Book Review — Speaking in Pictures: A Vision of Language by Neil Cohn

 Reviewed by Fer García

 Neil Cohn. Speaking in Pictures: A Vision of Language. Bloomsbury Academic, 2026. 328 pp. $36.95, ISBN: 9781350402164. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/speaking-in-pictures-9781350402164/

Many of us who spend our lives reading, making, or analyzing sequential art share an unwavering, foundational conviction: stripped of all commercial genre tropes and aesthetic noise, comics are essentially communication. We feel it when a panel grid paces our breathing, or when a simple gestural mark transfers a complex emotional sentence directly from one mind to another. Yet for decades, this conviction remained an abstract intuition. I, for one, lacked the formal vocabulary and empirical arguments to prove that visual narrative is far more than an artistic embellishment of text (until reading this book). Neil Cohn takes that raw, foundational idea, that drawing is a fundamental human conduit for thought, and systematically transforms it into a rigorous cognitive science. This shift matters because it strips away the romantic mystique of drawing as an elusive, magical gift, repositioning it as a structured communication mechanism as vital and natural to our species as speech or sign.

However, attempting to analyze the mechanics of human communication within a formal academic text creates an immediate structural tension. Dense scholarly monographs often flatten the very vitality of the visual dialogue they seek to understand, reducing fluid human exchange to static, sterile data. Cohn attempts to resolve this contradiction by writing and drawing the entire 328-page volume as a graphic novel. At first glance, this approach seems like a clever pedagogical gimmick, a lighthearted attempt to make cognitive science palatable to art students. But as the pages turn, the medium reveals itself as the actual methodology. Cohn manipulates layout, pacing, and visual syntax in real time, forcing the reader's brain to undergo the exact communicative processing leaps he is describing. The cartoon guide, a drawn avatar of Cohn himself, functions not merely as a friendly narrator, but as a relational bridge, transforming dense syntactic trees and EEG brain-wave diagrams into an active, two-way dialogue between author and reader.

This suggests that comics studies can no longer be content with literary or art-historical frameworks alone. For over thirty years, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics stood as the undisputed foundational text of visual storytelling theory, offering an artist's brilliant, philosophy-driven taxonomy of panel transitions and closure. Cohn does not discard McCloud’s legacy so much as he exposes its structural limits. Where McCloud described what cartoonists do, Cohn investigates how human minds inherently communicate.

To test this premise, consider Cohn’s deliberate choice of visual style. His drawing throughout the book is functional, minimalist, almost generic. One might initially push against this, wishing for the expressive line-work of a Chris Ware or the lush shading of an Alex Ross. Yet this aesthetic restraint serves a precise analytical purpose. By stripping away decorative flair, Cohn demonstrates that visual communication does not require photorealism to convey precise meaning. We do not need a meticulously rendered apple to retrieve the cognitive concept of "apple." The minimal line is sufficient to activate the mental lexicon, proving that our brains process drawn signs through abstract, shared rules of communication rather than raw mimicry of nature.

This realization reframes the central cultural tragedy Cohn identifies: why do we teach every child the tools of verbal communication, yet assume that visual communication is an innate, unteachable talent reserved for a chosen few? We do not abandon written literacy simply because a child fails to write like Shakespeare, yet we routinely abandon visual literacy the moment a child’s drawings fail to look like fine art. In doing so, we actively stunt one of humanity's most primal communicative channels.

This suggests that Speaking in Pictures is far more than a text on comic craft; it is a profound manifesto on institutional communication. However, potential readers must approach this book with recalibrated expectations. It is not an introductory manual for the casual fan curious about how superhero panels are drawn, nor is it a light weekend skim. The density of its linguistic terminology: construction grammar, semiotics, cross-cultural visual dialects etc. demands rigorous intellectual work. It is an indispensable, paradigm-shifting text for scholars moving beyond literary tropes, for cartoonists seeking to master the cognitive mechanics of human engagement, and for anyone who has ever suspected that drawing is simply human thought made visible. Cohn has delivered a rare theoretical milestone that validates what comic creators have always known in their bones: to draw is not merely to design, but to speak.

