Latin American Comics in the Twenty-First Century: Transgressing the Frame by James Scorer (University of Texas Press, 2024, 264 pages)

While writing this review, I visited a big bookstore in Los Angeles, where I live in, and I observed that the comic and graphic novel section was put aside in a little corner, somehow hidden from the main and “serious” areas. During the hour or so I spent there, all the people who visited the section were kids and teenagers and I couldn’t help feeling as if I didn’t belong there. The logic which excludes adults as part of the natural public for comics reflects a long-time stigmatization that points them out as banal or childish.

Against those prejudices, and against another one that considers them to be representative of the alienating consumerism of society of spectacle, James Scorer’s Latin American Comics in the Twenty-First Century: Transgressing the Frame manages to raise them to the level of dignity that they deserve. Conceiving comics more as a powerful medium for political and artistic protest, he takes them as authentic battlefields in which visual discourses meet textual narratives to produce symbolic landscapes, intensity contact zones, nodes of gathering and forcefields that serves as propitious spaces to imagine alternative futures, both for individuals and communities.

This book is not only a thorough study of the recent state of the comic production in the region: it is also a celebration of the possibilities of a truly transmedial genre that, itself, at the same time embodies the full productive potential of new media and retains some of the most valuable features of traditional ones. Scorer, a professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Manchester, examines a corpus of comics made in formats as varied as hand-made, print and digital, which circulates in such different media as underground magazines and zines, independent or institutional websites and traditional books. Through an analysis of comic production processes and a close reading of its products, the book takes the readers by the hand and leads them to a journey across a myriad of the most urgent challenges of contemporary Latin American societies, discussing at the same time with the most up-to-date theories that help us to interpret them.

The book opens with an overview of 20th century Latin American comic development, a production highly committed to the generation of traditional grand narratives that could function as identity bonds inside the different countries of the region, heavily grounded on a nationalist and populist sociopolitical vocabulary. He contrasts this development with that of the 21st century which, instead, functions more in the level of micronarratives and micropolitics, less interested in establishing a centralized and fixed canon and more willing to work as an experimental transnational critical device that helps to destabilize the existing one, moving freely beyond and between any kind of conceptual restrictions and borders. I found this point interesting, since I consider that this behavior inside the field of comics production resembles the earlier trajectory of Latin American cinema. Indeed, since the decade of 1980, tired of carrying the burden of some political agendas related to political liberation and the representation of the pain of the oppressed, it entered a path of rupture with the traditional ways of making films and embraced experimentation.

In a very provocative way, Scorer names what he considers the current heyday of Latin American comic production as the eruption of a volcano—an image he borrows after the title El volcán: un presente de la historieta Latinoamericana, an important comic compilation of the work of artists from ten Latin American countries published in 2017—to state that it was caused by a quietly simmering magma, a network of countercultural exchange among a great number of artists during the last two decades throughout the region, which crystallized in a transnational creative and collaborative milieu. That would differentiate this volcano eruption from the mid-20th century prose fiction Boom, which suggests the image of a sudden explosion that came out of nothing, or at least, out of nothing more than the geniality of a few male authors who worked in a more isolated fashion.

If 20th century authors were more reluctant to assume a cosmopolitan attitude, affected by a resistance towards everything that was suspicious of being expressions of ideological colonialism or political imperialism, the openness of today’s Latin American comics makes them more willing to dialogue between different traditions and worldviews, a gesture that aligns with the free movements of global capital and culture. Nonetheless, this doesn’t make them naïve about the place that the so-called “Third World” occupies in this system; on the contrary, they constantly denounce how communities suffer the consequences of its logic in terms of economic inequality, ecologic catastrophes, the phenomena of forced migration and political instability and violence.

The chapters follow a thematic logic which, although it can seem somehow abstract, bestows the book with a clear organization that would be well appreciated by the readers. However, this decision might be interpreted as a problematic application of foreign categories, those of the U.S. academia, to a field that has its own independence and that is not necessarily interested on the way in which intellectuals understand its activity.

The second chapter convincingly explores how the work of comic artists Colombian-Ecuadorian Powerpaola and Argentine Femimutancia undertakes a reflection on the issue of gender. In a nonessentialist way, not only by including controversial topics in their stories but also in terms of their aesthetics and visual rhetorics, they successfully problematize the traditional gender views and give voice to alternative forms of identity expression, participating in the discussions of transnational feminism and even proposing original views emanating from the cultural particularities of the region.

