Reading comics for the field of International Relations: Theory, method and the Bosnian War

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drawing. The question asked by the journalist in the cab leaving, as an afterthought, is whether Nike is a Serb, a Croat or a Muslim. Nike does not answer her — or the reader
— but the question provokes a vibrant red curtain engulfing the departing cab and Nike, the onset of the red is so powerful that it even overflows into the gutter below the panel. Bilal’s use of red in this panel supports Guillaume et al.’s (2016: 50) argument that colour can bean important visual modality, whereby the use of colour insecurity practices is not innocent. As Mazur and Danner (2014: 134) point out, the use of red/
blood is significant in other works of Bilal, not least The Hunting Party, where the characters memories visually bleed into the present. On this page of Le Sommeil du
Monstre, the use of blood might be read in a similar vein the question posed to Nike makes him recall the painful memory of the bloodletting that took place during the Bosnian War, as well as perhaps his own personal trauma of the double early loss of his parents and Amir and Leyla. Another reading is that the blood not (only) signifies
Nike’s memory, but that the question itself is, in David Campbell’s (1998: 24–25) words, a violent performance in that it suggests identities with fixed boundaries and beyond transformation.
As was pointed out by Bilal in interviews, Le Sommeil du Monstre does not provide graphic depictions of the Bosnian war, with one exception the opening panel that accompanies Nike’s first text panel in which he speaks of looking up through the gaping holes in the hospital. This image has an abstract, womblike form and surface far removed from what an actual building would look like. As Leigh Gilmore (2011: 161) has argued, using
Satrapi’s Persepolis as a casein point, the decision not to draw something that has been witnessed expands the repertoire of trauma’s representation to omission, silence, and a depiction of the void. The visual absence of the Bosnian war in Le Sommeil du Monstre provides a similar mediation of the limits of representation the horror of the Bosnian War cannot be drawn, but can be recalled by the reader through the words that describe it. The textual account appears as black text panels using typeset font, which tell the story of the first 18 days of Nike’s life as he regains his memory (the panel in Figure 4 refers today. These text panels are also used for making references to events, places, people and decisions familiar to observers of the Bosnian War, yet without assigning culpability. In the text panel of day nine for example, I remember I heard the names of the camps followed by a listing that begins with those controlled by the Serbs but followed by Croatian and Bosnian ones, indicating that camps were run by all sides (p. 45). On the album’s last page, the text from the opening black panel of day 18 is repeated, but now in a hand-lettered rather than typeset font, visualizing that the two narrative temporalities have caught up Nike has recovered the story of 1993 from his memory, and he has found one of the two other orphans Leyla. As the search for Amir goes on in the next volumes, the font remains in hand lettering. Interestingly, Bilal has opted for the opposite usage of mechanical-emotional font as one would expect from Eisner’s account as the 1993 narrative (the mechanical font) is the most emotionally charged, positively through repeated expression of love and devotion to Amir and Leyla, and negatively by accounts of the brutality of the war. As a contribution to discourses on the Bosnian War, Le Sommeil du
Monstre offers a post-genocide representation where atrocities are recognized, yet where the circle of violence can be overcome by the individual capacity for resisting the collective identity that one is being assigned.

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European Journal of International Relations 23(3)
Christmas with Karadzic
The final comic is Christmas with Karadzic by Joe Sacco, first available in 1997 in Zero
Zero, a magazine published by Fantagraphic, at the head of independent creator-driven production in the US in the s (Gabilliet, 2010: 107). As such, this publication was in a niche market in terms of print-runs, but critically noted by the comics avant-garde. In 2005, Christmas with Karadzic was reprinted in the album War’s End Profiles from
Bosnia 1995–96 (Sacco, 2005). By that time, Sacco had published Palestine in a 2001 collected edition, with a foreword by Edward Said that signified legitimacy beyond comics circles. Sacco is, as noted earlier, now credited with having invented the genre of comics journalism and is the recipient of multiple awards, including a prestigious Eisner Award in 2010 for Footnotes in Gaza.
First in a series of works on Bosnia, Christmas with Karadzic provides an account of Sacco and two fellow journalists going in search of Radovan Karadzic during the Orthodox Christmas in January 1996, just months after the Dayton Accords had been concluded. At this point, Karadzic had been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague but no arrest warrant had been issued and Karadzic was still making occasional public appearances. Somewhat coincidentally stumbling on Karadzic as the latter shows up for church service in Pale, the unofficial capital of the Bosnian Serbs, the climax of the story is when Sacco realizes that he feels nothing in the presence of Karadzic, a man he has despised for years. As such, Christmas
with Karadzic raises the question of how responsibility for genocide can be embodied, depicted and responded to.
Christmas with Karadzic is a story of Sacco struggling with his inability to respond emotionally to the physical presence of the Other, in the form of Karadzic. Sacco conveys in a text panel what does not sink in as he watches Karadzic:
not the rapes, not the concentration camps, not the cleansing, not the throats slit and the bodies dropped into the Drina, not the prisoners machine-gunned in their thousands and dumped into mass graves, nor the boggling amount of other corpses and crimes that lie at this man’s feet. (p. Yet, these remain unseen in fact, the only panel that provides a visual flashback to the war is a relatively peaceful one of tanks sitting on top of Mount Igman facing down at Sarajevo (p. 50). Sacco also abstains from the exaggerated style that he normally draws in for the depiction of Karadzic (see Figure 5). In short, by making Karadzic appear to the reader as real as he did for Sacco and without the visualization of the atrocities for which he is held accountable, Sacco is negotiating the question of representation such that not only is he telling the story of what he felt like, he is also giving the reader the ability to undergo a similar process of seeing, experiencing and reflecting. As such, Sacco is reiterating Hannah Arendt’s (1964: 54) famous experience at the Eichmann trial, that Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a monster, that it might be impossible ever to have genocide and mass atrocities be embodied by any individual human being.
Sacco frequently inserts his own figure into the story, always drawing himself with blank glasses thus, as Bartley (2008: 65) points out, he portrays himself both visually

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and anecdotally as an ambiguous figure whose instinct for self-preservation and gratification sometimes outweighs his ability to bean ethical witness. This ambiguity allows for two readings of Figure 5 — and Christmas with Karadzic more broadly. One reading is that of Western self-absorption as Sacco’s attempts to produce an emotional response through chanting Karadzic’s statement from when Sarajevo was under siege that
‘Sarajevans will not be counting the dead, they will be counting the living not only fails, but is visually and textually contrasted to the excitement of the three journalists. Moreover, in contrast to the puzzled men in the background, the journalists literally and metaphorically are able to walkout, of the frame, of Pale and of Bosnia all together. Another reading is that it is precisely by exposing their concern with getting the story,

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