The Illustrated Animal

Antennae
Issue 16– Spring 2011
ISSN 1756-9575
The Illustrated Animal
Lisa Brown and Coleen Mondor– Animals in Space / Craig This – Ecofeminist Themes in The Facts in the Case of the
Departure of Miss Finch / Christine Marran – The Wolf-man Speaks / Marion Copeland – Pride of Baghdad / Sushmita
Chatterjee – The Political Animal and the Politics of 9/11/ Andy Yang – Animal Stories, Natural Histories & Creaturely
Wonders in Narrative Mini-Zines / Marion Copeland – Animal Centric Graphic Novels: An Annotated Bibliography
Antennae
The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Editor in Chief
Giovanni Aloi
Academic Board
Steve Baker
Ron Broglio
Matthew Brower
Eric Brown
Donna Haraway
Linda Kalof
Rosemarie McGoldrick
Rachel Poliquin
Annie Potts
Ken Rinaldo
Jessica Ullrich
Carol Gigliotti
Susan McHugh
Advisory Board
Bergit Arends
Rod Bennison
Claude d’Anthenaise
Lisa Brown
Rikke Hansen
Petra Lange-Berndt
Chris Hunter
Karen Knorr
Susan Nance
Andrea Roe
David Rothenberg
Nigel Rothfels
Angela Singer
Mark Wilson & Bryndís Snaebjornsdottir
Helen Bullard
Global Contributors
Sonja Britz
Tim Chamberlain
Lucy Davies
Amy Fletcher
Carolina Parra
Zoe Peled
Julien Salaud
Paul Thomas
Sabrina Tonutti
Johanna Willenfelt
Dina Popova
Christine Marran
Concepción Cortes
Copy Editor
Lisa Brown
Junior Copy Editor
Maia Wentrup
2
Front Cover Image: Brian K. Vaughan & Niko Henrichon, Pride of Baghdad, DC Comics, 2006, front cover, 2006 © Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon
EDITORIAL
ANTENNAE ISSUE 16
O
ne of the least discussed forms of animal representation is that presented in the Graphic Novel.
This issue of Antennae, guest edited by Lisa Brown, aims at setting the record straight providing
the most substantial look at this uncharted field thus far. Lisa has written about animals in
popular culture for a number of publications, and most notably regularly publishes animal news through
her blog, Animal Inventory (www.animalinventory.net). She was a co-producer of the web show Animal
Inventory TV that presented stories of the human-animal bond. She is on the Advisory Board for Antennae,
and is on the Board of Directors of the Nature in Legend and Story Society (Nilas). Her book review of the
graphic novel Laika was published in Society & Animals: The Journal of Human-Animal Studies in 2008.
Lisa’s perspective on animals was profiled in a 2007 Boston Globe article entitled, ‘Monkey in the Middle’.
She has lectured at a number of venues, including Tufts University, Bentley College, and the annual
conference of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (2007). In 2007, Lisa received her Master’s
in Animals and Public Policy at Tufts University. Her degree focused on animals in society, including
ethical, legal, cultural and political dimensions of human-animal relationships. Lisa’s long-lasting interest
in comics and the representation of animals in visual culture has been pivotal to the making of this issue
which she will introduce over the rest of this editorial.
LISA BROWN – An Introduction to The Illustrated Animal
the author thinks about animals. The author’s
latent beliefs, opinions and assumptions are
exposed in his or her comics, just like with any art
form. This provides fantastic insight into the
underlying beliefs of the author’s culture, as well.
Murray Edelman, the noted political
scientist, wrote about how art and pop culture
provide insight into everyday life, in his book From
Art to Politics: How Artistic Creations Shape
Political Conceptions (1995). Edelman says that
"part of the meaning of artistic talent is the ability
to sense feelings, ideas, and beliefs that are
widespread in society in some latent form,
perhaps as deep structures or perhaps as
unconscious feelings, and to objectify them in a
compelling way (p 52)." Essentially, everything
that people see and hear is constructed and
influenced by imagery, so art and ideas are an
ever-entwining, mutually informing collaboration.
In addition to personal interpretations of art,
cultures have a collective understanding of
images as well. This is what makes art an integral
part of political behavior, attitudes, virtues, vices,
Until recently, comics and graphic novels [1] had
a reputation as a vehicle solely for children’s
entertainment, which caused a general neglect
of academic interest in the medium. Not
surprisingly, the field of animal-studies has
suffered a similar fate for similar reasons; until
recently, cultural interest in animals (as opposed
to biological interest) was viewed as a childish
indulgence. Therefore, examining the role of
animals in comic books joins together two
undervalued topics that are ripe for further study.
Cultural beliefs about animals are revealed in
comics, and these beliefs both reflect and
influence the value and significance that are
applied to animals, the environment, the natural
world, and even other humans.
With rare exceptions real animals do
not use language, so the talking animals that
abundantly populate the comic world are
necessarily the construction of human authors.
Studying the dialog and imagery of animals in
comics might not exactly reveal what a real
animal thinks, but it does reveal a lot about what
3
Joann Sfar
The Rabbi's Cat, Pantheon Books, 2005, Page 7, © Dargaud and Joann Sfar
different types of people – an athlete is drawn
with a muscular body and confident posture; a
“wimp” is depicted wearing a bowtie and glasses
and an insecure facial expression; a thief is
rendered wearing dark clothes, a hat and
sunglasses,
with
his
shoulders
hunched
secretively.
Everything
from
clothing
to
landscape to mundane objects have the
potential to communicate an entire story,
providing that the artist is familiar with his
readership's standards of reference, and
assuming he can use this knowledge skillfully.
Like all other stereotypes, images of
animals are culturally coded and take on certain
prescribed characteristics – especially in comics:
the proud lion, the mischievous cat, the sly fox,
the wise owl, the dumb bear, the untrustworthy
snake. By using subtle animal imagery in
drawings of humans, comic artists can infuse
problems, solutions, hopes and fears.
Edelman says, “Works of art generate
ideas about leadership, bravery, cowardice,
altruism, dangers, authority, and fantasies... (p.
2)” Will Eisner, one of the most famous comic
artists of the 20th century, reflects on the graphic
presentation of similar characteristics in what he
calls “standards of reference.” Both authors are
referring to stereotypic imagery -- a coded
pictorial that enables an artist to quickly
communicate
certain
emotions,
feelings
attributes, traits or personality types to his
audience. Stereotyping is traditionally known as a
way to establish and reiterate prejudiced
attitudes, but it is actually a tool that can be used
constructively, as well. In his book Graphic
Storytelling, Eisner demonstrates how to use
stereotypes
to
succinctly
invoke
certain
professions, personalities and traits, by drawing
4
Will Eisner
Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, Poorhouse Press, Page 20, 1996 © Will Eisne
of its stereotypical role as “the
represented”, the objectified
other, fixed and distanced by
the controlling look of the
empowered
human,
and
instead exploiting the flexibility of
the narrative space to turn that
look back upon the humans,
rendering
them
other,
dismantling their secure sense of
a superior identity (Baker, 158).
their characters with deeper meaning without
ever having their characters say a word. This is a
kind of reverse anthropomorphism, in which
people take on the characteristics of animals.
These characteristics are rarely based on real
animal behaviour, so studying this reversal in
comics is a useful way to discover how a
particular culture views animals.
Outside of the human-animal studies
community, it is a common belief that
representations of animals tell the audience very
little about animals, and that the animals are
only used to clarify human relations, human
conflict and human issues (Baker, 2001). In other
words, why would someone depict an animal,
unless to say something about humans?
However, animals in art have a great deal to tell
us. Steve Baker, author of Picturing the Beast:
Animals, Identity and Representation, explains
that in part, an animal representation potentially,
With
several
notable
exceptions,
contemporary theory written about comics
largely ignores a human-animal studies
perspective on the serious question of the animal
in the theoretical and artistic dialog. When
theorists do speak specifically about the role of
animals in modern comics, they almost always
discuss Maus, by Art Spiegelman. While Maus is a
seminal work that changed the landscape of
comics, it is only one limited example of how
[s]hows the animal slipping out
5
grievances, and provide humans an arena to
hear what they might say.
animals are depicted in the medium. There are
many other comics that have a lot to say about
animals.
Some of the many comics and graphic
novels that have definitive perspectives on
animals are discussed in this issue of Antennae,
which may be the only volume of it’s kind – a
collection of essays and interviews that discuss
the role of animals in contemporary comics and
graphic novels. The first piece, an interview with
Nick Abadzis (Laika) and James Vining (First in
Space), examines the way that the artists chose
to tell two distinctive nonfiction stories about
animals
sent
into
space
during
the
American/Soviet
space
race.
Chris
This’
‘Ecofeminist Themes in The Facts in the Case of
the Departure of Miss Finch’ takes a close look at
the role of ecofeminism in Neil Gaiman’s Miss
Finch, a character who seems to have very
rigorous opinions about animals and nature.
Christine Marran delves into the work of two
important Japanese manga artists in her article
‘The Wolf-Man Speaks: Humans, Animals, and
Hybrids in the Graphic Novels of Tezuka Osamu
and Ishinomori Shotarô’ and examines how
Osamu and Shotaro tackle anthropocentrism
through
the
lens
of
cross-species
animaloid/humanoids.
Marion
Copeland
discusses the award-winning graphic novel Pride
of Baghdad with author Brian K. Vaughan and
artist Niko Henrichon to get to the heart of how
they created this historical/fictional/nonfictional
work. In ‘Art Spiegelman’s Political Animal and the
Politics of 9/11’ Sushmita Chatterjee looks at the
work of Art Speigelman with a new perspective
and examines his use of animality and the other
in his book In the Shadow of No Towers, within the
context of Maus. In his personal reflection essay
‘Animal Stories, Natural Histories, and Creaturely
Wonders of Narrative Mini-Zines, Andrew Yang
shares how animal-focused zines ‘can be viewed
as a new form of natural history. Finally, in the
issue’s last article, Marion Copeland compiles a
compelling and thorough bibliography of comics
and graphic novels that focus on animals in her
article ‘Animal-Centric Graphic Novels: An
Annotated Bibliography’.
Ultimately, comics and graphic novels are
a virtually untapped source of insight into cultural
paradigms about animals. In particular, comics
can address animals in a way that is unique by
providing an alternate perspective on how we
humans believe animals think and behave, and
also how we treat them as a result. By providing
other animals an outlet for their voices, artists
simultaneously allow them a forum to air their
Notes
[1] There is an unresolved debate within the comic academic community
about whether the terms comics and graphic novels mean the same thing, or
refer to different uses of the art form. However, for the purposes of clarity,
the terms comics and graphic novels are used here interchangeably.
References
Baker, S. (2001). Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Berger, J. (1992) About Looking. New York: Vintage Books.
Edelman, M. J. (1995). From Art to Politics: How Artistic Creations Shape
Political Conceptions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Eisner, W. (1996). Graphic Storytelling. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press.
McCloud, S. (1994). Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1st
HarperPerennial ed.) New York: HarperPerennial.
6
CONTENTS
ANTENNAE ISSUE 16
8 Animals in Space
Laika and First in Space are two distinctive graphic novels that cover some very similar content – they are both nonfiction stories about the use of animals in space
exploration. Each book is authored by a writer/artist who tackles the subject matter with a specific interest in animal issues. We thought an interview with both authors would
provide a unique perspective on the issues surrounding the use of animals in space programs, and the challenges the authors faced in documenting each animal’s journey.
With an introduction by C oleen Mondor.
Interview questions by L isa Brown
29 Ecofeminist Themes in The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch
Craig This discusses the main character in The Facts in the Departure of Miss Finch (Dark Horse, 2007) by Neil Gaiman. The essay focuses on the idea that "Ecofeminists
believe that women interact with the environment in a spiritual, nurturing and intuitive manner. As a result of women's close association with the environment, their
domination and oppression has occurred in conjunction with the domination and degradation of the environment" (Brownyn James, Is Ecofeminism Relevant, 1996).
Text by C raig This
35 The Wolf-man speaks
Tezuka Osamu (1928-1989), whose graphic novels (manga) abound with human, animal, and species-crossing characters battling in epics of grand scale, is relatively wellknown in the Western world. Tezuka’s rival artist throughout his career, Ishinomori Shotarô (1938-1998) (who as a high school student assisted Tezuka in his Astroboy),
however, is far less known, though he similarly involved humans, beasts, and species-hybrids in intergalactic, transhistorical dramas.1
Text by C hristine Marran
46 Pride of Baghdad
In the spring of 2003, a pride of lions escaped from the Baghdad Zoo during an American bombing raid. Lost and confused, hungry but finally free, the four lions roamed the
decimated streets of Baghdad in a desperate struggle for their lives. Writers Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon discuss how they recreated this story as a graphic novel.
Questions and text by M arion Copeland
55 The Political Animal and the Politics of 9/11
In this essay Sushmita Chatterjee examines Art Spiegelman’s animal-human cartoons drawn in response to 9/11. She begins by briefly introducing Spiegelman’s contribution to
the world of cartooning and his approach to cartoons as a medium of experimentation with genre-defying potential.
Text by S ushmita Chatterjee
73 Animal Stories, Natural Histories & Creaturely Wonders in Narrative Mini-Zines
The Small Science Collective, a collaboration of scientists, artists, students, and anyone else interested in science, is responsible for the production of the “infectious” zines that
employ the language of comics for the purpose of spreading scientific knowledge.
Text by A ndy Yang
82 Animal Centric Graphic Novels: An Annotated Bibliography
Since, like comic-strips, graphic novels so frequently include animals, simply listing those graphic novels in which animals appear would be of little or no value or use.
Innumerable lists of graphic novels already exist, including some that do list animal characters. But none focus on graphic novels that might best be called animal-centric,
graphic novels focused on the lives of realistically-drawn and motivated nonhuman animal protagonists and./or have major themes that rise from the lives and challenges
faced by these nonhumans in the actual worlds/habitats (domestic or wild) in which these animals live. Although those worlds are often controlled by and for the welfare of
human animals, the intent of the graphic artist and writer in such novels is to provide insight into the lives and concerns of individuals who are other-than-human animals and
present themes that provoke empathy and concern in human audiences for other-than-human beings, their well-being, rights, and survival.
Text by M arion Copeland
7
ANIMALS IN SPACE
Laika and First in Space are two distinctive graphic novels that cover some very similar content – they are both
nonfiction stories about the use of animals in space exploration. Each book is authored by a writer/artist who
tackles the subject matter with a specific interest in animal issues. We thought an interview with both authors
would provide a unique perspective on the issues surrounding the use of animals in space programs, and the
challenges the authors faced in documenting each animal’s journey. With an introduction by C oleen Mondor.
Interview questions by L isa Brown
I
t struck me as oddly coincidental that in the
span of a few months two publishers would
release graphic novels about animals in
space. Laika by Nick Abadzis tells the story of
the first dog to reach orbit, onboard the Soviet
spacecraft Sputnik II on November 7, 1957. In
First in Space, James Vining writes about Ham,
the chimpanzee who was the first hominid in
space in 1961, sent by the Americans. (The US
referred to him as “the first free creature in outer
space.”) Both novelists combine history and
fiction to show not only what happened to these
animals and why, but to also explore how the
people who worked with them felt about the
launches. I can’t overstate the power the artwork
has on the stories here; in both cases the animals
are drawn so expressively that readers can not
help but consider their feelings about the tasks
and projects they were part of. This of course
makes the stories that much harder to read; and
the endings a lot tougher to bear. These are not
happily ever after books.
In First in Space, Vining uses black and
white drawings to accompany his look at the
American primate space program. Readers
follow the adventures of Ham (officially called
“Chop Chop Chang” or “Subject 65”) as he learns
to perform certain tasks in the space capsule
and tested for his ability to withstand such things
as high G-forces and isolation. The chimps were
kept in individual kennels, and sometimes cages,
and Vining shows some of the air force enlisted
men who worked with them questioning if the
training “might make them go a little crazy.” He
draws some dream sequences that show the
chimps exhibiting violent or confused behavior,
which follows with what modern researchers have
learned about their need for community. The
book is most revealing when it focuses on the
humans as they struggle to weigh the dangers for
the chimps (one of whom dies in the book)
against the need to be successful as “the world is
watching us…we have to do this right the first
time.” That pressure to succeed propelled the
program relentlessly forward until Ham was
launched on January 31, 1961. He survived the
flight and in a particularly poignant exchange
afterwards, was assured by the airman who
served as his handler that “You’re a hero now,
buddy! You’ve done more in your life than most
folks ever will. And you’ll get a big welcome when
we get back to New Mexico! You wait and see…
life’s going to be a lot different from here on out.”
But that’s not the way things worked out for Ham,
just as there most certainly was not a reward for
Laika’s contribution to her country either.
In his epilogue to First in Space, Vining
shows that Ham was not allowed to retire with
ease after his flight and instead was kept alone
and on display at the National Zoo in Washington
DC for seventeen years. Only after animal
activists pressured the zoo to relocate him was he
sent to the North Carolina Zoo where he died in
1983 of natural causes, after finally being
allowed to live with some fellow chimps. The
saga of the other space chimps does not end
there however, as Vining points to a group called
Save the Chimps in the final pages of his book.
As it turns out, the USAF, who ran the chimp
program, decided in 1997 to discontinue it and
sell the chimps as authorized by Congress. With
primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall as one of its
board members, Save the Chimps formed and
submitted a bid to have the chimps retired to a
8
Nick Abadzis
Laika, Cover image, First Second, 2007 © the author
9
James Vining
First in Space, Cover image, Oni Press, 2007 © the author
10
design a way for Laika to return to earth; a
political gesture thus dooms her to death.
To provide an added dimension to their
relationship, Abadzis has Dubrovsky imagine the
dogs are talking to her. At one point she pets
Albina and Kozyavka, who have just returned
from a successful suborbital launch. As she
absently asks them what it is like in space, Albina
“responds” asking Dubrovsky to “let me out” and
“let me go.” These interactions are all the more
powerful due to the illustrations which show the
dogs looking at her with the trust she has
engendered and show the handler clearly
wavering in her resolve. Dubrovsky reminds the
dog (and herself) of duty and repeats to all of
them that she will take care of them. This of
course turns out to be the greatest lie of all; the
dogs would have done better to never trust their
handlers and instead do everything they could to
escape. No one was looking out for their best
interests, and ultimately, no one ever truly would.
I knew what was going to happen in
Laika, but Abadzis still makes it impossible to not
feel deeply for this little dog and the people who
care about her. Laika died in Sputnik II, just as
everyone involved in the project knew would
happen. The surprise is that she died so quickly
and suffered so much. The Soviets kept the truth
about her death a secret for decades but in
2002 revealed that she did not survive past seven
hours in the flight. In that time the biometric
readings revealed that she suffered a great deal
from heat and other trauma. It was a hard end to
a life that had been spent doing what others
wanted and particularly bitter as it only
happened to further illusory political goals and
not science. Her story is an amazing one, on
many levels, and the treatment it has received in
this book is absolutely stellar.
Both Laika and First in Space should be
required reading for anyone interested in the
history of the space program. I’m still thinking
about these animals long after finishing the
books. Their stories stay with you and both
novelists
have
appropriately
received
recognition for the impressive work they have
done here to share Ham and Laika’s stories with
readers everywhere.
sanctuary. Their bid was rejected and the chimps
were awarded to a medical research lab in New
Mexico. Save the Chimps filed a lawsuit against
the USAF citing the fact that this particular lab
was under investigation for violations of the
Animal Welfare Act. After a year-long battle the
chimps were awarded to Save the Chimps and
are now living in a sanctuary in South Florida.
(And ironically, the med lab went bankrupt and
Save the Chimps ended up with all the other 266
chimpanzees there as well.) Reading about
Ham’s sad years in the National Zoo was hard
enough, without finding out about what
happened to the chimps who followed him in the
program.
In Laika, his very detailed graphic novel of
the first living creature to orbit the earth, Nick
Abadzis has written a touching story that is
devastating in both its historical accuracy and
emotional punch. He starts in a surprising way,
with “Kudryavka,” who was found as a stray and
became part of the Russian space program.
Abadzis reinvents those unknown early years in
the dog’s life and the effect is that long before
the renamed Laika is placed in her capsule,
readers care deeply about this dog. Because of
this early section, comparisons to such animal
classics as Shiloh, The Incredible Journey and
dare I say it, Old Yeller, are spot on. But Abadzis’s
book is about far more than a loveable dog; it is
about why this dog was sent into space and what
that mission meant to so many different people.
Abadzis has a lot of space to work with in
Laika and he uses it to flesh out the personalities
of all those who took part in the dog’s life. Most
significantly he explores the motivations of the
Chief Designer, Sergei Korolev, a man who spent
time imprisoned in a Siberian gulag under Stalin
and had a great deal to prove on the Sputnik
project. Korolev is just the man who makes the
decisions, however. It is Yelena Dubrovsky, the
technician who dealt directly with all the space
dogs and Oleg Georgivitch Gazenko, one of the
leading scientists in the program who later
expressed regret for Laika’s fatal trip who are
really the focus of the story. (While Korolev and
Gazenko were real, Dubrovsky was not.) Each of
them comes to bond with the newly named
“Laika” and feel varying degrees of compassion
towards her and the other space dogs. At first
everyone in the program falls back on a
dedication to country and communism as
excuses for the difficult decisions involving the
animals. It is when the Sputnik II launch is fasttracked however, to coincide with the 40th
anniversary of the USSR, that several face crises of
conscience. The new timeline leaves no room to
Lisa Brown: Nick, how did you first learn
about the story of Laika, the first dog in
space?
Abadzis: I think I first heard the story of Laika
when I was a child. It always struck me as odd
and sad, that she’d been sent up and they
11
contact with the head librarian of the Russian
collection there and she was very kind in
translating a few morsels of information from
obscure old Russian technical books and
memoirs. I studied old newspapers and press
clippings from the period I was writing about; I
read voraciously and obtained many books on
the Internet and, indeed, much information from
archival material that’s freely available online.
At the Smithsonian Institute in Washington
DC, I unearthed some old videotaped interviews
with several Russian scientists who worked on the
Cosmodog program – they have a Video History
Archive there. These tapes were valuable as
snapshots of some of the personalities involved in
the early days of the Soviet space program. Not
only that, there was footage of the labs and
equipment the scientists used so it was very
useful from the standpoint of that kind of
authentic visual material.
I got in contact with several space
journalists and historians and probably became
something of an annoyance to them – they were
gracious indeed in answering my many
questions. It was important to me to get the facts
right and get the sequence of events straight as
much as possible. I wanted to make the book
accurate but more than that, I wanted to present
a viable world, a sense of how things might really
have unfolded.
To that end, I also visited Moscow. A kind
lady at the Museum of Cosmonautics managed
to get me an invitation to see around Korolev’s
house – he was the Chief Engineer of the Soviet
space program. It’s a private museum now,
preserved as he left it, so that was very helpful in
getting a sense of his personality. He was a
fascinating individual whose sheer force of will
was largely responsible for making the Soviet
space program happen with relatively few
resources.
Then I collated all the information I had
into a realistic timeline – a training program for
the dogs, how it came about, what the
command structures of the various institutions
were like that Korolev forced together to create
the nascent Russian space effort.
couldn’t get her down again. Why? I always
wanted to know the answer to that question.
Years later, I discovered that Laika was the only
living being sent up by any agency on Earth – of
hundreds, from all her fellow Russian dogs, from
apes, insects to human beings – without the
express intention of getting them down alive
again. She’s unique in that aspect.
In 2002, new information about her
death, about what really happened, came to
light when a top Russian scientist admitted that it
had all been rather more of an exercise in
propaganda than a scientific mission. That
piqued my interest in the subject again and I had
the idea of doing, maybe, a short strip. As I
slowly began to research the idea, it snowballed!
Jim, how did you first learn about Ham,
the first chimp in space?
Vining: I initially started out by thinking I’d do a
completely fictionalized story about a space
monkey. I had made a doodle of a chimp in an
astronaut suit and titled it “First in Space.” That’s
where it started. I started writing, felt like I needed
some research to help guide me, and stumbled
on Ham’s story, which as it turned out was much
more interesting than the fiction I was trying to
create.
You both clearly used extensive resources
to be as accurate as you could in the
telling of these stories. What resources
did you use, and what did you find the
most helpful?
Vining: The National Air and Space museum
had a really nice collection of some articles from
the time, which made it easier for me to track
down more info. George House at the Space
Hall of Fame museum in New Mexico gave me a
transcript of an interview he conducted with Ed
Dittmer [one of the chimp handlers, who was also
in charge of the program], which helped me
flesh out his character. I also found some video
clips that I tracked down to a documentary that
was done by David Cassidy called One Small
Step. I guess it was his thesis project. It was
invaluable for some of the visual researchshowing some of the training implements and
living conditions at Halloman [Aerospace
Medical Center].
Since these are largely stories about
animals, you each must have struggled
with what perspective to use and how to
structure the narrative. How did you find
an answer to this challenge?
Abadzis: I availed myself of many publicly
available records. At the time I created the first
draft of the book, I lived in London so I went to
the British Library and dug around; I was put in
Vining: It wasn’t much of a struggle really. I
knew it had to be mostly from Ham’s point of
view. Who doesn’t love chimpanzees? Honestly I
12
James Vining
First in Space, Oni Press, 2007, p.28 © the author
13
Nick Abadzis
Laika, First Second, 2007, p.132 © the author
14
making them relatable and giving their
experiences that human context. I also had
several chimps that had to look different, but I
didn’t want to make them too much like
animation/cartoon archetypes –a big one, a
skinny one, a fat one, a girl (with a bow or
something), etc. There are only a couple of
species of chimps, but as I recall the space
program only used one because of their size and
adaptability. Fortunately, chimps are something
like 90% human anyway, so I didn’t have to worry
too much about giving them human
characteristics. I tried to use the handlers much
as Nick did to comment on how I might have felt
in that situation, seeing these animals I cared
about being trained for this potentially fatal
mission.
should have spent a little more time with the
human angle, but I found it easier to
concentrate on Ham. He’s so relatable.