The work of other two Colombian and Argentine artists, Inu Waters and Lucía Brutta, allows Scorer to discuss in chapter three the importance of punk in terms of comic production and distribution, especially in the zine circuit. He shows how the philosophy of this counterculture affects the way in which several artists conceive their aesthetics and their sociopolitical engagement, embracing a DIY attitude that irreverently celebrates ugliness, wastes, shit, the old, the grotesque and everything that the mainstream considers disgusting. I particularly enjoyed how in this part of the book the author gets the reader to enter some of the underground circuits of independent communities that work and live at the margins of the big media and official institutions, showing us some of their protagonists and projects.

Chapter four, a very political one, observes how some comics, this time through non-fiction narratives and comic journalism, try to denounce the severe socio-ecological harms that neoextractivist projects are causing in the region in the form of “slow violence,” sometimes in conjunction with armed groups. He does this looking at the work of the Peruvian Jesús Cossio and Nelly Luna, at some case studies in Colombia, especially a collaboration between artists and writers Pablo Guerra, Camilo Aguirre and Henry Díaz, and the social scientist Diana Ojeda and the community of Montes de María, and also expands its range beyond Latin America, including the work of the U.S.-Maltese artist Joe Sacco on the Dean indigenous communities in Canada.

The high emotionally touching chapter five brings up the important topic of history and memory. It highlights different artistic strategies in which the comics of the Mexican Augusto Mora, of the Argentines Ignacio Minaverry, Javier Tímboli and Ezequiel García, with the human rights group Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and the Chilean Javier Rodríguez, mobilize the archive in order to question official history and to fill the gaps created in collective memory by the end of the 20th-century violence, principally of repressive military regimes. Making some complex philosophical debates easy to understand, the author shows how the aim of these comics was to try to help, through creativity, to cope as a society with the aftermaths of a traumatic legacy that still haunts current generations, providing critical resources to rethink how to rewrite history.

Returning to fiction-oriented comics, chapter six, the most fascinating to me, studies a group of works that focus on one of the trendiest topics of our times: the undead. Zombies and vampires, as any monster, are very challenging figures because of their threshold and in-between nature. The zombie popularity has especially caught scholars’ attention in recent years as a symbol of residual colonialist fears—the possibility of infection by a threatening “other”—or the incarnation of the anxieties of post-capitalistic societies in industrialized countries—the insatiability of consumption and the annulment of subjectivity. Nevertheless, Scorer reminds us that more than a simple import of a foreign product that belongs to Hollywood’s entertainment culture, we can think of it as a reappropriation that fits well with the reality of the region, with its origin in the Caribbean island of Haiti. Following the Colombians Juan Pablo Silva and Joni b, a collaborative Chilean work, and a series by the Uruguayan Silva brothers, this part reviews how South American societies make use of these monstruous entities to recreate Latin American cities in post-apocalyptic and dystopic scenarios. This would be a metaphorical way to show and denounce the real horrors experienced in an already horrific every day, ruled by violence, precarity and corruption, and a resource to cope with the concerns that arouse during the Covid-19 pandemic. In some cases, zombies can even be invested by a more complex meaning, turning into positive and almost heroic figures.

Finally, chapter seven concentrates on how Colombian Carlos Díez and the Argentines Juan Sáenz Valiente and Jazmín Varela reflect through their stories on the possibilities of propitiating dwelling and affective meaningful encounters in the hostile spaces of neoliberal cities. According to Scorer, thanks to their artistic skills a challenging urban space can unexpectedly become poetic and fluid, giving occasion to attitudes of existential intimacy and political resistance. Thus, imagination works here as a tool for reenchanting an otherwise meaningless reality.

To conclude, there is one blind spot that I want to point out of this book. With its intention to be comprehensive and seeming to offer an extensive analysis of the entire region production—at least that is what the broad generality of the title suggests—, it replicates a typical habit of most academic works on Latin America: it puts aside the production of Brazil—although it gives reasons for this decision—, and leaves Caribbean and Central American production absent without an explanation. Beyond that, it was very pleasant for me, as a Latin American and Colombian, to see how a foreign author such as Scorer is fond of the region, something that helps a lot when it comes to reach this level of understanding and knowledge of its realities. I would like to close this review sincerely recommending the reading of this book.

Juan Manuel Díaz Leguizamón is a Colombian philosopher, historian and Ph.D. student in Hispanic Literatures and Cultures at UCLA. His research focuses on the ethical, political and epistemological dimensions of arts as instruments for resistance and change, in relation with violence and social justice.