This collaborative panel seeks to map the territory of this vibrant subfield, both within and outside the Iberian peninsula. Its aim is to bring together two audiences at the 2024 MLA Convention who may not always be in a scholarly zone of contact: the Comics and Graphic Narratives Forum and the 20th and 21st Century Spanish and Iberian Forum. In assembling papers that not only chart the course of Iberian graphic narratives but also show how these texts travel (across scholarly conversations, genres, and circuits of readership), it seeks to solidify bridges between these two scholarly communities, and account for possible gaps between them. Likewise, it attempts to move beyond prevailing approaches—which often ask what graphic narratives can tell us about Spain’s history, culture, or politics—to focus on what Spain’s graphic narrative traditions might offer to the international field of Comics Studies more broadly.

The panel opens with a panoramic view provided by Xavier Dapena’s intervention, “The ‘Golden Age’ of Spanish Graphic Narrative and Its Contradictions.” Here, Dapena traces the contours of the current graphic narrative boom in Spain, showing how despite comics’ popularization among the general public, including a plethora of works by women artists, Spanish graphic authors remain in a precarious publishing position. This conundrum perpetuates the precariousness of graphic authors, who have seen limited print runs and dwindling sales, with the industry in a constant state of crisis despite the hype of Spain’s “graphic novel movement.”

The next pair of papers examines innovative graphic novels in the context of colonialism and imperialism in Spanish visual culture. In “Seeing Elephants: Countering the Colonial Gaze in Hispanophone Comics,” Caroline Colquhoun focuses on the recent controversial collaboration between Nzé Esono Ebalé, Equatorial Guinea’s first published comics artist, and Spanish journalist and author Pere Ortín. Their Diez mil elefantes (2022) is a graphic narrative that deals with the memory of Spain’s equatorial African former colony, interrogating colonial memory and denouncing the physical, racial, and epistemic violence of the colonial project. Yet, due to charges of plagiarism by prolific Equatoguinean author Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, Colquhoun argues that the production of the comic unfortunately reproduces the very colonial logic it purports to criticize, complicating questions of colonial memory through intellectual imperialism.

In a similar vein, Nadiyah Aamer’s “The Spanish Odalisque in the Works of Ana Miralles” explores Miralles’ illustration work in two graphic novels, Djinn and Muraqqa (authored by Jean Dufaux and Emilio Ruiz, respectively) and the depictions of female protagonists as a contemporary permutation of historical Spanish Orientalism, rooted in racialized sexualization of Muslim women. With particular attention to how a female illustrator might reinforce and/or subvert sexist and Orientalist visual languages in her work, Aamer argues that the archetype of the Odalisque, in a contemporary visual modality, can both perpetuate and resist the imperialistic misogyny of this paradigmatic figure.

Finally, Kathy Korcheck’s “Spain beyond Spain: the Tourist Gaze in Contemporary Spanish Graphic Travelogues,” picks up on the transnational circuits and gazes discussed in the previous two papers but turns to the question of tourism, as it looks both into and out of the Iberian peninsula. The paper examines how graphic narratives explore both the deleterious effects of tourism on Spain and the experience of Spanish nationals venturing elsewhere. These works, especially when they juxtapose radically different cultural perspectives, reveal “contact zones”—to use Mary Louise Pratt’s well-known phrase—“where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (7). This presentation closes the panel by proposing the graphic travelogue as a medium for re-envisioning how we conceive of “Spain” and what constitutes “Spanish” graphic narrative today.

Panelists will give short presentations of approximately 12 minutes each, followed by a five-minute response from the discussant, to allow ample time for questions and discussion.