Book Review - Filial Lines: Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and Comics Form

reviewed by Marie Dücker, Assistant Professor (University of Graz)

Emmy Waldman. Filial Lines: Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and Comics Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Studies in Graphic Narratives), 2026. 260 pp. ISBN: 978-1-009-54883-0 (Hardback). https://www.cambridge.org/9781009548830

Filial Lines opens with two passages that, as Emmy Waldman writes, stayed with her throughout the writing of this book: the “scribble game” at the start of Art Spiegelman’s Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&!*, in which mother and son take turns making random marks for the other to transform into a recognizable picture; and the moment in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home in which Bechdel’s father hands her a funeral director’s wall calendar to write in, his own neat script already filling the first line. Both scenes, Waldman observes, make “lines on paper”—whether figurative or autobiographical—a relational rather than a solitary act. Both are also grimly shadowed by the suicide of the parent involved. This pairing of opening images is a canny and affecting way into the book’s central argument: that the comics form is uniquely suited to the visual working and reworking of familial inheritance, trauma, and creative filiation.

The book is organized into two main parts and an epilogue. Part I traverses five decades of Spiegelman’s output—from his underground Arcade strips to his post-Maus retrospective projects and his New Yorker work—through three formal tropes derived from comics’ own visual grammar: boxes, spirals, and tic-tac-toe. Chapter 1 reads Maus as a Jewish text in formal as well as thematic terms, tracing congruences between Spiegelman’s panel-boxes, the architected space of the Mishkan, and the practice of Midrash. Chapter 2 turns to Breakdowns and the figure of the spiral, arguing, via Edward Said’s theory of the dialectic between filiation and affiliation, that the filial ghosts Spiegelman cannot quite exorcise are precisely what authorize his modernist ambitions. Chapter 3 excavates a previously underexamined autobiographical character, “OXO,” and reads Spiegelman’s one-page New Yorker piece “Lost” (2016) as a return to the unresolved questions of Maus through the lens of a children’s game. Part II turns to Bechdel’s lesser-discussed memoirs, Are You My Mother? (2012) and The Secret to Superhuman Strength (2021), through two further formal figures: mirrors (as a way into mimesis, the mother-daughter bond, and the question of whether imitation can be enabling rather than merely replicative) and webs (as a figure for the bodily, material work of putting lines on paper, and for the possibilities of queer kinship and feminist community). An epilogue on Tessa Hulls’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Feeding Ghosts (2024) extends the book’s arguments to a new generation of graphic memoirists, proposing the braided river as a final formal figure for comics' negotiation of heterogeneous, transnational, and matrilineal histories.

What distinguishes Filial Lines from other scholarly monographs on Spiegelman and Bechdel, which has become a crowded field, is the sophisticated and elevated playfulness of Waldman’s formal methodology. Waldman is explicit that she does not offer her five figures (boxes, spirals, tic-tac-toe, mirrors, webs) as a strict taxonomy of the comics form, but rather as a “theatrical ensemble”: a cast of metaphors that help us encounter these works rather than simply classify them. This is a productive and intellectually honest distinction, and one that allows Waldman to bring psychoanalytic, feminist, and formalist frameworks to bear without forcing them into a false coherence. Her prose is consistently clear and vivid, and her close readings—whether of a single panel, a page layout, or the weight of a recurring motif—are among the sharpest I have read about in recent comics scholarship. The chapter on tic-tac-toe is especially pleasurable, yoking the grid of the gameboard to the grid of the comics page and using the mobile interplay of X and O to read the complexities of inherited trauma in Spiegelman’s largely neglected short work.

The book also makes a convincing case for rebalancing the scholarly attention devoted to Spiegelman and Bechdel’s most celebrated works. With only Maus and Fun Home to go on, Waldman notes, one might conclude that both cartoonists primarily come to voice through their fathers. Filial Lines demonstrates, by attending carefully to the fuller arc of each artist’s career, that it is the mother who looms largest across both corpuses—a reorientation that opens fresh critical ground. The juxtaposition of the two cartoonists is, moreover, consistently illuminating rather than merely comparative: Waldman traces a direct line of influence from Spiegelman to Bechdel while also mapping the significant differences in how each engages with modernism—Spiegelman through defamiliarizing formal experiment, Bechdel through a more ambivalent, affective working-through of the modernist canon as filial inheritance.

Filial Lines is highly recommended for scholars and students of comics studies, graphic memoir, feminist literature, Jewish American literature, and contemporary formalism. It is also, to a degree unusual in academic monographs on the medium, a pleasure to read: erudite, precise, and genuinely alive to what makes the comics form strange, beautiful, and necessary.