Abadzis: You always run the risk of
anthropomorphizing an animal character. I was
very careful about that: characters in the book
do this, but whenever any of the characters who
are dogs are seen on their own, I made sure that
they behaved like dogs, not people. As a culture,
we do tend to project our emotions upon
animals and it would’ve been very easy to Disnify
this story and make it very cute and engage
sympathy from the reader that way. I think that
would’ve been a cop-out and it would’ve meant
shying away from the central tenet of the story,
which is that this little dog got caught up in this
massive turning point in human history. I worked
very hard to show the events from a variety of
different standpoints, both human and canine.
To a certain extent, creating the human
characters, some of whom were based on real
people from history, was easier than creating the
characters of the various dogs who appear in the
book. I guess I drew on all the dogs I’ve ever
known but I as I mentioned previously, I was
determined not to anthropomorphize her too
much. Cartoonists have a tendency to make
cute little anthropomorphic characters based on
animals – we all do it, I do it – which can endow
them with the human qualities we might wish
they had. But real animals aren’t like that, they
don’t speak, and so we have to remember to
speak for them and in a responsible way.
Perhaps, speaking from a cultural perspective,
we need to anthropomorphize them less, or
create more stories and representations that try
to respect them as their own sorts of creature,
rather than indulge this tendency to humanize
them. I’m not saying we shouldn’t do that, just
that we should try other approaches too. It would
help with the way we think about animals as part
of human culture.
All that said, I did imagine what I might’ve
felt like if she happened to have been my dog,
which is where a lot of Yelena’s love for her came
from. You rely on instinct with that sort of
approach, and hope that your way of
communicating that sort of emotion works on the
printed page. Apparently, mine does. Creating
Yelena allowed me to have a more human
response to the fate of Laika at the center of the
story – I felt that was important.
You both used dream sequences to allow
the reader to get inside the head of
Laika. What did this allow you to do that
you could not accomplish in other parts
of the story?
Vining: I wanted it to be Ham’s story from his
point of view, so I thought the dream sequences
would help emphasize that angle as well as
playing around with what he might have been
feeling at the time in this strange situation. I also
felt like they were a nice visual break from all of
the clinical, historical stuff going on.
Abadzis: It allows you a viewpoint that might not
otherwise be allowable. It allows you to
understand how things might have been for the
dog and for the humans who were closely
connected with the dog. It can’t have been easy
for them and I wanted to show that. I nearly
always have a dream sequence in any story I tell
– we spend a third of our lives asleep; I’m
interested in that part of human experience!
Those sequences allowed me to connect the
canine characters with their human counterparts
more easily, too.
Did you write and draw with the intention
of deepening sympathy for animals who
are utilized in science, or was that a
theme that developed in the creation of
the story?
Abadzis: I tried to approach the story as a
whole with a sense of compassion. Of course,
that theme you mention was one I was very
much aware of, but I didn’t want to present it as
a point of view that would then unbalance the
whole narrative. I felt it was important to
Vining:xIxhadxsimilarxproblemsxanthropomorphi
-zing the chimps. You want to be true to the
experiences of the animals while
15
Nick Abadzis
Laika, First Second, 2007, p.51 © the author
16
James Vining
First in Space, Oni Press, 2007, p.39 © the author
17
with the focus of comics, how near or how far
you get to your subject but you have to be
mindful of what you might sacrifice if you lose all
your nuanced material, your precarious balance
between words and imagery. I like to keep things
simple – simple and direct with a strong
emotional subtext.
I think a lot of people overwrite comics –
usually people who think that making a graphic
novel is just putting somebody who can write
words together with someone who can draw
pictures. Comics aren’t illustrated texts – they
flow, they have pacing, currents and hidden
depths.
understand the historical context in which these
people operated, to try and understand that they
lived in a deeply oppressive society and that to
speak out of turn or publicly disagree with their
superiors meant risking disappearing in the
middle of the night and being shipped off to a
gulag. Essentially, I wanted to present as
unbiased an account as I could and allow the
themes of the story to speak for themselves.
Inevitably, the deeper themes of the story are
going to surface, because I as an author and
human being am interested in them. But to stand
in judgment of the people who were involved in
that space program wasn’t something I wanted
to do. After all, you can't choose where you're
born or in what political, religious or cultural
system you're brought up in. You make your own
decisions as you get older, but you can't help but
be formed by the environment and system
around you. The real challenge for anybody, for
any of the characters in this book, was to see
beyond that conditioning. In the book, as in real
history, some of those people did, some didn’t.
Vining: I absolutely agree with Nick. In school I
was told that if you can draw it, you should draw
it. I don’t read comics for large blocks of prose
describing what’s going on. I want to see visual
storytelling. That’s what makes comics unique.
Plus, my confidence in my writing skill tends to
push me towards finding ways to avoid coming
up with the precise words I need to tell the story.
Drawing is easier and much more fun.
Vining: I really want people to make their own
decision about that issue [of animals in science].
Obviously I have my own feelings, and I’m sure it
comes through. But the thing to remember is
that the men and women who trained these
animals truly cared about them. Ed Dittmer used
to take chimps home with him to play with his
kids. They lived and worked closely together, so
naturally they formed strong bonds. That’s what I
was really interested in showing.
What role do animals play in your
personal life, and how did that influence
how you told this story?
Vining: I’ve almost always had dogs growing up.
My wife and I just got our first dog in July. I feel
like there’s a lot more going on in an animal’s
head than we stupid humans can figure out. I
think any pet owner knows how that is. I figured
Ham would have a similar inner life.
How did you decide what should be
communicated with words, and what was
better expressed in images?
Abadzis: At this point in my life, I have no
animals around me at all. My family and I
recently moved to the USA from the UK, so before
we left even the fish tank we kept had to go No
pets allowed in our New York apartment. When I
was growing up though, as a family we owned
various species of mammals, reptiles and fish. It
was a zoo. The closest to a real world model for
“my” Laika was my brother’s dog Zippy, who is
sadly dead now. He was a very well-loved family
mutt. This might surprise some people, who might
assume on the basis of reading this book that I’m
an outright dog lover (I am, but I’m pretty keen
on animals generally) but I owned a cat as a
child who was very dear to me. He was a pretty
crazy animal, a common moggie [UK slang for a
mixed-breed cat], a brilliant idiot of an animal
who behaved more like a loyal dog – I still miss
him. I loved that cat.
Abadzis: Ha! I honestly don’t have a
straightforward, easy answer for that one. It’s the
fusion of the two that makes it work and it can be
a very subtle, nuanced balance. I’m forever
messing around with that balance as I create a
draft for any graphic novel or comic strip that I
do. Sometimes, it’s dictated by practicalities –
you just don’t want to put too much text on a
page because it crowds the eye, makes it
difficult to read. It’s primarily a visual medium,
and I’m a believer in paring everything back so
both the image and the words are reduced to
an expressive minimum. That way, there’s more
room for the reader to engage their own
imagination, to work in the gaps, in the guttering
between panels, in the turning of the page, to
create the illusion of time passing. You can play
When professors or colleagues ask me for
18
James Vining
First in Space, Oni Press, 2007, p.51 © the author
19
Nick Abadzis
Laika, First Second, 2007, p.52 © the author
20
recommendations on graphic novels that
focus on animal issues, I often suggest
that they and their students read Laika
and First in Space together.
Your graphic novels came out at about
the same time, so you hadn’t read each
other’s books before you wrote your own.
When you each read the other person’s
graphic novel, what did you admire
about the unique way he told such a
similar story? Did it help you see your own
graphic novel with new eyes?
give a better sense of closure to the story.
Without the flashback the ending felt a bit abrupt
and out of tune with the rest of the story, which is
more about the relationship between Ham and
his handlers.
Laika was published by ‘First Second
Books’. I’ve noticed that they seem to
have a particular affinity for publishing
graphic novels and comics about
animals. What was your experience with
‘First Second’ like, and do you remember
having any outright discussions with them
about the animal-centric nature of your
book?
Vining: Of course. Nick’s amazing - a great
writer who has such a light touch with his art. He
makes it all seem effortless. It made me feel
pretty inadequate when I compared the two
books! But it was nice a nice bit of serendipity
that they came out so close together.
Abadzis: Not really. Apart from some notes after
the first draft I submitted, First Second pretty
much left me alone. They know I’m both an
experienced storyteller and editor in my own right
– I have very particular views about what the role
of an editor is and how they should support an
author. I require any editor who works with me to
adhere to those rules. I engaged the support of
several friends who all work in publishing, all of
whom have editorial experience of some kind.
They gave me notes on the first draft of the book,
which were invaluable. There’s not a book in the
world that can’t be improved by the input of
some trusted advisors.
The fact that there are quite a few First
Second graphic novels concerning animals is
probably an underlying theme, an interest rather
than a conscious policy on their part. As far as
Laika is concerned, although the book is
ostensibly about the dog, it’s also a love story – a
love triangle between a man, a woman and a
dog. The death of the dog is at the centre of it
all, the inexorable historical center of gravity that
the characters are all heading towards. Perhaps
First Second have an interest in historical fiction as
a genre to explore in graphic novels; certainly
Laika falls into that category.
Abadzis: First In Space was actually published
by Oni Press shortly before Laika, I think. The first I
knew about it was after I’d finished my book when
Jim Vining contacted me and told me that we
had certain interests in common! He sent me a
copy of his book, which I was delighted to
receive. I think his book and mine make great
companion pieces, although we do have very
different approaches. In some ways, Jim had a
lot more information immediately available to
him as the US space program is very open about
its achievements and history whereas the Soviet
Union was very secretive and even now it’s
difficult to get ahold of records. I like Jim’s
storytelling and art style – it has that openhearted aspect to it necessary for telling what is,
mostly, an optimistic tale. I didn’t really have that
luxury as my central character dies at the end of
the book. I think my approach was that of a
detective, piecing together a patchwork, which
influenced the structure of the book in that I was
sometimes forced to find narrative solutions for
storytelling problems when there was no
information available. Jim’s approach might’ve
been more straightforward than mine in that all
factual info was readily to hand. Other than that,
I think we were both of a mind to tell a story
about vital turning points in history, and “firsts” who
haven’t really been celebrated as much as they
should’ve because they were animals. Although,
since 2007 and the 50th anniversary of Sputnik II,
the Russians have erected a dedicated statue to
Laika in Moscow. ‘Bout time.
Jim, what was your experience with ‘Oni
Press’ like, and did you have discussions
with them about the anim al-centric
nature of your book?
Oni is a great publisher to work with tremendously supportive and enthusiastic. They
cover a very wide range of genres. That’s why
they were one of the first I pitched it to. I saw that
they liked cartoony stuff and did historical fiction
stories.
Vining: Actually, I had initially ended the book
with Ham alone in his zoo cage in DC. My editor
recommended the little flashback at the end to
Have you heard from anyone who was
21
James Vining
First in Space, Oni Press, 2007, p.63 © the author
22
Nick Abadzis
Laika, First Second, 2007, p.155 © the author
23
intimately involved in your stories in real
life and what was their response to how
you portrayed them or the story in
general?
we [Americans] did everything comparatively in
the open, so I’m not sure how much actually got
out back then about what was going on. Ham
was very much a public figure. That had a lot to
do with how things were perceived on either side
at the time. I think part of the issue also has a lot
to do with time. If Ham had been allowed to die,
there would have been an uproar for sure. Fastforward twenty years, and Ham is forgotten for
the most part. He wasn’t on TV and in Life and
National Geographic as he was prior to his
launch.
Maybe the odd local news story on the
odd anniversary of his flight and on his passing.
Who got it worse? Who’s worse off -- the soldier
who dies in a war or the one that comes back
and can’t find a job and dies poor and alone
after years of being alone -- having been through
something no one other than a soldier can
understand? I think Ham was aware of what
happened to him -- or at least that it was
something “extraordinary” -- and it’s likely the
other chimps he came into contact with could
tell that as well. He apparently didn’t socialize
very well while he was in captivity in his later
years.
Abadzis: I did meet a guy at a lecture I did at
the National Air and Space Museum who’d
worked with Gazenko, the physician in charge of
the cosmodogs. He said I’d caught his former
colleague very well indeed. Other than that, I’ve
had no official response from anyone in the
former Soviet Union whatsoever. I did receive
several congratulations on the publication of the
book from several space historians and journalists
though, who complimented me on my attention
to detail.
Vining: I heard from Carol Gums. She is Ed
Dittmer’s daughter. She sent me an email and a
photo of Ham. She seemed to appreciate the
way I depicted her father - which was a huge
relief to me! I think she just wanted to say hi and
thanks for getting her father’s name out there.
She was super nice. There is extreme
contradiction in the way the stories of Laika and
Ham end. Laika dies in space, and the Russian
public – indeed the world – was outraged that
there was never a plan for her to return. Ham
returns safely to Earth, but lives his last days
abandoned and forgotten by the American
public in a zoo. There are many ways to look at
how and why humans responded to the fates of
these two animals in such categorically different
ways – Do you have any thoughts on why the
aftermath of these stories was so different?
Jim, what was it like to have to abandon
Ham to a zoo at the end your book, after
having travelled this story with him for so
long? Did you ever wish you could re-write
his story and give him a more fitting
ending?
Vining: Of course. To be fair, he spent his last
two years in a very nice sanctuary in North
Carolina. I didn’t include that bit because I
thought the 17 years spent in a habitat in a zoo
was a better representation of his later life. There
are several organizations out there that are still
working to place chimps that were used in testing
-- including the Air Force chimps and their
offspring -- into these sanctuaries, fortunately.
Abadzis: Tragedy gets attention…? The banality
of Ham’s final days, to be forgotten and moved
around like he was a possession, an object, is
very sad too – but it went unpublicized. Laika
died for what was, essentially a publicity stunt.
Ham was discarded – arguably, at least he was
cared for in a rudimentary sense. But he became
a curio in a zoo. I wonder what the thinking was –
he’d made this remarkable journey but then his
career as an experimental animal came to an
end, so he was sold or donated on. I think the
two endings actually have a lot in common, it’s
just that in one case, the animal was absolutely
stage center so her fate couldn’t be ignored.
Where Ham was concerned, it was reported that
he was down safe so everyone could breathe a
sigh of relief and turned their backs. After that, he
was just another chimp in a zoo, apart from a
plaque that said otherwise.
In the last pages of First in Space , you
promote an organization called ‘Save the
Chimps’ that provides a sanctuary for
chimps used in space and biomedical
research. What was the general response
you got for putting this in the book, and
did you know at the outset that you
wanted to include this?
Vining: I haven’t received any specific
comments, but I hope it brought them a little
extra money and some attention. I was very
glad they agreed to let me include them on this
Vining: The Soviets did everything in secret, while
24
James Vining
First in Space, Oni Press, 2007, p.69 © the author
25
Nick Abadzis
Laika, First Second, 2007, p.185 © the author
26
experimentation, then we just look the other way
most of the time (and I’ve been as guilty of that
in my time as anybody). All of this stuff needs to
be opened up and looked at, put on the table
and debated. That’s part of a much broader
human problem though, which is to do with the
way that we communicate, both with each other
and with our environment.
But getting back to Laika, I think the real
dog's story was probably a bit less colorful than
the way I portrayed it but certainly as banal.
Banal in the sense that fate conspired to put her
where she ended up, and nothing extraordinary
intervened. I saw stray dogs all over the place
when I was in Moscow, so not much has
changed. I guess, through the characters, I was
trying to put a sense of both the randomness of
life and its coincidences across.
As far as my work goes, I just have to
hope that the graphic novel I created allows
people to meditate and reflect upon some of
the questions thrown up by this particular episode
in history. Ultimately, it’s up to individuals to arrive
at their own opinion of what impact such
representations have; it’s my job to tell stories as
powerfully and honestly as I possibly can. And to
keep doing that, which I will.
project. I hadn’t planned on it initially, but I
thought it might be nice -- especially since one
of my resources was “One Small Step,” which
deals with the aftermath of the chimp program in
painful detail.
Vining: I haven’t received any specific
comments, but I hope it brought them a little
extra money and some attention. I was very
glad they agreed to let me include them on this
project. I hadn’t planned on it initially, but I
thought it might be nice -- especially since one
of my resources was “One Small Step,” which
deals with the aftermath of the chimp program in
painful detail.
And Nick, w hat was it like to have to kill
off Laika at the end your book? Did you
ever wish you could re-write her story and
give her the kind of life she deserved?
Abadzis: That was part of the impulse for
creating the book in the first place – some basic
desire to put things right, somehow. To give her
an escape hatch, a parachute, a way out. Of
course, if I was going to remain true to history, I
couldn’t possibly do that so in some ways, it was
quite a harrowing experience researching and
telling the story of her mission. They didn’t really
get much scientific data out of it. Laika was
deemed disposable – not perhaps by the
people who immediately cared for her, but
certainly by Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier who
was in the business of winning the Cold War
against the western bloc. He wasn’t going to
have many qualms about sacrificing the life of a
little dog. For all I know, he owned a dog of his
own, but he didn’t extend the same values to
Laika. She was expendable. I have to watch my
own cynicism here, because it’s easy to spin off
into how cheap life is from a human perspective.
Not much has changed: as a culture, we
Westerners purport to love animals – and we do,
but in a very normalized, particular and
deliberate niche. We don’t respect them much,
but then we have a problem respecting
ourselves and other human beings a lot of the
time. If animals are pets, it’s fine, we know how
we’re supposed to respond to them. If they’re
wild, we don’t seem to care as much, except in
a distanced, somewhat rarified manner, as if
they’re there for our entertainment on some
amusement park ride. I don’t think we really
comprehend on a deep cultural level what the
word “extinction” means and how many animal,
insect and plant species are on the verge of that.
If they’re animals bred for scientific
Finally, can you each tell me what you
are currently working on? More
specifically, any projects that have a
focus on animals?
Vining: I’m slowly working on a graphic novel
about Von Braun, the German rocket scientist. I
hadn’t planned on pursuing another spacethemed historical novel, but after stumbling on
the odd bits of info about Von Braun I couldn’t
resist. I was curious about how a man as brilliant
as Von Braun could get himself tangled up with
the Nazis in pursuit of his dream of achieving
space travel. It seemed like a good cautionary
tale about how a person- a scientist in particularcan loose their humanity in pursuit of a dream by
aligning themselves with evil forces. Which is
worse? Deliberately aligning oneself with evil or
accepting evil as a means to an end? Or maybe
not even recognizing the relevance or difference
between “good” and “evil” in service to one’s
dreams and one’s government? No animals
though!
Abadzis: I’m always working on more than one
project but this year I seem to be working on
about five at any one time! None of them involve
animals, however, although the one I’m drawing
27
at the moment does have a talking cigar in it.
Anthropomorphism is one of the cartoonist’s most
flexible tools, you see! I’m also working on a
graphic novel about the human urge to migrate,
about immigration and family, and another
project about the film composer Bernard
Herrmann. I’m sure I’ll get around to doing
another story involving animals at some point
though – I’ve got an idea about doing something
about tigers or fish, so we’ll see how that goes…
Nick Abadzis was born in Sweden to Greek and English parents
and was brought up in Switzerland and England. He is a writer and
artist who likes comics (which means these days he seems to be
known as a “graphic novelist”). His work for both adults and children
has been published in many countries across the world. He also
works as an editorial consultant and has helped set up several bestselling and innovative children’s magazines, including most recently,
The DFC for David Fickling Books, the first British children’s comic to
feature original characters in nearly a quarter of a century. His
storytelling contribution, Cora’s Breakfast, was featured in The
Guardian. His work has also appeared in The Times, The
Independent on Sunday, TimeOut, Radio Times and various other
BBC publications and websites. Other clients have included
Eaglemoss Publications, HarperCollins, Harcourt Education,
Scholastic, Orchard Books, DC Comics, Marvel Comics and
2000AD. He lives in London with his wife and daughter.
After graduating from art school in 2000, J ames Vining spent four
and a half years as a boatswain's mate in the US Coast Guard. After
his release from active duty, he spent the spring and summer of
2005 working on First in Space, his first self written published work.
He currently lives in Indianapolis where he is continuing his
education and researching his next project.
Both authors were interviewed exclusively for Antennae by Lisa
Brown in Autumn 2010 Antennae
The introduction by Coleen Mondor was originally published on
‘Book Sluts’ and is here reprinted with permission of the publishers.
28
ECOFEMINIST THEMES IN THE
FACTS IN THE CASE OF THE
DEPARTURE OF MISS FINCH
Craig This discusses the main character in The Facts in the Departure of Miss Finch (Dark Horse, 2007) by Neil
Gaiman. The essay focuses around on the idea that "Ecofeminists believe that women interact with the
environment in a spiritual, nurturing and intuitive manner. As a result of women's close association with the
environment, their domination and oppression has occurred in conjunction with the domination and degradation of
the environment" (Brownyn James, Is Ecofeminism Relevant, 1996).
Text by C raig This
E
nvironmentalist female comic book
characters are few and far between.
Those that do exist tend to be a mixed
bag. The 1940s Fiction House Comics’
Sheena, the Queen of the Jungle, a female
version of Tarzan, who despite being protective
of the jungle and the animals within, tended to
be more popular for her eroticism than her
environmentalism (Wright 73-75). Conversely,
botanist Pamela Isely, a.k.a Poison Ivy, the
villainess from DC Comics, champions “the
world’s diminishing fauna” through her actions as
an ecoterrorist (Beatty 272). Neither one of these
characters
presents
the
environmentalist
movement in a positive light. Miss Finch, the title
character in The Facts in the Case of the
Departure of Miss Finch, however, exhibits
attitudes and actions of an ecofeminist,
particularly vegetarianism, animal rights, and the
relationship of women with nature, that aid in the
understanding of this movement and its
relationship to society.
“Ecological feminism,” or ecofeminism,
does not solely focus on the issues of
vegetarianism, animal rights, and the relationship
of women with nature. Rather, ecofeminism
seeks “to link feminism, the study of women, and
women’s values, with the exploration of
environmental
issues”
(Mesina 1121).
Ecofeminism is a relatively new social and
political movement, at least, in terms of being
named. The term, ecological feminism, is
credited to Francoise d’Eubonne, who, in 1974,
used the term to describe women’s attempts “to
bring about an ecological revolution” (quoted in
Mesina 1122). However, because from its start,
ecofeminism did not have a “hard-letter scope
and definition,” over time a variety of issues—
sociological, political, racial, have been
attached to it” (Mesina 1120). Consequently,
ecofeminism has evolved to become an
“umbrella term which captures a variety of
multicultural perspectives within social systems of
domination
between
those
humans
in
subdominant or subordinate positions, particularly
women, and the domination of human nature”
(Warren 1). This diversity and plurality of issues has
become both a source of strength and weakness
for the movement.
While the relationship of
women to nature and the rights of animals are
generally agreed upon, vegetarianism is
controversial. Miss Finch portrays the tension of
these issues throughout The Facts in the Case of
the Departure of Miss Finch.
Briefly, The Facts in the Case of the
Departure of Miss Finch tells the tale of four
friends—Jonathan, Jane, an unnamed narrator,
and Miss Finch – who visit an underground circus
one dark and stormy night. Miss Finch initially
protests attending a circus because she does not
like to see animals harmed, but consents when
she is told that there are no animals. The circus,
29
Neil Gaiman, Michael Zulli, Todd Klein
Miss Finch, Cover image, Dark Horse, 2008, © the authors
30
entitled the Theatre of Night’s Dreaming, consists
of ten rooms filled with odd and eccentric
entertainments, or as the ringmaster announces:
Jonathan?
(Gaiman 10)
Miss Finch’s concern for the animals in this
passage supports the ecofeminist prohibition
against “the killing and conquering of animals ...
along with the consistent devaluation of animals
… [and ecofeminism views] animals as
individuals with their own rights, desires, and
independent existences” (Sturgeon 155). In
conferring rights upon animals, ecofeminists draw
their inspiration from 18th century philosopher
Jeremy Bentham who wrote in The Principles of
Morals and Legislation:
We shall travel from room to room—
and in each of these subterranean
caverns, another nightmare, another
delight, another display of wonder
awaits you!
Please-for your own safety—I
must reiterate this—do not leave the
spectating area on pain of doom,
bodily injury, and the loss of your
immortal soul (Gaiman 17) [1]
Along with some forty other people at the circus,
the four friends experience the “nightmares” and
“displays of wonders,” such as a blindfolded
Catholic Cardinal who throws knives at a scantily
clad woman; a dune buggy driven by a vampire
woman at full throttle; and a guillotine which
slices off the hands of spectators. As the quartet
passes through the exhibits, Miss Finch “is pulled
from the crowd despite her feeble protests” and
her friends do not find her until the ninth room,
where she appears as part of an exhibit (Wagner
384).
Miss Finch appears to be “a very dour,
very prim person” (Wagner 384). She is dressed
all in black—a black dress covered with a black
trench coat. She is wearing black boots and a
black beret over her long black hair, which is
pulled back into a ponytail. She also wears black
rimmed eyeglasses. When she speaks, the
ecofeminist themes of vegetarianism and animal
rights immediately emerge (Wagner 384):
The day may come when the rest of the
animal creation may acquire those
rights which never could have been
withholden from them but by the hand
of tyranny . . . a full-grown horse or dog
is beyond comparison a more rational,
as well as a more conversable animal,
than an infant of a day, or a week, or
even a month old. But suppose they
were otherwise, what would it avail? The
question is not, Can they reason? Nor,
Can they talk? But, Can they suffer
(quoted in Warren 78)?
Animal welfarist Peter Singer concludes:
Surely Bentham was right. If a being
suffers, there can be no moral
justification for refusing to take that
suffering into consideration, and,
indeed, to count it equally with the like
suffering (if rough comparisons can be
made) of any other being (Singer 52).
Jane: So we’re going to a circus,
and then we’re going to eat sushi.
M iss Finch:
circuses.
Miss Finch disapproves of circuses
because they devalue animals and cause
animals to suffer by holding them against their will
and forcing them to perform for human beings.
Miss Finch, along with other ecofeminists, believe
animals have the same rights as humans—life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
In
conferring rights upon animals, ecofeminists do
not so much raise animals to the status of
humans as they lower humans to the level of
animals, or rather to the level of nature. “In short,
a land ethic changes the role of Homo Sapiens
from conqueror of the land-community to plain
member and citizen of it” (Leopold 204). Or, as
ecofeminist Val Plumwood argued “humans
should recognize themselves as prey as well as
predator” (quoted in Sturgeon 154).
I do not approve of
Jane: There aren’t any animals in this
circus.
M iss Finch: Good.
