When most people think of politics and illustrations, their first thoughts usually run to the kind found in political cartoons and caricatures. These are the comics that populate the editorial pages of most newspapers and feature a satirical view of current events, those generated in the United States by such artists as Tom Toles, Mike Luckovich, Ann Telnaes, and Walt Handelsman. Or, the mention of politics and cartoons will bring to mind comic strips such as Walt Kelly’s Pogo, Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury, and Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County. Yet, while these examples of illustrative art certainly engage with social interactions, state affairs, and the permutations of power, they are by far not the only kinds that reveal the political dynamics of our cultures. As the various contributions to this special issue of Forum for World Literature Studies demonstrate, the combination of politics and art can take a variety of forms, engaging in narratives that expose the underpinnings of our civilization and lay out the passions that define us as a people.

The anime Gurren Lagann, known for its comedy, depicts a genuine sense of trauma following the combat death of Kamina. The contradictory messages encapsulated in imagery and dialogue simulate the loss of psychological integrity inherent to traumatic experience. In my article I focus on the protagonist Simon’s false assertion of recovery and self‑validation through dialogue and the depiction of authentic post‑traumatic experience through imagery. Ultimately, the series attests to the persistence and permanence of post‑trauma and reconfigures the trauma paradigm to exclude combat loss.

This essay considers the historically changing meanings of nationalism in the American animated cartoon. Images of globalization in recent Disney/Pixar films imply a centrifugal (outward‑looking) approach to the world, in contrast to centripetal (inward‑looking) Hollywood Disney cartoons. Pinocchio (1940) cannibalizes European civilization for the purposes of the American movie‑making machine. However, in recent Pixar films, the world draws out the Americans, giving testament to a very different world half a century later. Ratatouille (2007) concerns a rat named Remy who learns how to achieve his dream of running a restaurant, inspired by his idol Gusteau’s book, Anyone Can Cook. The film’s villain is Anton Ego, who at first laments Gusteau’s populism, but is eventually won over by the relationship between the rat’s cooking and his own mother’s. Thus, Remy wins over the villainous critic, striking a blow not only for the accessibility of French cuisine, but also for popular cinema as an art form that transcends the medium of angry (French) film critics. If Ratatouille is a centrifugal film about globalization, then it assaults not just the centripetal nature of Walt Disney, but Classical Hollywood Cinema more generally. Ratatouille articulates itself as a critic‑proof film by reworking the shibboleth of great American cinema itself, Citizen Kane (1941). The television commercial that begins the animated film serves as a biographical obituary of Gusteau, whose death motivates the plot of the film. The reporter Thompson’s quest for the truth about Charles Foster Kane results from the inadequacy of the opening newsreel. Conversely, Remy’s quest to prove Gusteau correct in Ego’s eyes—that anyone, from anywhere (a rat colony or the United States), can cook—results from profoundly transformed historical circumstances. Kane collects the artifacts of an almost dead Europe in his Xanadu, dying amidst its ruins. Remy thrives in a disinterred Europe, liberated by Gusteau’s charisma, finally capable of reigniting the passion of the cadaverous Ego.

This article examines Japanese manga depicting the composition of the Sangyō-gishō, three canonical Buddhist texts traditionally attributed to Japan’s Prince Shōtoku. It explores how portrayals of his authorship relate both to eighth‑century texts and to modern scholarship, focusing on Shōtoku’s relationship with Hyeja, his Buddhist teacher from the Korean peninsula. In doing so, the article shows how manga—a particularly popular medium in Japan—differs from scholarly works in the access it affords to these key Buddhist texts from early Japanese history.

Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Fun Home (2006), is one woman attempt to understand and recapture her father after his untimely death. The memoir focuses on his existence as a closeted gay man living in a small Pennsylvania town, the dysfunction of his family life, and as the memoir progresses, Bechdel explores her sense of psychic connection to her father based on her own identity as a lesbian. This essay explores Bechdel’s representational practices, in particular the methods she uses to link family, sexuality, and emotion to autobiography. She uses representations of things, especially her drawings of photographs and interior décor, to imbue her memoir with both veracity and emotionality; meanwhile she uses narrative, drawing, and photographic discourses to queer what Marianne Hirsch has coined “the familial gaze.” In showing us hand‑drawn snapshots of the private interior of the Bechdel family home, and in revealing the secrets contained in the pictures and drapes and antique chairs, Bechdel destroys what can loosely be called “the familial pact.” By this Bechdel tries to transform private suffering related to family and sexuality into a text for public consumption; her subjective experience is given representation as a means for eliciting emotion on a collective scale. In short, The paper discusses the implications of this memoir’s particular politics of emotion and its potential to queer representational practices related to autobiography and family, allowing us glimpses into new possibilities for self‑representation.

