 4
suggested to him by students who saw him as a mangaka, or manga

artist” (Mauzé). However, as Gray insists, Japan in this formulation
becomes a “useful Other” only because Yahgulanaas “does not nego-
tiate Japan’s own colonial legacy” (184), leading to the problematic
of whether Haida manga is really decolonial if it merely eschews one
colonial nation for another.
Reading for difference necessitates attending precisely to the geo-
political and historical contexts that Yahgulanaas invokes. For him,
as an Indigenous person, Japan’s own history of colonialism does not
resemble North American colonization and ongoing practices of incar-
ceration, which he mentions when describing Japanese internment
camps and the Japanese as a “demonized ethnicity” in North America.
Yahgulanaas’s position is a corrective to forms of postcolonial or even
colonial theory that conflate drastically different settings and peoples.
And yet, the construction that Haida manga takes throughout many
of these conceptualizations is syntactically posed through negation
rather than formal, historical, or material attribution. In many of these
descriptions, Haida manga is described as manga because it is not
North American. Thus, rather than a denotative term, manga is used
to mean “not comics,” as comics represents a specific genealogy of
colonial occupation.
There are a number of Indigenous artists in North America who
self-identify as comics artists, so Yahgulanaas’s resistance to the term
merits greater exploration. Lee Francis IV (Laguna Pueblo), founder
of Indigenous Comic-Con (first held in 2016 in Albuquerque), CEO
and publisher of Native Realities—an Indigenous comics press—and
owner of Red Planet Books and Comics, has championed the use
of comics and graphic novels as a way to reshape narratives about
Indigenous Peoples. As Francis states, “Give me something excit-
ing to read and we can foster a different understanding of native
identity” (qtd. in Helou). For Francis and other producers and prac-
titioners, Indigenous comics provides a valuable platform for reap-
propriating the means of representation and for promoting visions of
Indigenous sovereignty and success.
Francis relates being tired of seeing only “tragic stereotypes” of
Native people in mainstream media and wanting to present “stories
of Native people as superheroes” as a way to unlock the “Indigenous
Imagination” (Sorrell). Further, Canadian scholars Camille Callison
and Candida Rifkind stage an analogous argument in their intro-
duction to “Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels: An Annotated
Bibliography.” They begin by suggesting the problematic history of

representations of Indigenous Peoples in comics, drawing from work
by Michael A. Sheyahshe (Caddo) and C. Richard King, before cham-
pioning the possibilities that comics can offer for Indigenous self-
determination: “we have learned that Indigenous comics and graphic
novels matter . . . that Indigenous characters can be just as brave,
resilient, complex, messy, smart, and funny as any other comic book
heroes” (147). This celebration of “comics” as a medium for Indig-
enous self-representation serves as a counterpoint to Yahgulanaas’s
characterization of his own graphic narrative work and leads to the
question of what precisely distinguishes Haida manga from Indig-
enous comics.
In point of fact, King offers the opposite argument to Yahgula-
naas’s, asserting, “Native American artists have seized on the comic
book not simply as a means to interrupt imperial idioms but also
as a space in which to reimagine themselves and reclaim their cul-
tures” (220). If, for King, the medium is the message as well as the
technical a priori for Indigenous resistance and self-determination,
how do we understand Yahgulanaas’s insistence on the specificity of
nomenclature as it extends to his work? Park notes the importance
of “bestowing names,” in that naming “powerfully evokes the rela-
tionships that bind the name-givers and the named” (4), especially
in Yahgulanaas’s colonially renamed and denamed Queen Charlotte
Islands / Haida Gwaii. But given the role of naming in Indigenous
sovereignty, the question remains, as Yahgulanaas himself asks in
an early editorial cartoon, “What’s a Name?,” and in the case of his
work, what is manga?
At a conference presentation on Red, a respondent queried the
15
speaker about what makes Haida manga manga. The question
leads to an extensive problematic: because the term registers a rela-
tionship between nation/culture (Haida) and object (manga), while
invoking the hybridity of two different linguistic systems, it must
be considered in terms of location, or in the framework of Mignolo’s
local histories / global designs. This question can also be extended
in a number of locationally significant registers: What makes Haida
manga Haida? Or—as Richard Harrison asks—is there such a category
as “the Canadian graphic novel,” and how does Yahgulanaas’s work
15. This question was posed by Margaret Galvan to Jeremy Carnes after his talk
“The When and Where of Haida Art: Time and Place in Michael Yahgulanaas’ Red:
A Haida Manga” at the Modern Language Association conference in Seattle, 2020.
160 • C hapter 4
fit into such categorizations? These questions may all seem to revolve
around similar claims of location and formal categories, yet the stakes
involved in each should lead to increased caution against the erasure
of cultural specificity or a complete resort to cultural relativism.
As Kwame Anthony Appiah reminds us, what is called cultural
syncretism is often a vehicle for cultural imperialism or neocolonial-
ism (“Is the Post- in Postmodernism” 348). The exigence inherent in
any analysis of Yahgulanaas’s work is the careful consideration of
how to locate Haida manga in terms of at least three geographically
and politically delineated categories. Is it representative of Japanese
cultural production because of its formal categorization as manga? Is
it, above all, a Haida work, as Yahgulanaas is Haida? Is it, as Harri-
son suggests, a Canadian work because
politically, socially and artistically, Canada is a nation both West-

ern and Indigenous, but not both at once. As such, a key element of
Canadian identity lies in the way in which the term “Canadian” can
apply (and often does) both to one thing and its opposite—among
the qualities which, taken together, define the nation, there are con-
tradictions that cannot be reconciled in the sense that they are dis-
solved, but must, in the end, sit side by uneasy side. (53)
Harrison’s compelling case for the capaciousness of Canadian signifi-

cation unfortunately replicates the imperial principle of allowing set-
tler colonial terminology to absorb Indigenous sovereignty within the
framework of the settler colonial nation. As Haida artist Reg David-
son asserts, “Haida live with the daily dichotomy of art and politics”
(Augaitis et al. 38), whereby Haida art “is acclaimed as a Canadian
symbol” but “the land question remains” (38). By this dint, while we
might acknowledge that Yahgulanaas’s work comports with Harri-
son’s view of Canadian graphic narrative, Yahgulanaas’s own nam-
ing project is a form of self-determination that stands in resistance to
16
the national configurations of the North American continent. Even
more, as the official website of the Council of the Haida Nation notes,
“Our traditional territory encompasses parts of southern Alaska, the
archipelago of Haida Gwaii and its surrounding waters.” This map
16. As Haida artist Robert Davidson stipulates, “One cannot overstate the
importance of traditional Haida names . . . Names carry certain privileges and
responsibilities, they carry prestige, and at one time carried ownership to lands”
(qtd. in Augaitis et al. 50).
negates the relevance of the colonial Canadian–US borders, by con-

necting Haida Gwaii with the Kaigani Haida habitation in what is
known as the US state of Alaska (according to settler colonial nam-
ing practice). Stipulating that “all people of Haida ancestry are citi-
zens of the Haida Nation,” the Council makes clear that Harrison’s
championing of the malleability of “Canadian identity” does not rec-
ognize Indigenous sovereignty on its own terms and in terms of its
17
own self-determination.
Pursuantly, to reprise both Goeman’s and Mignolo’s approaches
to place and space, Haida manga is a way of “unsettling [the] colo-
nial map” of Canada and “asserting sovereignty through language”
(Goeman 11). It represents “border thinking” as “a dichotomous
locus of enunciation . . . located at the borders (interior or exterior)
of the modern/colonial world system” (Mignolo, Local Histories 85).
The dichotomous coupling of two linguistically and geographically
distinct nouns gestures toward their irreducible difference while pos-
iting their combinatory power as an epistemological intervention into
naming, geography, art, and commerce. The significance of Yahgula-
naas naming his work manga is not limited to the denotative import
of this term. As I argue in what follows, Yahgulanaas’s Haida manga
forces a rethinking of the relationships between terminology, form,
and sites of production. I contend that one must examine denotative
and connotative facets of manga in order to analyze how this discur-
sive construct is qualified or changed through Haida manga.
FORM
Writing about manga in North America, Frederik L. Schodt describes

a comparative framework not dissimilar to Yahgulanaas’s, noting the
predilection for “true fans” to “discuss how they prefer the Japanese-
style story lines and characters over American-style works” (23); thus,
at least on the surface, a dichotomy between comics and manga is
maintained. Yet Schodt goes on to complicate this division, explaining
that for the majority of fans, manga merely refers to a certain visual
style (“big eyes, big bosoms, very young-looking female characters,
and a cute quality not native to America”; 23) that is easily repro-
17. Cf. Gill 18.

162 • C hapter 4
duced in Korean manhwa and Chinese manhua, leading to these

forms also commonly receiving the nomination “manga.”
Further, both the production of Original English Language (OEL)
manga and the development of right-to-left printed books for readers
in English has led to a convoluted range of products that fall under
the classification of manga, especially as “the Americanized versions
of [manga] are neither truly Japanese nor truly American, for they
have text that is read left-to-right, horizontally, and images that are
read right-to-left” (Schodt 23). Tellingly, when speaking at the Bill
Reid Centre at Simon Fraser University, Yahgulanaas responded to
a question from a student concerning his decision to make the read-
ing direction left-to-right rather than right-to-left by asserting that “I
had to think of my primary audience . . . as much as I wanted to posi-
tion my community’s relationship with Asia, which is longstanding,
I had to realize that the audience I wanted to talk to is here.” In this
recognition of intended audience, Yahgulanaas situates his manga as
belonging to the nebulous range of OEL manga that Schodt outlines,
yet without the “visual style”—or at least without the big eyes and
big bosoms.
Yahgulanaas is hardly the first artist to produce manga out-
side Japan or to use the term in a “flexible” way. Sociologist Casey
Brienza has contributed invaluable scholarship on the ways in which
manga travels outside of Japan. In her work on “global manga,”
Brienza looks at the phenomenon as “a medium which has incorpo-
rated requisite cultural meanings and practices from Japanese manga
but does not otherwise require any Japanese individual or collective
entity in a material, productive capacity” (“Introduction” 5). Brienza
gives credit to Anne Allison’s assertion that manga is “cool” in the
US not because of any specific quality of Japaneseness but instead
because in manga and other cultural products, “‘Japan’ operates
more as a signifier for a particular brand and blend of fantasy-ware:
goods that inspire an imaginary space at once foreign and familiar
and a subjectivity of continual flux and global mobility” (Allison
277). Yet Brienza ultimately finds that the transnational domestica-
tion of Manga in America has led to a situation wherein the meaning
of manga “has evolved to have less to do with visual style or content,
or country of origin, and more about the presentation of the book as a
mass-produced commercial object and the intended target audience”
(Manga 12). For Brienza, who explains the origins and misuses of the
word, a new contemporary moment in globalization entails that man-
ga’s cultural specificity has been irrevocably blurred by transnational

commerce to the point where “whether or not it is from Japan is of
18
secondary importance” (12).
Both Schodt and Brienza direct a reader to understand manga as
a category of commodity objects, the name of which bears cultural
connotations that evoke but do not necessarily possess a direct con-
19
nection to Japan. This malleability of the term underscores Yahgula-
naas’s use but still does not fully describe whether Haida manga has
an aesthetic or technical meaning per se. Is Haida manga a Haida prac-
tice of manga or a unique entity unto itself? Brienza describes “what
the American manga industry does” as “domestication” (Manga 35):
a means of naturalizing form while simultaneously distinguishing
manga as a transnational—as opposed to global or national—cultural
production. Yet Yahgulanaas’s manga does not comport with all of
the commercial and production-based aspects of domestication that
Brienza outlines, again forcing the question of what makes Haida
manga manga.
Critics have differed in whether they understand Yahgulanaas’s
manga as a kind of naming practice or a formal description. Both
Park and Gray contend that Yahgulanaas uses manga connotatively
rather than denotatively; Judith Ostrowitz instead argues that manga
historically connotes a “nexus of Eastern and Western traditions”
(81), thus asserting the value of Yahgulanaas’s usage as a naming con-
vention that is precisely used in this case. In a more formal approach,
Miriam Brown Spiers relies on Scott McCloud’s and Robin Brenner’s
work on manga to conduct a close reading of Red as manga, by using
these comics theorists to explain how Yahgulanaas’s work comports
with the criteria distinguishing manga from comics. Of all critical
responses, Spiers’s is most earnestly and rigorously engaged in read-
ing Red as formally manga. However, even this thoughtful attempt to
firmly situate Yahgulanaas’s work within the parameters of Japanese
cultural production relies on tenuous distinctions between comics
and manga. Spiers lists popular themes from shonen and seinen manga
18. Certainly, the production of the “first Arabic-language manga comic,” The
Gold Ring, in Dubai, demonstrates manga’s global distribution (Good).
19. Japan may itself connote a broad range of meanings within scholarship on
manga: “cherished or disdained premodern traditions, a desired Other or rejected
colonizer, a language-wise closed realm or platform for transcultural interaction, a
particular visual style or specific media format, and a business model” (Berndt and
Kümmerling-Meibauer 2).
164 • C hapter 4
that Red uses, such as honor and heroism or sacrifice and obligation,
only to assert that these themes are lacking in comics. In her read-
ing, Spiers characterizes American comics as frequently “valoriz[ing]
a quest for vengeance” as opposed to manga, which demonstrates
“more formal and thematic experimentation” (49).
Because Spiers’s reading rests on the idea that valorized
“revenge” is an American trope, the reading appears both overgen-
eralized and limited. If this distinction is the main component that
makes Red manga, rather than comics, what about all of Yahgulana-
as’s other Haida manga? A formal element that Spiers quotes from
McCloud and attributes to Red as a marker of its “manga-ness” is the
“subjective motion and dizzy POV framing” (49). Yet she goes on to
assert that the subjective motion is especially evident in the reader’s
experience of Red not as a book but as a full wall mural. While it is
true that if a reader accepts this perspectival criterion as a marker of
manga, Red fulfills it, one must also assert that manga—as described
by McCloud—are not presented as full wall murals, making the con-
nection between Haida manga and manga further obfuscated rather
than clarified.
Instead of focusing on the mural as a site of formal correlation, one
might linger on the publication formats of both Red and “manga” as a
point of comparison. The conflation of material substrates and experi-
ence belies the real significance of the preponderance of the book in
both manga and Haida manga. Arguing that the situation of manga
in the US is markedly different from other types of comics in terms
of print conditions, Brienza notes that in the US, marketplace manga
began “migrati[ing] away from comics” (“Books” 102) in the late
1990s. Unlike US comics’ origins in newspaper and magazine fields
of production and circulation, manga “is a subset of the book field”
(109)—as are some, but not all, the objects termed graphic novels in
the US. Similarly, while many of the Indigenous comics championed
by Francis IV and King are originally published as comic books—or
floppy, short narrative installments—Haida manga and manga are
overwhelmingly circulated and sold as book-length objects. Brienza
even goes so far as to provide evidence suggesting that manga, or the
success of manga in US bookstores, engendered the affiliation of trade
book and comic book publishing fields (Manga 67).
Before I highlight Haida manga’s deconstruction of the book as
object, I would like to underscore how Spiers’s comparison might be
revised to consider an important shared material substrate between

Haida manga and manga. By looking at Haida manga and manga in
terms of the book, one can question the endemic versus translational
orientation of these forms: Are they published as books because this
format is in some way traditional or amenable to the content? Are
they published as books because, as discussed in chapter 2, they are
“born translated” (Walkowitz), and books already have established
circuits of transnational sales and exchange? Further, as Brienza notes:
The habitus of the comics field makes it difficult terrain for new,
aspiring actors of every sort, whether they be readers, sellers, or
publishing companies: publishers who have not already been long
situated in the field have trouble attracting extant readers; poten-
tial new readers, especially women and children, find extant mate-
rial confusing and shops unwelcoming; shops not run by longtime
insiders who know how to appeal to other longtime insiders cannot
keep their customer base; and so forth. (“Books” 106)
Instead of relying on generalizations about revenge tropes and dizzy-

ing perspectives, one might consider how Haida manga and manga,
as products excluded from the “long situated field” of comics that
Brienza outlines, are marketed as book-length objects, shifting audi-
ence expectations as well as points of sale.
This critique is not meant to discredit Spiers’s work, as Spiers is
one of the only theorists who attempt an informed and sustained
reading of Red according to scholarship on manga. Most readers are
content to let mention of the “manga elements” (Haines) of Haida
manga stand unexplored. Spiers’s is a meticulous and forthright
attempt to read Yahgulanaas’s work through its own terms. However,
I would like to suggest that another reading is possible.
Manga as a Toponymic Function
Insofar as Yahgulanaas’s use of manga may well seem to stem either

from negation of other terminology, and hence other artistic lineages,
or from a “marketing ploy” (Brienza, “Introduction” 14), one must
here reckon with a parallel slippage in the application of comics or
graphic novel to a plethora of heterogeneous cultural products, many
166 • C hapter 4
of which would otherwise be considered bande dessinée, fumetti,

20
komiks, and so forth. To return to both Goeman’s and Mignolo’s
theoretical frameworks, comics is one way of mapping cultural pro-
duction, and one that frequently serves as an imperializing nomen-
clature. As the previous chapter shows of the graphic novel, American
English terminology often becomes the lingua franca of transna-
tional comics production. In Mignolo’s formulation, comics is taken
as a global signifier to describe a number of “local” products, such
as “manga.” Yahgulanaas remaps both signifiers in meaningful ways.
Through manga, Yahgulanaas linguistically substitutes one settler
colonial term of continued settler relevance for a term with a bur-
geoning and differently defined operational territory. This substitu-
tion represents an important intervention in what Mignolo describes
as “cultural semiosis,” or “the conflicts engendered by coloniality
. . . in the sphere of signs” (Local Histories 14). To claim the power to
name his practice according to his own affiliations and local/global
situation, Yahgulanaas claims for himself the power that the colonizer
has long held over social-semiotic relations and toponymic systems,
just as his home of Haida Gwaii was long referred to by the Canadian
government as the Queen Charlotte Islands, until Indigenous sover-
eignty and resistance movements forced the recognition both of the
21
name for the place and the Haida Gwaii Reconciliation Act.
The power to name is thus its own form of intervention and anti-
colonial endeavor, but I contend that Haida manga does not merely
name a product; it names a place. Implicated in every aspect of Yah-
gulanaas’s work is the destabilization of land as the sole form of ter-
20. In their introduction to Manga’s Cultural Crossroads, editors Jaqueline Berndt

and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer acknowledge both the cultural interconnectivity
of all graphic narrative and the specificity of manga as a “cultural crossroads”: “It
goes without saying that all cultures are shaped by exchanges with others. Popu-
lar cultural practices in general and comics in particular have come to be built on
appropriation and hybridization. Suffice it to mention the examples of the melting
pot that gave rise to American comics, the impact of American comics—and later
manga—on bande dessinée, the manga piracy rife in 1970s South Korea, and the
recent transcultural success of the graphic novel. However, manga usually attracts
the most attention when culture is at issue within comics studies, at least pertaining
to culture defined in a geopolitical or national sense” (1).
21. Although Haida activist and leader Guujaaw acknowledges the “title and
rights” as a compromise with Canada, “The compromise is that we accept that we
will make accommodation with Canada rather than the USA, Russia, or Japan—
which are still options . . . And there are other [options], like decolonization” (qtd.
in Gill 18).
ritoriality and cultural production in favor of a transpacific concept

of borders and belonging. As Yahgulanaas suggests through his own
descriptions of transpacific exchange, the Haida partake of cultural
and aesthetic practices that mobilize water as both medium and
meaningful space. Schodt and Brienza conceptualize the Pacific as an
uncultured space between two cultural sites of production. Through
his terminology, his narratives, his page layouts, and his material
practice, Yahgulanaas remaps cultural production, suggesting that
while comics may be a settler colonial term that can fill all landed
space, manga offers a new map, one that joins sites of artistic practice
through the water that also fills his stories, structures his comics, and
determines his objects.
Although Gray and Brienza rightly insist that Japan is transmuted
or revised in North American manga practice, I argue that rather
than a “useful other,” Yahgulanaas remaps Japan as a place directly
connected to Haida Gwaii, just as much as Haida Gwaii might be
connected to Ottawa. Eschewing colonial borders of national demar-
cation, Yahgulanaas suggests alternate configurations that do not
discount the role of the ocean in place-making. The executive direc-
tor and curator of the Haida Gwaii Museum, Jisgang Nika Colli-
son (Haida), has explained the interconnectivity of place and art.
As a Haida artist and cultural docent, Collison maintains that “in
our world, it is understood that you cannot separate the land and
the water . . . In the same way, you cannot separate Haida art from
our way of life” (qtd. in Augaitis et al. 57). The Haida Land Use Vision
notes, “Our oral history traces the lineage of our families back to our
ocean origins” (Council of the Haida Nation 4), and further explains
the imbrication of land and water, noting how much of Haida Gwaii
was once above water, while the past century has entailed that “the
sea level has fluctuated by almost two hundred metres, while the fish,
forest life and our people adapted to the changing times” (6). Yahgu-
lanaas’s books Red and Carpe Fin both document the habitation of the
water, depicting vibrant human–sea filiations and transactions (fig-
ure 4.1); the terminology he uses to describe these works also remaps
the limits and connections between and among seemingly disparate
locations.
This new epistemological framing, whereby Haida manga oper-
ates as both a narrative and a toponymic practice, is made explicit
in the introduction to A Lousy Tale (2004), one of Yahgulanaas’s Rock-
ing Raven episodes, published as a fifteen-page floppy book. The
168 • C hapter 4
FIGURE 4.1. Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Carpe Fin, n. pag.
three paragraphs that introduce the work require a large amount of

McCloud’s “closure” in order to understand the associations being
made from section to section: The first and second are both five lines
long, the former narrating the story of “an Englishman who said he
had named a Pacific island after a British Queen,” the latter explain-
ing how Haida manga, “assisted by Raven,” “challenges fundamental
cartoon elements” (n. pag.). The first paragraph begins, “Once upon a
time,” invoking a fairytale- or lore-based modality; the second para-
graph uses only present-tense verbs to describe the formal capacity
of an artistic practice. Yet it is the direct, if otherwise unconnected,
juxtaposition of the final term of the first paragraph, Queen Charlotte,
with the first term of the second, Haida Manga, that stages both the
colonial encounter and its remapping.
The first paragraph is linguistically tinged with fantasy, so that

the reader can grasp the irony of the idea that a colonial toponym
“filled the emptiness of the Haida inhabitants with the fullness of
George’s wife Queen Charlotte.” The subsequent section, by never
referring explicitly to the content of the first in its colonial termi-
nology, provides a decolonial counterpoint, asserting, “Where a
typical comic represents time and space as an empty white gutter,
Haida manga, assisted by Raven reveals that time/space is an active,
twisting and expanding vitality where no island needs renaming.”
Although Haida Manga may not seem to be semantically paradig-
matic to Queen Charlotte, their juxtaposition visually creates a direct
correlation between the colonial toponym and the artistic practice, as
well as between land and sea. Queen Charlotte is positioned as a pros-
thetic form filling that which need not be filled, while Haida manga
arises from this redundant naming, as a medium for land and sea
and art and design. Yahgulanaas likens Haida design to “the study of
water,” as there is a tension “where space is either obviously filled or
seemingly empty, compression seeking expansion” (qtd. in Augaitis
et al. 156). Haida manga is, then, a radical approach to remapping,
one that supplants the primacy of land as the determining point of
contact and connectivity.
Haida manga as a toponymic, or place-making, gesture is not
limited to terminology; the practice is inextricable from the narra-
tive content and technicity in Yahgulanaas’s works. As Levell notes,
“His studies and paintings are ripe with imagery of water in motion,
seas and underwater realms are dancing with boats, fishing trawl-
ers and canoes and teeming with supernatural and eccentric marine
life forms” (Seriousness 43). Carpe Fin and Red both feature the water
as the predominant setting for the narrative, underscoring the con-
nection between the tree-based medium on which the stories are
printed, the water-driven ink that visually materializes the works,
and the narratives. Carpe Fin is the story of a seal-hunting expedition
that ultimately relegates the carpenter, Carpe, to the depths of the
sea, where supernatural creatures welcome him, and try to fit him
with his own fin, before stitching him into a sealskin and casting him
out. The final pages show the supernatural creatures rising in a wave
from the sea and joining the humans to share food. Red begins and
ends with the titular character’s sister Jaada on a dugout canoe on the
water. After Jaada is kidnapped by raiders, Red encounters the car-
penter on a rock in the middle of the sea. Red and the carpenter work
170 • C hapter 4
together to construct an artificial whale which they use to sail to the

land of the raiders.
Yahgulanaas reflects directly on the correlation between water
and Haida manga. His short piece The Wave (2014) links Haida manga
practice to the imbrication of land and water. In this work, Yahgula-
naas writes, “This paper is a wave. It is somewhere between the tree
it was and the possibilities that haven’t yet arrived.” Here, Yahgula-
naas literalizes the relationship between page and materiality while
weaving together the realms of representation and production. This
sentiment connects to the introduction for Carpe Fin (2019), which
describes how “the ragged edges of the temperate rainforest reach far
out onto an island in the western seas.” Land and sea are interwoven
in the language that denies their cartographic separation and estab-
22
lishes a new epistemology of place.
As this volume repeatedly shows, questions of place and origin
in comics are far more complex than they may seem: Are works asso-
ciated with the author’s or authors’ origins? With linguistic origins?
With material cultures? Yahgulanaas’s Haida manga is a manifold
technique of highlighting place-based encounters without sacrificing
the specificity of each place. His paratextual descriptions of the set-
tings of the stories weave land and sea as a continuous place, and the
term Haida manga similarly takes water as a meaningful site of place-
making. Yahgulanaas’s text in The Wave compels a reader’s awareness
of how the material substrate—drawn from trees—works with the
water-powered tool of the brush; even more, this framework impli-
cates publishers such as Douglas and McIntyre and Locarno Press—
both based in Canada—with their printers in China and South Korea.
Red and Carpe Fin are both printed in China and published by Doug-
las and McIntyre in British Columbia; The War of the Blink is printed
in South Korea and published by Locarno Press in BC. By attend-
ing to these connections, Yahgulanaas follows Goeman’s project of
“interrogat[ing] the use of historical and culturally situated spatial
epistemologies, geographic metaphors, and the realities they pro-
duce” (1) while remapping for the sake of spatial justice.
22. Christopher Green states, “By combining calligraphy’s expressive lines and
the narrative conventions of manga with the stylized figures of Haida crests and the
spatial ambiguity of Northwest Coast Native abstract painting and carving, Yahgu-
lanaas creates what he considers a pan-Pacific alternative to Western art and graphic
literature.”
The Panel and the Frameline
Yahgulanaas’s new epistemology—a form of border thinking—is

reflected not only in the terminology used to describe the work but
also in its formal attributes: most evidently, Red’s page design fea-
tures no orthogonal gridding and acts as a rebuke to colonial knowl-
edge systems and falsehoods about the emptiness of Indigenous
23
land. The role of the grid in the colonization of the Americas, as
an imaginary of space and as a form of control, has a long history of
scholarship (Johnson; Palmer; Brousseau; Siegert 97–120). Less well
theorized is the relation between the gridding of land and the grid-
ding of the comics page.
In The System of Comics, Thierry Groensteen describes the process
of drawing the comics or bande dessinée image as beginning with
the artist’s “almost necessary” (41, “presque nécessairement” 50) con-
24
struction of a mental or virtual frame (le cadre) for the image. Groen-
steen describes this first “appropriation of space” as quadrillage, or
“gridding” (41, 50). Thus, for Groensteen—as for most European and
US comics theorists—the grid is taken as a virtual and or technical
a priori for the visual appearance of comics. While he quotes Guy
Gauthier’s assertion that the preponderance of the rectangular frame
is intrinsically based on its status as a “pure product of the western
technocratic civilization, undoubtedly in association with the gen-
eral use of perspective, geometric rationality and the imperatives of
handling” (Gauthier 14, translation from Groensteen 47), Groensteen
offers two alternate motives. First, he proposes that the substrate of
the rectangular frame is itself rectangular, thus creating a mimetic,
homologous rapport between the rectangular page (book, magazine,
etc.) and the panel frame. Second, he offers that a rectangle is a shape
more capably placed into series (47, 57). According to Groensteen,
any panel shape other than a quadrilateral “presents a serious incon-
23. As Judith Ostrowitz writes, “Yahgulanaas is engaged with the illumination

of spaces that have previously been considered empty, both in a physical sense and
metaphorically. On one level, he connects his peopling of these voids with a denial
of the European legend that North America was ‘an empty space’ when it was first
encountered, because the realities of the so-called savages that inhabited this conti-
nent were ‘uncivilized’ and therefore negligible” (84).
24. See also Van Lier.
172 • C hapter 4
venience in obliging the neighboring panels to be contorted in order

