Reanimating Historical Violence in Multi-Ethnic Graphic Narratives

MELUS ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joo Ok Kim
Keyword(s):  
Graphic Narratives

Neurocomics and Neuroimaging

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Tougaw
Keyword(s):  
Brain Research ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
Brain Images ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Graphic Narratives ◽  
Novel Methods ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Cultural Responses ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Neuroimaging Techniques

This chapter examines a small number of recent graphic brain narratives that experiment with novel methods of visualizing the brain—including David B.’s Epileptic, Ellen Forney’s Marbles, and Matteo Farinella and Hana Ros’s Neurocomic. Tougaw argues that these narratives both draw from and challenge cultural responses to high-profile neuroimaging techniques, including PET and fMRI. Graphic narratives are a subcultural genre celebrated for their rebellious aesthetics and emphasis on narratives that challenge mainstream social and political assumptions. Brain scanning technologies are highly specialized tools that have revolutionized brain research and gained considerable mainstream attention. The mainstreaming of these technologies oversimplifies the images they produce, creating a widely held sense that they offer direct access to the brains they visualize. By contrast, graphic narratives put heavy emphasis on the aesthetic process involved in their making of brain images. While careful not to minimize these differences, the chapter argues that key similarities between neurocomics and neuroimaging techniques can be a means for clarifying the roles played by the sciences and the humanities in the cultural laboratory of contemporary neuromania.

scholarly journals Communicating Guideline Recommendations Using Graphic Narrative Versus Text-Based Broadcast Screensavers: Design and Implementation Study (Preprint)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Sinnenberg ◽  
Craig A Umscheid ◽  
Frances S Shofer ◽  
Damien Leri ◽  
Zachary F Meisel
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Practice ◽  
High Volume ◽  
Suppressive Therapy ◽  
Guideline Recommendation ◽  
Graphic Narrative ◽  
Design And Implementation ◽  
Resident Physicians ◽  
Graphic Narratives ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact

BACKGROUND The use of graphic narratives, defined as stories that use images for narration, is growing in health communication. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to describe the design and implementation of a graphic narrative screensaver (GNS) to communicate a guideline recommendation (ie, avoiding low-value acid suppressive therapy [AST] use in hospital inpatients) and examine the comparative effectiveness of the GNS versus a text-based screensaver (TBS) on clinical practice (ie, low-value AST prescriptions) and clinician recall. METHODS During a 2-year period, the GNS and the TBS were displayed on inpatient clinical workstations. The numbers of new AST prescriptions were examined in the four quarters before, the three quarters during, and the one quarter after screensavers were implemented. Additionally, an electronic survey was sent to resident physicians 1 year after the intervention to assess screensaver recall. RESULTS Designing an aesthetically engaging graphic that could be rapidly understood was critical in the development of the GNS. The odds of receiving an AST prescription on medicine and medicine subspecialty services after the screensavers were implemented were lower for all four quarters (ie, GNS and TBS broadcast together, only TBS broadcast, only GNS broadcast, and no AST screensavers broadcast) compared to the quarter prior to implementation (odds ratio [OR] 0.85, 95% CI 0.78-0.92; OR 0.89, 95% CI 0.82-0.97; OR 0.87, 95% CI 0.80-0.95; and OR 0.81, 95% CI 0.75-0.89, respectively; <i>P</i>&lt;.001 for all comparisons). There were no statistically significant decreases for other high-volume services, such as the surgical services. These declines appear to have begun prior to screensaver implementation. When surveyed about the screensaver content 1 year later, resident physicians recalled both the GNS and TBS (43/70, 61%, vs 54/70, 77%; <i>P</i>=.07) and those who recalled the screensaver were more likely to recall the main message of the GNS compared to the TBS (30/43, 70%, vs 1/54, 2%; <i>P</i>&lt;.001). CONCLUSIONS It is feasible to use a graphic narrative embedded in a broadcast screensaver to communicate a guideline recommendation, but further study is needed to determine the impact of graphic narratives on clinical practice.

scholarly journals Graphic Narratives, Trauma and Social Justice

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Courtney Donovan ◽  
Ebru Ustundag
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Social Recognition ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Visual Methods ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Written Text ◽  
Graphic Narratives

In this paper, we explore the relevance of graphic novels to understanding and responding to the complex nature of traumatic experiences. We argue that graphic narratives of trauma, which combine visual images and written text, significantly differ from biomedical and legal accounts by presenting the nuances of traumatic experiences that escape the conventions of written testimony. Building on the literature that integrates social justice concerns with visual methods and graphic medicine, we contend that graphic narratives effectively convey the complexities of traumatic experiences, including embodied experiences that are not always apparent, intelligible, or representable in written form, leading to greater social recognition of the dynamics and consequences of trauma. To illustrate this claim, we analyze Una’s Becoming Unbecoming (2015), a graphic novel that explores themes relating to trauma and social justice. Una relies on the graphic medium to explore the interconnections between personal and collective experiences of gender-based violence, and to show how physical embodied experience is central to her own experience of trauma. Graphic narratives like Becoming Unbecoming also offer a space for addressing the emotional, physical and financial costs of survivorship that usually are not available in legal written testimonies, potentially leading to better justice outcomes for trauma survivors in terms of social intelligibility and recognition, and access to social resources for healing.

