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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