Book Review - Crossing Lines: Comics About Human Migration

 reviewed by Alberto López Martín, Occidental College

Antje Ellermann, Frederik Kohlert, Sarah Leavitt, and Mireille Paquet, eds. Crossing Lines: Comics About Human Migration. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2025. $26.95 CAN. ISBN 9781049801223. https://utpdistribution.com/9781487533359/crossing-lines/

 

Scholarship on the representation of migration in comics has produced a substantial body of monographs and critical studies, while recent graphic narratives—whether autobiographical or working through genres such as comics journalism and dystopian fiction—abound with stories of diasporas, climate refugees, and the everyday challenges faced by migrants and migrant communities in their countries of destination. Crossing Lines joins this growing body of work examining migration, its causes, and its consequences through the medium of comics. What distinguishes the project is its collaborative premise: by bringing together academic researchers and comics creators, it puts the medium's capacity to tell migration stories to the test. As the editors observe in the introduction, emphasizing comics' potential to foster social change, the medium “can facilitate dialogue, fight disinformation, and generate empathy, thereby providing citizens with a more nuanced view of human immigration through narratives” (4).

Crossing Lines originated in a workshop organized by the editors in 2022 at the Centre for Migration Studies at the University of British Columbia. The event brought together nine Vancouver-based comics artists, community practitioners, and nearly forty scholars from UBC, Concordia University, and the University of Victoria. During the workshop, participants formed nine working groups, each led by a comics artist, to explore a specific dimension of migration and displacement that would ultimately take shape as a comic narrative. From the outset, each group was asked to ground its project in peer-reviewed research and to examine migration in all its complexity, avoiding simplistic or stereotypical representations. Interdisciplinarity lies at the heart of both the workshop and the resulting volume: contributors represent fields as diverse as anthropology, occupational therapy and social work, law, media studies, and Asian studies, complementing the editors' expertise in political science and English. Through this collaborative process and the subsequent editorial work, Crossing Lines ultimately took the form of eight comics, each created by a comics artist working with a team of three or four co-authoring scholars—a total of twenty-eight contributors, in addition to the eight artists and four editors. The result is a genuinely polyphonic collection that benefits from a diversity of perspectives and, importantly, includes a significant representation of migrant authors.

As one might expect, some comics are more effective than others, although all the stories carry considerable emotional weight. They also display a remarkable diversity of formal approaches and artistic styles. Kathleen Gros's "To/From" is among the collection's strongest contributions. Through a series of full-page illustrations, it explores the prejudice and exclusion embedded in the seemingly innocuous question "Where are you from?," juxtaposing the journey of an Afghan refugee and her family with the history of colonialism on the ancestral lands of what is now British Columbia. Jonathon Dalton's "Crossing Lines," the comic that lends the volume its title, presents six parallel storylines following six groups of travelers whose radically different experiences of crossing the Canadian border are determined by their legal status. Doug Savage's "Migratory Birds," in turn, reflects on the notion of citizenship through the naturalization ceremony of two characters in a world populated by anthropomorphic birds, including xenophobic Canadian geese and an Indigenous bird that reminds the newly naturalized citizens of the nation's silenced colonial past. In Hannah Myers's "Greener Grass?," the premise of a video game centered on the experiences of highly skilled migrants allows two friends to recognize both the obstacles migrants face—including barriers to employment and housing—and the privileges they themselves enjoy as Canadian citizens.

Emily Chou's "In Search of Bruce Lee" departs from the preceding stories by relying almost entirely on visual storytelling. It focuses on a migrant's intercultural and intergenerational connections through his admiration for the iconic actor and martial artist, reserving text for onomatopoeia and unintelligible speech balloons that convey the protagonist's struggle to navigate an unfamiliar language and culture. Scarlet Wings Kaili's "The Waiting Room" adopts a more somber tone, foregrounding the physical and psychological toll of migration by emphasizing the protagonist's stress, insomnia, and involuntary loneliness. Jess Pollard's "Butterfly," meanwhile, explores the shift in social status experienced by two migrants in relation to the lives they left behind in their countries of origin, their aspirations—whether for freedom or economic opportunity—and the sacrifices they have made to build a new life. Finally, Alyssa Hirose's "Belonging" offers an original exercise in abstraction, representing belonging and integration through a shape-shifting form that alternately blends with and stands apart from its surroundings, using synesthetic effects to evoke emotion. Each of the eight comics is followed by a brief discussion of its central theme, five discussion questions addressing issues ranging from content to formal choices, and an annotated bibliography of five additional sources for readers wishing to explore the topic further. Although the explanatory sections are occasionally overly explicit and may constrain the interpretive openness of the comics they accompany, they are, overall, an excellent addition that makes the collection particularly well suited for use in humanities or social sciences courses on migration at either the undergraduate or graduate level.

