Comic Artists' Navigation of Trauma, Affect, and Representation: Drawn Images as Entanglement of Body, Material, Memory

Abstract:The article is a dialogue between comic artists, writers, readers, and researchers. Recognizing the characterization of traumatic memory as fragmented, embodied, and encompassing multiple temporalities, it considers the implications of trauma and comics as more-than-representational. It challenges a representational logic of signification that informs presuppositions regarding trauma's narrativization and readability that privilege coherency and stability. At the intersection of trauma and comics, the article suggests a shift from comics as narrative/discursive objects to comics as artworks, as sensation and affect. Comics as material-discursive processes engage bodies (the tactile, sensory, and material) and drawing from and through embodied memory and multiple temporalities. The article includes the authors' address of trauma, affect, memory, and time through writing about their own artistic practices and diffractive reading.