Introduction to Focus: Graphic Fiction

At the click over into the twenty-first century, French comic book publisher L'Association released a one-shot, two-thousand-page behemoth, Comix 2000. Magisterial in scope—imagine 324 authors from 29 different countries—and astute in vision, it identified comic books then and now as a "major and universal means of expression and maybe even the most apt communicative medium of our times." Today, we no longer qualify such statements with a "maybe." In the order of things, comics exist as arguably the most apt communicative medium of our times—said from someone clearly without bias. They are everywhere—and we expect it to be so. Along with alphabetic luminaries, today we expect that a Gene Luen Yang, a Nate Powell, a Chris Ware, a Thi Bui, a Ta-Nehisi Coates will also pick up one of those prestigious national literary book awards; their art as covers to issues of The Atlantic and The New Yorker. And, of course, today we see the transmutation of comics constantly, appearing not only on the silver screen but also as plays, music performances, and Broadway musicals.

The ubiquity of comics as an important form of communication didn't happen ex nihilo nor only in the US. Comic making and consuming has been a planetary activity long before our twenty-first century. Long-standing, complex traditions can be seen in Japan with manga, in Korea with manhwa, in China with lianhuanhua, in France and Belgium with bande dessinée, in Spain with tebeos, in Mexico and Latin America with historietas, and in the Philippines with komiks, to name but a few. And, with the global distribution and consumption of comics (intensified by today's internet), these traditions have vitally informed one another, evolving new cross- pollinated styles and forms.

The creating and consuming of comics is a planetary phenomenon—and one that has been going on for some time; some even trace this back to those Paleolithic paintings in Dordogne, France. There is something compelling about creating stories with visuals—and then adding space and time complexity with words. Perhaps, as some argue, the gravitation toward comic book storytelling goes hand in hand with the rise to dominance of visually-driven cultural phenomena. Perhaps, as some have also argued, it's that we more willingly step into visually constructed story-worlds to experience ideas, actions, and behaviors—other ways of life. Speculation aside, we know for a fact that the visual (and verbal) medium of comics can and do powerfully make new our perception, thought, and feeling about us and the world we inhabit.

The incisive reviews that make up this special issue wonderfully and variously put into words how the careful (or not) use of visual (and verbal) shaping devices are used to create fictional stories that invite and guide our imaginative re-construction. We come to understand how Adrian Tomine uses such shaping devices (framing, line, and layout, for instance) to distill and then reconstruct with aplomb the aesthetic realization of our fear and embrace of mortality. We gain insight into how in Bottled Chris Gooch's use of an accumulation of minimalist mise-en-scenes (sparse interiors) and a trichromatic color scheme (black, white, and rust-red) conveys a potent sense of a young woman's malaise—a social suffocation. We begin to understand why we feel so much unease when immersed in Jillian Tamaki's Boundless—a comic that disrupts our expectations of visual and verbal word placement to intensify our sense of the racialized protagonist's feelings of dis-belonging. We are attuned to how the bullet flies through those first pages of I Am Alfonso Jones, streaking a path of destruction through the many young African American and Latinx men that we lose every minute of every day to racial injustices.

Comic book creators across the globe choose to dedicate their intelligence, skill, time, energy, and physical labor to create graphic fiction. Unlike, say, the other visually dominant storytelling mode of film, while the creating of graphic fictions takes a lot of time and labor, it is relatively inexpensive; the internet along with social...