The Capitalist Crisis Panel at Graphic Justice In Crisis 2020

Crisis and Corporate Personhood in Mark Russell’s Prez - Timothy Peters and Michaella Duggan
In 2015, DC Comics released Mark Russell’s Prez, a 6-issue mini-series re-envisioning a short-lived 1970s comic about a teenager elected president of the United States. With its reflection on the ludicrous excesses of American politics, a hyper-real consumer culture dominated by advertising and social media, and a mysterious ‘cat flu’ ravaging the US, this political satire now appears prescient of our current times. What underlies its indictment of the fundamentally mediate nature of contemporary politics (determining both the superficial and substance aspects of political life, with voting now occurring by Twitter) is a critical presentation of corporations, corporate personhood and the intertwining of corporate interests with the political. This comes in comic’s meditation on the nature of the corporate image, with CEOs able to hide their individual identity behind a corporate logo projected upon and replacing their face in all public interactions. However, it is the very law enabling this duality of corporate identity and personal anonymity that also enables teenager Beth Ross to be elected President and challenge the political dominance of corporate interests. This paper presents a cultural legal reading of Prez’s short-lived critical interrogation of corporate personhood, politics and the image.
The Economy or Your Life: Comic book depictions of Neoliberal Capitalism and related Criminal Violence - Nickie Phillips and Staci Strobl
Abstract: Global economic catastrophes attributed to the failures of neoliberal capitalism have long created, maintained, and exacerbated socio-economic inequalities. Scholars have recognised that this global order is criminogenic, but nevertheless, the logic of neoliberal capitalism continues to be supported by publics in the West. Because these logics are typically reinforced through narratives in media and popular culture, in this presentation, we examine how economic inequalities are depicted in American comic books with an eye out for the potential for comic books to potentially re-imagine the global economic order. We use a critical criminological approach to explore comic book depictions of economic inequality starting with the financial crisis of 2008 through the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS) and to the more recent portrayals of envisioned post-capitalist scenarios. As such, we primarily look at Lazarus, The Flintstones, and The Black Monday Murders, which act as important examples of comic books whose plots centre around economic inequality and related criminal violence. We place these books in contrast to more mainstream comic book depictions and discuss how the selected books imagine a political trade-off between global capitalism and the sanctity of human life, a cruel proposal that explicitly entered U.S. public discourse during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.
Fracking Hell! Joe Sacco’s Seismic Lines - Dom Davies
Abstract: In his most recent graphic novel, Paying the Land (2020), Joe Sacco thickens the cartographic and legalistic histories of draughtsmanship into his own hand drawn line. The book documents the history of the Dene nation, an indigenous people in Canada’s Northwestern Territory who have been subject to settler colonialism since the mid-nineteenth century, from initial land dispossession through to the infamous residential school system and, most recently, the damaging fracking industry. The story Sacco tells of the Dene people’s struggle for recognition from Canada’s settler state is one of repeated (mis)representations, whether cartographic, legalistic, bureaucratic, or artistic - each of which have their own destructive effects. By implicating his own drawings in the politics of representation and recognition, Sacco provides not only a history of the Dene people, but a history of “drawing” itself. In this paper, I show how Sacco’s thickened lines - his “seismic lines” - construe the act of drawing as a settler colonial weapon with devastating material consequences: from the cartographic lines of early settler maps that divided up and displaced indigenous people from their territories; to the bureaucratic lines of settler law and that further eroded indigenous solidarity and sovereignty; to the seismic lines of the fracking industry, which break up the land into subterranean fragments. Against these settler colonial lines, however, Sacco suggests another delineation: the line as a form of indigenous knowledge formed in connection with the land. As this paper argues, only when the settler notion of drawing-as-representation (cartographic, legal, etc.) is overturned can drawing be recovered as a way-of-being-in-the-world, instead. Sacco’s images are only notes, or sketches, towards a decolonised drawing practice, and by no means a finished picture.