Editors' Notes

Following the onset of a "pictorial turn" (W. J. T. Mitchell) in the 1990s, comics and graphic novels have become a major area of research in literary, literacy, and cultural studies. One of the earliest and most influential scholars to acknowledge comics as an expression of interventionist art was Marianne Hirsch, whose work has shaped how we examine the representation of trauma in graphic narrative. While Hirsch also figures importantly here as one of the first scholars to put Art Spiegelman's Maus (1986; 1991) in dialogue with the work of German studies,¹ in 2004 she wrote an editor's column in PMLA discussing the crisis of visual witnessing in the wake of historical and cultural trauma: "What kind of visual-verbal literacy can respond to the needs of the present moment?" (Hirsch, "Collateral Damage" 1212). Her analysis of In the Shadow of No Towers (2004)—Spiegelman's reflections on 9/11—illuminates the potential of graphic narrative to serve as persuasive aesthetic and political commentary. Yet Hirsch went even further, contending that Spiegelman's graphic narrative was a powerful tool for social justice work in that he "mobilizes comics and the acts of seeing and reading they demand in an attempt to see beyond the given-to-be-seen and to say what cannot otherwise be said" (Hirsch, "Collateral Damage" 1215).

The multimodality of graphic narratives produces text and image creations that are well suited to convey cultural, social, and political representations of presence, absence, and erasure. Graphic storytelling that is committed to social justice work, in particular, often interlaces the visible with the invisible—the verbal with the non-verbal—giving voice to the many forms and expressions of oppression, inequality, and injustice. With the language of comics being multi-layered and cross-discursive, text and drawn images are both interdependent and independent of one another. Comic art is therefore defined by discontinuity: "[E]ach image is articulated in relation to others from which it is nonetheless distinct" (Pizzino 636). Meaning is created through the active process of "imaginative production," in which the reader moves between word and image, navigating across gutters and frames, in order to produce narrative closure (Whitlock 978). As Edward Said observes in his introduction to Joe Sacco's Palestine (1993), comics free us to "to think and imagine and see differently" (ii). Ultimately, with the power to circulate across cultures in a global network of sequential art (Whitlock 969), graphic narrative has the capacity to intervene directly in social and political debates (Smith and Watson 168).

As a fundamentally diverse art form defined by its characteristic sequentiality, comics consist of many different formats and genres (graphic autofiction, graphic memoir, comics journalism, documentary comics, etc.) that draw attention to ethical and aesthetic modes of representation. An emphasis on representational concerns is especially relevant for graphic narrative storytelling practices as they pertain to humanitarian witnessing, human rights discourses, and the politics of recognition.

The eight articles featured in this special issue of Seminar bring these storytelling practices in German comics into conversation with human rights studies, antiracism, and social justice education. The contributions represent a rich and exciting diversity of approaches to both short-form and long-form comics; they comprise non-fiction and fiction narratives and encompass a broad array of human rights and social justice concerns.

The first three articles examine historical injustices and human rights atrocities by engaging with the history, memory, and legacy of colonialism and National Socialism. Furthermore, defying genre conventions through the use of representational counter-strategies, the cartoonists examined critically reflect on the construction of alterity in historical memory and popular media culture. In "Risking Representation: Abstraction, Affect, and the Documentary Mode in Birgit Weyhe's Madgermanes," Christina Kraenzle assesses Weyhe's attempt to recuperate a forgotten aspect of German Democratic Republic (GDR) history as an experiment with graphic documentary. In Madgermanes's (2016) history of Mozambican labour migration to the GDR, Weyhe's aesthetic strategy—which in part mimics documentary styles but also includes self-referential, affective, and abstract images—makes truth claims at the same time that it rejects conventional documentary forms. Kraenzle's analysis...