A report from ComicInvasionBerlin in its 5th anniversary

If there’s anything empowering about comics is that you can just grab a pen and a piece of paper to express yourself. You can also join others like you and form gatherings of people with common interests, developing a community that will probably continue to grow. That’s the case of most indie comic festivals, communities that attract audiences that will sometimes turn into creators and vice versa.

CIB was once a street mini comics festival, but after five years, it has grown into a two- week event that’s visited by about 7000 people, and has important visitors while focusing on a central topic each year. While most of the activities and published books are in German, CIB can be considered a local festival that welcomes international visitors and debates.

The activities are more or less the same that can be found in any book fair: presentations, panel discussions, contests, exhibitions, gatherings, book signings, drawing battles, workshops, concerts… But what’s particular about indie comics is the ease with which it addresses certain causes, and the sense that anyone can join the debate, regardless of credentials.

This year’s central topic is the refugee crisis, represented in the activities but most significantly, in the work of some of the artists. For instance, the official poster was designed by Ali Fitzgerald (http://www.alifitzgerald.net/), an US artist currently based in Berlin, who administers a comics workshop for refugees. The poster shows what seems to be a migrant whose possessions are being eaten by sharks and crocodiles, while she barely escapes the jaws of the animals, in a clear allusion to the path of the Syrian and Iraqi refugees across the ocean.

Art as a form of inclusion and expression of refugees into their new surroundings is driven by many workshops established in shelters across Berlin. It even has a phrase: “Drawing as Voice”. Indeed, drawing as a form of basic expression allows not only the refugees to express what the limits of language cannot, but also it invites their readers to understand and share their sense of misplacement and trauma, and hopefully, to get over the recurrent prejudice enforced by some politicians and the media.

The CIB gives space to individual authors but is currently promoting the work of collectives, and these are some of the most interesting comics seen during the festival’s main activities and its satellite program:

Swiss artist Alex Baladi’s personal stories (https://alexbaladi.wordpress.com/) are associated with the Comix 2000 book that was translated in the U.S. by Fantagraphics. Baladi, like the dozens of authors published in Comix 2000, tested the possibilities of wordless images. This bande dessinée author has over 20 publications and has been active since the early 1990s. His exhibition at the Supalife gallery was a collection of wordless comics, or simple illustrations (with no distinguishable narrative) about the extraordinary in the mundane, such as his piece of clothes hanging in a remote island.

Brazilian Augusto Paim’s (http://www.cartoonmovement.com/p/5845/comics) comic journalism follows the trend established by Joe Sacco. With “So close, faraway!”, presented at Renate Comics, he focuses on the crisis of the homeless in Brazil.

Collective “Drawing the line – Dissenting voices in contemporary comics” (http://www.neurotitan.de/Galerie/Archiv/2016/160409_Drawing%20The%20Line.html) honors its name and their exhibition at Neurotitan gallery showed the works of Rebecca Rosen (http://cargocollective.com/rebeccarosen/MAIDENHEADLOCK), Akvile Magicdust (http://www.akvilemagicdust.com/), Paula Bulling (http://paulabulling.net/), Radical Jetset, Marlene Krause (http://marlenekrause.blogspot.com), Tine Fetz (http://www.tinefetz.net/), Max Beitinger and Barrack Lima. These artists confronted a series of questions, such as their work responding to the rise of the new extreme right in Europe, the diversity of the comic scene and comics in the market of capitalist society.

Paula Bulling’s work about the Syrian refugees on a camp, called “Lesvos, November 2015” depicts the horrific experience of displaced families and the undignified conditions of how they’re treated. Barrack Rima is a Lebanese comic artist whose stories from home have an expressionism quality to emphasize the hostility of the local authorities. Written in Arabic and French, his comics are also made of collages.

Max Batinger in a German drawer whose work is mostly abstract images without text. His line of work is similar of Canadian Marc Bell with detailed his compositions. Tine Fetz is one of the most interesting artists of this collective. Born in Germany, she combines hand-drawn and digital illustrations to portray social subjects as well as personal stories that will immediately remind you of the Hernandez brothers in their Love & Rockets period.

