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The shared trauma and slow violence caused by industrial disasters alter the collective environmental memory of the surviving population. The survivors and victims of mercury poisoning are a case in point that exist as memorial remains of eco-sickness. Industrial disaster comics galvanise such discussions as concerns of environmental, social, and biological damage. The Minamata Story: An Eco Tragedy, written by Sean Michael Wilson and Akiko Shimojima, visualises the chaotic memories of the mercury poisoning disaster that ravaged the Japanese village of Minamata in 1956. Mediated through witness accounts and the research expeditions of the protagonist Tomi, the comic portrays the spatial landscape of Minamata as a container of memories. The Minamata Story illustrates the psychosomatic damage of the eco-crime on human body, and the resultant social vulnerability of victims in their post-disaster lives. It exposes the typical portrayal of the victims as toxic embodiments and assumes an empathetic perspective which is pitted against the medicalisation of the identities of survivors. The long-lasting nature of the biological damage qualifies the text as a case for intergenerational trauma and postmemory. Taking these cues, the present article analyses the representation of environmental memory, and reviews the visualisation of eco-sickness in industrial disaster comics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates three comic books written and illustrated by Ciaj Rocchi and Matteo Demonte, namely Primavere e autunni [Springs and autumns] (2015), Chinamen. Un secolo di cinesi a Milano [Chinamen. A century of Chinese people in Milan] (2017), and La macchina zerø. Mario Tchou e il primo computer Olivetti [Machine zero. Mario Tchou and the first Olivetti computer] (2021). The three texts provide graphic accounts of the establishment of a Chinese community in Italy using biographic narrations. The article analyses the three comics and their paratextual apparatuses, focusing on the authors' documentarist approach, the ways in which personal biographies are embedded in the story of Italy's resident Chinese community and in the history of Italy, and finally on the comics' intergenerational and diasporic testimonial value. Drawing on Hirsch's articulation of postmemory, on Mickwitz's analysis of comics as documentaries and archives, and on Nabizadeh's emphasis on comics as alternate narratives and memories, the article argues that Rocchi and Demonte's comic books while narrating private stories provide a visual representation of the history of modern Italy as grounded in transnational connections and are inherently multicultural. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In my graphic memoir The Wounds of Separation I combined personal memory and historical fact incorporating conceptual insights to tell a story about the way traumas are remembered. The story describes the forced migration of a child and how, in order to survive the devastation of WWII a young girl is separated from her parents and home causing lasting impacts on her life. The narrative content was enriched by a research process that involved understandings gained from trauma theories. In this paper I explore how these theoretical understandings shaped the creation of my graphic memoir and how representational theories helped direct the narrative choices to communicate the experience of trauma. I show how the conceptual underpinnings have been realised in my multimodal narrative identifying the text/image options that make the graphic memoir an appropriate representational choice. In my analysis of pages I describe the intended meanings I aim to communicate and explain the creative expression of those ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In my paper ‘Postmodern Chinoiserie in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese’ (2014,Literature Compass11 (1): 1–14), I propose that existing scholarship on the portrayal of Asians and Asian Americans in American comics has largely focused upon racist newspaper cartoons from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and modern Asian-American alternative comics. There exists a small but growing body of academic literature on the depiction of Asian Americans in modern mainstream comics. In this essay I seek to develop the scholarship by analysing Marvel’’s character Hazmat (Jennifer Takeda) in the context of modern depictions of Asians and Asian Americans in American comic books and the postmemory of Nagasaki Hiroshima, and the Japanese internment camps. This paper is organised in two parts. The first focuses upon the ways in which Asians and Asian Americans have historically been depicted (or, in many cases, not depicted) in American comics. The argument includes an examination of the ways in which the Marvel character Hazmat has been written in relation to those stereotypes. The second half of the essay considers the ways in which Hazmat embodies (quite literally) the violence towards Japanese civilians during World War II, and the ethics of exploring the history of genocide through the superhero genre. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]