12 - Graphic Journeys: Travel Writing and the Medium of Comics

Summary

TRAVEL NARRATIVES HAVE BEEN central to comics from their beginnings: the early years of mass print culture coincided with new forms of transportation, making travel an early popular theme that endures throughout the twentieth century in figures such as Hergé's Tintin or, in an East German context, Hannes Hegen's Digedags. However, it is only in the last few decades that comics and travel writing have fully converged, as artists working in the burgeoning realm of non-fiction comics have turned to travel writing and reportage. In the wake of the international success of authors such as Guy Delisle, Emmanuel Guibert, Josh Neufeld, Craig Thompson, and Joe Sacco, German-language comics artists such as Ulli Lust, Reinhard Kleist, Sascha Hommer, Olivier Kugler, Sebastian Lörcher, and Jan Bauer have also turned to the graphic travelogue, exploring the narrative possibilities of comics to represent experiences of mobility or to reflect on the ethics of the cross-cultural gaze.

The critical success of the travel comic is on one level surprising: both comics and travel writing have often been viewed with suspicion, occupying a precarious position between high art and popular entertainment. What is it about the marriage of these two frequently denigrated forms that now appeals to contemporary sensibilities? Comics have, of course, generally undergone a massive shift in cultural status. Once deemed the realm of children, comics have in the last three decades finally achieved recognition as a serious art form capable of sophisticated storytelling. The mainstream status of comics can be attributed to multiple factors, including the international success of individual works and artists and the influence of markets, such as Japan, in which comics were more readily accepted as art. However, Jared Gardner argues that the new cultural cachet of sequential art is best understood in the context of the rise of personal computing in the late 1990s and the allure and anxieties of a new digital age. On the one hand, comics seem particularly relevant to new modes of reading and viewing that developed in the wake of emerging computer technologies: with their emphasis on the selection, combination, and navigation of multiple visual signs, comics share affinities with the “database aesthetic” of new forms of digital communication.