25
to make space for the intrusion” (47).
Groensteen’s rationale and terminology reflect a Gramscian com-
mon sense, which also coincides with Mark Rifkin’s “settler com-
26
mon sense.” Thus modified, Antonio Gramsci’s “conception of the
world that is most widespread among the popular masses in a his-
torical period” (360) becomes “the ways the legal and political struc-
tures that enable nonnative access to Indigenous territories come to
be lived as given, as simply the unmarked, generic conditions of pos-
sibility for occupancy, association, history, and personhood” (Rifkin
27
xvi). As both Gramsci and Rifkin outline, shared values such as pri-
vate property or ownership of land are forms of domination and con-
trol that shape the materiality of daily life without explicitly indexing
their hegemonic influence nor their own etiology. For contemporary
comics studies, the grid appears normalized to the extent that it is
called “conventional” in the work of Benoît Peeters or “stereotypical”
(“Navigating” 1) by Neil Cohn, who goes on to stipulate that “the
most conventional layout of a comic page is a grid” (“Navigating”
28
3). When Groensteen describes the page in terms of convenience,
obligation, and intrusion, such a description reflects a widespread
belief system regarding space and appropriation. As he contends,
the page “express[es] a vision of the world founded on the notion of
order, on Cartesian logic, on rationality” (System 49). The grid, in this
commonsense view, forms the apotheosis for imagining the page.
In his conceptualization of the grid as a cultural technique, media
theorist Bernhard Siegert asks: “Can the expansion of Western culture
from the sixteenth to the twentieth century be described in terms of
a growing totalitarianism of the grid?” (98). Siegert notes that cartog-
raphers have used the grid as a way to order space since Ptolemy,
yet he marks the convergence of representational techniques of per-
25. Cf. Lefèvre: “The dominant frame model in Western art is a rectangle whose
base is greater than its height, but various other shapes can be used” (“Conquest”
229).
26. There is also a correlation to be drawn with de Certeau’s concept of “local
authority” (106).
27. It is no coincidence that Pascal Lefèvre titles his article describing the devel-
opment and continuity of the “four- and three-tier grid—the uniform waffle-iron
composition” as comics evolved “towards a greater degree of standardisation of
panel arrangements” (“Conquest” 252).
28. One can also see in Cohn’s offhand mention of “a grid’s similarity to text”
(“Navigating” 3) the development of what Angel Rama calls “the lettered city.”
spective and navigation by grid into “a common paradigm of image

29
construction and early modern colonial governmentality” (103).
Rather than the self-contained space of the Roman castrum under cen-
turiation, the colonial grid employed in the allotment of the Americas
combined features such as the infinite expandability of Hippoda-
mus’s early urban planning, with “the possibility of registering the
30
absent” (103). This ability to render land vacant was inextricable
from the form of the grid and its role in property.
As Hildegard Binder Johnson notes, the grid—as articulated in the
Seven Ranges Survey of 1785 and thereafter—is so constitutive of set-
tler common sense that “most Americans and Canadians accept the
survey system that so strongly affects their lives and perception of
the landscape in the same way that they accept a week of seven days,
a decimal numerical system, or an alphabet of twenty-six letters—
as natural, inevitable, or perhaps in some inscrutable way, divinely
ordained” (“Preface” n. pag.). The grid as a means of governmental-
ity and biopolitics—as when Foucault refers to the partitioning grid
“le quadriller litterallement” (Sécurité 11)—thus becomes an “inevi-
table” way of seeing, one that—as Siegert notes—creates an optics of
31
absence and presence based on colonial values. Goeman explains
that “the making of Indian land into territory required a colonial
restructuring of spaces at a variety of scales” wherein “Native bod-
ies . . . in relation to allotment . . . were conceived of as part of the
32
flora and fauna” (33). Little more than a century after the prolifera-
tion of allotment, in her seminal essay “Grids,” Rosalind Krauss cred-
its the grid with no less than “declaring the modernity of modern
art,” specifically through its antinatural capacity for “crowding out
the dimensions of the real and replacing them with the lateral spread
of a single surface” (50). As Krauss stipulates, “The grid is a way of
abrogating the claims of natural objects to have an order particular to
themselves” (50). Among these precedents, the epistemological con-
stellation between land, grids, and art coalesces.
29. Benedict Anderson similarly contends that the “late colonial state’s style of
thinking about its domain” is characterized as “a totalizing classificatory grid” (184).
30. Siegert notes the divergent aims but identical methodologies between the
gridding of South and North America (112).
31. Carlo Galli and Daniel Nemser similarly chart the “geometrization” of colo-
nial space (Galli 51; Nemser 31).
32. See also Nemser, esp. 25–64; Brousseau 142.
174 • C hapter 4
Yahgulanaas’s work creates a border-thinking response to the

hegemonic influence of the grid. While Siegert describes the settle-
ment fantasy of the grid as “the possibility of writing empty spaces,
that is, the ability to literally reserve a space for the unknown” (107),
Yahgulanaas notes the converse:
Someone asked me a question: “Why Haida manga?” And it was

a pushback against this notion of gutters, which reflects this false
idea that when settler populations fled the oppression of Europe and
were desperate to find something else, they imagined this place to
be empty because they needed it to be empty. So they had this term
called “terra nullius”—“the land is vacant.” So that their own story
was all that counted. Everything else had to be lesser than, it had to
be barbaric, it had to be modified, it had to be imagined to be less
than worthy. (“Guest Lecture”)
In this articulation of how his own practice extends between optic

and ideological approaches to the land and to the role of the grid or
gutters in comics studies, Yahgulanaas conceives of Haida manga as
a means by which to deconstruct the hegemonic force of the grid and
its correlate, the gutter. Comics studies, especially in the US following
Scott McCloud, has a long history of fetishizing the gutter as “host to
much of the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics”
33
(McCloud 66). Thus, the reader is posed as a master over absence,
invited to project their own imagined narrative in the space between
panels. Yahgulanaas draws the link between this form of projection
and that which segmented the land of the Americas according to a
form of gridding order itself linked so definitively to literary order by
Angel Rama (17–28).
Yahgulanaas’s works from A Tale of Two Shamans (2001) on expose
the narrowness of US and Franco-Belgian comics theory by construct-
ing pages with “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliber-
ate sequence” (McCloud 20), but without gutters. Instead, as Levell
describes, Yahgulanaas developed “an alternative comic idiom that
could accommodate the explosion of action and the multiplicity of
play between physical and metaphysical beings and realms that are
characteristic of Haida oral histories” (Seriousness 63) through the use
33. Cf. Baetens (“Une poetique”), who catalogs a number of different technical
relations between image, page, and gutter (or blanc intericonique).
of framelines. These curving, labile lines both segment pages into

sequence and draw images together into visual composition. Gray
contends that Yahgulanaas’s use of framelines to fill in the “gutter” of
the comics page “deconstructs the very concept of the comic border
in order to redefine nationhood in an Indigenous context and under-
score the imposed colonial border’s impact” (172). While Mauzé
describes the frameline as a “kind of visual metaphor or dialectic tool
to juxtapose a Haida vision of the world with Western ways of see-
ing, when it comes to space-time, or the connections between the peo-
ple in it and their relationship to the environment.”
Against the grid as an “abstract machine . . . that is nearly blind
34
and mute even as it makes others see and speak,” Yahgulanaas’s
framelines work as Mignolo’s “machine for intellectual decoloniza-
35
tion” (Local Histories 45). As Yahgulanaas has stated in talks and
in his short piece “In the Gutter” (2011), the whiteness of the gutter
suggests a vacuum or void of space-time in between the moments
of the panels (see figure 4.2). Using framelines instead provides “a
more honest way of looking at, depicting the world, by filling up the
time-space dividers and not pretending they’re white, empty vacant
spaces” (“Michael Yahgulanaas”), as colonizers did through the con-
cept of “terra nulius” [sic] (see figure 4.2). The frameline composition
also offers a “way of seeing, ‘reading,’ or experiencing art” (Levell,
Seriousness 82) that is distinct from both the expectations of paginal
segmentation in comics and manga and the codified study of Haida
formline composition.
Many readers (Spiers, Nodelman) have relied on McCloud’s insis-
tence that manga features more of what McCloud calls “aspect to
aspect transitions” between panels to interpret Yahgulanaas’s work
as manga. Yet McCloud’s entire system is predicated on the gutters
34. So Gilles Deleuze summarizes Foucault’s description of the diagramme

(directly related to the grid) in Surveiller et Punir: “C’est une machine abstraite . . .
presque muette et aveugle, bien que ce soit elle, qui fasse voir, et qui fasse parler”
(42).
35. This is not to suggest that Yahgulanaas’s work entirely avoids the grid. Yet
the grid is used only in the transposition or transmediation between mural and
codical formats: “Yahgulanaas designs the mural so it can be sliced into pages. He
starts with a small sketch, scans it and enlarges it, then creates a grid to map out the
pages” (Lederman). But he also calls this a “technical issue that I’m on the verge of
overcoming” (“Guest Lecture”) and notes: “I’m exploring Japanese scroll paper, a
mulberry paper, I want to do another one similar, but I want to do it on scroll paper
. . . so that I could fully eliminate the great white spaces.”
176 • C hapter 4
FIGURE 4.2. Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, “In the Gutter”
that Yahgulanaas radically undoes through his framelines. Similarly,

as discussed in chapter 2, Benoît Peeters’s Case, planche, récit—lire
la bande dessinée (1991), republished as Lire la bande dessinée in 2003,
established categories of page layout. Peeters schematizes four types
of page layout—conventional, decorative, rhetorical, or productive—
dependent on the preponderance of either the narrative (récit) or the
image (tableau). Analyzed using Peeters’s categorization, Red’s fra-
melines entail that every page in the book is “decorative,” privileg-
ing the tabular at the expense of the linear. This would mean that
each page in Red serves primarily as “an independent unit, whose
aesthetic organization trumps any other concern” (56; “Four Concep-
tions” par. 12)—that is, the story is drawn to accommodate the arch-
ing black patterns of the framelines.
However, the framelines in Red supersede decorative function
because they divide every page into panels, and they indicate and
structure the totalized image formed when all the pages of Red are
rearranged as a tableau (see figure 4.3). As a Haida artwork, Red’s
framelines produce an image of three interlocking figures (Spiers
42). Yet, as manga, the framelines designate the differences between
36
panels that allow a narrative to take place, making the pages irre-
solvably decorative and productive—whereby “it is the organization
of the page which seems to dictate the narrative” (66; “Four Con-
ceptions” par. 30)—dependent on the cultural system and material
format by which one is assessing the work. Red’s characters even
interact with the formlines, further complicating the question of their
role as decorative, extradiegetic, or diegetic elements. For example,
on page 1, Jaada, Red’s sister, grasps a formline that stands in for the
side of her boat, visible on the same page. On page 14 and elsewhere,
characters use formlines to climb, hold, or lean against. Spiers con-
tends, “Rather than the binary way in which Euro-American culture
often views the world, Red’s organic formline erases compartmental-
ization” (46). Yahgulanaas has stated that he uses framelines to dem-
onstrate other ways of seeing, and to break viewers out of traditional
boxes using new “space and time lines” (“Michael Yahgulanaas”).
The stipulated desire to use framelines to shake up reader expec-
tations and practices seems to have succeeded. Reviewing Red for
Multiversity Comics, Michelle White states: “The curved panel borders
make determining the order of events difficult; they also blend into
the art itself, making it hard to see where one panel ends and the
other begins.” Judith Saltman, writing for Jeunesse: Young People, Texts,
Cultures, ties the legibility of Yahgulanaas’s Red directly to consump-
tion practices: “Even for consumers familiar with the conventions of
comics and graphic novels, the sophisticated narrative sequencing
is a stimulating challenge in logic and intuition” (142). White’s and
Saltman’s expressed difficulty in reading Red exposes spatial naviga-
tion as a learned process, one inseparable from the epistemologies
implicated in its development. Johanna Drucker notes that when our
reading conventions become overly familiar, we fail to recognize both
36. As Spiers states, “Red reveals the importance of the formline to not only
Haida tradition but to narrative understanding as well” (46).
178 • C hapter 4
FIGURE 4.3. Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Red: A Haida Manga, full mural (above and facing)
their rhetorical and ideological dimensions, as well as the processes

by which we came to learn them (125), and Yahgulanaas states that
the framelines provide a challenge or a surprise for a reader at the
same time that they force the reader “to reflect on the connection of
external elements” to that which is within the panel (“Re: Academic
inquiry”). Thus, Haida manga, with its curving space and time lines,
may seem more difficult for some readers, but this difficulty draws
attention to the formal, disciplinary, and political conditions that
underscore reading graphic narrative as a cultural practice.
Even his distinction between the terms formline and frameline
reflects Yahgulanaas’s decolonial project. Formline is a term popu-
larized by American art historian Bill Holm, who wrote the now
seminal study Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form (1965).
Calling the terminology of “formline” both useful and “made up”
(Augaitis et al. 156), Yahgulanaas has used his art to critique Holm’s
“somewhat rigid set of criteria or canon that continues to burden the
production and evaluation of Native Northwest Coast art” (Levell,
Seriousness 41). In his artwork, Deconstruction of the Box (2003), Yah-
gulanaas plays with Holm’s schematic and hermeneutic approach

to “extract a meaning” from Haida art, finally undermining this
endeavor with a panel showing a “deconstructed” Haida formline
image of a bear shot for sport in disregard of its place in the larger
signifying system (Yahgulanaas, “Academic inquiry”).
Quibbling over artistic terminology may seem like highbrow
navel-gazing, yet the issue at stake in the distinction between form-
line and frameline goes well beyond the interchangeability of
three vowels. Holm’s study of Haida artwork reflects widespread
approaches to Indigenous cultural techniques whereby the situated
knowledge of the practitioners is discounted and dismissed in favor
of colonial knowledge systems. It is worth quoting Holm’s preface, in
which he qualifies his book’s sources:
Ideally, a study of this sort should lean heavily on information from

Indian artists trained in the tradition that fostered the art. Unfortu-
nately, I was unable to locate a qualified informant from the area
covered, i.e., the coastal region from Bella Coola to Yakutat Bay.
180 • C hapter 4
That there may be some still living is not questioned, but contempo-
rary work seen from the area reveals a lack of understanding by Indian
craftsmen of the principles that are the subject of this study. (xxvi–
xxvii, emphasis added)
Holm’s analysis thus abstracts the knowledge of artistic practice

from the practice itself, and disallows Indigenous understanding of
Indigenous art. Much like Peeters, Holm creates a taxonomic system
for describing layout based on how images fill space, according to
“configurative,” “expansive,” or “distributive” design principles (12),
manufacturing classification as a way to extract the study and mas-
tery of Haida art from the “Indian craftsmen” who produce it.
In Holm’s taxonomy, images are delineated by black formlines: “A
formline is the characteristic swelling and diminishing linelike figure
delineating design units. These formlines merge and divide to make
a continuous flowing grid over the whole decorated area, establish-
ing the principal forms of the design” (29). Holm’s invocation of the
grid in his schematization of formline use and development implic-
itly marks his Eurocentric approach to space in art, wherein an artist
approaches any project according to a perception of “total space” and
with the requisite need to “to control the shape of the ground or neg-
ative space” (67). Even in the curvilinear design of formlines (which
he distinguishes from “true lines”), Holm perceives a grid describing
all potential space. The formline grid creates the a priori condition for
extraction and compartmentalization as well as expansion and exten-
sion required for Holm’s analytical framework.
Yahgulanaas renounces this tendency toward both abstraction and
totalization in his theory and art. His development of a counter term
for formline reflects the dynamic process of his art wherein “there is
no prescriptive interpretation” (Levell, Seriousness 83). Yahgulanaas
calls his lines framelines because “formlines suggest an all knowing
ability. We see the form suggesting full understanding of the object. i
use the term frameline- it suggests a way into something else- a door/
37
window/entrance” (“Re: Academic inquiry”). In direct opposition to
the dual centrifugal and centripetal readings Krauss ascribes to the
grid (60 et passim), Yahgulanaas presents a third dimension for his
compositions: rather than demarcating flat space into segments, he
imagines the frameline as a matrical entrance to other spaces.
37. See also Bernardin 492; Levell, Seriousness 83; Green.

Yahgulanaas’s framelines visually enact his antigrid, multi

dimensional approach to the space of the page. Beyond the rumina-
tions in “The Wave,” framelines routinely interact with the diegesis,
intervening in perspectival conventions of foreground and back-
ground or form and content. In War of the Blink (2017), tops of totem
poles flow outward and become black framelines which themselves
become canoes and then the surface of the water on which the char-
acter Gunee’s canoe sails. At one point the lines even become Gunee
himself, filling in his eyebrow and extending around his head, creat-
ing the brim of his hat. At other points, framelines become splash-
ing waves, denying Holm’s strict division between symbolic and
representative art. In Red, formlines make the edges of the whale
ship that Red commissions the carpenter to build. When this ship is
imperiled—when it runs aground or when it is deconstructed so as
to rapidly surface—the framelines are drawn in crumbling pieces,
sometimes with sound effects (“Snap” on page 83) written on the
lines themselves (see figure 4.4). When Red decides to commit sui-
cide after killing his brother-in-law and destabilizing his community,
the great bow he uses is itself a frameline (102–3). Spiers reads this
use of linework as a commentary on the connection of Haida art to
the environment and the porousness of boundaries. The connections
between frames and “content” blur the distinctions between human
actors and environment, while the narrative stresses the responsibil-
38
ity that humans have for maintaining balance with these frames.
At the level of the page, framelines expose the oft-overlooked
techniques of the observer by challenging the naturalization of grid-
ding and z-path reading practices, yet the framelines go beyond the
page. Red, War of the Blink, and Carpe Fin are “books” that are them-
selves deconstructed murals—or vice versa—and each work has a life
as an installation as well as a commodity object. War of the Blink and
Red were displayed at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2006 and 2009,
respectively; Carpe Fin was commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum
and has hung there since 2018. The book versions of these works
include (as an image at the back of the book or a reverse print on
the book jacket) a miniature print of the mural version of the works,
in which the fluid framelines create continuous shapes and figures.
As Perry Nodelman contends, these works, as double museum instal-
38. My students have repeatedly interpreted Red as a cautionary tale about what
happens when you try to overpower your environment and wind up destroying it
in the process.
182 • C hapter 4
FIGURE 4.4. Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Red: A Haida Manga, page 83
lation and mechanically reproduced codex, implicate and frustrate

expectations and reading strategies associated respectively with art
and literature (192).
Haida Manga as Art Object
Within comics studies, the tension between the book and other for-
mats of comics composition has been a central point of theory since
at least Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle’s seminal article “Du linéaire au
tabulaire” (1976). In a translated version of the article, “From Linear
to Tabular,” Fresnault-Deruelle explains how the comic strip is often
thought of in “metonymic” relation to the comics page; however, the
distinct reading protocols instantiated by both the strip and the full
page, as a component of magazine or book-length comics, entail a
conflict between temporal and spatial dimensions, so that the linear

and tabular reading practices are “bound up in a dialectic of conti-
nuity versus discontinuity” (121; cf. Baetens and Frey, Graphic Novel
105). Similarly, Charles Hatfield echoes this Gérard Genette–inspired
attention to the “peritexte” by elaborating on the tension between
“text as experience and text as object,” wherein the diachronic comic
is always in dynamic situation to its materiality, which “includes not
only the design or layout of the page but also the physical makeup of
the text, including its size, shape, binding, paper, and printing” (58).
Thus, the doubling between the mural and book versions of Red, War
of the Blink, and Carpe Fin both extend and wholly deconstruct the
role of the book in relation to comics or graphic narrative.
The problematic set out by Fresnault-Deruelle, Hatfield, and
Harry Morgan—among others—regarding the study of what Mor-
gan calls “codexité” (61)—and which may also be thought under the
rubric of Jessica Pressman’s “bookishness”—departs from what we
might expect to be its usual parameters in Yahgulanaas’s work. As
discussed in chapter 1, the introduction of the book or album was, for
comics, a way of asserting the lasting value of otherwise lowbrow,
ephemeral matter printed in newspapers, floppies, and magazines. In
a full reversal of this formula, Yahgulanaas’s mural-to-book transfer
upends the high–low trajectory, reproducing a Benjaminian model of
the work of art in the age of its mechanical reproducibility. As Yah-
gulanaas stated in an interview about Carpe Fin, “not everyone can
get to the museum. Everyone can access the book” (Loik). And yet,
even if one accepts the inversion here—comics normally become
more highbrow and artlike through their inclination toward codexité,
while Yahgulanaas’s work as originally museal art diminishes in its
book form—as an Indigenous artist, Yahgulanaas is hardly represen-
tative of standard museum valuation.
The situation of Indigenous art in the museum is never not a
contentious issue, owing to the museum’s origin in colonial looting
(Azoulay; Onciul 4) as well as the continuous relegation of Indig-
enous art to either anthropology or history museums rather than
39
fine or contemporary art museums. A 2018 New York Times article
described “the representation of Native artists” in US museums as
“a trickle” (Loos). For reference, Yahgulanaas is, at the time of this
39. Levell, in “Site-Specificity,” provides a concise overview of the “art/artefact
debate” as it has inflected museology (94). See also Collison et al.’s Indigenous Repa-
triation Handbook.
184 • C hapter 4
writing, one of only four Indigenous artists featured in the Metropoli-

tan Museum of Art’s modern and contemporary collection (Green).
The museum as a particular archival practice and the work of art as
its material are inextricable from historical practices of colonial sub-
jection. The museum is historically linked to what Glen Coulthard
(Dene) describes as “the production of the specific modes of colo-
nial thought, desire, and behavior that implicitly or explicitly com-
mit the colonized to the types of practices and subject positions that
are required for their continued domination” (16). We have consid-
ered how Yahgulanaas’s works intervene in this colonial subjectiva-
tion at the levels of terminology and form; they also do so at the level
of materiality.
Therefore, as Levell stresses in her study of Yahgulanaas’s
museum installation Peddle to the Meddle (2007), his compositions
are “indigenized artworks that are generated as a site-specific form
of institutional critique but later dislocated, mobilized and rearticu-
lated in other disciplinary spaces” (“Site-Specificity” 93). Yahgula-
naas’s murals trouble normative discourses and classificatory logics
that inform the consumption of visual texts. They disrupt display
techniques, creating museal works that invite reading. Yet, in their
installation forms, they do not include the text in word balloons or
narrative boxes to facilitate the reading. By circulating as books at
the same time, they challenge the sovereignty of art spaces. As Yah-
gulanaas has stated, “What I like about a book is you have complete
authority over the story. You are the master . . . you can take this
book home, the sacred text, and if you have two copies you can create
your own monumental piece of Haida artwork” (“Michael Yahgula-
naas”); thus, the singularity of the museum installation is disrupted
by its reproducibility.
Yahgulanaas’s murals cum books radically remap the reading
spaces of graphic narrative. If comics are already understood as a
hybrid of words and images, Yahgulanaas’s works compel an even
more historically and culturally located inquiry beyond the conceptu-
alization of meaningful gaps between panels and “the often disjunc-
tive back-and-forth of reading and looking for meaning” through the
verbal-visual combination (Chute, “Comics as Literature?” 452). Red,
War of the Blink, and Carpe Fin problematize this formal conception
of graphic narrative by insisting on the material and locative compo-
nents of these gaps and disjunctures. They likewise introduce mate-
rial techniques and objects to resist and reimagine both the artwork
and the book as they have been developed as tools for imperial domi-
nation and Indigenous suppression.
Haida Manga as Codex
At the levels of both the page and the book, Haida manga decon-
structs the political and ideological values involved in navigating the
spaces of comics. To take one example, Red multiplies the linear and
tabular dimensions through its double construction as art object and
book. Red is at once a full mural, which one may read according to
methods of interpreting Haida formline composition, but which also
circulates outside of the museum: as Yahgulanaas notes, “My conver-
sation as an artist uses publications to talk with a lot of people, not
just those who have money to buy an expensive commodity that rein-
forces what they think I should be” (Augaitis et al. 164). On the other
hand, Red is sold as a book, with pages that are oriented according to
the tradition of the codex. Each page has its own linear framework,
but the note at the conclusion of the book specifically instructs the
reader to “rip the pages out of their bindings. . . . and using the pages
from two copies of this book . . . reconstruct this work of art” (109).
Once fully replaced in their order as the Haida “complex of images,”
the relationship of linear to tabular shifts again. As Yahgulanaas con-
tends, the double-reading of Red “will defy your ability to experience
story as a simple progression of events” (109). Moreover, the double-
materiality defies a reader’s ability to experience a book as a simple
object, and in doing so highlights the bound book’s own history, its
colonial significance, and the role it has played in simplifying the
complex stories of Indigenous experience.
Yahgulanaas is acutely aware of how market considerations have
determined and delimited possibilities for conceptualizing Indig-
enous art, and he conversely understands the formal constraints of
the codex:
I encourage people to make observations and choices arising from

their own experience without relying on the authority of the artist.
By extension, I’m asking that people reconsider their place in the
group . . . Converting a five-metre mural into a book was a game of
scale. Monumental in one manifestation, it becomes accessible to the
reader who holds it in their hands. The reader is free to direct pace
186 • C hapter 4
and even narrative direction. If they want to go backward, they can

. . . as much as I say, “Yes, destroy the book,” I really say, “Recon-
struct it.” I wonder, Why are books sacred? Are people sacred? Can we
really still afford to agree that ideology is more sacred than people?
(Sostar McClellan 39)
In the case of Red, transitioning from a 5 by 1.5 meter watercolor

work to a 108-page book is a form of reconstruction beyond the lim-
its of the work itself. The codex/mural dichotomy is itself undone
and renegotiated through the interconnectivity of the works and
their constraints.
The codex, as Yahgulanaas’s questions proclaim, has its own
fraught history both in the realm of Western epistemology and in
40
North American Indigeneity. As well attested, the codex as a mate-
rial form was inextricable from the spread of Christianity throughout
the Roman Empire and eventually beyond. By the third century, in
the sphere of the Roman Empire, the codex had the same popularity
for literary use as the book roll, which it would eventually supplant.
Yahgulanaas’s questioning of the sacredness of books highlights the
nonsecular origins and popularization of what would serve as the
material basis for seemingly secular epistemology, its archiving, ped-
agogical use, and circulation.
The religious introduction of the codex is no secret to Indigenous
and colonized peoples worldwide, for whom “the book” directly sig-
nified the Bible as a technology of ideological discipline and control.
As Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux) glibly notes, when colo-
nial settlers “arrived they had only the Book and we had the land;
now we have the Book and they have the land” (101). However, the
book has also been recognized as a tool for Indigenous sovereignty.
Indigenous literary production is a meaningful site of negotiation,
with some scholars advocating for the subversion and reconstruc-
tion of the book by Indigenous authors, and others advocating for a
reconceptualization of “the book” outside the Christian codical tra-
dition. Phillip Round notes how the book was mobilized by Native
authors, as it provided them “a much-needed weapon in their bat-
tles against relocation, allotment, and cultural erasure” (5). Louise
40. Colin H. Roberts and T. C. Skeat’s The Birth of the Codex is still considered the
seminal study of the Christian codex; see also Harris, “Codex”; Skeat; Meyer; Innis
131–32; cf. Bagnall; Harnett.
Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) claims that books have a long

history in the material culture of the Americas. In her text Books and
Islands in Ojibwe Country, she asserts that “people have probably been
writing books in North America since at least 2000 B.C.” (13). Fur-
thermore, Susan Bernardin directly connects Erdrich’s concept of the
book’s lineage in non-alphabetic, visual language to Yahgulanaas’s
Haida manga and “the moving practice of Indigenous literary arts”
(492). These claims regarding the radical potential of Indigenous liter-
ary production reinforce how Yahgulanaas’s works remap the book
in both cultural and material ways.
Culturally, Yahgulanaas’s Haida manga challenge how such
books are recognized and consumed, while materially, the books
destabilize the codex as a consumable object. Gray contends that the
mural form of Red can be recreated by “any reader with two copies of
the comic, disrupting the border between the accessible art of comics
and the refined viewing space of a fine art gallery” (182). Yet I con-
tend that a reader recreates the mural only insofar as Red completely
remaps the place of the work of art despite its peripatetic or reme-
diated installations. The mural, as a museum installation, recalls all
the Bejaminian discussions of aura, but perhaps, most importantly,
it is not a book. The book, Red, is necessarily a form that circulates
outside the museum space, as portable copy. As Chute notes, “The
medium of comics was marked from the beginning by its commodity
status” (“Comics as Literature?” 455), and the high-art/low-art divide
is intrinsic to the North American cultural history of these objects.
Thus, the challenge that Red, War of the Blink, and Carpe Fin pose
to hegemonic systems of artistic and literary valuation is directed at
rethinking the place of art and the book as a commodity object. For
example, for the reader to recreate the nonmuseal version of Red,
one must purchase two books. The linear containment of the narra-
tive is then denied by its doubling. With two Reds, where does the
story begin or end? What’s more, the stability of the codex, as a read-
ing device, is threatened by its deconstruction into nonbook form.
In order to create the Haida tableau, a reader irrevocably changes
how the story takes space. A new module of tabularity materializes
through the destruction of the previous module. Red, War of the Blink,
and Carpe Fin’s propositions serve to fundamentally displace the sta-
bility of the book as a commodity form and to provide a challenge to
the literary consumer. The long association of comics and collecting
188 • C hapter 4
leads to an aporia: the reader cannot possess both the manga and the
mural as commodity objects at the same time; one can only possess
their virtual duplication.
From the terminology to the page layout to the materiality of the
work, Yahgulanaas’s Haida manga (re)map space by mobilizing local
histories for the deconstruction of global designs. Comics, panels, gut-
ters, murals, books are but some of the terms and concepts put under
scrutiny through Yahgulanaas’s narratives. These works compel a
reader to contend with the latent ideologies and ossified concepts
of art and literature. This remapping project is especially evident in
Yahgulanaas’s use of framelines for the production of visual narra-
tive. Goeman insists on the literary as an essential channel for
the “imaginative” creation of new possibilities, which must happen

through imaginative modes precisely because the “real” of settler
colonial society is built on the violent erasures of alternative modes
of mapping and geographic understandings. The Americas as a
social, economic, political, and inherently spatial construction has a
history and a relationship to people who have lived here long before
Europeans arrived. It also has a history of colonization, imperialism,
and nation-building. (2)
By using graphic narrative in innovative ways, Yahgulanaas imag-

ines the epistemology of place, art, and story otherwise. He remaps
the space of graphic narrative by implicating the role of water in the
mediation of culture and cultural production. He counters the grid as
the underlying logic of graphic narrative. Haida manga reasserts the
materiality of art and literature: the page is not merely an insignifi-
cant vessel; it is a physical space of construction, navigation, conten-
tion, and negotiation.
C H A P T E R 5
SAMANDAL
AND TRANSLATIONAL
TRANSNATIONALISM
Verbal, Visual, Amphibious
How do you make “comics” if no such word exists in your language?

