Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading and Vulnerability by Eszter Szép (review)

Hungarian comics scholar Eszter Szép scores a home run with her first monograph, Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading and Vulnerability, a landmark work which expands upon and productively advances the "embodied turn" in comics studies. I daresay it is destined to become a canonical book, which draws on affect/reader response theory, gender studies, analysis of the drawn line and material culture for an extended, mostly persuasive case that nonfiction comics (on both the production and reception sides) operate through an oft-unacknowledged ethical framework of bodily vulnerability.

Szép has an active career as an author, instructor, curator, and popularizer of graphic narrative in a Central European country which—like some other former Soviet bloc states—has only recently and fitfully embraced comics culture in the Western sense. Szép co-organizes the annual International Comics Festival at Budapest, curated the first comics exhibition on the history of Hungarian comics in the National Széchényi Library in 2018, and co-edited Gendered Identities in Contemporary Literary and Visual Cultures (2018). She graduated from the Modern English and American Literature and Culture Doctoral Program at the Eötvös Loránd University Faculty of Humanities, Budapest, in 2018, and taught at the Milestone Institute, also in Budapest. Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading and Vulnerability is partly based on her dissertation.¹

In the book, Szép synthesizes concepts from Judith Butler (philosophy/ethics), Vivian Sobchak (phenomenology/Film Studies), Hillary Chute (trauma/graphic narrative), Suzanne Keen (empathy), and Aaron Kashtan (materiality), among others, to argue that comics studies has historically attended overmuch to the mind and not enough to the body. Yet there are always three bodies involved in the engagement with comics, she maintains: those of the drawer, the reader, and most provocatively the object (the comics work itself). The book's first line is in fact: "Reading comics is not only a performance of our cognitive skills, it is also a performance and interaction of bodies" (1, my emphasis). And as bodies, all bear a common fragility and mortality—in short, vulnerability. The book goes on to map out a framework "in which the embodied processes of drawing and the embodied processes of interpretation can be related in dialogical engagement" (4–5) through the common anchor of human vulnerability.

Turning to nonfiction works as the best evidence for her thesis, Szép highlights vulnerability as implicitly and explicitly articulated in the graphic narrative of Katie Green, Joe Sacco, Ken Dahl, Miriam Katin, and Lynda Barry. These artists, through often brutal self-presentations/examinations and/or explorations of real-world trauma, center the precarity at the core of what Gillian Whitlock calls "autographics." Building in particular on the work of Charles Hatfield, Elisabeth El Refaie, and others, Szép argues that "drawing one's avatar in comics is based on encounters with the Other within the self, and because of this, it is inseparable from experiencing and expressing vulnerability" (81). It's important to emphasize as well that Szép intends this approach as an alternative to identificatory models of comics consumption; she stresses the "fundamental nature of vulnerability" (10) as a precondition for a dialogical, ethical recognition of the Other (both within and without).

Such attention to the embodiment of comics-making/reading leads to a number of repercussions, which the author handily explores in case studies. Citing art historians like Simon Grennan and Philip Rawson, Szép maintains focus throughout on the central role played by the drawn line in graphic narrative, as both physical trace of the artist (what Jared Gardner calls "the hand") and as fabulously productive and performative agent of (re)creation. (Some of her insights resonate with those of Andrei Molotiu in his 2020 essay on cartooning in Comics Studies: A Guidebook, edited by Hatfield and Bart Beaty.) She follows Jennifer Higgie's conceptualization of Matisse's drawings as "thinking...