Narrator thought box:
I was
beginning to understand why Jane
and Jonathan had wanted me along
. . . Jane told Miss Finch that I was a
writer, and told me that Miss Finch was
a biologist.
M iss Finch: A biogeologist actually.
Were you serious about eating sushi,
31
option of a vegetarian cuisine. The
economy of their food practices,
however, and their tradition of
“thanking” the deer for giving its life are
reflective of a serious, focused,
compassionate attitude toward the
“gift” of a meal (Curtin 75).
The belief that animals are equal to
humans and should not suffer or be killed
inevitably leads to the question of vegetarianism.
Yet, despite this inevitability, vegetarianism,
particularly moral vegetarianism, has been
controversial within ecofeminism.
Moral vegetarianism is the position that
we should eat a vegetarian diet
because it is morally the right thing to
do, rather than for health, economic, or
environmental reasons. The issue of
moral vegetarianism is controversial,
even among ecofeminists.
Some
ecofeminists
believe
that
moral
vegetarianism is a necessary condition
of any ecofeminist practice and
philosophy. Others are not so sure or
disagree (Warren 125).
Seeing the cultural context in which groups like
the Ihalmuit find themselves causes some
ecofeminists to argue that moral vegetarianism
need not be practiced everywhere by everyone.
These ecofeminists believe the call to end all
oppression trumps vegetarianism and thus
believe the “commitment to pluralism should
prevail over arguments for vegetarianism”
(Adams 195). In response, the moral vegetarian
ecofeminists raise questions of commitment to
and contradiction within the movement.
However, this plurality of voices, argues
ecofeminist Janet Biehl, should be celebrated.
She
agrees
that
ecofeminism
is
selfcontradictory, but the self-contradiction should
be a healthy sign of diversity (Biehl 3).
Miss Finch adds to this diversity and
contradiction when she announces that her
objection is not to eating meat, but her objection
to sushi is that she prefers to eat her food
cooked. She then proceeds to lecture the three
others about the “worms and parasites that lurk in
the flesh of fish, which are only killed by cooking”
(Gaiman 12). After all, as a biologist, she is
aware of the perils of eating uncooked food.
While Miss Finch’s companions are put
off by her ecofeminism, they admire her as a
biologist. In the fifth room of the circus, the four
friends stop for refreshments and while they enjoy
those refreshments, Miss Finch regales them with
tales of her studies of komodo dragons.
“Should feminists be vegetarians?” asks Carol J.
Adams (Adams 195). Read two different
ecofeminists and one will get two different
responses. Claudia Card responds, “Must we all,
then, be vegetarians, pacifist, drug-free,
opposed to competition, anti-hierarchical, in
favor of circles, committed to promiscuity with
women, and free of the parochialism of erotic
arousal” (Card 139)? While Joan Cocks argues
that “[t]he political strategies are non-violent, the
appropriate cuisine, vegetarian” (Cocks 223).
The controversy over vegetarianism
results from the ecofeminist desire to be pluralistic
and accepting of all peoples and all cultures. As
such, vegetarianism quickly gets entangled in
other issues, such as cultural differences,
individualism, social privilege, and the ethics of
care (Sturgeon 153). Deane Curtin sums up the
argument of individualism and ethics of care
succinctly:
M iss Finch: I’ve been in Komodo
studying the dragons. Do you know
why they grew so big?
Though I am committed to moral
vegetarianism, I cannot say that I would
never kill an animal for food. Would I
not kill an animal to provide for my son if
he were starving? Would I not generally
prefer the death of a bear to a loved
one (Curtin 75)?
Narrator: Er . . .
M iss Finch: They adapted to prey
upon the pygmy elephants.
Cultural differences and cultural contexts, in
which groups of people find themselves also
complicates
the
argument
for
moral
vegetarianism:
Narrator:
elephants?
There
were
pygmy
M iss Finch: Oh, yes. It’s basic island
biogeology. Animals will naturally tend
toward either gigantism or pygmyism.
There are equations you see …
Narrator thought box: This was much
The Ihalmuit [1], for example, whose
frigid domain makes the growing of
food impossible, do not have the
32
conclusion, Miss Finch gets to do just that.
While continuing to enjoy refreshments,
Jane asks, “What do you think of prehistoric
animals being alive today in secret, unknown to
science?” Miss Finch acknowledges there is no
“lost world,” but remarks that “I wish with all my
heart that there were some [smilodons—saber
tooths] left today!” (Gaiman 28-29). The
conversation ends and the four friends then
continue through the circus into the sixth room
where a man put several ferrets into his bathing
trunks. Miss Finch objects, “ I thought you said
there were no animals. How do you think those
poor ferrets felt about being stuffed into that
young man’s nether regions?” (Gaiman 30).
Again, the animal rights issue is raised, but the
group proceeds into the seventh room, where
they are exposed to a bare-breasted nun and a
bare-bottomed hunchback. As the group
proceeds into the eighth room, a mysterious
hand reaches out, grabs Miss Finch, and pulls her
into the darkness. Stunned, the remaining friends
move on to the ninth room where they come
face-to-face with Miss Finch, as part of an exhibit,
now within nature:
more fun than being lectured on sushi
flakes. As Miss Finch talked her face
became more animated and I found
myself warming to her as she explained
why and how some animals grew while
others shrank.
(Gaiman 27)
Miss Finch, at this point, does appear to take on
the double identity of a traditional comic book
superhero. Miss Finch’s ecofeminism is the
private, nerdy, geeky persona that people can’t
stand to be around—akin to Peter Parker, Clark
Kent, or Diana Prince—while Miss Finch, the
biogeologist and explorer of animals and foreign
lands, is the heroic superhero – akin to
Spiderman, Superman, or Wonder Woman.
Comic book superheroes keep the two identities
separate so that family and friends are never
endangered by villains and to prevent the
continual requests to use their superpowers over
and over again. Miss Finch does not have
superpowers to protect, but she does have two
personas—the woman who loves nature and
animals and desires to protect them, and the
woman who reasons and uses her mind to study
animals. To her, they are one in the same
person, but her friends see them as separate.
Ecofeminists agree that the world also sees these
two persons as separate:
Narrator: Slowly, the mist cleared
and we saw Miss Finch. I wondered to
this day where they got the costume.
What little there was of it fitted her
perfectly. She stared at us without
emotion. Then the great cats padded
into the clearing.
. . . the way in which women and nature
have been conceptualized historically
in the Western intellectual tradition has
resulted in devaluing whatever is
associated with women, emotion,
animals, nature, and the body, while
simultaneously elevating those things
associated with men, reason, humans,
culture, and the mind. One task of
feminism has been to expose these
dualisms and the ways in which
feminizing nature and naturalizing
women has served as justification for
the domination of women, animals,
and the earth (Gaard 5).
Jonathan:
they’re . . . .
My God, my God, look
Narrator: Yes, just as she described
them the smilodons.
(Gaiman 38-39)
Miss Finch now appears in nature, stripped of her
clothes and eyeglasses, wearing only a loincloth
and holding a spear. Her black hair, once in a
ponytail, is down. At this point, Miss Finch
resembles the main character in Marian Engel’s
Bear. In Bear, a woman leaves a city in Canada
to go live on an island with a bear, and in doing
so, “perhaps achieved that great romantic idea,
to be in harmony with nature” (Thompson 32).
Miss Finch, like that character, has become one
with nature. However, Miss Finch is given the
opportunity to show that “ecofeminists believe
that we cannot end the exploitation without
ending human oppression and vice versa”
(Birkeland 19).
It is this dualism, this separation of woman as
nature lover and woman as heroic person, that
ecofeminism seeks to combine into one person,
one character. The goal of ecofeminism, then, is
“to reject the nature/culture dualism of
patriarchal thought and locate animals and
humans
within
nature”
(Gaard
6).
To
ecofeminists,
“values
and
actions
are
inseparable: one cannot care without acting”
(Birkeland 19). And, as the story draws to a
33
Narrator: The stocky woman raised her
umbrella and waved it one of the great
cats.
[1] Ihalmuit are an Inuit people who live in the Barren Lands region of the
Northwest territories in Canada. The desolation of the region leads the
Ihalmuit to hunt and eat caribou (deer). more: John Hopkins, 2001.
Wom an: Keep back, you ugly brute!
[The smilodon growls at the woman]
References
Adams, Carol J. “The Feminist Traffic in Animals” in Ed. Greta Gaard.
Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1993.
Narrator: She [old stocky woman] went
pale, but she made no move to run.
Then it [smilodon] sprang . . . batting her
to the ground with one huge velvet paw!
It stood over her triumphantly and roared
so deeply that I could feel it in the pit of
my stomach.
The stocky woman
seemed to have passed out, which was, I
felt a mercy. With luck she would not
know when the blade-like fangs tore at
her old flesh like twin daggers . . . then
Miss Finch walked forward took the great
cat by the neck and pulled it back.
(Gaiman 41-42)
Beatty, Scott; Greenberger, Robert; Jiminez, Phil; and Wallace, Dan. The
DC Comics Encyclopedia. DK: New York, 2008.
Biehl, Janet. Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1991.
Birkeland, Janis. “”Ecofeminism: Linking Theory and Practice” in Ed. Greta
Gaard. Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1993.
Card, Claudia. “Pluralist Lesbian Separatism” in Lesbian Philosophies and
Cultures. Ed Jeffner Allen. Albany: State University of New York Press,
1990.
Cocks, Joan. The Oppositional Imagination. London: Routledge, 1989.
Curtin, Deane. “Toward an Ecological Ethic of Care” in Ecological Feminist
Philosophies. Ed. Karen J. Warren. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1996.
Gaard, Greta. “Living Interconnections with Animals and Nature” in Ed.
Greta Gaard. Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1993.
The stocky woman learns, as Plumwood wrote,
that human beings are the prey, as well as the
predator. However, Miss Finch, in her role as
ecofeminist, understands that the rights of the
human are the same as the smilodon—the
smilodon cannot kill the human and so Miss Finch
pulls it away. Miss Finch acts on the feminine
ethical system of responsibility and care, which
ecofeminists hope to use to their advantage in
their movement.
The story ends with the three remaining
friends leaving the circus without Miss Finch.
Someone asks if they should wait for her, but the
others shake their heads no. As they drive away
in the car, the narrator character hears “a tiger
somewhere close by, for there was a low roar
that made the whole world shake” (Gaiman 4951).
This final roar reminds the narrator of the
ecofeminist belief that humans are within nature
and a part of nature. The interaction with Miss
Finch and her views of animal rights and her life
within nature has impressed upon the narrator his
place in the environment, for he does not just
hear a tiger roar, but rather hears a tiger roar that
makes the whole world shake. He leaves with a
better understanding of his place in nature. He
leaves with a respect for animals in nature, which
is what ecofeminists hope to achieve and it is
these themes that are played out in The Facts in
the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch.
Gaiman, Neil; Zulli, Michael; and Klein, Todd. The Facts in the Case of the
Departure of Miss Finch. Milwaukee: Dark Horse, 2008.
Leopold, Aldo. “The Land Ethic” in A Sand County Almanac and Sketches
Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Mesina, Rita Marie L. “A Take on Ecofeminism: Putting an Emphasis on
the Relationship between Women and the Environment.” The Ateno Law
Journal. 53, 2009: 1120-1146.
Singer, Peter. “Animal Liberation” in People, Penguins, and Plastic Trees:
Basic Issues in Environmental Ethics. Ed. Christine Pierce and Donald
VanDeVeer. Belmont: Wadsworth, 1995.
Sturgeon, Noel. “Considering Animals: Kheel’s Nature Ethics and Animal
Debates in Ecofeminism.” Ethics & The Environment. 14(2), 2009: 153-162.
Thompson, Kent. Rev. of Bear by Marian Engel. Axiom. 2.5, 1976: 32-33.
Wagner, Hank; Golden, Christopher; and Bissette, Stephen R. Prince of
Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman. New York: St. Martin’s, 2008.
Warren, Karen J. Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It
Is and Why It Matters. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2000.
Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth
Culture in America. Balti
Craig This was born in Ohio and still lives there. He earned a
Bachelor of Arts and Masters of Arts in History at Wright State
University (Dayton, Ohio). He teaches popular culture at Sinclair
Community College, which includes a course on Comic Books and
American Culture. In 2010, he partnered with a local literacy
organization, Project Read, to create the Project Read Comic Book
Literacy Project to promote literacy to pre-teens and teens through
reading comic books.
34
THE WOLF-MAN SPEAKS
Tezuka Osamu (1928-1989), whose graphic novels (manga) abound with human, animal, and species-crossing
characters battling in epics of grand scale, is relatively well-known in the Western world. Tezuka’s rival artist
throughout his career, Ishinomori Shotarô (1938-1998) (who as a high school student assisted Tezuka in his
Astroboy), however, is far less known, though he similarly involved humans, beasts, and species-hybrids in
intergalactic, transhistorical dramas.1
Text by C hristine Marran
T
Yomota suggests that Tezuka’s characters can
only learn the truth about the world through a
nonhuman other, even while a human-centered
order is consistently asserted as inevitable.
Recently, another Japanese media
scholar Thomas Lamarre has written about the
role of the playful animal other in Tezuka
suggesting that his work, like wartime animation,
offers scenarios of multi-speciesism in which the
interaction of species predominates, but tends to
end in a failure of a multispeciesies, cooperative
world:
ezuka Osamu and Ishinomori Shotarô might
easily be considered the two most prolific
graphic novelists in Japanese manga
history, so this essay tackles only one
primary aspect of Tezuka and Ishinomori’s
works: the ways in which animaloid and crossspecies bodies speak to the problem of human
narcissism and enlightenment civilization. In both
authors’ works, characters who are liminal—
neither completely animaloid nor humanoid—
are the ciphers for a critique of the
anthropocentric tendencies of human civilization.
Yet they part ways when it comes to articulating
the relation between humans and animals.
My interest in the nonhuman in Tezuka was
piqued by the following statement by prolific
media scholar Yomota Inuhiko who remarked:
[T]aken as a whole,
Japanese wartime animations
take the trope of companion
species to its logical limit, which is
especially
evident
in
the
Momotaro animated films with its
emphasis on Japanese animals
befriending of local animals of
other environments. Simply put,
Japanese wartime speciesism
headed toward “multispeciesism,”
which we might think of as a
specific form of multiculturalism
related to the Japanese effort to
envision a multi-ethnic empire. . .
Tezuka
continually
tries
to
separate multispeciesism (the
ideal of multi-ethnic empire) from
war, yet his manga tend to dwell
Why is it that nonhumans always
have to become the object of
exclusion in Tezuka’s works? Or, to put
it differently, why is it that humans
cannot maintain even their basic
sense of humanity without being
continuously designated as such by
others? Why is it that the moment this
act of designation ceases, humans
always lapse into uncontrollable
anxiety and eventually chaos? . . .
My nagging sense of discomfort with
Tezuka derives from what this contrast
serves to highlight, the obsessiveness
with which Tezuka continues to
reestablish human order even as he
attempts to relativize it.[ii]
35
Tezuka Osamu
Ode to Kirihito, Vertigo, 2006, © the author
categories of “human” or “animal.” It is not just
that multiple species cannot survive together, but
that any kind of cross-species or nonhuman
figure will face prejudice. The very title of a work
that features a persistently persecuted half manhalf dog character includes the term “sanka”
meaning “lament,” “eulogy,” or “ode.” The Ode
to Kirihito (Kirihito sanka, serialized 1970-1971)
features dog-faced man, once a purely
humanoid young doctor, who, in his efforts to
cure a strange disease that deforms its victims so
that they look like dog-humanoids is never able
to overcome the discrimination he faces upon
becoming infected with the disease himself.
Confronting such prejudice, Kirihito can only
on failure not success, and the
multispecies kingdom is usually
destroyed. Likewise those nonhuman creatures who strive for
cooperation across species tend
to die tragically.[iii]
Lamarre sees in Tezuka’s work a struggle between
a human-centric world in which human desires
and values prevail and a multispeciesist ideal in
which different species, humans and animals
can build harmonious societies.
Tezuka’s works not only lament the
impossibility of a multispeciesist world but the
impossibility of living beyond the simple
36
Tezuka Osamu
Ode to kirihito Vertigo, 2006, © the author
37
physical difference will mean his exile to a
perpetual liminal state.
Two volumes of Tezuka’s magnum opus,
Phoenix, feature another dog-faced man. At the
start of the volume “Sun, part 1,” a young man
caught on the battlefield of the Chinese enemy
in the 7th century has the skin carved from his
face by enemy soldiers who then place a
skinned wolf’s head on his own. The wolf’s head
grows quickly to become permanently attached
to his skin. The young man is not able to remove
the face pelt and must live as a half-human,
half-dog figure on the margins of human world.
This multiply-named cross-species character,
originally from the Korean Kingdom of Baekje
and member of the defeated clan Buyeo Pung,
is forced to flee to the island Yamato after his
defeat on the continent. While “Inugami” (DogGod), is able to find a position in Japan through
his
sympathetic
rescue
of
a
Yamato
commander, he remains an outsider not merely
for his rejection of political and religious
orthodoxy, but for his face.
Inugami has as his attendant an old
woman from Baekje with healing powers who
insists that he accept the “tides of history” and
direct his people away from faith in native gods
(who appears as animal-human crossbreeds)
toward Buddhism, as his lord dictates. She insists,
too, that he give up his love of a female wolf
Marimo for the human world, continually insisting
that he is not an animal. Inugami refuses to
choose humanity and cries out his love for the
dog-spirit Marimo. In this forlorn cry, he cries out
not just for a wolf, but a community of shapeshifters—forest spirits capable of metamorphosis
either by adopting a fully animal form or of
transforming themselves into a hybridinal, pointyeared humanoid. The jealous old woman finally
demands, “You must choose . . . Between me or
the female wolf!! And if you choose her, I will
have nothing to do with you from this day on!”
The jealous maternal figure’s passion drives her to
enforce a rigid distinction between animals and
humans. While Inugami accepts the shapeshifters as his rational equal, he is not averse to
sacrificing animals to protect the human villagers
under his watch. Lord Inugami puts oxen in the
front line in a battle against the enemy forces by
tying oxen to spiked logs to drive them toward
the enemies with swords and arrows. Inugami,
even as he ties up the oxen still believes that
“sure, we humans should be able to stop this
Buddhist invasion through rational discussion,” to
which Tsufu, leader of the Tengu goblins of Mt.
Ibuki replies, “Lord Inugami . . . I must tell you that
there is no longer any hope of that
lament his in-between state of being neither fully
man nor animal. His animal shell means that his
interior reason cannot be heard and he cries out
when enslaved into a freak show, “How cruel of
them to use such learned men in their freak
show! . . . I am a human being!” The doctor, who
sets out to prove the disease is not a virus passed
among non-whites as the global medical rumor
has it goes to Inugamizawa or Dog-God Marsh in
the mountains of Tokushima prefecture. (The later
appearance of a dog-faced nun who was
originally caucasian further confounds attempts
to explain the disease as a virus of non-whites.)
Kirihito eventually learns that other victims of the
disease are people who work within mines who
have been similarly exposed to toxic water that is
released with the mine during its excavation and
those who drink that water. The image of
huddled dog-faced men from an African mine is
similarly a visual lamentation at the racism that
would racialize the disease. Tezuka’s graphic
novel treats Kirihito’s metamorphosis as a tragedy
perpetrated by an anthropocentric society that is
so overwhelmed by the visual evidence of
difference, species-wise or racially.
The curious “twist” that Tezuka gives the
story is the insistent, unsympathetic perspective of
Kirihito toward animals. Even Kirihito’s capacity to
exercise reason in order to prove that the
Monmow disease is not a virus does little to
improve his state in the world and this resentment
increases his insistence on his distance from the
animal world even as he violently craves meat.
The animal-man comes to hate his urges. His
hope for a better situation, to return to his life as a
human doctor, emerges out of a lack of respect
for inferior bodies. Yet while Ode to Kirihito
laments the barbarism of humanity, it champions
the core of humanism—enlightenment reason—
as the only way out of speciesist and racial
prejudice. And yet this rationalism cannot
produce a solution for Kirihito who is only ever an
outcast, and eventually leaves his homeland to
work. Adorno and Horkheimer articulate the
fallibility of reason in their critique of
enlightenment thought: “The infinite patience, the
tender, never-extinguished impulse of creaturely
life toward expression and light, which seems to
soften and pacify within itself the violence of
creative evolution, does not, like the rational
philosophies of history, prescribe a certain praxis
as beneficial, not even that of nonresistance. The
light of reason, which dawned in that impulse
and is reflected in the recollecting thought of
human beings, falls, even on the happiest day,
on its irresolvable contradiction: the calamity
which reason alone cannot avert.”[iv] Kirihito’s
38
Ishimori
Dai-Zenshu, Nan nan da! Nan nan da!, 2007, p.88 © the author
39
with others or at least beginning to invent new
ways, or re-imagining old ways, of being in
relationship with others. These becomings are
fueled by a desire for proximity and sharing, to
engage with the other, to be “copresent” with the
other in a zone of closeness. Becoming-animal
frees humans from dichotomous relationships in
which the human dominates. It also inhibits the
reduction of the world to dualisms, such as the
“human” and the “animal,” “culture” and “nature”
and so on. The concept of becoming-animal is a
readiness, a desire, a want, to be guided toward
a different mode of being.
But Tezuka’s works suggest only the
tragedy that the animal and the hybridinal being
have no place, perhaps not unlike Kafka’s
characters in a state of becoming, Samson and
Red Peter. In order to escape prison, Inugami
must completely return to the species-bound
behavior. He must run on all fours and
“impersonate” a dog to escape the royal
grounds. Later when Inugami confronts a pack of
wolves in the forest he must stand on two legs to
“impersonate” a human to avoid the pack. He
must switch back and forth in his species
behavior as he does with language. His
hybridinal body, his bilinguality, have no place in
his world.
The medium of the graphic novel is
particularly suited to address species-crossing
and posthumanist ideas. Graphic novels, for their
lack of a need to retain a mimetic aesthetic, can
visually generate a sense of corporeal possibility.
As
Thomas
Lamarre
has
shown,
the
“plasmaticity,” as he calls it, of the animaloid in
anime enables the animal character to oscillate
between humanoid and animal being. A similar
claim for manga can be made. A semiotics of
comics should be based in an understanding of
this plasticity. And this plasticity can enable a
visual and narrative rendering of “becominganimal.” Put differently, the plasticity of the
medium proves a convenient medium for
putting in question anthropocentric aesthetics,
which, it could be argued, require a greater
degree of mimicry and mimesis. Manga’s
plasticity pushes toward a non-anthropocentric
aesthetics.
The irony in Tezuka’s works is that even
while he creates highly plastic characters who
become animal and a visual resemblance
among the humans and nonhumans in terms of
scale and line, that co-presence of human and
animal is continually interrupted by assertions of
absolute difference. Enlightenment reason
becomes the source of anthropocentric pride.
The doctor and his rational mind still remain at
happening.”[v]
The human in Tezuka alternately hangs
upon reason or devolves into irrational insistence
on absolute species difference. Modernity has
brought reason but with it also barbarity toward
non-familiar others. Kirihito and Inugami’s
experiences in the world are marked by continual
otherness that divests them of any power to be
equal among humans. Curiously, Inugami, is not
only animal (not human) and deity (not human),
but also a foreigner in Yamato. His conversation
with the princess suggests that he has an accent.
She coyly remarks, “In the language you use, I
sense something sophisticated, even elegant.”
This bilingual Inugami rejects his lord’s insistence
on Buddhism as the only true religion. He wants
his people to be able to choose between native
religion of animal and monster-gods and
Buddhism, or both. Inugami, in other words,
enacts hybrid crossings on a number of levels.
He embodies species-crossing in his very skin, he
is bilingual, he lies with an ethnically other human
of the opposite sex and rejects religious
orthodoxy. In many ways he embodies the act
of the Deleuze and Guattarian “becominganimal” in its most abstract sense. Deleuze and
Guattari’s concept of “becoming-animal” for
many of its readers has meant neither sustaining
a distinction between the human and animal nor
metamorphosing into an animal in identification
with it. Becoming-animal suggests instead an
overcoming of models of identification and
desire that are based in an assumption of shared
modes of reason, language and subjectivity as a
human subject. It is offered as a conceptual way
of thinking ourselves beyond the seemingly
impassable division between humans and
animals. Through becoming, the human joins
with the animal in a zone of proximity that
dissolves the identities and the boundaries set up
between them. This process disturbs and disrupts
usual ontological categories. In becominganimal, new ways of relating to one another
proliferate and these creations are created by
the shared event of becoming itself.
In “becoming-animal,” the human will be
significantly altered by this exchange with the
other animal and in the process will move out of
a position of dominance. Becoming-animal is
not a fantasy of becoming anything in particular,
but rather entering into an alliance with another
entity: “We fall into a false alternative if we say
that you either imitate or you are. What is real is
the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not
the supposedly fixed terms through which that
which becomes passes.”[vi] Becoming-animal is
a way of living differently, identifying differently
40
“blacks” from the “yellow” (who are “yapoo”
slaves). The memory and with it the history of
each yapoo is erased through surgical
procedure. Science and technology are no
place of refuge as in Tezuka. Rather they are the
tools of this speciesist, racist, and sexist society
that requires the erasure of the memories its own
use. The memory must be erased to create the
subordinate body. Fascism requires this erasure
and the technology to do it. As Adorno and
Horkheimer have suggested, “the perennial
dominion over nature, medical and nonmedical
technology, . . . would be made possible only by
oblivion.”[ix] The yapoo without his own history is
the bearer of the rejected corporeal who is also
the bearer for the labor and pleasure of the
Empire.
A more humorous approach to the
serious problem of anthropocentrism that would
make slaves of beasts is found in Ishinomori’s
“Future Shock” when the protagonist’s future self
emerges from a closet to help the young man
find a girlfriend. His future self suggests a humanfish. The student imagines a beautiful doe-eyed
mermaid. What he gets instead is a talkative and
smart dolphin. When he is woefully disappointed,
the future self remarks on how much smarter the
dolphin is, how dolphins and humans are likely to
become fast friends in the future. When the
student resists the future self’s remarks on the
brilliance of dolphins, the future self attacks the
barbarity of humans: “Don’t you so haughtily
claim that you don’t want an animal. Humans
are animals! From her [the dolphin’s] point of
view humans are the most barbaric, violent and
ugly, low-grade . . . she actually didn’t want to
meet you and I put her up to it. Disgusting. One
can’t date a primitive!” The manga closes with
the student believing that a dog on the street
looks at him with disgust.[x] In this case, to be an
animal is in no sense a pejorative.
