1 Introduction

Back in the summer of 2014, I engaged in a series of conversations with the Japan based graphic novelist Sean Michael Wilson.¹ What began as a virtual discussion concerning the need to rethink about how we educate broader publics on the question of violence, eventually turned into the co-production of a volume called Portraits of Violence: An Illustrated History of Radical Thinking that would later be published by New Internationalist in 2016 (Evans & Wilson, 2016). The book featured ten distinct chapters focusing on the work of canonical thinkers, including Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Paolo Freire and Susan Sontag, amongst others. While I had expected to the book to meet its sales expectations, I was nevertheless very surprised by the international interest in its publication, leading to a number of translations, including German, Korean, Spanish and Turkish. It also went on to receive a prestigious Independent Publishers Award in the graphic novel category. More of a surprise and revealing of my own initial naivety and full lack of appreciation of the genre (including its wide ranging productions from the original to the adaptive), were the positive responses I received about our adaptation from both younger and older adult readership, along my student cohort who continue to draw upon the book even though it’s not required reading.

Before turning to the details of this particular book and to offer some critical reflections, I do think it is important to deal further with some of my own initial misgivings and hesitations, as I believe these are also culturally important and instructive in the project’s development. Could a graphic novel after-all do real justice to any political problem, especially violence? Was there not a danger that in turning it into such an accessible style, the project would end up banalising and making light of deeply important issues? Worse still, could not the comic style actually be complicit in the objectification and insensitivity of victims? Prior to the project I had only a very limited understanding of the genre. It did therefore take me about two months before fully committing to the project. Having spent this time exploring more the history of the graphic novel (see below), what I also learned was how the very presence of the artform has been quite evident, though underappreciated, in more established aesthetic practices. There is in fact a highly agreeable understanding in critical philosophy, which has for some time fully appreciated the power of comedy (the artistic practice through which “the comic” emerges).² Such insight leads one to appreciate how the very role of the comic and its “characterisations” have been integral to how we have narrated history, broken apart crude essentialisations about human life, while being the vehicle that has allowed us to deal with the mire of existence. Whilst mindful of this, I simply hadn’t made the connection between the philosophy of comedy and the graphic novel. Furthermore, not unrelated, those working in the genre might also stress how the very words comic and comedy are etymologically related to the Greek komos, which associated with the “revels”, designated a time of humour, satyr and subversive transgression. Such festivals reinforced the importance of the komoedia — those literary and theatrical outputs so central to Greek poetics.³

Nevertheless, there was a question that continued to linger when dealing with the interplay between the discursive and the pictorial in the graphic novel style. This concerned whether the format detracted from seriousness of the text and offered a simplified or even superficial mediation of the prose. Could an illustrated version of Othello, for example, really capture the drama and intensity a more literal reading of Shakespeare might offer as the reader is sat alone with its words? Do we not in fact impose a certain image or dictate an impression in the minds of readership when providing artwork, instead of letting the words inspire their own “images of thought”? When growing up, it was almost a truism that the more mature one’s studies, the less images appear in the text. “There are no pictures in this book”, was often used to insist that things in the order of study were now getting serious, hence more attention demanded. While there is admittedly a notable distinction between books that feature artworks in comparison to the illustrated storylines of the graphic novel, even the simplest critical glance shows there’s no neat teleology between childhood books that feature artwork and their gradual disappearance into adulthood. While the very first book I was given was a beautifully produced illustrated version of the tales of Hans Christian Andersen, its prose was hardly lacking in intellectual depth. Indeed, as I went through the period into young adulthood, as Stephen King offered a truly powerful way to stimulate the imagination (in terms of representation how many times would the saying “the film is not as good as the book” be repeated), I still found something truly engaging in books featuring illustrations, especially the interactive “Fighting Fantasy” novels such as Warlock of Firetop Mountain and City of Thieves that featured dark and sinister monochromatic engravings. Later in life, I would return to older classics that still gave so much inspiration, from the tales of Sherlock Holmes such as The Hound of the Baskervilles, which were accompanied by the dramatic artwork of Sidney Paget (originally published in The Strand in 1902), along with what I maintain to be the best book of political theory every written, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, enhanced by John Tenniel’s vivid and captivating imagery. Carroll, for his part, was all too aware of the tensions here: “What is the use of a book”, thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”