Indeed, the format of Crossing Lines—with the discussion questions and suggested avenues for further exploration accompanying each comic, together with the richness of possible interpretations and the complexity of the issues they address—makes it an exceptionally valuable pedagogical resource. Yet the collection's strengths extend beyond its rich and compelling stories. The workshop that gave rise to the volume offers a replicable model of collaborative practice, one that could be implemented with relative ease in groups of four or five students as a semester-long project. In such a setting, students would not only read comics but also create their own, drawing inspiration from ecosocial issues and causes they care about. Ultimately, Crossing Lines is a commendable project that brings together a remarkable range of voices while bridging the gap between scholars, activists, and comics creators. Although the individual contributions are inevitably uneven in quality, the volume as a whole is an impressive and worthwhile achievement.

Review Essay: The Glamour of Ink, the Grind of Labor - on CJ Standal's Comics: The Call and the Cost

 Review Essay:

 

CJ Standal. Comics:  The Call and the Cost. CJ Standal Productions, 2026. 404 pp. US $6.99 (Ebook), ISBN:  979-8-9869-0507-5; 212 pp. US $49.99 (Hardcover), ISBN:  979-8-9869-0506-8. https://www.cjstandalproductions.com/ or https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/comics-the-call-and-the-cost-cj-standal/1148524250

 

 

The Glamour of Ink, the Grind of Labor

 

Fer García

 

Comics are usually sold to us as magic:  solitary geniuses drawing from the comfort of their homes, inventing worlds with nothing but paper, ink, and imagination. What Comics:  The Call and the Cost does, brilliantly and uncomfortably, is strip away that fantasy. This book insists on something the medium rarely talks about:  comics are not only art, they are labor. And like any labor, they come with struggle, exploitation, sacrifice, and negotiation.

I asked to review this book for two reasons. First, because my long-term work sits at the intersection of entrepreneurship and comics. Second, because there simply isn’t enough literature that treats the comics industry as an industry, with workers, power structures, and economic realities. This book doesn’t romanticize the grind. It exposes it.

 

Comics as a Paradox:  Art and Industrial Product

 

The opening chapter, “The Cost of Comics: A History of the Comic Book Labor Movement,” establishes the central paradox of the medium:  comics are art, but they are also mass-produced cultural commodities. From the very beginning, characters mattered more than creators. Intellectual property was more valuable than the people who generated it. Payments, copyrights, deadlines, and credit were structured around exploitation rather than sustainability.

What struck me most is how familiar this all feels. We tend to think of labor struggles as something that happened “back then,” but the dynamics described here are still alive today. We only know the famous name--Kirby, Davis, McFarlane, Mignola--and from the outside, it looks easy. You “just draw.” From home. For a living. But this chapter dismantles that fantasy. It shows that artists are not only artists. They are workers. And workers need rights, organization, and public recognition.

I was particularly drawn to the Image Comics story. Seven creators leaving a company to form a better one is not just a comics story--it’s a classic entrepreneurship story. Even more surprising was learning that Image became the first unionized comic book publisher in the U.S. The chapter doesn’t frame comics as a factory or a medieval guild. It frames it as what it really is:  a professional field still fighting to be treated like one.

The emotion here is double. Sadness for the struggles. And clarity about something essential:  if comics are professional work, then creators must demand professional conditions.

 

Marge Buell:  Strategy, Feminism, and Business Intelligence

 

The chapter on Marge Buell and Little Lulu is quietly radical. Buell wasn’t just a good cartoonist; she was a visionary. She understood transmedia reach before it had a name. She understood licensing. She understood control. And she understood that comics were not only expression, but business.

Little Lulu is feminist not because it preaches, but because it wants the same things other characters want, and because its creator wanted the same professional recognition other cartoonists had. Buell was strategic. She chose magazines over newspapers. She kept her copyright. She focused on licensing. And she built a career that gave her both creative and economic control.

What surprised me is that she didn’t “give up” as much as most creators had to. In fact, she protected her IP. She was able to do that, partly because she was not the sole breadwinner in her household--a reminder that even independence has structural conditions. The cost of comics here is gendered. Buell’s labor has been historically undervalued, simply because we didn’t know her story.

 

Oesterheld:  When Comics Become Dangerous

 

Héctor Oesterheld’s chapter changes the tone of the book completely. This is where “cost” stops being metaphorical. Oesterheld didn’t just lose money or visibility. He lost his life. And the lives of his daughters. And even his unborn grandchildren.

His crime was using science fiction comics to tell the truth under a dictatorship. This chapter reframes comics as historical testimony. Not entertainment. Not even just art. But resistance.

Oesterheld shows that authorship can be dangerous. That stories can be weapons. And that the price of taking sides can be everything. I won’t overemphasize martyrdom here. What matters is this:  he proved that comics can be as intense, serious, and morally charged as any literature. The glamour of ink here is paid for in blood.

 

Mazzucchelli:  Walking Away from “Making It”

 

David Mazzucchelli’s story is about a different kind of cost:  leaving success. He walked away from mainstream fame to follow his muse. He lost visibility. But, he gained relevance and freedom. And a good living on his own terms.