In a number of manga, Ishinomori
lampoons the evolutionary scale that places
man at the peak of evolution. In a two-page
drawing, Ishinomori presents “Evolution” (Shinka).
The evolution of man from ape is turns to
devolution when military weaponry is introduced.
The next stage of man’s “development” then is to
slobbering monster. Advanced technology has
taken man to monster. This single drawing is not
unrelated to his Beast Yapoo series in which the
Aryan matriarchy uses its advanced technology
to form a racist, speciesist, and highly sexually
perverse society.
As part of his rewriting of the “place” of
the human and animal, in contradistinction to
Tezuka Osamu, Ishinomori rewrites, parodically
the seat of truth. It is because humans act “like
animals” that they cause war and death on epic
scales. Kirihito may have been a hybrid figure,
but the real tragedy is that his excellent brain is
trapped in an animal body. Tezuka’s critique of
humanity then is a perpetual lament for the
exuberant humanity that can never reach its true
potential except in the rare case of a reasonable
man, who may even yet have uncontrollable
urges “like a dog.” The animal is still the
passionate and the irrational in a familiar myth of
enlightenment thinking.[vii]
The work of Ishinomori Shotarô seems to
take greater advantage of the plasticity of
manga and promises an overcoming of
enlightenment reason. It should first be stated,
however, that in comparison to Tezuka Osamu,
Ishinomori’s oeuvre exhibits a tremendous
diversity of visual style and narrative approach.
Some are epic histories (the History of Japan
series), some social satire (the Beast Yapoo
series), or entertaining environmental and
economic primers, or SF super hero stories (the
Masked Rider series) of insect-men. For such a
range and volume (Ishinomori holds the Guinness
Book of World Records for most comic book
pages published), it can still be argued that one
mainstay of Ishinomori’s texts is a critique of
enlightenment thinking that either produces
animal as inevitable tragic victim or the rational
human as rightly dominant.
Ishinomori’s
Swiftian
Beast
Yapoo
(Kachikujin yapoo, 1983-4) is a complicated story
about a white matriarchal galaxy called Empire
of a Hundred Suns (EHS) based on a 1950s cult
novel of the same name by Numa Shôzô. The
EHS is an Empire run on human and hybridinal
beast slave labor.[viii] The Empire raises “yellow
men” in a “Yapoonarium” calling them “simian
sapiens” in order to deny their human status in
order to more easily make of them property and
slaves to women. The surgically animalized and
mechanized body is dedicated to serving his
sadistic mistress, but he does not initially willingly
submit. He must be surgically altered,
brainwashed, and trained to perform submission.
He is trained to masochistically wish for
domination and to be able to read the desires of
his mistress. It is precisely the addition of the
“brain-washing” aspect of the narrative, the need
for surgical intervention to produce such a
hierarchy that enables a profound and explicit
critique of human dominion and narcissism. The
naming of the Japanese male body as “simian
sapien” links racism and speciesism. The Aryan
women separate whites from “blacks” (who are
humanoid workers in this SF novel) and the
41
Ishimori
Dai-Zenshu, Shiawase-kun, 2008, p.44-45 © the author
and miniaturizing the human or magnifying the
insect, bodies are exempt from predictable
gradations, in scale and value.
Ishinomori’s wide array of graphic
novels consistently pursue the notion of scalar
adjustment. His humans are smaller than toads,
his cicada bigger than boys. Not unlike Swift,
whom he parodies in Beast Yapoo, Ishinomori
combines the miniature and the gigantic. As
Monique Allewaert has shown in her work on
William Bartram’s plant life, when a nonanalogous scale is introduced, it becomes
impossible to measure the natural world through
the scale of the human body. Relation must be
considered outside of common measure. Wholly
outside of the analogical scene, the figure of the
naturalized human is largely, “which demands a
thinking of relation outside of measure.”[xii]
In addition to bringing the details of the
insect’s back and wings into crisp view while the
human remains a tiny shadowy presence of pure
pleasure and with almost no earthly significance,
Ishinomori also developed narratives of human /
and otherwise, scale. In another drawing as part
of his many surreal short manga, a single page
contains an enormous insect and tiny human
with a poem that reads, “Youth / It was the
summer of a moment / It shone so brightly
because [I] had no dreams,” Jun, Traveler of
Youth.[xi] In the place of no dreams—no future,
and of this moment which has no history, the
scale of animal to human, or insect to human
changes. The cicada looms and the human
waxing poetically is reduced to a happy speck.
About one of his most popular series, Masked
Rider (Kamen Raida-,), which features cross
species battling insect-humanoids Ishinomori
wrote, “I created Masked Rider to wave the flag
of revolution against the powerful civilization that
destroys the great Nature (dai shizen). . . ” This
series became a television show, and Ishinomori
admitted to taking the easy route and allowing
the power of television civilization to take over the
story, but at least in its originary form, the insect
need not remain mimetically identical to its
current scale. In skipping scales
42
Ishimori
Dai-Zenshu, Nan nan da! Nan nan da!, 2007, p.114 © the author
43
Ishimori
Dai-Zenshu, Kimyo-na yujin-tachi, 2008, p.178 © the author
The animal is drawn differently, with more
sophistication and mimetic sensibility while the
human seems cartoonish in contrast. The
mimetically drawn animal body brings attention
to the nonhumans as both to be included within
the frame of plant, animal, and human bios, but
as they are, in their plenitude. And the plasticity
of the humanoid means it can change. It can
change to have more affinity to the animal, while
the animal must remain, can remain, (should
remain?) in its own state. This is not to say that
Ishinomori does not have highly plastic animal
figures. He does in his voluminous oeuvre. The
point is that in many of his manga in which the
relations of human to animal are at stake,
Ishinomori draws the animal mimetically while
retaining the plasticity of the human figure. This
suggests an ethics in his drawing. The natural
world is to be reproduced in its fine detail with
little perversion of the line. In the environmentalist
conclusions to his economic primers, he rejects
the anthropomorphizing line in drawing and in
doing so he rejects anthropomorphizing the
animal suggesting the inherent charm of the
thing itself in all its susceptibility.
The animals and humans are drawn
qualitatively differently and while this might
animal resemblance. In 1977 and 1978,
Ishinomori published a series called Strange
Friends (Kimyô-na yûjin-tachi) featuring toads,
mudskippers, foxes, seahorses, and humans who
replicate certain corporeal features of these
animals. Each story brings together a human
and animal in uncanny resemblance, and they
are drawn out of scale. The final chapter of
Strange Friends about a toad and toad-like man
begins with the SF drawings of its protagonist
busily
drawing
at
his
desk:
“Scientific
development has accelerated and no one
knows when it would stop. But, but lately the socalled ‘material civilization’ seems as if it may
come to a halt. Or, is it just me who thinks that? I
often feel like some kind of completely different
kind of ‘civilization’ will exist. And, I will find an
entrance to it…that’s how it feels. That’s why I
decided to publish this.”[xiii] The next frame is of a
frog drawn to scale on a graph and mimetic
drawing of bats. Under them is quoted a book on
human’s inferior perceptions as compared with
animals.
In the conclusions to these shorter
manga, and his later Manga: An Introduction to
the Japanese Economy and Manga: An
Introduction to the World Economy, the animal
figure is far less “plastic” than the human figure.
44
appear to be an insistence on the difference
between animals and humans in comparison to
Tezuka’s relatively consistent style between
humans and animals, the narratives reveal
otherwise.
Ishinomori’s manga show less
humanist tendencies than Tezuka’s manga which
ultimately insist that the affinities between the
human and nonhuman are limited. The animal
will ultimately be sacrificed for the human world.
Ishinomori’s broad oeuvre is more fluid in this
sense and his stylistically flexible approach to the
human and nonhuman in his work articulates a
broader comfort with, or perhaps insistence on,
the kind of creaturely inclusivity and affinity that
Tezuka’s humanism does not allow.
Notes
[i] Ishinomori was assistant to Tezuka in 1953 and continued to work with
Tezuka over the postwar period in Japan. Ishinomori received the Tezuka
Osamu Culture Award and the 27th Japan Cartoonists Association Award
in 1998, among other awards.
[ii] Yomota Inuhiko, Mechademia 3 (2008): 108-109.
[iii] Lamarre, “Specieism,” unpublished manuscript.
[iv] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford, 2002),
186-187.
[v] Tezuka Osamu, Phoenix, 88
[vi] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press,
1987), 238.
[vii] The 21st century counterpart to Inugami in “Sun” wears a metallic
dog-head in prison and is forced to listen--along with hundreds of others in
the same prison--a recording in the wolf’s head that repeats on a loop:
“The sins of our materialistic approach to understanding life in the
twentieth century have finally caught up with us. The earth has been
corrupted by an unchecked culture of materialism. Life is on the verge of
destruction. (171) All prisoners must eat plankton. To be vegetarian and
half-beast is a painful punishment in Phoenix.
[viii] For a more detailed discussion of this graphic novel see Marran,
“Abject Male Subjectivity in the Postwar Manga Beast
Yapoo,” Mechademia, vol. 4, 2009.
[ix] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 191.
[x] Ishinomori Shotarô, Future Shock, 228-230.
[xi] Ishinomori, Fantasy Jun, 1981-1984.
[xii] Monique Allewaert, “Plant Life, or, How Machines Verge on the
Microcosmos,” unpublished manuscript.
[xiii] Ishinomori, Kimyô-na yujin-tachi, 168-170.
Christine Marran is Associate Professor, Department of Asian
Languages and Literatures, University of Minnesota
She specializes in Japanese popular culture from the 1870s to the
present; Japanese literature (particuarly early Meiji writing, especially
newspapers and gesaku literature); gender, sexuality, and identity in
print and film culture; ethics and the animal; and Japanese and Asian
film.
45
PRIDE OF BAGDHAD
In the spring of 2003, a pride of lions escaped from the Baghdad Zoo during an American bombing raid. Lost and
confused, hungry but finally free, the four lions roamed the decimated streets of Baghdad in a desperate struggle for
their lives. Writer Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon discuss how they recreated this story as a graphic novel.
Questions and text by M arion Copeland
P
\
ride of Baghdad tells the story of four
lions who escaped from the Baghdad
zoo during the American bombing of
Iraq in 2003. This graphic novel, written
by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Niko
Henrichon, won the IGN award for best original
graphic novel in 2006.
American writer Brian K. Vaughan was
already well-known as a comic book and
television writer when “his first graphic novel, Pride
of Baghdad, was released by DC Comics' Vertigo
imprint on September 13, 2006. The story, a
fictionalized account of the true story of four lions
that escaped from the Baghdad Zoo after an
American bombing [Operation Iraqi Freedom] in
2003, won the IGN award for best original
graphic novel in 2006” and has been called "’the
best novel so far’ about the war by the UK's
Telegraph”
Vaughan has received and been
nominated for numerous awards, including an
Eisner award for best series for Y: The Last Man
(2008); and an Eisner for Best Writer for his work on
Y: The Last Man, Runaways, Ex Machina and
Marvel's Ultimate X-Men, and for Best New Series
for Ex Machina (2005); among many others.
Vaughan was also a writer on the hit ABC
television series Lost from 2006-2009.
Niko Henrichon, a Canadian comic book
artist who now lives in France with his wife, child,
and cat, reports on his website homepage that
“he graduated in 2001 from a comic book and
illustration 3-year program at the Institut Supérieur
des Beaux-Arts de Saint-Luc in Liège, Belgium,
where he learned all the basic techniques of
comic book and illustration. Niko is [now] best
known for his work with writer Brian K. Vaughan in
creating the graphic novel Pride of Baghdad.
Henrichon's first major work was a graphic novel
titled Barnum!, written by Howard Chaykin and
David Tischman. He also did work on Fables, New
X-Men, Sandman, and Spiderman and he still
regularly provides covers for Marvel Comics and
DC Comics on series like Fantastic Four and XMen”. His work on Bill Willingham’s animal-centric
Fables primed him for depicting the lions in Pride
of Baghdad.
I will introduce this interview by explaining
that I have just finished writing the article “AnimalCentric
Graphic
Novels:
An
Annotated
Bibliography” for this issue of Antennae. Like Pride
of Baghdad, the graphic novels in the
bibliography focus on the stories and lives of
nonhuman animals. These graphic novels
foreground animal protagonists and offer insight
into animal consciousness and experience. My
questions for Brian K. Vaughan and Niko
Henrichon arise out of an interest in how and why
artists and writers make animal-centric choices.
The text and pictures in Pride of Baghdad
seem so much of a piece that it feels as
though your collaboration is seamless.
How did you two work together?
46
Brian K. Vaughan & Niko Henrichon
Pride of Baghdad, DC Comics, 2006, front cover, 2006 © Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon
47
Brian K. Vaughan & Niko Henrichon
Pride of Baghdad, DC Comics, 2006, page 51, 2006 © Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon
48
behavior did you do in order to develop
their characters and thoughts so
convincingly?
Vaughan: It was one of the best, closest
collaborations of my career. I actually pitched
Pride to Vertigo before I'd found an artist. It was
my ever-diligent Y: The Last Man editor Will Dennis
who recommended Niko Henrichon for the book.
I was really impressed by his work on the graphic
novel Barnum, but it was Niko's lavishly illustrated
sample drawings of realistic-yet-expressive
animals that convinced us he was the only artist
for the job. His artwork said so much, I ended up
cutting a huge amount of dialogue and trusting
his pictures to tell our story.
Vaughan: Thanks so much. I did a great deal
of research, including talking with amazing
people like Mariette Hopley, an I.F.A.W. "rescue
veterinarian" who spent time in Iraq after the war
began. I also spent weeks reading about the
region, studying the history of Iraq, learning
everything I could about lions, gathering tons of
photo reference, etc.
But really, artist Niko
Henrichon did all of the heavy lifting in making
our pride feel so real.
Henrichon: I have often received this comment
[about our collaboration] and I must say that I
take it as a compliment. This is great news, the
fact that many readers have thought that our
collaboration on this project was very close. For
my part, I can only say that Brian's script was so
evocative to me. Having to illustrate it was very
easy and the layouts were made by themselves.
I think Brian has also this quality to adapt to the
artist with whom he collaborated in order to
highlight its strengths. In fact, we worked together
as most writers and artists work. He sent me the
script and I realized a few layouts that I showed
back to Brian and Will Dennis, editor of Pride of
Baghdad. After that, we discussed over these
layouts and I finally realized the final pages.
Henrichon: We bought tons of books about
lions. Brian and I had several books in common
and sometimes, he indicated in his scripts the
pages of these books where the displayed
pictures of lions were interesting for our graphic
novel. This had an amusing scholar feeling that
sounded like: "open your book Being a Lion at
page 39...” I also watched a few DVD’s of
documentaries about lions, to see them in
action. I also went to the Zoo, it just happened
almost all the lions were sleeping or they were just
very lazy.
How did you research and develop the
look of the backgrounds and the setting?
Did you decide together to focus on this
particular story, and if so, what
influenced you to tell the story of the lions
out of all the stories in the history of the
war in Iraq?
Henrichon: At the moment we worked on the
book, it was the beginning of the blogging
madness. Several soldiers who went to Iraq held
that kind of blog and many of them have put
photos of their experience. These documents
helped me a lot to make the sets credible
because, of course, it wasn’t possible that I went
to Iraq myself.
Henrichon: The pitch of the project has been
submitted as is. The initiative comes from Brian at
100%. I just had to get onboard.
Vaughan: From Carl Barks' Scrooge McDuck to
Spiegelman's Maus, comic books have always
had a rich tradition of telling meaningful stories
with anthropomorphized animals. I was looking
to push myself by experimenting with this device,
and I was also hungry to write something that
addressed my conflicted feelings about the stillongoing Iraq War. When I read reports of a pride
of four lions escaping the Baghdad Zoo, I knew I
had a starting point for the story I needed to tell.
I was particularly struck with how the
coloring suggested that the animals and
the setting became one during the
bombing, much as the coloring of the
turtle seems naturally a part of the
coloring of the Tigris. How did you use
color to illuminate the themes of the
story?
Henrichon: Colors are a wonderful thing in
comics. I try to use them to give a little more than
what is normally there. Since there’s no
soundtrack, special effects and things like that in
comics, I try to use all the means available to
give a special feel to the images, to make the
scenes unique.
In Pride , you develop the overall theme
of freedom and captivity before the
bombing destroys the zoo and “frees” the
lions. The story reveals how the lions view
themselves before, during, and after the
shelling. What kind of research on lion
49
Brian K. Vaughan & Niko Henrichon
Pride of Baghdad, DC Comics, 2006, page 82, 2006 © Brian K. 50
Vaughan and Niko Henrichon
Brian K. Vaughan & Niko Henrichon
51
Pride of Baghdad, DC Comics, 2006, page 98, 2006 © Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon
Brian, nonhuman animals make
appearances in your other comics, but
are not typically the focus of your stories.
What made you decide to focus on the
lions and tell this story from the pride’s
perspective?
bombing or did you shape your pride to
develop the story or themes you had
decided on?
Vaughan: The actual pride of four lions served
as our inspiration, but Niko and I obviously took a
great deal of artistic liberty.
Vaughan: With fiction, audiences can watch
endless horrors inflicted on human beings, even
children, but put a dog in danger, and watch
people walk out in droves. Similarly, I think it's
hard for even the most sympathetic person to
truly feel for the civilian victims of foreign wars we
see on TV, but strangely, many of us can
somehow bridge that emotional gap when it
comes to seeing innocent animals suffer. I
wanted to write about war from the perspective
of noncombatants, and because animals
transcend race or creed or nationality, having
them be our sole protagonists hopefully allowed
us to tell a story that's universally relatable.
Can you talk about the other messages
or themes that are developed through
your artistic techniques (perspective,
pattern, rhythm)?
Henrichon: I do not like to discuss in length
about these aspects of the work. It seems to me
that the images should speak for themselves. As I
said in a previous question, I use everything at my
disposal to produce images that are as
meaningful as possible. One aspect that interests
me very much is the work of lights and shadows. I
always try to give every scene a dramatic lighting
to make it a little theatrical.
What depictions of lions or other animals
in literature, art, film, comics and graphic
novel traditions inspired and influenced
your own depiction?
Did Iraqi art or literature influence your
work?
Henrichon: Unfortunately, I can’t say I am very
familiar with the recent literature and the Iraqi
arts. However, I know a little Babylonian
mythology, including the famous Epic of
Gilgamesh. I watched the Babylonian classic art
to make some decorations in the settings. I
understand that Saddam Hussein himself was
very inspired by Nebuchadnezzar and it’s easily
understood when one observes the many
buildings and palaces built under his reign.
Vaughan: Honestly, none. You can’t help but
draw comparisons to something like The Lion King
when working on a story like this, but I was much
more influenced by the real Iraqi civilians I spoke
with than with any fictional animals.
Henrichon: I remember George Orwell’s classic,
The Animal Farm, which I loved. It was a book
that addressed some issues very seriously while
using talking animals. It is true that traditionally,
the stories featuring talking animals are more
oriented toward an audience of children. This is
obviously not the case with Pride of Baghdad. So,
although I like some Disney films, I cannot say
they were much of an inspiration for this project.
We wanted to get as far away as we could from
this very well known visual universe.
How did you decide what kind of
characters and which species (horse,
bear, turtle, human) the lions would
encounter in Baghdad? How do you see
each animal developing your themes?
Vaughan: A lot of the selections were based in
fact. Believe it or not, there really was a black
bear in the Republican Palace, most likely
belonging to the late Uday Hussein. Another
bear escaped the Baghdad Zoo and eventually
mauled and partially ate three civilians. But other
animals were selected simply because of what I
thought they might be able to say about the
region and the conflict. As for how each animal
might
advance
the
theme,
readers’
interpretations are always more interesting to me
than my original intent.
Why did you select lions, complicated
social predators, as your protagonists
rather than the antelope or baboons who
were their neighbors in the zoo?
Vaughan: I suppose the simple answer is that I
chose the lions because of how their story
ended.
Were the lions in your story modeled on
the individual lions that were actually in
the Baghdad zoo at the time of the
What do you hope readers carry away
52
Brian K. Vaughan & Niko Henrichon
53
Pride of Baghdad, DC Comics, 2006, page 121, 2006 © Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon
with them after sharing the story of the
pride of Baghdad?
Vaughan: That’s a difficult question, since I really
only ever write stories for myself. That said, I’ve
been heartened by the emotional responses I’ve
gotten from a very diverse group of readers,
including both U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians.
Henrichon: The book raises some questions
about the value of freedom and the imposition
by force of it. I think we should still have debates
on these topics. The West has this tendency to
believe that good values are only in his camp.
We sometimes forget that just 70 years ago, the
West experienced the barbarism in his most
extreme manifestation.
Brian, in addition to writing comics and
graphic novels, you frequently write for
other venues (film, television). Do you
have a particular perspective on animals
that you hope to communicate across
mediums?
Vaughan: Well, I absolutely love animals, but as
a storyteller, I’m much more interested in what
they have to say about us than what we have to
say about them.
Niko, do you have any plans to return to
the animal-centric verisimilitude of Pride
in the future?
Henrichon: I am currently working on a project
that depicts many animals but they are not the
main characters. I'm afraid I can’t say more
about it yet but it should be announced soon.
Brian, have you done any animal-centric
work since finishing Pride or do you have
plans to in the future?
Vaughan: I’m actually working on a very
animal-centric feature film as we speak, which I
hope you’ll be hearing more about later this year.
Both authors were interviewed exclusively for Antennae by Marion
Copeland in Autumn 2010 Antennae
54
THE POLITICAL
ANIMAL AND THE
POLITICS OF 9/11
In this essay Sushmita Chatterjee examines Art Spiegelman’s animal-human cartoons drawn in response to 9/11.
She begins by briefly introducing Spiegelman’s contribution to the world of cartooning and his approach to cartoons
as a medium of experimentation with genre-defying potential.
Text by S ushmita Chatterjee
O
rather than either-or carry us forward from the
cycle of violence? Perhaps, starting with a
fundamental,
elemental
binary,
that
of
man/animal, will help us comprehend the politics
in binaries that keep us re-inscribed in the statusquo of the present.
The events of 9/11 were followed by a
political response that sought to consolidate
political and social identities. The collapse of the
twin towers was used to justify a politics that
reinforced national loyalties and emphasized a
civilizational difference between the East and the
West. Hegemonic politics offered by official
government spokespersons and the media not
only consolidated macro boundaries but also
micro individual centered identities. US official
policies after 9/11 sought to barricade the
country from further attacks, a barricading not
only of the “homeland” but also its subjects. It
responded to violence with violence. Surely, “it is
time to allow an intellectual field to develop in
which histories might be felt in their nuances and
complexity, and accountability understood in
separation from cries of revenge” (Butler 2004,
23). As a response to the violence of 9/11, I
argue that Art Spiegelman provides us with a
prism to theorize on transformative politics after
9/11 through his animal-human cartoon images
in his work on 9/11 titled In The Shadow Of No
Towers (2004). By playing on the fundamental
elemental binary of man/animal, not only does
Spiegelman help us comprehend the politics of
ur political subjectivity is usually
constructed through binary schemas
(man/animal, man/woman, West/Islam,
civilized/uncivilized etc.). These binary
schemas are a vital part of our social-political
imagination, helping to consolidate who “we”
are. In our contemporary landscape, altered
inextricably after 9/11, binary thinking gained
increasing predominance. Samuel Huntington’s
“clash of civilizations” doctrine, which represented
the state of the world in the post-ideological Cold
War period, gathered increasing resonance in
the post 9/11 world, exemplified by official
pronouncements of “us” and the “terrorists.”[1]
The binary of “us” and “them” not only contains
“us,” but contains the “other” within parameters
which patrol the borders of our politics and
exacerbate violence towards the “other.” Any
kind of transformative politics would have to
contend with these binaries, especially in the
contemporary world after 9/11 which begs us to
move beyond the cycle of violence and death.
The binary thinking that Bush espouses in which
only two positions are possible—“Either you’re with
us or you’re with the terrorists”—makes it
untenable to hold a position in which one
opposes both and queries the terms in which the
opposition is framed (Butler 2004, 2). Indeed it is
important to ask, “what politically, might be
made of grief besides a cry for war” (Butler 2004,
xii). How do we reduce our complicity with
violence? Would thinking in terms of both-and
55
Art Spiegelman
In The Shadow Of No Towers,Pantheon Books: a division of Random House, front cover, 2004 © the author
56
hijackings of September 11 would
themselves be hijacked by the Bush
cabal that reduced it all to a war
recruitment poster. At first, Ground Zero
had marked a Year Zero as well…When
the government began to move into full
dystopian Big Brother mode and hurtle
America into a colonialist adventure in
Iraq—while doing very little to make
America genuinely safer beyond
confiscating nail clippers at airports—all
the rage I’d suppressed after the 2000
election, all the paranoia I’d barely
managed to squelch immediately after
9/11, returned with a vengeance. New
traumas began competing with still
fresh wounds and the nature of my
project began to mature (Spiegelman
2004, unpaginated).
binaries, but he also provides us with a framework
to visualize its undoing. Hence, in this essay, I
study how Spiegelman’s animal-human cartoons,
drawn in response to 9/11, constitute counterimages that defy binary thinking and enable a
democratic ethos at variance with caged
political subjectivity.
As the son of holocaust survivors,
Spiegelman narrated the horrors of the
concentration camps through the comic
medium in Maus, a form usually connected to
“the very unserious, unsacred world of
Loonytoons” (Gordon in Versluys 2006, 980).
Published in two parts, Maus subverted the
traditional use of comics to tell a tragic tale,
portraying Jews as mice and Nazis as cats.
Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for
Maus, which was the first time a comic novel had
won the prestigious award. Spiegelman’s
contribution to the world of comics is certainly not
restricted to Maus. As a pioneer of the
underground comix movement in the 60’s and
70’s, he worked towards varied experimentations
in comic art that helped to situate the place of
comics in the aesthetic history of modernism and
postmodernism (Witek 2007, x). In Arcade: The
Comics Revue (co-edited with Bill Griffith in 1975),
Spiegelman extended the artistic terrain of the
underground commix movement by working with
younger artists. In 1980, Spiegelman, along with
his wife, Francoise Mouly, co-founded RAW, a
large format graphic magazine that featured
strips by underground comic artists such as Chris
Ware, Mark Beyer, and Dan Clowes. In his
contribution to RAW (subtitled Open Wounds from
the Cutting Edge of Commix), Spiegelman
experimented with drawing and narrative styles,
producing strips that helped create an avantgarde of comic art (Siegal 2005).[2] Maus
demonstrated, without a doubt, that cartooning
can tell “serious stories with serious purposes”
(Harvey 1994, 245). And consequently, as Joseph
Witek writes, “comics today are made differently,
marketed differently, read differently, and
discussed differently than ever before, and Art
Spiegelman has been central to every one of
those changes” (Witek 2007, x).
In The Shadow of No Towers (2004)
continues Spiegelman’s work on serious stories
through an apparently unserious medium.
Spiegelman writes about the rationale for his
project on 9/11:
What is critical to the narrative urgency of his
comic book on 9/11 is that Spiegelman
witnessed the collapse of the Twin Towers. The
collapsing towers left an indelible imprint on his
mind, ”unhinging him” from his daily activities,
reiterating the lesson learned from his parents,
Auschwitz survivors, of always keeping his bags
packed (Spiegelman 2004 unpaginated).
Cartooning seemed a way for
Spiegelman to come to terms with the
ephemeral nature of existence after 9/11. He
recalls being “reminded how ephemeral even
skyscrapers and democratic institutions are”:
“When a monument—like two 110 story towers
that were meant to last as long as the Pyramids—
becomes ephemeral, one’s daily life, the passing
moment, takes on a more monumental quality”
(Spiegelman in an interview with Nina Siegal
2005). Spiegelman uses cartoons to grapple with
his feelings of disbelief, trauma, and vulnerability
after 9/11. Cartoons are a medium of great
condensation and allow him to pack and unpack the event.[3] Below is an exchange
between Spiegelman and Harvey Blume (1995)
which clearly elucidates the temper behind his
work.
AS: I had an entertaining moment
with the New York Times Book Review
when MAUS was given a spot as a
bestseller in the fiction category. I wrote
a letter saying that David Duke would
be quite happy to read that what
happened to my father was fiction. I
said I realized MAUS presented
problems in taxonomy but I thought it
belonged in the nonfiction list. They
I had anticipated that the shadows of
the towers might fade while I was slowly
sorting through my grief and putting it
into boxes. I hadn’t anticipated that the
57
totally non-representational painting or
in totally representational painting, the
moment of collision is the one where I
get the biggest charge. It's also true at
the end of the '20s, before the '30s set
in. That particular curdled innocence of
the '20s is still central to me; and if
there's a place where The Wild Party still
remains relevant in today's world it has
to do with something I can't fully
articulate; it has to do with that
particular collision, the collision between
the world that rhymes and the world
that doesn't.
published the letter and moved MAUS
to nonfiction. But it turns out there was a
debate among the editors. The funniest
line transmitted back to me was one
editor saying, let's ring Spiegelman's
doorbell. If a giant mouse answers, we'll
put MAUS in nonfiction.
H: What about this moment of the loss
of innocence draws you?
AS: It's always what interests me; it's
what exists between categories. It is
when something is at the point of
meeting something else but hasn't
melted into it. The example I keep
going back to is Seurat. I always like
Seurat's paintings. Depending on where
you stand you see either dots or people
in a park. But it's not just a field of dots
and it's not just people in a park. It's a
point of discovery because there are no
easy categories. It's true for Seurat, and
it's true for this particular moment of the
zeitgeist that takes place in the '20s,
and it's true for comics becoming
literature as they lose their central
function as things that sell newspapers,
let's say.
This
fascinating
dialogue
reveals
how
Spiegelman’s Maus created havoc on the
distinction between fiction and non-fiction. In the
hearty collision between categories, much like
Seurat’s paintings, Spiegelman finds the “biggest
charge,” the inarticulate moment of sheer
creativity that necessitates bringing together
different worlds, different sensibilities, fact, and
fiction. Spiegelman is inspired by what “exists
between categories,” “the collision between the
world that rhymes and the world that doesn’t.” His
way of working through the trauma of 9/11
oscillates between a world that makes sense and
the world that doesn’t. Often the world that
makes sense is the world of cartooned
caricature, of mice, ghosts, and fires. The “real”
world of categories provides little solace or
explanations.
In The Shadow Of No Towers breaks
from a neatly sequential narrative form. Very
different from the narrative style used in Maus,
Spiegelman’s In The Shadow Of No Towers is
irregular in style and does not have a patterned
narrative. Spiegelman draws himself in different
moods and semblances and conveys his
personal anguish through irregularly sized and
shaped panels alongside splashes of vivid colors.
The book is personal and intimate portraying the
inability and non-compliance of the author to
render a normalized picture.[4] The book consists
of thick, weighty pages like a children’s book. This
makes it impossible to turn the pages quickly, to
simply fast-forward. The labor of trauma is
stylistically represented. Half of the book (ten
pages) is about Spiegelman and his family
dealing with 9/11 interspersed with the artist’s
commentary on the Bush administration,
followed by six full pages of old comic strips.
Spiegelman introduces the second section in
prose, explaining why old newspaper comics
served as his solace after 9/11. Even though the
two sections of the book are ostensibly
H: So breakdown of genre is the
moment of possible discovery.
AS: It's not just a breakdown of genre;
very often it's a breakdown of values.
Genre
is
just
the
superficial
manifestation.
H: People get used to looking at genre
for guarantees. Fiction is fiction;
nonfiction is nonfiction. When those sorts
of distinctions weaken, it can be
unnerving.
AS: And that's the terrifying moment that
can lead to revelation. Nonfiction
associates itself with the exterior world
and fiction presumably deals with
sensibility. There's a point where those
things do and must meet. In Seurat, you
have a post-Impressionist moment
where the question is what is a picture?
Is the rectangle a window or is it a
canvas? Different values, different world
views are implied in each answer. Not
just a matter of style, not just a matter of
craft. And there's a move eventually
through Seurat to a certain kind of field
abstraction. Whatever value I find in
58
Art Spiegelman
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Apex Novelties, front cover, 1972-1999 59
© the author
interview Spiegelman remarked:
separated, the latter half spills onto earlier
sections in content and style. [5] Spiegelman
plays with sequencing and content, juxtaposing
different styles of image making in quick
succession.
This
strategy
undermines
a
categorical coherence for “a” systematic picture
(world) building. The author’s disorientation after
the events of 9/11 is effectively portrayed in his
style of presentation. I argue next that
Spiegelman’s picture (de)building questions our
world building through his use of animal images.
If one draws this kind of stuff with
people, it comes out wrong. And the
way it comes out wrong is first of all,
I’ve never lived through anything like
that—knock on whatever is around to
knock on—and it would be counterfeit
try to pretend that the drawings are
representations of something that’s
actually happening. I don’t know what
a German looked like who was in a
specific small town doing a specific
thing. My notions are born of a few
scores of photographs and a couple
of movies. I’m bound to do something
inauthentic (quoted in Witek 1989,
102).
Spiegelm an’s Anim al Im ages
Spiegelman’s use of animal images in
Maus was not without controversy. Taking his
epigraph from Hitler, “the Jews are undoubtedly
a race, but they are not human,” Spiegelman
drew
the
characters
in
Maus
as
anthropomorphized animals. While some drew
offence from the depiction of nationalities as
animals because it supports ethnic stereotypes,
others were able to discern in the cat-and-mouse
relational dynamic an effective metaphor for
Nazi-Jewish relations. Positively, Joseph Witek
points out, “there is something almost magical, or
at least mysterious, about the effect of a
narrative that uses animals instead of human
characters. The animals seem to open a generic
space into a precivilized innocence in which
human behavior is stripped down to a few
essential qualities, and irrelevancies drop away”
(1989, 112). Moving beyond the appropriateness
of animal images and its uses, classifying Maus in
a particular genre was also problematic. To
categorize Maus in the “talking animal” or “funny
animal” genre of comics seems a gross misfit.
While many remain dissatisfied with the term
“talking animal” to describe Maus, they sought to
delve further to fathom how a holocaust comic
book depicting nationalities as animals can be
so critically compelling (Witek 1989, 109). I
suggest that Spiegelman’s animal images
represent a “counter-image” that plays with any
rigid classificatory schema. Moreover, it is a
counter-image not in the sense of being against
image but in opening up images to their
malleability and porous borders. Questions of
genre, appropriateness, and usefulness are
playfully subverted in propelling the reader to
think in-between and through the frames of the
images, and of reality.
Spiegelman told an interviewer, “[o]ne
of the things that was important to me in Maus
was to make it all true” (quoted in Witek 1989,
102). It is important to note that the depiction of
humans as animals makes it “all true.” In an
To Spiegelman, depicting nationalities as animals
keeps representation “authentic.” What is
important to consider is that Spiegelman uses
animal images to represent complex relational
dynamics, not simply individuals, per se. In
Poland, Spiegelman met with visceral reactions
to the depiction of Poles as pigs. To Polish editors
and commentators, the depiction of Jews as
mice and Nazis as cats was unobjectionable.
However, for them the portrayal of Poles as pigs
was extremely problematic. On this issue,
Spiegelman retorted, “[l]et’s be honest about this:
On this particular subject, if there weren’t any
problem, that would be a problem” (interview
with Lawrence Weschler in Witek 2007, 231). On
the issue that calling someone a swine is a much
greater insult in Poland than in America, as swine
is what the Nazis called the Poles, Spiegelman
said, “Exactly! And they called us vermin. That’s
the whole point. You see, I didn’t make up these
metaphors, the Nazis did. I was just trying to
explore them, to take them seriously, to unravel
and deconstruct them. I must say, I keep waiting
for some Pole to take umbrage at the fact that I
portray Jews as rodents—I mean, I’m not holding
my breath or anything, though it would be nice”
(quoted in Witek 2007, 232). Spiegelman refers to
the Reich as a sort of animal farm. Jews, as
vermin, were pests to be exterminated, whereas
Poles, as pigs, were not to be likewise destroyed.
They were to be put to use and worked for their
meat.
Spiegelman continues to use animal
images in In The Shadow Of No Towers. The
rationale for the use of animal images in In The
Shadow Of No Towers is very different from Maus.
In In The Shadow Of No Towers it is clearly not the
fear of being “inauthentic,” as he clearly
60
we gloried in sunshine laws and a
freedom of information act. Now we
have a government that says public
documents cannot be entrusted to
the people or even the people’s
representatives. Once we could count
on law to protect our liberties. Now
people are arrested and jailed in
secrecy, without counsel, without
recourse. Even their families do not
know what has happened to them.
Once we were free to criticize and
ridicule a president who was merely
the servant of the people. Now we are
called to account for undermining the
dignity of the office, for not showing
respect for The Leader, no matter
what he does. The more young
people he sends to die, we are told,
the more we must show respect for
their killer, lest those dead appear to
have died in vain, which means more
will be sent to die. And intellectuals
conspired in this destruction of
freedom: the time of irony is over, they
said. Henceforth we are sheep. Sheep
who will not even bleat (Spiegelman in
Sharpe 2005, 1).
witnessed the towers, its destruction, and lived in
the shadow of no towers. On September 11th,
Spiegelman and his wife stepped out of their
lower Manhattan home to see the first plane
smash into the first tower. In a panic, they
realized that their daughter, Nadja, was in the
heart of the pandemonium as her school was
located right next to the towers. After they
managed to get Nadja from school, the couple
saw the second tower collapse.
We got Nadja out a few minutes before
the school decide[d] to evacuate and
made our way home on the
promenade alongside the Hudson. We
turned to see the North tower tremble.
The core of the building seemed to
have burned out, and only the shell
remained--shimmering, suspended in
the sky--before ever-so-slowly collapsing
in on itself. Françoise shrieked "No!. . .
No!. . . No!. . . " over and over again.
Nadja cried out: "My school!" while I
stared slack-jawed at the spectacle,
not believing it real until the enormous
toxic cloud of smoke that had replaced
the building billowed toward us (2004,
3).
Since September 11th, Spiegelman has
been living in the shadow of no towers.
Spiegelman tries to make it real, to understand
what happened on that September morning. The
acrid smell from the Holocaust looms large (“I
remember my father trying to describe what the
smell in Auschwitz smelled like. The closest he got
was telling me it was ‘indescribable.’ That’s
exactly what the air in lower Manhattan smelled
like after September 11th]” (Spiegelman 2004, 3).
Maus lives on in In The Shadow On No Towers in
the burning images of the twin towers, incessantly
questioning: Is this a different kind of
crematorium? Who and what burned here?
Memory leaks through from one event to
another, imploring us to see the similarities, and
the differences between the two.[6]
To Spiegelman, “under cover of
darkness” (without the presence of the glowing
towers), our democracy is being stolen away
from us under the guise of the need for national
security.
Spiegelman exhibits explicit partisan political
sentiments without clothing them in indirect
guises. It is clear, he states, that democracy in
America is under siege, freedom a farce, and
citizens reduced to sheep who obey without
bleating. His use of animal images in In The
Shadow Of No Towers needs to be understood as
an integral part of his political stance, not only
communicating his anxiety over the politics of
the present, but also his anger and need to forge
a different kind of political ethos. He uses animal
images in In The Shadow of No Towers to guard
against a passive animalization of our political
subjectivity.
Spiegelman’s animal images In The
Shadow Of No Towers take on a politics very
different from Maus. The animal figures in In The
Shadow Of No Towers are predominantly his own.
Other humans, even when they are called “Killer
Apes,” are seldom portrayed as animals. This is a
significant departure from Maus with deep
implications for the meaning of play in the
animal images. In In The Shadow Of No Towers
Spiegelman is portrayed with a mouse head. In
Maus this means “vulnerability, unalloyed
suffering, victimization” (Andreas Huyssen in
Versluys 2006, 984). Here, in In The Shadow Of No
Towers, Spiegelman as a mouse showcases the
Under cover of this darkness, this state
of panic in which we are encouraged
to cower, our democracy is being
stolen from us, in the name of
protection, of national security. Once
61
Art Spiegelman
Fig. 1, In The Shadow Of No Towers,Pantheon Books: a division of Random House, page 2, 2004 © the author
articulates subjectivity as an assemblage of
forces and constant movement. Spiegelman
shows himself clean-shaven before 9/11. He grew
a beard while Afghans were shaving off theirs
and finally his face changes into that of a mouse
(See Figure 1). Spiegelman has to undo himself
to deal with the present.
In Figure 1, Spiegelman engages with the
binary of man and animal by turning into a
mouse. Alongside the binary of man/animal,
self’s multiple energies of transformation. In a
frame adjacent to the one depicting the author’s
psychic collapse (Figure 1), the autobiographical
stand-in (as a mouse) is surrounded by Osama
Bin Laden and George Bush. The protagonist as a
mouse feels himself to be “equally terrorized by
Al-Qaeda and by his own government.” What
Spiegelman depicts is the self’s total weariness
and consequent disintegration under the trauma.
But this disintegration does not subtract. It re-
62
rearticulation
of
subjectivity
as
intensive
multiplicity. What they emphasize is the need to
think through the present in terms other than a
distinctively identified “I” vs. “Them,” towards
intensive
interconnectedness.
Similarly,
in
Spiegelman’s work, identity loses its relevance in
being able to deal with the present. The present
demands a “counter-image,” different from
legitimizing, identity nurturing representations.
Maybe, this is what “becoming animal” looks like
when one moves away from stable forms of
identification towards contamination of states of
experience and constant mutative becomings.
Spiegelman is not animal, nor is he human.
Indeed, “[i]ssues of self-representation have left
[him] slack-jawed.”
Steve Baker, in an article titled “What
Does “becoming animal” look like?” seeks to
explore what to him is the “most perplexing
question:” the question of whether or not
“becoming animal” amounts to something that
might be acted upon: a practice rather than
mere rhetoric (in Rothfels 2002, 68). Steve Baker
looks to the works of contemporary artists who
use animal imagery to test and illuminate
“becoming animal”. After a careful study, Baker
opines that “[t]he question is not so much what it
is as what it does… In “becoming animal”,
certain things happen to the human: the ‘reality’
of this “becoming animal” resides in that which
suddenly sweeps us up and makes us become”
(2002,
74).
Through
becoming
animal
Spiegelman discerns the continuity between
good and evil, human and animal. Leonard
Lawlor frames it very well when he writes of
Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming animal”: “If
we want to change our relationship to the world,
to others, and to animals, we must understand
how it is possible for us to change—how it is
possible to enter into the experience of
becoming” (Lawlor 2008, 171). To Deleuze and
Guattari, “becoming animal” is a creative
process which changes us and our relationship to
the world.
In a complex set of images (Figure 2),
Spiegelman depicts himself as evolving from a
lamp-human to a shoe-human and finally to the
mouse-human figure. Significantly, the mousehuman is the culmination of the process of
change and represents an intricate working
through with the despair and anger. Human
identities (neither the lamp nor shoe) do not
suffice and what is yanked out is the mousehuman. It is only this which enables working
through the political complexities of the present,
its incessant frustrations. The first image shows a
Spiegelman plays with other binaries such as
mind/body, and good/evil. The poster on the wall
showcases Spiegelman’s brain as residing
outside his body. And there is no difference
between good and evil with both Bush and
Osama bin Laden assuming threatening
postures. Binary thinking collapses at this moment
of trauma and all that remains is the weight of
the present. The text in Figure 1 reveals that
Spiegelman was still trying to figure out what “he
actually saw” on that September day. The events
of 9/11 play around Spiegelman revealing the
continuity between binaries (i.e., good and evil).
Meanwhile the “heartbroken narcissist” keeps
looking at himself in the mirror. None of his
reflections (with a beard or without) satisfy him
and he changes into a mouse. Spiegelman has
to undo himself as a human to deal with the
present and the trauma of the past. Maybe, by
undoing himself, the mirror will stop reflecting the
human bound in the politics of 9/11, and will
enable a reflection that is more satisfying.
However, it is not that Spiegelman
portrays himself at all times with a mouse head. A
cartooned human Spiegelman is juxtaposed with
the animal-human Spiegelman throughout the
text. The human is always in the past, the animalhuman in the present; as if dealing with the
trauma necessitated Spiegelman “becoming
animal.” It is useful to use Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari’s “becoming animal” to understand
Spiegelman’s
human
to
animal-human
transformation in In The Shadow Of No Towers.
Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming animal”
moves us beyond the paradigm of man/animal,
makes us question the borders of such
delineation, and presents the vision of an
affirmative reformulation of the present.
“Becoming animal” is the blurring of the
boundaries between the human and animal, an
undoing which de-centers man’s definition of
himself in opposition and against the animal. It is
thus an un-humaning of man with the potential
to make politics all the more humane. Deleuze
and Guattari write, “[b]ecoming animal does not
consist [of]…playing [an] animal or imitating an
animal…[I]t is clear that the human being does
not ‘really’ become an animal any more than the
animal ‘really’ becomes something else.
Becoming produces nothing other than itself”
(1987, 238). Building itself up on alliances rather
than binaries, “becoming animal” provokes
incessant questioning of the divisions which
define political and social intelligibility and
legitimacy. By interrogating our bordered
articulations (both tangible and intangible, within
and without) Deleuze and Guattari provoke a
63
Art Spiegelman
Fig. 2, In The Shadow Of No Towers, Pantheon Books: a division of Random House, page 9, 2004 © the author
Significantly, in Figure 2, mouse
Spiegelman hurls the cat away. He had earlier
justified the adoption of a new cat because his
old cat died and the new cat looks like the old
cat. After working through the other less benign
displacements, Spiegelman cannot bear to sit
with his new cat. Less and more benign become
unimportant. He sees how dualistic thinking easily
escalates, and actions spill into each other to
create very serious repercussions (i.e., “how we
demolished Iraq instead of Al-Qaeda”). Also, in a
text box at the end of the panel, Spiegelman
writes a disclaimer: “No creatures other than the
Artist were abused in the creation of this strip”).
Spiegelman does not abuse animals by hurling
the cat away. Rather, he uses the hurling of the
cat to showcase symbolically how he
incorporates the politics of “becoming animal”
by moving through appearances that keep him
reified inside the vicious cycle of displacements.
The successive set of images shows
that 9/11 is very much Spiegelman’s holocaust.
The use of the lamp cover brings to mind
accusations levied against the Nazis in using
calm Spiegelman reminiscing about his cat that
just died. He rationalizes the adoption of a new
cat because it looks like the old cat. The second
and successive set of images show him working
through
with
“displacements,”
political
manipulations less benign then his personal
rationale for a new cat (e.g., “remember how we
demolished Iraq instead of Al-Qaeda,” or how
“New York’s appropriate anxiety about the toxins
released into our air on 9/11 is displaced by our
!@%^ Mayor passing a law against smoking in
bars!” [Spiegelman 2004, 9]). Understanding
these “displacements” makes Spiegelman
displaced: his hand becomes his head; his head
moved to his hands; his shoe becomes his head.
Finally, he becomes animal and ventilates his
growing anger. Now we see that the picture of his
dead cat framed behind his arm chair comes
alive. The dead cat and the new cat become
one and the same, which mouse Spiegelman
hurls
away.
“Becoming
animal”
makes
Spiegelman see the dead past residing in every
vestige of the present. By undoing himself he is
able to truly see through the displacements.
64
Spiegelman,
Americans
have
become
animalistic in their political apathy. From Aristotle’s
depiction of man as a political animal in the
Politics, politics and the political man have long
been conceptualized in association with the
animal. To Aristotle, speech enables men to live
with justice in the Polis, an attribute exclusive to
human beings as political animals.[10] It is an
engagement in politics that makes men nonanimalistic
and
thus
“political
animals.”
Spiegelman plays with a similar idea when he
imagines American citizens as animals in political
apathy (i.e., with their head stuck in the ground
like ostriches). To become animalistic is very
different from “becoming animal” understood as
a creative reformulation of the present.
Spiegelman’s “becoming animal” defies gravity
of all sorts. “Becoming animal” is a heightened
awareness of oneself, not going underground,
but defying all foundations. “Becoming animal”
seeks to reinscribe “subversion at the heart of
subjectivity” (Braidotti 2002, 145).
The animal images in In The Shadow of
No Towers are a means to represent
Spiegelman’s working with the trauma of the
event. In a sense, we could contend that
Spiegelman’s animal images are not about
animals at all. Figure 3 was not really about
elephants, donkeys, or ostriches. Joseph Witek
discerns the curious indifference to the animal
nature of the characters as a distinguishing mark
of the talking animal tradition in popular
narratives where the characters as animals are
not attributed with their specific animal
characteristics (1989, 109). About Maus, Steve
Baker further points out that “[t]he metaphor
cannot hold, and yet that metaphor is at the
heart of the story and of the identities with which
it is concerned. In one sense of course it is
outside the story: the story is about people not
animals; the animal ‘masks’ are a mere conceit,
as the viewers’ privileged glimpse of the string
holding the second mask in place makes clear”
(2001,148). In an interview shortly after the
publication of Maus, Spiegelman described his
characters’ animal heads as being “mask like.”
He referred specifically to certain incidents in the
graphic novel where identities were doubly
masked (see next image, Figure 4), and insisted
that these showed the character’s animalization
to be a metaphor which inevitably broke down
from time to time (quoted in Baker 2001, 146).
In
Figure
4,
taken
from
Maus,
Spiegelman’s father approaches a Polish
trainman masking himself as a Pole with a pig
mask. Being a pig is reduced to wearing a
mask.[13]
Jewish people’s skin for the purpose. The use of
the shoe is also a symbolic reminder of
Spiegelman’s father’s occupation during the war:
that of a cobbler in the death camps. Collapsing
holocaust symbolism with animal imagery adds
multiple dimensions to the images above.
Descriptions of the death camps reverberate with
the language of the slaughter house: “‘[T]hey
went like sheep to the slaughter. They died like
animals. The Nazi butchers killed them’…The
crime of the Third Reich, says the voice of
accusation, was to treat people like animals”
(Coetzee 2003, 64). Spiegelman’s successive
metamorphosis in the images, his attempts at
undoing himself, resonates strongly with
Coetzee’s emphasis on the “sympathetic
imagination” where we don’t encapsulate
ourselves in our bodies as a “pea imprisoned in a
shell” but instead attempt to share the being of
another. To Coetzee, “…there is no extent to the
limit to which we can think ourselves into the
being of another. There are no bounds to the
sympathetic imagination” (2003, 80). The
“sympathetic imagination” necessitates being
irreverent to oneself, to ones’ boundaries which
inhibit reaching out.
It is only when Spiegelman is irreverent, not
only about others, but about himself, that he is
able to grapple with the present. Subjectivity
becomes fluid, multiple and discontinuous, a
process
of
interrelations.
Spiegelman’s
transformation above also reminds us of
Deleuze’s somatic dimension. This somatic
dimension is understood in vitalistic terms, freely
adopted from Spinoza’s conatus, namely, living
matter yearning to become and go on
becoming (Gatens 2000). What we see here is
“body anarchy” and a movement through a
protocol bound dictation for material existence.
Deleuze draws on both Spinoza and Nietzsche to
defend his enabling view of a subject resistant to
social norms and an oppressive State. His subject
creates havoc with the neatly formatted version
of
“man
as
rational animal.”
Similarly
Spiegelman’s images, as in Figure 2 above,
exemplify undoings and non-fixity.
In In The Shadow Of No Towers,
Spiegelman also uses animal images to satirize
the political situation. The following image is a
biting critique of binaries, the two party binary in
this case. In Figure 3, Spiegelman refers to
Republican elephants and Democratic donkeys
as self-interested animals who don’t really serve
the public interest.[9] What is needed is a new
“and revolutionary” Ostrich party where all
Americans would join their fellow citizens in rising
up to stick their heads in the ground. To
65
Art Spiegelman
Fig. 3, In The Shadow Of No Towers, Pantheon Books: a division of Random House, page 5, 2004 © the author
Yes, In The Shadow Of No Towers
continues with the non-animalness of the animal
images. In fact, in In The Shadow Of No Towers,
Spiegelman plays with the animal images that he
inherits from Maus and moves further towards a
politics that entails shifting identity thinking,
whether that of man or animal. Here, animals
become more than a metaphor, for they
become testimony to the dance of being, to the
need for scripting the ontological choreography
that Donna Haraway heralds elsewhere
(2003).[14] What becomes central is the process
of undoing, recomposing and shifting the
grounds for the constitution of subjectivities. As
Deleuze and Guattari write, “[b]ecoming animal
means precisely making the move, tracing the
line of escape in all its positivity, crossing a
threshold, reaching a continuum of intensities
that only have value for themselves, finding a
world of pure intensities, where all the forms get
undone” (1975, 145). Through his animal images,
Spiegelman represents a life lived and
understood more intensely, of increasing one’s
freedom and understanding of complexities, of
interrogating what lies between the boundaries of
the human and animal, and striving to become
otherwise.