How much the omission of images from books over time is less about intellectual value and more about economising on production costs for artwork and printing is certainly open to question? What we do know is history is replete and shaped by examples, where the power of the word has been truly enhanced by the power of the image. From the still remarkably vibrant pigmentations of the Codex Amiatinus Bible that is housed in the Laurentian library in Florence, which is widely acknowledged as the oldest surviving bible written in the English language, onto the version of Dante Alighieri’s own komoedia — The Divine Comedy, brought alive by interpretative illustrations of both Sandro Botticelli and later Gustave Doré, so the serious has always been associated with the aesthetic. Indeed, in each of these cases, the image didn’t simply provide artistic re-presentation. They would prove their own original and novel interpretations, which in the case of the Dante, proved just as important in terms of how we learned to imagine hell. We would also see a further brilliant example of this with Oscar Wilde’s Salome, which was accompanied by the outrageously captivating artworks of Aubrey Beardsley.⁴ Not only was the art in this collaboration equally as important as Wilde’s prose, it would be integral to the subversion of representations concerning gendered norms and, in the process, dramatically altered the direction of the graphic arts. Striking out in a way that is reminiscent to what Frederick Douglass called an “aesthetic force,”⁵ Aubrey’s revolutionary style would be evidently influential over the likes of Harry Clarke, especially in the haunting illustrations for the 1919 version of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination⁶ and a 1925 version of Goethe’s Dr Faust.⁷ It would also be central to what would eventually be called Art Nouveau. To conjure the words of Wilde from an inscription in a copy of Salome he gave to the artist, “For Aubrey: for the only artist who, besides myself, knows what the Dance of the Seven Veils is, and can see that invisible dance”.

Critics might invariably point out here that the artwork of the likes of Botticelli is a world away from the artwork of the more contemporary comic book genre. This is undoubtedly true. And yet we should not forget that art is ultimately a matter of taste and not a competition. We certainly should also not underestimate the influence or question the integrity of artists who work in this style, whose originality and technical skills are so evident and worthy of our appreciation. Just as there are exceptional and mediocre figurative artists, so there are exceptional and mediocre graphic novel illustrators, whose creations truly enrich the human conditions. The exceptional and pioneering work carried out by Studio Ghibli, which have notably been so influential within the genre, perhaps being the case point. Productions such as Spirited Away show how it’s possible through a harmonious combination of image and narrative to truly speak to different audiences, in a style that is able to traverse generations, while also touching about the most serious issues of tragedy, violence, loss, resistance and love, while affirming the power of the imagination. Though less visually dynamic, what the graphic novel does offer then is a means for the adaptation of a text and giving it over to a certain characterisation. Admittedly more simplified, it does then have merits and value on its own terms. But this is also where the intellectual dangers lie. Many of the criticism of the graphic novel might also be applied to film making or any other form of cultural production that seeks to visualise a discursive narrative. There are good adaptations, and there are bad adaptations. What’s at stake here is not about simply staying true to the original. It is all about igniting the affective, aesthetic and atmospheric registers such that the work takes on a life and distinct quality of its own meaning and purpose. Many studies show how the mind respond to images in ways that open up new pedagogical ways for discovery or what John Berger famously called “ways of seeing” (Berger, 1972). And it is also now widely accepted that in the age of new media technologies, the more effective ways of teaching offer a blend between the textual and the visual.⁸ It isn’t therefore so much a question about how whether the use of images have value or not in how we navigate the world. It is how they are achieved and brought together in ways that are pedagogically challenging. With these points in mind, I will now provide some critical reflections on my own productive experience with the graphic book format, revisiting the process, and offer some points of guidance for academics and scholars who are considering experimenting with the genre.