This question directly addresses ongoing issues of untranslatability
and inequality in world comics. In an early interview describing the
development of the Lebanese comics magazine Samandal, its found-
ers explained the title’s relation to the contents: just as the magazine
printed pages between image and text, so was the Arabic word for
salamander a reference to in-between-ness, a creature between land
and water. When the interviewer asked why Samandal’s subtitle is
“Picture Stories,” co-founder Hatem Imam replied, “There’s no one
1
word for comics in Arabic!” Whereupon co-founder the fdz inter-
jected, “But we’re kind of trying to change that” (Azimi). This chapter
focuses on the Lebanese comics magazine Samandal, in its object-
specific permutations and alongside comparator works. In its first
fifteen issues, Samandal published in a unique, trilingual format that
entailed flipping each issue at various points in the reading. Without
a dominant reading orientation, issues of Samandal offered experi-
mental ways to frame cultural and linguistic diversity.
1. Cf. di Ricco 200.
189
190 • C hapter 5
However, in the years since Samandal began publishing in 2007, its

very existence as a publication has come under threat due to charges
brought by the Lebanese government against three of its editors. In
2010 Lebanese organization the Catholic Media Center objected to two
stories published in Samandal 7, the “Revenge” (“Revanche”) issue,
charging Samandal with (a) inciting sectarian strife, (b) denigrating
religion, (c) publishing false news, and (d) defamation and slander
(Dueben, “Interview”). After a five-year trial, the magazine was fined
30 million Lebanese liras (the equivalent of about $20,000) (Lu). Fol-
lowing this decision and a crowd-funding push to secure the future of
Samandal, the editors determined that they would change the format
of the magazine. From 2007 to 2013 and for fifteen issues, Samandal
was a quarterly based on open calls and edited by committee. In 2014
it became a yearly publication under the direction of a single editor.
As the collective states, the shift “presupposes a subjective choice of
editorial direction (according to a theme or not), authors, working
methods and printing” (Samandal, “Mission”). In 2014 Barrack Rima
edited the Généalogie volume; in 2015 Joseph Kai edited the Géographie
volume; in 2016 Lena Merhej edited Ça restera entre nous (the sexuality
volume); in 2017 Raphaëlle Macaron edited the Topie volume on uto-
pia; and in 2018 the Experimentation volume (edited by Alex Baladi)
was published. The revived Samandal #16, signaling the return to an
open-call submissions format, had its release party in early 2020.
According to a framework of reading for difference, the vicissitudes
of Samandal’s format reveal world comics as an emergent field of objects
whereby context, contingencies, and politics inflect subjective and col-
lective choices in comics formation. This chapter traces how Saman-
dal as an organization and a publication worlds or opens and delimits
spaces for subjectivity, for expression, and for political life. Examining
world comics as a site of collaboratory potential, I focus my analysis
on the format(s) of Samandal, elucidating how they model a concep-
tualization of comics that resists discrete, nationalized cartographies.
The World, the Globe, and the Comic
Samandal was founded by Hatem Imam, Omar Khouri, Lena Mer-

2
hej, the fdz (Fadi Baki), and Tarek Naba’a. Begun in 2007, Saman-
2. Owing to idiosyncrasies in transliteration, many of these names appear in
variations (e.g., Omar Khoury, The Fdz, Tarek Tabaa are all listed on Samandal’s
website); I use the spellings listed in the first issue of the journal.
S A M A N D A L A N D T R A N S L AT I O N A L T R A N S N AT I O N A L I S M • 191
dal credits itself with being “the first trilingual, amphibious comics
magazine open to submissions issued in the Middle East.” As glossed
above, the amphibious element refers to its situation between worlds
of word/image, high/low, and traditional and experimental. Based in
Beirut, Samandal prints stories in Arabic, French, and English. As its
mission statement stipulates: “Our publications are read in several
languages, from right to left as from left to right and always with lay-
out translations in several ways” (Samandal, “Mission”). This claim
to layout translations is at the center of Samandal’s ability to reorient
comics readers and challenge normative ideas about what comics are
or can be.
The mission statement’s invocation of layout translations is more
than a reference to changing formats, which occurred when Saman-
dal switched from small trim quarterly issues to larger annuals after
issue 15, and again in 2020 when issue 16 heralded the original for-
mat’s “comeback” [Samandal, “#16 (2019)”]. Beyond the size and
shape, the form within the magazine is also translational. As a trilin-
gual publication, Samandal uses what I would deem—with all admi-
ration—a motley layout. Issues employ “flip pages” to alert readers
when to rotate the magazine between a left-to-right French or English
entry and a right-to-left Arabic entry. Some of the pieces published
have no words, leaving a reader to attempt to discern the proper ori-
entation either diegetically or from the context of the adjacent stories.
Between and among issues, entries vary in length and narrative cohe-
sion. Some stories are ongoing, such as Fouad Mezher’s series, “The
Educator,” or Hachem Raslan’s “John Doe”; other entries or vignettes
amount to a single page, such as Matei Branea’s “Bus” in issue 9.
The page length of each issue varies to the extent that the notorious
“Revenge” issue 7 was over 300 pages, whereas issue 13, the “Space-
Time” issue, is barely eighty pages. Furthermore, the styles and lay-
outs of comics vary considerably within a single issue according to
the wide range of artists involved.
Samandal’s heterogeneous collective model for publishing reflects
its situation relative to the major centers of comics production. In his
extensive study of urban comics, Dominic Davies highlights the value
of “collaborative artistic networks” (Urban Comics 177) to a number
of comics magazines produced and circulated outside the Europe–
Japan–North America aggregation. While such networks have also
informed production in the “big three” regions, Davies recognizes
Samandal’s correlates in groups like Egypt’s Tok Tok, and India’s
Pao Collective, as all three operate in urban centers (Beirut, Cairo,
192 • C hapter 5
and Delhi, respectively) in ways that might be better understood as

“networked urban social movement[s]” that “rewir[e] the otherwise
discriminatory infrastructures of [emerging global cities]” (178–80).
Davies’s characterization of Beirut, Cairo, and Delhi as “emerging”
cities gestures toward the temporal and geographic inequalities of
globalization as it economically delineates centers of production, val-
uation, and power.
Emergence and the global are terms frequently conceptualized in
opposition or dynamic tension relative to each other. Trying to inau-
gurate comics production outside established circuits of power and
finance requires imagining possibilities beyond those already delin-
eated in the US, Europe, and Japan. Davies understands “emerging”
as a synonym for “aspiring” (22) in the “context of the South’s aspir-
ing ‘global’ cities” (20), thus situating Samandal within a particular
group of “postcolonial” areas that have yet to realize their globality
3
according to standards established in the North. In Saskia Sassen’s
formative model of “global cities,” the unique “combination of spa-
tial dispersal and global integration” (Global City 3) that took place
in the late twentieth century produced a new type of city. Focusing
on New York, London, and Tokyo, Sassen contends that global cities
destabilize national boundaries as nodes in global flows of informa-
4
tion and capital. However, Sassen notes widening inequalities and
internal divisions within these cities, or what Stephen Graham and
Simon Marvin dub “splintering urbanism.” Global cities thus herald
bivalent spatial vectors of increased accumulation of global capital
and increased internal wealth disparity. While the networked infra-
structures and urban conditions of globalization might seem to her-
ald greater transnational comics production, such development is
sporadic and often championed as a sign of growing transnational
exchange without consideration of extant and emergent barriers.
3. As Doreen Massey phrases this critique, “they are developing, we are devel-
oped” (23).
4. A number of theorists, resistant to the seemingly neo-imperial implications
of centering globalization according to how a few privileged cities determine global
processes, have suggested a terminological shift from global cities to globalizing cit-
ies. As Brenda Yeoh argues, “The global city concept is often used not so much
as an analytical tool but as a ‘status’ yardstick to measure cities in terms of their
global economic linkages, to locate their place in a hierarchy of nested cities and to
assess their potential to join the superleague” (608). Furthermore, Ayșe Öncü and
Petra Weyland assert that “globalizing cities” is a way to acknowledge “other cit-
ies” in “other places” (2).
5
Conceptualizing cities as postnational, depoliticized spaces of con-
nectivity occludes how the concurrent proliferation of borders and
differences established through mechanisms of privatization and
state power affect localized urban cultures.
Thus, Samandal’s founders explain that their own censorship was
surprising to those outside the area, based on the view of Lebanon,
and Beirut in particular, as a liberal area with a free press. Founder
the fdz explains this as a sort of aspirational view that is only true in
comparison to “neighboring countries in the region,” while Khouri
adds:
This image of Lebanon as a liberal place (not just for the press, but
also socially) is publicly exaggerated because the country’s economy
is based on tourism. Being the only “liberal” island in a sea of sur-
rounding conservative countries brings all the big spenders here.
(Dueben, “Interview”).
As Samandal’s founders express, liberalism—in both its political and

economic expressions—presupposes a level playing field, but Khouri
asserts that this level playing field is merely illusory in the context of
globalization. Values in “common” are assumed as such according
to Western ideals, and “appearances” do not always represent dif-
ferences. From a visual studies standpoint, Nick Mirzoeff and others
have gestured toward the ways in which
global cities may present themselves as transparent hubs of friction-

less commerce, but their residents often experience them as con-
flicted, dangerous, and even haunted. These are the places from
which we have to see the world today and where we learn how to
see. (How to See 166)
Yet because the global city’s model for seeing the world is a learned
process, it is also one that can be unlearned. Comics possess uniquely
salient formal techniques for representing and contesting the global
city as a visual concept.
Given the anomalous architectures of comics, their spatial prac-
tices, and their juxtaposition of scale, the formal parameters of comics
have the potential to visually interrogate the simultaneous growth of
5. See Apter, Against World Literature 42.

194 • C hapter 5
the global city as spectacle and of the internal divisions within. Jörn
Ahrens and Arno Meteling claim that “comics are inseparably tied to
the notion of ‘the city’” (4), while Davies specifies that “it is the form
of graphic narrative that enables its analysis of infrastructural vio-
lence, phenomena that starkly define the urban condition of the con-
temporary global city” (Urban Comics 16). Davies adumbrates how
the comics form is generally tied to the “infrastructural production of
discriminatory urban environments, while simultaneously suggesting
alternative—and if informal, often common—modes of urban habita-
tion and public reconstruction” (16). The claim that comics enable an
alternative visualization of urban space is especially freighted with
import in the conceptualization of the global city, of which feminist
geographer Doreen Massey has grimly stated, “contemporaneous
multiplicities of space are denied, and ‘history’ is reduced to the sin-
gle linearity of ‘there is no alternative’” (23). Davies argues that the
comics in Samandal’s magazines “represent Beirut’s divided urban
spaces in order both to challenge and reconstruct them” (247), laying
conditions “for the future development of more socially and spatially
just urban practices” (254). By intervening in the visual production
of space, comics likewise intervene in the visual distinction between
world and globe, and between worlding and globalizing.
While Sassen distinguishes global cities from world cities based
on historicity—the global as a new phenomenon, the world as a type
of urban center dating to Goethe (“Global City” 28)—Aihwa Ong dis-
tinguishes globalizing and worlding as practices whereby
worlding in this sense is linked to the idea of emergence, to the

claims that global situations are always in formation. Worlding proj-
ects remap relationships of power at different scales and localities,
but they seem to form a critical mass in urban centers, making cities
both critical sites in which to inquire into worlding projects, as well
as the ongoing result and target of specific worldings. (12)
Following Davies’s characterization of how Beirut—like Cairo and

Delhi—is segmented into privatized spaces for neoliberal exchange,
Ong’s distinction allows us to conceptualize how Samandal resists
this privatization and provides a counterhegemonic response. Read-
ing Samandal as a worlding project is a way to remap “world com-
ics” against established hierarchies of power and space. Samandal’s
travels through time and across distance map emergent articulations
of the global, not necessarily in Davies’s sense of aspiring for global-
ity but rather in Ong’s sense of reimagining what such a globality

would look like. The scales of Samandal’s map vary from the local alt-
scene in twenty-first-century Beirut, to the linguistic-regional context
of comics in Arabic, to the global affiliations, alliances, and influences
that describe Samandal within broader economies of comics. This map
similarly folds and unfolds at the level of the page, where it mobi-
lizes productive tensions both familiar and novel. Samandal attests to
the emergence of global situations at multiple levels: the commercial,
the authorial, the linguistic, the formal, and the aesthetic.
Commercialism: Comics in Common
Samandal’s founding ethic and distribution practice is made evident

through the licensing of the work under Creative Commons. Cre-
ative Commons, in this instance, serves as a critical response both to
capitalist overdetermination of artistic production and to the prob-
lematic nationalism espoused under global copyright mandates such
as the Berne Convention. Creative Commons arose as a response
to the increasingly oligopolistic monopolization of media, and the
concomitant lack of access to creative works: “Creative Commons
thus emerged as a counterpoint to open-ended copyright pushed
by commercially successful creators and large media corporations”
(Garcelon 1309). Publishing under a Creative Commons license is a
testament to the sort of creative sharing and distribution that Saman-
dal enacts. Writing about the benefits that it offers, Creative Com-
mons senior counsel Sarah Hinchliff Pearson asserts:
Endeavors that are made with Creative Commons thrive when com-
munity is built around what they do. This may mean a community
collaborating together to create something new, or it may simply be
a collection of like-minded people who get to know each other and
rally around common interests or beliefs. To a certain extent, simply
being made with Creative Commons automatically brings with it
some element of community, by helping connect you to like-minded
others who recognize and are drawn to the values symbolized by
using CC. (Stacey and Pearson 33)
As an organization, Creative Commons is also cognizant of the risk of

replicating US imperial practices with regard to legal infrastructure,
as former CTO Mike Linskvayer notes: “Just in terms of messaging,
196 • C hapter 5
if our default licenses are based on US law, then we’re just a lackey
for the United States . . . which is just bad overall” (qtd. in Garcelon
1318). Samandal’s publication ethos—as represented by the Creative
Commons license—demonstrates resistance to publishing practices,
even those within Lebanon, that reproduce hegemonic and neoliberal
conceptualizations of intellectual property as well as the infrastruc-
6
tures of copyright practices based on such ideology.
Lebanon joined the Berne Convention in 1947 and only enacted its
own national copyright law in 1999 (“Copyright and Permissions”).
As one of the earliest attempts to regulate international copyright
and intellectual property rights, the Berne Convention, which began
in 1886, describes a set of rights dependent on a convoluted defini-
tion of “country of origin.” While the convention was predicated on
the need for copyrights to extend beyond the country of origin, this
concept—delineated in Article 5 of the Convention—is at once anath-
ema to Samandal’s international collaboratory and problematic for its
imperial underpinnings. The Berne Convention’s fundamental pur-
pose is the establishment of a “union” of countries that would uphold
the worldwide “protection of the rights of authors in their literary
and artistic works” (World Intellectual Property Organization). How-
ever, the rules and regulations of ownership are determined by Euro-
pean ideals of creativity, property, and authorship. Further, country
of origin is always determined by country of publication, with works
published in both Union and non-Union countries defaulting to the
Union.
From an example of ongoing cultural imperialism such as the
Berne Convention, one can surmise how even the seemingly liberal
conception of transnational exchanges of cultural objects reproduces
systems of power and greater inequities of cultural wealth and dis-
tribution. Further, attention to precedents in transnational copyright
illuminates the resistance in Samandal’s publishing approach. For
example, Samandal’s “some rights reserved” publishing model stands
in stark contrast to the excessive litigiousness of Moulinsart. Two
antipolar approaches to local and global comics production are delin-
eated: on the one hand, Moulinsart is invested in shoring up as prop-
erty any and all Tintin reproductions as a way to consolidate power
6. Samandal’s use of the Creative Commons license preceded the establishment,

in 2010, of the Lebanese Creative Commons Chapter. In an article heralding the
event, Lebanese NGO Social Media Exchange (SMEX) listed six “well-known exam-
ples” of CC licenses already in existence, with Samandal as one of the six (“Lebanon
Launches”).
in the hands of a few Europeans. On the other hand, Samandal’s col-

lective founders espouse the necessity of expanding the influence of
comics published in the Middle East by “open[ing] them up” to read-
ers elsewhere as a form of creative conversation and co-action. In a
Creative Commons grant submitted in 2010, the fdz describes Saman-
dal as “a non-governmental organization dedicated to the prolifera-
tion of comic art production in the Arab region” but laments that the
current distribution of Samandal comics is limited by its print condi-
tion. The grant would allow for a website whereby Samandal com-
ics would be translated into three languages and published online,
“thus creating a hub were [sic] comic book readers from everywhere
can read, share, critique and remix the works.” The proposal imag-
ines a network for Arab comics that would “bridge the localized com-
ics scene” and “connect an emerging genre with the comics medium
worldwide, encouraging exposure, feedback and exchange” (Saman-
dal Organization for Comics). Advocating for a comics practice in
which ownership is not limited to publishers but instead articulated
through relationships among artists, readers, translators, and remix-
ers, Samandal’s grant is a mode of worlding that imagines comics as a
form of community-building and collaboration.
Samandal’s acute attention to the co-determination of local condi-
tions and global networks is evident in its publisher collaborations
as well. While all of Samandal has been published under a Creative
Commons license, the first four issues were published through xan-
adu*, itself founded as “a non-profit art collective” (El Khalil). Begun
in 2003 by Zena El Khalil, a Lebanese expatriate living in New York,
xanadu* was founded as a response to the 9/11 attacks. As an “ungal-
lery space” in New York, xanadu* featured work from Arab art-
ists “during a time of extreme xenophobia in NYC” (El Khalil). El
Khalil imagined xanadu* as a way to provide creative opportunities
for Arab artists in the US. Upon her return to Lebanon, El Khalil, via
xanadu*, partnered with Samandal as well as other Lebanese artists
and poets, to publish works in Lebanon (Zalzal). Although El Khalil
may be historicized as the founder of xanadu*, her efforts should be
understood as woven within partnerships and collectives, and her
travels—and the travels of xanadu*—describe a specific and mutable
relationship between Arab art and place.
In becoming “a part of the Samandal family,” as noted in a press
release for Samandal issue 0, xanadu* brings together local Lebanese
arts collectives invested in a bivalent movement to make Arab arts
well known to a wider audience, and to bring artists from around
198 • C hapter 5
the world into the “beautiful place” created by xanadu* for artistic
production. Yet the rationale for this collaboration also stems from
lack, or an unequal playing field. As El Khalil describes, xanadu*
was a response to the ill treatment of and dearth of opportunities for
Middle Eastern artists in the US. As Samandal’s founders conversely
explain, Samandal was a response to the lack of adult comics in the
Arab world. “Xanadu” is, of course, not only a reference to a historic
Mongolian city but also inextricable from its Orientalist exoticization
by Marco Polo and later romanticization by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
To bring together a new word for comics—which is actually an old
word for a fire-born amphibian—with a word for an old place made
mythic through European imaginaries, xanadu* and Samandal assert
a material presence and future for an imagined Other (Said, Ori-
entalism 1–2) that has been delimited by conditions of scarcity and
underrepresentation.
In this material presence, publishing and copyright are imagined
not in the terms of the capital of the West but instead within the filia-
tions of a rhizomatic family. Through this structure of fluctuating yet
material affinities, Samandal, xanadu*, and other families recombine
in self-determinant centers of production. By articulating its own
means of publication in concert with other entities (under the license
of Creative Commons), Samandal addresses the “here and there” in its
subtitle (“pictures stories from here and there”) as oriented around a
here in Beirut, and a there in the commons of graphic narratives pub-
lished through its collaborative practices.
Authorship: The Right to Draw
Collectives and local–global scalar dynamics continually inflect

emergent developments (and regressions) in Lebanese comics. As
Massimo di Ricco and Jonathan Guyer note, Samandal finds a direct
precedent in the Mouhtaraf JAD (JAD Workshop), founded by
7
George Khoury (Jad) in 1986 (di Ricco 188; Guyer, “War” 83). In the
workshop, Jad/Khoury brought together cartoonist Edgar Aho, artist
7. Jad’s self-naming is itself a verbal-visual and locally inflected event. As he

explains, realizing that George Khoury was a name that “projected sectarianism”—
“No way that George would be Muslim, or Khoury which means priest”—Jad
sought “a neutral name” (Guyer, “Beirut”). And yet, he qualifies Jad as both a name
that would be easily pronounced by Western audiences and that looks good when
drawn on the page.
Wissam Beydoun, artist and art teacher Choghig Der-Ghougassian,

graphic designer and director May Ghaibeh, and her sister Lina
Ghaibeh, who would go on to be a professor of comics and anima-
tion at the American University of Beirut, where she is also found-
ing director of the Mu’taz and Rada Sawwaf Arabic Comics Initiative
(Guyer, “Beirut”). The final publication that this group put forth in
1989, Min Beirut [From Beirut], included six narrative accounts of the
Lebanese Civil War, or what Khoury calls “the sectarian war” (qtd. in
Guyer, “Beirut”), and modeled a collaborative anthology of Lebanese
comics for adults.
JAD Workshop set the conditions of possibility for Samandal in
a number of ways. Khoury’s belief in adult comics is reflected in
Samandal’s cover indication of the audience reading age: 18+ (di Ricco
190). Also, Omar Khouri recounts meeting with Khoury at AUB and
discussing plans for Samandal (Azimi). So too, Lina Ghaibeh’s role in
establishing the cultural legitimacy and possibility for comics in the
Arab world extends from her founding of the first archive dedicated
to these materials, to her role as a professor who teaches Arabic com-
8
ics, to her directorship of the Arabic Comics Initiative. In each capac-
ity, Ghaibeh consecrates these comics as works with an established
history, pedagogically relevant present, and promising future. The
archive is “dedicated to early examples of caricature and cartooning
from the 19th century, and the various spheres of underground car-
tooning they evolved into” (Guyer, “War” 83), while the Mu’taz and
Rada Sawwaf Arabic Comics Initiative offers workshops, symposia,
exhibitions, and awards to “promote comics, editorial cartoons and
illustration in the Arab world” (“Mu’taz and Rada Sawwaf Arabic
Comics Initiative”). Likewise, JAD Workshop’s focus on collabora-
tion illustrates the interplay between local, Beirut-based comics and
global connectivities, in relation to art collectives.
Beyond the precedent of the JAD Workshop and the influence
of the Arabic Comics Initiative, Samandal’s founders weave together
global sites and sights in the narrativization of the magazine’s gen-
esis. An article in Bidoun cites the Japanese anime Grendizer as a pri-
mary influence on their youthful imaginations, before noting the
fdz’s London-based education in film, Imam’s UK-based fine arts
education, Khouri’s travel to the US to become a painter, and Mer-
hej’s US-based design education. Each member lists additional com-
8. See also Morayef on the academic embrace of Arab comics through Ghaibeh
and Mu’taz Sawwaf.
200 • C hapter 5
ics influences, from Batman and Superman (Khouri notes that in

Arabic translation the “S” on Superman’s costume was backwards)
to Asterix and Tintin, as well as Middle East–based comics magazines
Majid and Samir. Drawing from separate sensibilities and transna-
tional art experiences, the friends “came together to create a comic
book of their own—in, of, and for Lebanon” (Azimi).
Describing the genesis of Samandal, Khouri and the fdz contextu-
alize the double-edged devastating and generative impact of the Leb-
anese Civil War on the development of its local comics scene. Years
earlier, Jad Khoury characterized the war as “the major if not decisive
factor in shaping my artistic choices, and making this comic path,
and helped comics as a genre of art to flourish” (qtd. in Guyer, “Bei-
rut”). Given its role as the theme for JAD workshop’s publication,
war features as both a destructive, ongoing, thematic element and
a formally generative component, necessitating adult-oriented com-
ics capable of handling the maturity of the topic. As the inheritors
of JAD workshop’s mature form, Samandal’s adult comics uniquely
reflect the experiences of the next generation of Lebanese artists dur-
ing the war. As the fdz explains, the civil war led to massive displace-
ment of Lebanese peoples, creating both a shared history of sectarian
violence and disparate but common diasporic experiences:
Lebanon specifically, because of the civil war, there’s a history . . .

and you have a lot of people, maybe second generation people who
are returning. Because the civil war got so bad you have to relocate
to a different place. There is very much that history that binds us
together, but at the same time it brings in so many different influ-
ences whether it’s people that have grown up in the States, or they
grew up in the gulf, or they grew up in France. Each one comes with
a completely different background. (“Lebanese Comics”)
The founders and artists of Samandal map inward and outward trajec-
tories of worlding comics. Samandal is always situated in an exchange
between the local experiences and aesthetics of the Beirut comics
scene and its transnational vectors.
Originally, the magazine was published through both a network
of known associates and an open call for contributions. The sub-
mission guidelines contain advice for illustrators and writers (or a
team) who have produced a comic, and for illustrators who “have no
script to work from” and for writers “who have no illustrator to work
with.” Both latter groups are advised to submit samples so that they
can be matched “with an appropriate writer [or illustrator] from our
Samandal database” (Samandal 2, 149). The magazine itself thus func-
tions as a major hub, connecting disparate nodes of comics producers
around the world. Although it was only printed in the three main lan-
guages of Lebanon (Arabic, French, and English), Merhej noted that
contributors also come from Brazil, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic.
As Merhej stipulates:
Our authors come from a bit of everywhere, especially in the Arab

countries of Egypt, Syria, Jordan . . . We think it is important that a
publication like Samandal exists in the Arab world. In addition, we
had no shortage of contacts abroad from the start: in Brazil [Flab,
designer of the El Perceptor series (published by Nucléa)] or in the
United States (Andy Warner). We have also developed partnerships
with foreign collectives: l’Employé du moi, with whom we published
our number 7. And we have exchanges with Bulgaria, the Czech
Republic, Serbia . . . These are often areas that have also known war,
which allows us to compare our experiences. Being an illustrator
also helps to meet other authors at workshops held abroad. We want
to develop collaborations wherever possible. (“Lena Merhej”)
As Merhej explains, from its inception, Samandal acted as a network-

building collective and publication center, one attuned to the inequal-
ities of neoliberal globalization. Merhej’s description of Samandal’s
inclusivity is couched in her attention to its role as a publication in
the Arab world, a world which is further qualified as one that has
9
“known war” along with other areas from which artists contribute.
Thus, the “bit of everywhere” that Samandal represents and delineates
as a global network of artistic collaboration is also situated accord-
ing to specific areas of shared experience and greater or lesser control
and authority in the global economies of graphic narrative.
From its inception to its current formation, Samandal’s con-
tributors have espoused a belief in the importance of operating
“beyond the demarcated and official boundaries, promoting dia-
logue between peoples using words and pictures to tell stories of
9. Jonathan Guyer quotes Samandal contributor Sandra Ghosn in his article

about Lebanese comics and commonalities among Lebanese and Arab artists: “War.
War is common. The memory of war, more precisely. I was born in the war; every-
thing I do goes back to this phase that I blocked out completely” (“War” 88).
202 • C hapter 5
their own” (“Samandal Comics Magazine: Issue One Press Release”).