So, what kind of identity thinking does
Spiegelman inspire? Would masking serve as a
useful exercise in democratic politics after 9/11?
How do we differentiate between wearing animal
masks and “becoming animal”? The use of
masks in Maus seeks to showcase the
complexities within identity categories, the
possibility of assuming another identity or
concealing identity. In In The Shadow Of No
Towers, Spiegelman’s animal-humans do not
conceal identity. They emphasize it even more
stringently. Spiegelman emphasizes identity to
reveal its lack, its inability to deal with the present
with any singularity. Only in “becoming” can “it”
grapple with the present. Spiegelman’s project is
not about categorical propositions to be
affirmed or negated. It is more about generating
connections and proliferating lines of inquiry in
what Deleuze and Guattari have called a
66
Art Spiegelman
Fig. 4, Maus, Pantheon Books: a division of Random House, page 64, 1986 © the author
rudimentary process of putting on a mask and
taking it off. In contrast, “…becoming animal lets
nothing remain of the duality of a subject of
enunciation and a subject of the statement;
rather, it constitutes a single process, a unique
method that replaces subjectivity” (Deleuze and
Guattari 1975, 36). Maybe, to speak of
“differences” between masking and ”becoming
animal” is itself self-defeating because the
politics of ”becoming animal” refers to a
panorama rather than a gospel of truth. Perhaps,
”becoming animal” should be felt in its intensity,
rather than in accounting for differences. It is a
rhizome of currents.
Spiegelman’s use of animal images in
“rhizomatic”
network
of
thinking:
“[B]ecoming is certainly not imitating, or
identifying with something; neither is it regressingprogressing;
neither
is
it
corresponding…becoming is a verb with a
consistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or
lead back to, ‘appearing,’ ‘being,’ ‘equaling,’ or
‘producing’” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 239).
Yes, “becoming animal” is very different
from simply masking. While masking entails a
play with appearance and realty and often
signals politics with subversive potential, it still
remains in the present. It still speaks the language
of oppression, even in its endeavor to overturn it.
Masking works within binaries in the very
67
Maus is meant to subvert ethnic stereotypes and
showcase Nazi-Jewish relations as a cat-mouse
game. In In The Shadow of No Towers,
Spiegelman challenges identity again with the
use of animal figures. 9/11 is his holocaust and
he continues with its central trope in making
sense of the events of September 11th. There are
no “real” cats in In The Shadow Of No Towers, only
Spiegelman himself as a mouse. The cats today
are less explicit. The cat-mouse game here
becomes puzzlingly insidious, in a way, when the
cats are our government (similar in a manner to
the German Jews), and ourselves, Spiegelman
himself before he becomes mouse and seeks to
undo his complicity with the present status-quo.
Thus, in In The Shadow Of No Towers, Spiegelman
“becomes animal.” In “becoming animal”
Spiegelman ceases to hunt “others.” He undoes
himself as a human (cat?) to fully realize his own
potential in understanding and dealing with the
present. The animal images are a counterimage. They showcase the inadequacy of
normal representation. Being human, contained,
does not allow him to see contained existence.
Through “becoming animal,” Spiegelman messes
with form, allows himself to be irreverent towards
boundaries. He counters animal politics by
“becoming animal.” “Becoming animal,” in this
case, is understood not as a mirror of animality,
but as a movement beyond mirroring, a
transgression of the present.
In Figure 5, we see Spiegelman
smoking profusely and deliberating on the
political climate after 9/11. In In The Shadow Of
No Towers, does Spiegelman “become Jew” as
he ponders about the dismal state of affairs after
9/11? Does Maus creep into his work on 9/11 in
significant ways?
Maus reverberates in In The Shadow Of No
Towers through the image of the mouse-human.
Spiegelman’s image of himself as mouse-human
takes on complex meaning and plays in
continuity with Maus and in reference to the
specificities of 9/11. Deleuze and Guattari’s
“becoming animal” is becoming minority.[16] It is
undergoing minor existence understood as
“abominable sufferings.” Abominable suffering
defines a minority for Deleuze and Guattari, and
“the affect of shame at being a man, at being
human all too human, with our oppressions, our
clichés, our opinion, and our desires, is really the
motive for change” (Lawlor 2008, 174). Thus,
“becoming animal” in becoming minority
undergoes sufferings without mimetic recognition
or representation. In “becoming animal,” one
does not represent the animal. Rather, one
undergoes the being of an-
other by undoing oneself from ontological
closetedness.
In
“becoming
animal,”
Spiegelman does not simply become Jew, but
also Afghan, and other minorities, and thus
images the politics of dissent against majoritarian
politics.
The
undoing
of
hegemonic
majoritarianism showcases Spiegelman’s motive
for change from the present status quo.
Conclusion
More than three thousand people were
killed on September 11, 2001. America declared
war against “terror” which was largely amorphous,
nebulous, and “evil.” An aggressive foreign policy
was used as a benchmark to install the new
attitude
of
governance—pro-active,
interventionist, preemptive. Amidst the creation of
the Homeland Security Department and passage
of the Patriot Act, many lamented the fall of
American democracy (Wolin 2008; Butler 2004;
Baudrillard 2002). Terror mirrored terror. The war
against terrorism was of global reach, the enemy
or “evil” seen and unseen. As Wolin succinctly
notes, “[t]errorism, power without boundaries,
becomes the template for superpower; the
measureless, the illegitimate, becomes the
measure of its counterpart” (2008, 73).[17] In
other words, the Superpower models itself on the
terrorism it seeks to combat, and vice versa. Two
forms of power, terrorism and super-power,
remain locked in indefinite mimicry. Where is the
space for democratic functioning or democratic
re-imagining within this vicious cycle of incessant
mirroring?
Art Spiegelman’s work exhibits a critical
reaction to the re-iteration of the circle of
violence. He is traumatized by Bush and Bin
Laden, by “good” and “evil.” Tugging at the
oppressively constructed parameters of binary
thinking, Spiegelman images the “human”
caught within this circle of violence through his
animal figures. Spiegelman’s mouse-human in In
The Shadow Of No Towers exhibits the active
tension of the politics of 9/11. In “becoming
animal,” Spiegelman provides not simply a
deconstruction of the status quo, but also an
active project of reformulation. His animalhuman will not join the Ostrich party members
with their head buried in the ground, nor will it
remain polarized as a Republican elephant or
Democratic donkey. Instead, Spiegelman’s
animal-human exhibits the self’s active ability to
respond to trauma by undoing its complicity with
violence. In Maus, Spiegelman’s portrayal of
humans as animals showcased the relational
status of the Jews, Poles, Americans, Nazi’s, etc.
In In The Shadow of No Towers, Spiegelman’s
portrayal of himself as an animal provokes the
68
Art Spiegelman
Fig. 5, In The Shadow Of No Towers, Pantheon Books: a division of Random House, page 3, 2004 © the author
Spiegelman chooses to revert back to his original
imaging of the plight of certain identities in
relation to oppressive power structures. Moving
beyond
a
description
of
the
subjectifying/animalizing conditions of increasing
government power in our lives after 9/11,
Spiegelman uses animal imagery to speak to
9/11. How can one maintain a critical
perspective on the present conditions and
provide a vision otherwise? Spiegelman’s animalhuman figure, which is neither human nor
animal, mocks a cohesive identity’s limitations to
capture the complexity in the politics of 9/11.
American politics after 9/11 marked the world
into “good” and “evil.” Spiegelman responds
through his animal-human images to transgress
subjectivizing identity categories, an insidious part
of the politics of 9/11. Thus he earnestly
questions, through his animal-human images,
what it means to be a political animal.
image of the predicament of American citizens
as vermin after 9/11. Also, it illuminates the
enormous resources in the hands of a citizen to
undo his/her compliance with the circle of
violence and instead work within self and society
to re-think political possibilities.
In “becoming animal,” Spiegelman
seeks to transgress the limitations of the
present.[18] He chooses to question and undo his
bordered cartographical terrain as a “human.”
He doesn’t simply re-inscribe his states of injury.
This kind of politics best answers Wendy Brown’s
concern when she writes, “given the subjectivizing
conditions of identity production in a late modern
capitalist, liberal, and bureaucratic disciplinary
social order, how can reiteration of these
production conditions be averted in identity’s
purportedly emancipatory project?” (1995, 55).
Brown implores us to move beyond a disciplinary,
subjectivizing identity politics that keeps us
trained into separate groups. Instead, she asks us
how subjectivizing conditions can be subverted
when we work with identity as an emancipatory
project, which was identity’s ostensible purpose.
Spiegelman’s animal images in Maus brought
before us the deathly play with identity, the
holocaust and the cold-blooded animal-like
slaughter of people. Regarding 9/11,
As mentioned earlier in this essay,
Aristotle’s postulation of man as a political animal
set the tone for centuries of political theorization
on the nature of man as an animal with
language. Armed with language, man is a
political animal destined to live in the Polis.
Moreover, as Aristotle stipulated, although, in
69
point of time, the individual is prior to the Polis, in
point of order and importance, the Polis is prior to
the individual. Man is a political animal and thus
the Polis represents the whole of which the
individual is just a part, and the whole is
necessarily prior to the part. Being a political
animal provokes images of man’s participation in
the life of the Polis. The difference between man
and animal is one of the central images of
political theorization throughout the historical
formulation of its key conception of the social
and political man.[19] Living in the State, being
good (i.e., obeying) citizens is linked to the
fundamental difference between man and
animal; as if maintaining the State requires
keeping to the distinction between man and
animal. We do see the re-iteration of the
Aristotelian conception of the political animal
resonating through centuries of “progressive”
thought. This continuity differentiates between
man and animal through the use of language;
recognizes man’s animal traits for which he
needs the State to keep him in bounds (and thus
political); and places the animal outside the
sphere of the State. Eloquently and aptly,
Benjamin Barber refers to liberal democracy as
the “politics of zoo-keeping.”
needs to be properly tamed in order to retain his
ontological status as man. Thus Barber
characterizes liberal democracy as the “politics
of zookeeping” where civil society is an
alternative to the “jungle” in the state of nature
(1984, 20). This “zookeeping” has obvious
restrictive and definitive implications in fashioning
man and his State.
Spiegelman’s animal-human images
resist the domestication of man under the aegis
of the dominant political power (i.e., the State).
Spiegelman, as mouse-human, is reflective and
is able to gauge and protest against the
“weapons of mass displacement” in the hands of
the State (Figure 2). This mouse-human is resistant
to the “politics of zookeeping” and the straightjacketing
into
Republican
elephants
or
Democratic donkeys (Figure 3). Speaking with
harsh irony, Spiegelman sees no difference
between the leader of his own country and the
“terrorists” (Figure 1). Spiegelman’s incessant
critique resists a disciplined and domesticated
political stance and emphasizes vitalic political
involvement. In “becoming animal,” Spiegelman
subverts the “politics of zookeeping” and the
delimited categorization of man as a political
animal, a classification that ties man to
compliant subject-hood under the State.
Spiegelman’s animal-human figures are explicitly
political and image the anguish of an American
citizen to keep alive his political agency through
a traumatic period for American democracy. The
present necessitates a counter-image where
“man is not a political animal.”
The uninspired and uninspiring but
“realistic” image of man as a creature
of need, living alone by nature but
fated to live in the company of his
fellows by enlightened self-interest
combines with the cynical image of
government
as
a
provisional
instrument of power servicing these
creatures to suggest a general view of
politics
as
zookeeping.
Liberal
democratic imagery seems to have
been fashioned in a menagerie. It
teems with beasts and critters of every
description: sovereign lions, princely
lions and foxes, bleating sheep and
poor reptiles, ruthless pigs and ruling
whales, sly polecats, clever coyotes,
ornery
wolves(often
in
sheep’s
clothing), and, finally, in Alexander
Hamilton’s formidable image, all
mankind itself was but one great Beast
(Barber 1984, 20).
Notes
[1] Nira Yuval Davis (2001) notes that war is a time for absolute
thinking (i.e., good and evil, us and them). The pressure to
conform to binary oppositions increases during war time. Davis
emphasizes that since 9/11 a “clash of civilization” narrative of the
relationship between the Wwest and iIslam has occupied centre
stage constructing the world as unbridgeable blocks. She notes
that 2001 was designated by the UN as the year of “Dialogue
among Civilizations.” This was initiated by President Khatami of
Iran who wanted the UN to promote a counter-ideology to
Huntington’s thesis. Davis notes that the notion of the dialogue
promoted by the UN and Iran does not challenge the reified
notion of “civilization” as a bounded and homogenous entity.
Instead, she suggests, we need a dialogic political culture which
respects differences among people and enables us to “establish the
shared elements of emancipation within every living, human value
system” (2001, 3). Thus, to Davis, we need a “dialogical
civilization” (2001, 3).
To Barber, in liberalism, man is
characterized as the selfish, egoistic animal that
needs the State to survive. The State keeps men
in bounds so that they cease “becoming animal”
and maintain their political integrity. Not being
animal, lets man remain man. However, he
[2] Robert Harvey writes on Spiegelman: “Art Spiegelman is a
thinking cartoonist. His creations were invariably intellectualized,
carefully designed to exploit the resources of the medium (1994,
237).
70
[3] In an interview with Gene Kannenberg, Spiegelman says
“Although my father was never interested in me becoming a
cartoonist, and I can’t say that I learned much at his knee that was
useful for becoming a cartoonist, but one thing that was useful is,
because of his own paranoia, he taught me how to pack. It was
very important at a young age to see how much you could fit into
the small volume of a suitcase. I always thought of it as a useful
kind of early training” (in Witek 2007, 245).
mother’s father’s house, and he offers them shelter in his stable, at
great personal risk. Both have pig faces, and yet one behaves with
great generosity, while the other, if one wants to be generous
about it, behaves out of sheer self interest. And that’s what things
were really like” (Iquoted in Witek 2007, 233).
[14] In The Companion Species Manifesto (2003), Donna Haraway
draws our attention towards understanding “significant otherness”
or how we are co-constituted along with our companion species.
To her the scripting of the dance of being is more than a
metaphor; “bodies, human and non-human, are taken apart and
put together in processes that make self-certainty and either
humanist or organicist ideology bad guides to ethics and politics,
much less to personal experience” (2003, 8).
[4] See Versluys (2006) for an excellent discussion on Spiegelman’s
mimetic representation of trauma.
[5] Spiegelman appears as the father in George Mcmanus’s Bringing
Up Father, fighting with his wife who cannot sleep because
Spiegelman watches CNN all night and who wakes Spiegelman up
with the blaring radio in the morning (and the fact that her face
suddenly changes into Osama bin Laden) (Spiegelman 2004, 8).
[15] Source: Spiegelman 2004, 3.
[16] Deleuze and Guattari tell us that there is no becoming-man
as man is majoritarian. Thus there is becoming
woman/animal/insect. As Rosi Braidotti eloquently points out,:
“The nomadic subject as a non-unitary entity is simultaneously
hetero-defined, or outward-bound. All becomings are
minoritarian, that is to say they inevitably and necessarily move
into the direction of the ‘others’ of classical dualism—displacing
them and re-territorializing them in the process, but always and
only on a temporal basis” (2002, 119).
[6] David Hajdu wrote in the New York Times Book Review:
“Spiegelman clearly sees Sept. 11 as his Holocaust (or the nearest
thing his generation will have to personal experience with anything
remotely correlative), and in In The Shadow Of No Towers [he]
makes explicit parallels between the events without diminishing
the incomparable evil of the death camps” (quoted in Versluys
2006, 980). Also, Anne Norton in Leo Strauss and the Politics of
American Empire (2004) sees in contemporary politics
reverberations from the Holocaust and the treatment of Jews.
[17] The term “superpower” first gained parlance in the 1950s in
relation to the US and USSR where they were designated as the
two super-powers of the world. In the contemporary world, the
term denotes a power which can project dominating power
anywhere in the world.
[7] Source: Spiegelman 2004, 2.
[8] Source: Spiegelman 2004, 9.
[9] Interestingly, cartoonist Thomas Nast’s use of the Democratic
Donkey and the Republican Elephant made these animals the
symbols of partisan politics.
[18] With Derrida, I do recognize that “transgression implies that
the limit is always at work” (quoted in Chambers 2005, 622). In
other words, even when we work “beyond”, we remain
circumscribed by the original parameters.
[10] In the Politics Aristotle writes, “It is also clear why a human
being is more of a political animal than a bee or any other
gregarious animal. Nature makes nothing pointlessly, as we say,
and no animal has speech [logos: ] except a human being. A
voice [phonos: ] is a signifier of what is pleasant or painful,
which is why it is also possessed by the other animals (for their
nature goes this far: they not only perceive what is pleasant or
painful but signify it to each other). But speech is for making clear
what is beneficial or harmful, and hence also what is just or unjust.
For it is peculiar to human beings, in comparison to the other
animals, that they alone have perception of what is good or bad,
just or unjust, and the rest. And it is community in these that
makes a household and a city-state” (1998, 4). Here Aristotle
emphasizes that speech belonging to man as a political animal
enables a political life which finds its fruition in the Polis.
Moreover, speech peculiar to the political animal is to be
distinguished from mere voice which is shared by all animals.
[19] For instance Machiavelli writing during the Italian renaissance
advises the ruler to be as powerful as possible. He must be both a
lion and a fox—a lion flashing in physical strength and a fox with
excellence in cunning. Machiavelli further asserts that there are
two ways to fight: one with a respect for rules and the other with
no holds barred. “Men alone fight in the first fashion, and animals
fight in the second” (1994, 54). Machiavelli emphasizes that in
order to win, one must be prepared to break rules and be more
of an animal.
In Hobbes’ political thought, often viewed in the context of the
legacy left by Machiavelli, we view how civil society is an
alternative to the war of all against all that characterizes the state
of nature. In tune with a Machiavellian temperament, Hobbes
depicts men as cruel, fighting, aggressive creatures who need the
state for their own protection. Again, continuing in the emphasis
traceable from Aristotle, the question of the man, animal, and
State are integrally connected. Referring directly to Aristotle’s
account of man and animal, Hobbes tells us, in his Leviathan, that
man and animal are different because men are continually in
competition for honor and dignity, which animals are not, and
therefore war and the need for a common power. Hobbes writes,
“…the agreement of these creatures is natural; that of men is by
covenant only, which is artificial; and therefore, it is no wonder if
there be somewhat else required (besides covenant) to make their
agreement constant and lasting, which is a common power to
keep them in awe, and to direct their actions to the common
benefit” (Hobbes 1994, 109). Thus to Hobbes, animals do not
need the State, while men, because they are different from animals
need the State for their common benefit. Further, Hobbes
emphasizes that while animals can communicate; only humans have
speech. In De Homine, Hobbes writes, “…that we can command
and understand commands is a benefit of speech and truly the
[11] Source: Spiegelman 2004, 5.
[12] Source: Image from Maus in Baker 1993, 147.
[13] Spiegelman’s use of masks also refers to the limitations of
using singular animal associations as a generalizable trait. As
Spiegelman said in an interview with Lawrence Weschler, “In
terms of the narrative itself, in terms of what actually happened to
my mother and father, it’s all very complicated: There were pigs
who behaved well and pigs who behaved shabbily, just as there
were mice who did likewise…My mother and father are
desperately roaming the streets of Sosnowiec, seeking shelter,
wearing pig masks, and first they knock on the door of the pigwoman who used to work for them as my brother’s nanny, and
she slams the door in their face; then they make their way to the
home of the pig-man who used to work as the janitor in my
71
greatest. For without this there would be no society among men,
no peace, and consequently no disciplines; but first savagery, then
solitude, and for dwellings, caves. For though among certain
animals there are seeming politics, these are not of sufficiently
great moment for living well” (Clarke and Linzey 1990, 19). The
emphasis on language has a fundamental political significance. Here
we return to a re-iteration of the Aristotelian dictum that only
humans with language are political animals. Among other animals
there may simply be the appearance of politics, not conducive to
“living well.”
Lawlor, Leonard. 2008. Following the Rats: Becoming-Animal in Deleuze and
Guattari, SubStance #117, Vol. 37, No. 3,pp.169-187.
Leventhal, Robert S. 1995. Art Spiegelman's MAUS: Working-Through the Trauma of the
Holocaust at http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/holocaust/spiegelman.html.
Machiavelli. 1994. Selected Political Writings: The Prince, The Discourses, Letter to Vettori.
Trans. David Wooton, Hackett, Cambridge.
Norton, Anne. 2004. Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Rauch, Leo.1981. The Political Animal: Studies in Political Philosophy from Machiavelli to
Marx, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
Rothfels, Nigel, ed.2002. Representing Animals. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
References
Sharpe, Patricia Lee. 2005. “The shadow since 9/11”:
http://whirledview.typepad.com/whirledview/2005/09/the_shadow_si
nc_1.html
Aristotle. 1993. De Anima, Translated by D.W. Hamlyn, Oxford: Clarendon Press;
New York: Oxford University Press.
Siegal, Nina. 2005. Interview with Art Spiegelman. Progressive. January.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1295/is_1_69/ai_n9525304
———. 1998. Politics, Translated by Reeve, Cambridge, Hackett.
Spiegelman, Art. 2003. Maus: A Survivor's Tale. London: Penguin.
Baker, Steve. 1993. Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation. Manchester:
New York: Manchester University Press.
———. 2004. In The Shadow Of No Towers. New York: Pantheon Books.
———. 2006. Only Pictures? Interview by Sam Graham-Felsen in The
_____. 2000. The Postmodern Animal. London: Reaktion.
Nation. February 20th. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060306/interview.
———. 2001. Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation. Urbana: U of
Illinois Press.
———. 2006. “Drawing Blood: Outrageous Cartoons and the Art of Outrage,”
Harper’s Magazine, June, p 43-52.
Barber, Benjamin R. 1984. Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Versluys, Kristiaan.2006.”Art Spiegelman's In The Shadow of No Towers: 9-11 and
the Representation of Trauma.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume
52, Number 4, Winter 2006, pp. 980-1003.
Baudrillard, Jean. 2002. The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers. London:
Verso.
Witek, Joseph. 1989. Comic books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art
Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Blume, Harvey, 1995. "Art Spiegelman: Lips," Boston Book Review:
http://www.bookwire.com/bbr/interviews/art-spiegelman.html
———. 2004. “Imagetext, or, Why Art Spiegelman Doesn't Draw Comics,” in
ImageText, Vol.1, No. 1.
http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v1_1/witek/.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2002. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming.
Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Published by Polity Press in association
with Blackwell Publishers.
———. Ed.2007. Art Spiegelman: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi.
Brown, Wendy. 1995. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Wolfe, Cary. 2003. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and
Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press.
Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York:
Verso.
Wolin, Sheldon S.2008. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of
Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Chambers, Samuel. 2005. “Working on the Democratic Imagination and the Limits of
Deliberative Democracy” in Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 58, No.
4, 619-623.
Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2001. “The Binary War,” Open Democracy,
http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict
war_on_terror/article_89.jsp.
Clark, Stephen R. 1999. The Political Animal: Biology, Ethics, and Politics, London; New
York: Routledge.
Clarke, A.B. Paul and Andrew Linzey. Ed. 1990. Political Theory and Animal Rights,
London; Winchester, Mass.: Pluto Press.
Coetzee, J. M., 2003. Elizabeth Costello. New York: Viking.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1975. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Gatens, Moira. 2000. “Feminism as ‘Password’: Rethinking the ‘Possible’ with Spinoza
and Deleuze” in Hypatia, Vol. 15, No. 2, 59-75.
Geis, Deborah R., ed. 2003. Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman's "Survivor's
tale" of the Holocaust. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press.
Gussow, Mel. 2003. “Dark Nights, Sharp Pens; Art Spiegelman Addresses
Children and His Own Fears,” The New York Times, July 31st.
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2003.The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and
Significant Otherness. Chicago, Ill.: Prickly
After completing a dual-degree Ph.D. from the Departments of
Political Science and Women’s Studies at the Pennsylvania State
University (May, 2009), S ushmita Chatterjee is currently teaching
at Augustana College, Illinois. She is currently working on a book
manuscript that studies post-9/11 identity politics through an
examination of Art Spiegelman’s visual politics. Sushmita enjoys
teaching, learning, and writing about democratic theory, visual
politics, feminist theory, and postcolonial politics.
Paradigm; Bristol: University Presses Marketing.
———. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Harvey, Robert C. 1994. The Art of the Funnies: an Aesthetic History. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi.
Hobbes, Thomas. 1994. Leviathan. Trans. Edwin Curley, Hackett, Cambridge.
72
ANIMAL STORIES,
NATURAL HISTORIES
& CREATURELY
WONDERS IN
NARRATIVE
MINI-ZINES
The Small Science Collective, a collaboration of scientists, artists, students, and anyone else interested in science, is
responsible for the production of the “infectious” zines that employ the language of comics for the purpose of
spreading scientific knowledge.
Text by A ndy Yang
C
pamphlet with a title “There go the Dinosaurs,”
you could learn that dinosaurs went extinct due
to suffocation when all the oxygen-providing
plants died in Noah’s flood.2 Another, “Moving on
Up!” provided a remarkable mish-mash of false
information and ideology regarding evolutionary
biology: “Then science tells us of the greatest
event of all time – we lost our tails! And began
our long journey into humanism.” 3
As someone studying for a doctoral
degree in zoology, I found myself equal parts
indignant and impressed by how these comics,
as mis-informative as they were, could be so
compelling to read. Although I had been
intermittently dialoguing with/confronting an
outspoken set of Creationist students that were
holding lectures and who infiltrated evolutionary
biology courses on campus that semester, the
Chick tracts seemed far more potent and
persuasive in their small, quiet, and unassuming
way. It was humbling that the evangelical
housekeeping staff (who I suspected was
responsible for the scattering of the religious
comics) was doing a better job of advocating for
their view of the organic world than the
professional biologists -- or for that matter, the
student Creationists -- on our own collegial turf.