2 Researching the Genre

As already noted, part of my initial hesitation with the project was simply being unfamiliar with the graphic novel style. Hence, like all research projects that demand our attention and pedagogical application, before fully committing I began to research more intently about the history of the genre and its district political usefulness. Aside from acknowledging how the comic book and graphic novel industry was evidently commercially successful (though even this I had underappreciated), from the widespread appeal of Marvel to Manga, I was nevertheless already a firm believer in the importance of art and aesthetics in terms of developing the necessary pedagogical tools for critiquing violence. This I believe is an important first step in any collaboration of this kind. Now leaving aside the issues concerning the distinction between the comic book and the graphical novel (largely based on debates concerning maturity of audiences), what my research revealed was how the graphic novel connects to a rich history of illustrative critique, which not only can trace its explicit satirical routes back to the work of the likes of William Hogarth, but in the more serious prose of some the texts already mentioned, offers a genealogy that can arguably be taken back to the artwork of William Blake,⁹ who engaging with literary classics mastered the mix between art, figuration and fantasy for the purpose of expressing a story on the nature of the human condition. Indeed, the connections between the more recent and highly celebrated graphic novelist Alan Moore (whose works notably include, V for Vendetta and Watchmen) and Blake is often lauded amongst the genre’s critics and writers (Whitson, 2006). The art of fabulation would not then only be an integral part of art and literary history, as philosophically appreciated by Gilles Deleuze and Donna Haraway. It could also be seen as an important precursor to the growing academic interest in the graphic novel from the 1980s onward.¹⁰ Evidently in keeping with the much wider cultural tradition of muralism in Mexico that dates back to the revolutionary turn at the beginning of the last Century,¹¹ the power of fabulation would be later given renewed political dynamism in the writings of Subcomandante Marcos and his illustrated conversations with Don Durito the errant knight beetle, who is seen as a Zapatista Don Quixote and a Mexican cousin of the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland.¹²

While the 1980s are widely recognised as a pivotal moment in the development of the graphic novel,¹³ it would be my own encounters during the preliminary research with one particular novelist and illustrator who rose to global prominence during this period, which fully convinced me to set aside any lasting doubts. Encountering the works of Art Spiegelman is a lesson in the seriousness and importance of the graphic novel genre. Spiegelman also provides the standard to which all who experiment with the format should aspire. His books Maus (1986) and In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) transformed my understanding of the graphic novel and should be mandatory reading for all before committing to a project of this kind. The Pulitzer winning Maus comprises of an extended exchange between Spiegelman and his father Vladek about his and Anja’s (Spiegelman’s mother, who later committed suicide) experiences as Jews in prison camps in Germany and Poland. Not only does the narrative deal with issues concerning the lived experience of the Holocaust, the complex nature of memory is purposefully addressed through the literal reworkings of political animality. As Jeff Adam notes on its sequential style: “narratives of the past [are] located within the present. By these means their pedagogical projects emerge: the transmission and dissemination of experientially derived (albeit partial and fragmented) traumatic historical societal events. The image text, as a medium for recounting societal or collective memory (as defined by the widespread acquisition of knowledge of social events), appears to facilitate the ways in which we come to experience, and to know, traumatic history” (Adams, 2008). A point further emphasised by James E. Young who noted how the book suggests “itself as a pointedly anti-redemptory medium that simultaneously makes and unmakes meaning as it unfolds” (Young, 1993, p. 22). We might note the evident comparisons and contrasts here between Paget’s rampaging Baskerville Hound, the terrified mice at the start of chapter two of Spiegelman’s Maus, and the movie poster for the animated adaptation of Richard Adams beautiful, tragic and politically resonant Watership Down.