Book review - Conversations with Lynn Johnston

 review by Neale Barnholden

McLaughlin, Jeff (ed.). Conversations with Lynn Johnston. University Press of Mississippi, 2026. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-Lynn-Johnston

 Readers of Lynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse have always located an interest in "the truth behind the work" in Johnston's personal life, as Jeff McLaughlin's volume of sixteen interviews with the cartoonist makes clear. With eight interviews conducted during the run of the strip and eight afterwards, the most consistent throughline is Johnston's account of how readers from her children's friends to strangers around the world interpreted the strip as a version of her own life. In a way that's what the strip was designed to do: at one point John
ston figures her own work as suiting the syndicate's need for a comic strip by a woman that (unlike Cathy Guisewite's Cathy) was about family life. Guisewite, an early mentor, told Johnston to make sure that, unlike Cathy, she didn't end up sharing a name with her character. Nonetheless the strip, arising from Johnston's cartooning about her own life for her OB-GYN and his other patients, retained an authenticity that has led many to read it as a kind of roman a cléf about a specific family in addition to a well-observed strip about families in general. Regarding the fictional Pattersons as the real Johnstons is by far the most common reading of the strip, for good or ill. In a surprisingly revealing interview with Tom Heintjes of Hogan's Alley, Johnston, her parents now deceased, is candid about her mother's history of physical abuse of Johnston and her siblings. This makes it even more interesting that McLaughlin's collected interviews twice mention For Better or For Worse portraying father John spanking his son Michael, based apparently on a real incident. In a 1980 interview John's real analogue expresses his discomfort with it (6), and a 1983 strip showing the same scenario was later redrawn as part of Johnston's revisiting (xvii). It shows the complexity of Johnston's work that this is both profoundly important and true to life, and also that it later came to seem like it didn't belong.

Over the years the main theme of the interviews—that the strip is Johnston's real life—takes on many different aspects. Youngest Patterson child April, the Millennial of the family and the only one born during the strip's run, has no real life analogue. This let Johnston use ideas that would have embarrassed her actual children (119). On the other hand, when her real husband Rod, a dentist and implicit model for fictional father John Patterson, had a marriage-ending affair near the end of the strip's run, Johnston wavered in another way between the character and his model, musing in 2014 that she would "bump off the husband" if she followed the strip into the future, "and I know exactly how to do it" (95). In the event, the last regular FBoFW strip has John and Elly reaffirm their marriage vows, suggesting Johnston's balancing act between fantasy and reality, or the more elusive comedy and drama.

Another source for For Better and For Worse is Johnston's observations of her friends and family. A remarkable phenomenon described at many points is Johnston's sense that she knows her characters as one would know a friend. The epitomal example is her decision to have Michael Patterson's friend Lawrence come out as gay. Angry over homophobic reaction to the murder of her own gay childhood friend, comedian Michael Vadeboncoeur, Johnston decided to write a gay child into her strip in 1993. This plot is described many times in this volume, sometimes delving into Johnston's decision to respond to her calmer hate mail, sometimes focusing on the business of newspapers dropping the strip, sometimes on readers seeing rare representation of their own or their child's experience. In the context of the strip, it always shows Johnston's admirable if depressingly timeless commitment to showing the reality of life. Significantly, the storyline isn't ultimately wish fulfillment or grim drama.

In one revealing incident bringing together authenticity, comic strips, and Johnston's own life, Johnston recalls reading comic strips as a child on her grandfather's lap, and reacting against his criticism of Charles Schulz' writing of child characters dialogue. To his remark that "no child has these thoughts", Johnston recalls thinking "We may not have the same words, but we have the same thoughts and the same feelings." Schulz later became a friend of Johnston's, but his approach to realism stayed psychological, and early  in her own strip Johnston made the key decision to age the characters in real time, parting ways from the majority of family strips. This moment is also discussed frequently, but for what must be one of the most consequential artistic choices of Johnston's life, it goes strangely unexamined. The reader is left with the impression that Johnston did it primarily to keep a flow of inspiration from her own growing children (fixed at several years older than the fictional ones). Another famous incident (as a child, I owned the book memorial) shows a stark divergence with Schulz' style, as family dog Farley dies heroically saving April from drowning. Schulz was deeply upset at the idea, first threatening to send Snoopy to the hospital on the same week so that nobody would pay attention to Johnston's work, then raving to Johnston about how "stupid" the little girl was to play on the creek. We might think of Schulz as the hallmark of a new age of comics' psychological realism—and the recent 50th anniversary of Peanuts certainly suggests this in its interest in Schulz' own private life—but Johnston's mix of life's good and bad is very different. Johnston's people grow up, and with that, can die.

