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Research Summary

Despite regular assertions that comic artists and comics scholars “no longer feel the immediate compulsion to justify” their work, the reflex to supply comics value has become an enduring frame to our discourse (Aldama 2018). These days, a critical fixation on what comics afford their publics (in aesthetic, ethical, and pedagogical potential) increasingly overshadows the outright defensive or apologetic mode, asserting the medium’s productive relevance by way of its “enabling” formal and representational capacities (Fawaz 2017). Yet even in this disguised form, the “compulsion to justify” registers the ongoing instability of comics work and its value – not only at the level of cultural prestige, but also in directly material terms. As Ashanti Fortson put it in their bleak acceptance speech for a 2021 Ignatz Award, “The more I work in comics, the less I want to… cartoonists must work themselves to the bone for years to be paid pennies with no healthcare.” What might it look like to connect what comics affords with what it costs?

My dissertation, More or Less Alive: Race and Labor in Comics Vitalism, begins by addressing this split between complaints about comics work and celebrations of comics affordance. The foregrounding of inexhaustible affordances in scholarship and popular criticism, I argue, manifests a wishful resolution to the pressures of comics labor, publishing, and extracted value. Rather than disposing of the affordance framework, I propose a critique that traverses certain fantasies about comics in relation to the material pressures that produce them. Each chapter of the dissertation examines a key term related to one of the medium’s vital affordances (viscerality, vividness, plasticity), then turns to comics that disturb and modify that concept’s usage.