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Research Summary

My dissertation draws a connection between two persistent yet conflicting stories told about comics: the perennial story of workers’ labor, exploitation, and exhaustion on one hand; and the medium’s historical associations with overflowing, unruly, vitalizing energy on the other. Comics’ uneven rise to prestige over the last half-century has frequently mobilized claims of the graphic form’s innate capacities for enlivening or animating its subjects. Useful as this move has been, I argue that such claims have entailed both the repression of vitality’s complicated racial histories and the displacement of artists’ melancholic labor stories to romantic avatars of the suffering artist. “Comics will break your heart”–a refrain attributed to both Jack Kirby and Charles Schulz–has only taken on renewed meaning for today’s cartoonists: in 2023, following the sudden death of a young cartoonist, the viral hashtag #comicsbrokeme flooded social media with stories of overwork; in 2024, Gladiolus Magazine published a collaborative essay on burnout titled “The Broken Heart at the Center of Comics.” As emerging genres like graphic medicine, comics journalism, and data comics offer comics as a vitalizing solution to new publics, my project takes a critical detour into the histories of race and labor that attend the fantasy of unfettered graphic life.