The parallel grammar of comics and text messages juxtaposed on the page from Sina Grace's graphic memoir, Nothing Lasts Forever, shows the thought bubble and the speech balloon in spontaneous ...reciprocity (Figure 1). ...Spider-Man simultaneously speaks with Norman Osborn, the Green Goblin, and wonders to himself how to resolve the conflict that his greatest villain is also his best friend's father.1 Though Spider-Man may be famous for his internal conflicts, they were not particular to him, indeed, one need only open any issue of most mainstream comics from before 2000 and will be flooded by images of characters deep in thought, surrounded by as many bubbles as soda pop, and poised for action or an encounter with a new plot element.2 For example, in the image of Storm with her hands elevated, the bubble directs the reader down the page into Storm's feelings as she comes to terms with the loss of her mutant powers and learns to live with herself in this new life (Figure 3). With the popularization of the psychoanalytic treatment in comic books,4 the direct connection to psychoanalytic practice seems obvious because thought, associations and feelings are brought into the room; the plot is dependent upon putting thoughts into words. ...despite the fact that attitudes toward this change in comics style of representation vary from creator to creator, a mere glance at comics of the last few decades demonstrates that contemporary trends have privileged a disembodied narrative voice which describes and determines all internal motivation in boxes above or amidst the comics panel, more prominent now that the thought bubble has all but disappeared. ...while the speech balloon has retained preeminence, revealing character, showing motivation and propelling
The great conductor Bruno Walter proclaims in his memoir, Theme and Variations: An Autobiography (1946) that, "Out of the countless variations of my life's experiences, I recognize and appraise ...myself as their theme" (p. vii, emphasis added). This paper considers the "uses" of Walter's memoir in the psychoanalytic treatment of a woman who had been clinically diagnosed as "pre-psychotic" and whose besetting fear was that people were only creatures, and that she herself did not have a "self." After many years of treatment, in what became a watershed in our work together, Ms. T, herself an accomplished musician, brought Walter's autobiography to me in the form of certain pages copied and highlighted from Walter's account of his brief, and remarkable treatment by Sigmund Freud. Walter's reflections upon his little known treatment by Freud's offered an inlet into the ways Ms. T and I learned to hear the variations on the theme of her self-through the seemingly intractable, psychotic symptoms that brought her into treatment. Her contribution of the Walter text became a shared witness in our analytic space, even as this account of her treatment testifies to our time together.
In early 2021 we met with Carol Tyler over Zoom to discuss her comics, her participation in the underground comix community, and her forthcoming work, The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of ...My Grief. Tyler shared her experiences making Fab 4 Mania: A Beatles Obsession and the Concert of a Lifetime as well as Soldier's Heart: The Campaign to Understand My WWII Veteran Father : a Daughter's Memoir while we communed over our love of comics and how the form is able to capture distinct experiences of trauma and grief, while making a good story. In our era filled with grief and loss, comics memoir persists as a medium that depicts such human feelings through image and text, while allowing us to find optimism in the fragile beauty of our world.
Comics on the Couch: Introduction Camden, Vera, J.; Zullo, Valentino, L.
American imago,
2020, Letnik:
77, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Mental health practitioners, many of whom were influenced by psychoanalysis, derided comics in the 40s and 50s in the United States.3 In 1905, not many years after Freud published his book on dreams, ...Winsor McCay, in the United States, created the comic, Little Nemo in Slumberland, a series of strips that ran for nearly three decades across different newspapers, including The New York Herald during the early part of the twentieth century. The comics artist as well as the psychoanalyst thus herald a uniquely modern self, attuned to the strange world of dreams.4 Reflecting the surging popularity of Freud's magisterial dream-book, two of the most famous comic pioneers of the twentieth century Joe Simon and Jack Kirby published The Strange World of Your Dreams in 1952, at the height of comics' popularity and at the height of psychoanalysis' popularity as well in the United States (Figure 3). ...The Strange World of Your Dreams asks on its very cover, "What do they mean—the messages received in sleep?," thus pointing to a creative interest in dreams and the ideas of psychoanalysis circulating at the time, also revealing how many cartoonists themselves were in analysis in these productive and creative decades.5 A Comic, Psychoanalysis The surge in the popularity of comics in the 1950s with their raw representation of the violence and sexuality in horrifying images that derived from memories of the recent war, bore a peculiar parallel to the traumatic memories that were also filling consulting rooms in post-World War II America. In an astonishing saga played out in the repressive era of American McCarthyism, the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham published his infamous book, Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today's Youth (1954) in which he attacked comics for their lack of artistic merit, their mass production, and the depiction of raw libidinal instinct.
A reviewer for The Wall Street Journal dismisses what he calls the 'cartoonish lumps' of the Medieval St. Albans figures at the Getty Center. He accuses the artist of childishness: as if the artist ...did not yet know, developmentally, how to draw. 'Their creators hadn't yet figured out how to make human beings look human. Their faces are expressionless and dumb (eyes are white circles with black dots in the middle) ... Their attenuated bodies ... are devoid of musculature or fat'. Such a critique defends against the amplified affective states conjured by these images. Drawing on psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu's theories of the 'skin-ego' and surface, this article reflects upon the childlike 'simplicity' of the lines shared by these 'cartoonish' figures, and the bold, spare lines of Alison Bechdel's graphic narratives. Bechdel summons affective regions conjured by the flattened surface of the seeming two-dimensional figures, layered against bubbled, staccato scripts. The childlike simplicity of Bechdel's renderings of the human figure allows an affective resonance and, ironically, a longing for the transcendent, enigmatic, and impenetrable realm invoked by the gaze of the Medieval figure.
In Spring 2020, Vera Camden and Valentino Zullo, American editors of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics sat down with Derf Backderf to discuss his new book, Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio. ...Highlighting how important this work is as a graphic monument to the 50
th
anniversary of the May 4 shootings, they spoke with Derf about his journalistic training, his development as a cartoonist, and his interest in depicting regional events that sustain global interest. Primarily featuring his new book, the conversation focuses on the power of the comics form to witness historical trauma and unbury victims through the drawn image, including those murdered on the Kent State University campus in 1970.
As 2020 came to a close we sat down with Thi Bui over Zoom to discuss her graphic narrative, The Best We Could Do, her recent collaboration on a children's book, A Different Pond (co-created with Bao ...Phi) and the urgency of her works in progress on climate change and immigrant detention and deportation. We discussed our generational responses to the Viet Nam War and her determination to reclaim the history of this American war from the perspective of the Vietnamese people. In an era where information is spread so quickly, often unreliably and indeed overwhelmingly, we recognise how important the slow journalism of comics continues to be.
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