In the Shadow of No Towers also connects to Spiegelman’s personal experience of witnessing violence, this time the attacks of September 11th, 2001, in New York where he was now living. Alongside offering a compelling narrative on the violence of that fateful day, the brilliance of this work is to further connect it to the politics of everyday life on the streets on the vibrant yet often brutalising city. Thus, capturing what Tim Grierson called “the fractured mindset of a frightened age” (Grierson, 2004, par. 4), Spiegelman, in short, shows the power to literally animate a problem, thereby allowing its author to also find reasons to believe in this world despite the horrors it continues to throw at us. As Carlo Wolff noted, “An artefact, a slab, a monument — this is no mere book. Unpaginated, ungainly and heavy, it seems to demand its own space. A coffee table can't contain a statement so thick and unsettling, a cry that would outshout chaos […] Unlike a work that's all text, you can ‘get through’ this quickly. Absorbing it takes more time. It's Spiegelman's attempt to keep the memory of the World Trade Centre from frying his brain. Patiently created, with great emotional trepidation, this signals Spiegelman's fresh commitment to a world he’s just beginning to trust again” (Wolff, 2004, par. 2–5). Or as Spiegelman himself would later explain in an interview with The New York Times, “How vulnerable New York — and by extension, all of Western Civ. — actually is. I took my city, and those homely, arrogant towers, for granted. It’s actually all as transient and ephemeral as, say, old newspapers” (Dreifus & Spiegelman, 2004). While the book is full of deep insight and critical awareness, arguably the standout page concerns the juxtaposition on page six, that deals with the history of the antisemitism he continued to encounter in New York, the return of Maus in these new fearful terrain, accompanied by the side art that reworks Richard Drews infamous image of the falling man.¹⁴ The three boxed narrative is certainly amongst the most striking in the whole novel:

“He keeps falling through the holes in his head, though he no longer knows which holes were made by Arab terrorists’ way back in 2001, and which ones were always there”.

“He is haunted now by the images he didn't witness… images of people tumbling to the streets below… especially one man (according to a neighbour) who executed a graceful Olympic dive as his last living act”.

“But in the economic dislocation that has followed since that day, he has witnessed lots of people landing in the streets of Manhattan”.

Invariably — the strength of Spiegelman's work comes directly from a position of authenticity. Very few of us would have to endure the suffering he faced; nor would we ever want that for others. But there is another lesson we can take from Spiegelman in our attempts to do justice to the subject of our concern. While it is important to speak with an authentic voice, it is also important to have the courage to speak truth to power. Hence, any such engagement with the image and text for the distinct purposes of developing a critical awareness, should push the boundaries of critique and be open to interrogate the operations of power. To echo the words of Henry Giroux who wrote the foreword to our particular book, “Creating alternative futures requires serious and sustained investment in arresting the cycle of violence, imagining better futures and styles for living amongst the world of peoples. It is to destroy the image of a violently fated world we have created for ourselves by taking pedagogy and education seriously, harnessing the power of imagination and equipping young people with the confidence that the world can be transformed for the better” (Giroux, 2016). Such a pedagogical understanding I would argue is crucial if the project is to have any critical meaning.