One can read this transnational inclusivity as a centrifugal, outward-
facing embrace of likeminded artists around the world regardless of
national, linguistic, or cultural borders. Indeed, considering Huda
Terki’s original-English-language yaoi manga piece in Samandal
2—“It’s My Love Letter”—which is a manga story in English read
10
from right to left and drawn by a young woman in Tripoli, Saman-
dal’s panels seem to evoke a borderless world.
The dialogue that Samandal promotes implicates not only space
but time as well. In his editorial for Généalogie (2014), the first Saman-
dal volume published after the switch to an annual publication
model, editor Rima notes that typically one imagines genealogy verti-
cally, drawing together ancestors and descendants (n. pag.). Instead,
he offers, why not approach the titular concept of the volume “hori-
zontally, and from the vantage of the language of visual narration?”
(n. pag.). In doing so, Rima collects artists across generations and
geographic locations, according to visual and narrative relations.
Rima literally positions Samandal as it looks outward, drawing a web
of international artists into its assemblage: “The starting point is Leb-
anon and the horizon is the whole world” (“Le point de départ est le
Liban et l’horizon est le monde entier”; n. pag.).
However, recent Samandal addition Karen Keyrouz qualifies that
the collective is also rooted in centripetal exigence. As Nina Morelli—
who interviewed Keyrouz for Middle East Monitor—describes it, Key-
rouz “points out that in a country where the government doesn’t
support culture, it’s natural for artists to come together. ‘After all,
any kind of collective is created because people know that together
they have a louder voice.’” Thus, the role of the collective, while still
operating as a form of decentralized and democratic production,
is also inflected by the lack of support for comics in Lebanon (see
also Khoury 13–15). Further, Joseph Kai stipulates that the collective
approach does not necessarily behoove local self-determination. Of
the small Lebanese comics scene, Kai avers that “it’s super-difficult
for me to think of one aspect that is Lebanese . . . It has very, very dif-
ferent and various references, and inspirations” (qtd. in Guyer, “War”
87). Keyrouz and Kai both make clear that the desire to transcend
the bounds of nationalism is not necessarily coterminous with a proj-
ect of liberation or even neoliberalism. Rather, in working toward the
10. Or perhaps women (Azimi).

creation of a Lebanese comics scene, Samandal’s creators came to see

that Lebanese national culture did not have a place for a dedicated
comics culture, necessitating a search for recognition and legibility in
a global comics scene.
However, despite its global network, Samandal could not avoid
being implicated in local frames of interpretation. Issue 7—a col-
laborative issue produced with L’employé du Moi, a Belgian com-
ics publisher—aroused the objection of the Catholic Media Center in
Lebanon, which ultimately led to charges and a fine against three of
the editors. The charges were based on two stories, one by Merhej
(who was out of the country at the time) and one by French artist Val-
11
fret. Thus, an issue produced as a transnational publication around
a shared theme was read and adjudicated against based on legal
and religious strictures in Lebanon. The editors do not understand
why charges were brought against only three of four editors, none
of whom were the artist for the offending stories; nor do they grasp
the rationale for fining Samandal without preventing its publication
or even censoring issue 7 (Muhanna; Dueben, “Interview”; Dabaie).
The editors do understand that the case itself was representative of
deeply sectarian laws in what is “not a secular country” (qtd. in Due-
ben, “Interview”).
The case against Samandal demonstrates the risks and complex
relations involved in the project of using comics to construct trans-
national, translingual, and transcultural coalitions. As recounted by
the editors singled out for charges, Khouri, the fdz, and Imam, when
they were first summoned to answer to Lebanese censorship authori-
ties, the censors’ lack of familiarity with comics was an impediment
in questioning. Rather than being read for its own logics and poetics,
Samandal was scrutinized according to international events. The Gen-
eral Security men took the issue’s title, “Revanche” (“Revenge”), as
an indication that it was meant as a retaliation for the Danish news-
paper Jyllands Posten’s publication of comics depicting the prophet
Muhammad (Muhanna; Dueben, “Interview”), thus misreading the
theme of the issue. Further misreading attended the comics struc-
ture itself: Merhej decries the deliberate graphic illiteracy enacted by
offended readers in her metacomic describing the outrage over her
“offending” comic (Dabaie). Here she stipulates that
11. Also known as Valfret Aspératus, also known as Cyprien Mathieu; born in
France, Valfret went to school and lives in Belgium (Delmas).
204 • C hapter 5
the image that upset Samandal’s readers is not complete and was
isolated in its context . . . Because the art of comics is based on the
narration in sequential images and is often accompanied by a text,
cutting or removing (or understanding) a picture of a comic story is
equivalent to cutting a word from a text. (qtd. in Dabaie)
As shown through the example of Metro’s banning as well, a lack of

widespread comics culture in a specific area can lead to reading prac-
tices predicated on unfamiliarity, and even bad faith.
Both Samandal stories that were singled out speak to the untrans-
latability inherent not only in comics form but also in religious imag-
ery. Merhej’s piece is a particular exercise in translational poetics, as
she takes regional insults from Lebanon and visually translates them.
Merhej explained that the purpose of the piece was to show the vio-
lence at work in the literal expression of some commonly used phrases
(Dabaie). “May God burn your religion,” illustrated through a priest
and an imam being lit on fire, was the translation singled out for its
denigration of religion. The calculus in the selection of two works, one
by a Lebanese artist and one by a French artist, links creators from
differential national locations of visual production in an overlapping
frame of juridical interpretation. Furthermore, in Elias Muhanna’s
analysis, “It was unusual that the suit was directed against the edi-
tors, rather than the artists.” As Muhanna reveals, “Khouri suspected
that this was motivated by the fact that one of the artists, Valfret, was
a foreign national, and the other, Merhej, was the daughter of a for-
mer minister.” For his part, Khouri did not see the choice of offense
as indicative of a complicated plot by the General Security office,
saying, “I think they probably just looked at the names of everyone
involved and decided who could be sued without any hassle” (qtd. in
Muhanna).
Valfret’s comment on the ruling was, “I was shocked . . . in Europe
you can say whatever you want” (qtd. in Muhanna), a claim that
begs further qualification. It is tempting to presume, as Valfret does,
that a secular approach to freedom of speech has no limits. Yet this
presumption rests on a facile distinction between nations as well as
juridical and lay readers. While Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo’s case
may seem to indicate that all manner of racist representation is per-
mitted in Belgium, David Enright’s case against Tintin in the Congo
demonstrates that the same imagery will not be tolerated in the same
way in England. In a far more horrifying example, French citizens
Chérif and Saïd Kouachi perpetrated the massacre of twelve people

at the Charlie Hebdo offices, putatively in retaliation for Islamophobic
cartoons. These brothers operated outside established French law, yet
their murderous outrage and the ensuing debates regarding Charlie
Hebdo’s satirical targets demonstrates that nationally delimited read-
12
erships are not homogeneous. Furthermore, Charlie Hebdo itself was
born as a result of government censorship and the outlawing of its
predecessor, the graphic satire magazine Hara-Kiri (Gautheron). The
banning of Hara-Kiri, following a 1970 cover comparing the death
of French hero Charles de Gaulle with a tragic fire at a dancehall in
Saint-Laurent-du-Pont that killed 146 people, indicates that in Europe
you cannot necessarily “say whatever you want.” In response to Min-
ister of the Interior Raymond Marcellin’s interdiction against the
magazine, one of the first issues of Charlie Hebdo, assembled by the
same editorial staff as Hara-Kiri, bore the ironic headline “There is
no censorship in France!” Some figures, be they a burning priest or a
World War II resistance leader and president, enter a localized realm
of the sacred, even in the most secular of democracies.
Frames for censorship as well as frames for reading and recogniz-
ing comics vary according to linguistic, religious, and national bor-
ders. Yet, while the case against Samandal demonstrates the precarity
involved in trying to break out of these borders, its aftermath reas-
serts the dynamic tension between national and transnational collec-
tives. Facing fines that nearly shut down the organization, Samandal’s
editors responded with a crowd-funding campaign that brought in
donors from around the world, as well as an anthology, Muqtatafat,
bringing together “artists from Arabic-speaking regions of the Middle
East, including Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan” (Lewis et al.). Although
editors A. David Lewis, Anna Mudd, and Paul Beran had planned to
release Muqtatafat before Samandal’s legal censure, they were able to
donate all profits to the continued existence of Samandal thanks to a
13
delay in publication.
12. In this regard, Emmanuel Todd’s Qui est Charlie? critically examines the
racialization of “freedom of speech” as it has been used in France to delimit citizen-
ships into hierarchies of exclusion and belonging.
13. Lewis attributes said delay to “short-sightedness”: “Those in the American
comics industry didn’t necessarily know what to make of these Middle Eastern
works, and they couldn’t count on there being a US market for them” (qtd. in Arab
Lit Quarterly, “Ground Breaking Middle Eastern Anthology”).
206 • C hapter 5
Feedback networks between global and local comics concerns both

imperiled and galvanized Samandal. As a way of reading for differ-
ence, the case and the role of transnational collectives in its unfolding
is indicative of what Emily Apter dubs “translational transnational-
ism,” an approach to world comics (or literature, in her use) “that
responds to the dynamics of geopolitics without shying away from
fractious border wars” (Against World Literature 42). Valfret is not
wrong to assert differences between national policies of censorship,
yet the case against Samandal reminds us that national differences
presuppose transnational frames of comparison and interaction. Col-
laborations across national borders conditioned the possibility of
issue 7, and they also reflected its adjudication in Lebanese court.
While the court’s ruling was localized, in that it targeted Khouri,
the fdz, and Imam for fines, the threat to Samandal as a publication
unfolded along global and local lines simultaneously. Transnational
fundraising networks worked to sustain Samandal, while its editors
avowed their enhanced commitment to publish comics in Lebanon
following the court case. Khouri avows that “the best resistance to
censorship is to make more comics” (qtd. in Dueben, “Interview”),
especially given the terms of the case brought against Samandal.
Because the title given to the suit is “The People vs. Samandal Com-
ics,” the editors felt a need to publicize the magazine’s persecution so
that “the people” might know “what the state is doing in their name”
(qtd. in Dueben, “Interview”).
Language: Thinking in Opposite Directions
Apter has clarified that she uses the term translational transnationalism
to “emphasize translation among small nations or minority language
communities” (Translation Zone 5). While Lebanon may indeed be
considered a small nation, it is also a sort of minority-language com-
munity given its trilingualism. In what follows, I consider the ways in
which conditions of linguistic possibility—trilingual French, Arabic,
and English publishing—engender Samandal’s appeal to transnational
contributors and readers as well as its unique formal characteristics.
Translation studies has long debated the politics of translating
between and among Western and non-Western languages, with oppo-
nents such as Apter famously advocating for “untranslatability” as a
strategy “against World Literature.” Apter contends that
to introduce questions of equality and the uneven distribution of lin-

guistic shares in world languages and literatures is to foreground
the political in translation theory. Nonequivalence, the right not to
translate, cultural incommensurability: these problematics not only
anchor the problem of untranslatability in world literature (and com-
parative literature more generally), they also engender the broader
question of what it means “to relate to” literarily. (“Untranslatabil-
ity” 199)
Following the claims of those who, like Apter, hold that untranslat-
ability functions as a tactic for resisting the Scylla and Charybdis of
monocultural homogenization or rampant pluralism attending the
globalization of culture (not to mention the culture of globalization),
one can read in Samandal’s linguistic structure a radical reimagin-
ing of how to physically foreground relations of translation and
untranslatability.
Since its inception, Samandal has been published in Arabic,
French, and English. While di Ricco and Davies describe Saman-
dal’s “multilingualism” as “pragmatic” (di Ricco 199; Davies, Urban
Comics 249), Merhej notes that the trilingualism actually “limits the
readership” (“Lena Merhej”). Indeed, although di Ricco and Davies
read the trilingualism in terms of the public the artists want to reach,
rather than as a product of colonial history, Merhej reminds us that
these three languages have a specific relationship to Lebanon, show-
ing the trilingualism’s dual centripetal and centrifugal valences. Ara-
bic, French, and English are specific to Lebanon and also represent
what Tejaswini Niranjana refers to as “unequal languages” (48) in
the determination of linguistic and aesthetic reading practices in the
nation. Myriem El Maïzi describes them: “the three languages spo-
ken in Lebanon—Arabic (the official language of the country), French
(the language of the mandate and the number one foreign language
currently in use in Lebanon), and English” (“‘Real News from Bei-
rut’” 200). These languages draw the reader’s attention to the violence
and colonial influence underlying their co-presence in the work. The
co-presence does not imply parity or an equal footing among the
languages; it gestures instead to sites of struggle in the practices of
14
recognition and literacy.
14. Interviewer Negar Azimi notes: “Language seems very important to you
guys. As far as I can tell, Samandal is the first trilingual comic ever. Very Lebanese.”
208 • C hapter 5
Although comics in Arabic can be traced back to karikatur in the

1880s (Guyer, “Arab Page” 12) or to the autonomic development of
Arabic-language comics magazines in the 1950s (Douglas and Malti-
Douglas; Merhej, “Introduction”; di Ricco), Arabic is not a “language
of comics” of the same magnitude as French and English. The co-
presence of all three in Samandal reflects both lived, material usage
and parlance in the region, and the influence of French and US com-
ics on the development of comics in Arabic. Hatem Imam describes
this trilingual comics situation in his article on comics in Arabic,
“Tongue-Tied—The Evasiveness of Language in Today’s Arab
Comics”:
We have always translated, lettered, reprinted and read American,

European, and Japanese comics, and in comparison rarely made
indigenous Arab comics. The rate and scale of production has been
in fits and starts, never really sustained or cogent, mostly targeting
children and often propounding dominant political ideologies from
pan-Arabism to Islamism. Few attempts struggled with forging a
native genre that transcended the barriers of sub-cultural differences
and dialects.
Imam gestures both outward and inward to show how languages

delimit comics production. English and French are two of the pri-
mary linguistic registers oversaturating the market for comics in the
Middle East, while the dialects in the region create “barriers.” In his
introduction to the catalog for the Angoulême exhibit, “The New
Generation: Arabic Comics Today,” Jad (as Georges Khoury) notes
the issue of language as the conundrum at the heart of the devel-
opment of Arab comics. He explains that classical Arabic (fusha)
“has traditionally dominated the literary sphere,” while “under the
influence of Pan-Arab ideology, dialects have progressively gained
ground thanks to the social and political interests of the Arab rev-
olutions” (15). Arabic-language comics expose multiple interwoven
negotiations and revisions at the levels of local and global forms
15
of expression. Yet Jad sees in Samandal an emergent dedication to
breaking out of hegemonic traditions of expression while also cham-
pioning linguistic diversity and self-determination. The title is a Lati-
nized Arabic word (i.e., Samandal, not Salamandre or Salamander), with
15. On this point, see Douglas and Malti-Douglas 224–27.

which Samandal asserts its local situation in Lebanon, at the same

time featuring two of the languages most associated with globalized
comics—French and English.
Samandal uniquely brings together three languages in order to
imagine new situations of global-local interactivity. The editors even
wrote the editorial for issue 3 in fusha (Azimi), serving as a meta-
commentary on the strangeness of literary language in this context
while drawing attention to its absence elsewhere in the work. For
editor Rima, such language play is itself a component of all com-
ics production and reading. In the Généalogie volume, he stipulates:
“Comics is a language of associations based on the creation of links
and ruptures, and characterized by permanent tensions, as much in
its inscription as in its reading.” These linguistic links and ruptures
that Rima identifies as the basis of comics are also reflected in for-
mal continuities and discontinuities. It is possible to qualify Davies’s
description of Samandal’s trilingualism as “pragmatic” by way of his
use of the Géographie volume as his primary source text. As he notes
of this work, translations in French, Arabic, and English are provided
as “footnotes” in the volume (Urban Comics 248); the same cannot be
said of all Samandal volumes. While I consider the page form in more
detail in the following section, Samandal’s translational approaches
have changed between issues. Issue 1 was republished originally on
Samandal’s website and subsequently on the platform https://issuu.
com with accompanying translations; other issues were published
with partial translations or booklets that accompanied the magazine.
Samandal demonstrates translation as a media-specific and emer-
gent practice. In his grant proposal for a trilingual website, the fdz
notes that “the translations, unlike the print versions, will be inte-
grated into the comics themselves to allow a non-disruptive reading
experience (something that would be practically impossible in the
print magazine short of reprinting every issue three times)” (Saman-
dal Association for Comics). Amusingly, the Topie volume of Saman-
dal was published in three distinct versions, “allowing each reader
to be fully submerged in the stories and making it ‘the first Arabic
publication of its kind’ according to [editor] Macaron” (Morley). In
creating linguistically distinct versions, the volume is actually—as
noted on Samandal’s website—three distinct books, each with its own
title: Topie in French, Toupya in Arabic, and Topia in English (https://
samandalcomics.org). However, the fdz gestures toward precisely
the frictions engendered by a trilingual comic. While any transla-
210 • C hapter 5
tion theorist is familiar with Walter Benjamin’s championing of the

interlinear scriptures as the ideal of translation (82), a commensurate
model for comics is perhaps only achievable as the fdz describes it,
through entirely separate publications. Samandal’s numerous transla-
tion approaches and strategies thus draw attention to the strangeness
16
of comics and translation.
As Niranjana reminds us, translation is always a situated prac-
tice, one responsive to history, power, and cultural differences. As an
example of translational idiosyncrasies, Samandal’s volume Ça Restera
Entre Nous, or “This Stays Between Us,” has a different title in Ara-
bic. Merhej explains that in Arabic the title is “Behind the Door,” but
this title would have a different connotation in French, given that in
France, “Derrière la porte refers too much to the porn film Derrière la
porte verte” (Samandal, “Samandal, deuxième rencontre”). Capitula-
tions and compromises are often made in translation based on local
cultures, yet frequency does not evacuate these negotiations of dif-
ferentials in power, money, and influence. By producing a cover with
two distinct titles sharing the same space, Ça Restera Entre Nous /
Behind the Door provides yet another model for reading difference in
comics production.
Of course, as demonstrated in chapter 2, it is the imbrication of
image and text that creates an existential barrier for translation. To
consider a counterexample, L’Association’s massive anthology Comix
2000 collected 2,000 pages of comics by 324 authors from twenty-
nine countries. Aspiring to collect the best comics art from around
the world, the editors determined that all pieces should be wordless
in order to skip “the agonies of translation” and so that “anyone in
any country will be able to read the same book. A universal comic
tome!” (Menu, “Preface”). Without discounting the significance and
innovation of Comix 2000, one can see this claim to a cosmopolitical
universality as a mode of subsuming difference. Taken for granted
are the precepts that everyone is able to read the same way without
words, and that the tome affords universal access. A contrapuntal
reading considers that the book, formatted for left-to-right reading,
has already delimited the readers oriented in this direction. Further,
with only one contributor from a country whose official language is
Arabic, the book establishes the universality of comics in rather uni-
lateral ways, so that artists from French- and English-speaking coun-
tries represent the majority of the best comics from around the world.
16. See Reyns-Chikuma; Zannetin.

FIGURE 5.1. Translation of Mazen Kerbaj, “Suspended Time Vol. 1: The Family Tree,” shows the
panels as originally printed on the page, with columns adjacent to the comic showing translations
formatted to accompany the panels
Samandal’s experimental approach to translation offers a counter to

Comix 2000 by continually negotiating with and foregrounding trans-
lation as a generative point for creative engagement.
Through reading one of the first comics published in Samandal,
Mazen Kerbaj’s “Suspended Time Vol. 1: The Family Tree,” we can
see the political potential of the “agonies of translation.” “Suspended
Time” constructs a narrative through a series of minor changes
between panels (see figure 5.1). From panel to panel a word or image
is altered or erased so that a new expression emerges. The text and
image are united within the picture plane so that each modifies the
other. A print announcement for Evan Antoine Mazen Kerbaj’s birth
is painted over, panel by panel, until only his grandfather’s name—
Antoine Kerbaj (“The First Generation”)—remains, beside a painting
of Antoine himself. This painting will shift first into the Holiday Inn
made famous in the Battle of Hotels in 1975, and then into Mazen Ker-
baj (the second generation), before shifting again into Evan Antoine
Mazen Kerbaj (the third generation), as all the while different word
combinations revise and reshape how the images are read and their
relations to preceding and subsequent panels. The specific combina-
212 • C hapter 5
tion of image and text makes the work explicitly untranslatable in

the way that Apter uses this term to foreground incommensurability
(Against World Literature 3). The same effect cannot be achieved by
replacing the Arabic text with English and flipping the orientation
of the pages. Therefore, in order to “translate” the online version of
the comic, the editors of Samandal displayed a translation alongside
the comic but external to the panels (see figure 5.1). In this way, the
translation of “Suspended Time” can only appear as translated work
by denaturing that which it is designed to translate. The comic as a
paginal composition is no longer visually cohesive, now distended
from a portrait layout into a wider format without the same rectilin-
ear organizing principle. The translation is a supplement: that which
supplants the visual coherence of the page layout while it supple-
ments the linguistic decoding of the text.
“Suspended Time” functions in my reading as a metaphor, object,
and agent. It is a metaphor for comics’ relationship to literature: com-
ics might be added to world literature, but only by disfiguring the
unexamined textuality of literature and disorienting those readers
whose mastery has been established through literary means. It is an
object in that I read it at a particular moment in space and time and
my reading of the work shifts depending on the material substrate
of the edition I read. This object demands that I attend to the histori-
cal and literary specificity of global print cultures. While I read, I feel
the reading as it reorients my eyes and hands in unfamiliar ways. It
is also an agent, in that as I read “Suspended Time,” it becomes an
instrument for cultivating disorienting reading practices. It spurs me
to question how certain works appear in the world. What possibilities
does the translation open? What does it foreclose? What possibilities
do global comics as a media technology offer for reorienting world
reading and world readers?
Kerblog versus Beyrouth juillet-août 2006 versus

Beirut Won’t Cry
A necessary point of comparison for how a format handles trilingual-

ism and translation is found in the travels of one of Kerbaj’s other
works, originally published on his blog, Kerblog. In July 2006 Kerbaj
began documenting the thirty-three-day Israeli bombardment of Bei-
rut with a series of cartoons and comics which he published online.
These pieces are frequently satirical with text in Arabic, French,

and English throughout. A year after their posting, L’Association
acquired the rights to publish the entries in book form as part of their
Côtelette imprint. As noted in chapter 3, Côtelette was conceived as
the more “literary” of L’Association’s imprints, featuring a standard-
ized ivory cover and rectangular roman or novelesque trim size. The
book was titled Beyrouth: juillet-août 2006 and published with accom-
panying French subtitles for any post originally written in English
or Arabic. A decade later, in 2017, Fantagraphics published a book
version entitled Beirut Won’t Cry with the subtitle Lebanon’s July War:
A Visual Diary. This version was released through the Fantagraphics
Underground imprint, with English translations and an introduction
from Joe Sacco.
These three versions of a work demonstrate how commercial print
practices can delineate readerships in time and space. The blog for-
mat engendered a formal punctuation correspondent to posting times
while creating a contiguous scroll in which the past rolls out behind
the latest entries. Though Ghenwa Hayek describes the narrative
structure as a “social contract, which in the ‘Kerblog’ case is the read-
er’s volition to keep on clicking” (179), the digital format of imme-
diate publication also creates the possibility of a reader who is not
clicking back through past entries but instead waiting for a post in
real time. Because many of the entries are Kerbaj’s drawn responses
to events as he is living them, Kerblog becomes an instance of what
Charles Hatfield calls “radical synchronism” (52), whereby at any
point in time, the frame of the computer screen and the blog scroll
may present multiple moments in time within a single space.
Readership for the blog is also conversational such that it becomes
part of Kerblog. Readers may post comments to any of Kerbaj’s draw-
ings, and he in turn admonishes or thanks readers at times in text-
only posts such as one from July 26, 2006: “please do not contact me
for any interview anymore.//i am beginning to freak out repeating 5
times a day the same things. if your interested in what i am doing,
please write yourself a story about it (it’s easy, you’ll see)” (“i am
sorry”). Commenters self-locate in a range of places and through
multiple languages. Some describe having found the blog through
local newspapers or friends; others attest that they do not know how
they stumbled upon Kerbaj’s work.
L’Association’s 264-page volume Beyrouth or Fantagraphics’s 266-
page Beirut shift the temporal relations of the work and delimit the
214 • C hapter 5
books’ readership through both paratextual and translational cues.

