International Comics

Reading a translated work often involves figuring out where the author is coming from. Why do the characters behave the way they do? Is it a French thing? Maybe they had it translated by a poor grad student delirious with hunger. Whatever causes my unease with a foreign work, at root I know there’s something I just don’t get. International writing always has something to do with crossing cultural borders, with negotiating limits and lines. The experience can be baffling, intimidating—just plain overwhelming.

But international comic art is an altogether different affair—seemingly accessible because (if nothing else) comics must be sequential, as Will Eisner termed it. I may not understand one panel, but if I keep moving, chances are a picture will emerge from the whole. And generally speaking, comic art invites me along for the ride. Not a Kiwi? That’s cool—I can still get it. Not Japanese? No problem. In a time when international tourism is a serious, sometimes dangerous prospect, international comics can operate as a passport for the postmodern subject.

As touring destinations go, Iran doesn’t top the U.S. Department of State’s list. And from the first page of Marjane Satrapi’s comic memoir Persepolis: A Story of a Childhood and her follow-up, Persepolis II: A Story of a Return, I found myself right in the middle of a presumably hostile environment. By the last panel, I felt punched in the gut. How did this happen?

Satrapi uses a disarmingly simple black-and-white style as she relates the history of her life lived inside, outside and in response to late-20th-century Iran. Such technique is crucial, as many of her Western readers may be less than enthusiastic toward Iranians and what little they know of Iranian history. Nothing makes the reader feel quite so much like an insider—with all the connotations of confinement—as the frequent scenes of Satrapi’s family sitting around the living room, shades drawn to foil would-be informants, while they talk casually and frankly about problems with the Iranian government and society. These tales don’t incite anger and hatred toward Iran and Iranians; if anything, they inspire empathy. Persepolis is about being an outsider when inside and vice versa—having a split national and cultural identity.

As an American male, I anticipated I’d have a difficult time finding a way into Satrapi’s story. But instead, an intensely proud, educated woman close to my own age shares experiences at-once cosmopolitan and completely personal—and rather than being rebuffed or offended, I see her as she sees herself. Satrapi invites the reader into her interior world, and it’s irresistible.

Far more forbidding to visitors is the world of Spanish author Juan Diaz Canales and artist Juanjo Guarnido’s detective comic Blacksad. Their characters are animals, thereby essentializing a 1940s-inspired noir world. It’s Max Ernst meets Sam Spade. At moments, the titular John Blacksad re?ects on what it means to be a cat: how sense of smell affects his impressions of people, for example. Yet many details resist hard-and-fast animal characterization. Apart from such obvious absurdities as a polar bear marrying a housecat (who then has two kittens), characters have mostly human bodies (including hands) and walk upright. Where does personality end and species trait begin? In Blacksad, boundaries are permeable and help create the unease so typical of noir tales—nothing is as it seems, except when it is. Nowhere does this concept have greater effect than in Blacksad 2: Arctic Nation, in which the life-and-death choices racism fosters boil down to the color of one’s fur.

Sometimes we’re outcasts from the start, if our fur isn’t the right color or if we look—or are—Middle Eastern. In contrast, the residents of Dylan Horrocks’ Hicksville find themselves at the dead-center of all things comic (even if the town is situated in New Zealand). Opening with a comic nod toward Griffin and Sabine, Hicksville is a kind of just-so story about comic artists, styled much like the more recent Jasper Fforde novels of literary detective work; interpolated throughout the main investigative plot are allegorical tales of exploration. Hicksville plays with the boundary between truth and fantasy, between here and elsewhere, using a metaphor of exploration. Maps, directions, time and their role in dramatizing the importance of personal choice and integrity make this book an anthem for comic artists. The fictional Hicksville is not so much a boundary line as it is a terminus: an Avalon for the kings of comics.

The more I look, the more I find that international comics go beyond political borders to make themes of both boundaries and their transgression. Comics like David B.’s Epileptic—with the author’s attempt to untangle epilepsy from madness and guilt from freedom; Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima’s Lone Wolf and Cub, about a samurai treading a path between honor and damnation; and even Hergé’s Tintin, its boy reporter oblivious to borders in the grand imperial style—underscore this emphasis on dividing lines. Central characters stand at the border between events or lives, and as liminal ?gures, provide gateways allowing readers to pass from one realm to the next. How the authors construct this balance at the intersection of two perspectives is absolutely central to their artistic choices—and it’s what makes the stories so rewarding. Perhaps that’s the ultimate lesson of international comics: every place or text I discover—country, ?lm, book or comic—represents an articulation of home for someone. But what comics allow us to do is visit these lands as a welcome guest. I come back—sometimes saddened, often exhilarated—but always with a greater sense of what it means to be human elsewhere. That, in turn, lends humanity to our own lives. Perhaps comics can do for us now what the 18th century’s Grand Tour supposedly did for those privileged enough to enjoy it: season them, temper them and—most importantly—elevate their appreciation for fellow human beings.