3 Narrating the Violence

The basis for the book was actually informed by a master’s level course I had been teaching for several years concerning “Theories of Violence”. While teaching this author-based program, there were a number of pedagogical lessons I would learn, which ended up being instructive for this volume. 1) There is no universal language when it comes to critical engagement. Often in fact, when a student fails to grasp a concept, this can reveal more about the limits of language and its capacity to reach out and truly capture the mind of an audience. It is incumbent therefore upon the academic to learn to speak in multiple grammatical ways, presenting the same concept, idea or problem in different ways depending on the listeners; 2) The overburdening use of visual discourse on teaching platforms such as PowerPoint is the surest way to kill the critical imagination if it is done badly. Students respond in far more engaged and inspired ways if you manage to bring alive a problem through the use of imagery and the focused use of textual narrative from a range of theoretical, poetic and literary sources; 3) There is however a danger when using imagery in the context of violence. While there is a need to remain ethically sensitive to a problem, being parasitic to an image and use it merely as a prop or object is bad practice. Violence often stems from the objectification of life, hence to objective its representation is nothing short of committing a further act of intellectual and aesthetic violence; 4) To overcome this, there is much to be gained from resourcing the history of art. It is in fact possible to narrate the entire history of war, violence and the human condition through a handful of masterpieces; 5) Art however is not simply about a cultured or even more censored way to visualise problems that are by definition horrific. Critical thinking on violence has to confront the intolerable, while being open to the emotional field. Any educator on violence would fail if they didn’t intellectually and emotionally challenge their students; 6) Central here is how we understand the importance of aesthetics. Politics doesn't simply borrow images or use them when it’s convenient. Politics is aesthetic as it is all about creating images of thought, images of belonging, images of the world; 7) In this regard, when dealing with critical pedagogy, we are always dealing with the art of politics, which demands an appreciation of the power of images as both a negative and transformative force; 8) Trying to follow in the footsteps of all the wonderful and inspiring educating orators, such as Cornel West, the ultimate test for the academic is to be able to bring a timeless concept or idea to life and make it resonate in the present. The art of lecturing is all about telling a story, building a narrative, weaving together the conceptual with the historical, while presenting those ideas so that the imagination is captivated and the intellectual journey travelled enriching, even if that journey is to take you into the most brutal chapters in history or the dark recesses of the mind.

But these lessons are just a start point. I cannot emphasise strongly enough the importance of collaborating on such a project with an author who truly understands the genre and is able to animate the ideas. Writing of graphic novels is a unique skill that requires considerable dedication and know-how. As I learned through the hours of conversations, discussions around content, debates to ensure conceptual clarity, the drafting and redrafting of the prose, all this requires patience, compromise and above all the spirit of collaboration. This is especially the case when piecing together a narrative of the violence and transferring the structure and prose into a storyboard that has a credible arc to offers the reader a purposeful direction through the conceptual terrain. With the ambition being to add to a growing body of literature that both takes the genre very seriously and reaffirms the need for better visual literacy when it comes with dealing with the most pressing issues we face. As Lynell Burmark explains, “the primary literacy of the twenty-first century is visual… Our students must learn to process both words and pictures. To be visually literate, they must learn to ‘read’ and ‘write’ visually rich communications. They must be able to move gracefully and fluently between text and images, between literal and figurative worlds” (Burmack, 2008, p. 5). The task for the writer is therefore to produce the very kinds of works, which do ethical justice to the subject, pedagogical justice to the educated need for critically informed citizens, and aesthetic justice to the visual art of critical interventions for the purposes of rethinking and reimagining the world.

In our attempts to achieve this, we would draw upon a number of illustrative styles, from the complicated to the more minimal. Working with six different artists, each allocated a specific chapter based on the style we felt best suited to the narrative and questions being raised, it was important to ensure that each chapter retained its distinct focus. Like any public lecture, it was important to provide an informative background, clear insight into the conceptual problem, without stupefying or assuming the audience is incapable of understanding complex issues. We did however proceed on the basis of assuming no prior knowledge on behalf of the readership. To ensure the book was coherent and focused, each author was allocated ten pages, which featured one specific concept we felt best represented the author’s contribution to the understanding of violence. While not in any way exhaustive, the book featured chapters such as Agamben and “Bare Life”, Frantz Fanon and the “Wretched of the Earth”, Noam Chomsky and “Manufacturing Consent”, onto Susan Sontag “Regarding the Pain of Others”. As part of my own visual learning process, I personally found it meaningful to work with a story board in which all the scenes were visible. This allowed for a visualisation of the full story, along with ensuring the conceptual arc was coherent. We would eventually piece together the final pages into a poster format for a number of public exhibitions.