Introduction: Migration in Twenty-First-Century Documentary Comics

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This introduction discusses the remarkable capacity of the graphic novel as a medium to engage with migration in the twenty-first century—not just its ability to tell stories about migration, but also to comment on the traditions, routines, and politics of depicting migration in visual culture. We introduce and situate this special issue's five contributions, which analyze graphic novels and online comics published in Europe and the US between 2009 and 2017, with particular attention to the ways these works engage in intermedial critique and use empathetic images to inform, challenge, and move their readers. We adopt the term "documentary comics" from Nina Mickwitz to designate comics that, like film documentaries, combine aesthetic techniques and symbolic systems of signification with compelling representations of the actual world. In order to contextualize the works that the articles in this issue analyze, our introduction also discusses Parsua Bashi's "graphic novella" Nylon Road (2006), Simon Schwartz's The Other Side of the Wall (2009), and Gaby von Borstel and Peter Eickmeyer's Liebe deinen Nächsten (2017), and concludes with a "coda" on contemporary examples of the codex, a form that originated in pre-Hispanic Latin America.