The tonnage of entries effected by the blogroll is formally renegoti-
ated according to the thickness of page stock along with the num-
ber of pages. By taking each image as a discrete paginal entry, the
L’Association and Fantagraphics books create a sort of capsular aes-
thetic wherein each post is its own enunciation rather than a partici-
pant in a long, vertical strand of visual responses. The brief length of
the bombardment—thirty-three days—is undermined by the blog’s
inclusion of far more entries, connoting the feeling of waiting for
bombs to fall in a drawn-out, moment-to-moment approach. The
17
books distend the period July 14, 2006–August 14, 2006 into thick
stacks of pages. Moreover, the reverse chronology of a blog, wherein
the latest post is the first that a reader encounters, is reversed in the
book, which begins with posts from July 14, 2006, and progresses
past the purported August 14 end of the war, until August 27, 2006.
As opposed to Kerblog—and to Samandal—these books are rhe-
torically situated vis-à-vis an intended audience, and a monolingual
one at that. This situating is evident in the print orientation of the
books; both are read left-to-right, in keeping with French and Eng-
lish readerships. It is also clear from the linguistic realignment; both
are titled in French or English, and all corresponding captions and
prose are in the same language. The text-only blog entries—originally
in English—are translated into French throughout Beyrouth. More
importantly, for the sake of Comics Studies, both books are also aes-
thetically oriented in a distinct way that diverges from the blog.
Beyrouth is visually recognizable as a Côtelette book, and Bei-
rut Won’t Cry bears a number of paratextual trappings of not only a
highbrow graphic novel but also a particular kind of Fantagraphics
book. These aesthetic sensibilities are likewise evident in the delin-
eation of readerships that the books produce, such that in 2017 the
UK music magazine Wire can title an article about Beirut Won’t Cry
“Mazen Kerbaj Inks New Graphic Novel” (emphasis added), and
Davies can describe the book’s “temporal immediacy” and “resound-
ingly presentist documentation” (Urban Comics 39). The newness per-
ceived by these readers of English is a result of the commercial and
aesthetic repackaging of decade-old contents. That is, the contents are
“new” or “immediate” only for a reader who has not read Kerblog or
17. As noted by El Maïzi, the end date of the “war” is disputed, as are many
related details (199).
Beyrouth ten years prior. Similarly, when Paul Love reviewed Beirut
Won’t Cry for US-based publication World Literature Today, he pointed
out that “the print publication of the book is actually the second time
these images have been shared with the world” (emphasis in origi-
nal), explaining that they were originally published in blog format
without noting the existence of Beyrouth.
The counterexample of Kerbaj’s texts is provided not as a rebuke
to book publishing, which has its own constraints and exigencies, but
instead as a reminder of why Samandal’s process was and continues to
be distinct. Beyrouth and Beirut Won’t Cry are books oriented toward a
specific, linguistically delineated readership. They reduce a trilingual
text to a dominant linguistic regime, which in turn determines formal
aspects of the text. While each claims the cultural capital correspond-
18
ing to the “indie” publishers, L’Association and Fantagraphics—not
to mention the specifically rarefied imprints, Côtelette and Fanta-
graphics Underground—they are rendered for convenient consump-
tion according to recognizable aesthetic and cultural expectations.
Further, they literally do not make a reader work in the same way
that any of the first fifteen issues of Samandal forces a reader to move,
to exert energy in the act of reading the magazine. On the one hand, a
reader of Beyrouth or Beirut Won’t Cry will always encounter a left-to-
right orientation, uniform extradiegetic elements, and translations; on
the other hand, a reader of Samandal may open a magazine at random
only to realize they must reorient the work in order to read it.
Form: Trilingualism and the Heterotopia of the

Flippy Page
Samandal’s approach to trilingualism conjugates all the medial aspects

of comics: as Hatfield schematizes these tensions, they are the inter-
play between word and image, between single panel and sequence,
between sequence and surface, and between text as object and text as
experience (32–67). By using a “flippy page” (see figure 5.2) as a way
to delimit and orient a reader to the reading direction in a given sec-
tion of Samandal, the magazines exemplify the multifaceted nature of
what Hatfield calls image-text tension. Comics engender a jockeying
between the image and the text, but also—as in the case of Saman-
18. See Beaty.

216 • C hapter 5
FIGURE 5.2. Assorted “flippy pages” from Samandal
dal—between images and texts, creating linguistic zones for a reader

to experience frictions and border crossings. At any point, a narrative
in Samandal might end and be followed—or preceded—by a page that
suddenly changes the orientation of narrative progression. Similarly,
the flippy page as a bidirectional reading plane rubs up against the
comics page, imparting linear–tabular tension with another dimen-
19
sion. Unlike Comix 2000, Samandal magazines do not presume a uni-
versal legibility; instead, the format explicitly marks and materially
enacts differential readerships.
The flippy page acts in conjunction with the many other ways in
which Samandal abrogates world literature as a means of shoring up
objects, authors, languages, aesthetics. It is a checkpoint both between
languages and between readerly sensibilities. It is also a checkpoint
through which one passes into a different space, which in turn neces-
sitates that the reader move herself. Like a Foucauldian heterotopia
20
(“Other Spaces”), the flippy page is a specific form of nonplace that
exists only in relation to the two places it conjoins, yet it takes space
as its own—named—place, one with a unique set of rules informing
its construction and use.
As noted in a 2015 announcement for Merhej’s workshop at
the British Library, “the Flippy Page is an upside-down technique
invented by Samandal to deal with the two opposite reading direc-
tions of Arabic and English” (“Flippy Page”). Some of these pages
feature characters from stories, while others are sui generis, merely
verbally instructing or visually suggesting that a reader flip the
magazine. The act of flipping the magazine while reading forces a
reader to confront the physical orientations of literacy. Even a trilin-
gual reading subject must physically resituate the work in order to
move between languages. Flippy pages function as translation zones,
in which a reader is disoriented and reoriented in meaningful ways.
To juxtapose the global to the local, Samandal is especially indicative
of the processual makeup of form. The protean shifts in the work
describe a space that is at once virtual, subject to emergent contexts
and constraints, and actual, limned and delimited by material concat-
enations of history, politics, and power.
Aesthetics: Experimental Salamanders
From the magazines to the volumes of Samandal, formats shift in

emergent ways. The volumes have a larger trim size and handle
translation differently from volume to volume, and compared with
19. Even the material format of Samandal creates translational effects: Khouri
chose the trim size based on his preference for manga (Azimi), so the issues are
Lebanese-produced emulations of Japanese objects.
20. The page is also comparable to Mark McKinney’s discussion of the interplay
between the affrontier and the afrontier (Redrawing 3, 33).
218 • C hapter 5
the magazines. Besides the radical pluralism of Topie, volumes like

Géographie and Généalogie have a central meeting point so that left-
to-right and right-to-left stories come to a border or divide midway
through these larger works. Rather than the frequent negotiations of
the heterotopic flippy page, these volumes suggest a formal détente.
While readers might begin from either cover, their decision will ulti-
mately lead to a limit point where they must start again from the
opposite side.
All these changes evince an approach to the global as always in
formation. Languages, formats, and even aesthetics are consistently
in flux, and Samandal’s shifting approaches express this mutability.
The open-call submissions of the magazines led to a wide variety
of styles from a heterogenous field of producers. Some of the artists
were professionally trained, with graduate degrees in art or design.
Some were high school students. Even the shift to a single editor for
each volume of Samandal entailed a unique aesthetic sensibility each
year. The heterogeneity of aesthetic styles and topics throughout
the print history of Samandal makes a reader critically aware of how
graphic works are judged and evaluated. As an American scholar, I
must always contend with the violence that my own reading prac-
tices do to texts by inscribing them within what theorist Rey Chow
calls “hierarchical frames of comparison—and judgment—that have
long been present, that stand in the way, as it were, as universals sub-
suming otherness” (88). Samandal’s differences are reminders of the
need to be cognizant of how expectations derived from financially
dominant centers of production in global networks come to overde-
termine how we imagine “comics.”
As the field of Comics Studies expands to consider works in a
more global cast, it is paramount that it likewise rethink alterity and
orientation in its approach. To return to Ong’s formulation of world-
ing as “situated everyday practices,” how can the study of comics
conceptualize “practices that creatively imagine and shape alterna-
tive social visions and configurations—that is, ‘worlds’—than what
already exists in a given context” (12)? Such practices may involve
collectivities that broker local and global conditions for artistic and
creative production, constellating emergent and even risky zones of
interactivity. Such practices may involve modes of publication that
eschew predatory and exclusionary traditions of property and nation-
alism. Such practices may involve reading in ways that are physically
disruptive to our conditioned physicality. To shape a world in which

unlearning imperialism is possible, and in which the politics of loca-
tion is an intrinsic reading modality for image-texts, we must allow
our expectations, our literacies, and even our books to be flipped
from time to time, that they may flip us in return.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Abedinifard, Mostafa. “Graphic Memories: Dialogues with Self and Other in Persepolis
and Persepolis 2.” Familiar and Foreign: Identity in Iranian Film and Literature, edited
by Veronica Thompson and Manijeh Mannani, Athabasca UP, 2015, pp. 83–109.
Abirached, Zeina. “Artist’s Statement.” European Comic Art 8.1 (Spring 2015): 69–86.
———. A Game for Swallows: To Die, to Leave, to Return. Translated by Edward Gauvin,
Graphic Universe, 2012.
———. Mourir partir revenir. Le jeu des hirondelles. Paris: Cambourakis, 2007.
Abomo, Marie-Rose Maurin. “Tintin au Congo: ou La nègrerie en clichés.” Images de
l’Afrique et du Congo-Zaïre dans les lettres belges de langue française et alentour. Actes
du colloque de Louvain-la-Neuve, 4–6 février, edited by Pierre Halen and János Riesz,
Textyles-Éditions, 1993, pp. 151–62.
Abdalla, Iskandar and Stefan Winkler, translators. Metro: Kairo Underground. By
Magdy El Shafee, Edition Moderne, 2012.
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke UP, 2006.
———. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. Routledge, 2000.
Ahrens, Jörn, and Arno Meteling, editors. “Introduction.” Comics and the City: Urban
Space in Print, Picture, and Sequence, Continuum Books, 2010, pp. 1–16.
Allan, Michael. In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt.
Princeton UP, 2016.
Allison, Anne. Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. U of Cali-
fornia P, 2006.
221
222 • BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism. Verso, 1991.
Apostolidès, Jean-Marie. The Metamorphoses of Tintin, Or, Tintin for Adults. Translated
by Jocelyn Hoy, Stanford UP, 2010.
———. Tintin et le mythe du surenfant. Moulinsart, 2004.
Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” The-
ory, Culture and Society 7.2 (1990): 295–310.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?”
Critical Inquiry 17.2 (Winter 1991): 336–57.
Appollo. “Persepolis [t1] de Marjane Satrapi.” du9: l’autre bande dessinée, Mar. 2001.
https://www.du9.org/chronique/persepolis-t1/.
Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. Verso, 2013.
———. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton UP, 2006.
———. “Untranslatability and the Geopolitics of Reading.” PMLA 134.1 (2019): 194–200.
———. “Untranslatables: A World System.” New Literary History 39.3 (Summer 2008):
581–98.
ArabLit Quarterly. “Ground-Breaking Middle Eastern Comics Anthology Launches;
Proceeds to Support ‘Samandal.’” ArabLit Quarterly, 18 Dec. 2015. https://arablit.
org/2015/12/18/ground-breaking-middle-eastern-comics-anthology/.
L’Association. “Petite histoire pour néophytes.” L’Association, https://www.lassociation.
fr/infos/.
Assouline, Pierre. Hergé: The Man Who Created Tintin. Translated by Charles Ruas,
Oxford UP, 2009.
Augaitis, Daina, et al. Raven Travelling: Two Centuries of Haida Art. Vancouver Art Gal-
lery, 2006.
Azimi, Negar. “Samandal: Super Friends.” Bidoun 18 (2009). https://www.bidoun.org/
articles/samandal.
Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. Verso, 2019.
Baetens, Jan. “From Black and White to Color and Back: What Does It Mean (Not) to
Use Color?” College Literature 38.3 (Summer 2011): 111–28.
———. “Hommage à Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle: Pour relire « Du linéaire au tabulaire ».”
Les cahiers du GRIT 1 (2011): 122–28.
———. “Pour une poétique de la gouttière.” Word & Image 7.4 (1991): 365–76.
Baetens, Jan, and Hugo Frey. The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. Cambridge UP, 2015.
———. “Modernizing Tintin: From Myth to New Stylizations.” The Comics of Hergé:
When the Lines Are Not So Clear, edited by Joe Sutliff Sanders, UP of Mississippi,
2016, pp. 98–112.
———. “‘Layouting’ for the Plot: Charles Burns and the Clear Line Revisited.” Journal of
Graphic Novels and Comics 8.2 (2017): 193–202.
Baetens, Jan, et al. “Introduction.” The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel, edited
by Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey, and Stephen E. Tabachnick, Cambridge UP, 2018, pp.
1–18.
Bagnall, Roger S. Early Christian Books in Egypt. Princeton UP, 2009.
BIBLIOGRAPHY • 223
Bahrampour, Tara. “Tempering Rage by Drawing Comics; A Memoir Sketches an

Iranian Childhood of Repression and Rebellion.” New York Times, 21 May 2003.
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/21/books/tempering-rage-drawing-comics-
memoir-sketches-iranian-childhood-repression.html.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers, Hill and Wang, 1972.
Bassnett, Susan, and Harish Trivedi. “Introduction: Of Colonies, Cannibals and Vern
aculars.” Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, edited by Susan Bassnett
and Harish Trivedi, Routledge, 1999, pp. 1–18.
Beaty, Bart. Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s. U of
Toronto P, 2007.
B[eauchard], David. L’Ascension du haut mal tomes 1–6. L’Association, 1996–2003.
———. Epileptic. Translated by Kim Thompson, Pantheon, 2005.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator” [first printed as introduction to a
Baudelaire translation, 1923]. Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn and edited
by Hannah Arendt, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968, pp. 69–82.
Benoît-Jeannin, Maxime. Le Mythe Hergé. Villeurbanne: Éditions Golias, 2001.
Bentahar, Ziad. “Tintin in the Arab World and Arabic in the World of Tintin.” Alterna-
tive Francophone 1.5 (2012): 41–54.
Bernardin, Susan. “Future Pasts: Comics, Graphic Novels, and Digital Media.” The
Routledge Companion to Native American Literature, edited by Deborah L. Madsen,
Routledge, 2016, pp. 480–93.
Berndt, Jaqueline, and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer. “Introduction: Studying
Manga across Cultures.” Manga’s Cultural Crossroads, edited by Jaqueline Berndt
and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Routledge, 2013, pp. 1–15.
Berninger, Mark, et al., editors. Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay
of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives. McFarland & Company, 2010.
“Beirut Partita: Zeina Abirached’s Lecture at Duke University on 25 Sep. 2013.” Center
for French and Francophone Studies at Duke. YouTube, 7 Oct. 2013. https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=nPBTZ8kegjI.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
———. “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition.” Colonial Dis-
course and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura
Chrisman, Columbia UP, 1994, pp. 112–23.
Bisson, Julien. “Zeina Abirached: La bande dessinée qui pose un regard drôle et
décalé sur l’horreur . . . et la nostalgie d’une nuit de conflits.” L’Express, 11 Jan.
2007. http://www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/zeina-abirached_813223.html.
Bourdil, Pierre-Yves, and Bernard Tordeur. Bob de Moor: 40 ans de bande dessinéee, 35
ans au côtés d’Hergé. Editions Lombard, 1986.
Bredehoft, Thomas. The Visible Text: Textual Production and Reproduction from Beowulf
to Maus. Oxford UP, 2014.
Brienza, Casey E. “Books, Not Comics: Publishing Fields, Globalization, and Japanese
Manga in the United States.” Pub Res Q 25 (2009): 101–17.
———, editor. “Introduction.” Global Manga: “Japanese” Comics without Japan? Ashgate,
2015, pp. 1–21.
———. Manga in America: Transnational Book Publishing and the Domestication of Japanese
Comics. Bloomsbury, 2016.
Brousseau, Marcel. “Allotment Knowledges: Grid Spaces, Home Places, and Story
scapes on the Way to Rainy Mountain.” NAIS: Journal of the Native American and
Indigenous Studies Association 5.1 (2018): 136–67.
Burns, Charles. The Hive. Pantheon, 2012.
———. Incubation. Pigeon Press, 2015.
———. Johnny 23. Le Dernier Cri, 2010.
———. Last Look. Pantheon, 2016.
———. Sugar Skull. Pantheon, 2014.
———. Vortex. Cornélius, 2016.
———. X’ed Out. Pantheon, 2010.
Callison, Camille, and Candida Rifkind. “Introduction: ‘Indigenous Comics and
Graphic Novels: An Annotated Bibliography.’” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cul-
tures 11.1 (2019): 139–55.
Cambourakis, Frédéric. “Frédéric Cambourakis.” LM: Art & Culture, 16 Feb. 2013.
http://www.lm-magazine.com/blog/2013/02/16/frederic-cambourakis/.
Carrier, Mélanie. “Persepolis et les révolutions de Marjane Satrapi.” Belphégor 4.1
(2004). https://dalspace.library.dal.ca//handle/10222/47691.
Casanova, Pascale. “Literature as a World.” New Left Review 31 (2005): 71–90.
———. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M. B. Debevoise. Harvard UP, 2004.
Cascone, Sarah. “Publisher Strips Hergé’s Heirs of Millions of Dollars in Rights to
Tintin Drawings.” Art Net News, 9 June 2015. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/
tintin-rights-court-ruling-306273.
Cates, Isaac. “Comics and the Grammar of Diagrams.” The Comics of Chris Ware: Draw-
ing Is a Way of Thinking, edited by David Ball and Martha Kuhlman. UP of Missis-
sippi, 2010, pp. 90–104.
Caumery, and J.-P Pinchon. L’enfance de Bécassine. Gautier et Languereau, 1913. MSU
Libraries Digital Repository. https://d.lib.msu.edu/gnn/1122#page/4/mode/2up.
Celotti, Nadine. “The Translator of Comics as a Semiotic Investigator.” Comics in
Translation, edited by Federico Zanettin, St. Jerome Publishing, 2008, pp. 33–49.
Chalmers, Robert. “Marjane Satrapi: Princess of Darkness.” Independent, 30 Sep. 2006.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/marjane-
satrapi-princess-of-darkness-417932.html.
Chavanne, Renaud. Composition de la bande dessinée. PLG, 2010.
Cheah, Pheng. What Is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Duke
UP, 2016.
———. “World against Globe: Toward a Normative Conception of World Literature.”
New Literary History, 45.3 (2014): 303–29.
Chow, Rey. The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Compara-
tive Work. Duke UP, 2006.
Chute, Hillary. “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.” PMLA, 123.2
(Mar 2008): 452–65.
———. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. Columbia UP, 2010.
———. “An Interview with Charles Burns.” Believer Magazine, 1 Jan. 2008. https://
believermag.com/an-interview-with-charles-burns/.
———. “The Popularity of Postmodernism.” Twentieth Century Literature 57.3/4 (2011):
354–63.
———. “The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” Women’s Studies
Quarterly 36.1/2 (2008): 92–110.
Cohn, Neil. “Navigating Comics: An Empirical and Theoretical Approach to Strate-
gies of Reading Comic Page Layouts.” Frontiers in Psychology 4.186 (2013): 1–15.
———. Who Understands Comics?: Questioning the Universality of Visual Language Compre-
hension. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.
Collison, Jisgang, et al. Indigenous Repatriation Handbook. Royal British Columbia
Museum, 2019.
Conley, Tom. Cartographic Cinema. U of Minnesota P, 2007.
Cooke, Rachel. “Riad Sattouf: not French, not Syrian . . . I’m a Cartoonist.” Guardian,
27 Mar. 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/27/riad-sattouf-arab-
of-the-future-interview.
“Copyright and Permissions: Lebanese Law.” American University of Beirut: Uni-
versity Library, Library Guides. Jan. 26, 2021. https://aub.edu.lb.libguides.com/
copyright/Lebanese-Law.
Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recogni-
tion. U of Minnesota P, 2014.
Couch, Chris. “The Publication and Formats of Comics, Graphic Novels, and Tanko-
bon.” Image [&] Narrative: Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative 1 (Dec. 2000).
http://www.imageandnarrative.be/narratology/chriscouch.htm.
Council of the Haida Nation. Haida Land Use Vision. Apr. 2005. http://www.haidanation.
ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/HLUV.lo_rez.pdf.
La cour d’appel de Bruxelles, 9ème chambre. Mbutu Mondondo et Le Conseil Représen-
tatif des Associations Noires contra Moulinsart et Éditions Casterman. 28 Nov.
2012. Tintin.com, https://www.tintin.com/tintin/actus/actus/003918/jugement_
tintinCongo_MONDONDO.pdf.
Cowan, Alison Leigh. “A Library’s Approach to Books That Offend.” New York
Times, 19 Aug. 2009. https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/a-librarys-
approach-to-books-that-offend.
Crucifix, Benoît. “Cut-Up and Redrawn: Reading Charles Burns’s Swipe Files.” Inks:
The Journal of the Comics Studies Society 1.3 (2017): 309–33.
Dabaie, Marguerite. “Help Samandal Speak.” Hooded Utilitarian, Nov. 2015. https://
www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2015/11/help-samandal-speak/.
Damluji, Nadim. Majalat: The Art of Arab Comics. https://majalat.tumblr.com/.
———. “An Introduction.” Tintin Travels, 3 June 2010. https://tintintravels.com/
post/662020335/introduction.
———. “Samir Magazine and the Art of Bootlegging Tintin.” Tintin Travels, 16
Apr. 2011. https://tintintravels.com/post/4655671320/samir-magazine-and-the-art-
of-bootlegging-tintin.
Davies, Catriona. “Egypt’s Banned Graphic Novel to Be Published in English.” CNN,
23 Mar. 2011. http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/meast/03/23/egypt.graphic.
novel/index.html.
Davies, Dominic. “Comics and Graphic Narratives: A Global Cultural Commons.”

Words Without Borders, Feb. 2017. https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/
february-2017-international-graphic-novels-volume-xi-comics-and-graphic.
———. Urban Comics: Infrastructure and the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narra-
tives. Routledge, 2019.
Davies, Dominic, and Candida Rifkind, editors. Documenting Trauma in Comics: Trau-
matic Pasts, Embodied Histories, and Graphic Reportage. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Davies, Humphrey, translator. “from Metro.” By Magdy El Shafee. Words Without Bor-
ders (Feb. 2008). https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/graphic-lit/from-metro.
———. “Humphrey Davies Recommends the Best of Contemporary Egyptian Litera-
ture.” Five Books (2011). https://fivebooks.com/best-books/egyptian-literature-
humphrey-davies/.
Davis, Rocío G. “A Graphic Self: Comics as Autobiography in Marjane Satrapi’s Perse-
polis.” Prose Studies 27.3 (2005): 264–79.
de Certeau, Michel. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Translated by Brian Massumi,
U of Minnesota P, 1986.
———. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Stephen Randall, U of California P,
1984.
Debord, Guy, and Gil Wolman. “A User’s Guide to Détournement (1956).” Situation-
ist International Anthology, edited and translated by Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public
Secrets, 2006, pp. 14–21.
Deloria, Vine Jr. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. U of Oklahoma P, 1969.
Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Les Éditions de Minuit, 1986.
Delisle, Philippe. Bande Dessinée Franco-Belge Et Imaginaire Colonial: Des Années 1930
Aux Années 1980. Éditions Karthala, 2016.
———. “Le Reporter, Le Missionnaire Et L’« Homme-Léopard ». Réflexions sur les
stéréotypes coloniaux dans l’œuvre d’Hergé.” Outre-mers: Revue D’histoire 96.362
(2009): 267–81.
Delmas, Gabriel. “Delmas x Valfret Asperatus.” du9: l’autre bande dessinée, Mar. 2017.
https://www.du9.org/entretien/delmas-x-valfret-asperatus/.
Denson, Shane. “Afterword: Framing, Unframing, Reframing: Retconning the Trans-
national Work of Comics.” Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics
at the Crossroads, edited by Shane Denson et al., Bloomsbury Academic, 2014, pp.
271–84.
Denson, Shane, et al., editors. Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at
the Crossroads. Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.
Detournay, Charles-Louis. “Pour le 90e anniversaire de Tintin, Moulinsart affirme
son leadership sur Casterman.” ActuaBD, 9 Jan. 2019. https://www.actuabd.com/
Pour-le-90e-anniversaire-de-Tintin-Moulinsart-affirme-son-leadership-sur#nh1.
———. “Tintin quitterait Casterman?” ActuaBD, 30 Apr. 2009. https://www.actuabd.
com/Tintin-quitterait-Casterman.
di Ricco, Massimo. “Drawing for a New Public: Middle Eastern 9th Art and the Emer-
gence of a Transnational Graphic Movement.” Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events,
Identities, edited by Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji, Routledge, Taylor and Francis,
2014, pp. 187–203.
Dine, Philip. “The French Colonial Empire in Juvenile Fiction: From Jules Verne to
Tintin,” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 23.2 (Spring 1997): 177–203.
Dony, Christophe. “Postcolonial Theory: Writing and Drawing Back (and Beyond)
in ‘Pappa in Afrika’ and ‘Pappa in Doubt.’” More Critical Approaches to Comics:
Theories and Methods, edited by Matthew Brown, Matthew J. Smith, and Randy
Duncan, Taylor and Francis, 2019, pp. 20–36.
———. “What Is a Postcolonial Comic?” Chronique de Littérature Internationale (7 Nov.
2014): 12–13.
Douglas, Allen, and Fedwa Malti-Douglas. Arab Comic Strips: Politics of an Emerging
Mass Culture. Indiana UP, 1994.
Drucker, Johanna. “Graphic Devices: Narration and Navigation.” Narrative 16.2 (May
2008): 121–39.
Dueben, Alex. “‘I Was Convinced That Beirut Stopped at the Wall’: An Interview
with Zeina Abirached.” Comics Journal, 25 Nov. 2013. http://www.tcj.com/i-was-
convinced-that-beirut-stopped-at-that-wall-an-interview-with-zeina-abirached/.
———. “An Interview with Samandal.” Comics Journal, 18 Dec. 2015. http://www.tcj.
com/an-interview-with-samandal/.
———. “Kidd Designs Alex Ross’ ‘Rough Justice.’” Comic Book Resources, CBR.com, 23
Mar. 2010. https://www.cbr.com/kidd-designs-alex-ross-rough-justice/.
Eberstadt, Fernanda. “God Looked Like Marx.” New York Times, 11 May 2003. https://
www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/books/god-looked-like-marx.html.
Edwards, Brian T. After the American Century: The Ends of US Culture in the Middle East.
Columbia UP, 2016.
———. “Jumping Publics: Magdy El Shafee’s Cairo Comics.” Novel 47.1 (2014): 67–89.
Eggers, Dave. “Why Knopf Editor in Chief Sonny Mehta Still Has the ‘Best Job in the
World.’” Vanity Fair, 15 Sep. 2015. https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/09/
sonny-mehta-knopf-editor-in-chief.
Eisner, Will. Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative. Poorhouse, 1996.
El Hak, Maha Gad. “Remarques sur le discours de Persepolis (Bande dessinée et film
d’animation).” Revue Dilbilim XIX, İstanbul 2009: 75–89.
El Khalil, Zena. “About Zena.” Zena El Khalil. http://www.zenaelkhalil.com/
zena#:~:text=Zena%20is%20also%20the%20founder,of%20extreme%20
xenophobia%20in%20NYC.
El Maïzi, Myriem. “‘Real News from Beirut’: Blog BD et témoignage de guerre.”
French Cultural Studies 27.2 (2016): 199–215.
El Shafee, Magdy (‫الشافعي‬ ‫)مجدي‬. Metro (‫)مترو‬. Malamih (‫)دار مالمح للنشر‬,
2008.
Elder, Josh. “Comics: The Universal Language.” Medium, 31 May 2015. https://
medium.com/@joshelder/comics-the-universal-language-a940213ad83c.
Elsworth, Peter C. T. “Tintin Searches for a US Audience.” New York Times, 24 Dec.
1991, p. C9.
Emmerich, Karen. Literary Translation and the Making of Originals. Bloomsbury, 2017.
Enright, David. “Tintin in the Congo Should Not Be Sold to Children.” Guard-
ian, 4 Nov. 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/nov/04/
tintin-in-the-congo.
Erdrich, Louise. Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country. National Geographic, 2003.
Evans-Bush, Katy. “An Animated Dispute in Egypt.” Guardian, 17 Apr. 2009.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/apr/17/
egypt-freedom-of-speech.
Evenson, Brian. “‘Catalog of an Impossible Library’: A Conversation with David B.”
World Literature Today, Mar. 2016. https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2016/
march/catalog-impossible-library-conversation-david-b-brian-evenson.
Exem. Zinzin, maître du monde. Éditions Tchang, 1984.
Farr, Michael. Tintin: The Complete Companion. Last Gasp, 2011.
“Flippy Page Comic Workshop.” British Library, 26 July 2015. https://www.bl.uk/
events/flippy-page-comic-workshop#.
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” Diacritics 16 (Spring
1986): 22–27.
———. Sécurité, territoire, population: Cours au Collège de France (1977–78), edited by Fran-
çois Ewald, Alessandro Fontana, and Michel Senellart, Gallimard, 2004.
———. “What Is an Author?” Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of
Foucault 1954–1984, edited by James D. Faubion and translated by Robert Hurley
and others, The New Press, 1998.
Fresnault-Deruelle, Pierre. “Du linéaire au tabulaire.” Communications 24 (1976): 7–23.
———. “From Linear to Tabular.” The French Comics Theory Reader, edited by Ann Miller
and Bart Beaty, Leuven UP, 2014, pp. 121–38.
———. Hergé, ou, Le secret de l’image: essai sur l’univers graphique de Tintin. Casterman,
2000.
———. “The Moulinsart Crypt.” European Comic Art 3.2 (2010): 119–37.
Frey, Hugo. “Contagious Colonial Diseases in Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin.” Mod-
ern & Contemporary France 12.2 (2004): 177–88.
———. “History and Memory in Franco-Belgian Bande Dessinée (BD).” Rethinking His-
tory: The Journal of Theory and Practice 6.3 (2002): 293–304.
Frome, Jonathan. “Identification in Comics.” The Comics Journal 211 (1999): 82–87.
Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. “A Disappointing Crossing: The North American Reception of
Asterix and Tintin.” Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the
Crossroads, edited by Daniel Stein, Shane Denson, and Christina Meyer, Blooms-
bury Academic, 2014, pp. 257–70.
———. “Sutures génériques et fêlures intérieures chez Charles Burns.” Sillages critiques
28, 1 May 2020. http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/9579.
Gagliano, Maria. “#SLWC17: Meet the Speakers—An Interview with Ayesha Pande
Literary Agent Anjali Singh.” Slice, 15 June 2017. https://slicemagazine.org/slwc17-
meet-the-speakers-an-interview-with-ayesha-pande-literary-agent-anjali-singh/.
Galal, Mona, Mónica Carrión, and Pedro Rojo, translators. “Extracto del cómic ‘Metro’
de Magdy el Shafee.” Fundación Al Fanar para el Conocimiento Árabe, 18 Sep. 2015.
http://www.fundacionalfanar.org/extracto-del-comic-metro-de-magdy-el-shafee/.
Galli, Carlo. Spazi politici: L’età moderna et l’età globale. Il Mulino, 2001.
Ganguly, Debjani. This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form.
Duke UP, 2016.
Garcelon, Marc. “An Information Commons? Creative Commons and Public Access to
Cultural Creations.” New Media and Society 11(8): 1307–26.
Gautheron, Agnès. “« Charlie Hebdo » : la première fois que « Le Monde » l’a écrit.”
Le Monde, 18 Sept. 2020. https://www.lemonde.fr/m-le-mag/article/2020/09/18/
charlie-hebdo-la-premiere-fois-que-le-monde-l-a-ecrit_6052740_4500055.html.
Gauthier, Guy. Vingt leçons sur l’image at le sens. Edilig, 1982.
Gauvin, Edward. “A Game for Swallows by Zeina Abirached.” Edward Gauvin blog, 24
July 2012. http://www.edwardgauvin.com/blog/?p=1067.
———. “Re: Katherine Kelp wants to get in touch with you.” Received by Katherine
Kelp-Stebbins, 28 July 2017.
Ghosh, Bishnupriya. Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular. Duke UP, 2011.
Gikandi, Simon. “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality.” The South Atlantic
Quarterly 100.3 (Summer 2001): 627–58.
Gill, Ian. All That We Say Is Ours: Guujaaw and the Reawakening of the Haida Nation.
Douglas & McIntyre, 2009.
Gilmore, Leigh. “Witnessing Persepolis: Comics, Trauma, and Childhood Testimony.”
Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, edited by
Michael Chaney, U of Wisconsin P, 2011, pp. 157–63.
Glissant, Édouard. Philosophie de la Relation: Poésie en étendue. Gallimard, 2009.
Goddin, Philippe. The Art of Hergé: Vol. 1, 1907–1937. Translated by Michael Farr, Last
Gasp, 2008.
———. The Art of Hergé: Vol. 2, 1937–1949. Translated by Michael Farr, Last Gasp, 2009.
———. Hergé and Tintin Reporters: From Le Petit Vingtième to Tintin Magazine. Translated
by Michael Farr, Sundancer, 1987.
Goeman, Mishuana. Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations. U of Min-
nesota P, 2013.
Good, Oliver. “Gold Ring: The UAE’s First Manga.” The National (United Arab Emir-
ates), 20 July 2009. https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture.
Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Hackett, 1978.
Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures,
Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. Routledge, 2001.
Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks Volume 3. Edited and translated by Joseph A. But-
tigieg. Columbia UP, 2007.
Gravett, Paul. “Hergé & The Clear Line: Part 1.” Paul Gravett, 20 Apr. 2008. http://
paulgravett.com/articles/article/herge_the_clear_line.
Gray, Brenna Clarke. “Border Studies in the Gutter: Canadian Comics and Structural
Borders.” Canadian Literature 228/229 (Spring/Summer 2016): 170–87.
Green, Christopher. “Fluid Frames: The Hybrid Art of Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas.”
Art in America, 2 Nov. 2017. https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/
fluid-frames-the-hybrid-art-of-michael-nicoll-yahgulanaas-60076/.
Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Duke
UP, 2005.
Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan. “Introduction: Transnational Feminist Practices
and Questions of Postmodernity.” Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Trans-
national Feminist Practices, edited by Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, U of