The prelevance and thus success of the
Chick Tracts made a certain amount sense given
the structure of university education where the
expectation is that you enroll in a course to learn
reation M yth
“Is Their Another Christ?”
“Are Roman Catholics Christians?”
“Who is He?”
These are the questions that the titles of small
two-color comic books would pose whenever I
took short breaks in the lounge of the laboratory
building where I was undertaking my graduate
studies.
Given that I was living in North Carolina,
and well within what is known as the American
“Bible Belt,” finding religious propaganda on a
coffee table in a relatively public space wasn’t a
big surprise. Indeed, these particular booklets,
“Chick Tracts,” were some of the more ubiquitous
pamphlets one would come across. Pocketsized, inexpensive, and handy, these comics are
eponymous of their originator, Jack Chick, an
evangelical Christian who had the insight (he
claims revelation) that graphic narratives could
be a powerful medium to spread the message
of the Gospel.1
Though I was typically unfazed by these
pamphlets, I began to take exception when the
ones being left in the lounge surreptitiously took
on a decidedly anti-evolutionary bent. From one
73
Small Science Collective
The Carrier Pigeon by Mario Martinez, 2009 © the author
but because of real snakes that scared me with
their slither; because of the stories I heard about
large pythons in the forest and way they
occupied
my
imagination
visually
and
narratively. It had less to do with the classes I
took -- which came after the facts of personal
experience -- and more to do with the
excitement I gained from imagining the lives of
creatures in the stories and pictures that
populated the books and magazines I
happened across.
The ubiquity of the Chick Tracts made
some of us start to wonder why their shouldn’t be
small, free science comics in public spaces that
could present a counterpoint to the religious
propaganda arguing that dinosaurs were on
Noah’s Ark or that humans and monkeys aren’t
related. This gave birth to the Small Science
Collective (SSC) zine project.4
something about organisms or evolution. Outside
the confines the campus’ four credit-hours
lecture and laboratory, however, there was a
discernable silence on the matter of nature and
its many wonders. At best, a few taxidermied
animals and pressed plants managed to wanly
decorate the corners of academic halls, but
beyond the walls of the biology classrooms, nary
a peep nor petal about biodiversity could be
found. As for educating our own community
about the natural world, I realized that
academics like myself were doing a shabby job
indeed.
Even for students enrolled within biology
classes, experience with creatures can be largely
restricted to a clinical treatment of well-prepared
specimens that often do little to stimulate interest
or curiosity. I, for one, became interested in
zoology not because of pickled jars of snakes,
74
Small Science Collective
Dive Deep by Laura Hughes, 2009, © the author
75
Encyclopedia of Life for example, endeavor to
make “species pages” for every known organism
as a standard, universal internet reference to life’s
diversity.7 While such approaches are invaluable
for databasing basic information about
organisms, the graphic narratives of comics and
zines offer an important and distinct means to
visualize biodiversity that is grounded in a tradition
which pre-dates our modern taxonomic
accounts – the writing of “natural histories.”
Before what we now call the Scientific
Revolution, natural history was a term that
described the general inquiry into the things that
existed in nature.8 However, this was not limited
to a standardized scheme of traits and attributes
considered objectively verifiable. It also included
the various relations and configurations through
which things manifested themselves in the
broadest cultural sense. As Michel Foucault
describes in The Order of Things:
Anim al Stories as Natural Histories
“Zines” are booklets or pamphlets that are
conceived, created, and published outside of
the commercial sphere, typically with a close
attention to visual structure and content. Given
this, graphic narratives are often naturally the
preferred format for most of the SSC’s zines. These
work equally well as eight-page palm-sized
booklets
in
paper,
as
downloadable/printable/foldable PDFs, and also
as comics on the web.
While the SSC covers a wide spectrum of
topics – from particle physics to pachyderms -many of the zines are what could be called
“animal stories.” These narratives have animals
as their subjects, and occasionally as their
narrators as well. They explore how the animals
look, what they eat, where they are found, and
generally how they make a living in the world.
However, these animal stories avoid a children’s
book sensibility in significant ways. Animals are
not anthropomorphized so much as they are
personified as a means to highlight their unique
traits, qualities, and behaviors. Some of the zines
will invite readers to think of animals as friends or
consider the animals’ situation in an analogous
manner to our own human situation. However,
the purpose in this is to create a conceptual
bridge for conceiving the complexities of what
animals are, in contrast to what we typically or
simply presume them to be. In this way, we can
distinguish narratives that explore animals and
their unique and remarkable ways of being in the
world from those stories that simply use animals
as characters in what fundamentally are human
stories, dramas, and psychologies. Examples of
this latter kind are familiar in Snoopy, Mickey
Mouse, Garfield, Donald Duck and countless
other cases of animal bodies speaking in human
tongues. Examples of animals as creatures in
their own right, however, are much fewer and
farther between. One notable example is the
Sunday version of the American newspaper
comic Mark Trail 5 which, after 60 years, still
highlights one species of animal and its ecology
in relation to the (increasingly human)
environment. Another notable example of the
animal-focused narrative is Isabella Rossellini’s
series Green Porno, which does something similar
in the form of narrative video short that is
unmistakably zoöcentric in its sensibility. 6
Ever since Linnaeus, our modern scientific
presentation of animals has been dominated by
lists that enumerate atomized physical traits and
evolutionary placement in the manner of
bulleted points. Large scale projects like the
to write the history of a plant or
animal was as much a matter of
describing its elements or organs as
of describing the resemblances that
could be found in it, the virtues that it
was thought to possess, the legends
and stories with which it has been
involved, its substance, the foods it
provided,
what
the
ancients
recorded of it, and what travelers
might have said of it. The history of a
living being was that being itself,
within the whole semantic network
that connected it to the world
(p.140). 9
The historia of “natural history” signifies “learning or
knowing by inquiry,” in its Greek root. The narrare
of “graphic narrative” means to "tell, relate,
recount, explain," in Latin. Therefore these terms
share a commonality of purpose. We see that
creaturely comics and zoological zines can be
understood as a contemporary form of the
natural histories that were once woven from the
cultural threads of observations and imagination.
What can such narratives accomplish
compared with the objectivity and authenticity of
detailed scientific illustration and its power to
reveal? How do the practices relate? I posed
these questions to Alex Chitty -- a biology
educator, illustrator, and author of the comic
featured here, the Indomitable Water Bear:
I was drawn to scientific illustration
because it helped me see. After
looking closely at a specimen in order
76
Small Science Collective
How to be a Proper Host…to a Botfly by J. R. Goldberg, 2007 © the author
77
Small Science Collective
Snake Legs and Wisdom Teeth by Andrew Yang and Christa Donner, 2008 © the authors
By this account, the graphic narrative form is
consistent with the sensibilities of scientific
illustration in helping us visualize organisms in
ways not otherwise possible, while at the same
time extending beyond the usual goals of
illustration in terms of what is to be discovered.
Rather than simply visually specifying the details
of anatomy, the idea is to communicate the
possibility of what the organism’s behaviors,
actions, and (perhaps even in some sense)
personality are in terms of how it relates to other
species. “If we just need to know what to call an
organism, then we never really give ourselves the
chance to learn or develop an understanding of
it,” says Chitty, “It would be a pity if by describing
these organisms in order to share knowledge with
others, we are actually defining them too
concretely and leaving viewers with the feeling
that no further investigation is required.”
to draw it, I understood it better. I also
liked being able to use ‘suspension-ofdisbelief’ strategies because I could
draw what the human eye couldn't
actually see. For example I could
draw both the interior and exterior of a
specimen at the same time, or I could
take a tiny detail from an initial
drawing and draw just that tiny part of
it as if we were seeing it under a
microscope. Drawing for a graphic
narrative takes these suspension-ofdisbelief strategies even farther - I am
conscious of the facts, but not
restricted by them. I can create a
character that - though generally still
true to form - can stray from the truth
and encourage opportunities for
viewers to establish a personal
connection.
78
79
Small Science Collective
Ear Wig by Lyra Hill, 2008 © the author
80
If scientific illustration and its didactic
intent risks narrowing the sense of further
discovery through its exactness and specificity to
form, the proposition is that narrative opens up
the possibilities for the viewer and reader to
engage in a whole other way. To the extent that
it is true for the audience of the graphic narrative,
clearly this also seems to be the case for the
authors as well. In talking with Chen Dou about
her comic Meeting a Giant Octopus she
commented, “I've always felt as if drawing
animals brings me closer to the creatures that
share residence on planet…it allows me to place
myself in a different world where there is more
interaction and understanding between human
beings and other species.”
It is in this way that the graphic narratives
featured here draw a clear line between
illustrating the possibilities for understanding
animals and our relationships to them more fully
on the one hand, and simply caricaturing them
anthropomorphically on the other. Arguably,
allowing for a more expansive understanding of
animals is a unifying quality of the zines and
comics that the Small Science Collective seeks
to distribute. Given how ubiquitous the tendency
is to either fetishize animals as wild and Other or
superficially employ their forms for the purpose of
decoration or costume, there is a real possibility
to create narratives that function as natural
histories of a post-Darwinian kind. This allows us to
recognize and examine the fundamental (and
fundamentally important) continuum that exists
between humans, animals, and the totality of
nature.
(6) Website of the comic strip Mark Trail
http://www.kingfeatures.com/features/comics/mtrail/about.htm
(7) The Encyclopedia of Life Project: http://www.eol.org/
(8) Shapin, Stephen. The Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998. p.232.
(9) Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences. New York: Routledge, 2002. p.448.
References & Notes
(1) The complete list of Chick cartoon gospel tracts:
http://www.chick.com/catalog/tractlist.asp
(2) “Moving on Up?” full version available at:
http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/1038/1038_01.asp
(3) “There Go the Dinosaurs?” full version available at:
http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/1041/1041_01.asp
Andrew Yang is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago where he teaches classes in biology, as well as
the visual culture of science. He received his PhD in Biology from
Duke University where he studied the evolutionary ecology of social
insects and the philosophy of science. The Small Science Collective
project continues to grow among artists, scientists, students and
anyone compelled to share their interest in various creatures and
features of the natural world. Please feel free to contact us at
[email protected].
An example of another anti-evolution Chick tract “Apes, Lies and Ms.
Henn” available at:
http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/1051/1051_01.asp
(4) The Small Science Collective online:
http://smallsciencezines.blogspot.com/
(5) The Green Porno video project of Isabella Rosselini:
http://www.sundancechannel.com/greenporno/
81
ANIMAL-CENTRIC
GRAPHIC NOVELS:
AN ANNOTATED
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Since, like comic-strips, graphic novels so frequently include animals, simply listing those graphic novels in which
animals appear would be of little or no value or use. Innumerable lists of graphic novels already exist, including
some that do list animal characters. But none focus on graphic novels that might best be called animal-centric,
graphic novels focused on the lives of realistically-drawn and motivated nonhuman animal protagonists and./or have
major themes that rise from the lives and challenges faced by these nonhumans in the actual worlds/habitats
(domestic or wild) in which these animals live. Although those worlds are often controlled by and for the welfare of
human animals, the intent of the graphic artist and writer in such novels is to provide insight into the lives and
concerns of individuals who are other-than-human animals and present themes that provoke empathy and concern
in human audiences for other-than-human beings, their well-being, rights, and survival.
Text by M arion Copeland
A
drew stories in the form of satiric pictures with
captions underneath,” and feel certain that “a
case” could also be made for seeing “Hogarth’s
‘Harlot’s Progress,’ and its sequel, ‘A Rake’s
Progress,’” as “graphic novels of a sort—stories
narrated in sequential panels” (McGrath print
format 1). British graphic novelist “Bryan Talbot’s
Alice in Sunderland explores, in part, the history of
the graphic novel in Britain, wending from
Bayeau Tapestry to Hogarth’s cartoons and Sir
John Tenniel’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
illustrations” (Mulholland 3). Certainly Jean
Grandville’s early 19th century etchings showing
unique human-animal combinations have
influenced the tradition as have the profusely
illustrated “little books” of Beatrix Potter.
Scholars do agree that “graphic novels
and comic books have become an integrated
American cultural literary form of the 21st century”
(Brittany).[i] “The graphic novel is a story told
principally through pictures…like a comic book,
but typically treats a more serious issue in a larger
format. For example, Art Spiegelman’s Maus,”
was created for an adult audience (Armstrong).
Randy Malamud points out in Reading Zoos that
when “Steve Baker examines the phenomenon of
talking animals,” it is mainly in respect to comics,
and that he builds on an “insight of [Ursula K.] Le
nimals leap from the walls of Lascaux,
from the inner walls of pyramids in Egypt
and Mexico, from the megaliths of Druid
and Mayan observatories, from the walls
of museums and galleries, from the screens of
movies, television, You-Tube, and from our DNA.
Inherent in all human art, nonhuman animals
seem to have claimed comics as their natural
habitat since the form began, but have come
into their own only recently in the animal-centric
graphic novel, an evolutionary leap from the socalled “funny animal” genre of comics.
Perhaps this leap has occurred because
the graphic novel relies less on the word than
does the traditional novel even when it is
illustrated, and relies more on text than does the
traditional “comic” even when it contains words,
and, like Animal Studies itself, draws upon many
disciplines and perspectives in its creation.
Most historians of the graphic novel
assume comics and the graphic novel
“[o]riginat[e] with the illuminated text of the [13th
and] 14th century” (Bettley). Others stretch the
genesis back further and into non-Western
climes: Charles McGrath claims that “[t]he notion
of telling stories with pictures goes back to the
caveman. Comic book scholars make much of
Rudolph Topfler, a 19th century Swiss artist who
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Art Spiegelman
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Apex Novelties, 1972-1999 © the author
83
the academic curriculum at various levels and in
various departments; from communication
studies, to literature and literary criticism, to fine
arts and, because they are so issue-oriented, to
history, social science, and psychology, as well.
In time, their reach will extend to the behavioral
and biological sciences (consider, for instance
Hosler’s Clan Apis (2000) or The Sandwalk
Adventure (2003) and Keller’s Charles Darwin
(2009) and, of course, to animal studies and
human-animal studies.
Other signs of acceptance are the
appearance of graphic novels, which once
could be purchased only in comic book
specialty stores, in book stores and public
libraries, and their being “increasingly reviewed as
just another aspect of contemporary writing in
The New York Times and other sources” (Snowball
3). “The Comics Scholars’ email discussion list,
which serves as an academic forum for those
involved in research, criticism and teaching
related to comics (Ault, 2005), is hosted by the
University of Florida…[which]…also hosts an
annual Conference on Comics and Graphic
Novels.” The “interplay between text and image”
in the graphic novel demands skills in visual
literacy that, ironically, given the overwhelmingly
visual nature of contemporary activity, are not
currently being taught, although many educators
are beginning to use graphic novels to teach
visual, as well as textual literacy (Snowball 2).
Looking just aslant, as Emily Dickinson
suggests, reveals the ubiquity, constant and
shaping, of other-than-human animals in the
graphic novel. Early on, we human animals
seem to have understood our role in Earth’s
repertory company. More recently, star-struck,
we’ve assumed (or pretended) we have the right
to the best leading roles. Although they often
appear in comics and graphic novels as
supporting characters, with or without agency,
other-than-human animals have also been
created as protagonist and/or narrator, with
agency – often as talking animal characters. In
George Herriman’s Krazy Kat and Walt Kelley’s
Pogo, animals are sentient and aware that they
have a life story to tell. Rich and varied, from
eyebrow mite to dinosaur, their descendants
appear as fully rounded characters in animalcentric graphic novels, taking center stage with a
strut that probably feels familiar, even
anthropomorphic,[iii] but on closer inspection
could belong only to mite or dino.
Guinn’s that something in the strategy of the
talking-animal story [which includes the “funny
animals” genre of comics] makes it inherently
subversive of patriarchal culture (Malamud 137)”
The graphic novel is, by nature, a
boundary-bending genre, and is now frequently
accepted as “the equivalent of ‘literary novels’ in
the mainstream publishing world” (McGrath 1).[ii]
Although the current graphic novel remains, like
comics, decidedly masculine and violent,
featuring predominantly Caucasian superheroes,
and written and drawn largely by male
Caucasians, animal-centric graphic novels tend
to be less stereotypical and are, on the whole,
more issue oriented. George Herriman (18801944), the writer and illustrator of the early
animal-centric Krazy Kat (1913), was AfricanAmerican, a fact reflected in the speech,
culture, and conflicts of his characters Krazy and
Ignatz. Recent graphic novels have become
more culturally varied: Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s
Cat reflects Jewish culture, as does Spiegelman’s
Maus. All three might as easily be classified as
nonfiction since the autobiographical content is
so intricately entangled with the fictional content,
an entangling that is boundary-bending. What is
more to the point is that Herriman, Spiegelman,
and Sfar, unlike the deceptively titled Spaniel
Rage (Vanessa Kelso), The Squirrel Mother
(Megan Kelso), and Diary of a Mosquito
Abatement Man (John Porcellino), have also
created animal-centric graphic novels, in which
the nonhuman protagonists face problems
unique to the cultures or habitats they share with
others of their species, as well as with the humans
around them. They are, as a result, less
narcissistic and anthropocentric than current
mainstream graphic novels tend to be.
Although scholarly theory dealing with
graphic novels remains, as Gretchen Schwarz
writes, in its infancy, it is of particular interest
because—again boundary-shattering -- it “is
emerging from multiple disciplines—art (Carrier’s
2000 The Aesthetics of Comics), English (Varnum
and Gibbons’s 2001 The Language of Comics),
and history (Harvey’s 1996 The Art of the Comic:
An Aesthetic History), as well as cultural
studies….At the extreme end of the scholarly
literature is The System of Comics (2007) by
French scholar Thierry Groensteen, a ‘semiology
of comics’ in which the author argues
[erroneously, I think] that the words in a graphic
novel are really irrelevant” (Schwarz).
The increasing acceptance of the
graphic novel as a serious genre for both adults
and younger readers is resulting in its inclusion in
84
wrappers, mark them as forerunners of the comic
book. They are amazingly animal-centric,
claiming in the preface to be “the first time in
literary history that animals were allowed to speak
for themselves,” and, although Applebaum
points out that this assertion is not literally true,
pointing to Cervantes and Hoffman as writers
employing this device, they are likely the first
modern “comics” to allow animals that privilege
that is usually reserved for human animals (x-xi).
A Bibliography of Animal-Centric
Graphic Novels, 13 th -21 st Centuries
Partially Annotated
13 th and 14 th centuries
Marginalia in hand-written and hand-drawn or
illuminated texts by monks and nuns in
monasteries often featured animals “painted in
vibrant colors and gold leaf. The purpose of
illumination was literally to light up the page, to
make the text easier to read and more
comprehensible by illustrating the subject matter,
by breaking up the blocks of text, and by giving a
structure to the page.” (Bettley)
G oethe. Reineke Fuchs. Illustrated by Wilhelm
von Kaulbach. 1846 and 1857.
This is “a latterday version of the Roman de
Renart…modeled quite closely on Grandville’s
animal pieces, these drawings by Kaulbach, very
different from the bulk of his rather academic
output, are esteemed most highly today by
many critics” (Applebaum xviii).
18 th century
Hogarth. ‘The Four Stages of Cruelty’, 1751.
19
th
1895— the first com ic strips appear in
newspapers
20 th century
century
Beatrix Potter, as Bryan Talbot points out in The
Tale of One Bad Rat (1995), might be thought of
as the first of the graphic novelists.
G randville (Jean-Ignace-Isidore G erard).
The Metamorphoses of the Day. 1829.
G eorge Herrim an. Krazy Kat. 1913.
Krazy Kat—of Coconino County in the Arizona
Desert—evolved from a minor character in an
early Herriman cartoon: The Family Upstairs. He
escaped to star in his own comic strip in about
1913, and until 1944, enhanced Hearst’s City Life
week-end supplements. He was ‘designed to
appeal to intellectual readers who were
otherwise revulsed by the scandals on the front
page.’ “Like all great art, Krazy Kat [and
Herriman’s illustrations for Archy are] less simple
than [they] first [appear]. [They] [demand] study”
as do serious comics and graphic novels,
especially for readers not used to integrating
words and visual art (Dale 94). This explains the
degree to which Spiegelman’s Maus draws on
the series, and why R. O. Blechman’s “Magicat”
(Talking Lines) provides a fantasy update of Krazy
Kat.
________. Scenes of the Private and Public Life
of the Animals.1840.
________. The Animals Painted By Themselves
and Drawn by Another. 1866.
________. An Other World. 1858.
“The ‘metamorphoses’ were the satirical humananimal combinations…[which have become
standard in modern comics from Disney and
Spiegelman, to Danales and Jason]….: full
bodies of animals in human clothes, human
bodies with animal heads, or even further
variations.
These
hybrids….
are
used
emblematically to represent the [human]
personality traits (greed, cowardice, etc.)
traditionally associated with them in fables,
bestiaries, folk sayings and other popular lore.
This does not preclude loving attention on the
part of the artist to the physical characteristics,
and even the real habits of the animals
depicted…. that he loved [and] knew…at first
hand” (Appelbaum viii).
The Animals, like many long books of
the day, were published serially (a hundred
installments from 1840-1846) in colorful paper
Art Spiegelm an, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale I: My
Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon, 1986.
Although most critics agree with Marianne
Dekovan that the German shepherds in Maus
“are the only animals that represent themselves,”
there are clues in Maus II that Spiegelman
intends to awaken his reader to a dimension
85
George Herriman
Krazy Kat, 1913 © the author
beyond the almost unimaginable cruelty of the
Nazi Holocaust: the issue of domestic abuse is
clear in Vladek’s treatment of Nadja and Mala;
and the house of Dr. Pavel, Art’s therapist, himself
a Holocaust survivor, “is overrun with stray dogs
and cats,” suggesting that the treatment of
animals in modern society is analogous to the
Nazi’s treatment of the Jews (Dekovan 368n1;
McGrath 43).[iv]
“Maus existed outside of any normal
comic book genre except, if one stretched far
enough, funny animal stories” and “permanently
altered…the graphic novel landscape,” as well
as the treatment of animals in the graphic novel
(Weiner 35).
G rant M orrison. Animal Man 1988-1995.
Originally a DC Comics superhero, Animal Man
first appeared in Dave Wood’s Strange
Adventures #180. Buddy Baker does not so
much shapeshift as temporarily borrow the
abilities of other animals.
Wood’s Baker
remained a minor character until 1988-1995
when he was “revived and revamped” by Scottish
writer Grant Morrison with an important
innovation: Morrison’s Animal Man, though still a
comic book character, emerged as an
advocate for animal rights and champion of
vegetarianism like his creator.
Morrison’s series is now available as a
trilogy: Animal Man (Vertigo, 2001); Animal Man:
Origin of the Species (Vertigo 2002); and Animal
Man: Deus ex Machina (Vertigo, 2003).
1990-2000
Jeff Sm ith. Bone. Irregularly released 19912004.
Heavily influenced by Walt Kelley’s Pogo and
Disney’s Bugs Bunny, and originally conceived as
a comic book series to be published
independently, Smith’s fantasy epic has
appeared in graphic novel form since 2002
(GRAPHIX, 2002; Cartoon Books, 2004; Scholastic,
Stan Sakai. Usagi Yojimbo: Books 1-10.
Fantagraphics, 1987-present.
Usagi is a 17th century “masterless samuri rabbit”
who fights injustice against all creatures with the
aid of a rhino bounty hunter and a feline
bodyguard. Sakai’s style is funny animal
translated by manga.
86
2005; GRAPHIX, 2008) and, among other honors,
was featured in an exhibit at Wexner Center for
the Arts, Ohio State University, July-December
2008. The Bones, nonhumans of no definable
species, exiled from their homeland, find their
way to a mysterious valley populated by talking
animals of many species, including homo
sapiens, surviving under the constant threat of the
Lord of the Locusts. It becomes the Bones’
mission to save this world from this menace. See
SLIS
Reading
Group-Graphic.Novels:
Communications, 1995.
Bryan Talbot. The Tale of One Bad Rat.
Milwakee: Dark Horse Books, 1995. Winner of the
Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album Reprint
[2008].
A tale of child abuse that draws its inspiration
from the works of Beatrix Potter who, along with
several turn-of-the-century writer/artists, might be
thought of as the first graphic novelists. When
“Helen Potter…runs away from home [with her
pet rat] to escape an uncaring mother and a
sexually abusive father…..she finds her way to the
Lake District, drawn there by her love of the work
of Beatrix Potter, and in that beautiful landscape
she
at
last
finds
peace.”
www.readalike.org/graphic_novels/sje.html
Dave Sim s. Cerebus, a comic series begun in
1977, combines adventure and fantasy
elements, that take the little gray aardvark into a
human world.
There are currently two
collections: Church and State (1987-88) and
High Society (1994) and three independent
graphic novels: Jake’s Story, Melmoth, and
Flight. Sims describes his story about a three-foot
aardvark as a 300-issue novel. Its “ironic and
witty dialogue” is outstanding.
(www.rbooks.co.uk/product.aspx?id=02240847)
Talbot’s tale is, writes Neil Gaiman, “‘a
lovingly crafted story about, in the end, the
meaning and value of fiction and art, about
what we take from the past, and what we bring
to the future.’”
2000-2002
Art Spiegelm an. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale II: And
Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon,
1991.
Jay Hosler. Clan Apis. Active Synapse Comics
#15, 2000.
Since Hosler is both a biologist and bee specialist
at Ohio State University, his novels carry special
weight in their accurate description of animals.
Herman Melville. Moby Dick. Adapted by W ill
Ricardo Delgado. The Age of Reptiles: The
Hunt. Dark Horse Comics, 1992.
“Delgado brings to life the oldest stories of life on
our planet….These stories of dinosaurs living when
the planet was the only storyteller are now
imagined and relayed through Ricardo’s
distinctive illustrations….Ricardo leads us into a
world…brought vividly to life through startling
staging, fast-paced [wordless] stories, and the
fundamental struggles of nature. We are not
transported back but rather into a world we can
never know without our storyteller as a guide”
(Tom Schumacher, Introduction).
