Crossing Lines – serie

Fragmented and hybrid in style, On Comics and Grief examines a year in comic book publishing and the author’s grief surrounding his mother’s death. This book connects grief, memory, nostalgia, personal history, theory, and multiple lines of comics studies inquiry in relation to the comic books of 1976.Structured around a year of comic books with a cover date of 1976, the book is divided into an Introduction plus twelve sections, each a month of the 1976 publishing year. Two comic books are highlighted each month and examined through the interwoven lenses of creative nonfiction and comics studies. Through these twenty-four comics, the book addresses the major comic book publishers and virtually all genres of comics published in 1976.By pushing the ways in which the personal is used in comics studies, combining different modes of writing, and embracing a fragmentary style, the book explores what is possible in academic writing in general and comics studies in particular. On Comics and Grief both acts as a way for the author to process his grief and uses grief as a way to think about the comics themselves through the emotions and personal connections that underlie the work we do as scholars.

Graphic Refuge is the first in-depth study of comics about refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and detainees by artists from the Global North and South. Co-written by two leading scholars of nonfiction comics, the book explores graphic narratives about a range of refugee experiences, from war, displacement, and perilous sea crossings to detention camps, resettlement schemes, and second-generation diasporas.Through close readings of work by diverse artists including Joe Sacco, Sarah Glidden, Don Brown, Olivier Kugler, Jasper Rietman, Hamid Sulaiman, Leila Abdelrazzaq, Thi Bui, and Matt Huynh, Graphic Refuge shows how comics challenge dominant representations of the displaced and bring a radical politics of refugee agency and refusal into view. Rather than simply affirming the “humanity” of the refugee, these comics demand that we apprehend the historical construction of categories such as “citizen” and “refugee” through systems of empire, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism.Building on scholarship in critical refugee studies, architecture and infrastructure studies, and postcolonial theory, Davies and Rifkind argue that refugee comics move us through this wider recognition and towards more expansive ideas of refuge as a lived political relationship.