Minnesota P, 1994, pp. 1–33.
Griffin, Kevin. “Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas: The Politics Behind Haida Manga.”
Vancouver Sun, 20 Apr. 2011. https://vancouversun.com/news/staff-blogs/
michael-nicoll-yahgulanaas-the-politics-behind-haida-manga.
Groensteen, Thierry. “The Art of Braiding: A Clarification.” European Comic Art 9.1
(Spring 2016): 88–98.
———. Comics and Narration. Translated by Ann Miller, UP of Mississippi, 2013.
———. “Definitions.” The French Comics Theory Reader, edited by Ann Miller and Bart
Beaty, Leuven UP, 2014, pp. 93–114.
———. The System of Comics. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen, UP of Missis-
sippi, 2007.
———. “Why Are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimation?” A Comics Studies
Reader, edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, U of Mississippi P, 2007, pp. 3–11.
Groth, Gary. Telephone interview with the author. 15 Aug. 2019.
Grove, Laurence. Comics in French: The European Bande Dessinée in Context. Berghahn
Books, 2010.
“Guest Lecture: Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas.” The Bill Reid Centre at SFU. YouTube, 6
May 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pri3SCalWPY.
Guilbert, Xavier. “The Inner Worlds of Charles Burns.” du9: l’autre bande dessinée, 6
Aug. 2015. https://www.du9.org/en/entretien/the-inner-worlds-of-charles-burns/.
Guyer, Jonathan. “From Beirut: The Origin Story of Arab Comix.” Institute of Current
World Affairs, 9 Sept. 2015. https://www.icwa.org/from-beirut-the-origin-story-of-
arab-comix/.
———. “On the Arab Page.” Le Monde Diplomatique (Jan. 2017): 12–13.
———. “War, Romance, and Everyday Life in Beirut’s Emerging Alt-Comix Scene.”
International Journal of Comic Art 21.2 (2019): 74–90.
Haines, Robert. “Red: A Haida Manga by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas.” The Joe Shus-
ter Awards, 22 Feb. 2010. https://joeshusterawards.com/2010/02/22/red-a-haida-
manga/.
Hajdu, David. “Persian Miniatures.” Artforum (Oct./Nov. 2004). https://www.mutual-
art.com/Article/Persian-Miniatures/66A209E1F044F4EA.
Hanafy, Iman. “Revolutionizing the Graphic Novel.” symploke 24.1–2 (2016): 421–34.
Harnett, Benjamin. “The Diffusion of the Codex.” Classical Antiquity 36.2 (Oct. 2017):
183–235.
Harris, Susan. “Graphic Censorship.” Words Without Borders, 17 Apr. 2008. https://www.
wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/graphic-censorship/.
Harris, William V. “Why Did the Codex Supplant the Book-Roll?” Renaissance Society
and Culture: Essays in Honor of Eugene F. Rice, Jr., edited by J. Monfasani and R. G.
Musto, Italica, 1991, pp. 71–85.
Harrison, Richard. “Seeing and Nothingness: Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Haida
Manga, and a Critique of the Gutter.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature /
Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, 43.1 (Mar. 2016): 51–74.
Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. UP of Mississippi, 2005.
Hatheway, Cameron. “Review: A Game for Swallows.” Bleeding Cool, 12 Jan. 2013. http://
www.bleedingcool.com/2013/01/12/review-a-game-of-swallows/.
Hayek, Ghenwa. Beirut: Imagining the City. I. B. Tauris, 2015.
Helou, Samanta. “Native Superheroes Are the Norm at This All-Indigenous Com-
ics Store.” Good, 5 June 2018. https://www.good.is/features/native-american-
indigenous-comic-store-red-planet-albuque.
Hergé. The Black Island. Translated by Michael R. Turner and Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper,
Methuen Books, 1966.
———. The Blue Lotus. Translated by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael R. Turner,
Little, Brown, 1984.
———. Le Lotus Bleu. Casterman, 1974 (1946).
———. Le Secret de La Licorne. Casterman, 1943.
———. L’Île Noire. Casterman, 1938.
———. Objectif Lune. Casterman, 1953.
———. On a marché sur la lune. Casterman, 1954.
———. Prisoners of the Sun. Translated by Michael R. Turner and Leslie Lonsdale-
Cooper, Methuen Books, 1971.
———. Red Rackham’s Treasure. Translated by Michael R. Turner and Leslie Lonsdale-
———. The Secret of the Unicorn. Translated by Michael R. Turner and Leslie Lonsdale-
———. The Seven Crystal Balls. Translated by Michael R. Turner and Leslie Lonsdale-
———. The Shooting Star. Translated by Michael R. Turner and Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper,
———. Tintin au Congo. Casterman, 1974.
———. Tintin au Pays des Soviets. Casterman, 1981.
———. Tintin in American. Translated by Michael R. Turner and Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper,
———. Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. Translated by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and
Michael Turner, Little, Brown, 2007.
———. Tintin in Tibet. Translated by Michael R. Turner and Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper,
Hergé and Numa Sadoul. Entretiens Avec Hergé. Casterman, 2011.
Hodapp, James, and Deema Nasser. “The Complications of Reading Egypt as Africa:
Translation and Magdy el-Shafee’s ‫( المترو‬Metro).” ALT 35: Focus on Egypt: Afri-
can Literature Today, edited by Ernest N. Emenyonu et al., Boydell & Brewer, pp.
22–38.
Holland, Jessica. “Graphic Novel about Egyptian Life Gets English Publication.”
The National (United Arab Emirates), 6 June 2012. https://www.thenational.
ae/arts-culture/books/graphic-novel-about-egyptian-life-gets-english-
publication-1.406735.
Holm, Bill. Northwest Coastal Indian Art: An Analysis of Form. U of Washington P, 1965.
Howes, Franny. “Imagining a Multiplicity of Visual Rhetorical Traditions: Comics

Lessons from Rhetoric Histories.” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 5.3
(2010). http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v5_3/howes/
Hunt, Nancy Rose. “Tintin and the Interruptions of Congolese Comics.” Images and
Empire: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, edited by Paul S. Landau and
Deborah Kaspin, U of California P, 2002.
Huntington, Samuel. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72.3 (1993): 22–49.
———. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Simon and Schuster,
1996.
Iadonisi, Rick. “Bleeding History and Owning His [Father’s] Story: Maus and Collab-
orative Autobiography.” CEA Critic 57.1 (1994): 41–56.
Imam, Hatem. “Tongue-Tied—The Evasiveness of Language in Today’s Arab Com-
ics.” ArteEast: The Global Platform for Middle East Arts, summer 2008. http://arteeast.
org/quarterly/summer-2008-tongue-tied/.
Innis, Harold. Empire and Communications. Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.
Italie, Hillel. “Andre Schiffrin: A Gadfly within the Publishing World.” Arizona Daily
Sun, 19 May 2001. https://azdailysun.com/andre-schiffrin-a-gadfly-within-the-
publishing-world/article_93c2673e-ac09-55b4-bb83-54b5af8eb3e1.html.
Jaggi, Maya. “The Godfather of Egyptian Graphic Novelists: Magdy El Shafee.” News-
week, 25 June 2012.
Jakaitis, Jake and James F. Wurtz. “Introduction: Reading Crossover.” Crossing Bound-
aries in Graphic Narrative, edited by Jake Jakaitis and James F. Wurtz. McFarland
& Company, 2012, pp. 1–22.
Jaquette, Elisabeth. “Formerly Banned Graphic Novel ‘Metro’ Now Available in
Cairo.” Arabic Literature (In English), 28 Jan. 2013. http://arablit.wordpress.
com/2013/01/28/formerly-banned-graphic-novel-metro-now-available-in-cairo/.
Jarno, Stéphane. “Mourir, partir, revenir, Le jeu des hirondelles.” Télérama 3037, 29
Mar. 2008. https://www.telerama.fr/livres/mourir,-partir,-revenir,-le-jeu-des-
hirondelles,26937.php.
jock123. “English editions re-lettered? #9.” Tintin Forums, Tintinologist.org, 23 Feb. 2006.
https://www.tintinologist.org/forums/index.php?action=vthread&forum=8&topi
c=1280.
Johnson, Hildegard Binder. Order Upon the Land: The US Rectangular Land Survey and
the Upper Mississippi Country. Oxford UP, 1976.
Kannemeyer, Anton. Pappa in Afrika. Michael Stevenson, 2010.
Kaplan, Caren. “The Politics of Location as Transnational Feminist Critical Practice.”
Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, edited by
Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, U of Minnesota P, 1994, pp. 137–52.
Kashtan, Aaron. Between Pen and Pixel: Comics, Materiality, and the Book of the Future.
The Ohio State UP, 2018.
Kerbaj, Mazen. Beirut Won’t Cry: Lebanon’s July War: A Visual Diary. Fantagraphics
Underground, 2017.
———. Beyrouth: juillet-août 2006. L’Association, 2007.
———. “i am sorry to decline your proposition.” Kerblog, 27 July 2006. http://mazenker-
blog.blogspot.com/2006/07/i-am-sorry-to-decline-your-proposition.html.
———. “Suspended Time, Number 1: The Family Tree.” Samandal 1 (2008): 15–34.
Khoury, Georges (Jad). “Rebellion Resuscitated: The Youth’s Will Against History.”
Catalogue: The New Generation: Arabic Comics Today, Alifbata, 2018.
King, C. Richard. “Alter/Native Heroes: Native Americans, Comic Books, and the
Struggle for Self-Definition.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 9.2 (Apr.
2009): 214–23.
Kirk, Mimi. “Graphic (Novel) Repression in Egypt.” Foreign Policy, 9 Oct. 2013. https://
foreignpolicy.com/2013/10/09/graphic-novel-repression-in-egypt/.
Koutsoukis, Jason. “Banned Egyptian Writer Fights for Comic Relief.” Sydney Morn-
ing Herald, 28 Nov. 2009. https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/banned-
egyptian-writer-fights-for-comic-relief-20091128-gdttfz.html.
Krauss, Rosalind. “Grids.” October 9 (1979): 50–64.
Labio, Catherine. “The Inherent Three-Dimensionality of Comics.” Yale French Studies,
131/132 (2017): 84–100.
Langford, Rachel. “Photography, Belgian Colonialism, and Hergé’s Tintin au Congo.”
Journal of Romance Studies 8.1 (Spring 2008): 77–89.
Le Monde.fr and AFP. “Justice belge refuse d’interdire ‘Tintin au Congo.’” Le Monde,
12 Oct. 2012. https://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2012/02/10/la-justice-belge-
refuse-d-interdire-tintin-au-congo_1641919_3214.html.
“Lebanese Comics w/ Omar Khouri and Fadi ‘the fdz’ Baki.” Podcast. May 2019.
Ventures by UChicago Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Soundcloud. https://
soundcloud.com/uchicago-cmes/lebanese-comics-omar-khouri-fdz.
“Lebanon Launches Creative Commons Chapter.” SMEX, 10 Nov. 2010. https://smex.
org/lebanon-launches-cc-chapter/.
Lecigne, Bruno. Les Héritiers d’Hergé. Magic Strip, 1983.
Lederman, Marsha. “Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas Seeks Solutions to Environmental May-
hem in New Work Carpe Fin: A Haida Manga.” Globe and Mail, 26 Nov. 2019. https://
www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/article-michael-nicoll-yahgulanaas-
seeks-solutions-to-environmental-mayhem-in/.
Lee, Wendy. “Anjali Singh: Combing the Edges.” Guernica, 15 July 2014. https://www.
guernicamag.com/combing-the-edges/.
Lefèvre, Pascal. “The Conquest of Space: Evolution of Panel Arrangements and Page
Layouts in Early Comics Published in Belgium (1880–1929).” European Comic Art
2.2 (2009): 227–52.
———. “The Importance of Being ‘Published’: A Comparative Study of Different Com-
ics Formats.” Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics,
edited by Anne Magnussen and Hans-Christian Christiansen, Museum Tuscula-
num, 2000, pp. 91–105.
Leservot, Typhaine. “Occidentalism: Rewriting the West in Marjane Satrapi’s ‘Per-
sépolis.’” French Forum, 36.1 (Winter 2011): 115–30.
Levell, Nicola. “Beyond Tradition, More Than Contemporary: Four Northwest Coast
Artists and Citizens Plus.” Urban Thunderbirds: Ravens in a Material World, authored
and co-curated by Rande Cooke, Francis Dick, lessLie, and Dylan Thomas, Art
Gallery of Greater Victoria, 2013, pp. 38–49.
———. “Coppers from the Hood: Haida Manga Interventions and Performative Acts.”
Museum Anthropology 36.2 (Sept. 2013): 113–27.
———. The Seriousness of Play: Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas. Black Dog, 2016.
———. “Site-Specificity and Dislocation: Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas and His Haida
Manga Meddling.” Journal of Material Culture 18.2 (2013): 93–116.
Lewis, David A., Anna Mudd, and Paul Beran, editors. Muqtatafat: A Comics Anthology
Featuring Artists from the Middle East Region. Ninth Art Press, 2015.
Libération. “«Ten» Inspire Marjane Satrapi.” 12 Feb. 2003. https://www.liberation.fr/
cinema/2003/02/12/ten-inspire-marjane-satrapi_430673/.
Link, Alex. “Tulips and Roses in a Global Garden: Speaking Local Identities in Persepo-
lis and Tekkon Kinkreet.” Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels,
edited by Carolene Ayaka and Ian Hague, Routledge, 2015, pp. 240–55.
Lofficier, Randy, and Jean-Marc Lofficier. The Pocket Essential Tintin. Pocket Essentials,
2007.
Loft, Steve. “Who, Me? Decolonization as Control.” Decolonize Me, Ottawa Art Gal-
lery; Oshawa: Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2012.
Loik, Louise. “Using Art to Blur the Line between ‘Us’ and ‘Them.’” Canada’s National
Observer, 15 Oct. 2017. https://www.nationalobserver.com/2017/10/15/news/using-
art-blur-line-between-us-and-them.
Loos, Ted. “A Canadian Museum Promotes Indigenous Art. But Don’t Call It ‘Indian.’”
New York Times, 13 July 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/arts/design/
art-gallery-of-ontario-indigenous-art.html.
Love, Paul. “Beirut Won’t Cry: Lebanon’s July War: A Visual Diary by Mazen Kerbaj.”
World Literature Today, Mar. 2018. https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2018/
march/beirut-wont-cry-lebanons-july-war-visual-diary-mazen-kerbaj.
Lu, Alexander. “Samandal, a Beirut-based Anthology Targeted by the Lebanese Gov-
ernment, Needs Your Help.” The Beat: The Blog of Comics Culture, 23 Dec. 2015.
https://www.comicsbeat.com/samandal-a-beirut-based-anthology-targeted-by-
the-lebanese-government-needs-your-help/.
Lyotard, Jean-François. Le Différend. Les Éditions de Minuit, 2013.
Maher, Robert. “Local Action & Geomatics: The Gowgaia Institute on Haida Gwaii.”
GoGeomatics Canada, 27 Nov. 2015. https://gogeomatics.ca/local-action-geomatics-
the-gowgaia-institute-on-haida-gwaii/.
Malek, Amy. “Memoir as Iranian Exile Cultural Production: A Case Study of Marjane
Satrapi’s Persepolis Series.” Iranian Studies 39.3 (Sep. 2006): 353–80.
Mangles, Alex. “Stitching Out a Life in Graphic Memoir.” Los Angeles Review of Books,
8 June 2015. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/stitching-out-a-life-in-graphic-
memoir-baddawi/.
Marks, Clifford. “Wise Beyond Her Years: How Persepolis Introjects the Adult into the
Child.” Picturing Childhood: Youth in Transnational Comics, edited by Mark Heimer-
mann and Brittany Tullis, U of Texas P, 2017, pp. 163–80.
Marion, Jean-Luc, and Michael Syrotinski. “Terrifying, Wondrous Tintin.” Yale French
Studies 131/132 (2017): 222–36.
Marion, Philippe. Traces en Cases. Académia, 1993.
Massey, Doreen. World City. Polity Press, 2007.
Mauzé, Marie. “Haida Manga: An Artist Embraces Tragedy, Beautifully.” The Conver-
sation, 12 July 2018. https://theconversation.com/haida-manga-an-artist-embraces-
tragedy-beautifully-99543.
May, Elizabeth. Paradise Won: The Struggle for South Moresby. McLelland & Stewart,
1990.
“Mazen Kerbaj Inks New Graphic Novel Beirut Won’t Cry.” The Wire, 17 Aug. 2017. https://
www.thewire.co.uk/news/47782/mazen-kerbaj-inks-new-graphic-novel-beirut-
won-t-cry.
Mazhari, Shadi. “Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and the Overarching Problematic of
Totalitarianism and Democracy in Postrevolutionary Iran.” Persian Language, Lit-
erature and Culture: New Leaves, Fresh Looks, edited by Kamran Talattof, Routledge,
2015, pp. 287–301.
Mazur, Dan, and Alexander Danner. Comics: A Global History, 1968 to the Present.
Thames and Hudson, 2014.
McCarthy, Tom. Tintin and the Secret of Literature. Granta, 2011.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Kitchen Sink Press, 1993.
McKinney, Mark. The Colonial Heritage of French Comics. Liverpool UP, 2013.
———. Postcolonialism and Migration in French Comics. Leuven UP, 2020.
———. Redrawing French Empire in Comics. The Ohio State UP, 2013.
Medley, Mark. “Pacific Notion: The Convergence of B.C.’s Haida with Japan’s Manga.”
National Post, 17 Oct. 2009. https://mny.ca/en/article/2/2009-10-17-pacific-notion.
Mehta, Binita and Pia Mukherji. “Introduction.” Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Iden-
tities, edited by Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji Routledge, 2015, pp. 1–26.
Menu, Jean-Christophe. “Preface.” Comix 2000. L’Association, 1999.
———. “Stay Off My Patch.” The French Comics Theory Reader, edited by Ann Miller and
Bart Beaty, Leuven UP, 2014, pp. 327–33.
Menu, Jean-Christophe and Sammy Harkham. “Interview.” Comics Journal 300, Nov.
2009.
Merhej, Lena Irmgard. “Introduction: New Comics in the Arab Countries.” Muqtata-
fat: A Comics Anthology Featuring Artists from the Middle East Region, edited by A.
David Lewis, Anna Mudd, and Paul Beran, Ninth Art Press, 2015, pp. 7–10.
———. “Lena Merhej.” Interview with Voitachewski. du9: l’autre bande dessinée, Dec.
2011. https://www.du9.org/entretien/lena-merhej/.
———. “Men with Guns: War Narratives in New Lebanese Comics.” Postcolonial Com-
ics: Texts, Events, Identities, edited by Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji, Routledge,
2015, pp. 204–222.
———. “What Happened.” In “Help Samandal Speak,” by Marguerite Dabaie, The
Hooded Utilitarian, Nov. 2015. https://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2015/11/help-
samandal-speak/.
Meyer, E. A. “Roman Tabulae, Egyptian Christians, and the Adoption of the Codex.”
Chiron 37 (Jan. 2007): 295–331.
“Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas (Haida) on the Charles Edenshaw.” Bard Graduate Cen-
ter. YouTube, 3 May 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKiwF2e2OqQ.
“Michael Yahgulanaas—Red: A Haida Manga.” University of British Columbia. You-
Tube, 4 Oct. 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBbLiEqUZ-g.
Mickwitz, Nina. Documentary Comics: Graphic Truth-Telling in a Skeptical Age. Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016.
Mignolo, Walter D. “I Am Where I Think: Epistemology and the Colonial Difference.”

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 8.2 (1999): 235–45.
———. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Think-
ing. Princeton UP, 2000.
Miller, Ann. “Les héritiers d’Hergé: The Figure of the Aventurier in a Postcolonial Con-
text.” Shifting Frontiers of France and Francophonie, edited by Yvette Rocheron and
Christopher Rolfe, Peter Lang, 2004, pp. 307–24.
———. Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strip. Intel-
lect, 2007.
———. “Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: Eluding the Frames.” L’Esprit Créateur 51.1 (Spring
2011): 38–52.
Miller, Nancy K. “Out of the Family: Generations of Women in Marjane Satrapi’s
Persepolis.” Life Writing 4.1 (2007): 13–29.
Mirzoeff, Nick. How to See the World: An Introduction to Images, from Self-Portraits to
Selfies, Maps to Movies, and More. Basic Books, 1996.
———. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Duke UP, 2011.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Iconology, Image, Text, Ideology. U of Chicago P, 1986.
Miyoshi, Masao. “A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the
Decline of the Nation-State.” Critical Inquiry 19.4 (1993): 726–51.
Morayef, Soraya. “Arab Comics: Fit for Academic Exploration.” Al-Fanar Media, 18
Nov. 2014. https://www.al-fanarmedia.org/2014/11/arab-comics-fit-academic-
exploration/.
Morelli, Nina. “Samandal: Lebanese Graphic Novelists Rise from the Ashes.” Mid-
dle East Monitor, 18 Nov. 2020. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20201118-
samandal-lebanese-graphic-novelists-rise-from-the-ashes/.
Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68.
———. “World-Systems Analysis, Weltliteratur.” Review 28.3 (2005): 217–28.
Morley, Madeleine. “After a Controversial Lawsuit, Lebanese Comic Publisher Saman-
dal Has Returned Stronger Than Ever.” Aiga: Eye on Design, 8 June 2018. https://
eyeondesign.aiga.org/after-a-controversial-lawsuit-lebanese-comic-publisher-
samandal-has-returned-stronger-than-ever/.
Morgan, Harry. Principes des littératures bandes dessinées. Éditions de l’An 2, 2004.
Mouchart, Benoît. À l’ombre de la ligne claire: Jacques van Melkebeke, le clandestin de la
BD. Vertige Graphic, 2002.
Mouchart, Benoît, and François Rivière. La damnation d’Edgar P. Jacobs: biographie.
Seuil/Archimbaud, 2003.
Mountfort, Paul. “‘Yellow skin, black hair . . . Careful, Tintin’: Hergé and Oriental-
ism.” Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 1.1 (2012): 33–50.
Mufti, Aamir. Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literatures. Harvard UP, 2016.
Muhanna, Elias. “The Fate of a Joke in Lebanon.” New Yorker, 26 Sep. 2015. https://
www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-fate-of-a-joke-in-lebanon.
“The Mu’taz and Rada Sawwaf Arabic Comics Initiative: About Us.” American Univer-
sity of Beirut, n.d. https://www.aub.edu.lb/saci/Pages/default.aspx.
Nadel, Dan. “The Comics Pantheon Likes.” Publishers Weekly, 20 Oct. 2003. https://
www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/comics/article/22455-
the-comics-pantheon-likes.html.
Naghibi, Nima, and Andrew O’Malley. “Estranging the Familiar: ‘East’ and ‘West’
in Satrapi’s Persepolis.” ESC: English Studies in Canada 31.2–3 (June/Sept. 2005):
223–47.
Nemser, Daniel. Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico.
U of Texas P, 2017.
Niranjana, Tejaswini. Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial
Context. U of California P, 1992.
Nodelman, Perry. “Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’s Red and the Structures of Sequential
Art.” Seriality and Texts for Young People: The Compulsion to Repeat, edited by Mavis
Reimer et al., Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 188–205.
Onciul, Bryony. Museums, Heritage and Indigenous Voice: Decolonising Engagement.
Routledge, 2015.
Öncü, Ayşe, and Petra Weyland. Space, Culture and Power: New Identities in Globalizing
Cities. Zed Books, 1997.
Ong, Aihwa. “Introduction: Worlding Cities or the Art of Being Global.” Worlding Cit-
ies: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, edited by Ananya Roy and Aihwa
Ong, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, pp. 1–25.
Ostby, Marie. “Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Persian Miniatures, and the Multifaceted
Power of Comic Protest,” PMLA 132.3 (May 2017): 558–79.
Ostrowitz, Judith. “Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas: It Looks Like Manga.” Objects of
Exchange: Social and Material Transformation on the Late Nineteenth-Century North-
west Coast, edited by Aaron Glass, Yale UP, 2011, pp. 79–89.
Owens, Chris. “Tintin Crosses the Atlantic: The Golden Press Affair.” Tintinologist.org,
Jan. 2007. https://www.tintinologist.org/articles/goldenpress.html.
Pagano, Ernesto, translator. Metro. By Magdy El Shafee. il Sirente, 2010.
Palmer, Mark. “Theorizing Indigital Geographic Information Networks.” Cartograph-
ica 47.2 (2012): 80–91.
Park, Liz, editor. Old Growth: Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas. Red Leaf, 2011.
Pasamonik, Didier, editor. L’Affaire Tintin au Congo. Actuabd.com, 2016.
———. “Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo: ‘Cette bande dessinée est raciste.’” Actu-
aBD, 31 Aug. 2007. https://www.actuabd.com/Bienvenu-Mbutu-Mondondo-
Cette-bande-dessinee-est-raciste.
———. “Frédéric Cambourakis (éditeur): ‘La bd est en crise depuis une petite année.’” Actu-
aBD, 12 Sep. 2011. http://www.actuabd.com/Frederic-Cambourakis-editeur-La-BD.
———. “Hergé: une ligne claire.” De Georges Remi à Hergé. Institut Saint Boniface, 1984.
Paul, Pamela. “Life under Siege: ‘A Game for Swallows,’ by Zeina Abirached.” New
York Times, 14 Nov. 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/books/a-game-for-
swallows-by-zeina-abirached.html.
Peeters, Benoît. “Four Conceptions of the Page: From Case, planche, récit: lire la bande
dessinée (Paris: Casterman, 1998, pp. 41–60).” Translated by Jesse Cohn. ImageText
3.3 (Spring 2007). http://imagetext.english.ufl.edu/archives/v3_3/peeters/.
———. Hergé, Son of Tintin. Translated by Tina A. Kover, Johns Hopkins UP, 2012.
———. Lire la bande dessinée. Flammarion, 2003.