Eisner. Natier Biall Minostchine, 2001.
In contrast to the Classics Comics’ adaptation
by Sophie Furse (2007), this is an adult graphic
novel interpreted by one of the acknowledged
masters of the genre.
Chris Onstad. Archewood. 2001
The web-based series was gathered as a graphic
novel in 2007. “It’s not a graphic novel in every,
or maybe any, traditional sense,” writes Lev
Grossman, “but Archewood is so profoundly
genius it would be a crime to put it anywhere but
on this [Top 10 Graphic Novels] list, and at the top
of it. Archewood defies categorization or
description, but a brief, futile attempt at a
synopsis would go something like this: A bunch of
cats, some robots, a bear and an otter who’s 5
years old, live together in a fictional
neighborhood called Archewood, which you
might think of as a grown-up, suburban, stoned
version of Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood….The art is
at times crude, but it rises to moments of
extreme lyrical beauty, and the writing has
enormous emotional range—from aching
Robert Crum b. Kafka’s Metamorphosis. 1995.
“Crumb dominates the brief history of the graphic
novel the way Cimabue dominates Vasari’s first
volume of ‘Lives of the Artists’—as both an
inescapable stylistic influence and a kind of
moral exemplar.” McGrath compares Crumb’s
style to Goya’s and Brueghel’s, claiming it is
equally recognizable and powerful (McGrath 3),
making it particularly suited to a retelling of
Kafka’s metamorphosis of man into insect. The
story is further updated in Blechman’s Talking
Lines (2009).
M iyasaki, Hayao. Nausicca of the Valley of
the Wind. Perfect Collection: Vol. I. Viz
87
Jay Hosler
Clan Apis, Active Synapse Comics 2000 © the author
88
G rant M orrison. We3. Ill. Frank
Quitely. New York: DC Vertigo, 2007.
“…the story of three lab animals—a dog, a cat,
and a rabbit—taken off the streets and hardwired
into military battle suits [what Ursula Heise more
accurately calls “cyborg superweapons with
incipient language abilities]”. Trained to be the
next generation of soldiers, and marked for
destruction by the project overseer, the animals
are freed by their handler, whereupon they
promptly revert to more…traditional patterns of
behavior” (Craig). Although the rabbit is killed,
“the dog and cat are rescued and reconverted
into contented pets by a homeless man—an
ending whose neatness and sentimentality
create an odd tension with the darkness of the
plot and the experimentalism of Quimby’s visual
style, which put We3 at the cutting edge on
innovation in the genre” (Heise 508).
sadness to some of the most brilliant, bizarre
comedy happening anywhere, in any medium.”
M asashi Tanaka. Gon. DC Comics, 2001.
2003-2004
Jay Hosler. Sandwalk Adventure: An Adventure
in Evolution Told in Five Chapters. Columbus, OH:
Active Synapse, 2003.
“[B]eyond the kitchen garden, through a door in
the hedge, Darwin had just designed and built ‘a
thinking path,’ a sandwalk that loops its way
round the edge of a small wood. Sand and red
clay lodge in the ridges of his walking boots. He
walks the loop of the thinking path five times a
day before lunch” (Stott 69-70).
G reg Rogers. The Boy, the Bear, the Baron,
and the Bard. 2004.
This textless graphic novel “was short-listed by the
Children’s Book Council of Australia, Book of the
Year for Younger readers” (Snowball 5).
Chris W are. Quimby The Mouse. Jonathan
Cape, 2003.
Not the conventional cartoon mouse, Quimby is
“beset by insecurities and obsessions that haunt
him as he continues in a dark and cruel world”
(Kanneberg 313). “Cleverly appropriated oldfashioned animation imagery and advertising
styles of the 1920s and [30s][v] are put to use…at
the service of modern vignettes of angst and
existentialism. As this cartoon silhouette of a
mouse ignominiously suffers at every turn, the
spaces between the panels create despair and
a Beckett-like rhythm of hope deceived and
deferred (but never extinguished), buoying
Quimby
from
page
to
page.” (www.rbooks.co.uk/product.aspx?d!id=02240726)
Andy Runton. Owly: The Way Home. Top Shelf,
2004.
Kannenberg comments that “Runton’s drawing
style has a[n]… obvious sophistication…[that]
conjures a whole host of emotions from his
seemingly simple [animal] characters and
conveys a great sense of their inner and outer
worlds” (28-29).
Adam Sacks.
Comics, 2004.
Bill Willingham. Fables Vol #2: Animal Farm.
Ill. Mark Buckingham. DC Vertigo Comics, 2003.
The series which relocates fairy tale characters in
modern New York, began in 2002. I include only
the most animal-centric of the collected comics,
those focusing on nonhuman characters who are
“forced further into exile to a farm upstate where
their otherworldly nature can be concealed.”
They remain discontent with such speciesism,
feeling that their nonhuman natures are needed
to resolve the plots the human characters cannot
solve.
Salmon
Doubts. Alternative
2005-2007
Lindsay Cibos and Jared Hodges. Peach
Fuzz, vol. I. TokyoPop, 2005.
Joann Sfar. The Rabbi’s Cat.
Pantheon Books, 2005.
New York:
Anna Sewell. Black Beauty. Adapted by J ane
Bridgm an and Ray Richardson. New York:
Puffin, 2005.
Juan Diaz Canales. Ill. Juanja Guarnido.
Blacksad. Ibooks, 2004.
Paul Wright. Smelling a Rat. Jonathan Cape,
2005.
“Trevor Gristle lives in Merton with his mom and
dad and sister. He lives in a world of his own,
dreaming of superheroes, and his stories are not
always believed by his family. So when he returns
Jason. You Can’t get There From Here.
Fantagraphics, 2004.
89
anthropomorphizing the creatures, and instead
[he] magically bestow[s] human speech upon
them, portray[ing] their communication as growls
and roars that are somehow intelligible to
humans” (Kannenberg 480-481).
home one day with a giant seven-foot-tall
insatiably
greedy
spotted
rat
called
Ratman,…the rest of the Gristles, for once, are
forced to believe him.
“From this starting point Paul Wright tells
and illustrates a brilliantly funny and surreal tale.
His drawing is superb, his imagination knows no
bounds and his satirical eye is as sharp as a
knife.” Ratman began as a comic strip in The
LondoncTimes
Jam es Vining. First in Space. Oni Press, 2006.
The story of Russia’s first dog in space from the
dog’s point of view.
(www.rbooks.com.uk/product.aspx?id=02240738).
Nick Abadzis. Laika. New York: First Second,
2007. See: Lisa Brown’s “A Graphic Novel Raises
Ethical Issues: Laika, By Nick Abadzis.” Society
and Animals 16:3 (2008): 293-296 and “An
Interview with Nick Abadzis, author of Laika.”
Animal Inventory Blog, Oct. 27, 2008:
http://www.animalinventory.net/2008/10/27/an_int
erview_with_nick_abadzis
Rebecca Dart. Rabbit Head. 2006.
Jessie Reklaw. “13 Cats of My Childhood” from
Couch Tag, 2006. Although the graphic novel
itself is an autobiography, the cats who were a
part of Reklaw’s childhood family are rounded
animal-centric characters in this selection from
Pekar’s anthology (232-251).
Sarah Boxer. In the Floyd Archives. New York:
Random House Pantheon, 2007. “…an animal
tour of all things Freudian”
Aaron Reynolds. Ill. Leonard and Ekik. Insect
Ninja. Stone Arch Books, 2006.
The first of a series combining the author’s love of
bugs and books. Tiger Moth is the leading
character of this insect-rich world.
www.randomhouse.com/pantheon/graphicnovels/boxer.ht
ml.
Am anda Dine. Antlers: A Graphic Novel
Exploring the Connections Between Human,
Animal, and Landscape. Undergraduate
Integrative Project Thesis, School of Art and
Design, University of Michigan, 2007-2008.
_____________. Tiger Moth and the Dragon Kite
Contest. Stone Arch Books, 2006.
Anna Sewell. Black Beauty. Adapted by L . L.
O wens. Ill. Jennifer Tanner. Stone Arch Books,
2006.
Erin Hunter. The Warrior Graphic Novels, 2007.
Brian Jacques. Redwall: The Graphic Novel
(Part One). Adapted by S tuart M oore. Ill. By Bret
Blevins. New York: Philomel, 2007.
Closely based on the original plot, the peaceful
existence of the mice of Redwall is threatened by
an invasion of city rats. Survival necessitates the
emergence of a leader under whom the Redwall
animals can band together. Neither the
shortness nor its reliance on black and white help
this version achieve the richness of Jacques’
story, although Blevins’ training in Marvel and DC
Comics allow for impressive battle and action
sequences full of grit, if not blood. Even more
important, as one reviewer said, “Blevins never
forgets that these are animals, not little people in
animal clothing” (Elizabeth Bird 5 Dec 2007:
www.schoollibraryjournal.com/blog/1790000379/
post/16600).
Craig Thom pson. Good-Bye, Chunky Rice.
Pantheon, 2006.
When the little turtle, Chucky Rice, sails off to find
where he truly belongs, “his [inconsolable] little
mouse friend” tosses “hundreds of bottles into the
sea—each one containing the solitary line, ‘I miss
you’” (Kannenberg 200).
Bill Willingham. Ill. Mark Buckingham and
Sharon McManus. Fables: Wolves. DC Comics
Vertigo, 2006.
Bryan K. Vaughan. Pride of Baghdad. Ill. Niko
Henrichon. New York: Vertigo/DC Comics, 2006.
Although Pride of Bagdad is Vaughan’s first
animal-centric
graphic
novel,
realistic
nonhumans, while not the protagonists of the
comic books as they are here, do play significant
roles in earlier Vaughan publications. In Y: The
Last Man, for instance, the hero’s sidekick,
Ambersand, is a capuchin monkey. “Vaughan
invests the lions with believably leoline
‘personalities,’….avoid[ing] the trap of
________. Redwall: The Graphic Novel (Part Two).
Neil Kleid. Ill. By Alex Nino. New York: Philomel,
2007
90
David Peterson
Mouse Guard, 2009 © the author
with the reality that he is not a human being? All
is at least partly resolved in…Lia’s utterly irresistible
graphiccnovel.”
Sim one Lia. Fluffy. 2007.
“Originally published by the author [Canbanan
Press] in four volumes, Fluffy is described by
Simone Lia as ‘a story of unanswerable questions,
love, despair, adventure and happiness.’ Fluffy is
a baby rabbit who is being looked after by an
anxious, single man called Michael Pulcino.
Michael tries to make it clear to Fluffy that he is
not his daddy, but Fluffy appears to be in denial.
Michael is being pursued by Fluffy’s nursery
school teacher, and partly to escape her, he
and Fluffy set off to visit his family in Sicily. Will
Michael escape her? Will Fluffy come to terms
(www.rbooks.co.uk/product.aspx?id=02240804)
M asashi Tanaka. Gon: Vol. 1. CMX, 2007.
Wordless, like Delgato’s The Age of Reptiles, Gon
is an out-of-time tiny T-Rex wandering “nearphotorealistic…environments” where he meets
modern “animals of all sorts who breathe not only
authenticity but life into a story” which argues for
animal cooperation and ethics (Kanneberg 39).
91
________. Gon: Vol. 2.
2008-2010
Kate Dicam illo. The Tale of Despereaux: The
Graphic Novel. Adapted largely from the film
version by M att Sm ith and David Tilton.
Candlewick, 2008.
M elville, Herm an. Moby Dick. Adapted by
Sophie Furse. Ill. Penko Gelev and Sotir
Gelen. Barron’s Educational Series, 2007.
A graphic novel version in The Classics Comics
tradition: see also Melville 2001.
G eorge Herrim an. Krazy and Ignatz 19431944:
He
Nods
in
Quiessant
Siesta.
Fantagraphics, 2008.
O sam a Tezuka. Buddha: Vol. I Kapilavastu;
Vol. II The Four Encounters; Vol III Devadatta.
Delphine Perret. The Big Bad Wolf and Me.
Sterling, 2007.
“Delphine Perret has created an irresistible,
almost-graphic novel without boxes for the very
junior set, replete with the kind of ironic-cool
humor and subtlety that made the “Calvin and
Hobbes” cartoons so beloved….
The Big Bad Wolf and Me takes
simplicity and the art of the drawn line to
admirable heights, relying on two-color drawings
in brown, black, or blue, with an occasional
sparing dash of red, yellow, and green. Perret
brilliantly controls her blank spaces, and is not
afraid of letting her two characters hang around
in them. It’s nice to think there may be further
adventures of The Big Bad Wolf and Me” in which
the boy continues to ‘retrain…the wolf to be big
and bad’” (Rosenberg).
Dan Jolley and Don Hudson. Warriors:
Tigerstar
&
Sasha—Into
the
Woods.
HarperCollins, 2008.
Sasha, placed with a new family when her
beloved human is sent to a nursing home, runs
away to the woods behind her old home. There
she encounters clans of wild cats, very like the
well-known cats in Erin Hunter’s Warrior series.
Drawn in an effective manga style, Sasha
teaches readers what it feels like to lose a home
and have to struggle to survive in a wild world
without human caregivers (Jung).
W alt Kelly. Pogo: The Complete Daily and
Sunday Comic Strips Volume 1: Into the Wild Blue
Yonder. Fantagraphics, 2008.
Steve Purcell. The Collected Sam & Max:
Surfin’ the Highway. Tell Tale Games, 2008 (20th
anniversary issue).
A freelance team of police, a dog
and a rabbit, deal with everything from volcano
gods “to a legion of rats (and the world’s largest
prairie dog), and demons. They also take a trip
to the moon where they meet moonrats and
giant cockroaches” (Kannenberg 336).
David Petersen. Mouse Guard Vol. 1 Fall
1152. Arachadia Studios, 2007.
David Petersen. Mouse Guard Vol. 2: Winter
1152. Archadia Studios, 2009.
“Set in the year 1152, a contingent of anthropomorphic mice…must defend their rodent
world from a rogue dictator. The guard wishes to
live peacefully and protect against harmful
creatures without upsetting the balance of the
mouse society and predator-prey relationship
they share with the world surrounding
them….Sharing many of the fantasy tropes
found in Bone, Mouse Guard also includes bold
character depictions [and, unlike the black and
white
Bone]
is
entirely
in
color”
Doug TenNapel.
Image Comics, 2008.
Monster
Zoo.
Aaron Reynolds. Kung Pow Chicken. Stone
Arch Books, 2008. (See Reynolds, 2006)
________. The Pest Show on Earth. Stone Arch
Books, 2008. (See Reynolds, 2006)
(www.readalike.org/graphic_novel/sjc.html).
Andy Runton. Owly: The Way Home and The
Bittersweet Summer. Top Shelf, 2008.
Aaron Reynolds. The Dung Beetle Bandits.
Stone Arch Books, 2007. (See Reynolds 2006)
Johann Sfar. The Rabbi’s Cat, Vol. II. New York:
Pantheon Books, 2008.
________. The Torture Cookies of Weevil. Stone
Arch Books, 2007. (See Reynolds, 2007)
92
Walt Kelly
Pogo, 2008 © the author
93
Rodale. 2009.
Rodale's multitextured version introduces a
more accessible Darwin, no less complex—or
fascinating. The graphic novel follows Origin's
original chapters, combining snippets of Darwin's
text with quotes from letters, illustrative examples
from his time and from the present, and
occasional invented dialog. Fuller's full-color
plants, animals, charts, maps, and scientific
accoutrements are effective. An afterword from
Keller brings the scholarship up-to-date, from
Mendel's pea plants to Wilson's sociobiology. For
a really animal-centric telling see: Jay Hosler's
The Sandwalk Adventures.
Shirley Hughes. Bye Bye Birdie. 2009.
This is famed children’s author “Shirley Hughes’ first
graphic book for adults. A young man, in his
best bow-tie and boater, meets a fashionably
dressed—and rather bird-like—young lady. But
when he takes her home she undergoes a
transformation and our hero’s dreams of
connubial bliss suddenly turn into the stuff of
nightmare: Totally wordless, Bye Bye Birdie
showcases Shirley Hughes’ brilliant drawing and
her
extraordinarily
vivid
imagination.”
(www.rbooks.co.uk/product.aspz?id=02240807)
Hakabune Hakusho. Moyamu Fujino: Animal
Academy. Vols. I and II. Tokyo Pop, 2009.
Fifteen year-old Neko, who has been rejected by
every high school she has applied to, is finally
accepted at Morimoni where, she discovers, all
the other students are animals who can transform
into humans and are there to learn how to
behave in human society.
Perhaps her
acceptance can be explained by the fact that
her name, Neko, means “cat.” Can she pass?
The manga tradition reflects the Japanese
culture in its animal-centricity.
Bo Obam a: The W hite House Tails.
Bluewater Productions.
The original comic book, which sold out
when it was released in September 2009, will be
released as a graphic novel in March 2010, using
the fun-loving Bo to instruct readers about White
House history and past presidential pets (Daniels).
________. Moyamu Fujino: Animal Academy.
Vol III. Tokyo Pop, 2010.
Secondary Sources
Erin Hunter. Illus. Bettina Kurkoski. Seekers:
Toklo’s Story. New York: HarperCollins, 2010.
Anthony, Lawrence with G raham Spence.
Babylon’s Ark: The Incredible Rescue of the
Baghdad Zoo. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007.
This source authenticates the plot of Pride of
Bagdad and makes a point about the actual
situation that applies, as well, to Vaughan[AD8]’s
animal-centric graphic novel: “This was about
more than just a zoo in a war zone. It was about
making an intrinsically ethical and moral
statement, saying: Enough is enough” (50).
Kevin C. Pyle. Katman. New York: Henry Holt,
2009.
Lisa Trum bauer. Ill. Aaron Blecha. Graphic
Spin: The Three Little Pigs: The Graphic Novel.
Stone Arch Books, 2009.
Zheng Jun. Tibetan Rock Dog. 2009.
Not yet available in the United States, the novel’s
hero is a Tibetan mastiff named Metal who grows
up in a Buddhist temple, learning, from his
grandfather, the ancient wisdom of his breed.
This includes “the secrets of walking upright and
speaking human language,…canine meditation
[Heavenly Mastiff Yoga],” and a hatred of their
“ancient enemy, the Tibetan wolf” (Danwei
quoted in Pothaar). When he becomes the
companion of a rock musician, very like the
author, and moves to Beijing, Metal discovers a
secret underground world where all dogs walk
upright and talk. There he forms a rock band with
friends he met in obedience school. Zheng Jun
describes the film inspired by the novel as a
serious version of Kung Fu Panda.
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Brown, Lisa. “A Graphic Novel Raises Ethical
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Guide to Graphic
Novels. ALA. 2010. Goldsmith’s (director of
branch services, Halifax P.L.s, N.S.) aim with this
guide is to get librarians onto the radars of
fanboys and fangirls and train reader's advisory
(RA) professionals about which comics to offer to
which readers. She addresses how to advise
comics-savvy readers of all ages, as well as
nudge "traditional" readers toward graphic novel
options. Additionally, she addresses how to
suggest interplays of graphic novels with films
and gaming, and discusses how they are
supplements
to
more
broadly
based
[mw9] books like David S. Serchay's The Librarian's
Guide to Graphic Novels for Children and Tweens
(LJ 9/15/08), Robin E. Brenner's Understanding
Manga and Anime (LJ 9/15/07), and Michael
Pawuk's Graphic Novels: A Genre Guide to
Comic Books, Manga, and More (LJ 7/1/07).
Geis, Deborah. Approaches to Art Spiegelman’s
Maus. 2003.
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M oore, Clayton. “Graphic Attack: Vertigo
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Animal.” PMLA 124. 2(March): 503-510.
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96
References & Notes
25 March 2007: D7.
Rothzchild, D. Aviva. Graphic Novels: A
Bibliographic Guide to Book-Length Comics.
Libraries Unlimited, 1995.
[i] On the whole “…graphic novels share so many characteristics with
comic books and collections of cartoon strips that separating graphic
novels would be difficult…to do consistently….Many discussions of graphic
novels…go on to use a broad definition that includes not only stand-alone
stories in comics form published as books but also collections of stories
[like Fables] initially published serially in comic books and collections of
newspaper comic strips reprinted in book form.” DDC [Dewey Decimal
Classification] also lists graphic novels in 741.5—art—rather than in 800—
literature in order to emphasize that the visual aspects of the form are as,
if not more significant than the text itself (“Graphic Novels in DDC”).
Vertigo, the publisher of Fables, as well as both Vaughan’s Pride of Bagdad
and Morrison’s We3, claims that their books “teeter on the verge…of
literature” (Moore). Vaughan, also the author of the comics Swamp Thing
and Y: The Last Man, sees Pride of Bagdad as his “first full-length, standalone graphic novel” (Carl Banks).
Schwartz, Gretchen E. “Graphic Novels for
Multiple
Literacies.” Reading
Online—New
Literacies:
http://www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/jaal/11-02_colur
________. “Teaching Visual Literacy Through
Graphic Novels.” American Association of School
Librarians (online Jan-Feb 2008):
http://www.ala.org/mgrps/divs/aaslarchive/kquarchives/vol8
[ii] Another indication of this acceptance is that, starting with Jay Cantor’s
Krazy Kat: A Novel in Four Panels and Michael Chabon’s Kavalier and
Clay, contemporary fiction has begun to allude to and borrow from the
graphic novel, crossing, among others, the boundary separating text and
visual arts. Cantor and Chabon are joined in this by works like Umberto
Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Evan Kuhlman’s Wolf Boy,
Susan Schade and Jon Buller’s Travels of Thelonius, the Australian novelist
Joshua Wright’s Plotless Pointless Pathetic, Hapless Hopelass and Goom,
and Gwen Vernon’s Dragonbreath and Nurk: The Strange, Surprising
Adventures of a (Somewhat) Brave Shrew. The latter three “intersperse
graphic novel sections with text novel sections…. [Travels of Thelonius i]s
the story of a post-apocalyptic world where humans have disappeared and
there are civilizations of talking, thinking animals. Thelenonius is a
chipmunk who lives in the forest but longs for adventure; he is fascinated
with the legendary humans” much as we are with dinosaurs and
mammoths” (www.wandsandworlds.com). Wright’s Plotless is equally
apocalyptic but substitutes anthropocentric angst for Buller’s focus on the
survival of those species surviving homo sapiens. Vernon’s novels,
intended for younger readers, emphasize quest, adventure, and
interspecies cooperation with no human presence. Opening the genre to
books depending equally on illustration and text would also draw in
hybrids like Gary Larson’s There’s Hair in My Dirt (New York:
HarperCollins, 1998) and Sue Coe’s Pit’s Letter (2000) in which
nonhuman animal protagonists like Larson’s Worm and Pit’s Dog are, as is
Schade and Buller’s chipmunk Thelonius, protagonists, narrators with
agency appearing in animal-centric stories.
Snowball, Clare. “Graphic Novels: Telling Tales
Visually.”
Synergy 4, 2(2006): 18-22:
http://www.alia.org.an/~csnow/research/publish/synergy.http
Spurgeon, D.
“Comics Reporter Sunday
Interview: Nick Abadzis.” The comics reporter.
Reviewed
March
6,
2008:
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ck_abadzis/
Stott, Rebecca. Darwin and the Barnacle:
The Story of One Tiny Creature and History’s Most
Spectacular Scientific Breakthrough. New York
and London: W. W. Norton, 2003.
Varnum , R. & C. T. G ibbons, eds. The
Language of Comics. Jackson, MI: University
Press of Mississippi, 2001.
[iii] The anthropocentric human-animal characters, from Spiderman and
Cat Woman, to Wolverine and Animal Man, are an important element in
this tradition, akin perhaps to the hybrid traits found in Egyptian deities
and Greek gods and heroes, and similar figures in many other cultures.
Seen from this perspective, they point in the direction of reverence for
other animals and kinship between humans and other animals. It seems
significant that Scott McCloud classifies Morrison and others working in
this tradition as “animists” and recognizes that the devices they develop
“to make their [nonhuman] characters and plots come alive” for human
readers can be isolated and examined (quoted in Wolk 181). Morrison
took his first steps toward the animal-centric in The Invisibles, where
readers are forced to get outside their context by substituting a multiple ,
de-centered perspective for human sterioptic vision (Wolk 262, 266), thus
overpowering the anthropocentric “I” with what is actually a multiple-self
composed of multiple species. As Wolk puts it, the graphic novel is “an
ideal medium for diverting the reader’s consciousness into multiple
subjectivities” (370).
Weiner,
Stephen
and
Keith
R.
A.
Decandido. The 101 Best Graphic Novels.
2001.
Weiner, Stephen. Faster Than a Speeding
Bullet: The Rise of the Graphic Novel. New York:
Nantier, Beall, Minouschine, 2003.
Whyte, M alcolm . Great Comic Cats.
Francisco: Pomegranate, 2001.
San
Wolff, Carlo. 2010. “On Graphic Novels:
Humanity, Glorious and Vile.” The Boston Sunday
Globe 3 January: K7.
[iv] Spiegelman complicates the matter even more by raising the question
of what mask to give his non-Jewish wife prefaces the story; the masks
themselves are revealed sometimes as masks although at other times the
characters seem to be humans with mouse, cat, or pig faces.
Wolk, D. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels
Work and What They Mean. Cambridge, MA:
DaCapo Press, 2007.
[v] Wolk likens the technique to that of Harriman’s Krazy Kat with
seemingly anthropomorphized animals revealing themselves as real cat,
mouse, and dog (353ff).
97
Beatrix Potter
The Tale of One Bad Rat 972-1995 © the author
Marion W. Copeland, an independent scholar, is currently
affiliated with Humane Society University (HSUS) where she offers
two courses:
Animals and Literature and Interdisciplinary
Perspectives in Animal Studies. She has tutored and lectured in the
Masters of Science program in Animals and Public Policy Program at
the Center for Animals and Public Policy” at Tufts University
Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine and is professor emerita of
English at Holyoke Community College (MA). In addition to being
fiction review editor for both Society and Animals and NILAS (Nature
in Legend and Story), she is co-editor of What Are the Animals to Us?
The author of many reviews and essays, she has also published two
books: Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa) and Cockroach.
98
Antennae.org.uk
Issue sixteen will be
online on the 21st of
March 2011
Antennae.org.uk
Issue seventeen will be
st
of June 2011
online on the 21
99