Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Turning to three contemporary alternative publications from North America, France and Belgium, this talk delineates the contours of childish elements in graphic novels to show how they figure as the unsaid in a transatlantic comics history marked by the emergence of the graphic novel: in the zealous ‘growing up’ of comics, the childish and childlike has been reconfigured to acquire a more marginalized, heavily connoted space within comics for adults. In the now acclaimed, but once difficult to publish, comics by Lynda Barry, in Dominique Goblet’s partially autobiographical Pretending is Lying or more recently Disa Wallander’s Becoming Horses, the childish and childlike are activated to open the spaces and meaning-making potential of the graphic novel in overlapping but different ways. I examine the possibilities of understanding these graphic novels’ incorporation of childlike elements - ranging from the collaging of children’s drawings, the interweaving of imitations thereof, to the representation of children’s spaces, imaginations and logics - from the angles of affective connections, material interventions into the possibilities of communicating and expressing through drawing and the essence of drawing itself (use of childish colors, forms, techniques) to the hybrid, word-image spaces of the graphic novels themselves and how, ultimately, the very space of the book-object is reconfigured through childlike elements.