———. Tintin and the World of Hergé: An Illustrated History. Translated by Michael Farr,
Bullfinch Press, 1992.
Pilcher, Tim and Brad Brooks. The Essential Guide to World Comics. Collins & Brown,
2005.
Place-Verghnes, Floriane. “Instruction, distraction, réflexion: lecture de Persepolis.”
French Cultural Studies 21.4 (2010): 257–65.
Pleban, Dafna. “Investigating the Clear Line Style.” Comic Foundry, 7 Nov. 2006.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160305161452/http://comicfoundry.com/?p=1526 .
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge, 1992.
Pressman, Jessica. “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature.”
Michigan Quarterly Review 48.4 (Fall 2009): 465–82.
Qualey, M. Lynx. “‘Metro’ Available to Friends, Not Family.” Egypt Independent, 31
July 2012. http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/metro-available-friends-not-
family.
Rama, Angel. The Lettered City. Edited and translated by John Charles Chasteen, Duke
UP, 1996.
Repetti, Massimo. “African Wave: Specificity and Cosmopolitanism in African Com-
ics.” African Arts 40.2 (Summer 2007): 16–35.
Reyns-Chikuma, C[h]ris. “Introduction: Translation and Comics.” TranscUlturAl 8.2
(2016): 1–7.
Rich, Adrienne. “Notes Toward a Politics of Location.” Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected
Prose 1979–1985, Norton, 1994, pp. 210–31.
Rifas, Leonard. “Ideology: The Construction of Race and History in Tintin in the
Congo.” Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, edited by Matthew J.
Smith and Randy Duncan, Routledge, 2012, 221–34.
Rifkin, Mark. Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American
Renaissance. U of Minnesota P, 2014.
Rima, Barrack. “Éditorial.” Samandal: Généalogie. 53 Dots, 2014.
Roberts, Colin H., and T. C. Skeat. The Birth of the Codex. Oxford UP, 1983.
Roberts-Farina, Jessica. “Thirty Years of ‘Old Growth.’” The Tyee, 10 Mar. 2012. https://
thetyee.ca/Books/2012/03/10/Old-Growth/.
Roche, Olivier, and Dominique Cerbelaud. Tintin: bibliographie d’un mythe. Les impres-
sions nouvelles, 2014.
Rossetti, Chip. Telephone interview with author. 23 Oct. 2019.
———, translator. Metro: A Story of Cairo. By Magdy El Shafee. Metropolitan Books,
2012.
———. “Translating Cairo’s Hidden Lines: The City as Visual Text in Magdy El Shafee’s
Metro.” The City in Arabic Literature, edited by Nizar F. Hermes and Gretchen
Head, Edinburgh UP, 2018, pp. 306–325.
Rota, Valerio. “Aspects of Adaptation: The Translation of Comics Formats.” Comics in
Translation, edited by Federico Zanettin. St. Jerome, 79–91.
———. “The Translation’s Visibility: David B.’s L’Ascension du Haut Mal in Italy.” Belphé-
gor 4.1 (Nov. 2004). https://dalspace.library.dal.ca/bitstream/handle/10222/47698/
04_01_Rota_davidb_en_cont.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.
Round, Phillip H. Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663–1880. U
of North Carolina P, 2010.
Royal, Derek Parker. “Foreword; or Reading within the Gutter.” Multicultural Comics:
From Zap to Blue Beetle, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, U of Texas P, 2010, pp.
ix–xi.
———. “Introduction: Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Nar-
rative.” Melus 32.3 (2007): 7–22.
Sacco, Joe. Palestine. Fantagraphics Books, 2001.
———. Palestine: A Nation Occupied. Fantagraphics Books, 1993.
———. Palestine: In the Gaza Strip. Fantagraphics Books, 1996.
Said, Edward. “The Clash of Ignorance.” The Nation, 4 Oct. 2001. https://www.thenation.
com/article/clash-ignorance/.
———. Culture and Imperialism. Knopf, 1993.
———. Orientalism. Penguin Classics, 1978.
———. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Harvard UP, 1983.
Saltman, Judith. “A Publisher’s Legacy: The Children’s Books of Douglas & McIntyre.”
Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 5.1 (2013): 132–48.
Samandal. “#16 (2019).” Samandal Comics. https://samandalcomics.org/project/16/.
———. “Mission and Activities.” Samandal Comics. http://new.samandalcomics.org/
about/#mission.
———. Samandal 13. 53 Dots, 2012.
———. Samandal 9. Dar al Kotob, 2010.
———. Samandal 7. Dar al Kotob, 2009.
———. Samandal 2. xanadu*, 2008.
———. Samandal 1. xanadu*, 2007.
———. “Samandal, deuxième rencontre.” Interview with Voitachewski. du9: l’autre bande
dessinée, July 2017. https://www.du9.org/entretien/samandal-deuxieme-rencontre/.
Samandal Association for Comics. “Grants/Samandal: Publishing Comics Online in
Three Languages under CC Licenses.” Creative Commons Wiki, last edit 30 June
2010. https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Grants/Samandal_:_Publishing_
Comics_Online_in_Three_Languages_Under_CC_Licenses.
“Samandal Comics Magazine: Issue One Press Release.” Xanadu Productions, 28 Mar.
2008. http://www.xanaduproductions.net/salamander/pr-samandal1.html.
Sanders, Joe Sutliff, editor. The Comics of Hergé: When the Lines Are Not So Clear. UP of
Mississippi, 2016.
Sante, Luc. “The Clear Line.” Give Our Regards to the Atom Smashers, edited by Sean
Howe, Pantheon, 2004, pp. 24–33.
———. “She Can’t Go Home Again.” New York Times, 22 Aug. 2004. https://www.
nytimes.com/2004/08/22/books/she-can-t-go-home-again.html.
Sassen, Saskia. “The Global City: Introducing a Concept.” The Brown Journal of World
Affairs 11.2 (Winter/Spring 2005): 27–43.
———. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton UP, 1991.
Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis tome 1. L’Association, 2000.
———. Persepolis tome 2. L’Association, 2001.

———. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. Translated by Mattias Ripa and Blake Ferris,
Pantheon, 2003.
———. Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return. Translated by Anjali Singh, Pantheon, 2004.
———. “Persepolis: A State of Mind.” Literal: Latin American Voices / Voces Latinoamerica-
nas 13. http://literalmagazine.com/persepolis-a-state-of-mind/.
Schiffrin, André. The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over
Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. Verso, 2001.
———. Words and Money. Verso, 2010.
Schodt, Frederik L. “The View from North America: Manga as Late-Twentieth-
Century Japonisme?” Manga’s Cultural Crossroads, edited by Jaqueline Berndt and
Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Routledge, 2013, pp. 19–26.
Screech, Matthew. “Introduction.” European Comic Art 3.2 (2010): v–xiii.
———. Masters of the Ninth Art: Bandes Dessinées and Franco-Belgian Identity. Liverpool
UP, 2005.
Serrano, Nhora Lucía, editor. Immigrants and Comics: Graphic Spaces of Remembrance,
Transaction, and Mimesis. Routledge, 2021.
Serres, Michel. Hergé, Mon Ami: Études et portrait. Moulinsart, 2000.
Shatz, Adam. “Drawing Blood: A French Graphic Novelist’s Shocking Memoir
of the Middle East.” New Yorker, 12 Oct. 2015. https://www.newyorker.com/
magazine/2015/10/19/drawing-blood.
Sheyahshe, Michael A. Native Americans in Comic Books: A Critical Study. McFarland,
2008.
Shih, Shu-Mei. “Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition.” PMLA 119.1
(2004): 16–30.
Siegert, Bernhard. Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the
Real. Fordham UP, 2015.
Singer, Mark. Breaking the Frames: Populism and Prestige in Comics Studies. U of Texas
P, 2018.
Singh, Anjali. Telephone interview with the author. 14 July 2017.
———. Skype interview with the author. 25 Sep. 2019.
Sitterson, Aubrey. “The Adventures of Tintin and the Case of the Too-Convincing Pirates,
or How Apple and Comic Fans Got Fooled.” IFC blog, 3 Nov. 2011. https://web.
archive.org/web/20130327024017/http://www.ifc.com/fix/2011/11/tintin-apple-
app-store-piracy.
Skeat, T. C. “The Origin of the Christian Codex.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und
Epigraphik 102 (194): 263–68.
Smith, Sidonie. “Human Rights and Comics.” Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Auto-
biography and Graphic Novels, edited by Michael Chaney. U of Wisconsin P, 2011,
pp. 61–72.
Smolderen, Thierry. The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay.
Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen, UP of Mississippi, 2014.
Sorrell, Traci. “Interview: Lee Francis IV on Native Publishing, Bookstores & Indig-
enous Comic Con.” Cynthia Leitich Smith, 4 Apr. 2018. https://cynthialeitichsmith.
com/2018/04/interview-lee-francis-iv-on-native/.
Sostar McLellan, Kristine. “Mythic Proportions” Interview. Suburbia 16/17 (2015):
38–39.
Soumois, Frédéric. Dossier Tintin: Sources, Versions, Thèmes, Structures. Jacques Antoine,
1987.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. Pantheon, 1986.
———. MetaMaus. Pantheon, 2011.
Spiers, Miriam Brown. “Creating a Haida Manga: The Formline of Social Responsibil-
ity in Red.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 26.3 (Fall 2014): 41–61.
Spivak, Gayatri. Death of a Discipline. Columbia UP, 2003.
———. “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives.” History and Theory 24.3
(1985): 247–72.
———. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Critical Inquiry 12.1
(1985): 243–61.
Spurgeon, Tom. “CR Holiday Interview #3: Bart Beaty on Persepolis.” Comics Reporter, 22
Dec. 2009. http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/cr_holiday_interview_03/.
Stacey, Paul, and Sarah Hinchliff Pearson. Made with Creative Commons. Ctrl+Alt+Delete
Books, 2017.
Stanbridge, Nicole. “Introduction.” Urban Thunderbirds: Ravens in a Material World,
authored and co-curated by Rande Cooke et al., Art Gallery of Greater Victoria,
2013, pp. 11–19.
Storace, Patricia. “A Double Life in Black and White.” New York Review of Books, 7 Apr. 2005.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2005/04/07/a-double-life-in-black-and-white/.
“Student Sues Publishers over ‘Racist’ Tintin au Congo Book.” YouTube, uploaded
by AP Archive, 30 July 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-4UncCa5pI&
ab_channel=APArchive.
Stulik, Dusan C., and Art Kaplan. The Atlas of Analytical Signatures of Photographic Pro-
cesses. Getty Conservation Institute, 2013. https://www.getty.edu/conservation/
publications_resources/pdf_publications/atlas.html.
Takeda, Louise. Islands’ Spirit Rising: Reclaiming the Forests of Haida Gwaii. UBC Press,
2015.
Tensuan, Theresa M. “Comic Visions and Revisions in the Work of Lynda Barry and
Marjane Satrapi.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (Winter 2006): 947–64.
Thompson, Harry. Tintin: Hergé and His Creation. Hodder & Stoughton, 1991.
Thompson, Kim, and Tom Spurgeon. “CR Holiday Interview #8—Kim Thompson.”
The Comics Reporter, 22 Mar. 2012. http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/
resources/interviews/37008/.
Todd, Emmanuel. Qui est Charlie?: Sociologie d’une crise religieuse. Éd. du Seuil, 2015.
Tornare, Alain-Jacques. Tint’Interdit: Pastiches et Parodies. Éditions Cabedita, 2014.
Townsend-Gault, Charlotte. “Art Claims in the Age of Delgamuukw.” Native Art of the
Northwest Coast: A History of Changing Ideas, edited by Charlotte Townsend-Gault,
Jennifer Kramer, and Ḳi-ḳe-in, UBC Press, 2013, pp. 864–935.
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is not a Metaphor.” Decolonization:

Indigeneity, Education & Society 1.1 (2012): 1–40.
Tully, Annie. “An Interview with Marjane Satrapi.” Bookslut, Oct. 2004. https://web.
archive.org/web/20161129163704/http://www.bookslut.com/features/2004_
10_003261.php.
Valenti, Kristy. “Translation Roundtable—Part One of Three.” Comics Journal, 2 June 2010.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160329021608/http://classic.tcj.com/international/
translation-roundtable-part-one-of-three/.
Valium, Henriette. 1000 Rectums, It’s an Album Valium. H. Valium, 1996.
Van Lier, Henri. “La bande dessinée, une cosmogenie dure.” Bande dessinée, récit et
modernité, edited by Thierry Groensteen, Futuropolis, 1988, pp. 5–24.
Venuti, Lawrence. Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic. U of Nebraska P, 2019.
———. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. Routledge, 1998.
———. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. Routledge, 1995.
———. “World Literature and Translation Studies.” The Routledge Companion to World
Literature, edited by Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir, Routledge,
2011, pp. 180–93.
Versaci, Rocco. This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature. Continuum,
2007.
Voitachewski. “Zeina Abirached.” du9: l’autre bande dessinée, Aug. 2011. http://www.
du9.org/entretien/zeina-abirached/.
Vrielink, Jogchum. “Effort to Ban Tintin Comic Book Fails in Belgium.” Guardian,
14 May 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/law/2012/may/14/effort-ban-tintin-
congo-fails.
Walkowitz, Rebecca. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in the Age of World Litera-
ture. Columbia UP, 2015.
Wanzo, Rebecca. The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political
Belonging. New York UP, 2020
White, Michelle. “Red: A Haida Manga.” Multiversity Comics, 23 Aug. 2016. http://
www.multiversitycomics.com/reviews/red-a-haida-manga/.
Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics.” Modern Fiction Studies
52.4 (Winter 2006): 965–79.
———. Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. U of Chicago P, 2007.
Winkler, Stefan, and Kerstin Pinther. “Metro: Magdy El Shafee.” Afropolis: City/Media/
Art, edited by Kerstin Pinther, Larissa Förster, and Christian Hanussek, Jacana,
2012, p. 102.
Wivel, Matthias. “A House Divided: The Crisis at L’Association (Part 1 of 2).” Com-
ics Journal, 3 Nov. 2011. http://www.tcj.com/a-house-divided-the-crisis-at-l%E2%
80%99association-part-1-of-2/.
Wolk, Douglas. “The GN Imprint That Isn’t.” Publishers Weekly, 7 Mar. 2005. https://
www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20050307/25390-the-gn-imprint-that-isn-t.
html.
———. “This Sweet Sickness.” New York Magazine, 6 Jan. 2005. http://nymag.com/
nymetro/arts/books/reviews/10851/.
World Intellectual Property Organization. “Berne Convention for the Protection of

Literary and Artistic Works (as amended on September 28, 1979).” WIPO IP Por-
tal. https://wipolex.wipo.int/en/text/283693.
Worth, Jennifer. “Unveiling: Persepolis as Embodied Performance.” Theatre Research
International 32.2 (2007): 143–60.
Yahgulanaas, Michael Nicoll. “Academic inquiry about your work.” E-mail to the
author. 11 July 2020.
———. Carpe Fin: A Haida Manga. Douglas & McIntyre, 2019.
———. A Lousy Tale. Rocking Raven Comix, 2000.
———. “Notes on Haida Manga.” Geist 70 (Fall 2008): 54–56.
———. “Re: Academic Inquiry about your work.” E-mail to the author. 21, 22, 24, 26
Aug. 2018.
———. Red: A Haida Manga. Douglas & McIntyre, 2009.
———. A Tale of Two Shamans. Theytus Books Ltd. and Haida Gwaii Museum at
Qay’Ilnagaay, 2001.
———. A Tale of Two Shamans. Locarno Press, 2018.
———. War of the Blink: A Haida Manga. Locarno Press, 2017.
———. “The Wave” (2014). Haida Manga. http://haidamanga.com/series/1/the-wave.
Yamanaka, Chie. “Domesticating Manga? National Identity in Korean Comics Cul-
ture.” Reading Manga: Local and Global Perceptions of Japanese Comics, edited by
Jaqueline Berndt and Steffi Richter, Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2006, pp.
193–204.
———. “Manhwa in Korea: (Re-)Nationalizing Comics Culture.” Manga’s Cultural Cross-
roads, edited by Jaqueline Berndt and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Routledge,
2013, pp. 85–99.
Yeoh, Brenda. “Global/Globalizing Cities.” Progress in Human Geography 23.4 (1999):
607–16.
Yuste Frías, José. “Traduire l’image dans les albums d’Astérix: À la recherche du
pouce perdu en Hispanie.” Le tour du monde d’Astérix, edited by Bertrand Richet,
Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2011, pp. 255–71.
Zalzal, Zéna. “Le feu et les mantras de Zena el-Khalil.” L’Orient Le Jour, 21 Aug. 2017.
https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/1068291/le-feu-et-les-mantras-de-zena-el-
khalil.html.
Zanettin, Federico. “Comics in Translation: An Overview.” Comics in Translation,
edited by Federico Zanettin, St. Jerome Publishing, 2008, pp. 1–32.
I N D E X
Abdalla, Isakandar, 77, 78n6, 88, 88 fig. Aldama, Frederick Luis, 3, 8

2.2, 94 fig. 2.5, 102 Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature
Abedinifard, Mostafa, 108n4, 130n25 (Hatfield), 115
Abirached, Zeina, 106, 136–47, 138n29, Anderson, Benedict, 33
143n31; Atelier de Recherche ALBA, anti-Semitism, 48
studied graphisme at, 142; David B.,
anticolonialism, 11, 48, 61, 166
Jacques Tardi, Emmanuel Guibert
Apostolidès, Jean-Marie, 30, 31, 43,
cited as influences, 142; École natio-
47n23, 48
nale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs,
attended, 142 Appadurai, Arjun, 135
Abomo, Marie-Rose Maurin, 25, 48 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 26, 54–56, 58,
66; cultural syncretism as imperial-
After the American Century: The Ends
ism, 160
of US Culture in the Middle East
(Edwards), 80 Appollo (Olivier Appollodorus), review-
ing Persepolis, 110, 111
Ahmed, Sara, 16, 147
Apter, Emily, 6n8, 10, 18, 193n5, 206,
Aho, Edgar: member of Mouhtaraf JAD,
207, 212
198
Arab Spring, 79–81, 83. See also #Jan25
Alaidy, Ahmed, 83
Arabic dialects, 208. See also fusha
albums, 4, 5, 32, 36, 39, 44–46, 58, 59, 67,
79, 117–19, 124, 126–27; format, 32; Ascension du haut mal, L’. See L’Ascension
lack of success in US, 4, 5, 58. See du haut mal
also bandes dessinées Association, l’. See L’Association
245
246 • INDEX
Assouline, Pierre, 31, 35n15, 41, 44n21 Breaking the Frames (Singer), 113
authenticity, 152–156. See also Haida Bredehoft, Thomas A., 87n10
manga Brienza, Casey, 162–65
Azoulay, Ariella, 152n8 Bringing up Father (McManus), influence
on Tintin, 6
Baetens, Jan, 11, 31n10, 57, 60–62, 84n9, Broadhead, John, 153–54, 153n11
117, 118, 174n33, 183; cites black- Burke, Laurie, 51
and-white as an artistic choice, 145, Burns, Charles, 19, 25–27, 57, 58–61,
146 62n33, 62n34, 63, 64, 66, 120. See also
Baki, Fadi. See the fdz Nitnit trilogy
bandes dessinées, 4, 10, 11, 13, 14, 23, 33,
34, 37–39, 113, 115, 117, 119. See also Cairo, 70, 71, 73–7, 80–82, 84, 90, 96, 99,
albums; comics 192
Barthes, Roland, 31 Callison, Camille, 158
Bassnett, Susan, 15, 16 Cambourakis, Frédéric, 142, 143
Beauchard, David. See David B. Canada: Canadian identity, 160
Bécassine, 33, 37 captions, 36–39, 67, 81
Beaty, Bart, 3, 32n13, 46, 109, 110, 113, Carpe Fin (Yahgulahnaas), 151, 168 fig.
115, 116, 119, 121, 124, 144, 145, 4.1, 169; experienced as a mural, 183,
215n18 187; habitation of the water, 166;
Beirut, 137, 141, 143n31, 191–95, 198–200, original art commissioned by and
212 displayed at Seattle Art Museum,
Beirut Won’t Cry, 213–15; reformatting of 181
Kerblog, 214. See also Beyrouth: juillet- Carrión, Mónica, 78
août 2006 Casterman, 36, 46, 46n22, 51, 52, 68;
Benoît-Jeannin, Maxime, 48 ordered standardized font for Tin-
Berenboom, Alain, 52 tin, 44
Berndt, Jaqueline, 166n20 Celotti, Nadine, 86
Berne Convention, 195, 196 Chaland, Yves, 56
Between Pen and Pixel: Comics, Materiality, Charlie Hebdo, 205
and the Book of the Future (Kashtan), Chute, Hillary, 2n1, 3, 11, 12, 104, 105n2,
101 130, 145, 187
Beydoun, Wissam: member of Mouhtaraf Ciboulette collection, 118, 119, 124
JAD, 199 clash of civilizations, 105, 105n1
Beyrouth [Catharsis] (Abirached), 142, 143 codexité, 183
Beyrouth: juillet-août 2006 (Kerbaj), Coeurs Vaillants, 35, 39n20, 45
213–15; format, 213; reformatting of
Cohn, Neil, 6n9, 172, 172n28
Kerblog, 214; subtitles, 213. See also
Beirut Won’t Cry colonialism, 13, 23, 24, 28, 29, 31, 34,
45, 47–51, 53, 54, 149, 158, 171;
Bhabha, Homi, 63, 64, 106, 107, 154
use of gridding, 172. See also
Bitterkomix (Kannemeyer), 57 decolonization; postcolonialism;
Black Hole (Burns), 58 anticolonialism
bonelliano. See format comics auteur, 105, 113, 116
border thinking, 151, 174. See also comic strips, 5, 6. See also comics
Mignolo, Walter comics: distribution, 5; form, 4, 5, 12, 40,
braiding, 66, 94, 98 194; global, 4, 136, 196, 203, 212; rac-
INDEX • 247
ism in, 25, 29; semiotics of, 9, 11, 76; Dirks, Rudolph, 37
term used as imperializing nomen- détournement, 17, 55–57
clature, 165; untranslatability of, 189,
Dony, Christophe, 29n6, 57
204; See also bandes dessinées; comic
strips; comics scholarship; graphic Douglas, Allen, 71n3, 142n30, 208n15
novels Douglas and McIntyre, 170
comics scholarship, 11, 13, 14, 24, 84, 91,
126, 148, 166n20, 172, 174, 182, 214, Eberstadt, Fernanda, 111, 130
218
Edenshaw, Charles, 149, 153
Comic Shop, 77, 78n6
Éditions Cambourakis, 142
Comix 2000, 210, 211, 217; format, 211
Edition Moderne, 77, 79, 101, 102
Conley, Tom, 93
Edwards, Brian T. 70, 73, 75, 76, 80–84,
Cornélius, 64 102
Creative Commons, 195, 196–98, 196n6 Egmont, 53
Crucifix, Benoît, 60 Ego comme X, 118
cultural appropriation, 108, 153 Egypt, 5–8, 70, 75–82, 201. See also Cairo
cultural identity, 109, 158 El Khalil, Zena, found of xanadu*, 197,
198
Damluji, Nadim, 50, 51, 142n30 El Shafee, Magdy, 3, 5, 18, 19, 69–71, 73,
Danner, Alexander, 14, 118 76, 77n4, 78, 79, 80–83, 87, 90 fig-
ure 2.3, 96, 97 figure 2.6, 102, 136;
David B. (David Beauchard), 105, 106,
arrested, 76; Libyan by birth, 78. See
110–14; Satrapi, influence on, 113,
also Metro
118
Emmerich, Karen, 87
Davies, Dominic, 8, 76, 89, 191, 192, 194,
207, 214; highlights importance of Enright, David, 51, 53
collaborative networks, 191 Epileptic. See L’Ascension du haut mal
Davies, Humphrey: translation of Metro Exem, 56
into English, 77, 78n6, 80, 83, 88, 95,
100, 102
Fantagraphics, 71, 120, 121, 135, 213–15
Davis, Rocío G., 107
Farr, Michael, 61
de Moor, Bob, 56
Fili, Louise, 117
Debord, Guy, 17, 17n4, 55n31
flippy pages, 17, 18, 20, 215–18
decolonial mapping, 17, 18, 150, 168,
Fondation Moulinsart. See Moulinsart
169, 188
format, 4, 5, 17, 32–34, 44, 46, 58, 59, 64,
Decolonize Me: Ottawa art gallery exhibi-
73, 74, 84, 101–03, 119, 126, 143, 144,
tion (2012), 152
146, 164, 165, 182, 189–91, 212, 213,
decolonization, 7n10, 53, 148, 149, 152; 217, 217n19; album, 4, 32; blog, 213,
Haida manga as a tool for, 20, 175 215; bonelliano, 101; codex, 175n35;
Delisle, Philippe, 14, 29, 29n6, 30n8, graphic novel, 118; lianhuanhua, 64
33–35, 47, 51n29 formlines, 20, 154, 154n12, 155, 175, 177–
Denson, Shane, 7, 14 80, 177n36, 185
Der-Ghougassian, Choghig: member of Foucault, Michel, 114, 116, 144, 173,
Mouhtaraf JAD, 199 175n34
Dernier Cri, Le, 64 framelines, 155, 175–81
di Ricco, Massimo, 142n30, 189n1, 198, France, 19, 37n16, 105–07, 110, 113–16,
207 118, 120, 121, 124, 126, 129, 130, 133–
digitization, 101 37, 141, 142, 144, 147, 205
248 • INDEX
Francis, Lee, IV, 158, 164 Gray, Brenna Clark, 157, 158, 163, 167,
Frank, Dan, 122, 123, 123n19 175, 187
Fresnault-Deruelle, Pierre, 11, 11n13, 12, Grewal, Inderpal, 16, 17
23n3, 43, 73, 84, 182, 183 gridding, 171, 173n30, 174, 181; based on
Frey, Hugo, 29n6, 31n10, 48, 57, 60–62, Cartesian logic, 172; colonialist tool,
117, 118, 183 172–74; Western concept, 172, 173
Fundación al Fanar, 77, 78 Groensteen, Thierry, 3, 10, 11n12, 12, 73,
84, 85, 94–96, 98, 171, 172; gridding
fusha, 208, 209
as a priori for comics creating, 171
Groth, Gary, 120, 121
Gabilliet, Jean-Paul, 14, 58, 59, 62n34
Galal, Mona, 78
Haida Gwaii, 149, 156, 159, 161, 166
Game for Swallows, A. See Mourir, partir,
Haida manga, 20, 149–52, 154–61,
revenir: Le jeu des hirondelles
163–70, 174, 178, 178 fig. 4.3, 182 fig.
Gauvin, Edward, translator of Mourir, 4.4, 185, 187, 188; as Canadian art,
partir, revenir: Le jeu des hirondelles 160; as decolonial mapping, 167–69;
into English, 144, 146 challenges how books are recog-
Gauthier, Guy, 171 nized and consumed, 187; cultural
Gerner, Jochen, 56, 66n36 “hybridity,” 153, 154, 159, 166n20;
Ghaibeh, Lina: member of Mouhtaraf defines a difference between Haida
JAD, 199; American University and Western ways of seeing, 175;
of Beirut professor of comics and gridding, a new idiom replacing,
animation, 199; Mu’taz and Rada 174; Japan directly connected to
Sawwaf Arabic Comics Initiative, Haida Gwaii, 166; on cover of The
Last Voyage of the Black Ship, 154;
director of, 199
what defines it, 160, 164. See also
Ghaibeh, May: member of Mouhtaraf
Indigenous art; Indigenous comics;
JAD, 199 Yahgulanaas, Michael Nicholl
global cities, 8, 191, 192, 192n4; comics Hanafy, Iman, 75, 76, 80, 84
relation to, 193, 194
Hara-Kiri, censored and outlawed, 205
Goddin, Philippe, 23, 31, 34, 63
Harrison, Richard, 159–61
Goeman, Mishuana, 150, 150n6, 151, 161,
Hatfield, Charles, 2n1, 3n2, 11, 34, 42, 73,
166, 170, 173, 188
74, 84, 85, 91–94, 100, 115, 183, 215;
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 5, 5n7, “radical synchronism,” 213
194
Hayek, Ghenwa, 213
Golden Press, 44
Henry Holt and Company: Metro, first
Goodman, Nelson, 22 book-length English language edi-
Ghosh, Bishnupriya, 22 tion of, 77, 78n6
Graphic Novel: An Introduciton, The Hergé (Georges Remi), 4, 23, 31, 33, 35,
(Baetens and Frey), 117 37, 38–42, 38n17, 44–46, 48–52, 55, 56,
graphic novels, 2, 4, 19, 59, 74, 80, 82, 61, 63, 65; Orientalism, 50; research,
102, 109, 110, 113, 117, 118, 120, 124, 61; use of word balloons, 37, 38
126n22, 135, 140, 141, 143–46, 164, Hive, The (Burns), 58, 59, 64
165, 166, 166n20. See also comics Hodapp, James, 75, 76, 78, 82–84, 92, 95
Graphic Universe: Mourir, partir, revenir: Holm, Bill, 153n10, 178–81; dismissal of
Le jeu des hirondelles as A Game for Indigenous artists in favor of colo-
Swallows, US publisher of, 144 nial knowledge system, 179; Euro-
Gramsci, Antonio, 172 centric approach to space, 180
INDEX • 249
Hunt, Nancy Rose, 49–51 juillet-août 2006, publisher of, 213;