Because the field of comics studies is still relatively new, critique of the rhetoric used by luminaries such as Scott McCloud and Paul Gravett pushes the study of comics closer to legitimation. Taking as my premise the assumption that criticism affects the development of its object of critique, I argue that Orientalism in the discourse of comics studies has been detrimental to the evolution of comics in the US. Orientalist rhetoric inscribes and partitions the East from the West, foreclosing the possibility of fusing Eastern subjects or styles in Western comics, and also presenting comics in both the US and Japan as monolithic and homogenous. If those who study US comics want to encourage further growth in their medium of study, then rather than perpetuating Orientalism, they need to recover cultural flow and the diversity of both manga and comics in the US. As critics open the door to cultural flow in their rhetoric, comics artists will be able to do the same for their techniques and subjects, learning from each other and growing the medium to reach its full potential.

In the present landscape of Hollywood movies the image of the cowboy is widely decreased to the nonconforming misfit within infantile features. As the so‑called golden boy giving some variety to the audience, he became a synonym for otherness. As for the matter of Western comics, the Franco‑Belgian cowboys belong to a special hero species. They represent the dismantlement of the flat and flawless Western heroes in the manner of old John Wayne movies. Regarding those failing Western men it is interesting to see in which way political and social circumstances influenced the authors. Although the stories were told on the background of the American west, famous artists like Jean‑Michel Charlier expressed via their works dissatisfaction with Americas politicking and criticized international affecting events like the Vietnam War. By comparing different types of Franco‑Belgian Western comic protagonists, ranging around outlaws, gunfighters and drunkards as well as mountain men and trappers, the essay interrogates the position of artists and authors towards the political and economic situation during the 1970s. As one of the examples, the portrayed hero of the chronological arranged epic Lieutenant Blueberry who, throughout the course of the episodes experiences not only a vehement change in appearance but also in personality will be the principal focus of research.

Historically, Japanese manga has been used to comment on social and political issues in the present, as well as describe and narrate events in the past. Since the early 1990s a growing amount of revisionist manga has been published alongside increasingly vitriolic public debates concerning Japanese colonialism and the Greater East Asian War. These two groups have been known to influence one another. One example of this can be seen in manga artist Yamano Sharin’s Kenkanryū, a work that aligns itself with leading scholars and commentators denying the ills of Japanese colonialism in Korea. This article examines some of the visual and narrative techniques used by Yamano to narrate and subsequently distort the history of Korean laborers during the war.

Using Kevin Huizenga’s short story “Glenn Ganges in Pulverize” as a case study, this essay argues for a reconsideration of the function of handwriting in North American alternative comics. For reasons largely having to do with cultural politics, comics scholars have held that in the alternative comic, handwriting functions as a privileged means of access to the author’s unique embodied subjectivity. By staging an encounter between handwriting and digital technology (specifically videogames), Huizenga shows that handwriting is never about pure subjectivity’s embodiment—that there is always a gap between the author and his or her handwritten trace. At the same time, Huizenga suggests that what makes handwriting poignant is precisely the conflict between the reader’s knowledge of this gap and his or her desire for connection with the author.

Japanese pop culture artist Murakami Takashi’s Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture includes an explication of the artist’s view of the relationship among otaku culture, post‑World War II Japanese history, and the future national identity of Japan. In this article I argue that for Murakami the hope of a better future for Japan relies on the remasculinization of national identity. That remasculinization relies on the cultural imaginings of Japan’s otaku. However, Murakami’s account of otaku elides both the gender realities of the otaku community and the heterogeneity of that community; if the future of Japan is built on Murakami’s account of otaku, that future has a shaky foundation.

One Piece is a long‑running shōnen manga series that deals with many political themes. Shōnen manga is typically defined as manga for boys, but people of all ages and genders frequently read it. Shōnen manga is therefore analyzed in terms of its key themes, identified as hard work, victory, and friendship. One Piece uses these themes in a basic formula in which the heroic pirate crew faces off against a series of increasingly powerful villains. Each member of the crew represents specific values, and the enemies represent the antithesis of these values. Combat is ideological, with the heroes’ victory reaffirming the primacy of the values represented by the thesis. The arc Water Seven is investigated, as is its use of characters to explore the relationships between the individual and the state in terms of national security. In One Piece, it is found unacceptable to sacrifice individual rights of the innocent for a perceived improvement in the security of other people.

