The graphic novel's West Asian new wave. (c2014)

Abstract

While the graphic novel is becoming a well-established genre in the West with its own definitions, bi-cultural authors develop a new West Asian trajectory, both in form and subject, from their own displacements as well as the region’s historical legacies and conflicts. This thesis, a comparative study of the two graphic novels, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi and Palestine by Joe Sacco, is an analysis of what distinguishes this regional new wave of the graphic novel. By examining the media and aesthetic strategies that they develop to narrate social and political strife and emergence, this study shows how the graphic novel in West Asia derives as much from regional popular traditions of political cartoons and televised skits (from Iran to Egypt and the Levant) as it does from the western comics tradition. But what are the implications of such a development of the graphic novel in this region?