This chapter is a direct challenge to the fantasy of “making it” in comics. The mainstream audience often thinks success means working on famous superheroes and only drawing. No editors. No writers. No compromises. Just glory. Mazzucchelli destroys that myth.

Here, success is personal. Not financial. Not institutional. But internal. The grind doesn’t disappear when you go indie. It becomes more honest. Following your muse is still work. And if you expect exceptional results, your labor--not just your ideas--must be exceptional.

 

Jeff Smith and the Business of Dreaming

 

The Jeff Smith chapter is one of the most practical in the book. Bone didn’t succeed because of magic. It succeeded because of planning. Because Vijaya, Smith’s wife, demanded a business plan. Because Smith treated his dream like a company.

This is entrepreneurship in its purest form. Smith learned that the real customers were retailers. He looked beyond the direct market. He went to Disney magazines. To libraries. To Scholastic. He adapted. He changed his model. Even Kickstarter becomes part of the story.

The lesson here is brutal and beautiful:  vision without structure collapses. Community, partnership, and strategy are not romantic, but they are what allow art to survive.

 

Schulz, Davis, Watterson:  Creativity vs. Capitalism

 

The final major chapter is a masterclass in how creators negotiate with capitalism. Schulz balances licensing with control. Davis leans into merchandising. Watterson refuses almost everything.

All three want control of their IP. But, they pay different prices. Schulz manages to balance. Davis maximizes. Watterson stays “pure.” Fans interact with comics through merch. That’s a fact. But, how much of your soul you sell along with the lunchbox is the real question.

This chapter shows that there is no perfect solution. Only personal ones.

 

Why We Write

 

The afterword ties it all together. The author writes not because it’s easy, but because life hurts. And stories help. Writing is not just a career. It’s a remedy. For others. And for ourselves.

“Writing is one of the best things we can give someone, especially ourselves.”

After reading this book, that line hits differently. Because now we know what writing costs.

Comics:  The Call and the Cost is not a book about comics as fantasy. It’s a book about comics as work. As risk. As negotiation. As sacrifice. It’s a book every creator--and every reader who thinks comics are “just fun”--should read.

Because behind every beautiful panel, there is a body, a schedule, a contract, a struggle, and a choice.

And that is the real story of comics.

 

 Garcia runs The Comicpreneur, a newsletter and ongoing project focused on entrepreneurship for independent comic creators, helping them think about career sustainability, business mindset, and the economic realities of making comics. 

 

Graphic Novel Review: I Won’t Pretend These Missiles Are Stars. Life in Iran During the 12-Day War. An Anthology from The Cartoonist Collective in Tehran

 reviewed by John A. Lent, Founding Publisher/Editor-in Chief, International Journal of Comic Art

The Cartoonist Collective. I Won’t Pretend These Missiles Are Stars. Life in Iran During the 12-Day War. An Anthology from The Cartoonist Collective in Tehran. Brooklyn, NY:  Street Noise Books, 2026. 212 pp. US $22.99 (Paperback). ISBN:  978-1951-491-55-0. https://www.streetnoisebooks.com/

 

 

In these dark days, nothing is more important than spreading the voices of Iranians out there. In the end, we have only one request, remember us, remember Iran, and speak loudly about it.--The Cartoonist Collective

 

It is February 19, and I write this, remembering Iran and my friends there, as war-monger and war-profiteer Trump has just deployed an overkill and provocative mission of multiple destroyers, the U.S.’s largest supercarrier, attack aircraft, drones, electronic warfare jets, and more to Iran in preparation for an invasion.

I Won’t Pretend These Missiles Are Stars is an apt graphic novel to be reading at this time, with its vivid accounts of the fear, hopelessness, indecision, and sense of foreboding experienced by civilians when their abodes are under attack--in this case, those of Iranians during the 12 days in June 2025 when they suffered constant bombing by Israeli aircraft.

Packaged in 15 segments, each told and illustrated by a member of Tehran’s The Cartoonist Collective, their titles foretold their contents, examples being, “I’ll Tell You a Story If We Don’t Die,” “Under the Same Roof,” “Until after the War,” “Stay Alive,” “Tehran Apocalypse,” and “The Fireworks.”

The stories recount the wide array of feelings and preparatory plans and actions of those under threat of death. A sampling includes what, in normal times, would be considered preposterous or laughable:  “When bombs hit, my first instinct is not to scream but to prep my own corpse like a mortician on overtime.” “I still want to die but I have a deadline to meet.” “You can’t fully let your anger out, because you’re still raw from the last wound, and then it flares up again.” “It hurts my heart to see how people with dreams and hopes…become emotionless statistics when it serves the interests of the government.” “My friend stays up at night, hoping for peace and a clear sky, and I stay awake at night to think about my funeral.” “I hated the word war, that small three-lettered word, that took so much from us, the wounded people of Iran.” Another story shows a young female cartoonist decked out with loads of jewelry given to her by her mother and friends which she described as “a little something to hold on to as I passed away, or at least to make looting my corpse more of a luxury experience.”

