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  • Reanimating Historical Violence in Multi-Ethnic Graphic Narratives
  • Joo Ok Kim (bio)

The ongoing damage and renewed force of hurricanes impacting the Gulf regions of the United States and beyond resurrect the legacies of Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Katrina exposed the degree to which militarized humanitarianisms linked the “natural” disaster of the hurricane and US military violence in Iraq. In cultural production, scholarship, and social critique, Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War are historically linked by the US military’s humanitarian apparatus, which allocates disaster under the cover of disaster relief. Understanding both events through the fragmented representations of multi-ethnic graphic narratives allows readers of such works to unsettle and critically reassemble the memories of the hurricane and the war. In my examination of two multi-ethnic graphic narratives, Mario Acevedo and Alberto Dose’s Killing the Cobra: Chinatown Trollop (2010) and Mat Johnson and Simon Gane’s Dark Rain: A New Orleans Story (2010), I analyze how the recurring presence of Iraqi civilian murder by the US military entwines the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina. Acevedo and Dose, and Johnson and Gane, use the graphic genre to lay bare the liberal maintenance of transnational violence that undoes easy distinctions between “at home” and “abroad.” Indeed, both graphic narratives attend to fractures as form and content to structure the geohistorical dynamics of militarized duty in Iraq with foundational legacies of racism in the United States. How the graphic narratives frame the war—spatially fragmented, aggressively nonlinear—reanimates the intertwined cultural histories of Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War. The tension between narrative and visual exploitation, and the reality of reckoning with USauthorized civilian murders, illuminates the continuum of such violence. In their representations of mourning civilian deaths, and the convergence of humanitarian and military force in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, Killing the Cobra and Dark Rain graft the war-sanctioned violence against Iraqi civilians onto militarized registers of US domestic space, tracing the fractures of transnational humanitarian empire.

The textured and fragmented dynamic of visual and sonic storytelling in graphic narratives such as Killing the Cobra and Dark Rain offers a unique aspect [End Page 91] to historical narratives. They visually calibrate the scale of historical trauma, rendering the senses of war and disaster into ordered layouts while expanding our frameworks for glimpsing the fabulations characterizing the Iraq War. Theorizing historical fiction and the histories of genres, Shelley Streeby chronicles the shared material origins of comics, science fiction, and fantasy, finding that “The history of comics and the history of science fiction and fantasy are in many ways inseparable, since they emerged from the same world of sensational newspapers, dime novels, and pulp magazines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (“Reading” 151). As with dime novels, pulp magazines, and serialized stories, comics represent a cultural form that has historically been dismissed and marginalized in academic discourse. Yet graphic stories are important for historical fiction precisely because they constitute a popular medium with the capacity to invite all readers into complex engagements with historical trauma and violence. Martha J. Cutter and Cathy J. Schlund-Vials observe that multi-ethnic graphic novels “turn to the past not only or necessarily to create a new factual history but instead to ask readers to resist stabilizing the past’s meaning as a totalizing narrative,” thereby encouraging readers “to envision polyphonic, diverse, complicated narratives of history—versions of history that enable not only recitation of past trauma but also a reevaluation of what is at stake in the envisioning of history itself” (16). The force of graphic narrative thus emerges from its historical affiliation with popular genres, the shared emergence of comics with fantasy and science fiction, and the graphic medium’s distinctive formal capacities for destabilizing the linear compulsions of history.

Acevedo is perhaps best known to readers of speculative fiction and urban fantasy, and he enjoys a role in shaping contemporary Chicana/o science fiction. His Felix Gomez series started in 2006 with The Nymphos of Rocky Flats, later leading to Killing the Cobra as a graphic spin-off of that novel. Killing the Cobra narrates the adventures of Felix Gomez, a Chicano Iraq War veteran turned vampiredetective, who fights...

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