LCS Seminar Series -- Dr. Liz Ho (English, Lingnan) "Maps in comics"

In this talk, I argue that the proliferation of globes, cartography and mapping practices in graphic novels index the medium’s self-reflexive links to critical geography. Reading a range of graphic novels such Dylan Horrocks’s Hickvsille (1998), Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2007); and Guy Delisle’s travel writing series (Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea (2005); Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China  (2006); Burma Chronicles (2008); Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (2012)), I claim that the iconicity of maps are a way for comics to theorize about the medium’s negotiations and engagements with the here and there.  I will outline the shared visual emphasis and formal techniques between maps and comics: in their unique combination of text and image both make “propositions in graphic form” (Krygier & Wood) and when comics and maps intersect their shared visual semiotics can produce geopolitical arguments (Dittmer). I show how maps in comics subject the map-making process to parody and reconceptualization by challenging the dominant narratives of how place is made legible. At the same time, I show that the geographical metaphors that make up the language of comics are underscored by a real geography of colonialism, immigration and the struggles of the global south. My talk ends with a discussion of MAP Office’s (Laurent Guterriez and Valerie Portefaix) 2015 installation “Hong Kong is land” – a massive 2x8m piece that draws on cartography and the comic form to demonstrate how the spatialized language of comics and maps can create propositional, future scenarios of Hong Kong that can respond to the city’s unbalanced geography and the urban population’s future needs. This paper offers a rare comparative study of the geographic rhetoric of “comics studies” and what graphic novelist Dylan Horrocks has called “a new way of mapping”  that has emerged in geographers’ appreciation of the medium of comics. 

Elizabeth Ho is Associate Professor of English at Lingnan University (Hong Kong) where she teaches global literatures in English.  She has published on postcolonial neo-Victorian fiction and graphic novels in journals such as Cultural Critique and College Literature.  She is the author of Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire (Continuum 2012) and is currently working on her second monograph, tentatively titled “Map-able: The Politics of Postcolonial Space”.