Hyslop, Neil, 44 Comix 2000, publisher of, 210; Perse-
polis, first success of, 118n13, 123
Last Look (Burns), 59, 64
Imam, Hatem, 189, 203, 206, 208; co-
Last Voyage of the Black Ship, The (Yahgu-
founder of Samandal, 190; fine arts
lanaas), 151, 155
education, 199
layout, 73–76, 84, 85, 96, 98, 100, 180, 191,
Incubation (Burns), 64
212; Peeters classifications of, 172,
Indigenous art, 152, 153, 158, 180; in 176–78. See also panels; sequence
museums, 183–84. See also Haida
Lebanese Civil War, 137, 143n31, 199, 200
manga
Lebanon, 77, 137, 140–42, 146, 147, 193,
Indigenous comics, 158, 159, 164 196, 200–207, 209
Innis, Harold, 36 Lecigne, Bruno, 24, 42, 56. See also ligne
Iran, 104, 105, 108–10, 127, 131–34, claire
136n28, 140, 141, 146, 147 Lefèvre, Pascal, 4n5, 32n13, 126, 172n25,
Islamophobia in the US, 133 172n27
Leservot, Typhaine, 109, 130, 133
#Jan25, 81, 102 lettering, 44
Jijé, 56 Levell, Nicola, 151, 155, 169, 174, 183n39,
184
Johnny 23 (Burns), 64–66, 65 fig. 1.3;
ciphers in, 65, 66 lianhuanhua format, 64
ligne claire, 6, 23–25, 27, 28, 30, 40–43, 56,
61, 62, 62n34, 67; masks complica-
Kannemeyer, Anton, 57 tion and confusion, 43; practicality
Kaplan, Caren, 19, 137 for reproduction, 40; semiotic effects,
Kashtan, Aaron, 101 42; trains readers to see the world
Kerbaj, Mazen, 211–15, 211 fig. 5.1 as a legible text, 24; visual imperial-
ism, 24, 42
Keyrouz, Karen, 202
Link, Alex, 109
Khouri, Omar, 190, 193, 199, 200, 203,
Little, Brown & Co., 4
204, 206, 217n19
Locarno Press, 170
Kerblog, 212–14
Loik, Louise, 150n7
Khoury, George, 198–200, 208; founder
of Mouhtaraf JAD, 198; “Jad” used Lousy Tale, A (Yahgulanaas), 167, 168
as pseudonym, 198n7; Lebanese
Civil War as major influence on, 200
Majid, 200
Kidd, Chip, 122
Malamih, 76
King, C. Richard, 159
Malek, Amy, 108, 112
Kroll, Pierre, 54 Malti-Douglas, Fedwa, 71n3, 142n30,
Kümmerling-Meibauer, Bettina, 166n20 208n15
manga, 13, 14, 101, 156, 158–67, 163n19,
Labio, Catherine, 33 166n20, 175. See also Haida manga
Lapin, 118 maps, 89, 91–99, 156, 161. See also Metro
L’Ascension du haut mal (David B.), 106, Martin, Jacques, 56
110, 112, 113, 115, 118, 127, 135, 137 masks, 27, 66
L’Association, 111, 113, 113n9, 115, Massey, Doreen, 192n3, 194
118–21, 124, 126, 127, 132; Beyrouth: Masson, Pierre, 11
250 • INDEX
Maus (Spiegelman), 5, 111–20, 116n12, Mondodo, Bienvenu Mbutu, 19, 25–27,

122–24; comparison to Persepolis, 25n5, 43, 51–54, 57, 68
119, 136–45; first collection publica- Monsieur Jabot (Töpffer), 37
tion, 122; published in two volumes,
Morgan, Harry, 11, 183
126n21
Mossieu Réac, 37
Mauzé, Marie, 150n7, 175
Moulinsart, 46, 46n22, 51–53, 65, 68, 196
Mazur, Dan, 8, 14, 118
McCloud, Scott, 11, 13, 19, 27–31, 28 fig. Mourir, partir, revenir: Le jeu des hiron-
1.1, 29, 35, 42, 49, 57, 60, 63, 66, 67, delles (Abirached), 106, 136; com-
84, 163, 164, 174, 175; describes ligne pared to Persepolis, 137–46; format,
claire, 27, 28; gutters, privileging 143; format changes between French
of, 174; viewer identification with and US editions, 144
Tintin, 31, 42, 63; Tintin as a stereo- Mountfort, Paul, 48, 49
type, 26, 30; used by Spiers in close Mouhtaraf JAD, 198–200
reading of Red, 163, 164; uncritical
Mu’taz and Rada Sawwaf Arabic Comics
reading of Tintin, 57; Western, white,
Initiative, 199
anticonquest reading of Tintin, 43
Mubarak, Hosni, 5, 79, 80, 83
McKinney, Mark, 14, 29n6, 30, 35, 42,
217n20 Mufti, Aamir, 3, 8, 17, 105n3
McManus, George, 6, 37 Mukherji, Pia, 14
Mehta, Binita, 14 Muqtatafat, 205; profits donated to
Mehta, Sonny, 123, 123n18 Samandal, 205
Menu, Jean-Christophe, 118, 119, 127,
135, 144 Naba’a, Tarek: co-founder of Samandal,
Merhej, Lena, 190, 201, 203, 204, 207, 208; 190
co-founder of Samandal, 190 Naghibi, Nima, 108, 128
Metro (El Shafee), 3, 6–8, 17–20, 69–71,
narration, 37, 38, 94
74–76, 78–81, 83, 86; banned in
Egypt, 5, 4, 69, 75, 76; “first” Egyp- Nasser, Deema, 75, 76, 78, 82–84, 92, 95,
tian graphic novel, 75, 78, 102; lay- 96
out, 70, 85, 99; maps in, 88, 89, 90 fig. Native Realities, 158
2.3, 91, 92 fig. 2.4, 94 fig. 2.5, 94–99, Niranjana, Tejaswini, 16, 207, 210
97 fig. 2.6; newspapers in, 93; qualifi-
Nitnit in Otherland (Valium), 56
cation as an African work, 75; sound
effects in, 87, 89; translated into Nitnit trilogy (Burns), 25, 57–64, 66;
Spanish, 77, 88, 101; untranslatability swiping in, 60
outside of Egypt, 75, 79, 81–86 No Tankers, T’anks (Yahgulanaas), 149, 153
Metro, 3, 5–8, 17–9, 69–71, 74, 76–86, 88
fig. 2.2, 89, 90, 90 fig. 2.3, 92 fig. 2.4,
Old Growth (Yahgulanaas), 153
93–96, 94 fig. 2.5, 97 fig. 2.6, 99 fig.
2.7, 100–103 O’Malley, Andrew, 108, 128
Meyer, Christina, 14, 15, 186n40 Ong, Aihwa, 194, 195, 218
Mignolo, Walter, 7, 7n10, 16, 31, 151, 159, Orientalism, 19, 50, 51, 105, 106, 109, 114,
161, 166, 175; decolonization through 140, 147, 198; Indigenous, 109
“border thinking,” 151 Ostby, Marie, 105n2, 108, 112n7, 127
Miller, Ann, 3, 14, 29n6, 42, 47n23, 146 Ostrowitz, Judith, 163; Yahgulanaas’s
Mirzoeff, Nick, 26, 29, 47, 52, 67, 193 illumination of empty space, 171n23
Mitchell, W. J. T., 87 Outcault, Richard F., 37
INDEX • 251
Pagano, Ernesto, 77, 87, 89, 91, 94 fig. 2.5, Pieds Nickelés, 37
95, 102 Pigeon Press, 64
Palestine (Sacco): Cairo, depiction of, 71, postcolonialism, 9, 14–16, 25, 26,
72 fig. 2.1, 73, 75; format, 74; influ- 54, 57, 63. See also colonialism;
ence on Metro, 70, 73 anticolonialism
Palestine: A Nation Occupied (Sacco), 71 postmodernism, 25, 26, 55–58
Palestine: In the Gaza Strip (Sacco), 71 Pratt, Mary Louise, 24
panels, 11, 20, 38, 39, 62, 71, 73, 85–87, Pressman, Jessica, 4, 5, 183
94, 95, 96–103, 171, 172, 174, 175, 177,
184, 211. See also layout; sequence
Pantheon, 2, 5, 59, 113, 117, 120–24, quadrillage. See gridding
120n15, 126, 127, 132, 133, 135 Qualey, M. Lynx, 78
Papagaio, O, 35
Pappa in Afrika (Kannemeyer), 57 RAW, 113, 117
Pasamonik, Didier, 25n5, 40, 52 reading for difference, 1, 6, 7, 12, 21, 25,
Peddle to the Meddle (Yahgulanaas), 28, 29, 84, 129, 158, 190, 206; defini-
museum exhibit, 184 tion, 28, 29; Haida manga, 158; Her-
Peeters, Benoît, 12, 37, 37n16, 38, 39n19, gé’s works, 49; in production, 211;
40, 41, 46, 73, 84; page layout classifi- opposed to consumption practice,
cation, 172, 176 28; role of transnational collectives
in Samandal, 206
Persepolis (Satrapi), 5, 13, 18, 19, 104–13,
116–32, 118n13, 125 fig. 3.1, 134, Red: A Haida Manga (Yahgulanaas), 16,
135, 136n27, 136n28, 138, 140–42, 20, 151, 155, 159, 163–65, 169, 170,
144, 145, 147; as a cultural object, 176, 177, 178 fig. 4.3, 181, 182 fig.
105; avant-garde comics, credited 4.4, 183, 185–87; duality as book and
with the rise of, 115; compared to mural, 183, 185–87; experienced as
L’Ascension du haut mal, 111, 112, a mural, 164, 181, 185–87; frame-
127; compared to Maus, 111, 112, lines interact with diegesis, 181, 182
123, 124; compared to Mourir, partir, fig. 4.4; full mural, 178–79 fig. 4.3;
revenir: Le jeu des hirondelles, 137–46; Haida manga, 159, 163; layout defies
comparison to Persian miniature, Peeters’ classifications, 175–77; lay-
114; association with Shahnameh, out, reviews of, 177; story summary,
105, 127; English translation, 120–24; 169–70
French edition covers, 127–30, 128 revisionism, 26, 29, 42–46
fig. 3.2; format, 124–30, 125 fig. 3.1; Rich, Adrienne, 15
introductions to, 132, 133; narra- Rifkin, Mark, 172
tive alterations between French and
Rifkind, Candida, 8, 158
US edition, 130–32; narrative pro-
gression of the French covers, 127; right to look, 52, 53
reviews of, 110–113; title of, 130; Rima, Barrack, Samandal editor, 202, 209
translation of, 133; US edition, 104, Rojo, Pedro, 78
105, 110, 124; US edition aligns with Rossetti, Chip, 76, 78n6, 86, 87, 90, 91, 96,
Maus, 132; US edition cover, 129, 96n12, 99, 100, 100n13; translation of
129 fig. 3.3, 130; US edition volumes Metro into English, 77, 80, 82, 83, 85,
given subtitles, 130, 131 86, 87, 89–91, 92 fig. 2.4, 96, 99 fig.
Persian miniatures, 105, 109, 114 2.7, 100, 102
Petit Vingtième, Le, 33, 35, 38, 45 Rota, Valerio, 4n5, 117
photogravure printing, 40–42 Royal, Derek Parker, 9, 49
252 • INDEX
Sacco, Joe, 70, 71, 72 fig. 2.1, 73–75, 81, Soumois, Frédéric, 49n24
120, 213 sound effects, 87–9, 88 fig. 2.2, 102, 146,
Said, Edward, 6n8, 24, 51, 105n1, 105n3 181
Samandal, 10, 18, 20, 189–212, 214–19; Bei- Spiegelman, Art, 5, 105, 106, 110–13,
rut-based, 191; challenged by Leba- 115–18, 120, 122, 124, 126n21; literary
nese Catholic Media Center, 190, comics, contribution to development
203; changes in format, 190; Creative of, 115
Commons grant, 197; Creative Com- Spiers, Miriam Brown, 163–65, 177,
mons Licensing of, 195–98; fined by 177n36, 181
Lebanese government, 190, 203, 205;
Spivak, Gayatri, 3n3, 6n8, 18, 46, 105n3,
fines paid through crowd-funding
114, 136, 141
campaign, 205; “flippy pages,” 191,
215, 216 fig. 5.2; formats, 191, 217, Stanbridge, Nicole, 152, 153
218; international contributors, 201; Stein, Daniel, 14, 15
Lebanese Civil War impact on Leba- stereotypes, 9, 10, 17, 25–27, 30, 47, 49,
nese comics scene, 200; partnered 50, 53, 54, 60, 68, 158
with xanadu*, 197, 198; “The People Storace, Patricia, 107
vs. Samandal Comics,” 203–05; pro-
Sugar Skull (Burns), 58, 59, 63 fig. 1.2
moting dialogue across borders,
201; styles, heterogeneity of, 218; “Suspended Time Vol 1: The Family
Topie volume published in three Tree” (Kerbaj), 211, 211 fig. 5.1, 212
distinct versions, 209; translation Swarte, Joost, 6, 56
approaches, 209, 212; trilingual for- swiping, 58, 60, 61
mat (Arabic, French, English), 189, System of Comics, The (Groensteen), 73,
206–09, 215, 217; worlding, 190, 194 94, 171
Samir, 50, 200
Sante, Luc, 24; Persepolis to Maus, com-
Tahrir Square demonstrations, 82
parison of, 111, 130
Tale of Two Shamans, A (Yahgulanaas),
Sassen, Saskia, 192, 194
151, 155, 174; Haida manga advent,
Satrapi, Marjane, 13, 19, 104–16, 118; 155
comparison to Abirached, 136, 137;
tensions (Hatfield), 17, 34, 73, 74, 84, 85,
comparison to David B., 110–12,
89, 91–93, 96, 100, 215, 216
114–16, 124; comparison to Spiegel-
man, 110, 115, 116, 120, 124 the fdz (Fadi Baki), 189, 190, 193, 197,
199, 200, 203, 206, 209, 210; Samandal
Schiffrin, André, 117, 121, 122, 122n6
dedicated to proliferation of comic
Schodt, Frederik L., 161–63, 167 art production in Arab region, 197
Shwandl, R., 91n11 38, rue Youssef Semaani (Abirached), 143,
Screech, Matthew, 33 143n41
sequence, 91, 93, 94, 96–99, 174, 175, 215. Thompson, Kim, 120, 121, 135
See also panels; layout Tintin (Hergé), 4–6, 10, 17, 18, 23–36,
Shahnameh, 105, 127 23n2, 38–68; albums, 4, 5, 10, 32–36,
Shih, Shu-Mei, 32 39, 42, 44–46; anti-Semitism in,
Silverman, Kaja, 50 48; Africans, caricatures of, 48, 49,
52–54; The Black Island, 59; The Blue
Singer, Marc, 112n8, 113–14, 117, 135
Lotus, 48; capacity for worlding, 41;
Singh, Anjali, 121, 122–24, 126, 127, colonial gaze, 50; copyrights, 46;
129–30, 134
dehumanization of the Other, 49;
Sirente, il, 77 Explorers on the Moon, 59; in America,
Smolderen, Thierry, 36, 37, 84n9 36, 46, 56; in the Congo, 35, 36, 45–54,
INDEX • 253
57, 204; in the Land of Black Gold, 45; Venuti, Lawrence, 3n3, 69, 70, 75, 83, 102,
in the Land of the Soviets, 30n8, 33, 35, 133, 134; translation does not pro-
36, 39, 40, 41, 46; in Tibet, 36; legal vide unmediated access to the origi-
challenges to, 26, 51, 52, 68; lettering, nal text, 133, 134
44; localization of, 35; neofacism, Vingtième Siècle, Le, 32–36, 38, 38n17, 40,
48; pastiches and parodies, 55, 56; 45. See also Le Petit Vingtième
pirated editions, 46, 50, 55, 64, 66; Vortex (Burns), 64
Prisoners of the Sun, 48; racism, 49,
67; Red Rackham’s Treasure, 30; revi-
sions, 45, 46, 53, 65, 67; The Secret of Walkowitz, Rebecca, 3, 82
the Unicorn, 30, 60; The Seven Crystal Wanzo, Rebecca, 3, 9, 17, 24, 26, 29, 49,
Balls, 48; The Shooting Star, 48, 59; 53, 67
standardized font, 44; use of cap-
Wallez, Norbert, 32n11, 35
tions, 37–39; word balloons, 38, 39
War of the Blink (Yahgulanaas), 151, 184;
Tintin au Pays des Nazis (Tintin in the
experienced as mural, 183, 187; fra-
Land of the Nazis), 55
melines interact with the diegesis,
Tintinologists, 23, 23n3 181; original art displayed at Van-
TNT en Amérique, 56 couver Art Gallery, 181
Töppfer, Rodolphe, 37, 41 Winkler, Stefan, 77, 78n6, 88, 94 fig. 2.5,
Tornare, Alain-Jacques, 56 102
Totor (Hergé), 37, 38 Wolk, Douglas, 120 n15; Epileptic,
Townsend-Gault, Charlotte, 152 reviewed in comparison to Persepolis
and Maus, 112
translation, 1, 3, 3n3, 4n4, 5, 10, 13,
15–20, 23, 38n17, 44, 50, 51, 66, Wolman, Gil, 17, 17n14
68–71, 70n2, 74–89, 88 fig. 2.2; 89, word balloons, 37, 38, 86, 101, 121, 184
91–93, 95, 96, 100–07, 117, 121, 122, world literature, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 17, 19, 32,
124, 133–36, 140–46, 155, 191, 2000, 80, 82, 136, 212, 217; untranslatabil-
204, 206, 207, 209–15, 217; cultural, ity, 5n7, 206, 207
4n6, 104–07, 109, 120, 123, 132, 133, worlding, 8, 18, 22, 33, 41, 42, 45, 46, 52,
165; four loci of, 86; Samandal, vary- 67, 114, 141, 190, 200, 218; cities as
ing titles for issues of, 210. See also sites of, 194; Samandal’s grant, 197
Metro; untranslatability
tressage. See braiding
X’ed Out (Burns), 58, 59, 64–66
Trivedi, Harish, 15, 16
xanadu*, 198; founded in response to
Trondheim, Lewis, 118
9/11, 197; founded in 2003, 197; non-
Tuck, Eve, 149, 150 profit art collective, 197; partnered
with Samandal, 197
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
(McCloud), 27, 28, 28 fig. 1.1 Yahgulanaas, Michael Nicoll, 16, 18, 20,
Unpopular Culture: Transforming the Euro- 153; arrested for Haida sovereignty
pean Comic Book in the 1990s (Beaty), activism, 150; asserts naming rights
115 as an act of decolonization, 166; cre-
untranslatability, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 18, 75, 79, ating for his audience, 162; comics,
155, 189, 204, 206, 207, 212 critique of the term, 156, 158; envi-
ronmentalist, 149; framelines as tool
for decolonization, 175; framelines
Valfret, 203, 203n11, 204, 206 definition, 180; framelines interact
Valium, Henriette, 56 with diegesis, 177, 181; framelines
254 • INDEX
vs formlines, 180; framelines vs imagery and symbolism, 169, 170.

quadrillage, 175–7; gridding, border See also Haida manga
thinking as a response to, 174; Haida Yang, K. Wayne, criticizes misuse of
First Nations member, 149; “In the “decolonization,” 149, 150
Gutter,” 176 fig. 4.2; Holm, criticism “The Yellow Kid and His New Phono-
of, 178, 179, 180; Japan, connec- graph” (Outcault), 37
tion to, 157; manga, remarks of the Yuste Frías, José, 86
flexibility of the term, 156; manga
used as a political statement, 157;
sculptor, 150; terra nullius, 174, 175; Zanettin, Federico, 86, 91
“tradition of innovation,” 153; water Zinzin, maître du monde (Exem), 56
STUDIES IN COMICS AND CARTOONS
Jared Gardner, Charles Hatfield, and Rebecca Wanzo, Series Editors
Lucy Shelton Caswell, Founding Editor Emerita
Books published in Studies in Comics and Cartoons focus exclusively on com-

ics and graphic literature, highlighting their relation to literary studies. The
series includes monographs and edited collections that cover the history of
comics and cartoons from the editorial cartoon and early sequential comics
of the nineteenth century through webcomics of the twenty-first. Studies that
focus on international comics are also considered.
How Comics Travel: Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies

Katherine Kelp-Stebbins
Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia

José Alaniz
Authorizing Superhero Comics: On the Evolution of a Popular Serial Genre

Daniel Stein
Typical Girls: The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips

Susan E. Kirtley
Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading, and Vulnerability

Eszter Szép
Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid

Christina Meyer
The Goat-Getters: Jack Johnson, the Fight of the Century, and How a Bunch of
Raucous Cartoonists Reinvented Comics
Eddie Campbell
Between Pen and Pixel: Comics, Materiality, and the Book of the Future
Aaron Kashtan
Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics

Kate Polak
Drawing the Line: Comics Studies and INKS, 1994–1997

Edited by Lucy Shelton Caswell and Jared Gardner
The Humours of Parliament: Harry Furniss’s View of Late-Victorian Political Culture

Edited and with an Introduction by Gareth Cordery and Joseph S.
Meisel
Redrawing French Empire in Comics

Mark McKinney

(Studies in Comics and Cartoons) Katherine Kelp-Stebbins - How Comics Travel - Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies-Ohio State University Press (2022)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

(Studies in Comics and Cartoons) Katherine Kelp-Stebbins - How Comics Travel - Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies-Ohio State University Press (2022)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

(Studies in Comics and Cartoons) Katherine Kelp-Stebbins - How Comics Travel - Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies-Ohio State University Press (2022)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

H O W C O M I C S T R AV E L

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cover design by Andrew Brozyna

INTRODUCTION Graphic Positioning Systems 1

CHAPTER 1 The Adventures of Three Readers in the

CHAPTER 2 Graphic Disorientations: Metro and Translation 69

CHAPTER 3 Persepolis and the Cultural Currency of the

CHAPTER 4 Border Thinking and Decolonial Mapping in

CHAPTER 5 Samandal and Translational Transnationalism 189

FIGURE 1.1 Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics 28

FIGURE 1.2 Charles Burns, Sugar Skull 63

FIGURE 1.3 Charles Burns, Johnny 23 65

FIGURE 2.1 Joe Sacco, Palestine 72

FIGURE 2.2 Comparison of panel from Arabic, English, German,

FIGURE 2.3 Magdy El Shafee, Metro 90

FIGURE 2.4 Chip Rossetti trans., Metro 92

FIGURE 2.5 Ernesto Pagano trans., Metro; and Iskandar Ahmad

FIGURE 2.6 Magdy El Shafee, Metro 97

FIGURE 2.7 Chip Rossetti trans., Metro 99

FIGURE 3.1 Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 1 and Satrapi, Persepolis:

FIGURE 3.2 Covers of Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 1, 2, 3 and 4 128

FIGURE 3.3 Cover of Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a

FIGURE 4.1 Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Carpe Fin 168

FIGURE 4.2 Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, “In the Gutter” 176

FIGURE 4.3 Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Red: A Haida Manga,

FIGURE 4.4 Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Red: A Haida Manga,

FIGURE 5.1 Translation of Mazen Kerbaj, “Suspended Time Vol.

FIGURE 5.2 Assorted “flippy pages” from Samandal 216

The writing of How Comics Travel took place on Indigenous land.

Some sections from chapter 3 were previously published in

Is the World of World Literature the World of

nial, feminist, antiracist literacies that help us redraw the world as a

1. Cf. Chute, “Comics as Literature?”; Hatfield; Versaci.

undertake to destabilize the boundaries of the literary and to suggest

As verbal-visual media, comics present new possibilities for the-

2. Or outright condemned; see Hatfield 34–36.

The concept of global comics also demands a rethinking of the cul-

4. Although translations under copyright will generally preserve the artwork,

the examples Pressman describes, full of images or engaging visual

7. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s invocation of a “universal world literature”

of comics, the role of transnational economies in comics distribution

Differences in the World

The recognition of the differences between literature and comics fur-

than insisting that comics are intelligible identically everywhere,

The act of reading a graphic narrative involves the reader in a pro-

10. Mignolo describes border thinking as “the necessary epistemology to delink

Is Metro an Egyptian comic because it was originally published in

functioned from the very beginning as a border regime, a system for

With Mufti’s account looming, how might we describe comics with-

among others, have all produced book-length scholarship that con-

Differences in the Comics

Prevailing wisdom assumes that comics, by their formal nature, facil-

of local knowledges as global designs. Rather than a transcendent

gin? Are they still bandes dessinées in translation? As anti­colonial

of tabular reading in the form of temporal consideration but notes

Thinking about how comics travel is, in this book, a geographical

entangled in different marketplaces and readerships. More conceptu-

comics scholarship and the seriousness with which bandes dessinées

comics take on in various instantiations, while pointing to “border-

gin? Are they still bandes dessinées in translation? As anticolonial

Tintin was not the first modern Franco-Belgian bande dessinée to