Romance comics, a type of comic that featured illustrated narratives about love, were developed in post‑World War II America and marketed extensively to girls and young women. Through a variety of narrative and visual devices, many of these comics claimed to convey truth to their readers, thereby offering plausible models of behavior for their readers to emulate or avoid. Very few romance comics engaged with controversial topics, but one particular example, entitled “Good‑By Innocence!”, dealt extensively with the causes and consequences of premarital sex, one of the strongest taboos for young middle‑class women of the mid‑20th century.

Joe Sacco, arguably the most respected comics artist‑journalist of his generation, dramatizes the stories of individuals whose lives have been traumatized by their involvement in the Middle East conflicts and the Balkan Wars. Through the defamiliarizing form of comics, anecdotal rather than panoramic perspective, and self‑effacing autobiographical narrative, Sacco challenges the faux‑objective stylistics of mainstream journalistic treatments of these unsettling topics. In The Fixer: A Story From Sarajevo (2003), Sacco addresses the problematic relation between the time‑limited but saturational attention of the Western News Media’s gaze and the war violence itself. Sacco interprets the Balkan conflict as in part a performative response by unacknowledged persons to a fleeting experience of notoriety. Interested in telling the stories of persons caught up in war after the mainstream media has moved on from covering their story, Sacco’s work also has implications for our understanding of the relationship between liberalism ethics, and the aesthetics of comix.

In Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, the personal is political. Originally told through a series of graphic narratives and then as an animated film, Satrapi’s autobiographical account tells of her experiences growing up in Iran under the Shah, then under the even more repressive Islamic Republic, before her parents sent her to school in Vienna at the age of 14. Caught between East and West, Satrapi finds herself having to adapt to her new culture while longing for home. It is suggested in this discussion of Persepolis that Satrapi’s narrative works within the confines of what Laura Marks has termed intercultural cinema, an expanding genre wherein individual memories of diasporic peoples are called upon to connect with their cultural and social histories. This project is an examination of how the medium of animation functions in its visual and narrative structure in order to loosen the perceived boundaries between cultures, geographies, histories, and socio‑political backgrounds. Employing Walter Benjamin’s concept of storytelling, this analysis explores how Persepolis uses personal narrative and individual memory to make room for new voices and subjectivities to emerge within the historical archive. It is proposed that Persepolis encourages an embodied, sensory, and interactive relationship between viewer and viewed in order to create a shared collective experience, and an argument is made for the expansive capabilities of a simplified visual medium to deepen our understanding of the complex influence of memory, cultural tradition, and nostalgia in the production of individual and social histories.

This essay reviews a number of recent critical works in which comics and politics are intimately connected. From explorations of the cultural and national contexts in which specific comics appeared, to the study of the actual politics underlying works, the essay gives a survey of comics scholarship published today, which evidences the growing interest in the study of political notions such as nationhood, globalization, propaganda, or womanhood. Additionally, the essay also considers the audience for such works, as while many of the works reviewed are intended for an academic audience, the field of comics scholarship often crosses traditional boundaries into creator and fan‑produced criticism.

The 2007 International Conference on 20th Century American Poetry in Wuhan, China, inaugurated a newer era for American poetry study in China and for the exchange of poetry between China and America. The landmark conference proceedings included over 70 essays by authors from around the world. The conference also led to the formation of the Chinese/American Association for Poetry and Poetics (CAAP), based at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW). In order to facilitate academic exchange and to promote poetry and poetics of (and beyond) America and China, CAAP will co‑host “Dialog on Poetry and Poetics: The First Convention of the Chinese/American Association for Poetry and Poetics” (Wuhan, China, September 29–30, 2011) with CPCW at Penn, Central China Normal University, Foreign Literature Studies (AHCI journal), and Forum for World Literature Studies. CAAP President Marjorie Perloff, professor of Stanford University and fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), CAAP Vice‑president Charles Bernstein, Professor of University of Pennsylvania and fellow of AAAS, and CAAP Vice‑president Nie Zhenzhao, professor of Central China Normal University and vice‑president of China National Association of Foreign Literatures, will attend the conference together with many other scholars from America, China and other parts of the world. We hereby sincerely invite all scholars and poets of the world to this grand academic occasion.