Reading comics for the field of International Relations: Theory, method and the Bosnian War
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| European Journal of International Relations 23(3) practice (how comics are generally drawn) or as a practice that challenges general practice. Thus, while comics are positioned within asocial realm with general routine practices performed by artists, publishers, journalists, reviewers, critics and readers, one should study how particular comics practise in relation thereto. Comics as text–image discourse Theorizing comics as international relations also requires a consideration of the particular way in which comics use text and images to produce a narrative. In comics scholarship in the neo-semiotic tradition, the following terminology has been developed to describe the relationship between images and text. The most general term is that of the frame, which closes off and confers a particular form onto a space perhaps the most easily identifiable frame is the panel, that is, a portion of space isolated by blank spaces and enclosed by a frame that ensures its integrity (Groensteen, 2007: 25); the horizontal alignment of panels is a strip; the space between panels in a strip and between the last panel in a strip and the first panel in the strip below is the gutter; the margin is the space that runs from the border of panels and towards the edges of the page and balloons are spaces used to present speech or thought. The page is the main unit of analysis and is described as a hyperframe. As many comics consist of more than one page, pages situated opposite each other are dependent on a natural solidarity, and predisposed to speak to each other (Groensteen, 2007: 35). As Groensteen (2007: 30) puts it, the moves from the strip to the magazine and album indicate systems of panel proliferation that are increasingly inclusive’. The theorization of the specificity of comics discourse within neo-semiotic scholarship can be brought to bear on the question of whether images are able to speak independently of words, a question that has been much discussed within research on visuality in IR (Bleiker, 2015; Hansen, a, 2015; Möller, 2007). Atone level, this is an ontological question, but the way it is answered has crucial analytical and methodological implications (Aradau and Huysmans, 2014; Bleiker, 2015). Möller (2007) has, for example, argued that images make such ambiguous utterances that it is impossible to assign them a securitizing status independently of spoken or written discourse. In contrast, drawing on the iconological tradition of Panofsky, Heck and Schlag (2013: 899) hold that the image has an ‘auto-activity’ and the ability to affect, confirm and transform beliefs in relations to spectators and producers. Positioned between these positions and adopting a poststructuralist theorization of language as relational and inherently unstable, I have argued that neither the word nor the image can speak in the absence of linkages and dif- ferentiations to other signs (words and/or images) (Hansen, a. However, certain images — and words — can be repeatedly discursively constituted, thus assuming a position where they appear to bespeaking in and of themselves. This debate has engaged the image in general or singular, freestanding images in the form of photographs or cartoons, with a tendency to constitute the relationship between text and image as a binary. Turning to the medium of comics effectively deconstructs this binary in that comics are by definition both textual and visual. As noted earlier, in comics, drawings are not simply illustrations of text, but integral to the constitution of a narrative. Moreover, text not only conveys a written discourse, but is itself part of Hansen 589 the visual. Choosing different sizes of font is a visual choice that operates through a particular epistemological register. For example, according to Eisner (2008: 26), Typesetting does have a kind of inherent authority but it also has a mechanical effect that intrudes on the personality of freehand art. The size of font to represent different degrees of urgency and insecurity — from danger to DANGER — is another visualization of text through which a comic may mobilize an emotional response and securitize. The placement of text is also visually significant, speech balloons can, for example, be used to create a connection between two panels, thus knitting a story together. The fact that writing is, at least in the case of comics, itself visual recasts the debate on visuality in IR from that of whether images can speak independently of words, to that of how text and image constellations constitute meaning. Asking the how question allows us to trace how text and images work with and perhaps against each other without privileging either image or writing. To not assign privilege is to underline that there is an inherent instability, in that words and images are simultaneously part of the same comics narrative and two distinct utterances the image can never be exhausted by the text and the text can never be exhausted by one image. This inherent instability connects theoretically with the poststructuralist understanding of identities as never fully stable while subjects are constituted through discourse in the attempt to make their identities look natural and given, there is always a surplus of meaning that destabilizes closure and certainty (Der Derian and Shapiro, 1989; Hansen, 2006; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). Subjects are constituted as having an identity, yet an individual subject can never fully represent that identity. When analysing comics, therefore, one should study how text and images are mobilized such that coherent identities are produced, for example, through representations of human subjects. However, one should also ask where and how such cohesion is destabilized through specific characters — visually and textually — that challenge representations of homogeneous collective identity. Theorizing comics as text–image discourse also draws attention to how meaning — and stability and instability — is produced not only through what is put into words and images, but also by what is not. As noted earlier, the virtual absence of limitations on what can be drawn makes comics a uniquely positioned medium through which to trace boundaries of representation. In the wake of the Nazi Holocaust, Theodore Adorno and the Frankfurt School asked if there were events of such profound suffering and evil — genocides, atrocities, torture — that they defied representation. If the answer was yes, then any attempt to represent them would inevitably trivialize their radical status (Ray, 2003). In IR, this question has been engaged in the context of art photography’s ability to communicate events like the Rwandan genocide and the war in Bosnia (Lisle, 2011; Möller, 2009; on comics on the Rwandan genocide, see Chaney, 2011). Comics strategies for engaging the limits to representation include the relaying of events through text only or through the use of blank or mono-coloured panels that visually indicate that something exists but cannot be shown. Understanding how comics engage with the question of representation is also related to the status of the gutter. The role of the gutter is crucial because the medium of comics operates, as noted earlier, through panels that are separated from one another. Yet, even long comic books only have a limited number of panels through which to narrate compared to the medium of the novel or the film. The challenge is that fora comic to be |