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.

ICAF Lent Award Applications Now Open

Dear graduate student comics scholars,

Please consider applying for the International Comic Arts Forum's John A. Lent Scholarship in Comics Studies. Applications are Due Tuesday, December 20th. More information below.

Dec 20 is the deadline for students in comics studies to apply for the John A. Lent Award.

NOW ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS! John A. Lent Scholarship in Comics Studies International Comic Arts Forum Due Tuesday, December 20 Applications are now being accepted for the John A. Lent Scholarship in Comics Studies competition from the International Comic Arts Forum. The Lent Scholarship, named for pioneering teacher and researcher Dr. John Lent, is offered to encourage student research into comic art. ICAF awards the Lent Scholarship to a current student who has authored, or is in the process of authoring, a substantial research-based writing project about comics. (Preference is given to master's theses and doctoral dissertations, but all students of comics are encouraged to apply.) The Scholarship is subject to the condition that the recipient present a half-hour talk, based on her or his research, during the ICAF conference in Vancouver, April 20-23, 2023. The award consists of up to US $750 in kind to offset the cost of travel to and/or accommodations at the conference. A commemorative letter and plaque are also awarded. No cash is awarded. Applicants must be students (or have been students since the last ICAF was held), or show acceptance into an academic program at the time of submission. The application for the 2023 Lent Scholarship is now open. The deadline to apply is December 20, 2022.    The Scholarship competition is adjudicated by a three-person committee chosen from among the members of ICAF's Executive Committee. To apply, please submit the following to icafcomic@gmail.com.  A self-contained excerpt from the project in question, not to exceed twenty (20) double-spaced pages of typescript. A brief cover letter, introducing the applicant and explaining the nature of the project. The applicant's professional resume. A brief letter of reference, on school letterhead, from a teacher or academic advisor (preferably thesis director), establishing the applicant's student status and speaking to her/his qualifications as a researcher and presenter. The recommender can email the letter directly to icafcomic@gmail.com.    PLEASE NOTE: Applications for the Lent Scholarship are handled entirely separately from ICAF's general Call for Proposals. Students who submit abstracts to the general CFP are welcome to apply separately for the Lent Award. DR. JOHN A. LENT is one of the leading proponents of the international study of comics, and of comics research within academia. Having lectured and taught on comics and mass communications all over the world, Dr. Lent is recognized as an authority and vital resource in comics studies; he has had an incalculable impact on the lives of students, fellow scholars, and comics creators worldwide. Header image by Jaime Hernandez Copyright © 2022 International Comic Arts Forum, All rights reserved. You are receiving this announcement because you registered for an ICAF event or opted in at our website. Our mailing address is: International Comic Arts Forum c/o Qiana Whitted 1620 College Street Columbia, SC 29208

Remembering Martin Barker by Ian Gordon and Jonathan Gray

 IJOCA has reached out to some of the people close to the ground-breaking scholar and asked for their remembrances of Prof. Martin Barker.

 

Martin Barker (1946-2022)

Ian Gordon

I saw that Martin had died through Paul Gravett’s social media post. Earlier Roger Sabin emailed to let me know Martin Barker had died. Roger knows how much I appreciate Martin’s work, but for some reason this message went to the spam folder, like so many important emails. I am not sure how many emails Roger sent out but if the outpouring of love on social media are any indication it might have been a lot. Martin touched many academic lives and his generosity knew few bounds.

I first met Martin at the College Art Association meeting in Washington, DC in February 1991. I was just at the start of my PhD research and attended the conference specifically to meet Martin. It was held in the cavernous Marriott hotel (then a Sheraton) in Woodley Park with the overflow of attendees in the Omni Shoreham across Calvert Street. Martin’s presentation at the conference was a breathtaking image driven piece. He used three projectors (no PowerPoint then) and counterpoised a series of images. Looking through his publications this paper gave rise to Martin’s piece on Judge Dredd. He dealt with the shift from corporation control to creator control of comic art characters. He spoke of fan communities’ roles in opening these opportunities and the corresponding direct marketing set up by entrepreneurs. He was weary of the entrepreneurs, but hopeful about the fan communities. This was 1991!