Different interviewers seem to approach Johnston in her different facets, and reveal different responses. It's to McLaughlin's credit that he found interviews taking Johnston in somewhat different ways. She positions her strip as a feminist deconstruction of family strips written by working husbands (217)—think of the number of classic strip gags about men coming home from work, vs the number about cleaning up the house. In another sense her significance is the ongoing drama of the characters and the realism that flows from that. Still again, to some her Canadianness is important, and Johnston describes an early editor warning her to never use Canadianisms (254), thankfully overruled by other (American) editors.

This reminded me of the curious conversation at the beginning of American author Rainbow Rowell's 2011 novel Attachments, where two newspaper employees debate whether For Better or For Worse takes place in Canada. They locate part of the pleasure of the strip in the apparent riddle of whether today's installment will finally feature a bag of milk or a chesterfield. In reality the question seems quite obvious as Johnston's inspiration is exclusively from her time in North Vancouver, Lynn Lake, Hamilton, and other Canadian locations. Only the volume's Canadian editor Jeff McLaughlin, in an excellent capstone to the volume, asks about the strips' portrayal of Indigenous characters in a prolonged storyline set in a northern Manitoba community, receiving an answer that interestingly inverts the logic of Lawrence's homosexuality, in that Johnston did it to share a culture she expected her readers to know nothing about. Johnston's belief that settler Canadians are appalling unaware of indigenous culture and communities is rooted in her own experience and seemingly proven by this being the sole mention of the storyline.

McLaughlin's foreword notes that few interviews from during the strip's run were substantial, and also remarks that they were very repetitively focused on the same storylines (Lawrence coming out and Farley dying evidently); as a result the bulk of the book is retrospective. Johnston, however, is a complicated figure for temporality, having ended her strip with a years-long revision of her earlier work, to an extent that reminded me of Hergé's wholesale redraws of his work (with at least one motive for Johnston being the same as Hergé, the evolution of her drawing style). As with the best of the Conversations volumes, the interest for scholars is both the authorial voice and the intriguing threads to pull on. For my part, having recently read many Peanuts retrospectives, I was struck by the fact that Johnston, like Schulz, suffered from a neurological condition giving her a hand tremor—this despite the fact that unlike Schulz her art grew noticeable finer and more detailed over the years. Where Schulz' tremor has received some scholarly attention, I'm unaware of any medical interest in Johnston's work. And on the same lines, Johnston's career turn from medical illustration to cartooning is an interesting juxtaposition—and reminded me that Fred Kelly, a Canadian comics great of a different generation, made the exact opposite switch. While this volume would be fascinating and useful to fans of the strip, it is also an invaluable resource for scholars looking at what is indisputably one of the most important Canadian comics ever.

As a last note, it's made clear in this volume that Johnston was one of the last cartoonists to work with a two-decade long syndication contract, which enabled her work to sprawl for years and reach a relatively huge audience, even as it forced her to a rigid schedule of production and made her answerable to editors. A standout roundtable with Raina Telgemeier and Kate Beaton suggests a link between Johnston's work and the later prominence of memoirs in the graphic novel form. For Better or For Worse is perhaps the only daily newspaper strip to be so clearly recognizable as an ancestor of the form. I wouldn't suggest McLaughlin's selected interviews "reveal" For Better or For Worse as the memoir so many readers took it as, but I think some incidents make it clear that it was dedicated to a realism that approached memoir. For her part, as this book amply shows, Johnston has spent a career both acknowledging the authenticity of her strip, as well as disclaiming any one-to-one relationship between the Pattersons and her own family—and in a later interview, is magnanimous and generous to her the memory of her abusive mother. This book is a testament to the complexity of Johnston's work, a complexity connected directly to her conviction that gay children and overworked mothers (and dead dogs, and goofy sound effects) simply exist and are a part of life, which sadly continues to be a lesson worth teaching. "It's just stuff," Johnston remarks, introducing what seems like an alternate title to her strip: "Stuff that happens to everybody" (68).

