Folding, Cutting, Reassembling: Materializing Trauma and Memory in Comics

Abstract

Visual representations of trauma and memory are common in comics and graphic novels and have been explored at length by scholars. Less widely discussed, but nonetheless significant, are the ways in which trauma and memory have been realized materially through the physical forms that sequential arts have taken. This chapter addresses these forms, first examining two examples of visual metaphors used to explore the effects of trauma: Rosalind B. Penfold’s torn timeline image from Dragonslippers and Nicola Streeten’s broken vase from Billy, Me and You. The chapter then proceeds to consider three instances where the material form of the comic has itself been brought into play by creators: Joe Sacco’s The Great War (2013) which uses folding, Dana Walrath’s View From the High Ground (2016) which uses cutting, and Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’ Red: A Haida Manga (2010) which asks its reader to take apart the whole book and reassemble it. In each of these examples, the reader is required to make physical interventions upon the text, simultaneously acknowledging the bodily impacts that trauma can have and the physicality of trauma’s causes.

My thanks to Will Grady, Maggie Gray, Ian Horton, and Margaret Pilkington for their input into this chapter. Some of the works addressed in this chapter have also been discussed, albeit in very different ways, in chapters in Representing Acts of Violence in Comics (Hague, Horton, and Mickwitz eds., 2019; see references to Pearson, Streeten, and Szép in this chapter’s bibliography for full details).