I remember being nervous and wanting to introduce myself to Martin and realizing there would be a throng of people wanting to talk to him at the end of the session. I anticipated a long wait so went to the bathroom during the last paper and there, washing my hands, I met Martin. I hesitantly introduced myself and apologized for doing so in that space. He laughed. I mentioned how wonderful and helpful I had found A Haunt of Fears when doing some work on comics as an undergraduate. I mentioned my research and he took particular interest in my tracing of when comic strips spread to newspapers across America, then a rather difficult process of research using microfilm at the Library of Congress. After about 10 minutes standing outside the bathroom with audience members starting to spot him there (look we all drank a lot of cheap coffee at these things in those days) and wanting to chat we agreed to meet the next day in the hotel foyer and have lunch. Martin went back to the session. The next day I waited and waited, but clearly there had been some miscommunication. I was quite happy though to have met him and to have had a better chat than the snatched few words that so often happen after a popular paper at a conference.

I did write to Martin and asked what had happened. I also outlined some more aspects of my work including an interest in intellectual property. Being a pack rat I have both these letters still. He apologized and said the whole session had been a blur thanks to his nervousness and when asked by Nina Kallmyer to go to Philadelphia, he had forgotten our arrangement. Reading his letter, I had not remembered that it was Martin who pointed me in the direction of long time-Duke, and now Columbia professor, Jane Gaines’s work on intellectual property and Superman, work that shaped my thinking on that issue and indeed eventually saw me write a book on Superman. That’s a thirty-year intellectual debt and I’m glad to have been reminded of the connection. I saw Martin again at the International Conference on Graphic Novels and Comics in Manchester in 2011. He was working the room approaching scholars young and old to discuss their papers and, in some cases, solicit contributions to his open access online journal Participations. I wish I had spoken to him more, but I do remember being thrilled to see him again and very chuffed to be asked for a piece.

For me, Martin’s stand-out work on comics is Comics: Ideology, Power & the Critics (1989). Writing for the volume Secret Origins of Comics Studies in 2017 (p. 125) I noted it “is a work often overlooked by comics scholars but widely cited in cultural studies work. It is a rich and complex book, although written in a conversational tone, with many useful cautions about drawing conclusions based on methodology that a priori sets up the conclusion as the only possible outcome of the research. Barker addresses ideology in comics directly and takes issue with many scholars’ readings of ideology into comics. Barker’s absence from so much comics scholarship is perhaps explained by his primary focus on British comics and his explicit exclusion of superhero and underground comics from his analysis. Barker criticizes scholars’ too-easy use of a notion of identification, the resort to media effects as a justification for moral panics on both the left and the right, develops his own approach to ideology, and brings this all together as a theory and a method in a case study application in reading How to Read Donald Duck.

One reason Barker is not so widely cited in comics scholarship is that he is not a theory builder, but rather a careful critic of theory who avoids totalizing statements and generalizations. To demonstrate the weak points of Dorfman and Mattelart’s work he offers three other interpretations of Disney that “appeal to exactly the same evidence from the stories” (1989, p. 287). As he tells it “for Reitberger and Fuchs … capitalism is mocked by being made absurd,” for another critic Dave Wagner “if we were not able to laugh at Scrooge, he could not survive to be the object of our derision” and for Michael Barrier “the humour is a parable of human absurdity”—how we are undone by our obsessions (Barker, 1989, p. 287). For Barker it is not that comics do not have an ideology, but that such is not singular, even within, say, Uncle Scrooge comics and that getting at this requires more than a reading of a comic or set of comics. What he calls the production history of comics is also important. For Barker the Scrooge comics oscillate between “two poles of American middle-class ideology: a self-congratulatory but humourous desire for wealth; and an obsessive fear of power-politics” (Barker, 1989, p. 299). Barker’s views here are predicated on his belief that comics establish a contract with their readers in which various negotiations of topics and content occur, negotiations somewhat observable through circulation figures and changes in plot devices, tropes, and the like in comics. In Disney’s case, the Scrooge comics are absent the awful lack of play induced by Disney’s creation of theme parks where all the work of play has been done already, and they also lack the horrible prettiness of Disney’s nature films where “animals end up performing to a Disney script with a voice-over narration making then cutely, dehumanised humans” (Barker, 1989, p. 290). Barker saw his work as “hints and gestures” and that “new kinds of research” that it was necessary to do more."

Hints and gestures. New kinds of research. And necessary to do more. These are Martin’s legacy. The reminder to be humble in “hints and gestures” should not override the extraordinary rich work of Martin Barker. 