 

Book Review — Hip-Hop and Comics

 Reviewed by Fer García, El Comicólogo

Howard, Sheena C., Justin D. Burton, and Brea M. Heidelberg, eds. Hip-Hop and Comics. University Press of Mississippi, 2026. 280 pp. $34.95. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/H/Hip-Hop-and-Comics

 Even for those of us who consider ourselves deeply versed in sequential art history and well-acquainted with hip-hop culture, reading Hip Hop and Comics feels like stepping into a room where two familiar worlds reveal an unsuspected, shared architecture. We often think of these mediums as merely friendly neighbors, a Marvel variant cover here, an album art homage there. Yet this volume demonstrates that their relationship runs far deeper, bound together by the fundamental art of constructing a public persona. In both realms, the creation of an avatar, an alter ego, or a masked identity is not just a stylistic trope, but a survival strategy and a performative stage for navigating visibility, community, and social critique.

 However, mapping the history of two distinct, massive cultural movements creates an immediate tension between grassroots authenticity and academic framing. Scholarly collections risk over-intellectualizing what was originally born out of raw, spontaneous street-level expression. Editors Sheena C. Howard, Justin D. Burton, and Brea M. Heidelberg navigate this contradiction by anchoring the book’s early chapters in the physical realities of self-determination. The historical baseline established by Howard’s analysis of Eric Orr’s self-published Rappin’ Max Robot in 1986 and Darryl McDaniels’ DMC imprint matters because it repositions comics not as mere commercial merchandise, but as tools of raw independence.

This opens up a broader realization: at their core, both hip-hop and comics share a radically low barrier to entry. To make a statement, a cartoonist historically needed little more than a pencil, paper, and access to a photocopier -- a line of direct expression that today translates into a social media feed accessible across the globe. By connecting New York’s early underground print culture to public graffiti murals and grassroots comic making in contemporary India, the anthology proves that sequential art and hip-hop are twin social reactions to immediate economic and political environments. The jump from 1980s South Bronx to modern South Asia might initially feel geographically vast, but it reinforces the thesis that these mediums are global dialects of localized resistance.

 This suggests that corporate adaptations of Black culture must be examined with a far sharper critical lens. The middle section of the anthology turns toward Marvel Comics, examining the push-and-pull between pulp authenticity and corporate appropriation. While chapters analyzing Luke Cage and Hollywood cinematic adaptations offer useful critiques of how corporate media sanitizes the political edge of hip-hop and Black masculinity, the theoretical momentum truly hits its stride when contributor Stephen J. Tyson Jr. unpacks formal storytelling techniques. Seeing how comic page rhythms, panel arrangements, and visual sampling directly mirror hip-hop beat-making and sampling techniques offers an illuminating framework for how two different art forms communicate through shared structural mechanics.

 Where the book becomes most urgent, however, is in its rigorous interrogation of media, performance, and masculinity. The analysis contrasting Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks with white-created mainstream satires like The Boys feels particularly vital in our contemporary moment. In an era increasingly impacted by reactionary online subcultures and the toxic posturing of the "manosphere," these chapters illustrate how distorted notions of Black masculinity are constructed, performed, and challenged. Satirical comics and hip-hop culture become essential lenses through which these destructive tropes can be dissected and dismantled.

 Similarly, Johnny Jones’s chapter on the late Daniel Dumile (MF DOOM) and his adoption of the Dr. Victor Von Doom persona offers a profound meditation on grief, trauma, and identity. It demonstrates how a real-world artist can inhabit a supervillain's metal mask to build an impenetrable armor against industry exploitation while processing personal loss. Here, the comic book icon is not a corporate brand, but a living vessel for artistic self-preservation.

 This suggests that Hip Hop and Comics is ultimately designed for a specific academic audience. Potential readers seeking a light, casual coffee-table book on comic art homage or superhero pop culture may find themselves weighed down by the volume's dense sociological framework. The text demands active engagement with critical theory, cultural studies, and gender analysis. It stands as an indispensable, challenging work for music historians, sociologists, intersectional scholars, and academic theorists who want to understand how marginalized communities construct identity, resist systemic power, and speak truth through sound and line.

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.