LGBT topics were represented by the Superqueeroes, a collective-exhibition that is appropriating the massively popular genre of superheroes. Superqueeroes is about heroes and heroines observed in already existent mainstream comics, such as X-Men and characters like Catwomen, and also created on the basis of ordinary people’s lives and their acts of struggle and resistance in a hetero-normative world.

The exhibition presents work by well-known LGBT artists such as Tom of Finland, Alison Bechdel, Ralf König, Wolfgang Müller, as well as newcomers Megan Rose Gedris (http://rosalarian.com/), Erika Moen (http://www.erikamoen.com/), Elizabeth Beier (http://www.elizabethdrewyou.com/new-blog/), Theo Van Den Boogaard (http://www.theovandenboogaard.nl/), Simon Bosch (http://simonbosch.de/), Jennifer Camper with her Hernandez Bros. style (http://www.jennifercamper.com/home/) and Kylie Summer Wu (http://transgirlnextdoor.tumblr.com/), among many others. These new artists will often portray known LBGT artists as heroes and heroines. While not necessarily LGBT themselves, some of the artists contribute to the exhibition in solidarity.

But it is perhaps the collective action of people’s drawing what results the most satisfying, specially for those not used to any means of expression. Children and adults get together in the early stages of the Berlin spring, draw cardboard murals and create scale models with the most diverse of subjects in what is already one of the most significant areas of Berlin: the Haus Schwarzenberg (https://www.circus-berlin.de/fabisch-history/), which, like most parts of the city, still reminds of the horrors of the war and the at the same time, the efforts to rebuild the city, a task in which art and culture are the fundamental pillars.

For more information and photos, go to: http://www.comicinvasionberlin.de/ 

Archived version: 

https://web.archive.org/web/20180628162139/https://www.bookwitty.com/text/a-report-from-comicinvasionberlin-in-its-5th/5714097dacd0d05dbc9aa043

https://www.bookwitty.com/text/a-report-from-comicinvasionberlin-in-its-5th/5714097dacd0d05dbc9aa043

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Jessica Jones TV series

Jessica Jones TV series, episode 1: rethinking the superhero

From comics to television
The history of comics shows this is a cultural field of ideological tensions, where mainstream ideologies have been contested, criticized and parodied since the early years of the comic strip until our days. One of the most challenging was the poetic and elegant defiance of gender stereotypes composed by George Herriman in his Krazy Kat comic strip. The rich epoch of the sixties counterculture in the United States, was one of sexual liberation where irreverence became almost the norm for male artists, while females found in comics a platform of self-expression in the Wimmen’s Comix movement.

The self-awareness of narratives was prevalent in the eighties, where genres were re-thought and intervened in what have become now classics, such as Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore’s Watchmen. What most of these manifestations have in common is that they appeared in the margins of the comics industry, creating sub-genres and movements that eventually become assimilated by the mainstream industry, which saw an area of opportunity for business, with new narratives that could attract new readers.

Such is the case of Jessica Jones, a comic originally published by Marvel that intended to shift some gender stereotypes. Along with a new roster of super heroes created for contemporary times and branded by Marvel as “New Avengers” series, Jessica Jones has been adapted to other mediums such as film, video games, literature and most recently, television.

This article will discuss episode 1 of the TV adaptation of Jessica Jones, with a focus on its genre and gender subversions.
Created in 2015 by Melissa Rosenberg as a web television series produced by Netflix, Jessica Jones, played by Krysten Ritter, is the story of a grumpy, alcoholic and disheveled private investigator suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Jessica, we learn as the series progress, possesses strange physical powers but has quit them after a traumatic event. She is now in search of a common, more anonymous life and has a struggling business, set up from her impoverished home/office.

