Introduction: Comics and The Anarchist Imagination

This special issue brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to reflect on comics and the anarchist imagination. The curators of the 2014 British Library exhibition, "Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK," noted that "there has always been a certain anarchic streak" in comics (Gravett and Dunning 74). Indeed, since Ralph Chaplin's Black Cat appeared alongside the work of Ernest Riebe and Ern Hanson in the IWW's Industrial Worker in the early twentieth century, comics and cartoons have been prominent fixtures in anarchist publications, while comic books themselves have often featured anarchist heroes. To take a few more examples: in the 1960s and 70s, Donald Rooum's Wildcat comics strips featured in The Syndicalist, Freedom News, and Peace News; Clifford Harper's illustrations appeared in Undercurrents, Anarchy Magazine, and Black Flag; and Anarchy Comics (1978-1987) mixed together fiction, history, commentary, and artwork. Gaining a wider audience in the 1980s and 1990s, Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta (1982-1989), Grant Morrison's The Invisibles (1994-2000), and Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle's Batman: Anarky (1999) featured anarchist themes and characters. More recently, graphic biographies like Sharon Rudahl's A Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman (2007), Rick Geary's The Lives of Sacco and Vanzetti (2011), and Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot's The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia (2016), as well as visual histories such as Paul Buhle's Wobblies! A Graphic History of the International Workers of the World (2005), Cindy Milstein and Erik Ruin's Paths Towards Utopia: Graphic Explorations of Everyday Anarchism (2012), and Sean Michael Wilson and Benjamin Dickson's Fight the Power! A Visual History of Protest Amongst the English Speaking Peoples (2013) bear witness to a strong relationship between comics and anarchism.

Despite this long and varied history, surprisingly little critical attention has been given to the close relationship between art, aesthetics, and politics in anti-authoritarian movements. To date, studies have focused principally on avant-garde modernism across Europe and North America, including Allan Antliff's path-breaking exploration of the role of anarchism in the formation of American modernism as well as his wide-ranging study of the relationship between art and anarchism from the Paris Commune to the fall of the Berlin Wall; Theresa Papanikolas' study of the role of Dadaism in the development of anarchist philosophy in France; Richard D. Sonn's focus on anarchism, the artistic avant-garde and sexuality in France's interwar period; Nina Gurianova's examination of the "aesthetics of anarchy" in the early Russian avant-garde movement; and, most recently, Patricia Leighten's study of the role of anarchist aesthetics in the development of modern art in pre-war Paris. Leighten's essay for this special issue extends that study to look at the larger body of František Kupka's cartoons in relation to the culture of satire and the anarchist movement before the First World War, positioning Kupka as a key figure in this cultural project. Josh MacPhee and Erik Reuland's illustrated history of art, aesthetics, and anti-authoritarian politics and Robyn Roslak's examination of neo-impressionist landscapes and cityscapes and the anarchist imagination have also charted similar territory. Although Bob Levin does not engage with anarchism, his collection of essays, Outlaws, Rebels, Freethinkers & Pirates, gestures towards the "anarchic streak" often found in comics and cartoons. In his study of American popular radicalism, Michael Cohen comes closer to our project when he argues that "radical cartooning did not merely provide comic relief for the movements, but was an active force in framing socialist ideology and goals in a revolutionary age" (35). Finally, scholar of anarchism Jesse Cohn examines the aesthetics of anarchist expression across cultural forms (Anarchism) and, in both a direct precursor to this special issue ("Breaking") and his contribution to it, suggests that the particular diagrammatic qualities of certain comics embody an explicitly anarchist visual culture.

Such scholarship has carved out important avenues of inquiry into questions of the relationship between art, aesthetics, and...