These stories are powerful accounts of non-military people encountering wartime conditions, which we seldom hear. The book is an assemblage of first-hand stories told in everyday conversation, drawn in a variety of styles and color schemes, and designed in an easy-to-follow format.

I Won’t Pretend These Missiles Are Stars is highly-recommended for comics art practitioners, academicians, and aficionados, because of its superb storytelling and art, for anyone who still believes war is glamorous, and for the many of us who have not had to suffer war.

Book Review - The Early Reception of Manga in the West

 reviewed by C.T. Lim

Martin de la Iglesia. The Early Reception of Manga in the West. Ch. A. Bachmann Verlag, 2023. ISBN 978-3-96234-077-3. <http://www.christian-bachmann.de/b_bn13.html>

Comic studies’ publications in general are in bloom. One can imagine manga and anime scholarship studies in English (as distinct from scholarship written in Japanese) would constitute a big part of that given the popularity of manga and anime. Recent titles by Eike Exner and The Cambridge Companion to Manga and Anime edited by Jaqueline Berndt are notable. The Early Reception of Manga in the West is a fine addition to the list.

de la Iglesia posits the origins of the popularity of manga in the West dating to when the first translated manga was published by independent publishers in America in the 1980s. He argues against the general perception that the manga boom started in the late 1990s, when dubbed anime adaptations of manga such as Dragon Ball or Sailor Moon were shown on television. 

de la Iglesia focused on four titles as the starting point of manga’s acceptance in the West: Lone Wolf and Cub, Japan Inc, Akira, Crying Freeman. These were titles translated and published in America and Germany in the 1980s and 1990s, which Iglesia dubbed as the first manga wave of 1987 to 1995 (in the book’s back matter). 

He argues though that the impact of the early translated manga in the 1980s and 1990s was limited. Although one can say that the publication of the 1970’s Lone Wolf and Cub by First Comics was a big deal in the American direct sales market, as it featured covers and introductions by famed cartoonists including Frank Miller, a hot property in the 1980s. Miller was visibly influenced by Japanese gegika manga such as Lone Wolf and Cub in his 1980s comics Daredevil, the four-issue Wolverine mini-series and Ronin. 

Lone Wolf and Cub was soon followed by The Legend of Kamui, Mai the Psychic Girl and Area 88. American readers would also have been exposed to translated manga in Frederik Schodt’s landmark book, Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics (1983) and I Saw It!, a comic book version of Barefoot Gen published by Leonard Rifas in 1982. And this is where, when reading this book, I am reminded how our mind plays tricks on us. We remember things differently. Some things we remember as bigger than they actually were. In my mind, the publication of the English version of Lone Wolf and Cub was a major comic book event. In reality, Iglesia proves empirically that Lone Wolf and Cub was not that significant in the whole scheme of things for manga publication in the West. In short, looking at the reception and sales of Lone Wolf and Cub, and Japan Inc in America and Germany, they are not significant to manga’s breakthrough in the West. But the Marvel Comics’ imprint Epic’s edition of Akira was the game changer, despite its more expensive prestige format. (p. 144) The Western comic book format was a hinderance to the success of Lone Wolf and Cub and the graphic novel format did not make Japan Inc a best seller, but Akira broke through the market.

In terms of argument, approach and structure, the author borrows heavily from reception history, which is the fundamental art historical method used in this study. Its overall aim is to find out what people in certain regions of the world thought about manga at a certain time. (p. 10) Iglesia chose to focus on people rather than manga readers to get a broader sense of the reading audience. To quote: 

 

Note that I deliberately use the generic term people instead of more specific ones such as manga fans or even manga readers. This is because the latter terms imply a particular subset of recipients who repeatedly or even regularly read manga and who already have a pre-formed opinion about manga that sets a positive expectation for their next act of reception; in other words, the act of manga reception has become a habit for them. In this study, the only prerequisite to qualify as a relevant recipient is that he or she has read at least one manga, or even only part of a manga. 

But there is a problem with this approach. To quote:

 

However, only a small fraction of these recipients have recorded their thoughts about their reception experience, and even less have done so in a form accessible to researchers today. The best bet for the researcher is to seek out records that have been both written down and published. The most common form of such records is a text in a magazine – most likely a specialised comic magazine (that is, a periodical that reports about comics, not an anthology of comics)… As a result, the group of recipients that I concentrate on is narrowed down to what I am going to refer to as journalists, be they professionals or amateurs, with vocational training in journalism or not. (p 10-11)

Iglesia is aware of the limitations of taking journalists’ writings on manga at face value. 

