Latin American Comics in the Twenty-First Century: Transgressing the Frame, James Scorer, 2024, University of Texas Press
Are comics in Latin America becoming “non-national” in the 21st century as the region continues to experience the birth pangs of a new era?
This would make sense, as the forces of globalisation and integration challenge traditional concerns with the national-popular just as they have elsewhere in the world.
One might consider the latest expressions of populism—from Bolsonaro in Brazil to Milei in Argentina—as indirect political symptoms of this phenomenon, rearguard actions against the unstoppable erosion of nationhood in an increasingly connected world.
Author James Scorer has made this important observation in his detailed study of trends in Latin American comic art. He puts forward a plausible case that, if anything, this genre has worked in recent decades to destabilise—as opposed to reinforce—traditional national narratives.
Scorer argues that the nation has not disappeared as a site of concern, but where it rears its head the emphasis is nuanced and the focus unexpected and subversive.
One can recognise what he says when he writes: “By contrast to literature or cinema, Latin American comics artists have never aspired to write the ‘great national comic’, let alone the ‘great Latin American graphic novel’.”
One reason for this, inevitably, is the lowly status ascribed comic art by elites who do not regard it as a form of high culture, and as such it is inherently critical of their world.
Using the Ecuadorian-Colombian Powerpaola’s Virus tropical as an example, Scorer notes that the major sociopolitical conflicts of nation-states are still present in twenty-first-century Latin American comics, but are often addressed at a micropolitical level, or beyond the frame.
In this case, the protagonist kisses her boyfriend while sheltering behind a car as shots fired by drug cartels can be heard in the background. The landscape is one of activism against repressive national norms, personal relationships, shared expressions of creativity that lack overt manifestos or blunt political or aesthetic statements.
“Collectively they are persistently subversive, celebrating countercultural gestures of the ‘under’, the disruptive power of humour, and transnational gestures of solidarity,” the author writes.
In keeping with this observation, Scorer approaches the study of comic art through a transnational, transborder, and transgressive methodology.
His premise is that comics production in the region is more interconnected and networked across national borders than ever, and there is a greater sensibility to comics as a means of speaking to political issues that transgress boundaries.
For that reason, he talks of the existence of a “Latin American comics”, exemplified by the publication in 2017 of a ground-breaking compilation of comics by artists from 10 countries, El Volcán: Un presente de la historieta latinoamericana.
Scorer examines the work of artists from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay in an effort to identify what the “Latin American” dimension really is.
His answer is that, as regional comic art is profoundly diverse and dynamic, it responds to the notion of the “threshold”—a “site of productive uncertainty situated betwixt and between precarious geographical limits and processes of social, cultural, and political mixture, all blurring the certainties of fixed identities and entrenched communities.”
One author has described this as a form of borderland distinguished as much by content as by its lack—the fact that the “lacunae, gaps, and fragments of comics do exacerbate uncertainty, incompletion, and the meaning that emerges from blankness.”
Adopting a thematic approach, Scorer focuses on the content and context of the principal print comic publications released between the 2000s and the present, a turbulent era of socio-political change and conflict.
The first chapter is fascinating, exploring the tensions between the established narratives of national comics traditions and Latin America as a site embedded in global markets and transnational flows.
Scorer counterposes, for example, the long-standing nationalist narrative of the Argentine magazine Fierro: La historieta Argentina—expressed through support for Kirchnerist Peronism—with a more transnational landscape of comics production exemplified by Carboncito, published in Peru, and Revista Larva, in Colombia.
Moving on, he looks at the transnational feminisms and gender politics found in recent Latin American comics, a key aspect of much recent production. As a “minoritarian” cultural form, comics have long been dominated by masculine-nationalist narratives that promote heteronormativity and hyper-sexualized visions of women, whereas Scorer looks at the work of the artists who challenge these.
Another focus is the DIY world of comics zines and its close relationship to punk, often comprising an important critique of the cultural wasteland created by neoliberalism and commercial publishing.
A chapter on non-fiction comics—and in particular, those that engage with neo-extractivism in Latin America, building on a long tradition of comic art that explores social themes—highlights the non-urban context of much comic production in Latin America.
As Scorer notes, many of these comics focus on Indigenous communities, the peoples most likely to be affected by the extractivist frontier that expanded under governments of the Pink Tide.
The author also looks at contagion—through works on lockdown and zombies—and the violence of the Mexico–US border, a key threshold that speaks to his methodology.
Latin American Comics in the Twenty-First Century offers a thought-provoking alternative approach to an important art form that does not gain the profile it clearly deserves in the study of visual culture.
Scorer’s methodology offers an original perspective on regional trends and patterns that, if we care to look, may be precursors to cultural production closer to home.
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Categories: Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, North America, Peru, South America, Uruguay