European Comic Art

The articles in this edition of European Comic Art (ECA) have in common a historical perspective, from the pre-Civil War Spain of Mickey Revista Infantil Ilustrada to the post-Civil War Spain of Pablo Roca's family photograph; Germany under the Nazi regime and the GDR of the 1970s and 1980s; second-wave feminism in 1970s France; and, most recently, the precarious situation of refugees in the Calais ‘jungle’. Diverse representational strategies are considered: the adjustment of a global comics brand to a national context and specific ideological programme; the juxtaposition of photographs and drawn images; the metonymic use of objects to conjure up an irretrievable past; the parody of misogynistic stories and images; and the deployment of absurdist humour in a documentary comic to dispel a compassionate or sentimental response and prompt distanced reflexion.

The short-lived magazine Mickey Revista Infantil Ilustrada (Molino, 1935–1936), marked a pivotal moment in Spanish children's press by introducing material of the Walt Disney Studios to its readers. Following the Italian Topolino (1932) and the French Le Journal de Mickey (1934) the magazine Mickey Revista Infantil Ilustrada represents three innovative trends in children's periodicals in Spain in the 1930s: the intersection of local and American comics, genres, and formats; different efforts to connect with the local reader; and gender stereotypes. The new comics formats, the readers’ club, and gender-specific sections impacted the local audience and reveal how magazines ‘script’ the actions of their readers. By examining the three intersections, this article illuminates how the magazine reflects the political, ideological, and cultural transitions in Spanish society of the mid-1930s.

Photography and comics were both media born with modernity in the nineteenth century, with an important role in the configuration of mass society. Photography has been related to comics in many ways, but it is in non-fiction comics where authors have exploited its potential as an index of reality and as evidence for testimonies. Works such as Art Spiegelman's Maus or Emmanuel Guibert's Le Photographe [The photographer] contributed to open a field of experimentation that some Spanish cartoonists have also explored. A comparative analysis of graphic novels such as Paco Roca's Regreso al Edén [Return to Eden] or Carlos Spottorno and Guillermo Abril's La Grieta [The crack] and La Falla [The fault] enables an assessment of the multiple values of photographs when they are included in a graphic narrative.

German comics have in recent decades become an important art form in terms of their engagement with popular memory culture. The four works selected for discussion in this study explore the formation of identities through documentary and literary memory work: Kinderland [Land of children] by Mawil, Da war mal was [There once was something] by Flix, Madgermanes by Birgit Weyhe and Heimat [Belonging] by Nora Krug. While the comics give form to lived experience, passed-on or intergenerational memories, everyday objects and material culture play a particular key role in these four works. Objects become a vehicle for the artists to use as memorable signifiers in their storytelling and to work around ambiguities or difficulties of communicating distinct relationships to the past.

This article examines three comics strips published by the feminist French underground magazine Ah!Nana (1976–1978) in which the artists Nicole Claveloux, Yves Chaland, and Cecilia Capuana lampoon marriage and child-rearing. I contend that their criticisms are based on the feminist works of Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray, as well as on the anti-family stance of the May ’68 movement, on American underground feminisms, and on post-war anti-Americanisation movements. Even though Claveloux's, Chaland's, and Capuana's comics were conceived independently of each other, they can be read in a climatic sequence in which the critique of marriage and gender roles metamorphoses into the creation of an independent female protagonist who not only questions the status quo but also embodies a new understanding of gender and kinship.

In Les Nouvelles de la Jungle de Calais [News from the Calais jungle], authors Lisa Mandel and Yasmine Bouagga report on the 2016 migrant camp dismantlement. Instead of opting for a descriptive empathetic approach aligning with the expected humanitarian discourse, the narrator resorts to humour to highlight the absurd situations migrants encounter. This article demonstrates that humour, an effective narrative engine, underpins a powerful criticism of the system migrants must navigate. Humour is used to mitigate the representational effect of the spectacle of harsh living conditions and redirects our attention to the shortcomings of the humanitarian approach and to the key role played by journalists in disseminating simplistic or inaccurate reports. Through absurd humour, the book avoids many representational pitfalls and invites the reader to reflect on their own positionality.

Dona Pursall and Eva Van de Wiele, eds., Sugar, Spice, and the Not So Nice: Comics Picturing Girlhood (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2023). 250 pp. ISBN: 9789462703612 (€30.00)

María Porras Sánchez and Gerardo Vilches, eds., Precarious Youth in Contemporary Graphic Narratives: Young Lives in Crisis (New York: Routledge, 2023). 288 pp. ISBN: 9781032123592 (Hardback: $180, eBook: $41.24)

David Pinho Barros, The Clear Line in Comics and Cinema: A Transmedial Approach (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2022). 266 pp. ISBN: 9789462703209 (€59.50).