 

It is safe to say that the intent of a journalist writing about a comic is not, for instance, to give an accurate and objective picture of the manga reception of his or her time, and the intended recipient of his or her message is not a researcher working 30 years in the future. It is crucial to be aware of the original configuration of these acts of communication – of the intended recipient and the original intent of the journalist. We need to find out what the journalist wanted to achieve, as this intent shapes the content of his or her message, in order to extract the information we are interested in.

 

Some journalists were even comic publishers themselves at the same time. A different but no less problematic incentive for journalists to review comics was the opportunity to obtain review copies – particularly as there was usually no (or only little) monetary compensation – which tempts journalists to write unduly positive reviews in the hope of receiving more review copies from the same publisher in the future. 

Furthermore, 

 

The importance of the role of journalists cannot be overstated, as they were a major part of, in the words of Bourdieu, the whole set of agents whose combined efforts produce consumers capable of knowing and recognizing the work of art as such. This means that the production of »the meaning and value of the work, that is, the attitude of readers towards individual manga titles, is to a certain extent shaped by critics (as well as publishers, who Bourdieu mentions explicitly). So in addition to trying to find out what a critic him- or herself thought about a particular manga, we should also aim to estimate the influence of a journalistic text on the attitude of the reader of that text towards the manga in question. (p. 11)

 

Although in a footnote to this paragraph, Iglesia said that comic magazines are not widely read so their influence on readers would be limited. Again, this is a reminder not to take things at face value, but with a critical eye. The important point is this: the whole idea of perceiving manga as a genre has been brought about by these journalists. (p. 12)

So to unpack the above, this book is really about the reception of manga by journalists and, in turn how the views of these journalists influence others' views and reception. But I would say this is problematic because how do you prove this? It is an issue of causation that cannot be solved easily. You can show a co-relation, but you cannot prove causation. On page 214, it was suggested that “by mapping one reception environment (Japan) onto the other (USA), one could speculate about the chances that such a hypothetical early manga translation would have had.” I doubt that is so. The book also does not examine the influence of manga on the American comics creators such as Miller because Iglesia argues “this kind of reception is hardly relevant to the larger question about the propagation of manga among the general public”, (p. 13), I disagree as Frank Miller was so popular at one point that his fans would read manga because of him. I know I did. 

Chapter-wise, Iglesia examines his case studies by looking at their publication and reception in America, then in Germany. Deep analysis and comparison is being done here by looking at issue six (1987) of Lone Wolf and Cub as it was also the only one to be included in the first German edition of the series. For the Akira chapters, he looks at issues like flipping the art, coloring, script, charts to show the rank sales of Akira in Advance Comics Top 100, the number of cyberpunk scenes in the Akira issues and which year they appeared in. Akira is central to Iglesia’s argument; that is, if you accept his argument. 

There are some things I disagree with. While he has proved with sales figures and reviews that Lone Wolf and Cub was a “modest cult hit” (p. 63), I disagree with the assessment that its “relative lack of success was most likely due to (the) rather mediocre quality of the original material (compared to Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s Akira, for example)” (p. 63). This same subjective assessment was also leveled on Crying Freeman, which was described as a “mediocre series” in the back matter. While Akira is great and I would say superior to many other manga series, too much acclaim is given to it. One need not dismiss Lone Wolf and Cub and Crying Freeman to argue Akira was good or important. His position does not accord with the fact that Freeman’s author Ryôichi Ikegami was given a highly acclaimed lifetime achievement award and a retrospective at the Angouleme Comics Festival a few years ago. 

I am also not convinced by the utility of Chapter 8, Online Survey. It had 22 responses and it was a checklist to find out which manga were read when, in order to pinpoint the breakthrough of manga in the West. (p. 201) There were no open-ended questions. While Igelsia explained why he chose to conduct a survey instead of conducting in-depth interviews to get more responses, I believe interviews with 20 respondents would be richer and the resulting data more meaningful.

Compared to the other case studies, the book devotes three chapters to Akira, both the manga, the anime and its connection to cyberpunk. He rightly pointed out the importance of cyberpunk in making the film popular, although the English edition of the manga was popular for other non-cyberpunk reasons. (p. 162) On this aspect of transmedia and intertextual context (p. 160), another area Iglesia could have explored is to compare the success of Akira as a film shown in the cinemas and Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon as anime shown on television, and how both events differ as turning points in making manga popular in the West. The difference in medium should tell another story. While outside the remit of this book, the impact of Ghost in the Shell film (1995) and the Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series would be interesting case studies. Other points he discussed are the importance of the adoption of the tankobon (roughly paperback) size in the eventual success of manga in the West (p. 199), and the issue of flipping artwork for publishing Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball. (p. 218)

All in all, I enjoyed reading this book, as it brought me back to the 1980s of reading manga in English. Being in Singapore, I have been reading manga in Chinese. Recently I wrote a chapter on the reception of manga and anime in Singapore. This book exposed me to other reception approaches and theories. 

