Comics, Cartoons, Graphic Novels

The field of Latin American comics studies is relatively young. Though there are earlier studies of caricature, the most significant developments in studies of the region’s comics date from the 1970s and 1980s. During this period, intellectuals, scholars, and historians focused on comics as a neocolonial site of struggle or as expressions of autochthonous national-popular traditions. Some artists and scholars also explored the language of comics itself, setting out innovative approaches to page composition, interrelations between word and image, sequentiality, panel arrangements, or use of color, often as part of the wider political backdrop. Since that period, and particularly given the historic ties between comics and popular culture, the region’s comics have usually been read through the prism of the nation, a means of tapping into the social and political imaginaries of “the people.” That tendency persists into the twenty-first century: edited books tend to draw out overarching regional trends in introductions before individual chapters focus on individual national case studies and the work of specific authors. Much scholarship on Latin American comics has focused on the three countries that can claim to have had something akin to a comics industry: Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, the latter also significant as the conduit for translated works within the region. There are, nonetheless, a significant and growing number of studies of comics in other Latin American countries, particularly Chile, Colombia, Cuba, and Peru. There is also an established and influential body of work on Latinx comics, though that falls beyond the scope of this bibliography. Scholarship on comics in other countries remains, unfortunately, underdeveloped. Though reading Latin American comics through national narratives remains important, the increasingly transnational nature of Latin American comics in the new millennium—a situation facilitated by the digital turn, growth in indie publishers, international comics festivals, and a thriving and sometimes itinerant zine scene—has meant a shift toward more comparative and transregional studies. Innovative studies on specific works, authors, and magazines are being supplemented by new methodological approaches, such as recent studies of the graphic novel. Though there is scope for more research into artistic working practices, the wider roles associated with comics work (not just writers and illustrators, but also pencillers, inkers, editors, graphic designers, publishers, etc.), and audiencing (particularly using quantitative analysis), scholarship is becoming increasingly diverse, with long-standing political commentaries now embedded in more extended and far-reaching analysis of issues such as gender and sexuality, race, memory politics, and ecology, as well as a greater awareness of intermediality, which has opened up innovative and rich analytical avenues for comics analysis.