Jessica’s skills as an investigator gain from her unique superhero capabilities, despite her trying to suppress them. She’s introduced as a disenchanted and sometimes cynical character walking through the streets of New York City and entering a posh office. She shows no respect for figures of authority and no plans to improve her personal and professional circumstances. Downplaying herself, she interacts only with strictly necessary characters in the first episode, especially the source of her most important jobs: Jeri Hogarth, a powerful female defense lawyer with questionable ethics.

The first five minutes of episode 1 shows no male characters, and instead displays two powerful women interacting with each other, one as a freelance investigator and the other as the owner of her law firm. The first subversion of the series is the lack of reliance on male characters, and a display of women overtaking traditionally male-dominated work ambiences. A second subversion is the representation of these women’s appearance: Jessica is scruffy, wears little make-up and has a leather jacket, blue jeans motorbike type of style; Jeri wears a skirt and short hair. None of them fall into stereotypes of femininity. However, the politics of power are intact in the representation of Jeri’s assistants: two stereotypical feminine women in their assigned work space.

Jessica’s first night at the job makes this superhero genre show intersect with a noir detective genre where ambience and mood enhance the story as well as the character’s personality. The dark streets of NYC echo Jessica’s solitude, misanthropy and stalkerish proclivities, as one of the main male characters is introduced: watched in an objectified kind of way by Jessica (a third subversion), Luke Cage has superhero powers and will become Jessica’s object of desire.

Superheroes have been traditionally represented as ordinary people who go through an extraordinary event and gain extraordinary powers from them. In this sense, Jessica Jones is a conventional character, as her struggles and suffering have the function of making her more convincingly human. PTSD isn’t new either; but its ramifications are: rarely we have seen the routines of an alcoholic protagonist in a state of desperation. Jessica’s health issue make her more human and believable, but more importantly, it is displayed on television without mockery or alarmism, and the camera’s angle portrays it accordingly:

Picture 1: Jessica’s world is upside down

Secondary characters (her neighbors) are introduced. They’re all misfits, but portrayed in a way that makes the audience feel empathy and closeness for them,  as they limit Jessica’s self-destructiveness. Marginal characters assigned to the narrative can be considered another subversion, despite how common this is now in the field of comics. But TV is a different issue, going through its own rearranging of genres and narrative possibilities.

Despite her troubles, Jessica is a competent and fearless P.I., especially when male characters want to dominate her. Sexual practices show other subversions: seduction and copulation are represented without TV’s traditional conservatism of the act being suggested instead of shown. Jeri’s lesbian affair and relationship are introduced without delicacy or soft tones; Jessica seeks, gets and dominates her lover. Jessica is proactive in her desires, represented in a frontal and loud way.  While this can be considered a gender subversion, Jessica’s white privilege over her black lover has provoked reactions. https://www.themarysue.com/race-in-jessica-jones/

Trish Walker’s introduction is the most deceptive of all: She looks stereotypically feminine, has a successful job as a radio host and enjoys the comforts of her luxury NYC condo, with its panic room and reinforced security. Jessica’s sister is apparently her opposite: blonde, rich, physically fit, a public person. Yet, all these stereotypes hide a vulnerable woman who shares Jessica’s past and deepest secrets, and like her sister, refuses to be a victim. Their interaction has a narrative function, as it introduces the villain of the series without actually showing him. 

This ominous character is coming back for Jessica, via her job. He’s using a vulnerable young woman reported as lost to get to Jessica, victimizing and taking away the woman’s autonomy. This suggests how powerful he is before he’s even introduced. As Jessica tries to rescue this girl and her parents, a shocking murder sequence closes the pilot episode. This proves devastating for our heroine, while at the same time detonating her come back to her superhero senses and resolution to face and destroy her nemesis.

The pilot of Jessica Jones progresses in an engaging narrative and successfully introduces the characters, their motivations and their life and work environments, while shifting gender stereotypes in the mass communication media that is television. While there is an imbalance of gender and race issues, these are now part of a collective discussion that should be welcome. 
Archived version:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180628162131/https://www.bookwitty.com/text/jessica-jones-tv-series-episode-1-rethinking-the/56c2a1d9acd0d072fda38e2e

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