 

Big Name B: With Thanks to and in Memory of Martin Barker 

Jonathan Gray (University of Wisconsin – Madison)

The first academic conference at which I ever presented was the Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA) Conference in London, 2002. I was two years into my PhD and ready to share some thoughts, findings, and ideas. But my talk wasn’t till the last day, and I’d been warned this meant nobody would come: they’d all be on a train home. So I realized that receptions were likely my only place to make any kind of intellectual contact. Working up the confidence and gumption to introduce myself to Big Name A whose work I admired took the whole first half of the event, as I stood nervously eating crudités. Then I went and talked to him and he was a monumental jerk: condescending and rude, he seemed angry that I liked his work, disdainful that he needed to stoop so low as to talk to me. I retreated, shell-shocked, and decided I should maybe head home. As I shuffled off ignominiously to the door, though, I saw a man standing with no interlocutor. His name tag grabbed my attention since I loved his work. Big Name B was Martin Barker. Figuring that BN-A had already done the damage, and what worse could BN-B pour on, I thought I’d give this a second shot. Ten minutes later we were still talking. Barker was lovely. Gracious in receiving my compliments, yes, but quick to pivot to ask me about my work, and then enthusiastic and generous in discussing it. He challenged some of my assumptions and recommended some remedial reading, but all so constructively. In a room in which I didn’t matter to almost everyone, he made it clear that my ideas did matter to him. Later on he encouraged me to send him some of my work, which I did, fully expecting no response, and feeling apologetic for doing so (surely he was just being nice, and now here I was calling his bluff?) … and shortly got a long response back with incredibly thoughtful comments. Barker was probably the first person who wasn’t one of my own professors to express interest in my ideas, to communicate they might be important and valuable, and to encourage me to move onwards.

I’ve held that story privately for two decades, since egregiously Barker and his work weren’t more widely known. And then he passed away, and all of a sudden, Twitter and Facebook came alive with remembrances from so many others echoing my story. Except it was their story too, clearly, of Barker being enthusiastic and encouraging at an early age, generous and constructive, supportive and inspirational. And so although I share “my” story, I am now happy to know that it is a shared experience that many of us had, because Martin Barker really cared about ideas, not the position or name on their name tag.

I’ve also come to realize how appropriate this is given his scholarship. Barker wrote important work about comics, but the work I knew best was about film audiences. What was especially exciting and important about it was that he regularly talked to the audiences before the film was released, or at least in its early days. This may strike some as profoundly odd: surely, one might think, an audience has to be created in the act of consumption. How can one study “reception” or audience “reactions” to something that “doesn’t [yet] exist.” Barker sagely realized, though, that so much of the work of interpretation happens before we interact with a text, at the levels of anticipation, expectation, and framing. Thus his superb book with Kate Brooks, Knowing Audiences: Judge Dredd, Its Friends, Fans, and Foes (Luton: University of Luton Press, 1998), reports back on audience research conducted with people who were anticipating the Stallone Judge Dredd. Barker and Brooks posit that we all come to films with/in our own SPACE (Site for the Production of Active Cinematic Experience), our own orientation, and they insist that audience reception should begin with a consideration of these, not with the naïve assumption that audiences arrive as blank slates. Then, with Jane Arthurs and Ramaswami Harindrinath, The Crash Controversy: Censorship Campaigns and Film Reception (London: Wallflower Press, 2001), he tracked how the censorship campaign surrounding David Cronenberg’s film Crash was so overpowering in the UK that it framed the film, trapping it within tight interpretive bonds, for all audiences (even those who found the campaign odious). More ambitiously, he then worked towards a large and multinational reception project examining reception of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, where anticipation was once more a key (but by no means) the only object of analysis. So when I say it’s only appropriate that Martin Barker cared so much about helping young scholars, it’s because his work announced his realization that beginnings matter, that trajectories can be established from the very outset. He knew this of media, and he ensured that he cared about it with people studying media.

It saddens me to know we’re now without Barker. My last email from him came about two years ago, out of the blue, with pages worth of comments and questions about my most recent project. He never gave up being a mentor, yet never talked to me as though I was a mentee, just a colleague, peer, and equal who was working on something. May we all learn something from him. Be, or seek to be, Big Name B.