scholarly journals ‘Gaijin Mangaka’: The boundary-violating impulse of Japanized “art comics”

2019 ◽  
pp. 3-26
Author(s):  
Ana Matilde de Sousa
Keyword(s):  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Culture Industries ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Graphic Narratives ◽  
Negative Identity

This paper investigates the artistic strategies of Japanised visual artists by examining the emerging movement of manga-influenced international “art comics”—an umbrella term for avant-garde/experimental graphic narratives. As a case study, I take the special issue of the anthology š! #25 ‘Gaijin Mangaka’ (July 2016), published by Latvian comics publisher kuš! and co-edited by Berliac, an Argentinian neo-gekiga comics artist. I begin by analysing four contributions in ‘Gaijin Mangaka’ to exemplify the diversity of approaches in the book, influenced by a variety of manga genres like gekiga, shōjo, and josei manga. This analysis serves as a primer for a more general discussion regarding the Japanisation of twenty-first-century art, resulting from the coming of age of millennials who grew up consuming pop culture “made in Japan”. I address the issue of cultural appropriation regarding Japanised art, which comes up even on the margins of hegemonic culture industries, as well as Berliac’s view of ‘Gaijin Mangaka’ as a transcultural phenomenon. I also insert ‘Gaijin Mangaka’ within a broader contemporary tendency for using “mangaesque” elements in Western “high art”, starting with Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno’s No Ghost Just a Shell. The fact that the link to Japanese pop culture in ‘Gaijin Mangaka’ and other Japanised “art comics” is often more residual, cryptic, and less programmatic than some other cases of global manga articulates a sense of internalised foreignness, embedding their stylistic struggles in an arena of clashing definitions of “high” and “low,” “modern,” “postmodern”, and “non-modern”, subcultures and negative identity.

Remediation and hypermediacy: Ezekiel’s World as a case in point

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-229
Author(s):  
Ayelet Kohn ◽  
Rachel Weissbrod
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Original Work ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Holocaust Survivors ◽  
World War ◽  
Graphic Narrative ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Graphic Narratives ◽  
Jewish Resistance ◽  
Resistance Movement

This article deals with Kovner’s graphic narrative Ezekiel’s World (2015) as a case of remediation and hypermediacy. The term ‘remediation’ refers to adaptations which involve the transformation of the original work into another medium. While some adaptations strive to eliminate the marks of the previous medium, others highlight the interplay between different media, resulting in ‘hypermediacy’. The latter approach characterizes Ezekiel’s World due to its unique blend of artistic materials adapted from different media. The author, Michael Kovner, uses his paintings to depict the story of Ezekiel – an imaginary figure based on his father, the poet Abba Kovner who was one of the leaders of the Jewish resistance movement during World War II. While employing the conventions of comics and graphic narratives, the author also makes use of readymade objects such as maps and photos, simulates the works of famous artists and quotes Abba Kovner’s poems. These are indirect ways of confronting the traumas of Holocaust survivors and ‘the second generation’. Dealing with the Holocaust in comics and graphic narratives (as in Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, 1986) is no longer an innovation, nor is their use as a means to deal with trauma; what makes this graphic narrative unique is the encounter between the works of the poet and the painter, which combine to create an exceptionally complex work integrating poetry, art and graphic narration.

‘Who were you crying for?’: Empathy, fantasy and the framing of the perpetrator in Nina Bunjevac’s Bezimena

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 373-386
Author(s):  
Dragoş Manea ◽  
Mihaela Precup
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
The Body ◽  
Immigrant Workers ◽  
Female Immigrant ◽  
Graphic Narratives ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Final Question

Serbian-Canadian cartoonist Nina Bunjevac’s third book, Bezimena (2019), embeds child sexual abuse and murder in an improbable geography where myth and fairy tale work together to create an otherworldly atmosphere, by turns mesmerizing and horrifying. Bunjevac’s previous work (Heartless [2012] and Fatherland [2014]) testifies to her continued commitment to exploring issues that are relevant to the feminist project, such as domestic violence, abortion, sexual assault and discrimination against female immigrant workers. In this article, we are particularly interested in exploring the manner in which Bezimena frames the figure of the perpetrator, as the context of the final question of the book – ‘who were you crying for?’ – repositions the entire ethical premise of the narrative by suggesting that responsibility for perpetration may lie both within and without the body and consciousness of the perpetrator himself. In conversation with scholars who attempt to expand the narrow category of ‘perpetrator’, such as Michael Rothberg or Scott Strauss, we explore how graphic narratives can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of perpetration, particularly in the case of sexual assault, and analyse Bezimena’s innovative approach to the representation of perpetration, as the book’s depiction of perpetrators and accomplices is mixed with elements of fantasy and mythology.

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