Book Review - The Color of Paper: Representing Race in the Comics Medium by Chris Gavaler

 reviewed by Hélène Tison

Chris Gavaler. The Color of Paper: Representing Race in the Comics Medium. Ohio State University Press, 2026. https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814216040.html

Chris Gavaler, a renowned comics scholar who has previously authored and co-authored several authoritative volumes of comics scholarship (such as The Comics Form: The Art of Sequenced Images in 2022; Creating Comics: A Writer’s and Illustrator’s Guide and Anthology in 2021; Superhero Comics in 2017) takes on the complex and fraught question of visual representations of race in graphic narratives: not only what formal elements are used to represent race, but how, combined with culturally constructed racial categories, they are interpreted by viewers.

The Color of Paper is technically detailed and precisely referenced; Gavaler offers a clear methodology, provides a very pedagogical presentation of elaborate concepts in order to determine “how a material image composed of ink on paper conveys the culturally constructed concept of a racial category,” (1) and how the white page relates to racial Whiteness. He explains in the Introduction: “I attend to the physical (or discursive) qualities of an image that produce representational (or diegetic) qualities as perceived by individual viewers, because how those formal processes contribute to larger racial constructions is not fully understood.” (5)

Gavaler combines his own very thorough formal analyses of a large number of comics, in color, grayscale or black and white, with data gathered through surveys in which viewers were asked to identify the race and ethnicity of comics characters. Gavaler acknowledges that the survey methodology is imperfect and considers the findings tentative; yet despite their shortcomings, they not only enable him (and his readers) to avoid generalizing from his (our) own perception, but they also do provide valuable input – and some unexpected results, at least for this reader: as an example, only 67% of initial respondents identified a childhood self-portrait of Ebony Flowers in Hot Comb as Black.

The volume, alternating theoretical demonstrations and the application of theory to concrete examples, is clearly structured in four parts. “Backgrounds” analyzes page whiteness, exploring the division between surface and mark, the structuring effects of the white page’s “negative spaces,” such as gutters, and the unmarked areas whose default color represents skin color. Part 2, “Languages,” looks at what it means to “read” an image – generally through a combination of symbolic reading and non-symbolic observation – and, keeping in mind that race is not reducible to appearance, what it means to read race in an image.

Based on this distinction and noting that there is currently no consensus concerning color analysis, the first chapter in Part 3 argues that non-realistic traditional coloring (CMYK) tends to encourage more symbolic reading than digital coloring, which appears more realistic. Gavaler then looks at black and white reprints of color comics, and at colored versions of initially black and white or grayscale comics, and at their reading by paired survey groups, to further determine the extent to which color contributes to denoting race.

Part 4, “Bodies,” opens up the discussion to include gender, and turns to the relation between visual representations of (fictional or non-fictional) characters in figurative art (including comics) and the world beyond, the world of the viewer; it proposes “a theory of visual representation based on viewer perceptions of authorial intent, while also revealing an inherent gap between perceptions of race and gender and the actual racial and gender identities of represented individuals.” (211) Finally, Gavaler discusses the ways in which the physical space of reading, the spatial, overlayed relations of viewer/ comics, and the positionalities of viewers and creators, complicate the White gaze and the assumptions of Whiteness that have been dominant throughout the historical span of the medium. 

Gavaler, who begins with a lucid discussion of what he describes as “the ambiguities of race as understood in the US,” or the “illogic of US racial thinking,” (8) does a sound, thorough and essential job, enabling his readers to make sense of our own readings of characters, putting clear and convincing words on perceptions that can otherwise remain imprecise. Inspired by such essential authors as Rebecca Wanzo and Qiana Whitted, and grounded in his impressive command of comics theory, he opts for a material, micro-level focus that is not only fruitful theoretically, but fascinating when, throughout the volume, he applies it to detailed analyses of a large number of extremely varied artists, from Herriman, Schulz, Sherald and Magritte to Eisner, Kirby, Miller, Heck, Grell, Hernandez, Abel, Bechdel, Passmore, Tomine, and Flowers, among many others.

This is an essential read for anyone interested in understanding the ways in which race is represented and perceived in comics, as well as for anyone keen on comics theory.

Book Review: Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics by Eike Exner (UPDATED)

Reviewed by John A. Lent, International Journal of Comic Art (UPDATED 12/28 with a response from Exner)

Eike Exner. Manga:  A New History of Japanese Comics. New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2025. 256 pp. US $37.50. ISBN:  978-0-3002-8094-4. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300280944/manga/

  In just his first two books so far [Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History and this one], the young--and independent--researcher, Eike Exner, has made monumental contributions to manga studies, revising historical points; taking exception to, and challenging, long-held “facts” and notions with newly-discovered evidence that he has uncovered; filling in gaps in manga’s timeline, and carefully and methodically analyzing nearly every aspect of manga.

