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

Hansen
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the practices surrounding the release of Le Sommeil du Monster: it was published simultaneously in 14 countries, the French edition with a print-run of 350,000, and a worldwide sale of 400,000 copies The album was nominated for the Best Album Prize at the
Angoulême festival, the most prestigious comics festival in the world, and there were numerous interviews with Bilal in the French media that validated his artistic accomplishments, as well as his ability to speak with insight on Bosnia. Bilal’s sublime graphics are achieved by changing from drawing at a table to painting standing up, thus working in a painterly manner with acrylic, pastel, gouache and Chinese ink (Beaudoin et al., 1998).
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The outcome is a very different visual style from normal comics, as evidenced in Figure 4 (reproduced in colour in the online version of this article. In terms of cultural legitimacy, this reception situates Bilal’s work as comparable to that of real painting and his practice as that of an artist. Through these interviews, Bilal’s extra-comic discourse enters into the public constitution of Le Sommeil du Monstre:
Bilal consistently stresses that the wars of the former Yugoslavia began as past atrocities were being forgotten, and that memory is the key to avoid future wars. Living in Paris since the age of nine, Bilal’s authority to speak about Bosnia is linked to him being of Yugoslavian decent with a Czechoslovakian mother and a Bosnian father. In stark contrast to Sarajevo Tango, Bilal explains how he found it impossible to show the events of the war through pictures.
In terms of visual-textual discourse, Le Sommeil du Monstre is science fiction, featuring flying cars, new galaxies, androids, clones and human–animal morphing characters. As Krygier (2015) points out, the narrative includes so many intersecting themes (world order domination, art as destruction, religion, infectious animals) that the overall impression is complicated, if not confusing. Read as a comic on the Bosnian War, however, it is considerably more straightforward. Opening in a dystopic 2026 New York City, Le Sommeil du Monstre is structured around two temporal levels of narration that of a story unfolding from 2026 and onwards; and that of the first 18 days in the life of Nike Hatzfeld, Amir Fazlagic and Leyla Mirkovic, three orphans brought into the hospital in bombed-out Sarajevo in 1993. Those 18 days are told by Nike as he recovers his memory, starting with day 18 and ending on day one. We learn that Nike’s father — and probably his mother — were shot by Amir’s father, a Serbian sniper. The day after, Amir is born and his Bosnian Muslim mother dies in childbirth, causing
Amir’s father to commit suicide. Sharing the same bed, Nike swears to protect Amir and Leyla when he is 16 days old, and not even the discovery that his father was killed by Amir’s changes this. Having regained his memory of Amir and Leyla — they were separated when Nike was 27 days old — Nike embarks on a quest to see them reunited, a quest that continues across three additional albums, the three finally meeting at the end of the fourth and final album, Quatre?, published in 2007.
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Le Sommeil du Monstre
— and the tetralogy overall — provides a more complicated engagement with the Bosnian War than Sarajevo Tango’s construction of Serbs as perpetrators of genocide and the international community as complicit. As Nike recovers the memory of day two, he notes that this damn war is awaking The Beast, an amalgam of enmity and violence nurtured through history and a general human propensity for destruction, perhaps even evil. A second war in 2012 is also mentioned in passing, thus underscoring the volatility of the Dayton Peace Accord. Yet, the story that links Nike, Amir and

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European Journal of International Relations 23(3)
Leyla is one of care and compassion, and of the human ability to overcome even deeply personal violent pasts.
In marked contrast to Sarajevo Tango, Le Sommeil du Monstre does not construct a Serbian or any other Other. In an opening passage, shown in Figure 4, the violence of assigning collective identity to human subjects is communicated through text and

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