12 - The Graphic Novel

Summary

This chapter has two aims: to present a basic semiotics of comics relevant to a vegan reading practice and to demonstrate its critical value in a reading of a widely available and celebrated trade comics serial, Monstress (published from 2015), by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda.

As the various chapters within this section of the present volume attest, many literary forms and genres invite vegan reading practices. One might naturally think that comics, just like other literary forms and visual art practices, is merely susceptible to vegan critique. But this would miss something curious about comics that goes beyond its openness to critical alternatives. No matter the creator, the style, or the content, strange as it may sound, comics calls for vegan reading. Like other arts, it is true, we see in it a capacious, adaptable tradition of mimesis and imagination, able to represent multifarious aspects of our world and ourselves. But we may notice something else: it is an entire tradition of art – of formal creative practices and generic reading habits – built on a unique approach to expressing lives and their environments. Thus humananimal discourses and ecocritical interests, as I will sketch out below, are central to the making of comics as an aesthetic form and as a historical genre. Coming from this perspective, vegan reading sets a particular challenge. I take the challenge to be to expose the panoply of power relations evoked in representations of the appropriation of nonhuman by human lives. Such a task can have no final horizon of knowledge; it is totalizing, as extensive as the entanglements of its world or worlds extend, never certain and complete. Comics, which displays a lively world-building on its sleeve, invites this task of reading in a unique and provocative way.

The visual language of comics develops a long tradition of the grotesque in art, which depicts deformed or hybridized human, animal, and plant figures in ornamentation and design. This tradition enters comics through its origins in nineteenth-century caricature, from whose generic purposes the modern comics figure of the plastic, stylized person – human, animal, in-between or other – has been freed. The many kinds of animalized and other nonhuman characters in Monstress are descendants of the grotesque tradition.