A couple of his revisions pertained to the origin of the term “manga” and the connection between early audio-visual technology and comics. Exner reasoned, the claim that Hokusai Katsushika’s Hokusai Manga was connected to Japanese comics was unfounded; though some of the 19^th-Century woodblock printer’s manga were meant to be funny, none was of a narrative stripe and many were simply images of buildings and plants. To make his point, Exner made the analogy that to connect the sketches to comics is,

 

akin to suggesting that the history of Super Mario Bros. should be traced back to shōgi (Japanese chess) because they are both games. Games did not change from one thing into another; people decided to apply the word game to a new category of objects. Likewise, manga did not change or evolve from Hokusai’s manga into comics; people began using the word for a new category of objects, based on an assumed shared characteristic rather than a direct connection between the two (11).

 

To Exner’s thinking, the connection between early audio-visual technology and comics is more than “sheer coincidence” as commonly assumed. Rather, it is because of a “casual connection” that comics creation followed the “spread of pantomime cartoons, motion lines, pain stars, and depictions of sound, and coincided with the spread of film and sound recording” (22).

Among many misconceptions that Exner rectifies are the almost-sacrosanct image of the so-called “god of comics,” Tezuka Osamu, pointing out his tendency to exaggerate and, occasionally, lift whole scenes from others’ works, and that akahon (cheap comics that plagiarize popular characters with new stories) were published solely by small, short-lived firms, when actually, a huge percentage of them were the product of a large enterprise into other forms of entertainment.

Exner makes a herculean attempt to fill out the entire timeline of manga history, providing a six-page chronology from 1890 to 2017 as an appendix, and supplementing periods shortchanged in previous research, such as the 1920s, which, he showed, yielded the establishment of today’s top three comics publishers and the first Japanese magazine that topped a million circulation, namely, King.

At times, Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics goes into diversion mode, dishing out what can be classified as mini-instructional “lectures,” for example, on how styles change; the technical use of color, hatching, and stripping; the importance of viewing topics in a contextual manner, etc. When doubt clouds conclusions, Exner utilizes common sense logic--e.g., the “simplest explanation is most likely the correct one” (22) or the most plausible reason among a batch of notions should be chosen.

As is his nature, Exner spent many hours in national and university libraries across the United States and in Tokyo, scouring the original newspapers and magazines and referring to any relevant correspondence available. He also gathered data from collectors of manga and other researchers’ interviews. The book is thoroughly documented, with notes that carefully explain, add to, take exception to, and even supplement, what Exner wrote in his first book. It appears that interviews were not conducted.

One of the few shortcomings of the book is the sparse treatment of manga during the war years, 1940-1945, although Exner devotes some space to the 1930s’ wartime comics. But, for those five years of the early 1940s, it would be useful to know how many manga were published, by government and private publishers, under what restrictions, by whom, with what type of content, and with what effect? What were the contents of any decrees issued referring to censorship generally, and how did they apply to manga? Where there any instances of publishers or artists who dared to ignore censorship rules; any examples of underground publishing or artistry activity?

The other criticism of Manga… is directed at the publisher, Yale University Press. It would seem that a press of Ivy League prestige and out of respect for the work of a dedicated scholar, would have treated the work more professionally A large section of the book is barely readable, using a smaller and faint typeface--pages 214-248, that include a chronology, notes, bibliography, and index. A number of the images stood to be upgraded by enlargement and better placement while being photographed.

Readers of Manga:  A New History of Japanese Comics, or any work by Exner for that matter, can expect the excellence associated with his name--research that is very comprehensive and wide-ranging, an abundance of information that is rigorously scrutinized and carefully analyzed, and writing that is clear and concise--even casual and seemingly effortless at times--, meant to instruct, educate, and entertain. A full package, to my thinking.

[Full Disclosure:  The reviewer was one of five individuals who wrote testimonials for this book.]

A version of this review will appear in IJOCA 27-1. 

UPDATE: Notes from Eike Exner:

I'm very grateful for the kind review (and John's previous support for my work). 

I'll add two small points of clarification: the reason for the little space devoted to manga between 1942 and 1945 is that there were only a handful of serialized strips during this time and I already had to ask for an extension to the original word limit. Discussing that period in greater detail would have given it undue prominence compared to its historical importance. My next book will examine the period in great detail, however. 

Yale University Press is not primarily to blame for the images not being perfectly aligned. Many materials were only available from institutions that will only make physical copies for patrons. I could have tried purchasing more historical materials myself but that would not have been possible for all. Most images should ideally be larger, but the larger the images, the weaker the claim to fair use, for which there are no clear standards. 

One reason why I went with YUP is that they were willing to claim fair use, which not all presses are. I looked into asking for permission for all images but learned that this is not practically feasible; in many cases it's not even simple to find out who currently holds the rights to works by deceased creators, and even if you do figure this out it's often not clear how to reach the rightsholders. It was also important to me to include those images that I thought were most useful to understand the history, not whatever images I could get permission for, which would skew the visual representation towards certain creators.